Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - James Robert Brown on Thought Experiments, the reality of mathematics, and the Continuum Hypothesis

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

Graphics are included in the YouTube version to make it easier to comprehend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV7BQZy1A6oPatreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44* * *00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:17 The connection between mathematics and ethics 00:03:05 Mathematical concepts that are interpreted solely physically (thick and thin concepts) 00:16:33 The continuum hypothesis 00:19:23 A counter proof to the continuum hypothesis 00:24:45 What's possible can have probability of zero (measure zero, technically) 00:33:50 Platonism and "thick" mathematical concepts 00:34:39 Moral realism / objectivity, without God 00:36:59 Does 2+2=5? 00:40:43 Moral intuitions as serving a marker for what's "correct"? 00:46:42 What's makes some theory correct beside its ability to predict / explain? 00:47:54 Does libertarian Free Will exist, and how is it coexistent with physics? 00:53:13 VIEWER TEST: Platonism test for the audience 00:54:53 Did Shakespeare invent Hamlet, or discover it? 00:56:09 What created the Platonic world? 00:57:42 Eternal vs Sempiternal 00:59:12 Thought experiments as a tool of probing physics, without experiment 01:00:39 Galileo's thought experiment demonstrating objects fall at the same rate despite different masses / heaviness 01:03:39 Thought experiment demonstrating relative motion (invariance of physical laws given uniform motion) 01:05:01 The Tower thought experiment demonstrating the opposite of the above 01:09:43 VIEWER TEST: Are you a Newtonian absolutist, or a Leibnizian relationalist? 01:12:45 Why did Prof Brown go into the philosophy of math, instead of directly into mathematics (or physics)? 01:13:20 Have any philosophical problems ever been solved? 01:14:47 Is God good? Or is goodness independent of God? 01:15:41 Descartes vs Leibniz on God's power (God can do anything -- except what's logically impossible) 01:18:43 The parochial view of physicists / mathematicians to dismiss what they can't define 01:22:31 Thought experiment from Newton regarding the necessity of space 01:24:45 Einstein's variation on the above thought experiment 01:28:17 How to classify thought experiments 01:31:35 Prof. Brown's thoughts on Wolfram's TOE and Eric Weinstein's TOE 01:32:40 Nicholas Gisin's thoughts on real numbers, and free will 01:33:02 What other foundations are there to physics, other than classical logic? 01:39:05 What does Mathematical Realism look like when it's NOT Platonic? 01:45:31 The physical laws themselves as abstract entities, which have causal power 01:55:55 Lee Smolin's Principle of Precedence as a bridge between Platonism and non-Platonism 01:59:01 Deriving an "ought" from an "is" 02:03:29 What does James not like about Sam Harris? 02:06:45 Is Math discovered or invented? 02:10:18 Does Platonism entail some idea of a God? 02:14:49 Theism vs Deism 02:16:34 On the Sokal Affair and the trouble with Postmodernism 02:22:01 Limits of free speech? 02:27:41 The problem of commercializing research 02:33:09 On Jordan Peterson's "Darwinian" definition of truthSubscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (in 2020) and seeing more conversations like this

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Thought experiments in physics are pivotal for the generation of novel ideas, the dissolution of old ones, or simply for an original take on specific phenomenons that already exist. Given that fundamental physics has been stalled in the past few decades, primarily due to a lack of data as well as other factors, and I'm trying to put forth my own theory of everything and integrate it with consciousness, I thought, how far can I go with thought experiments? James Robert Brown is a professor of philosophy, specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto, and he was generous enough to give me a few hours of his time. He's written several books, which I recommend you check out, and we spoke yesterday, which is what you'll see first, as well as at the end, I'm going to append a sliver of a conversation

that me and him had about two years ago, but I never posted. This is perhaps the deepest dive you'll see on YouTube on thought experiments, as well as Platonism. There's even a test to see whether or not you're a Platonist or a non-Platonist or a Newtonian or a Leibnizian, and they're in the timestamps. Again, in these podcasts, I tend to not shy away from technical details, for one, because I think when you sacrifice details, it's akin to sacrificing the truth, or at worst, giving a false impression,

as well as I think that the audience, that is you, are extremely smart and you can keep up. Enjoy. It's as if this is my first time. All right, man. Enjoy. It's as if this is my first time. All right, man. Hello, Professor Brown. How's it going? It's going well.

And please call me Jim. Okay, Jim. So Jim, what are you working on these days? I'm working on the connection between mathematics and ethics. There's some features of both that are already well known. For instance, our mathematical knowledge and our ethical knowledge don't come from sensory experience. Yeah, do you mind expounding? Well, by sensory experience I just mean sight, hearing, smell, taste. You don't know that there are infinitely many prime numbers

because you've gone out and seen them. Right. You don't know that root two is an irrational number because you held up a ruler on a diagonal square and got an irrational number. Our mathematical knowledge is definitely not empirical, though it might be connected to the empirical world in some indirect ways, but it's certainly not like the natural sciences at all.

Well, what does that have to do with ethics? Well, ethics is exactly the same. So you could see one person kill another person. That could be an empirical experience. But to judge it as an immoral act is not empirical. Somebody pulls out a gun and shoots somebody else and a red light doesn't flash in the corner of your eye saying, this was wicked, this was wicked. Okay, and how we acquire ethical knowledge and how we acquire mathematical knowledge are surprisingly similar in a number of ways. You mentioned before in one of your talks on YouTube about the distinction between thick

and thin concepts. Do you mind delineating that for the audience? Not at all. This is a really interesting idea. It's fairly new inside ethics. So the idea of thin concepts are, thin concepts can be anywhere. They can be in the sciences, in everyday life, and in ethics. So if I say the house is on fire, I'm using thin concepts. If I say words like mass, color, taste, those are all thin concepts. But they're from the factual realm. Okay. And then in the ethical or evaluative realm are more thin concepts,

but they're just in a different realm. So good, bad, beautiful, ugly um uh obligation those duty those are thin concepts from ethics okay so the world it seems like is made up of thin concepts some are in the factual realm some are in the normative evaluative ethical realm now then um a few years ago, people began to focus on a number of words that we use in daily life, and they seem to be really important in how we treat things and how we reason. And these words are called thick, and that's because they're simultaneously fact type terms and Evaluative terms. Okay. So if I say If I say Kurt you are very healthy That's actually I'm saying two things I'm talking about your health in a factual sense like your blood pressure is 120 over 80 all right for instance but i'm saying more than that when i say you're healthy i'm saying and it's a good state

that you're in so there's an evaluative component as well as a factual component when i say you're healthy if i say another example beside okay yeah I'll give you lots more. Brave. Courageous. Okay? Courageous. If I say Mary was courageous, that includes a kind of factual component, especially if we've just seen Mary run into a burning house

and save the family's pet dog. Okay, so she's pulled it out. So there's a straightforward factual component to that about Mary's action. Okay, but there's also an evaluative component, like what she did was a good thing. It's good to be brave. Well done, Mary, we're really proud of you so brave is different it's thick brave is thick now some people say you don't need thick concepts they're very convenient so you don't need them because I could say this Mary ran into the house she brought out the family dog and here comes the evaluative. And what she did was good. Or I can just sort of summarize it. Mary was very brave.

And the word brave, courageous, those sort of terms, those are thick concepts. And we use them a lot. And we reason with them a lot. Something is, and once you get the feeling um it's uh you can find them all over the place why is the word good not a thick concept uh because it's it's it's just thin it just it's just pure evaluation it doesn't tell you anything right right right right okay it doesn't tell you anything factual that's why it's thin evaluative and if i say mary entered the burning house that doesn't tell you anything uh evaluative it just gives you a factual description of

something that happened okay but once you get the hang of it you see all sorts of terms are thick loyal liar dastardly uh untrustworthy see those if I say Kurt you're very untrustworthy I'm suggesting that you've cheated me on something or you've lied to other people or something like that and it's a bad thing mm-hmm so you see how it's a thick term right does it always go to good or bad on that one line spectrum I know if you were, if we were in the artistic realm, it might be rather than good or bad, it might be beautiful, ugly, something like that. Okay, but you can see the evaluative term from the one realm and the straightforward factual. So if I describe a picture like, well, there's a little bit of red here and there's some blue there.

So if I describe a picture like, well, there's a little bit of red here and there's some blue there. Okay, that's the sort of... You just read the RGB values. That's a thin, yeah, that's a thin description of the painting from a factual point of view. And then if I want to say it's spectacularly beautiful or it's charming. Sorry, charming would be a thick concept. It's beautiful, just plain beautiful. Okay, that would be a thin concept. And if I say it's charming, it's evocative and suggesting a combination of things that are both factual and evaluative simultaneously. Those are the thick ones. Okay, so why am I interested in that? Because that's what I just told you is sort of... Right, and how does that relate to mathematics? Exactly. Okay, that's the important question.

So I've been thinking about... By the way, thick concepts in ethics, that's commonplace, okay? And everyone in ethics knows about thick, thin, and the standard views about them. Okay, when I was thinking about ethics and math, I'm looking for all kinds of connections between ethics and math, not just the one about neither of them are empirical. Okay, our knowledge isn't empirical in either case. What are the other connections? Well, one of them might be a kind, there might be an inside math and physics a kind of thick concept so i don't want to talk about facts and values now i'm just using this as an analogy so there

can be math and there can be physics pure math okay you understand pure math is just you know nothing but set theory and pure physics has got nothing mathematical about it. And the way math gets applied is math provides models for the physical realm. This, what I just said, is slightly contentious. It's probably a majority opinion, but there are lots of people who would dispute it. Let's just stick with the majority opinion for now. are lots of people who would dispute it let's just stick with the majority opinion for now math provides models of the world and what a physicist will do is look at the the range of models in plato's heaven and say i think this one is is structurally very similar to the physical realm. Okay? And we apply math in that sort of way. Now that would

be thin. Pure math is just thin. Those are nothing but thin concepts. Pure physics without any math in it, nothing but pure physical concepts. Could there be a thick concept that somehow or other involves both. Not just modeling. Modeling by itself isn't going to do it. A thick concept would be a kind of really intimate intertwining of the two. And I was sort of vaguely thinking about this,

and I came across a wonderful quote in a famous calculus book. The book, for any mathematicians who are watching they'll know the book it's by spivak it's just called calculus uh did you take physics and math yeah do you know that you know the book i'm talking about yeah it's a famous book it's first year 157 ah okay but it's a wonderful it's a wonderful and his second book is also great it's like a direct book where it's tiny because large and then the second book on manifolds yeah yeah yeah you're right you're absolutely two pages long it takes you a whole semester to get through that

well one page of exposition followed by 10 pages of uh uh gut-wrenching problems that are so hard to solve okay so anyway uh there was this wonderful passage in the calculus book so he's just doing elementary stuff and he's teaching derivatives first derivative second derivative and he says all of this stuff is really important especially the second derivative why well think about newton's newton's law, F equals MA. Acceleration is the second derivative. Okay, we got that. Then he says, next time you're in a car and you go around a corner, you can feel the second derivative.

You think about that. No, no, I feel the acceleration. Right. And it's modeled. I don't feel a second derivative. Come on. I don't feel a second derivative. Don't be ridiculous. Nobody can feel a second derivative. It exists in Plato's heaven. You can't smell an infinite series. You can't taste a tangent plane. And you can't feel the second derivative, right? That's what you should say. But the more I thought about it, I thought, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder if people who work with, well, with math in general, physicists and engineers in particular,

physicists and engineers in particular, who maybe have to do problems of motion where acceleration is important. And they get so used to treating physical acceleration. Think of the acceleration as an actual physical process and attaching it to the second derivative to calculate. It's become so internalized with them that acceleration and second derivative becomes a single concept it's just a fused concept this would this would be an example

of a thick concept and i got talking to some physicist friends uh about this and they're now they don't exactly understand and appreciate what i'm trying to get at but there's enough of a an understanding that they could sort of they could sort of agree that the that some parts of math not all but some parts of math that they use they've so internalized that to utter the math or to utter the mathless physical description, they're just so intertwined, it's become one single thing. What else besides acceleration is there for math? Well, this would be hard because I don't want to say it's all the time because I wouldn't want to say that someone in quantum mechanics who thinks about the state of the system just flips over to a Hilbert space, which is how we represent states in quantum mechanics, and just thinks of them interchangeably.

the same notation for both we just use a simple psi function for the vector in the Hilbert space or for the state meaning the physical property of a quantum mechanical system that's a candidate but I'm I'd be reluctant to say that stick maybe an example is a very old example a good example and that's real numbers and points on a line. So you know you have a line, just say the unit interval, and we just attach all the real numbers between 0 and 1, and we think of a real number and a point as the same thing. Just back and forth, and once you, it's, well, it's the whole basis of analytic geometry. Ever since Descartes said it was 400 years ago, when he just said real numbers and points on a line,

or pairs of numbers and points in a plane and so on. We just, they're just completely interchangeable. Right. And you're saying that that's a thick concept because I think I think maybe word line implies space No, not line. Let's say point point and number Point and number they become Almost a single concept now we can separate them Okay, I can ask you to separate okay in your mind and you can do that, but they're so interchangeable. In fact, they're so interchangeable that Girdle in a famous article called What is Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis starts out, he says, the continuum hypothesis is the question, how many real numbers are there or equivalently, how many points are there on a line it just takes them to be the same issue and that's that's surprising for a logician who is you know super super careful

about um about making distinctions when he thinks it's appropriate okay so what's the significance of this why are you spending your time thinking about this? I think it's intrinsically interesting, but for me, it might actually do some work. You know the continuum hypothesis. This is the claim that the first uncountable infinity is aleph one, and it might be, and the claim is that it is the real numbers. The real numbers have size Aleph 1. The natural numbers are infinitely many but there's only Aleph 0 of them. The real numbers are a bigger infinity and the conjecture is that they're the next biggest infinity. So they'd be Aleph 1. No one's been able to prove the continuum hypothesis or refute it. And in fact, there's an independence proof, meaning you can't prove it and you can't refute it on the basis of existing axioms of set theory.

