Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The God Crutch: Do The Laws of Physics Exist?

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Are the laws of physics governing forces or elegant summaries? In this deep and often humorous debate, Barry Loewer of Rutgers and Eddy Chen of UC San Diego clash over the very nature of physical reality. Are the laws of nature real, mind independent constraints that shape what’s possible or are they human made descriptions of observed patterns? Together they explore metaphysics, causation, probability, and whether the universe is truly ruled by anything at all. A must watch for anyone questioning the foundations of science itself. Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Timestamps: 00:00 The Nature of Physical Reality 42:28 The Circularity of Scientific Understanding 1:05:44 Reality Explored 1:08:28 Describing Human Experience 1:10:10 The Role of Science 1:10:58 Understanding Motion and Laws 1:12:19 The Nature of Laws 1:14:55 Possible Worlds in Philosophy 1:18:05 Configuration Space Debate 1:21:10 Quantum Mechanics and Reality 1:22:50 Metaphysical Necessity 1:27:13 The Nature of Free Will 1:30:14 Bridging Philosophy and Science 1:32:05 Constraints and Freedom 1:34:57 Philosophical Disputes 1:39:08 The Journey of Learning 2:05:16 Teaching and Learning Dynamics 2:07:23 Closing Reflections Links Mentioned: •⁠ ⁠Barry’s published papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=n_RTOwO00oEC&hl=en •⁠ ⁠Eddy’s published papers: https://arxiv.org/a/chen_e_1.html •⁠ ⁠Neil Turok on TOE: https://youtu.be/ZUp9x44N3uE •⁠ ⁠Greg Chaitin on TOE: https://youtu.be/zMPnrNL3zsE •⁠ ⁠Leonard Susskind on TOE: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok •⁠ ⁠Emily Adlam on TOE: https://youtu.be/6I2OhmVWLMs •⁠ ⁠Laws of Nature and Chances (book): https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Nature-Chances-Breathes-Equations/dp/0198907699 •⁠ ⁠Laws of Physics (book): https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Physics-Elements-Philosophy/dp/100901272X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CHA72RYFUOI8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.OjkhTXRzZw_SWTMFZp8dUtREsTxacKuwg03AsLUUp6qLCuygS74CtEgujWl7wMvVEt-ErFEz-CfFLiiXTmuUCwKq0TW4WLFIA3DIhDNVaV4.gRuqaZldjUa8Kv_j1ew-CfZGQqtdt00X55fyMZ9NGD4&dib_tag=se&keywords=eddy+chen&qid=1749667626&s=books&sprefix=eddy+chen%2Cstripbooks%2C128&sr=1-1 •⁠ ⁠On the Plurality of Worlds (book): https://www.amazon.com/Plurality-Worlds-David-K-Lewis/dp/0631224262 •⁠ ⁠Tim Maudlin on TOE: https://youtu.be/fU1bs5o3nss •⁠ ⁠Tim Maudlin and Tim Palmer on TOE: https://youtu.be/883R3JlZHXE •⁠ ⁠How Physics Makes Us Free (book): https://www.amazon.com/How-Physics-Makes-Us-Free/dp/0190269448 •⁠ ⁠From Time Asymmetry to Quantum Entanglement (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.05029 •⁠ ⁠Jacob Barandes on TOE: https://youtu.be/7oWip00iXbo •⁠ ⁠Realism with a Human Face (book): https://www.amazon.com/Realism-Human-Face-Hilary-Putnam/dp/0674749456 •⁠ ⁠Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy (book): https://www.amazon.com/Causation-Nature-Early-Modern-Philosophy/dp/0199664684/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 •⁠ ⁠The Maniac (book): https://www.amazon.com/MANIAC-Benjamin-Labatut/dp/0593654471 •⁠ ⁠When We Cease to Understand the World (book): https://www.amazon.com/When-We-Cease-Understand-World/dp/1681375664 •⁠ ⁠Eddy’s paper on time and nature: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09226 SUPPORT: - Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join - Support me on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal - Support me on Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - Support me on PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 SOCIALS: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have to acknowledge that we don't fully access the physical reality. These are metaphors that have gone crazy. This seems like a very historical debate. Nature cannot violate the laws of God. Why not? The laws of physics as something that constrains or even causes the world around us is as fundamental a concept as anything. That's what I investigate on this channel.

However, do laws like this even exist in this manner? Do what we call the quote laws of physics actually compel reality? Or do they describe patterns that we observe? Professor Barry Lauer of Rutgers University champions the Humean view that laws are sophisticated summaries, not these primitive governing forces. Professor Eddie Chen of UC San Diego defends the opposing position through minimal primitivism. That is, that laws are fundamental metaphysical facts that genuinely constrain physical possibilities. A special thank you to Barry as he had just come off of a 12-hour flight. You'll notice the playful camaraderie between these two, and that's because

Barry, along with David Albert, were Eddie Chen's PhD supervisors. Stick around until the end as we get to questions of free will and ultimately whether the mathematical structures physicists discover reflect mind-independent features of nature or are projections of human pattern-seeking onto brute facts. To me, the stakes extend beyond academic philosophy. It's about how we understand the laws that shape our conception of science, causation, and you, yes you, your place in the universe. I like to talk about a phrase that we use often, and it's so often that it's become

second nature to us all. What is it that we mean when we say the laws of physics? Laws. So this channel is called Theories of Everything. We explore various unification attempts and laws of physics, but we don't talk about, well, what is a law and what is its role in ontology and causation? So I know you all have different views on this. Various technical jargon will come out like humanism and primitivism and so on. Mentaculous if we get to that as well. Best systems, etc. Those will all be defined. But for now, as an introduction for the audience, you have different stances on the place of the wave function regarding ontology and or its place in the laws of physics. So let's tease those out and let's start with Eddie, please.

How do you see it? And then we'll hear from Barry. So for me, laws of nature are fundamental facts. They discover in the universe. They are not part of something else. They are not, you know, reduced to what goes on in the universe. So laws of nature in some sense are a lot of physics, something like lots of mathematics and lots of logic, they just be and govern, they constrain, they

explain and a lot of physics have less robustness than laws of mathematics and laws of logic, but they're still part of the fundamental goings on of the universe. And in that sense, they are primitive facts. But they're still part of the fundamental goings-on of the universe. And in that sense, they are primitive facts. They are facts that exist in the world. They don't depend on anything else. And one crucial element of this governing business is that laws constrain what's physically possible.

So there is the actual world, the universe we're living, the universe in which the big bang happens and here's us and there's the maybe big crunch. And there's all that goes on in the universe and lots of nature can strain the possibilities for this universe. So what could have been the case? The kind of actuals, the possibilities and necessities. So, laws governs the universe by allowing certain possibilities to unfold and certain possibilities to not be the actual world. The actual world is one element of the many possibilities allowed by the laws of nature. Okay, Barry, why don't you spell out your view on what laws are? Okay. Well, first thing I want to say is that much of what Eddie said,

I can agree with, at least those words. But I think I would mean a little bit different things by many of those words. But I can agree that law is constrained under a certain understanding of constraint. I agree that they support counterfactuals. I have a whole theory of counterfactuals. We will want to get to it and so on. So I agree with the words, but there's something I don't agree with.

I don't agree that laws are what Eddie called primitive facts. Now, I'm not exactly sure what primitive facts are. I think it's useful to go back with a little history. Do you mind that? Sure. You do mind it? No, no, please do. Okay. I think it's very interesting

to think about the history of the concept of laws. First most interesting thing is no one has written a history of the concept of laws of nature. There's one book that kind of comes a little bit close, but nobody has really done it. If I were a historian, I would think that that's, you know, right, we're just right on the tree ready to be plucked off. People have written histories of probability and chance, a closely related notion. No one's written a history of the concept of law. So the concept of law in the modern sense really has a father.

I want to ask you to guess who the father was. It is Father's Day today, isn't it? Yes. Okay. Maybe we should celebrate this guy. All right. He's a pretty French philosopher famous, pretty famous French philosopher. I bet you know who I'm talking about. Rousseau?

No. Come on. He was interested in breaking the laws, not in the French. Much more famous than Rousseau. The most famous man. The one that every... Descartes? Yeah. Yes. If you will go into Paris, you walk down Route Descartes. Okay. Descartes. So Descartes was the father, really. I mean, this is a little bit of an exaggeration, but the father of the concept of, modern concept

of laws of nature. He had a vision. His vision was that there could be a few principles that can be expressed in mathematics, which are not primitive facts at all. What they do is they describe how God moves matter around. Descartes had the view that all activity in the universe was due to God. So Descartes had this view that what the laws were, were they described how God moves things around. It was God who did the constraining, God who did the enforcing, God who moved things around. So they described how God constrains things.

But they weren't primitive facts. They described what God was doing. They had two important features. One was what Eddie was calling the constraining or what's usually called the governing feature. And the other was the unifying feature. They unified all of nature. And of course, they're also mathematical. And you know why Descartes knew that the laws had to be mathematical because he thought God must be a mathematician, because he was a mathematician. Okay, this is the history, really, honestly, the history of when the Nelson Law originated.

And the people who've written about it, I can give some references of scholars, a guy named Peter Harrison, another person named John Milton, not the poet, another one. The philosopher was written close to a history as a person called Walter Ott, but he doesn't really do it. So it would be an interesting thing for somebody to do. Okay. So the concept of law started, I'm going to stop in a minute. The concept of law has had these two aspects at the very beginning, the unifying or organizing aspect and the constraining aspect. What Eddie has done is picked up on one of the aspects.

I've picked up on the other aspect. The reason I've done that is I find the constraining aspect absolutely un-understandable. What does it mean for the laws to constrain? How do they do it? Is there a super law that's appealed to to make them constrain, or does it just happen automatically because they're laws?

I mean, there's a third alternative here. Some people think that the things in nature themselves have powers and they produce the laws. Aristotle kind of had a view like that, but he didn't have it as a mathematical view about laws, but other people in contemporary times have taken up that view. It doesn't work very well in contemporary physics. Okay, but these are the main three views, there are a few other views around. So, Eddie and I are here to battle.

Unifying versus constraining. Eddie might want to say both. I say jettison the constraining because once you have the unifying, you've got everything you need. Okay. So when you said super law, is there a super law that governs the regular laws? The analogy to Descartes would be the super law is God and God is the one governing. Absolutely. You got it.

Okay. So the way that I see the disagreement between you both is that we can think of traffic laws as an analogy, and most of us would say that traffic laws cause the motion or orchestrate at least the motion of the cars. But then there's also something like a weather report where we're just documenting patterns that we observe. So it sounds like Eddie you're more on the traffic laws are the laws and then Barry you're more on we're just summarizing these are just descriptions of what's occurring. You're really good Kurt that's a very good way to put it.

Okay. Thank you. Please. It's very favorable to my point. But notice this. In the other room, I can come out because I've driven just once in Budapest, I managed to get a ticket at one time. So you can violate the laws of man. Nature cannot violate the laws of God. Why not?

Well, that's a really good question, isn't it? Why not? Well, maybe because laws just unify nature. So there's nothing there to violate. I think there is this question of what's explaining the no exception clause for summaries view. So suppose we don't think laws govern laws constraint. Suppose we think that laws merely summarize and unify. What's about the laws of nature that they have no exceptions. They apply to almost everything or everything literally in the universe.

Yeah, they unify everything. Isn't that interesting? First of all, we don't really know that because general relativity and quantum mechanics have not been unified. As I was reminded last night with my string theorist friend. I'm going into that. I didn't have to be reminded of course, but the hope is Einstein had this hope. Einstein, many people think of as at some point in his life, he became a believer in God. I've read Einstein pretty closely.

I don't think that's true, I'm not absolutely certain. But he did express faith. He expressed faith that a scientist has to have that nature will be unified. So science works under the assumption that he can find a unification or she can find the unification of nature.

And so far, it's working. In fact, let me make another historical note, which I find astonishing. After Descartes proposed his project for the next millennia, finding the mathematical laws of nature, he wrote a few down. They were abysmal failure actually as laws of nature. They didn't well, he kinda got, sort of came close to inertia,

but he wasn't very good at it. A long 80 years later, another guy came along, the Frenchman's archenemy, Isaac Newton. And he basically satisfied Descartes dream up to a point. If Descartes had lived to see Newton, I don't want to go into what I'm about to say, couldn't be broadcast. I mean, it's amazing to think about what he would think.

Newton came up with a few simple laws or a scheme for laws, which looked like it was going to unify all of nature. Many people thought for a long time that it did. Suddenly, got into more careful examination that they discovered it didn't. But it does and works very well. If you want to get your pendulum clock working or your cannonballs flying in the right direction,

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Shop now at nofrills.ca. So I want to hear from Eddie about where he agrees in contrast with your earlier views. So Eddie, please. Yeah. So that's very helpful, Barry. I think that the two rows of laws are both important and unifying role is one we try to, we're motivated and aspire to find in the laws of nature. Um, but without this constraint, the basic constraint, um, it's, um, it's

not clear how the unifying thing can does any explanation, right? So I think it's the taking for granted in many scientific communities that the laws and principles we find in the end can explain and they constrain with governance somehow. They explain how things fall in the same way, how things move in their same right way. And of course, people focus on the unifying part. And they say, okay, what is the simplest way and most natural way and most unifying way we can find laws of nature write down principles and equation write down that explains things. Of course, people are not very explicit about how laws explain. And there will be debates about this.

And there'll be two ways to cash out how people think about laws of nature. But I do think that the majority of scientists, the naive view, the flat-footed view is the view that laws, even though they're nice, they have satisfied this constrained relation with this governing role. Otherwise, they are not laws. They are not something we aspire to find in nature. That's what you say. Now, Eddie, about your talking about taking advice from scientists, do you take advice from the general scientists about what you want to think about quantum mechanics?

Quantum mechanics is a difficult case. Shut up and calculate, Eddie. Shut up and calculate. You do not. Of course, what scientists have done is they bought into Descartes' general picture and they started to using this language of governing. That's the language they're using, governing and constraining, as though they somehow couldn't deal without it.

It's like you had a crutch that you don't need anymore. You never used, it never held you up. you know, a crutch that you don't need anymore. You never used, it never held you up. So maybe we should clarify the view of constraining and summarizing and just to, for the audience. Maybe you should say first. Please. Well, you put summarizing in my mouth.

I did not say summarizing. Okay, okay. How about I summarize and also explain summarizing? I'll do so with an analogy again for people who are educated in physics. So maybe a germane analogy, you can tell me if this is germane or not, is the action principle. So we extremize action. Now one could argue that the universe is genuinely extremizing its action. It's lazy if we're doing least action principle.

Alternatively, someone can contend that that's just an, the stationary action principle is just an elegant way of summarizing what nature is doing. The principle itself isn't causative. It doesn't drive anything. It just encapsulates the behavior in a concise summary. So that's one way of viewing, or at least one way that I view the difference between a law of nature causing something. Now what I'm confused about Barry is is there some meta principle that says that the laws of physics are even describable by something simple. So you say that it's all unified or it could be there's something in algorithmic information theory called Kolmogorov complexity.

We also know it well. And it could be conceivably that the universe is not compressible. It could be. It doesn't seem like that. It seems like we're able to write down something relatively short and do some predictions. So is there in your mind some meta principle that suggests that the universe is indeed compressible outside of initial conditions? And we can also talk about initial conditions. We can. So a couple of things here. One is I like the way you put things.

I think it's good. When talking about the universe being compressible, you have to think about which parts you're going to compress. And the parts you're not going to compress, comagora of complexity, has a lot to do with too. Because along in the 19th century, along came a couple of people who figured out how to supplement the laws of nature in a way so they give

much much more information about the ordinary facts in the world. I'm sure you know what I'm referring to, yes. Probability. Ah. Probability. Okay. So, what's not compressible can still get a lot of information about by introducing the notion of probability. I have very definite views about how to think about probability as well.

Eddie and I were having a long conversation. I don't know, when was it, Eddie? My brain is going. When did we have this long conversation, we thought we might actually almost be in agreement. Yes. About objecting probability. That's what got me into philosophy, in fact,

and it's one of the big questions about giving a good account of what objective probability is. It's really fascinating that physicists, mathematicians, biologists, they know how to use the notion of probability pretty well. They don't know what they're talking about. Bertrand Russell had a most wonderful thing. I'm sure you know this, that Bertrand Russell is great.

If you want to go get a one-line quote to use for something, you go to Russell. He said, probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially since nobody knows what it means. And that's verbatim. Yeah, there are many of these quips where someone says that so-and-so, when no one knows what it means, entropy, for instance, I think von Neumann said that. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, but I know what entropy means, it's screw von Neumann. Von Neumann was much smarter than he, but I know what entropy means is screw for Neumann. But Neumann was much more part of the theory. He knew what it meant too. I don't believe that. Okay, so Eddie, one of the questions from Barry earlier was, well, what does it mean? What is this super law that governs the laws? What's going on here when you say that? And also, what does it mean to explain? Because you keep using the word explain. Right. So colloquially, when someone is explaining to someone else,

they say, okay, can you explain to me how do I get to the CN tower? I'm in Toronto, so let's say, explain to me how I get to the CN tower. They say, okay, you go forward from here, you make a left, etc. But they don't say something like you take infinity categories and you just, like that's not an explanation to them

because they don't know what infinity categories are. So explaining has something to do with meeting the person where they are and then providing a line of justification. But that's colloquially and you're obviously speaking about the laws of physics. I don't imagine our demonic understanding of explaining is what you mean. So what do you mean? Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away.