Right. And if you think that the existing axioms of set theory are adequate for the whole of mathematics, what that really means is the continuum hypothesis is independent of all of mathematics. Right, right. You can know everything in math, you still wouldn't know the continuum hypothesis.

So you could just arbitrarily make it a new new axiom that would solve the problem but it would be very unsatisfying because right because why are you doing that rather than making its negation the new axiom so we're looking around for um what you might call independent evidence for the continuum hypothesis one way or the other. What might work? Well, maybe physical analogies would work, you know, you just sort of think about it, you're not going to prove it, you're not going to have any old fashioned proof, but you might have some other kind of argument. If you are a realist, or a mathematical Platonist, If you are a realist or a mathematical Platonist, you're going to say it is true or it is false.

I just don't know which. Okay. Now, question. How much detail do you want? Oh, that's fine. Well, let's go in more. I know Gödel was a Platonist and he believed it's either or. Gödel was a Platonist. Yeah.

and he believed it's either... I think that he proved that it's... I don't recall if it's both either the negation or the positive affirmation of the continuum hypothesis. He showed that it's consistent. It's consistent with the rest of set three. Yeah, you can add it and you won't get into trouble. Right. And it was

later Cohen showed that you can add the negation and you won't get into trouble. And the two results together give you independence. The audience will keep up. Get into as much detail as you like. Let's go into a disproof of the continuum hypothesis. Okay.

You'll have to be hand-wavy because we don't have papers and pens. That's right. PowerPoint slides. This is a result a number of years ago from Chris Freiling, an American logician, and it's wonderfully clever and it's a refutation of the continuum hypothesis. Okay, so as you say it'll be a bit hand wavy. So for those with a math education, So for those with a math education, they will know what, well, I'm going to start out with what's called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, including the axiom of choice. Okay. can prove what's known as the well ordering theorem which means you take any set whatsoever and you can give it a well ordering and that's to and that means you can line it up with the

ordinal numbers so one two three four five and then omega which is now the first infinite ordinal and then you keep counting ordinals, ordinals, ordinals, and then when you get all of the countable ordinals done, you get into the uncountable ordinals. This will sound like mystical nonsense unless you've taken a course in set theory and learned about the hierarchy of infinite sets. So anyway, the well ordering theorem says that you can put any set, including the real numbers between zero and one, you can line them up with the this infinite string of ordinals. Now they won't go in the same order as the natural less than order, they'll be jumping all over the place. You know, like one half might be associated it's not an

intuitive ordering it's not like we we have any apprehension of it no uh we just guarantees it yeah the well-ordering theorem guarantees that that it exists but nobody has any idea of what a well-ordering of the real numbers would be no one's's found one yet. We've got well-orderings of the rational numbers, and they're pretty straightforward, but not of the real numbers. So technically, the well-ordering theorem says that the subset, that any subset is well-ordered. It says that any subset has a first element. Right. Right. Right. Just to see that the ordinary ordering is not a well ordering, if I say, take all the real numbers greater than one half. Sorry, can you repeat that just to say that what?

Take the real numbers. Yep. Greater than one half. What's the first element? Right, right, right. Greater than, but not including one half. Doesn't have., yeah that's right. It doesn't have a first element, so that's just not a well ordering. But with some other bizarre ordering I might take them, any subset, and it would have to have a well order. It would have to be a first element okay so we've we we imagine that we've got a well ordering of the

real numbers but just between zero and one that'll do okay now comes a little statistical argument you and i are going to throw darts we're going to throw darts at the real line between zero and one it's a thought experiment can't do it in reality, but a thought experiment. I throw a dart and I hit a number P, somewhere between 0 and 1. You throw your dart and you hit a number Q which is going to be later in the well-ordering than my dart P. Why? Because there's only a countable infinity at most of numbers earlier in the well-ord ordering from P and an uncountable infinity after and so so that you might be earlier than me but the probability

is zero right right right and you your dart you you've hit number Q and you can say exactly the same argument you're gonna say the chance that i'm earlier in the well ordering is zero and the chance that it's later is is one now we've got an absurdity because i i said you've got to be later than me right right right right and you've argued correctly that i've got to be later than you. Right, and we have different points. Yeah, and now we've just got an absurdity. And what led to this absurdity? The assumption that there are Aleph 1 real numbers. If there were Aleph 2, it wouldn't be a problem.

Okay, why is that? Because I might have landed in an uncountable, there might be an uncountable number of points earlier than me. And an uncountable earlier than you. So we couldn't argue. We wouldn't be able to do that. The trick is when you've got a countable infinity of numbers, and here comes the result from what's known as measure theory.

The chance of landing in there is zero it's not impossible but it's zero probability right and that's interesting for people to wrap their head around that you can have a zero probability but possible that's right it's not well people can look at it it's not the same as impossible. Okay. If anyone, just to take a slight tangent, anyone who finds that absurd, think of a roulette wheel with every real number between zero and one on it. Okay, you spin the wheel and it's going to stop somewhere. What's the chance it's going to land on say one half? Well there's infinitely many places it could stop. So the chance is one out of infinity which is going to be zero. It can happen but it's going to be zero

probability. Okay so you and I now have this little, we've each got this little argument. And, and we show that the, the other guy is, is impossible. And this is absurd. And the assumption, the background assumption that led to this, that the continuum hypothesis is true is in trouble you've got to throw it out okay all right now this is really interesting I mean it's it could be an argument you know that settles a continuum hypothesis though it's not a proof in any ordinary mathematical sense it's really Mathematicians who look at this are, oh, they're very queasy, you know, they don't like this kind of reasoning. They don't mind suggestive reasoning that's outside of mathematics. They don't want to take

it as real evidence that, you know, that this could be a theorem, you know, a real genuine, sure to be true result. Very uneasy about it. And I'm uneasy about it. I'm also curious as how it works. I mean, I know how I can reproduce the proof. I know how it works in that sense. But why the hell does it work? You know, it shouldn't work. And then what is its connection to reality? How is it that we can think this and it's true? Is that what you mean by how? No, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's sort of, that's, that's behind it all, for sure. But in particular, there are assumptions made for this little argument to go. And, and here, here, here are some of the assumptions. First of all, the real numbers and the points on the line correspond. Okay? So the geometric line between 0 and 1 and the uncountable infinity between 0 and 1 real numbers, they're exactly the same.

They pair up. Ah, yeah. Okay. Okay? It's an obvious assumption to make, given the long history of analytic geometry, but I just want to make sure it's there. Second thing, when you threw a dart and I threw a dart each of us hits a point at random. The chance of hitting any point along the line is no different than any other point. Okay? It's equi-probability for every point. Okay my that's true for my dart also true for your gut there is a symmetry between our throws in the sense that it doesn't matter if you throw first

and i throw second or i throw first and you throw a second or if we throw simultaneously it's irrelevant and finally uh independence the your result has no effect on my result, and vice versa. Okay. And when you think of all of those assumptions, these are crucial assumptions. Things like probability can be captured completely inside set theory. Independence can be captured completely inside set theory. independence can be captured completely inside set 3. The symmetry of the two throws can be captured completely inside symmetry. How come the damn argument works? Because if I tried to spell out the probability of my little argument,

or the symmetry or the independence, I tried to spell it out in standard mathematics and could get that result, then something would have gone terribly wrong. I tried to spell it out in standard mathematics and could get that result then Then then something would have gone terribly wrong. I can't get that result from ordinary mathematics so the probability In my argument the independence in the argument the symmetry in the argument can't be the probability symmetry symmetry, and independence of standard mathematics. Something else, something weird is going on. It must be a related but a different concept in each case. What do you think is going on? I think it's a thick concept. I think

probability as we normally use it is a thin concept thin mathematical concept i think in the dart thought experiment to refute the continuum hypothesis i think probability has taken on a new richness in the example it's become physicalized in some sense and so here's where I'm looking at the analogy with ethics. Instead of a thin concept from mathematics or a thin concept from physics, I've got a thick. This is thick probability. It's got both physical and mathematical aspects to it. Like courageous is both. In set theory, we can formalize probability. Yeah. So what's thick about this?

Just throwing the dart, but we can not use the dart and say we pick a point at random. And there's obviously random variables which have nothing to do with darts. So what's thick? I don't hear what's thick about this. I don't know. Maybe I'm thick. You've got to help me out. No, not at all. The thickness would come in the way the thought experiment is done.

You're supposed to imagine yourself throwing a dart at an actual line. Try to make it physical. Even if you think it's mathematical, it's outside of set theories. Why do you have to imagine that? Why can't you just say pick a point at random instead of throwing a dart is there a difference well the dart the dart is is supposed to be a guarantee that it's genuinely at random um if i asked you to pick a real number between zero one one at random I'm almost certain you couldn't do it. I know, I know.

What I'm saying is that you can formalize what it means to pick a number from 0 to 1 randomly in statistics, independent of saying throw a dart. And you can formalize it with set theory, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. That's certainly true. The thing is, well, here's what I am faced with and you're faced with. If we assume that the argument works, the Freiling argument works, the refutation, we assume it works. And it does seem to make these crucial assumptions. Well,

it assumes Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with choice. Okay. And then it assumes the randomness of the dart throw, the symmetry of the dart throw, the independence of the dart throw, and the correspondence between real numbers and points on a line. It assumes that if all of that is just part of mathematics, existing mathematics, then we would have derived a refutation of the continuum hypothesis inside mathematics. It wouldn't have been independent after all. Since it is independent independent demonstrably independent one of those premises has to be false i see i see and so uh if i just say well let's take the randomness one i don't know which one is false at least one of them has got to be false so the randomness one is false there must be um the randomness that we're assuming in the thought experiment cannot be analyzed in normal set theory terms.

It's got to have some kind of physical component that enriches it so that we can pull off this argument. So that's where, this is where the thick concepts come in. I see. So it becomes not ordinary randomness in standard math. It becomes a thick randomness. It's got a physical, it's become physicalized

in some important sense. Now you say physicalized with a grimace. Is that because there is, you're a Platonist and you feel like, well,

if it's not a thin mathematical, by the way, is there a connection between thin and thick and Platonism and non-Platonism? I don't know. Most of the people who talk about thick and thin in ethics, what they are, they often conclude that this is the end of the fact value distinction. So if you think of facts as part of the physical realm, and if you were a Platonist about ethics, and they're declaring the end of this dichotomy

between moral reality and physical reality, then I'm not sure about the status of moral reality when it's all over. I would like to think it's still there. And these are a kind of hybrid human-made concepts, both in ethics and in math. I was to say that you would like to believe that morals are a part of the Platonistic world or a moral world. Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a moral realist. Yeah, for me, there's, I hate the distinction between fact and value, because it makes it sound like values aren't themselves facts, but they are. They're moral facts. Murder is wrong. That's a moral fact. Setting kittens on fire for pleasure to watch them burn and suffer. It's a moral fact that that's wrong.

How do we get that moral fact? Where does that moral fact come from? Okay, now this gets back to the problem, a simultaneous problem for both ethics and for mathematics. So most Platonists believe not only in the reality of mathematics And if you're a platonist about ethics or a moral realist you believe in objective moral facts the the big problem and the thing that people who are empiricists and naturalists complain about is You have no access to these facts Even if they did exist because you can see smell touch and so on but if these live in a in a realm completely separate from us you have no contact with them you couldn't

learn about them and so on and so on the response from uh moral realists platonists is to appeal to intuition. And intuition is a cognitive capacity that we have that will give us knowledge. So to take math, everybody has scads of moral intuitions about math. Even if you had almost no mathematical training, you have a powerful intuition that two plus two equals four. And that's a moral intuition? Sorry, no, a mathematical intuition that two plus two equals four. And if I pressed you and I said, oh, look, I just read in

the newspaper today that, you know, in Brazil, some wonderful physicists in Brazil have just done some fine-tuned measurements, and they have discovered that 2 plus 2 actually equals 3.95. It doesn't equal 4 after all. Right. This is actually germane, because there was a recent controversy about 2 plus 2 equals 5. I don't know if you've heard of it no okay so i think about one side we can talk about that afterwards no no no the other side was being serious it was it was because they were saying that the way that math is set up is western and it's not taking into account other modes of knowing and there are possible worlds where two plus two could equal five and in different interpretations which it's true i mean if you have modulo something I'm sure you can make

two plus two equal five or you're absolutely right but it doesn't mean it may be standard interpretation and there's probably good rules of thumb in in some sciences where you you're now not talking two plus two you're talking about two some things and two some things so if you're talking about two somethings and two somethings so if you're talking about uh what is it water a liter of water mixed with a liter of alcohol perhaps doesn't give you two liters of liquid it gives you something like 1.9 liters of liquid because of the you know the some atomic goings-on reduces the the volume of the whole thing you could you might conveniently talk that way yeah because you're in the lab and it's very constrained but no two plus two equals

four and more generally you know a little bit of arithmetic and then i can become abstract and i can say um any number m and any number n if i together, M plus N, it's going to equal N plus M. And everybody, they think about that for a minute and a half and say, yeah, yeah, right, I see it. Yes, it's true, and it has to be true. That's an example of mathematical intuition. Okay. Okay? Okay.

It's not empirical, though. mathematical intuition. Okay. Okay. It's not empirical though. Math and ethics have been the two thorns in the side of empiricism. Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate just for a second because I'm trying to wrap my head around this. When you have n plus, when you have like a plus b equals b plus a, just so that it's clear, do we not define that with the addition being commutative? And then we make a model and say that our numbers correspond to it. We do. But people's elementary experience with arithmetic would lead them in that very direction. They've done enough adding.

They've been making change. They've been counting pebbles. Who knows what? And after a while, they come to realize that whether they've been told that the commuter okay you're strictly speaking about the intuition behind it not proving it to be true that's right uh because to to the audience see proving it to be true that's really interesting we actually assume it in in the way that we define addition and multiplication that they're doing arithmetic in any formal sense we typically start out with something known as the piano axioms

okay and they tell us how to add how to multiply and they give us a principle called mathematical induction and then everything in arithmetic follows well i need to qualify that almost everything in arithmetic follows. There is a problem about completeness, but never mind that. And everybody's intuition, if you've been playing with arithmetic for a while, you'd say, yeah, this is the truth.

This is how addition works. This is how multiplication works. Okay, let's not get hung up on it. Let's assume that we have a strong intuition and we prove it. Those are examples of intuitions. Now, we have the same thing in ethics. So, if you saw somebody, if you saw some teenage kids catch a kitten, pour gasoline on it, set it on fire, you would be aghast. You would be morally outraged. you have a very strong moral intuition that that was an evil thing to do but those kids don't uh they might they might and they are just uh overwhelmed

by peer pressure and gang behavior and stuff like that and you're right they might not even yeah now let's imagine they might now let's's take the edge case. The which? The edge cases, just to investigate this. So what if they genuinely don't have anything wrong with that? Like Genghis Khan, for example, said the best life would be conquering his enemies and enslaving their women. And now we look at that and say that that's ridiculous. But let's believe him that that actually invoked pleasure in him. And he thought that was morally correct. Okay, well, I don't know enough about him to know exactly what's going on.

So I'll give you the short answer, and that is we've made a hell of a lot of moral progress since that announcement. Right. How do we make the claim that we've made moral progress without already assuming what we're trying to prove? That's an extremely difficult question. I don't want to say, well, my views have won over the long run, though they have. Like my view is we shouldn't have slavery. And almost everybody agrees with that now. My view is that women should have slavery. And almost everybody agrees with that now. My view is that women should be treated equally with men. And most people agree with that now that they wouldn't have a century ago. My view is that gays and lesbians and so on should be treated with, you know, equal rights and dignity and so on and so on. And I'd say at least a strong majority of Canadians, if not a strong

majority of the world population, agree with that. So I don't have a hard and fast non-circular argument. I can say that as people think about these things over time, they tend to change their views in the direction that that we have come not many people were against slavery for years and years and then had an epiphany and said I made a terrible mistake I think we should have slaves I think that would be a great idea okay well don't go in that direction let me let me press for a bit I actually agree with you but here's what I'm thinking here's what pops into my head so a social consensus what is required and what if 10 years from now you know there's some evidence that people who are on the lower end of the iq

spectrum have more children let's just imagine that many people and we can even demean them and say conservatives like let's say we're let's imagine that we're we're progressive liberals i'm not even i'm not saying we are but let's just say these foolish reactionary conservatives are the ones that populate the earth and then they like it slavery later and the majority of the earth likes slavery except those who are enslaved but they're a minority yeah does that make that correct no okay no no no is an objective. Right, so there's something else. So what's going on? Okay, so there's two questions. Is there such a thing as objective right or wrong?

Yes. I mean, correct. Is there an objective shape of the Earth? Yes. I think it's round. It's spherical. And I think we've got a ton of evidence that this is so. But if for some reason in the future people said no

we're pretty sure it's flat um and then i would say well i pity that future civilization they've got it wrong they've made a terrible mistake that's fact straight factual stuff okay morally if people actually said well i we think we think slavery is a pretty good idea, I would say they've made a terrible, terrible mistake. But I acknowledge the possibility that it could happen. Germany was a very progressive country in the 19th and very early 20th century. And then by the time, you know, horrible calamities in the 30s, Hitler comes to power and a majority of Germans are willing to go along with some pretty horrific views. Uh-huh. Yeah, they're just wrong. They're just wrong.

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direction and then you're saying no that's wrong but how does that not jive with saying that there's societal movement towards a certain direction and that corresponds to being objectively correct morally no no it's it this, this is a very good question, and it's very hard to answer. I don't have a terrific answer. I only have a weak answer. And my weak answer is that it's like science. We make progress in science. It's possible that what we believe today about let's say quantum mechanics and relativity a hundred years from now people will say uh i don't know let's go back to newton let's believe newton okay i think i think the chances of that are minuscule and the thing is that there's been

incremental evidence it's fallible evidence, but incremental evidence all along pushes people upwards, okay? It makes us brighter, we know more, we're more sophisticated in physics, and I think something like that goes on in our moral and political lives too. Interesting, okay. Now with regards to Newtonian physics becoming relativity and then okay. We say that one is more correct because it can explain more. So it's just, that's evidence.

That's evidence. Is pure explanatory power what makes the theory correct? And the reason why I say that is, okay. No, explanatory power is a sign, is evidence that it's correct. I see, I see.

Okay? It is... This much is logically possible for anyone who's a realist, that all the evidence could point away from the truth. Everything that we count as evidence. Like, is it explanatorily powerful?

Yeah. Does it... Is it incredibly accurate? You know, does it make spectacular predictions to the 25th decimal place? Yeah, it might do that too. And it might...

And yet, in spite of all of this, it might be false. What are your views on free will, by the way? Do you believe in it? Yes? Do you believe in it? Yes. Or do you believe against it? Oh, interesting. Okay, now are you like Daniel Dennett where you say, well, I have a compatibilist view?

No, I have here, I feel completely at sea. Speculate away. I operate. I live my life as if I have free will I am I eat too much and I blame myself I blame my willpower and while it would be very nice to blame something else I can't I just blame myself I I get angry at others I get angry I mean some people I think can't help what they believe, others I think have gone out of their way to make themselves stupid and I blame them for that. So I'm happy to blame people for not doing what I think they ought to do, and I do think they have free will.

I don't know how to live in a world where we really don't have free will. But I may have, I may be just highly, that's not an't have free will. But I may be just highly... That's not an argument for free will. That's just an argument for we have to live as if there is free will. I don't know how really to live otherwise. Now, I've seen some people who are very sophisticated talk about this subject. And maybe they'll be able to

persuade me in the long run that we don't have free will or there's a very good chance we don't have any free will but we should we can act like this and this and this and this and so on so i i really i i i have childish immature underdeveloped views about free will. The standard view that's opposed to free will is, well, what caused you to make so-and-so decision, and then it's your neurology. Okay, well, what caused that? And you keep going until you get to a cause that's not you.

Yeah, you just get along that chain of causes. Right, right. Where does that chain of reductionism, because we just talked about physics being extremely powerful and more and more accurate, and there doesn't seem to be room for free will. So where does free will comport with our view of physics in the way that it's formalized currently? as you just put it. Here's another issue in which I do not have strong views, but it's sort of in the background. And this is the difference between, this is the issue of reductionism and emergence. So if you have a complete reductionist view, and your world is deterministic, it's very hard to make room for a free will. But if you have an emergentist view, that is, yeah, physics is at the bottom, but in a certain level of complexity,

there could emerge biological laws. Like strong emergence. Yeah. And out of that could emerge psychological laws and so on. And free will would be something that is emerging at some higher level. It's not going to emerge out of elementary particle physics.

I mean, sometimes people try to do that because they take quantum indeterminacy to be, you know, it's just stupid. It's just really bad arguments. But if we did have some kind of emergence you might have free will right but again I can't make up my mind on that issue either where I was going to go is there's no evidence for strong emergence

but there's plenty of evidence for reductionism like there's no link in the chain that's broken in the reductionist account as far as we could tell so then to believe that we have free will and i'm i'm not suggesting that i don't believe i'm just throwing something out so to believe that we have free will seems to be counter to evidence so how do you jive with saying that i'm a person who goes wherever the evidence leads me but simultaneously

saying that i'm someone who believes in free will and when i say go wherever the evidence believes sorry that i'm a person i'm a person who goes wherever the evidence leads i mean evidence in terms of scientific evidence because obviously you can be a spiritualist and say well i have the intuitions and maybe you might appeal to intuitions but i'm curious so what do you say to that um well um i i do uh. I do count myself as somebody who's led by the evidence. On the other hand, I don't agree with you about there's no gaps in the going from us to elementary particles. I mean, try to imagine accounting for Donald Trump's election in terms of writing down the Schrodinger equation for the population of the world. What I meant.

And then solving it and getting out that Donald Trump is president. What I meant was that so far there's no link that's been shown to be false. That doesn't mean that there is. No, no, no. I completely agree with you. So there's no evidence for it. And there's plenty of evidence. That doesn't mean that there is. No, no, no. I completely agree with you. So there's no evidence for it. It wouldn't be very reliable. That would be like religious people who argue for

the God of the gaps. God fills in the gaps in our scientific knowledge. Yeah, it's a foolish way of doing it. Let's talk about Platonism. Do you mind defining for the audience what Platonism is? Sure. Modern Platonism is? Sure. Modern Platonism, as opposed to being a strict follower

of Plato. Modern Platonism is simply the view that there are abstract entities. Numbers being the most obvious example of this. They exist in some way, shape, or form?

Yep, they're real. They exist. And there are facts about them, like two plus two equals four. There are infinitely many prime numbers and so on. And these objects and these facts are completely independent from intelligent creatures. So even if no intelligent life existed anywhere in the universe,

it would still be true that there are infinitely many prime numbers. If you believe that, you're a Platonist. In fact, there's a little litmus test for audience members who've never thought about it before. There's a little litmus test for audience members who've never thought about it before. Ask yourself, do you think mathematicians discover new truths of mathematics, or do they somehow invent or create them? Shakespeare created Hamlet. If Shakespeare or no intelligent being had ever existed, Hamlet would not exist.

no intelligent being had ever existed, Hamlet would not exist. On the other hand, the spherical shape of the earth would still be a fact, even if no intelligent being had ever existed. I say math is more like the shape of the earth and less like Hamlet. That's what it is to be a mathematical realist or a Platonist. When you say, something that just popped into my head was the infinite monkeys on the typewriter, and then you can make an analogy between Shakespeare and information. So just say the works of Shakespeare is just one extremely large number, given that you can translate it to bits isomorphically. Okay, and that number exists. So then did Shakespeare actually invent Hamlet or did he discover it? No, no, no. Arithmetic is rich enough that it can encode Hamlet. That's all.

So technically did he discover it or did he create it? Hamlet was created by Shakespeare, not discovered by Shakespeare. Okay. But when the mathematician discovers or produces, when Euclid produced the theorem that there are infinitely many prime numbers, Euclid discovered something. He discovered something

that exists, that is true, independent from him. He didn't make it up. I see. It's not a cultural item of any sort. It's just a brute way the world is i see i see i see but it's the abstract world it's not a physical object it's an abstract entity yeah now what creates this platonic world it's always been there nothing created it yeah so how do we talk about the platonic world without sounding mystical, without sounding theological?

It's like it's always there. It's ever-present. It is timeless. It's an uncaused cause. Yeah. Well, you can imagine the universe, the physical universe, always existing, right? In fact, there's good reason to believe that it always has. existing right in fact there's a good there's good reason to believe that it always has uh i know we're we we're we talk about big bang cosmology and we're what 13.8 billion years old

but if but the inflationary scenario we're probably just one of you know the multiverse and these things have been going on forever so our mini our universe is just one of a infinite number of pocket universes pocket universes have always existed and they generate more um through this process called eternal inflation or just go back to pre-big bang cosmology where we used to believe standard physics believed that the universe was infinitely old. It didn't have a beginning and it won't have an end. It just is eternal.

Not created by God. This is, atheists were happy to believe this. It's just, this is the way things are. So the platonic world was always there. Or even to say the word always implies formulating it in terms of time, and it's timeless. There's an old philosophical distinction we hardly use anymore between eternal and sempiternal. Sempiternal?