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Again, that's economist.com slash toe. Demotic understanding of explaining is what you mean. So what do you mean? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's a huge continuum of notions of explanation, meaning that's where we are in ordinary life versus in the scientific context explaining phenomena in double-slick experiment, you know, lots of physics. And I don't think it's a big difference. There might be differences in terms of things we invoke to explain, whether I'm invoking the absence or the presence of some, you know, a person to explain something falling or breaking.

But the kind of explanation I think is continuous. And even ordinary life explanations, they are backed by something. Insofar as they're accurate or they are Faithful, they should be tracking some kind of general laws Maybe about human nature and maybe about human psychology economics and then all the way back to deeper and deeper principles so for me explanation is by some simple constraint. And this is the view of lots of nature developed with

Charlton Goldstein, a metaphysicist at Rutgers University. So we call this view minimal primitivism. Right. So for us, the laws are basic. They underline everything. So they are not reducible to something else. They are not summarizing. They are not unifying, merely reunifying.

They can be nice summaries, they can be nice unifying simple features, but they are fundamental features of the universe. They coexist with the universe, the mosaic, and they can give rise to some kind of causal explanations, how A causes B and B causes C, but causation is not fundamental to the picture. And the, the print, the example you use earlier was very helpful. The least action principle was one of the examples that motivate us to, to think about this more general picture of governing laws.

Some people think that, well, if you have real laws in nature, governing things, there must be causal laws. So A at T1 causes B at T2, and that's the way the universe moves, step-by-step, moment-by-moment generating. But think about general relativity, think about modern physics, think about quantum mechanics,

at least action principle, Lagrange mechanics. All of this seems to pull away from this step-by-step production picture. So I remember you have Emily Atlin on the YouTube channel before, and she was also suggesting this all at once picture. So we have very similar ideas of time and laws. So for us too, the laws govern the whole universe, the entire space time and its contents, um,

and in a sense all at once. Um, for me, explanation has to be not just any constraint, but it has to be some simple constraints. So simple laws of nature, the least action principle, quantum mechanical Schrodinger equation, Einstein field equations, they are not simple in the sense that they're not like something we learned from elementary school, but they're simple in the sense we can build up on simpler principles and develop sophistication and work with more and more complicated mathematical formalism.

Um, but they are much better than what could have been the case. It, which has no law, no simple principle and no regular at all. And then we'd be completely lost. Science cannot be down in that case. We wouldn't be lost. They wouldn't be. We wouldn't be. They, in a limiting case that they're still case. We wouldn't be lost. They wouldn't be. We wouldn't be. They, in a limiting case that there are still constraints.

We wouldn't be here. Right. There's some fancy words that probably will come up that haven't. I'm surprised they haven't so far like non-Humian, which is not to be confused with non-human, although Barry, you're so staunchly humian that- That's not true. You may say that to be non-humian is to be non-human.

I'm going to correct that in a little while to tell you what my actual view is. But Eddie knows why we're laughing and I don't think I can repeat the story because it's at the expense of a colleague. But confusing you me and with you man can make a big problem. Okay. The word mosaic also came up. I think this is a great time for you Barry to define what mosaic is so that the audience can also follow. But also at the same time,

while doing that, please explore the relationship between boundary conditions and laws. Okay, so a lot to do here. First of all, given what Eddie just said, as I said before, I can agree with a lot of what he said and a lot of the words that he said. I don't want to make it sound as though I don't.

Of course, I think that in some sense, the law's a constraint. Of course, I think that in some sense, the laws constrain. Of course, I think they explain. Of course, we have a different spin take on many of these notions, which we may want to get into if we want to get into the fine points here. Okay. Now, in contemporary writing, while some philosophers have thought about what laws of nature are, David Hume had a little bit of a thought or not much, Kant thought about it in some sense, and others did. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that a few philosophers cooked up some things. And then all of a sudden, there was an upsurgence of people with views like Eddie's, because Eddie doesn't want to

be tarred with these people, I think, but they're definitely in the same group. David Armstrong, Michael Tooley, and Fred Jetsky. And they thought that laws were relations between properties, primitive facts, which were relations between properties, but primitive relations, which constrain or govern events. And another philosopher, or two other philosophers, looked at that and said, so they scratched their heads, second to that, how do they do that? How do they do this governing? How do they do this governing? How do they do this constraining? I know how the laws of man govern the laws of man.

We have the courts and the prison system and so on that helps do it. And then of course, what people want and desire and believe. They thought, maybe we don't need this constraining business. David Lewis came up with a very interesting idea. Now I'm going to expound David Lewis's view. It's not my view since other people will see this. I've published a book recently about this and about the book. There's a second book about it. So I guess people care about their books.

I'm not sure I did, but I do a little bit now. I'll place a link to both of your books on screen and in the description right now. One of us is a much better publicist than the other one, I have to say. But anyway, so I haven't done anything about it. So okay. Well, my book has the cooler title. We can maybe come to that later. Okay. All right.

Okay. Now, about your actual question. What should I say here? Okay. So here's David Lewis's view. David Lewis thought that all the primitive facts were primitive properties instantiated throughout all the space-time. So he thought there was an arena, a space-time arena. He wasn't very explicit because he left it open. How many dimensions does it have?

He thought probably times just one dimension, you know, maybe space has many dimensions. He didn't really say. He thought that the fundamental properties were probably instantiated by point-like individuals, like particles maybe, or maybe just by points, because the properties themselves were sufficient to make for there being materiality. And the properties might be things like mass, charge, spin, those are examples he gave, silly example to give spin there, but he did. And there would be these properties.

And so imagine a mosaic filling in the tiles. So when God created the universe on the Eumen view, David Lewis's Eumen view, all God had to do, God doesn't exist in time, so God doesn't have to do anything in time. Just created the universe all at once. He created the whole of expanse of space and time and filled it up with fundamental properties. Lewis called them perfectly natural properties, instantiated at points or at point-like individuals throughout all these space and time.

And since it was a space and time, these point-like individuals or points had spatial and temporal relations to each other. Then Lewis said, you know what Eckhart was really after? He wanted the best systematization of this thing I put down here. Now you guys may think it's a complete mess. It looks like that at first,

but if you're clever enough, I've made you a key. If you learn mathematics, you will be able to learn it. Then our job according to Lewis is to find the best systematization of this. He used the word systematization. He did not use the word summary.

Other people have used it for him. I like the word unifying better, the best unifying counter. Now, I quickly want to add that this is not my view. My view is a little bit more complex and maybe we want to get to that later. But this is in the neighborhood of my view. I like the part that it does not have that laws govern or constrain in the literal sense and does not have laws as being primitive facts. So here's two places that Eddie and I absolutely disagree, which is great because philosophy would not exist if it wasn't for disagreements. This is what makes it go around. Okay that's Lewis's view. Now the question for Lewis is, well, how do you give an account of explanation?

Right. Okay, okay, and I can come to that in a second. Then other questions like, where does probability fit into that? Lewis said a view and I have a view about that. There's also kind of a, I guess a basic question Barry for Lewis's view and the view of humanism that at a bottom level there's nothing that enforcing the pattern there's nothing that making things happen there's nothing that you know setting a boundary in what's possible what's not possible

so no that's not true that's totally not true well there's not true. That's totally not true. Well, there's a mosaic. The mosaic is all there is in reality, right? That's all there is. You're hankering after something more. But in fact, there is something that, as you say, enforces the laws of nature enforce in a certain sense. So I can say just with you that because of the loss of gravity and the loss of second law of motion and the size of the Earth and the size of the Moon, that the Moon will fall in an elliptical orbit and that one side of the Moon will be bulging

out from the Moon as the moon goes around the earth. That's what was a tide on the moon. All of that is going to be up to us. All of that because, explain and notions of explanation. Because how we think about the universe, how we come to interact with it is not because there is something, you know, basic that does the explanation. Well, this is what you're hankering after. You still would want God. And I understand, I mean,

you may really want God. I want laws. That's a different issue. Okay, okay, okay. But you don't need law. Okay, okay. This is what maybe the coup de grace. What would happen, Eddie, if God came and he whispered in your ears and said, you know, okay, this is what maybe the coup de grace. What would happen, Eddie, if God came and he whispered in your ears and said, you know, Eddie, there are no primitive law facts.