Sempiternal. So sempiternal means true at all times. Eternal means outside of time. So mathematics is true outside of time if if if numbers were somehow or other which a small number of people believe a kind of part of the physical realm but a kind but somehow attached to the physical realm so the physical realm didn't exist but somehow attached to the physical realm so if the physical realm didn't exist numbers wouldn't exist that would be a simple eternal version so in casual talk we say yeah it's eternal it's always the

case but this distinction like God standard view of God God is eternal outside of creation right whereas whatever God created is and if God created anything that lasted forever in creation that would be sent eternal I see I see Wittgenstein had a quote about this he said if eternal means infinite temporal length, then... That would be temporal. Right. If it didn't mean that, but instead meant outside of time, then anyone who lives in the present moment is living eternally. Yeah, well, that's...

Beautiful. Also a bit mystical. A few weeks ago I emailed, or maybe a couple months ago I emailed you about thought experiments. I don't recall how the conversation started, but you sent me a book book on thought experiments you didn't know that i was thinking of writing a book i actually started but your book was far more articulate than mine about thought experiments just i recommend people who watch this to to read it's like it's like spit back second book on manifolds it's a short read and compendious. Something I've been trying to develop is,

is there a way of formulating the laws of physics from pure thought experiments? What drove me to think that was the Galileo experiment, the thought experiment with Galileo. And you had already thought about this as well. And in fact, you just started writing a book about it. It's not like you solved the problem. Otherwise, we'd invent plenty of new technology, but you've made what I think is progress. So let's talk about that book. Do you think that ultimately the laws of physics can be generated from armchair philosophy, just sitting back and thinking a thought experiment?

Certainly not all. In fact, not even most. But just every now and then, I think we can learn something about the world in a non-empirical way. And my favorite example is Galileo and falling objects. Galileo's a wonderful thought experimenter. Maybe the best ever. He's absolutely terrific. Einstein was a very good thought experimenter too. They're probably in the same league, but if anything, I think Galileo is a notch above. My favorite thought experiment of all time, and I remember hearing it when I was an undergraduate and thought it was the most dazzling thing I'd ever heard. And this is the argument for all objects, regardless of how heavy they are, fall at the same rate. So it's a thought experiment.

You imagine yourself going up on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, if you like, and you're dropping a cannonball, which is quite heavy, and a musket ball, which is relatively quite a bit lighter. Now, the common sense view and the view in Aristotle are the same. It says that heavy objects will just fall faster than light objects. And we've got a lot of experience to that effect, you know I mean if you do throw a cannonball and a feather, you know, you know that the cannonballs gonna hit the ground a lot sooner So Galileo says all right if Heavy objects fall faster than light objects, let's imagine a compound object consisting

of a cannonball and a musket ball glued together, okay, and drop it. Now we've got three things. We've got a cannonball, a musket ball, and this composite objects. Now on the principle that heavy objects fall faster, this composite object is going to fall fastest of all of the three. But unfortunately, it's not. It's going to be slowed down by the fact that the cannonball part of the composite object wants to fall at its fast rate, but it's going to be held back by this little musket ball attached to it, who's wanting to fall at a slower rate. So it's like jumping out of

a window with a little tiny parachute it's going to slow you down um and so that's absurd the composite object will be both faster and slower than the heavy cannonball by itself there it's and that was the end of common sense about falling objects and the end of Aristotle on freefall and But the solution how fast do things fall is obvious when you've reached this point and here's the here's where they? Were a physical intuition actually comes in and you don't need to perform the experiment You just think about it and you realize oh, they all have to fall at the same rate. And that's how things fall. Things fall at the same rate, regardless of how heavy they are.

To me, this is still one of the most beautiful thought experiments as well. And it's what led me on the journey of thinking. I wonder how much more of physics can be gleaned by just thinking about what's consistent, what contradicts. Oh, a ton of things. Galileo's other, I think his other very, very famous thought experiment is the inside the ship, where he can't tell by hypothesis, he can't tell whether the ship is stationary in the port or moving across a very smooth ocean and he says okay, I'm inside and

birds are flying around inside front to back and it's the same whether I'm sailing or at port I throw up a ball to my friend back and forth same whether we're moving or in port fish are in a back and forth same whether we're moving or in port. Fish are in a aquarium tank inside the ship and they swim back and forth in the tank and it doesn't matter whether we're stationary and moving. Everything is the same on the inside. And that's his argument for what has become the principle of relativity. That inertial frames, the laws of nature are exactly the same in any inertial frame Whether it's a stationary one at rest in port or moving smoothly over the over the sea What was the impetus for him thinking of this thought experiment was it because he was suggesting the earth is moving and people were wondering

Well, shouldn't we be moving if the earth is moving or was it something else? That's exactly right There was another thought experiment prior not Galileo's but prior to Galileo And people were wondering, well, shouldn't we be moving if the earth is moving? Or was it something else? That's exactly right. There was another thought experiment prior, not Galileo's, but prior to Galileo. This is a medieval thought experiment, sometimes called the tower experiment. And that is, if the earth is moving, either around the sun or spinning on its own axis, either way, and you dropped an object from a from a tower then as the earth moved the object would fall way behind the base of the tower right it never does that it always falls right down at the base right and you can use a similar ship argument where if you're on a ship and the ship is sailing and you drop a ball it'll fall behind the ship or where the tail end of the ship was

that's right the tower that's what the the the equivalent tower argument would use but galileo says no no it's not going to be like that at all if you're uh if you're just inside the ship you can't see out you drop a ball it'll land at your feet uh and if you're moving over the sea at 20 knots and you drop a ball, it's still going to land at your feet either way. Right, right. And then more general, of course, you just make the claim the laws of nature are going to be the same in any inertial frame of reference. And that's the principle of relativity. That's Galileo's version. And it's the version, it's the only version we use. When Einstein gave us special relativity he hung on to the principle of relativity because it was in danger. It was in danger from Maxwell's

electrodynamics which seemed to need a universal ether as if there was a single frame in which physics was correctly described and and and they're moving a moving anything that was moving in the ether frame you wouldn't get the right results that is that you'd have to take that into account the laws of nature are now let's get to Newton with the absolute space in the bucket so newton had a thought experiment that demonstrated absolute space okay so this is another extremely famous thought experiment and for this i can show a diagram from the book or from any other place

i don't want to take from the copyright holder no no have you got it there no i mean i'll show it when we're when i'm editing oh yeah yeah yeah you can show it from my book don't worry sure yeah i you i grant you permission thank you i appreciate that okay now um so uh newton gave two versions of this one was the bucket okay and and so uh the way the way you should think of it is you've got a bucket um and you can you can twist the rope okay and the and here's the bucket and the water is very smooth on top and you let the bucket go because it's the only thing in the universe for this for the well for the bucket there's all there's there's newton and there's everything around okay never mind let me do the bucket and then's Newton and there's everything around. Okay, never mind.

Let me do the bucket and then I'll switch to the other one. Sure, sure, sure. Which is the empty universe. Okay, so at first the water is flat and the bucket starts to rotate. And gradually, and so initially, before anything happens, the water and the bucket are at rest with respect to one another. Then they start to rotate, and they're rotating together, both the bucket and the water, and the water starts climbing the walls. And then you stop the bucket, and the water's still climbing, and it gradually subsides to flat again.

and the water's still climbing, and it gradually subsides to flat again. Now the question is, how do we explain the difference between the water and bucket being at rest initially, and the water's flat, and later on the water and bucket are at rest with respect to one another, but the water is concave, The water is climbing up the walls. How do you explain the difference? And Newton says, okay, you know what's going to happen. Here's the explanation. In the first case, the water bucket system is not rotating with respect to space.

And later, when the water is climbing the walls, the whole system is rotating with respect to space and later when the wall water is climbing the walls the whole system is rotating with respect to space itself and then conclusion therefore space exists it's not just you know something that you know we're we use as a convenience or something like that actually let me go back and make sure, and people can figure out what their instinctive view is on this, okay? This will be the difference between a Newtonian on the one hand and a Leibnizian relationalist on the other hand, okay? Question. If there was nothing in the whole universe universe no object existed anywhere in the universe would space still exist could space still exist and i find that when i ask my students that question

about half of them say yeah empty space no problem there could be empty space and the other half said that's ridiculous there couldn't be such a thing as empty space. If there's no objects, there's just no space, period. This sounds like the tree falling in the woods. The space-time version. There's some connection to that, you're right. And there's a counterpart to that for time. If I say to my class, okay, imagine that nothing ever happened. Everything was just frozen solid

could time still pass half the class will say no no events no time the other half will say yeah time's still passing but nothing's happening very different instincts people have about this. And that one's also about 50-50? Yeah, roughly 50-50. Same people? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They're highly correlated. Okay.

Yeah. So if you think empty space makes sense, and you think time without events makes sense, you're a Newtonian. You're with Newton. And if you think that no objects, no space, or no events, no time, you're an instinctive Leibnizian, a relationalist. And what about you? My instincts are mostly with Newton. It's also, another thing that's interesting about this is that my class will be typically half physics, half philosophy

students. It doesn't break along that line at all. Oh, interesting. Half the physicists are Newtonians in instinct, and half of them are Lagnitzians. And the philosophy students are exactly the same. Half of them are Newtonians, half of them are Lagnitzians. Have you done this with mathematicians? I'm curious. I do it with mathematicians for other things and often that are philosophically interesting and I am often surprised at the split in the mathematical audience exactly corresponds

to the split in the philosophy audience. That is you can't tell from someone's answer whether they're a mathematician or a philosopher By the way, do you consider are you a professor of philosophy of math or philosophy of physics or both? No just philosophy But my specialty inside is things like math and physics. I see this is some I mean some philosophers are You know, they specialize in the history of philosophy or in ethics and so on. Math and physics are my specialties inside. As an aside, another aside, why did you end up choosing to go into the philosophy of math instead of math? Is it just purely based on what interested you or was there something else? That's a really interesting question. I think it was pretty much right at the beginning, like when you're beginning undergraduate and then you have to pick majors and stuff like that. I thought

I can do anything in the world as a philosopher and no one will say, yeah, you're not doing philosophy anymore. One of my first questions for this that i wrote down it's has any philosophical question ever been solved and this relates to that because i'm curious to know it's something i've been thinking about i searched this on google and it's not clear the only one that i can think of is maybe zeno's paradox with saying well you're only accounting for finite time but have any major philosophical problems ever been solved um i'd be more confident in saying a lot of views have been decisively refuted so there's a lot of people in philosophy saying well we don't know that we're we know we know that we're making progress

in this limited sense that we now know certain things are false that we didn we know we know that we're making progress in this limited sense that we now know certain things are false that we didn't know were false you know 50 years ago or something like that but i mean there are lots i have lots of philosophical views uh about which i'm fairly confident and i think those might count people would disagree with me of course right, but there'd be a there'd be a some Significant number of people who would say yeah, we think that's right in defense of Yeah, I mean to take one of the one of the most important and oldest is Plato's

Plato's refutation um for the need for God in order to have objective ethics it's in the dialogue called the Euthyphro and it's a very simple little argument and it doesn't it doesn't refute the existence of God it just says no no no objective ethics objective right and wrong, is completely independent from God. God's got nothing to do with it. It's a wonderful little argument. And if you are an atheist, you're happy with the conclusion, right, we can have objective ethics, we don't need God. And if you do believe in God, you could say, well, I still believe in God, and I believe in objective ethics.

The intimate connection that I thought was there actually isn't there, but everything else is. Or someone can reject the conclusion and say, yes, God can advocate for the murder of a child and that would still be good because God advocated for it. That's the essence of the youthful argument because everyone will balk at that. And they think, well, something is moral because God says so. And then you say oh yeah so if he told you you had you had to rape every woman you can see then that would be a good thing to do. Is that what you believe? And no one will believe that. And then they realize that this is stupid. I can't, what I've been saying all along is a really stupid view. The most we can get out of God is God is a truthful reporter of objective moral rules.

Like we can trust God to tell us what the moral rules are, but God isn't making them. They have to be independent. That's a really, it's a wonderfully interesting problem that's underappreciated. I think theologians don't want to touch it. And there's another one that they even more don't want to touch. And that is how powerful God is. The one about ethics is a lot like what Leibniz thought about God's power. He'd say, Leibniz, do you think God is all powerful?

He'd say, you betcha. He can do anything. Descartes. Leibniz wouldn't say that, though. Because Leibniz... He'd have a qualification, which I'm going to give you in a second. Okay, okay. He'd say, Descartes, can God do everything?

He'd say, you betcha. He can do anything. And then you say, well, can he make it rain? It's a sunny day right here. Can he make it rain? Sure, he can make it rain. Leibniz, could he make it rain? You betcha, he can make it rain, just like that. And then you say to Descartes, could he make it rain and not rain simultaneously? Descartes would

say, yes, he can even do that. I can't imagine what it would be like, but he can do it. And Leibniz would say, no, he can't do that. He can make it rain, he can make it not rain, but he can do it and leibniz would say no we can't do that he can make it rain he can make it not rain but he can't pull off a contradiction so god god can do anything that's possible that's god's power right and and that and and the leibniz view about what god can do in the physical realm is very much like leibniz, I think, with all the same view about ethics. You know, God can advocate almost anything, but God actually couldn't make murder okay. God couldn't make torturing kittens morally okay. He doesn't have that kind of power. You know, when we're talking about whether or not philosophical problems have been solved,

you know when we're talking about whether or not philosophical problems have been solved something i found online which it's funny it's the reason why philosophical problems have not been solved is that as soon as they haven't solved they get relegated to something like physics or math for example you know physics was called natural philosophy before and then when we know that's a good that's actually a really good point the hardest problems stay in philosophy the ones that are unsolvable stay in philosophy as As soon as they're solved, they get outside the realm of philosophy, and that's why philosophical problems seem to have never been solved. That's a really good point. In fact, that's how a lot of philosophers think of their discipline, as giving birth to the sciences. Once we sort something out, it takes off a life of its own sometimes when I

talk to hardcore physicists they don't like to deal with concepts that are maybe you might call them thick although I might be using your terminology incorrectly I'm gonna call them ambiguous like for example consciousness or free will or yeah yeah those are right right and they would just say i don't know what it means to i don't know what that means and so let me just stay with my rulers and protractors but the philosophers are willing to deal with what seems meaningless and try and find meaning and then it's and concretize what's ambiguous or disambiguate what's ambiguous and then it goes into another realm yeah yeah that's right and i

don't particularly like the the this there's a dismissal that and an arrogance that comes from the purely mathematical and purely physical professors that i've spoken to where they don't want to deal with certain concepts that seem that are ill-defined they'll just say well i don't deal with that and that's meaningless. And so you can pursue that, but that's a religious pursuit to even talk about consciousness or what it means to die or what does life mean. Well, yeah, that seems rather short-sighted

because so many, I mean, I can understand them saying, I don't want to deal with consciousness as a physicist. I'm very happy to talk about it and think about it and reflect on it. It's probably outside the realm of physics. I'm also very interested to talk about politics and how we should organize society. But I wouldn't... Derive it from the Schrodinger equation. Exactly. Okay, now the bucket. Okay, so anyway, the bucket, Newton's final conclusion, water still initially,

water concave at the end, what's the difference? Explanation, the bucket is not rotating, then the bucket is rotating with respect to space itself and therefore space exists. It's meant to be an argument for the existence of space as a thing in its own right. As well as all these material objects all around us, there is also space. It's an extra thing. Likeibniz said that's rubbish. There's nothing to space except the relations among physical things. Get rid of the physical things, there's nothing left over. So Leibniz didn't agree with the conclusion of the thought experiment, or he just didn't get presented with this thought experiment? No, that's really a good point. They had a

wonderfully interesting correspondence back and forth. It's called the Leibniz-Clark correspondence, because Clark is very close to Newton. We don't really know whether Clark was simply taking dictation from Newton. He might have been, or he might have just talked to Newton about how to formulate answers, but there's about six letters back and forth between them, and they keep getting longer and longer. Leibniz died. It never came to an end, Leibniz just unfortunately died. And Leibniz has wonderful answers to a whole lot of stuff that uh newton talks about and but leibniz is a brilliant brilliant person when people are talking about the luminaries they mention einstein and newton but leibniz is to me on the same category of new. Oh yes, he's unquestionably one of the all-time spectacular greats. Yeah, yeah, universal great. He's just brilliant in

everything. Okay, okay, so anyway, but that's the bucket. But you see Newton then said, gave a second version. It's the same argument, but this is the really interesting one So, uh, he says you imagine two spheres Connected by a cord or a rod or something a cord make it a cord or an elastic and he says There there's a tension In the elastic, okay, it's stretched Um the material sorry, sorry, is this in your thought experiment book as well that I can place an image for? Okay. It'll be in the same place.

Okay, I'm just trying to visualize it right now. I'm visualizing something like a barbell. It looks like a dumbbell. Okay, so you got the two spheres and they could be made out of some massive thing. It could be wood. They don't attract or repel. But there's a tension. Okay, the cord is stretched Okay, okay. Okay. How could you explain this? There's nothing in the universe It's an empty universe. How do you explain it Newton says easy the whole thing is rotating and You see the the individual objects try to move in straight lines they try to move inertially and hence there it's stretching the the cord between them and That's how you account for it. Well, what's the cause of this inertial motion space itself?

Space is the source of inertial motion and inertial forces and stuff like that this is the if now if you're if you're if you're someone like Leibniz, you're gonna have real problems with this. Because space... you see for Newton space has real properties. It can cause things. It causes things to move in straight lines. That's why if you throw an object, no force on it, it'll move in a straight line it's space that sort of guides it

as it were that way and if there were no space there'd be no accounting for why it moves in a straight line rather than just at random Leibniz died before he could really tackle that issue who he who knows he

might have even been won over by it you wanted to know about how einstein reacted to this right einstein changed his mind but early on and this is at the in the very first uh couple of pages in the in the paper on general relativity. For the audience, just to clarify, the Newton bucket experiment demonstrated, at least for Newton, the presence of absolute space. That's right. Space is a thing in its own right. Yeah. What Einstein does is he rejects the whole setup. So he imagines two spheres that are rotating with respect to one another. And one is perfectly spherical. And the other one's a kind of an ellipse of revolution.

Okay, so it's elongated at its equator. Okay, just like our Earth spinning on its axis. It's a little wider at its equator. Okay, just like our Earth spinning on its axis, it's a little wider at the equator. So Einstein imagines these two things in an otherwise empty space. And he says, how can you explain this? And then he says, you can't. You must

appeal to distant matter. This is really Mock's answer to all of this you must appeal to distant matter that you can experience you can see it and uh and one of the uh object the the ellipse of revolution um that object not the spherical but that object is rotating with respect to that distant mass. So it's not space itself that causes inertial motion. It's the presence of

billions of tons of mass all over the universe. Let me see if I have this correct because I don't recall this. So are you, is what you're saying something like we don't know for rotating unless we see stars rotating above us Yeah, or is this it's completely is that that's Einstein. Yeah, okay What about the centripetal force or centrifugal force? So what does he say about that? We would feel it It's not caused by rotation with respect to space. It's caused by rotation with respect to distant matter. In fact, this is Mark. Mark made an empirical claim about this and I don't think it's very practical so no one can ever do it. But Mark said imagine that you did Newton's bucket in a bucket where the where the walls of the bucket were several miles thick

okay okay so imagine them 100 miles thick incredible mass and then you and you rotate this thing yeah okay so in newton's bucket when you rotate it the wall the water starts to climb the wall yeah lock said if you've got enough mass in the bucket itself, the water would stay level. Therefore, it's not rotation with respect to space. It's rotation with respect to external masses. The bucket itself becomes the... You need such a big bucket. You know, you couldn't ask the government

to pay for this experiment. They would be turfed out of power in the next election when the population got wind of it. In your thought experiment book, you fractionate into two. There's constructive, destructive types of thought experiments, and then constructive, conjectural, and so on. Did you come up with that, or was that something you found?

There's a little bit in the... Well, I should tell you, when I first decided... Let me back up a little more. When I first heard about the Galileo thought experiment of the falling bodies, I thought that's the most wonderful thing I'd ever heard. And then after I got tenure, I thought, okay, they can't fire me now. I'm going to do what I wanted to do for a long time, and that's start thinking about thought experiments.

And there was virtually no literature on it. There's, you know, people make the odd offhand remark. And of course there are lots of thought experiments floating around, but nobody had ever written about it in a collection. What's their nature, you know, how do they work and stuff like that. And I was shocked that I could read almost everything that had ever been written about thought experiments in a long weekend. It was almost nothing a bit by mock and a bit by, you know, almost everything that had ever been written about thought experiments in a long weekend. It was almost nothing. A bit by Mark and a bit by a few other people and that's it.

So the few people who had commented on it usually divided things up into the positive, negative kind of thought experiments. Thought experiments which try to give you a new theory versus thought experiments. Thought experiments which, you know, try to give you a new theory versus thought experiments which just destroy an old theory. Okay, so Schrodinger's cat is a negative thought experiment in the sense that it's just supposed to undermine standard quantum mechanics. But other thought experiments like Heisenberg's's gamma ray microscope,

which gives you the uncertainty principle, that's more positive, give you a new positive result type thought experiment. So that was a beginning of a taxonomy there. Then I just fine-tuned it a little bit. Okay, you fine-tuned only the constructive part. Well, the destructive part goes down to direct so it's like i don't recall what direct was there's and then one of the constructives goes down to direct as well yeah um i i think i can't remember now whether i i mean there were

some distinctions i didn't bother making but might have made in passing when i was describing that taxonomy um the negative thought experiments i might have put them lumped them all together as just negative yeah there's probably an important difference between negative thought experiments that follow from the theory itself, which just shows that they're internally incoherent, and negative thought experiments which show a clash between a theory and other more or less established knowledge. So I could fine-tune there and you could probably make more distinctions. Anytime you're setting up a taxonomy, there's a kind of balance between, you know, to what extent can this be simplified and enlightening? And to what extent do you go into so much detail, it just becomes, you get lost in the detail.

Have you been keeping up with theories of everything? There's been a couple of new ones this year. Yeah. A little bit. Have you read up on Wolfram's or eric weinstein's no uh wolfram wolfram's views uh he just thinks that the world is an automaton and um uh he he sees digital computers as answering all questions. I'm still sufficiently wedded to continuity in a lot of places that I don't. I think digitizing things is only a nifty approximation and good for solving a lot of practical problems. But I don't think it's going to reveal the deeper truth. I may be wrong. I may be wrong.

but I don't think it's going to reveal the deeper truth. I may be wrong. I may be wrong. I have physics friends who do believe that space-time is discrete. Yep. And if they're right, then understanding the world as a gigantic digital computer, that becomes a little more plausible. You definitely should read that paper that you sent me, which I thought that you knew Nicholas Jessen and you were completely familiar with his work. Anyway, just for the audience.

I read it at the time. I remember saying, I do remember sending it to you, but I just completely forgot it. Okay. I'm just going to give a bit of background. Yes. Send it if you, if you have, I'll send you a lecture from him because it's, it's wonderful. Okay. He has Nicholas Jessen is a physicist who is answering a question that i was curious about which is why i asked jim here i said hey is there any other logical foundation of physics other than classical logic because i'm wondering i'm always curious like what's holding us back from theories

of everything and i'm trying to tackle it from as many angles as i as i can and so i thought maybe this is one and you said well there is this person named nicholas jessen who thinks that intuitionist logic is a way to go and when i read that now i'm getting now it's coming back yes yes okay and so what he was saying he has a few different reasons for believing that first of all real numbers aren't real and the reason for this is to say, is because there's only a finite amount of information that can be in any finite volume. So let's say it's a real number. If it's an arbitrary real number, then it's going to collapse into a black hole if for whatever reason, the particle somehow carries that

information with it. Okay. Well, you can leave and leave that aside. He says that all of deterministic physics, like classical physics, actually is completely compatible with an indeterministic view. Forget about quantum mechanics. And the reason is that all we can do is test it to a certain precision. Let's say 30 decimal places. That's being a bit generous, but let's say 30 decimals place for classical physics then you can easily construct indeterminate

indeterminate functions so here's one i can't say it because i can't say it i would just have to write the function out but let's say you have the real line so zero to one and then you you somehow stretch the real line and then you cut the real line in half i'll have to tell you have the real line, so zero to one, and then you somehow stretch the real line, and then you cut the real line in half. I'll have to tell you what the function is, but either way, that real line, you can describe any number as zero point B1, B2, B, like the digits of, okay, great. What that function effectively does is remove the first digit. So instead of it being 0.B1, B2, B3, it's 0.B2, B3, B4. Okay. Now, given that, given that, let's say finite, let's say non-real numbers are completely compatible with classical physics, because we don't know where the end of the error bar effectively gives a real number, or if it's just cut off.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Sorry if I'm not explaining correctly. Okay, given that, then we can have these simple systems that actually are not just chaotic because we don't have sufficient information, but because within it, it genuinely is indeterminate. For example, that function. Like, if you just choose an arbitrary... Okay, so you get the idea. Okay, so then he was saying that indeterminacy

is not incompatible with classical physics, even though we like to think of classical physics as being a determinate theory. You can't... So then he goes on to say, calling physics deterministic or indeterministic is not a scientific question because both models predict the exact same reality

that we see classically. Forget about quantum mechanics. And then he goes on to make a connection between that and free will. He's a proponent of free will, much like yourself. And he says it can be saved. The libertarian version of free will he's a proponent of free will much like yourself and he says it can be saved the libertarian version of free will not the compatibilist that is that i choose from the possible world oh anyway that's extremely intriguing to me like one so i thank you so

much for that and i'm going to talk to nicholas about it good oh that that i'm i'm glad you got so much out of it. My instincts are to disagree quite strongly. To start with, I'm a realist and a Platonist about math, not a constructivist, not an intuitionist. So I think all those decimal expansion to infinity, it exists. But it exists in Plato's heaven. So I don't know where black holes would come in unless he's trying to physicalize the numbers and then the decimal Representation would require an infinite amount of ink in a very small space and collapse into a black hole

Some I'm sort of joking and say yeah, I understand but the thing is I think You need real numbers, irrational real numbers in physics. Think of, try to imagine doing physics without pi, which is an irrational number. It's got an infinite decimal expansion. Try to imagine doing physics without the square root of 2. Square root of 2 comes up all over the place in just in quantum mechanics. You've got a

two-state system. You know, it could be an up or a down and you describe the state as 1 over root 2 up plus 1 over root 2 down and then to get the probability you square that so square one over root two squared is one becomes one half and that of course you can measure accurately but you're going to always represent it as one over root two you're going to have to appeal to these now he may say ah but i'm only appealing to an approximation of one over root two like I only need five if I win five decimal places And so I'm really it's really a rational number. That's all I need for a complete empirical adequacy It would be hard to argue with him over that

I think my my best argument against him would be the utter simplicity of the real numbers as opposed to truncating them and turning them into rational numbers to do physics. But from an empirical point of view I may have to concede that there's not going to be any empirical distinction between the two. Right. Okay, I'm going to read from your book. Oh, before I get to that,

you did mention that there are some examples of non-Platonic forms of mathematical realism. I can't conceive of that. So do you mind expounding? You said that Mill or Kitcher, Kitcher, yes, that's right. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Sure. Okay.