All I did was to make a mosaic and I put a lot of patterns in, a lot of patterns you can find. Would you give up explaining then? Well, what about if God tells you that actually there are primitive laws and they do explanation? Oh Well, I know what I would say to God what I did when I was 13 years old Which is? Well, it's not something so public. Okay, okay Okay, but maybe Kurt doesn't know what I'm referring to here even but but I mean in that case, I would just say

I'll be wrong about the metaphysics and yeah there is no explanation in that case yeah okay well I think you'd just be wrong scientists would not stop doing their science they should not stop doing because they yeah go ahead Kurt okay well let's talk about summaries versus best systems so right now Barry you're being recorded I don't know if that's a surprise to you. The audience is seeing you, okay? Not live, but they're going to see you at some point.

So in some sense, this is a summary of you, of what you've been doing. Okay, I wouldn't say that explains what you've been doing. And I don't know if I don't know what the difference is then in terms of this video versus a best system. So like the video is a summary. We can agree to on that. Is it a best system? Why is it not a best system? How the heck can best systems explain? This is not the best of best systems. Here's the heck how best systems can explain. They unify. They unified all,

I'm not speaking for Lewis. they unify all of the mosaic. That's how they explain, because they unifiers. Let me give you an example, something I think may be eye-opening to you. People for a long time looked at various phenomena. They looked at ice cubes melting. They looked at smoke dispersing in the air. They dropped some ink and water and it dispersed. They looked at people and they got old.

All of these things, they have nothing to do with each other, right? But all of them involve there being particles of matter moving around in more or less in accordance with Newtonian laws, not exactly Newtonian laws, but more or less Newtonian laws, and a certain probability distribution over all of these. That unifies all of this. That's what explains it. Once we see that these are all connected with each other. We have one of those aha experiences. Aha, now I see how it is that growing old and smoke dispersing in the air are really the same elk.

Could it be that the laws of nature are not unified? Well, in my view, I mean, unification is a matter of degree. It could turn out, maybe this will be the case, that no one will discover, and maybe because there isn't a real unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. I very much doubt that. I think one of those has got to go, I think I know which one is gonna change. But people will still be looking. But yeah, when you have faith,

you have to know that it's faith. Science is based on faith. That's a really important point. What do you mean? I mean, scientists have to assume that there's order in nature. Now, in order to make themselves feel better about it, they like to posit there being

these primitive facts that enforce the order. But in fact, they'll need another primitive fact to connect their primitive facts to the ordinary facts, and I'll need yet another primitive fact to make for their primitive facts. So they have primitives coming up out of their whatever. Okay. So there's something called the Munchausen trilemma. I think it's also known as the Agrippa trilemma, something like that,

which is that to give any explanation, you have three options. You have foundationalism, so you start with some axiom which it can't be justified because if you're making an appeal to something else that something else Would be the axiom so some unjustified axiom or you have an infinite regress or you have circularity Okay, so you just pointed out that there's an infinite regress, but that is also a potential option Maybe the universe is an infinite regress now Eddie I'm not trying to say that you believe that. And maybe you don't believe that.

But if you don't, please comment on anything that Barry's just said. Yeah, so I like the setup you just mentioned, Kurt. So in terms of foundationalism versus infinite regress, I think for lots of nature, lots of physics, the view I have and divided with Charlie Goldstein is kind of foundational picture. It's kind of a flat-ed foundational picture trying to capture what

physicists have in mind, what, um, the non-human philosophers have in mind, which is there is something in the world, the laws of nature, they govern what happens in everything. Every room, every particle, every field. And, um, this laws are kind of the fundamental axioms in theory, and they are not summary of what happens. Unlike the human picture, the axioms here are real axioms. The axioms are the fundamental metaphysical sense,

the real sense, they are the foundational axioms. They are real axioms. Are the pianos axioms real axioms? I agree, but then the best system axioms, they are, you know, they supervene on the mosaic. The laws are at the basic level of reality. So there's a universe and there are laws and the laws govern the universe. On the human view, there's a universe and that's it.

And the mosaic is all there's fundamental. The laws supervene on the universe and other things are prevailing on the laws and so on. But the laws are not at this basic level of reality. Well, as I've said a few times, I expounded David Lewis's view, not my own view. I don't know whether we want to come to that at all. Yes. My own view is, okay, I can explain it. It's a little bit, in some ways, a little bit certain respects closer to Eddie's. Because what I do think is fundamental is reality, nature.

It's fundamental. But I also have a funny view about reality. Nature, it's fundamental. But I also have a funny view about reality, but can I come back to the trilemma? Is there something in mind about that? Another quote, this time not from Russell, but from Otto Neurath, and he's been quoted especially by Quine. I'm sure you know this quote from Neurath that Quine uses. He said, science is like a ship at sea that we have to rebuild while at sail. There's no dry dock, no foundational place to bring it into.

To put it up on whatever you put it up on and to redo it. We got to redo it at sea. Neurath really had it right, I think. He was responding to the foundationalists of the Vienna school. I'm not very far from Vienna. I'll be there in not so long. Budapest, Vienna, near each other.

So it's a kind of circularity, but it's circularity with a purpose. It's a circularity aiming to coming up with a better and better and better ship. So there is a guiding light, what science should be like. It should be as simple as could be, as comprehensive as can be,

as informative to human beings as can be. So it needs a lot of different parts and Scientists have been fairly good not at understanding what they're doing. I don't think it's good at that, but they're very good at doing what they're doing Understanding what they're doing that's the job for Eddie and me to do It sounds like you're talking about science what science is like and what scientists are like, but what is nature like? Well, we're trying we're trying to find out yes now I know Eddie earlier and I don't want to butcher what you said But earlier you were saying look these are then tied to our descriptions. Like you said something like that

There's something then subjective to Barry's view if I was understanding you correctly. So feel free to comment. Maybe I misunderstood. Yeah, the thought was that the human view on the Lewis kind of best system view, best summary view, what laws are, which propositions, which sentences are laws, which sentences are kind of factuals, which sentence express what we can do, what we cannot do, are basically tracking what we mean by simple

and informative summaries, which can be very much up to us. So suppose I somehow convince the scientific community to change our standards of say simplicity, then it could be the case that the laws could change too. You change a different set of laws. And that doesn't seem like what we mean by laws of nature. Laws of nature, laws of physics seems like something completely objective and independent of us, our interests, our situations, our political allegiance and so on. So it doesn't, shouldn't be so dependent on what we think and what we do. I agree with Barry that there is an

important part of how we do science, what is a rational procedure to carry out the method to carry out science that might be tracking our interests and that's kind of a big mystery on both sides, on humanism and non-humanism. But minimal primatism and non-human view, I like, the laws are what they are in themselves. The laws don't change in response to our interests. The laws don't shift just by changing our standards of criteria of evaluation. And that I think is a basic necessary condition for laws. It's a precondition for something to be a law. Do you think I disagree with that?

I think you disagree with that, right, Barry? Wrong. Wrong. for something to be a laugh. Do you think I disagree with that? I think you disagree with that, right Barry? Wrong. Wrong. Suppose, let me ask you, Eddie, suppose someone said, I have a new idea for baseball. What we do is we play baseball in a teacup. And what we do in playing baseball is instead of innings,

we just have teabags. And the way we play baseball is instead of having innings, we just have tea bags. And the way we play baseball is we, it depends on how many times we dip the tea bag into the tea. What do you think about that? That's not a very good rule for baseball. It ain't baseball. Well, if somebody changed the rules in the way you're talking about, it would not be good rules for laws.

Now, why is that? Well, tradition and history and the fact that it's been successful in the past. You don't need a crutch to stand on. You just keep looking for a crutch. Okay? I mean, I'm attributing this to you. I was going to complain a little while ago that you were attributing mysteries to you man's which they don't have.

Because you shouldn't do that. I shouldn't do that to you. But you can understand that from my point of view, you're constraining. It's kind of like a, like so we're hankering after God. You don't need it. What about the laws of mathematics and laws of logic? They're not mere summaries. What about them?

They seem to constrain. Tell me what, what are they constrained? Logical realities and mathematical realities that one plus one is two is not three. Do you know that? I agree that one plus one is two and not three. I'm glad we are in agreement about that. But how do they do the constraining? I'm not saying I'm not putting a view about them.

I find this the deepest of mysteries that I know about. I agree that it is a fundamental primitive and the way we understand the primitive notion, like in mathematics we have primitive notions. They did not say that. Yes, okay, let me say, how one might remove some mysteries. One can remove some mysteries by drawing connections or define things in terms of those primitive notions.

We can define kind of factuals, causal relations, notions of time and dependence in terms of the laws. And then we see, okay, how laws do things in the world is by making certain things true, making certain things happen. And then we just kind of talk about things we are familiar with, like how tables and chairs depend on each other on configurations. So from my point of view, you just keep repeating your point over and over again, doesn't make it any more true.