Mill is the classic example. So he'd be, you'd call him a mathematical realist. Which Mill is this? John Stuart Mill. Okay. Almost everybody who's a mathematical realist uses realism,

Platonism, roughly interchangeably. I they might they might want to make some fine distinctions and that's because almost everybody who is a realist is happy to be called a platonist but there is mill is a mathematical realist who is absolutely not a platonist so for mill numbers are really just um a kind of abstraction from the physical realm. They're part of the physical realm, a bit like colors. So when I say two plus two equals four, I'm actually talking about physical stuff. So two apples, it's just a short form for a more general, it's a generalization of two apples plus two apples equals

four apples. Two liters of water plus two liters of water is four liters of water, etc., etc., etc. I just simplify it to two plus two equals four. But it is learned empirically, and it's about the physical, empirical world. That's Mill.

Okay? Frege made a lot of fun of him. Nobody believes Bill. They think it's preposterous. But you see how it's realist in the sense that it's about reality and it's meant to be literally true. Yeah, I just don't see how it's not Platonistic. So can you help me out? Because if it's saying that the generalities are true, what does he mean by true? Where do they exist?

So if you're saying that... If I said these apples are red. Yeah. Okay, that's a straightforward empirical realm. The fact that they're red. Wavelength. Right here. This is it. And if I said these two apples and these two apples make four apples,

it's all about what's right here. Okay? There's nothing about Plato's Heaven in that. It's all right here. Okay. It's just that when I say two plus two equals four, without reference to apples or liters of water or chocolate biscuit or anything like that, it's it's a it's kind of abstracted from but

it's really about the physical realm ah okay so let me see if i get the difference okay okay the platonist would say you're reflecting some other truer world and mill would say you're predicated on this world it's true but it's dependent on this world not some other world is that what you mean yeah but no no would say and there's no other world it's just this one the closest I can think of for an analogy would be talking about colors so I mean I can say this Apple is red that bananas yellow but I can say at a slightly more abstract level, but I'm still here in the world, red plus yellow make orange.

See, I'm still here in the imperial world. Yeah, I see. Even though I'm not talking about a particular apple or a particular banana, but red plus yellow make orange. So why is that ridiculous? What you said that Mill is laughed at by Frege and many other mathematicians. If the universe is finite, if we thought it was finite, if we're just standard Big Bang, the universe is finite. There's only finitely many elementary particles in it. There's only finitely many things in it. That means there's a biggest number. And I say, oh, let's call it n. Biggest number. That's it. I say, well,

what about n plus one? Do you think n plus one is bigger than n? And of course, you'd say, of course it is. And Mill doesn't't know how what's mill going to say there's no such numbers in plus one you're just making it up i see and so it just seems preposterous we believe there are infinitely many prime numbers infinitely many numbers mill doesn't know actually what to do with this if the universe is finite. If the world, if the universe is infinite, he got lucky. And maybe he can get around that problem. But he's going to have a lot of problems.

Why does the universe being finite mean that there has to be a finite conceptual number? Because even with the... If you think of numbers as... With reference to the physical universe. If you think of them as independently existing in Plato's Heaven, no problem. The world could be, the world could just cease to exist and still all those things in Plato's Heaven would be just fine. Could you still not save it by saying, for example, right now on my desktop, I have a few items, and then there's n factorial way of, well, not your n, but little case n,

factorial way of arranging them, and then you just keep adding. So no matter what, even when you... Okay. Yeah, yeah, you can keep doing the combinatorics ad nauseum, but you're still never going to break out of the finite realm because let's say we okay i'm just trying to grapple with this so let's say we've we come

up with large n so that's your n then i say well let's still permute that a bit more and then we get n factorial the big n factorial and then we say well that's a maximum then we just factorial again and we still get infinity so we still get any possible number can be reached with this no they have to be tied somehow to the empirical world remember he's a staunch Imperial empiricist and he doesn't like Platonism he doesn't like abstract entities so if had, if I have two apples, if I have two apples, I can say, okay, one, two, and then I can bunch them together and say, I can say now that's a third object. Okay. So he would have a, he would have a problem with possibilities. The reason why I say that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. You can't, they have to be concrete. I have to be measuring four apples. I could say that possibly you can arrange, yeah, yeah, that's right. They have to be concrete. I have to be measuring four apples. I could say that possibly you can arrange them in eight, but that's because there exists something else that I can concretize as eight. Sure. Okay, okay. That's right.

Okay, I get it, I get it. Now I'm going to read the last part of your book, which I found wonderful. You say this, my suggestion is very simple. Distant correlations are caused by the laws of nature. I realize this almost sounds silly. One wants to say the correlations are the laws of nature, but this,

if you recall in the preceding chapters, is not true. A law of nature is an independently existing abstract entity, a thing in its own right, which is responsible for physical regularities. Okay, now this was in regards to something called the entanglement of bells inequality but we can forget about that what you're suggesting is that the physical laws themselves are akin to entities and i haven't heard that expressed before and i think that's going to take me maybe maybe weeks or months to to fully apprehend and and perhaps even contribute some of my own ideas to it's a it's a brazen statement and i'm i'm a fan of audacity so can you expound on this yeah um i'm not sure

i wrote that quite a while ago and my views on quantum mechanics are constantly in flux so i'm not sure i would uh agree with that in particular. However, with the general idea, I certainly still think that is true. So let me explain what I'm trying to get at. For most philosophers, they really, really like David Hume. David Hume has a view about the nature of causation and the nature of laws of nature, which is very empiricist. And what it really amounts to is that a law of nature is nothing but an empirical regularity. So if I say, all ravens are black, or it's a law of nature that ravens are black, what it just means is that every time I see a raven, it's black. That's it. That's all

there is to it. It's just the raven. So Hume does away with causation. Yeah, causation is like that too. Fire feels hot. Every time I stick my hand in a fire, it feels hot. The heat doesn't cause the pain. It's just correlated with the pain. Okay. Every time I stick my hand in the fire, I feel pain. It's just this regularity. There's nothing more to causation than the regularity. There's nothing more to a law of nature than a regularity. So if I said, explain why this raven is black, Hume would have to say, all ravens are black. This is a raven.

Therefore, this is black. That's the only explanation he can give. His laws of nature are really just summaries of what we experience. They can't really explain anything. They don't have any explanatory power. So they're like data points and then generalizations? Data points, and then the law is nothing but a summary of the data points.

Okay. Yeah. There's no explanatory power there. Okay. Now, if you're a staunch empiricist you're happy with that you say science is in the business of organizing experience and predicting experience but we're not in the business of actually explaining things okay hmm that explanation that's not our business okay

um I hate that view I think we're in the business of explaining and understanding and stuff like that so a lot of hard-nosed empiricists would call me oh it's just mushy sentimental nonsense but i'm sticking to my sentimentality and i want understanding and i want explanations and so on so here's an alternative view of laws of nature Laws of nature are not just regularities. They're actually connections between properties so I'll stick to the Raven example, even though It's it's probably a poor example, but it's very easy to understand and illustrate So when I say so there's properties raven

there's the property of ravenhood okay that is the property of being a raven being a member of a set of ravens is ravenhood sure yeah okay and there's the property of being black okay and so the law of nature is not the regularity that all ravens are black. The law of nature is that the property of being a raven is connected to the property of being black. And that's the law of nature. And that law of nature forces the regularity that all ravens are black. It's the law that explains why the raven is black why is why is this raven black it's a raven it has the property of ravenhood and that

necessitates the property of blackness okay okay that's that's that's it i mean it sounds it sounds like hokey nonsense but the thing thing is you're actually introducing something new in the world over and above the mere regularity, and that has explanatory power. Okay. So the way that I'm thinking about this is that there's a set of all black objects and then ravens are a subset of that, but I don't see what what's different than

what a human is saying there'll be a property a property of ravenhood and a property of blackness and it's not just a coincidence but but there's a kind of what's sometimes called a gnomic connection uh this is like a physical necessity between the property of ravenhood and the property of blackness. There's a gnomic necessity between the property of electronhood and negative charge. Okay. Okay. It's not just an accidental correlation. Okay, it's not just it's not just a an accidental correlation. There's something deep Yeah, I guess what i'm having trouble is i'm For an electron it's like we define it as that which has this if we found an electron with the with negative two

Instead of negative one. We wouldn't call it an electron. We call it something else Probably that's true. Um, but but that's That's a that's that's an evidential thing. Of course, all of this is fallible. When I say all ravens are black, it's a law of nature that ravens are black. Could be mistaken. We could find in Madagascar, you know, ravens that are green or something like that. But you're saying, okay, hypothetically. So I'm trying to understand this.

So hypothetically, you're saying that a property of Ravenhood is that it's black. Okay. Okay, so what does this have to do with, sorry, what does this have to do with causality? Okay, so let me back up and make this view of laws of nature a bit more plausible.

Sure. As it is the Hume view. So, you see, Hume view, it's just a regularity that all ravens are black. Now, let us suppose you're doing this video from your house, right, or your apartment. Let's suppose that every human being who's ever been in that apartment has worn socks. Okay? Yeah. So is it a law of nature that everyone who enters Kurt's apartment wears socks?

Is that a law of nature? In this house it is. It doesn't sound like a law of nature, but it's a regularity. And that apartment might be blown up tomorrow so that in its entire history it was always true every time someone entered that apartment they wore socks see oh that's not a law of nature that's just one of those accidents how can i distinguish a genuine law of nature which is a regularity for Hume, from these accidental things. Hume has no answer.

There's no way you can separate the two. But if you believe that laws of nature are properties, then I would say it's the law of nature about ravens being black. The property of ravenhood necessitates the property of blackness. However, the property of enteringven hood necessitates the property of blackness okay however the property of entering kurt's apartment does not necessitate the property where so that was just contingent that was just that's right and so now you know it's still uh empirical science has to discover what are the accidental regularities versus what are the laws that can be really hard but the thing is there is a metaphysical difference between the two and hume hasn't got a metaphysical difference between the two it's just wow it's just

a big coincidence okay so now what does that have to do with with causation is just the flip coin of laws of nature. So it is the law of nature that A's are B's is the same as A's cause B's. Yes. Yeah. What I'm curious about, what I found most fascinating was that it was as if you're saying E equals MC squared is like an object itself that comes in and influences the world. Yeah. object itself that comes in and influences the world. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to figure out what, what the law of nature would be. I mean, I can say it's a law of nature equals MC square.

It may be hard to figure out putting it in these metaphysical terms, the property of energy and how it's related to the property of mass and the property of speed of light and and stuff like that but they'll they'll on this view there would be such a relation a relation of necessitation between energy as a property and mass as a property have you heard of lee smolin's principle of precedence i know him well and I have heard of it and I have forgotten what it is okay it's it's something like that one of the reasons the electron collapses in the way that it does or that sorry this explains decoherence I believe that the reason why a large object collapses is because by chance somewhere else in the universe, a large object has collapsed in a similar manner and it's felt at some other part of the universe,

the patterns are felt. And so they collapse similarly. And that explains some of the regularities to use that word. Okay. That's the principle. Um, I, I don't know what to say about that. Um, I should, I, I i i just gonna i'm just gonna have to go and and and right right right right well what i was wondering is i'm curious if that merges both platonists and non-platinists because it's as if it's formulating something that's true and putting it into this world that we now look to to represent reality but it was being invented at some point. Yeah, yeah. Invention and discovery. That's interesting the way you put it.

I'm inclined to think it's not because, as I said, I know him quite well and we argue over the issue of Platonism all the time. He's very anti-Platonist. Yeah. Are physicists generally anti-Platonist and mathematicians are pro?

No, no. They're a mixed bag on it. They're all over the place. Are physicists generally anti-Platonist and mathematicians are pro? No, no, they're a mixed bag on it. They're all over the place. Most working physicists, I would say, don't have strong views about the nature of mathematics. For them it's a tool. They use it, they just sort of grab it out of the tool bag, use what they want, and don't have philosophical views about it. If they work in fundamental physics, as Lise Mollen does, she has very strong philosophical views about the nature of physics. You know, is he a realist? Is he, you know, what, and so on.

He's unquestionably a scientific realist when it comes to physics, but he's an anti-realist when it comes to mathematics. Interesting. Same with Carlo Rovelli, who Smolin and Rovelli often work together. I've gotten to know Rovelli quite well because he now lives in London here. He's my neighbor. Oh, cool. Cool. And he's unquestionably a scientific realist when it comes to physics, but hostile to Platonism. But this is true for both Ravelli and Smolin. They can't quite put their finger on what it is they dislike about Platonism so much. So they're not winning the argument yet. So it's just a feeling that they have, but they dislike it because it has a mystical

quality to it? Not sure. Okay, Jim, thank you again so much. I appreciate it. Oh, great pleasure. Do you think we can derive an is from an ought or an ought from an is? That's a really hard question. The simple answer is no, because one is an imperative sentence and the other is a declarative sentence. I mean, just logically, grammatically, they're going to be different kinds of things. We can come close.

How can we come close? Well, we can come close in the sense that... Let me actually back up and talk about it in a very indirect way, okay? There's a traditional view that there's a distinction between facts and values. It's the same thing. There's just a cleavage between the two. And science is totally concerned with the facts. And morality and maybe religion and other things could be concerned with values. The trouble with that view is that too many things in science, it's messy. There are all kinds of values even in just doing science itself. So for instance, I can tell you about how to find out an infinitude of facts and maybe one of them you might be interested in. So what is the distance between the tip of my nose

and the center of mass of the sun? Now I'm going to move. No, I can ask you about the center of mass of your nose and the center of mass of that guy out on the street from his nose to the center of mass of the moon. You could measure all of those things and they would all be factually correct if you measured correctly. But after one or two of these, that's enough.

And you're going to make a value choice that pursuing more of these is not worthwhile and that there are other things that are more valuable. So all facts aren't on a par. Some are clearly better than others. And you as a scientist are going to make these kinds of value judgments all the time. And you're going to make methodological value judgments, which are even more important. Like you're going to say, okay, I've got two theories here. Which one should I believe? Oh, this one's simpler. Well, that's actually a value judgment that simplicity is to

be preferred to complexity when you're talking about scientific theories. So right away, so all right, so we've got these two theories. I choose this one on the basis of simplicity. And now I say, oh, well, the facts according to this theory are different than the facts according to that theory. What are the facts? Well, I've just decided on this theory. So now I found out what the facts are. But it is value laden in the sense that I've just decided on this theory, so now I found out what the facts are, but it is value-laden in the sense that I've chosen this theory on the basis of its simplicity. So you see how the values begin to infect the facts themselves. And once you get into fairly sophisticated science and you're making methodological choices about how to pursue this, you'll find that there's all kinds of values that are getting tied up in there and it's very, very hard to disentangle them.

So in essence, no, it's not possible to derive an ought from an is. That's right, you can't. On the other hand, the more important question is, can you disentangle your oughts from your is's? And the answer to that question is I think no. And so now making a big fuss about the distinction between is and ought is probably a bad idea. So when you're looking at another scientist, don't ask just give me the facts because a good scientist wouldn't be able to, who had a sophisticated view of this issue, would not be able to tell you what are the clear facts and how much the facts as presented, in fact, depended upon value decisions made along

the history, the whole history of science up to that point. Now, that doesn't mean you can just say, well, I'm a racist. I'm proud of my values, and I'm going to let that guide my research, you know, from here on in. You can't get away with that stuff, though lots of people try. But I do mean that there's going to be a lot of values that you're not even aware of. And they have been sprinkled through the entire history of science up until the present day. And it'll continue to be like that. What's your problem with Sam Harris?

You said that you have some... He's a militant atheist, as am I. You are a militant atheist. A militant atheist. So I have no trouble with Sam Harris on that front. The only thing I dislike about Sam Harris, and oh, by the way, he was the voice of reason in his discussion with Jordan Peterson. So you agreed with him there?

Oh, completely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Much more than I was expecting because I've seen Sam Harris before and he sort of irritates me. You don't like his views on talking about this? Well, you see, there's a lot of militant atheists

and often they're condemned as a group. Hitchens, Dawkins, you know, and Harris, Dennett, and Sam Harris. But Harris worries me unlike the others. And the thing that worries me is that he has a special hatred for Muslims. I don't. I think Muslims have ridiculous religious views, just like Christians have ridiculous religious views, as do Hindus and Buddhists and so on. They're all just ridiculous. But I think in, especially in this age, in the current conditions, for anyone to pick on Muslims, especially in the United States, it's bordering on a kind of – a real bigotry that is worse than unhelpful.

What if you're just criticizing Islam and not the Muslim people themselves? is worse than unhelp. What if you're just criticizing Islam and not the Muslim people themselves? This is tricky. You can criticize Islam, except that Islam is actually the belief held by people, so you can't criticize Islam without criticizing people who are Muslim. Maybe that's one of the problems, is that intellectuals like yourself, like I, we like to debate ideas, and it's difficult to detach our egos from the ideas but we know that okay when a better idea comes along we adopt that and we take a little hit to the ego

but we're different than our ideas so there is a separation between the people and then the sure sure and I have no no trouble with that the trouble is when you're talking to and I'm in a mass media and talking to a mass audience, and you start railing against Islam, it just spills over to a dislike of that guy who's sitting next to you who happens to be a Muslim. Yeah, so I don't trust him. I just want to make sure I understand. So something like when you criticize Islam, it's easily construed as criticizing Muslim people

and then the effects of you criticizing Islam is that other people aren't going to look at Muslim people with a negative light. That's right. Yeah. I mean I don't like Islam any more than I like Christianity. But if I had a company and I'm going to hire people, I'm not going to discriminate against Muslims. I wouldn't hire a Christian over a Muslim. That seems to me to be just grotesque bigotry. I would hire an atheist over anybody.

But when it comes to religions, I think if you're going to criticize them, criticize them. So all religions are equal in that they're all equal in that? Equally groundless. Yeah. I think religion is one of the worst things that's ever happened to us. Humanity. Yeah. Done a great deal of harm.

Let's get to Platonism. Let's get to Platonism because this is your domain. This is what you are. So let's explain what Platonism is and then let's give people a test so that they can find out if they're a Platonist or not. All right. Well, when I teach topics related to this, I usually ask my students at the very beginning whether they think mathematics is discovered

or invented. Is it discovered like physics or is it invented like the game of chess? And I'll get very mixed reactions. What is it, 50-50? No, I'd say more on the discovery side, but a very sizable number on the invention side. Let's say two-thirds, one-third, something like that. And then I tell them things that often surprise them, and that is that working mathematicians are overwhelmingly Platonists. That is a Platonist is very briefly believes that mathematics is there waiting to be discovered. It's independent from us. Mathematical facts would be true even if no one ever discovered them, even if

there were no intelligent creatures in the entire history of the universe. Pi would still be an irrational number. On the other hand, chess would not exist if there were no intelligent beings. Okay? Most working mathematicians, now you were a math student, so you may have picked this up from your teachers. Most working mathematicians are in fact Platonists. They believe that when they do mathematical research they're investigating something that's there waiting to be discovered and if they get it right they have discovered something new.

Okay, so that's Platonism. That's Platonism in a nutshell. And you're a Platonist? I am a Platonist. So what does it mean to exist? What does that mean? Because I actually consider myself to be a Platonist. I would actually think that the game of chess does exist in some form, in the sense that there are these rules, and game theoretically you can construct a model of chess,

and so that, if you can form a mathematical model of it, then it exists. You're right. You're right. So my example, you can fuss with my example, but it's just meant to be a crude example for getting into… Can we not then extrapolate it and say that everything that possibly is logical exists? Well, there is a view about possible worlds. Okay, so whenever we speak in a certain mode, like I say, there are no elephants in this room, but it is possible that there is an elephant in this room.

It's not actual, but it is possible. What does that mean? It's green right now. What does that even mean? Well, one view says you have to understand reality as made up of possible worlds. The actual world is one world. And another world, there's another world that's almost exactly like this one. There's a counterpart.

I'm in it. Is it different from the multiverse theory of quantum mechanics? No, yeah, completely different. Yeah. This is a logical thing, not a physics thing. So there's another possible world that's exactly like this one, except there's an elephant over there in the corner. Otherwise, they're exactly the same. That is a possible world. And for me to say it is possible that there is an elephant in this room,

that is a true sentence because there exists a possible world with an elephant in it. Can we not extrapolate that to God, that it's true that God exists? That's really an interesting question, and it's actually debated. Because it sounds like, well, maybe atheism is true in this world, but maybe there's another world in which there is a God. That's going to be problematic. But it's actually up in the air. It's logically tenable. It's not clear that it's logically

tenable, and that's why it's controversial, because intuitively it seems like it ought to be. Yeah, if an elephant can be here, then why can't we make an abstract notion of something? Yeah, there could have been a God, there just isn't. Okay, that sounds sensible, but if there could have been a God, then there will be a God in a possible world. The trouble with that is the way we conceptualize God is God is a necessary being. And that means if God exists at all, God must exist in every possible world. It's a kind of all or nothing entity because of the way God... Because omnipresence? The omnipresence of God? Not just omnipresence, but I mean in every world.

Whether there is a God or not, it's not an option. It's either in no world or in every world. Mathematics is like this. See, if pi is an irrational number, then pi is an irrational number in every possible world. There's no world in which it's equal to three and a quarter or something like that. Okay. It's always irrational. And it's the same with God. Either God just can't exist. It's impossible. He's like a contradiction. Wait, how's that commensurate with the elephant though? Because to me, if you can construct an

elephant in another world, how do you know that that elephant elephant being true now we have to get to some physics but how do you know that that elephant can logically exist just like logically pi is irrational okay we can prove that pi is irrational now we're saying there's an elephant in this room and we're saying that that's possible how do we know that's possible how do we know that's a possibility just like we know for sure pi is irrational okay fair enough prima facie it's possible like you can't think of any principled objection to there being an elephant in this room you say well how did it get here you know answer they it's a small elephant they brought it up in the elevator walked it over here and it's been sitting here since we started talking you can easily imagine a scenario in which something like that is the case.

So the possibility of an elephant in this room is a pretty clear case of a possibility. But the God one, that's a really hard nut to crack because it seems like God, because remember God is defined in a certain way. In fact, some people even define God as the necessary being. And anything that's necessary must be true in every possible world. This is standard logic talk about possibility. And God would have the same status as 2 plus 2 equals 4. If it's true anywhere, it's true everywhere. 2 plus 2 equals 5. If it's false anywhere, it's false everywhere.

Okay? And so God is either like one or the other. I'm come down on the side that God's like a contradiction, and absurdity. Well, that only disproves the Christian notion of God. So what about these Hindu notions of God? Oh, yeah, that's fine. So then they could exist. They could exist. So you're against an omnipresent necessary being.

Don't say omnipresent. Omnipresent just means God is everywhere in space. That's unchristian and un-Muslim. The standard view is God is external, outside of space and time, and can observe us, cognizes us, but isn't in here participating. Might intervene for a miracle here and there, but the idea that God is one of us, like that song, God is one of us, just a stranger on the bus and so on,

that's heresy for Christians wouldn't Christians say that you're made in the image of God there's a little bit of God in you and every time you act God is almost acting through you when you make a decision it's like you're a conscious that's good they're gonna take that as a metaphor I'm just debating you know what if it's not what if that is the Christian notion of God that actually there's a little spark. There is an external God, but also he's in you as well. Okay. Could that exist in these possible worlds?

Is that commensurate with the idea of... Not if it's part and parcel of a certain kind of God who can't exist in principle. But a lesser God... I mean, look, you know the difference between deism and theism? Theism is like standard religion, organized religion. God cares about you. God is a person. It's a personal God. You can talk to God.

He might answer your prayers, you know, all of that sort of stuff. That's a theistic view. A deistic view of God just says there is a kind of supernatural creator of all of that sort of stuff. That's a theistic view. A deistic view of God just says, there is a kind of supernatural creator of all of this, but he doesn't give a damn about us. Maybe he died after he created it. Maybe even he's a committee. You know, maybe there's 27 of them,

and they fought over the details, and that's why a lot goes wrong. So the God that exists but doesn't intervene? And doesn't intervene. Set things up to just run like a magnificent clockwork. And that's deism. That's deism, yeah. Okay, so 18th century would-be atheists were often deists, and that's because Darwin hadn't come along yet, and they couldn't make sense of design in nature, and they thought you have to have an intelligent designer for this. They couldn't escape that. They certainly didn't believe a word of Christianity, but they did believe in some kind of intelligent creator of all of this. And that's a very common view in the Enlightenment.

The American founding fathers, you know, like Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, they were deists. They weren't Christians. Americans don't even know their own history. They make a big deal of being a Christian nation. Actually, they started out as a as an anti-Christian nation. So you must love America. Not with Trump. I should explain Sokol's motivation. Sokol is very left-wing, very concerned with social issues.