Just like my point doesn't get any more true when I repeat it over and over again. No, I'm trying to clarify this point that on Lewis' view on traditional humanism, before moving to Sir Barry's, your new view of package deal account. On traditional humanism, there is this worry about idealism, that laws seems idealistic, they seem dependent on our interests and our wills. And too much so that what my worry, whether they deserve the name laws. Lewis himself had that worry.

He called it ratbag idealism. Right. So I started thinking, I knew it came from down under, because Lewis liked to go visit Australia a lot. I knew it must be from Aussie, Australian or New Zealand. In fact, it is. I thought at first that a rat bag was a bag,

that rats carry their cheese around in. Yeah, it sounds like something negative, but it sounds like something attributable to a person. Like you call it, you are a rat bag or you have rat bag qualities. Yeah, that's exactly right. You got to the chase, whereas I want to have a little fun with it first. Then I thought maybe no,

maybe it's a bag that the rat catchers carry their rats around in. But it's neither. I spoke to Al Hayek, who's my Australian source on stuff. He said, it just means disreputable. So you went right to the chase here. Just means disreputable. So Lewis was afraid that people might think his view is idealist, just like, and he thought that would be bad.

Then he argued that it wasn't. And I devoted many pages of my book, arguing that my view and Lewis's view too is not idealist in any bad sense now to say that there is not as One philosopher called it the mark of the serpent all over our concepts like the concept of laws That philosopher was Hillary Putnam was one of my heroes So Hillary Putnam had a view one of my heroes. So Hillary Putnam had a view that he called realism with a human face. I call my view realism with a scientific face because science attributes a certain goal or aim to what we want by way of unification,

by way of simplification, by a way of informativeness, by way of symmetries and a bunch of other things like that. And if we try to satisfy that, maybe nature will oblige. So on this view Barry, it is the ideal scientific practice and the in that limit of inquiry that when science is completed, that kind of standard, that is the rational standard for choice of how we evaluate laws of nature on the best system account or on a package deal account. And that, that's saying is not as subjective as I thought before, because now there is a standard and unique standard doesn't change.

It is whatever it is. Just like baseball has its standards. But you know Barry, there is kind of a worry about circularity here, right? What we mean by ideal, a good scientific practice, and you know, what we evaluate that to be the fixed point, depends on what we think about counterfactuals and probabilities and people's abilities and people's actions, interactions in a community, the social aspects. And all of them are modal concepts that imbue with a lot of nature. So usually we understand those notions in terms of laws. So if we catch that laws in terms of that, and that in terms of laws,

there seem to be a big maybe kind of distance circle, but still it's a circle. You could call it a circle if you want, but it's a virtuous circle if it's a circle. There is a kind of all of it hanging together kind of a feel to it, but it does all seem to hang together. Okay, and that's what's important about it. If it didn't, we'd be in trouble. But so far, so good, and philosophers have been working to spell out theories of what

probability is, what kind of factuals are, so that it does hang together. And scientists, and you know, the standards have changed over the history of science. Arisola had different standards than Newton had, and Einstein had different standards than Newton had, and quantum mechanics can temporary has different standards, and the mathematical mathematics used to express the laws of nature have changed over time.

And what counts is a simple account has changed over time. So these things do change over time, but of course they change in orderly ways, still with the aim of coming up with a kind of account of the nature of reality. Now it would be nice to think that out there in heaven, God wrote down, these are the laws are man, you better get them. And maybe even move things around in accordance with it, as they kind of thought. But I don't think it's like that, because I don't think we understand how that could work.

Okay, so I want us to be more analytic and less colorful. So when we use words like, this is a rat bag or this is God, and I assume God is a synonym for magic, like you're evoking magic. I'm evoking a human face, a scientific face, a virtuous circle. That's like poisoning the well, because it's saying that firstly, well, it's giving the impression to the audience, like these are the ideas that are foolish and these are the ideas that are more. So let's be more analytic. Explain what reality is and what nature is.

Barry, please, I want to hear what you think it is because- I can't explain what reality is. That's what science is doing, is doing its best job at coming into account of reality. But in my view, reality is describable more or less by quantum mechanics. Now, to get into an account of what quantum mechanics is about is a different subject matter.

But that's what we think of as the fundamental cause because that's turned out to be a mathematical way of expressing a big chunk of the best systematization of our world. It systematizes the periodic table, for example. Sorry, are you all in agreement in terms of philosophy? For instance, realism versus idealism or anti realism or so on. Do you all agree on some broad outlook? Or do you disagree? Like is one of you an idealist and others a materialist?

I think Barry and I, if I'm correct, we are roughly in agreement on the general methodology and the realist picture of metaphysics. Maybe some differences in the details about how realist we are. I'm a realist with, as Hillary says, a human face or a scientific face. But I'm definitely on the realist side of this discussion. I do think that there are people and if there were no people or creatures, intelligent creatures, there wouldn't be science. I do think that there are people, and if there were no people or creatures, intelligent creatures, there wouldn't be science.

So you need intelligent creatures for there to be science. But I don't think that makes me an idealist. Yeah, so on my view, what's real, so I'm a realist too, So on my view, what's real. So I'm a realist too. And on my view, what is fundamental and what is real in the universe are two things. The first thing is the mosaic kind of thing, the universe, the space-time manifold. It could be space-time in general relativity or maybe quantum gravity kind of manifold or maybe more general kind of string theoretic description of the universe.

But that by itself is not complete. If I write down the theory of everything in terms of the space time manifold, then it is missing the most important ingredient, which is the laws of nature. So it's going to be the second part, which is a lot of physics, laws of nature, the fundamental laws that govern the universe. And to capture both parts, then the theory is complete at the fundamental level. And this should entail all the important regularities order we see around us about gas in the box, about cells, about galaxies, about tables.

And this might include the law might include deterministic laws of temporal evolution, boundary condition laws like the path hypothesis, plus probabilistic laws such as stochastic processes or genuine randomness, or maybe some probabilistic boundary conditions. And together this will give us, I hope hope a very unifying and simple and powerful theory that can explain a lot of regularities. So on the methodology part that we should still strive for describing this in terms of simple informative unifying descriptions and that's going to be in agreement with a lot of humanism and what Barry said. And in terms of probability, there would be a crucial difference, I think. There is going to be some kind of questions on how do we understand

probabilistic laws in terms of constraints? I think we should put that off for a little bit if you want to get to it. Because I want to deal with something, two things. I want to deal with something, two things. One is, of course I can agree with a lot of what Eddie just said in words, but I did want to say that if he were to write down every last event in the mosaic, what would happen is his arm would fall off

way before he got to the end. And in fact, his arm and what's going on, it would be in the mosaic someplace. Where there's circularity. Right, it's a self-reference. That's self-reference, okay. So I'm not suggesting anything like that, of course. What I think is that what science is aiming at,

or what Lewis is suggesting, I'll expound my view if you want in a minute. I think what Lewis is aiming at is a best systematization of the mosaic. And he hopes that there is one. It is a matter of faith. And Newton, in fact, did come up with something that looked like something pretty close to it. Wasn't quite right.

When Maxwell came along and improved how to put light and electromagnetism into it and improve things a lot, but created a big problem, that big problem was solved by, by one of the big problems was solved by special relativity, but some other big problems remained. One of them was how to talk about the structure of matter. That problem was solved to a large extent by quantum mechanics.

So the system got more and more complicated as it encompassed more and more of reality. And all along, something stayed the same, what Arthur Eddington called the Supreme Law of Nature. He didn't mean it that it constrained incidentally, but he called it the Supreme Law of Nature. It's the Second Law of Nature. Wow. And what he meant by it was not just that entropy doesn't decrease.

What he meant by it is the probabilistic assumption that Boltzmann used in order to entail the probabilistic version of the second law. He said no matter how the dynamical people's proposals for what the dynamical laws are changes, they get better and better. No matter what, this will stay. And this is very interesting, and the reason is that it provides the connection between macroscopic phenomena and microscopic phenomena. It's always a probabilistic connection. So given the microscopic state, let's say the fundamental quantum mechanical or Newtonian state, of course, if you're given it, you can say the fundamental quantum mechanical or Newtonian state.

Of course, you're given it. You could say exactly what will happen. Laplace famously told that to Napoleon. But nobody is ever given the fundamental state of the world at a time. What you can do is only come up with a probabilistic account of it. You could say it's just as likely to be this kind of state is that kind of state, or give some sort of probability distribution of the states. Turns out Boltzmann assumed the simplest of all possible probability assumption. It

looks like he was right. And then when Eddington said that that's the supreme law of nature, he knew what he was talking about, Because that has survived, and it's right. I don't see any contradiction between what you're saying, what Eddie believes, because the laws themselves, in my understanding, could be probabilistic. Maybe you believe they aren't. Oh yeah, there's no contradiction there. The contradiction is how we understand the word constrain. I don't think it's doing any work. I think constrain just

means satisfies. That's all. What Eddie thinks constrain is some sort of like semi-causal notion. It makes things happen. Ah, okay. So then would you say that the dispute hinges on theories of causation here? Well, I think Eddie would reject my saying that laws do us anything, but it was assured, but they're doing something like that. They're making things happen. He used that language before. Right, right, right.