He was worried that, well like me, I'm also quite concerned with a whole lot of social issues. And I worry about students who would become, you know, socially active in an efficient and productive way because they're pro-science. They're willing to, you know, get the facts right and do serious investigations into the social situation and so on. The trouble with postmodernism, it becomes a bit lazy. It's given to sloganeering. It's given to analyses that, well, I don't know. They see certain things as political that aren't political and often just pick up the wrong end of the stick. Anyway, Sokal, as you already indicated, submitted this ridiculous paper and said,

I'd like to publish this. And it made all kinds of claims using quasi-technical jargon, some of the things you would know. So he said mathematics supports a woman's right to an abortion. It's in the form of the axiom of choice. You know this? Okay, now you having a math background you understand that the axiom of choice has got nothing to do with free will choice and whether you have an abortion. So it was full of jargon, just ridiculous jargon like this, and the editors published it. I've always had a bit of a guilty conscience about it, even though I completely support Sokol and his

motivation. I was editing a journal at the time and when I saw the headline in the New York Times, it was on the front page. And all I could, I choked, oh, God, this could happen to me. I wonder if anybody's hoaxing me. And the thing is, in the popular press, there's all this talk about peer review. And they don't really understand the peer review process and why you would ignore the process in certain cases and do something else. And it's not intellectual corruption, it's just something else is going on. So if you've got a journal, a physics journal, it's a very well-established discipline with methodological guidelines that have been

laid down, they're reliable, and if somebody follows them, they can be okay. If they violate them badly, you think, no, this is a piece of garbage. We are not going to take it seriously. But if you're starting a new field, like postmodern accounts of science or something like that, you don't have a long tradition that you can point to and say, this sort of thing works, that sort of thing doesn't.

You're in virgin territory. And people who are doing that actually need to be encouraged and given a lot of free reign. Don't come down on them too hard for publishing stuff that turns out to be crap. Now, what about the grievance study affair? Well, I'm in favor of giving them a lot of free reign. By grievance studies, you mean things like women's studies, black studies, aboriginal studies, and so on. No, I think… The most recent hoax that came out.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know it well. I read a very short article on it. But I don't like the spirit behind attacking them. I think they do need to be attacked every now and then. And they certainly shouldn't just think that they don't have set guidelines to know when when something is going to work well and when something isn't going to work well they want to encourage a very generous and broad conversation about issues and i think that's fair and it's intellectually healthy

and in line with academic freedom and in and and and it's part and parcel with academic freedom. The only thing I have against post-modernism not these disciplines like women's studies or anything like that I think it's terrific. I think we should have women's studies and so on but I am on the pro-science side of the left and that's because

I think once you if you're a serious post-modern says, oh, truth, truth, schmooze, you know, facts, smacks, you know, whatever, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. It's really, really important to get things like global warming right in order to, you know, to understand what's going on and to tackle it politically, to solve these problems. I don't see that postmodernists have ever done anything useful in combating climate change. The facts about racism, the facts about the climate, the facts about the pharmaceutical industry, those things are really important that we get those things out. industry. Those things are really important that we get those things out. There might be some truth to this. So I usually back off and say, well, you know, some approximation to an egalitarian socialist world. And maybe some people are five times as well off as other people.

But that would be such an incredible improvement over the current situation that I'd go happily to my grave, you know, if the difference between the poorest and the richest were only fivefold in wealth. As you know, it's much, much, much, much greater than that now. I also think What I care about most of all You see a lot of people care about rights and they care about freedom and freedom of speech and and so on and I think those things are important

but I think human well-being Trump's everything if all humans are reasonably well off and they're happy and content, then that's the kind of world I want. If we have to sacrifice some rights, say you even limit freedom of speech to some extent for that, I'd be willing to do that. I think going to the wall for complete freedom of speech, for instance, is a complete mistake. I like Canada's laws. We have a great deal of freedom of speech here, but not complete. So for instance, we have hate laws. I'm in favor of hate laws. Now,

I have lots of philosophical colleagues and American friends and so on who think the U.S. is much better in this regard. There's just no constraints on your speech. I mean you can't you can't libel someone. You can't incite violence. Yeah, you can't incite violence, but you can you can deny the Holocaust in the United States. You could declare that Muslims are a treacherous group of people and they ought to be oppressed and so on. You can't say that in Canada. You could be prosecuted under the law for that. I favor those constraints on freedom of speech. And I would favor probably other constraints too on other kinds of things that we consider free

in exchange for an enormous increase in human well-being, that we're happier, healthier, we have richer lives, people can intellectually develop and physically develop to the best of their abilities. That's the kind of world I want. That's very much a left-wing view of things. I think that ought to be as far as you go, but it's going a hell of a long way. Usually when the left is attacked for going too far, it's either they want to use a great

deal of force to bring about egalitarianism, that's one way, and the other way is the political correctness. They're accused of excessive political correctness. I think that's just almost always that's a false charge. That's just a bogus charge. That's like Donald Trump, you know, complaining that millions of people are streaming across the Mexican border, murdering and raping. It's just a lie, right? It's just a grotesque lie. Okay, there is something we never actually talked about this but I'm going to interject this because this is an allusion back to what we were talking about earlier. Political correctness is not a threat to the university. We're incredibly free to do whatever the hell we want. Nobody is being suppressed inside a university. It's a remarkable, universities are remarkable institutions. I think they're wonderful institutions. But what about what happened with Jordan Peterson where they didn't even want him to speak and they shut, they had a whole protest against him and they want to get him fired.

Yeah, that's probably a bad idea. He should probably be allowed to speak. Probably. Yeah, I will say probably because I'm not absolutely definite. Very likely, I think. But I won't say that about absolutely everybody. So, for instance, let's take, what's his name, Spencer. Richard Spencer. Richard Spencer, who's a white nationalist. Yes. Yeah. See, I have serious qualms about allowing him to speak. We, universities that is, are in a kind of a bind here. If we let, if the universities let Richard

Spencer speak, he gets a kind of prestige and cachet. So you're worried about legitimizing his point of view? Yeah, just by allowing him to speak at a university. And then, but if we turn him down, then we get branded as being, as censoring him, political correctness, and so on. Universities can't win. And often right-wingers know we can't win. And often they don't even care whether they're allowed to speak or not, because they know they're going to win just by either speaking or being turned down and then they go to the press and say we're being censored and then they get you know they

win some notoriety for this anyway i don't think that intellectual real intellectual life of the university is in any way harmed by so-called political correctness. The real dangers to universities is completely tangential to this. The real dangers is the commercialization of research. We haven't talked about that at all. Yeah, I saw that. And that's a really big deal and it's an incredibly deep subject and you probably don't want to go into it. And you have a talk about that, right?

Well, you touched on it in your past talk. I used to do a lot of work. I haven't done much recently, but I used to do a lot of work I haven't done much recently but I used to do a lot of work on this you have one that's public that people can go to that people can search on you yeah yeah I can I can I don't know off the top of my head I can find something and we'll put the links in the description give you a link yeah but the commercialization of research is having a tremendous effect pharmaceuticals I think are just about the worst. In particular, yeah.

Yeah, it skews research. So health problems are not tackled by the best solution, they're tackled by chemical solutions, which might be the best solution, but maybe diet, exercise. For depression, things like exercise are at least as effective as the best antidepressants. Without side effects. But you can't, yeah. But you can't make… like exercise are at least as effective as the best antidepressants. Without side effects. But you can't, yeah. But you can't make... You can't patent it.

You can't patent it. And so it's having an effect on what kind of research is actually carried out. That is a real worry. So if we're interested in the truth and not just the truth, but truths that are good for human beings, that improves the quality of our lives, our health, for instance, then we have to really, really, really worry and get a grip. There's just far too much money coming in from industry. And in fact, often they don't give all that much money,

but they top up. But we get money from government funding. And that's arm's length. The government doesn't interfere with that. They just give the National Research Council money. And then they distribute it in a peer-reviewed way to physics and chemistry and so on. But often individual researchers will apply for money

from a pharmaceutical company. So they're getting a ton of money from the government and then a pharmaceutical company will often give them significant top ups and it'll change the direction of the research and that's having a very bad effect and we're just getting

crap drugs often these days because of it. You're not a fan of the FDA? The FDA is not so bad? The FDA doesn't have enough? I remember hearing a talk that the FDA's restrictions are too much, are too restrictive because they're limiting the amount of drugs that can come into market. Oh no, they're not restrictive enough in that sense.

Drug companies will complain that they're slow and Drug companies will complain that they're slow and restrictive and so on. No, we need to change the FDA rules. Well, the Americans need to change them. Right now, they are mandated to license anything that goes through a clinical trial and is considered effective when compared with a placebo. That can be incredibly minuscule, you know and and yet billions of dollars will be spent on on these drugs and if this drug gets patented and There's only generics to compete with it. Then they'll pour a ton of money into advertising

doctors will start prescribing this and doctors can be Corrupt corrupted by their prescription habits and get money from the pharmaceuticals by the cheerleaders yeah you know about the cheerleaders yeah that's remarkable and and these often the very old generic drug is much, much better than these newer drugs. Fewer side effects, better positive effect, incredibly cheap to produce, and so on. It's really a tragedy. It's hard to know how to combat it.

I think I know how to combat it in Canada. Hard to know how to combat it in the United States, because the United States economy is so structured around intellectual property rights. I've tried to figure out how much of American exports to the world is in the form of IP rights. Because whenever you buy anything that's American, I mean you buy a piece of plastic, but its value is in the form of IP rights mostly. And so what percentage of the economy is actually IP rights? I don't actually have views across the board on patents,

but on drugs, I think it's a terrible mistake and we should eliminate patents on drugs. One of the reasons is, unlike, say, my new iPhone, full of patents, but I can tell whether the damn thing works. I just turn it on and it works or it doesn't work. But in the case of almost every drug, there's no way for an individual to determine whether he or she is benefiting from this drug. All you can do is look at it in a very statistical way.

And there's an incentive to produce a drug that works as long as you take it true and that's not good oh I see what you mean yes treating chronic diseases is much better than curing something with a vaccine for instance yeah yeah all kinds of problems like this anyway commercialization that's I think is the real threat to intellectual life and not political correctness, which is really, really small potatoes, even in its worst examples. You said that you had some trouble with Jordan Peterson's point of view of truth. Oh, well, watching a video that you directed me to, and I'm glad. This was a video, a discussion between him and Sam Harris.

Who you also don't necessarily like. I have special problems with Harris. We can talk about that. Maybe we'll get to those later. necessarily like? I have special problems with Harris. Maybe we'll talk about that later. Yeah. So this was, Harris invited him on and Harris seems to be one of these people who doesn't like political correctness and thought that Jordan Peterson might be good, a nice ally perhaps, because he too is anti-political correctness and so on. But then they got bogged down on this notion of truth and as far as I can tell, Peterson is just wacko on the concept of truth. I should just explain, when people talk

about truth, they're not talking about particular truths. Like we can argue whether or not the neutrino has mass, okay? We don't know what's true and we don't know what's truths. Like we can argue whether or not the neutrino has mass, okay? We don't know what's true and we don't know what's false. And we can argue about that and produce evidence. This is arguing about the very concept of truth itself. What does it mean for something to be true? And a normal person, normal philosophers, standard philosophers, take a more or less a common sense view about truth. So a sentence, a statement, a belief is true because it corresponds to the way things are. So the sentence, there is a recording device on the table, that's the sentence. That's a true sentence because there is in fact a table, a recording device, and one is on top of the other. It's a very simple

conception of truth. There are other conceptions. Some people say, no, no, truth has got to be linked to evidence. So the sentence, there is a recording device on the table, is true if and only if there is some method of gathering evidence to establish that truth. Lacking that evidence, it is not true. If you are a realist about truth, as I am, then a sentence could be true even though the evidence isn't there for it. You shouldn't believe it if you don't have the evidence. That's a different matter. But truth and evidence are things that you can pry apart. So what is Peterson's conception of truth as you understand it? He has a crazy idea that he calls Darwinian. And so a sentence is true if it has survival value.

He's thinking of this as a very crude thing. There are some philosophical ideas about truth that are maybe a little close to that, that he might, if he knew about them, he could say, oh, I sort of believe that. Pragmatism. Pragmatism often identifies truth with what is workable, detectable. Serviceable to life?

Serviceable to life, but it's much more sophisticated than mere crude Darwinian survival value. Darwinian survival value, but you can sort of see some kinship between Peterson's view and pragmatism. Now the trouble with Peterson's crude view is there's a ton of stuff we know that's independent of survival value. In fact, may even be true contrary to survival value. So just think of all the things you know about quantum field theory. That wouldn't help you in life's struggle at all. If you were in the jungle trying to, you know, like our distant ancestors, you're not going to survive, thank goodness, based on your knowledge of quantum field theory. You could make a Jordan-type case for a lot of crude, simple beliefs, like trust your color perception to distinguish edible things from non-edible things.

You know, that sort of level. That's fine. But to enter into the realm of sophisticated science, which he certainly wants to participate in, he's got to have an awful lot more subtle and sophisticated view of what he's doing than his simple Darwinian view of truth.