I don't mean making things happen in time in a causal way. I do mean that. So the notion of constraint here is a primitive, right? And in so far as it's a primitive notion, I cannot define a primitive in terms of other things in my theory. Otherwise it's not going to be a primitive. It's just like you said, the kind of foundational kind of hierarchy. If I really have a foundational hierarchy of being honest, I've got to tell you

my axioms and primitive vocabulary and trying to elucidate the connections by drawing connections to things we understand. But if we say, okay, if we don't understand the primitive notions from the other point of view, I can try to convince them. Maybe it is something familiar. Maybe it is something that can elucidate things we understand anyways. So the causal explanations can be understood in terms of boundary condition laws plus deterministic evolution with stochastic evolution. And, um, those things are familiar.

It seems like familiar things about A causing B can be understood in terms of the primitive constraint, even though constraint is not temporal, even though it's not like something that producing things in time. Yeah. Okay. So from my, let's focus on that in just a minute. But from my point of view, what you're doing is running together issues about ontology

with issues about what might be called ideology or conceptualology. Axioms have to do with how you formulate your concepts. For example, real number theory can be axiomatized in a lot of different ways. God didn't say what the right primitives are. Geometry, Euclidean geometry, can be axiomatized in a bunch of different ways.

God didn't say these are the right axioms. Same with number theory. There are many ways of axiomatizing. Same way with the laws of nature for that matter. Is it Lagrange's principles, Hamilton's principles, or what? Okay, so I think this is these are matters of ideology or conceptualogy, how you formulate the best systematization. I think that is to a certain extent a free, not free, but I mean it's something that can be done in different ways.

Matters of ontology have to do with what exists and what the relationships are among the things that exist. I think, David Lewis thinks, again, I haven't really come to my view, David Lewis thinks that what exists is the mosaic and laws are propositions all right, but they're propositions that are made true or false by the structure of the mosaic. They don't need a special truth maker other than the mosaic and the rules for what it is to be a law. So I don't think I'm running over the distinctions, Barry. My view of ontology is more expensive than usual. I allow properties and relations to be part of ontology too, and laws to be part of ontology.

I don't like that, but I don't mind properties and relations being part of ontology. I don't think laws are, I think somebody could say, I think there are these things, I'm going to name them, I call them laws or nomoses. I say, well, what do they do and how do they do it? I think you're going to be dumbfounded. Barry, are you in the minority? Are you suggesting I'm a physicist and there are no laws of physics, technically speaking?

What you mean is that nobody has are no laws of physics technically speaking What you mean is that nobody has discovered the laws of physics. You don't mean that there are no laws of physics. Are you? No, no, I'm asking What do you mean? Do you mean to say that people speak about laws of physics? There aren't actually laws. They're just best systems or hopefully we will get to the best system I don't know what this just business is. This is a big deal. It's not a just, it's a big deal. But I'll come to my view now.

I don't have Lewis's view. I want to have even less than he has, in some sense, more than another sense. I think what there is fundamentally is reality. I think the view I have, the philosopher who's most like the view I have, I believe, although you're going to find this very weird, is Spinoza. You know, he's a fellow traveler in some sense. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Spinoza thought that what there was was reality. Now, he called it the mind of God. I can do without that, but there's reality. Reality can be described in a lot of different ways. Reality can make true or false the descriptions that we come up with. Now, you might ask, what are the descriptions that Adam came up with? Those are excellent questions. That's for another session, I think, and I've written about that as well. But that's not what we're talking about here.

But, so reality can be described in various ways. Among the ways they can be described is ways that satisfy certain goals that people have come up with in their life. The goals of understanding their world, and which they've articulated more and more along, wanting to have a simple, comprehensive systematization that can account for things like the motions of the planets and the motions of the shooting stars and the motions of projectiles and pendula,

and many things that begin with the word P, planets, peculiar people, all sorts of things that begin with the letter P1, have accounts of their motions. So motion became a very important notion in physics. We wanted to account for their motions by systematizing the motions of things. That's what I was talking about. What I was saying about ice melting and smoke dispersing and inked, diffusing. Yes.

Okay. All of this is motion. It's systematized by the molecular theory of matter and the fundamental dynamical laws, maybe the Newtonian and maybe they're more sophisticated, and electromagnetic, and maybe, and you're going to need a probability assumption that Boltzmann added to That systematizes all that and shows their connections for me. That's what explaining is So what is fundamental on this view Barry is the macroscopic things in motion

That's fundamental or something just called reality with no description, no joints, no carving, no structure in the sense that I cannot even describe it's like a count here, a numeral, that thing in itself, if it has any description, it's going to be bringing it closer to us. No, first of all, just reality, just reality. Let's listen to those words heading, just reality. Let's listen to those words heading, just reality. That sounds like a lot to me. Now, when you say it doesn't have any description, quite the opposite, it has many descriptions.

The science satisfying the goals of science is one way of describing reality. Maybe there are other ways of describing aspects of reality, maybe artistic ways of describing aspects of reality, maybe artistic ways, always of describing aspects of reality that satisfy different criteria, which don't match those of science. Maybe there are yet other ways.

Sometimes people have wondered whether the way we describe human beings in terms of beliefs and desires can be fit in with the way we describe the motion of beliefs and desires can be fit in with the way we describe the motion of objects and mechanics. I think it can be, but you've got to think a bit about it. Some people think it can't be, like Donald Davidson and some other philosophers, maybe

Quine. Putnam as well. So Putnam, one of your heroes, said that the sooner that we understand that the realm of knowledge that encompasses reality isn't just that the realm of knowledge that encompasses reality isn't just this sphere of science, that there are other spheres like ethics, and Aristotle thought that as well, the sooner we'll come to a saner view of ourselves and of science. I'm all for that.

But it doesn't mean that it all can't be fit together. And as far as the motions of things are concerned, physics is the king. So if a motive or a desire moves you, it's ultimately got to be accounted for in terms of neurons firing in your brain or something like that. Now, I don't know how to do it. Nobody knows how to do it. But the hope is that people will figure out. People have made progress towards understanding how it is that the brain makes people move when they have beliefs and desires and fitting beliefs and desires into this picture one of the great heroes of Red Rutgers, I may, was he gone by the time you came, Eddie? Jerry?

Jerry was still teaching, yes. Still teaching. So Jerry Fodor, unfortunately, Kurt, you can't interview him. He would make the greatest of interviews. If you could interview him, it would make the greatest of the greatest interviews. But he tried to make contributions to the visceral subject that we're talking about.

It's interesting. The reality has many guys, it has many descriptions. All of them are equally valid, but there's no fundamental. What's this word valid? Wait, how does this word valid creep in there? Okay. So they're, they're all going to be good descriptions. They're all descriptions.

All right. The many descriptions. And there's no fundamental unique descriptions of the, in terms of perfectly natural properties, what was fundamental in the world That's not going to be privileged by this package deal account. Well It's going to be privileged by the package deal account I mean there may be more than one of them actually they may not be one of this privilege I think do think we have a good reason to believe that already

but that's a little dispute within the thing but what the thing that you're focusing on is, the package deal account, it pays attention to the criteria that science has evolved over the history of science and trying to mesh those and fit those together. Those are ever evolving. They're evolving as of now,

out of new methods of mathematics. I mean, can you use algebraic topology and physics? People argue about that. And the laws would change as the standards evolve? Laws don't change. What happens is that we have to change our criteria. I mean, I don't know, do you want to say baseball changes? Do we have a new game or what?

But I do think we could say that we were mistaken before. We've come up with a better account of what the laws are. We're mistaken about what laws are or what laws there are. Okay, someone asked what the laws are, they want a list of things. They want Schrodinger's equation maybe or F equals MA or the gravity or Einstein's field equations or something like that. These are what the laws are. They're equations, things written down.

What the laws are is the kind of thing we've been engaged in, a philosophical account about what it is to be a law. Okay, now I haven't really given my package deal account and I don't know whether the engaged in a philosophical account about what it is to be a law. Okay. Now I haven't really given my package deal account and I don't know whether the time has come to do it. Has it come? Sure. Okay.

So I don't like Lewis's account because it too, I think rests on a crutch. His crutch is perfectly natural properties. I threw away my crutches. Okay. There's like two crutches you're throwing away, right? First of all, the fundamental law that constrain or govern and second is fundamental mosaic. Right, mosaic, right? I don't have those questions. Just like I believe in both of them. I believe mosaic and laws are fundamental.

You believe neither is fundamental. Right. Okay. You keep using the words fundamental. It can be used in a lot of different senses, but anyway. So what I think is where we start is where science started. They started by noticing things like when you throw rocks, they move in a certain kind of path, kind of similar path to the way a projectile moves when you shoot a cannon. Maybe a similar path in certain ways to the way a shooting star moves when you see it go in a parabola. Maybe in a similar way to we might think how a planet moves if the parabola doesn't close

and becomes an ellipse. So you note these similarities about these things. And we want to unify them. What we discover is that in order to unify the macroscopic, we have to introduce the microscopic, things we can't see. We introduce them, like in my case, what I was given with the ice and the ink and the smoke, that if we think of these things as being made up out of little particles, we see the connections between all of these behaviors in accordance with certain, what I call, principles.

And he might call them fundamental laws. I just call them attempts at a best systematization of reality. And we try to come up with that. And in fact, we've done, not me, I haven't done dittily here. I did a little bit. I've published two scientific papers in my life, so I'm not a very good contributor to this. But it's not something that human beings have done.

They've come up with a pretty good systematization, which involved introducing unobservable microscopic things in order to help systematize the macroscopic. So in some sense the macroscopic plays a kind of fundamental and epistemologically fundamental way, but it's not ontologically fundamental. What's ontologically fundamental for me is reality which can be described in many many different ways. Eddie would like there to be a unique way to describe reality. That's the way. Okay. But that's not me. What distinguishes reality from another world that isn't reality?

Okay, so possible worlds have come up earlier in the discussion. So that's a very interesting notion. It goes back in some sense to, Leibniz used this notion, and some people thought then that he should be burnt as a heretic for using the idea of possible worlds. David Lewis, one of the heroes of the story, he made a big deal out of possible worlds. He wrote a whole book on possible worlds. And there's a lot of them, and he thinks the actual world is one of them. And you know what distinguishes it from the other ones?

Just one thing. It's you, right? You, me, us, it's the actual world. And all the other worlds are actual, it's an evidence if they have any. Okay, so all the worlds in Lewis's view are similar in certain respects. Now, my view is very different from that.

Lewis wanted there to be possible worlds because he wanted to give an account of metaphysical possibility and metaphysical necessity. I think also you probably see that I'm a somewhat deflationary philosopher. I think that these are two philosophical nightmares, metaphysical. I'm not understanding. Would you then say that every single set that can be constructed exists if it has a member to that set?

Like you said that the other possible worlds exist if there are people in them. Like what I don't understand. No, no, no. I was thinking the talk of possible worlds. I don't believe in possible worlds like that. I believe in stories that we can tell in our world, but I don't think that there are other possible worlds like Lewis believed. I agree with Lewis more or less on his account of laws, not exactly, but I do not agree with his account of metaphysical

modality. Oh, right. Okay. I don't think he needs it because he just doesn't really need it for his account, account of factuals or his account of laws or anything else useful. It just creates headaches for him. Okay. Actually, I said, all right, I see what you're saying, but I don't think I do. Are you saying that Lewis believed possible worlds existed in some sense?

You're saying, no, no, no, they're just, they're just our, our hypotheticals. Yes, more or less. That sounds good to me. So to Lewis then possible worlds is just, is a misnomer. There's somehow existent worlds that are possible. Yeah, but that's the right nomer because they exist, but they're possible because they're not actual to us, to their inhabitants, to the actual ones.

Actual for him is what he calls zinandexical. So Lewis thinks that literally those possible worlds exist as spacetime manifolds. So here's one spacetime manifold that we are having this conversation. Now the concrete spacetime manifold that's not touching our manifold exists. It's like parallel worlds. They're not touching. They're not like many worlds in everything, but they are non-interacting parallel worlds all there, encompassing. Okay. Okay, let's get to something related, seemingly related, configuration space. So, Eddie, you and I had this conversation off air that you believe that configuration

space is too large to be a fundamental arena, and that maybe space-time or whatever is underneath space-time is true or real or more real. So please talk about the distinction between you both in your views of the ontology of configuration space. Yes. I think there can be lots of developments in future quantum theory, quantum gravity, about what is fundamental, but what should be fundamental is some kind of low dimensional manifold, maybe 20 some dimensions. But it should not be 10 to the billions of billions dimension or configuration space. The space of possible configurations of the particles or the field variables.

That space is a huge space. It's hard to recover the ordinary life of tables and chairs, you and me, from that huge space. But it's much more straightforward and to start with a low dimensional space, respecting all the ordinary symmetries and recover the manifest image. Now, to do this, we have to think about quantum mechanics in a slightly new way. So there are different interpretation quantum mechanics, de Broglie-Bohm, GRW, many worlds, but all of them postulate this wave function

and the wave function lives in this high dimensional configuration space. And to be a realist like us, it's natural to be tempted to be a realist about the wave function and the configuration space it lives on and take that to be the fundamental space. And everything else is derived in lose array or something.

I think that we should start with the ordinary space and see how can we make sense of quantum mechanics. One way to use think the wave function or the quantum state as like a law of nature. So coming back to the question of laws of nature, well, we know that many things we write down as laws, Hamiltonian function, Lagrangian, they also live on a high dimensional space. They're functions of say, the classical phase space in classical mechanics.

So that's just a high dimensional space too. So if you think of the wave function to law, encoding some kind of interactions by telling things how to move, then the wave doesn't have to be something concrete, like a particle or a field, but a wave can be a law of nature telling things how to move. And this tradition of developing this school thought of normal logic, interpretation of wave function.

That's, um, I think facing some of the crucial tasks in whether we can get this to be a simple description. And that's why I kind of depart from the traditional school. I think, okay, maybe we can think about the density matrix. And that's a bit more coarse grained and just write simple enough to be a law of nature. And that's the other view I've been developing. I think about called the one calculus view. The density matrix is a fundamental law of nature.

And you can have everything else, ordinary stuff, living ordinary space time, or a more generalized manifold. Why didn't you call it the Chen Tech cast? If someone else calls it, I'm mad. So we strayed onto another subject matter. And you really want another guest to be debating Eddie on this subject. I can do it because I'm interested in it, but I don't have a firm opinion about this issue

about what the fundamental space and space time is. But I can, I do understand why someone might think it's a very high dimensional configuration space. I don't know who Eddie is to tell reality that it can't have that as its fundamental space, but Eddie may know better than reality. I don't know. But it might be that that's the best way of systematizing the world. In fact, I think this, the person I'm thinking about, you know who I'm talking about, Kurt? Jacob Barndes? David Albert. I'm thinking about. You know who I'm talking about, Kurt? Jacob Barnas?

David Albert. Ah. Okay. So I don't mean, I'm sorry to do this silly guessing game thing. My wife was downstairs. She always was to whack me over the head for doing that to her. You know, but that's the least of her reasons. so I'd give a lot of reasons. Anyway, so there is a dispute within quantum mechanics, but we were almost on another topic which you didn't quite complete, which is very interesting for you, and that is the nature of metaphysical necessity and metaphysical possibility and whether you really need the

notion of concrete possible worlds worlds as Lewis called them, what you called realities. You were sort of shocked because you said, do you think they really exist? And the reason you said that is because you think exists should be just confined to actually exist. But no, Lewis thought exists has a more general use, exists in this very general sense as Eddie explained. Okay, that's what Lewis thought. I don't need that. I don't like that. exists in this very general sense, as Eddie explained.

Okay, that's what Lewis thought. I don't need that. I don't like that. I don't think the notion of metaphysical possibility and necessity is very useful. The only thing anyone ever has used it for to use is to prove the existence of God in a fallacious proof called the ontological proof, but it's not a good notion. What Barry would move you closer to Eddie's view and Eddie, what would move you closer to Barry's? Now, Eddie did accept that if God came down and spoke to him, Eddie would change

and say I was wrong about metaphysics. Barry, you said, well, when I was 13, well, we're gonna talk about that off air. So if God can't convince you, Barry, what is it? Like how movable is your view? How amenable is its evidence? I could bring myself to understand what actually could be meant by the laws constraining

over and above the laws, the events just satisfying the laws of nature. That would move me, but no one's ever been able to explain it to me. Maybe I'm dense, but no one's ever been able to explain it to me. Maybe I'm dense, but no one's ever been able to explain it. Now, in fact, Eddie and I view are much closer together. For example, we have a colleague and friend, Tim Maudlin, another good interviewer. Have you interviewed him?

Several times. I'll place the links on screen and in the description as well for that. Okay. screen and in the description as well for that. Okay, okay. So Tim has a view in the Eddie Ballpark, but he thinks the laws are just dynamical. They're what he calls floats, fundamental laws of temporal evolution. They take the state of the world at a time and produce subsequent states and they keep doing the producing, the producing, the producing, the producing, the producing. Now I kind of understand what producing is, except I don't know what laws, how these things called laws can do the producing.

Wait, you understand producing, what are they constraining? It's a good point. No, I understand what constraining is, when I'm constrained to drive, less than a hundred kilometers an hour. I understand what that means, okay? But I don't understand what it is

for the laws to constrain, that's right. I know what it is for the factory to produce more potato chips, but I don't know what it is for the laws to produce anything. I need some metaphors that have gone crazy. Wittgenstein had a nice phrase. I don't mostly, I don't appeal to Wittgenstein, but I like this phrase of his.

She says, sometimes language goes on a holiday. This is an example of it. Let me push back a little bit. Well, so Barry was talking about the convergence. I will come back to that. But in terms of the meaning of constraining or even meaning of production and solicitation on my camp, the non-human camp, where there are different views about what laws how to govern. I think one can make sense of the primitive in maybe just understanding what a theory says, right?

If the theory says you can understand kind of factuals, causation, maybe probabilistic dependencies in terms of the laws, then we somehow implicitly understand the laws, how they constrain. I know that you are going to disagree on the metaphysics, but the metaphysics, the notion of constraining can be understood by how we understand other things, right? So someone says they want to kick it away. Have they kicked away the counterfactuals then? You get away what?

The constraint? They kick away and say that, you know what? I'm gonna do without, one day I'm gonna throw away my crutches, I'm gonna walk on my own. Do I have to throw away the counterfactuals too? On my view, yes. Yeah. No, but I'm not on my view. I agree.

I don't see why. I understand counterfactuals pretty well. I don't think you're understanding counterfactuals any better than me. So I see what you're talking about. Sorry, I did interrupt you, Barry. You were talking about the production versus MIMPE and BSA. Yeah. So among the people who have so-called non-Yumian views

are the Shelley Goldstein, Eddie Chen view, the Tim Maldon view, and I referred earlier to David Armstrong and another crew. Emily Appleman, for example, too. Yeah. So there are a fair number of people who think they still need the crutch. Okay. It's okay. You know, it's not up to me to take the crutch away. I wouldn't do that.

I really don't think anybody would topple over, but they wouldn't hold on to it. It's okay. All right. But I don't want it. I'm sure I don't want it. I'm sure I don't need it. So the main difference between the Maudlin view and the Edie Chen Shelley Goldstein view, is that Chen and Goldstein, the laws constrain all of reality

sort of a sense all at once. Now it's a bad metaphor because it's not at once. It's not a temporal notion. Right, right. It's timeless. Whereas on Mordland's view, time comes into the story very centrally, very important. He has to have time as a primitive notion as well.

Eddie doesn't have to have it. He may want it, I don't think so, but he may want it. I don't want it. I know I don't want it. So time is not primitive to me. I think I can give an account of what time is, but it ties up my general scheme. But- You mean time's direction, right?

Time's direction, well, I think time is, in systematizing the world, we want to come up with the best systematization of the world as we see around us. And we see our world in space and time. We may modify our conceptions of space and time. Whoever would have thought that the things that can happen that are not simultaneous with each other, or no one coming before the other.

That's true. But yeah, so we've changed our mind about exactly we. I mean, Einstein changed people's minds about, or some people's minds of actually this is, people still argue over this in a funny way. I'm gonna get into that, but. Sure. It's okay, it's okay.

So I think we start with Wilfred Sellers, another hero of mine's philosopher. You can't interview him yet anymore either. He liked to use the phrase, the manifest image of the world and the scientific image of the world. We start with the manifest image of the world. The way the world appears to us when we start moving around in it.

We develop a vocabulary for talking about it in terms of macroscopic objects, in terms of mental, you know, items that we talk about in terms of the being stars and planets and clouds and weather and rain and plants and so on. And we noticed that these seem to be a system that plants grow bigger and then they die. Well, that happens to my kitten too, and to human beings too. So it must be something in common about all of this. What could that be?

Okay, well, it took a lot of discovery to come up with a decent account. I'm not sure it's quite done yet. But it all ultimately boils down to what we're calling before the second law of nature. And I don't mean delver simplified, but that's a big part of it. That unifies all of these processes. So that's what I think is involved in what explaining is and what laws do. So you have the manifest image and the scientific image.

And Wilfrid Sellers said the biggest job for philosophy in the 20th and 21st century is to reconcile the manifest and the scientific image. I think I completely agree, Barry. I think this is something that... Oh, I sure you would, would you not? Yeah. Okay, okay, sure, of course. But what I'm saying is that we're starting with the manifest image, that's enough for us to have as rebuilding the ship at sea. We don't need an ontological crutch.

Epistemologically, yes, I agree, but ontologically. Ontologically, all we got was reality. We don't need an additional crutch. We don't need there being these primitive laws. We don't need there being primitive laws of temporal evolution. We don't need there being primitive constraints. We don't need there being a mosaic. You mean mosaic.

Okay? We just need reality. So when I was asking about, Barry, what would move you closer to Eddie, you'd said it would be to understand what it means to constrain over and above satisfying. Now when I speak to people who are not libertarian free will people and are more on the compatibilist end, actually they aren't even compatibilist, they would say free will is a meaningless concept. I don't even know what it means.

So usually people don't buy into something because they, not because they disagree, but they don't even know what that position means I know you have several papers on free will Barry. It's all linked to them on screen right now Now Eddie I'm going to ask you to explain what it means to help Barry along and hopefully Barry You'll say okay. I I get that now. I'm I'm understanding still don't agree, but I'm understanding more your position Eddie But I'm also curious still don't agree, but I'm understanding more of your position, Eddie. But I'm also curious, if there aren't constraints, then are we free in your view, Barry? And does free will have anything to do with that? Or are you-

You're asking me. No, I'm asking you about free will now. Because if you don't believe in constraints- So you'll be happy to know that I've written papers on free will, which I'll be happy to send you. I have views about that as well. I think the important thing here is a philosophical point, and that is that many concepts that we inherit from our ancestors just aren't quite right. They need to be modified. Sometimes

they just need to be jettisoned completely. There are concepts like that. Think about the ether, whatever they call it, the ether. Should it have been jettisoned or should it have been identified with a field? I don't know. Probably jettisoned. But free will, I think we need to want to keep. Causation is a great example. I think what people think about causation is very screwed up, needs to be modified. Bertrand Russell, the great quoter, he said, what do you say about causation? He said causation is like the British monarchy. People keep it around because it's mistakenly thought to do no harm. That's what Russell said. Now, I don't agree with Russell. I think we need the notion of causation,

but it's not primitive, it's not fundamental. It's gonna fit into my general overall account, and I do fit it in to my general overall account via the notions of counterfactuals and correlations and stuff like that. Okay, so I think there is something like free will, but I'm more in a school of what you'd call a compatibilist. I think there are fundamental laws of physics. A friend of mine, another good interviewer, Jananne Ismael,

I'm speaking with her shortly. Oh great, okay, she wrote a book called How the Laws of Physics Make Us Free. Right. When she told me the title, I thought she said, how the laws of physics make us flee. I was just remembering her physics classes, but no, they make us free. Because in fact, and I agree with her, that the laws of physics contain within it the secret for how to make for compatibilism. And I could give, we could give you a whole session on that if you wanted to sometime.

Jenna and I don't see the exact same views about that, but we both agree about being compatible. So I think that people do have, there is a distinction between doing something free and doing something under constraint. But there I mean a real constraint, where somebody's going to shoot me in the head, or do something else to me. If I don't do what they say I should do. That's a real constraint. I don't think anyone's going to shoot a particle in the head if it doesn't move in accordance with F equals MA. Okay. So Eddie, firstly, I'm curious about your view on free will since we're on that

subject, and then also it would be great to explain the difference between constraining and satisfying. Yeah. So on the constraint and satisfying question, I think that gets to the heart of the debate between humanism and non-humanism. And one of the motivation, Shardigos and I had when writing the paper, developing the view was to really sharpen the disagreement. And when it's such a decent production with temporal evolution or time's

direction, then it looks like really we are at a case where the only difference is between whether you have this notion that's playing a metaphysical role only or just a semantic role of making truth conditions. And it's hard to kind of give a knockdown argument for this view, but it's just something that we think is very natural given how we do science, very natural how we think about explanations and grounding counterfactuals in science. And we can give axioms, say, if something constrains something else, if the law L constrains Mosaic M, then M satisfies the law L. But besides that, since it is a primitive, we cannot explain this in more illuminating fashion by appealing to other more fundamental, more primitive notions.

So if someone understands our view, they see what we're saying. If someone says, well, we don't accept the view, we cannot convince them by saying, okay, here is a primitive and you have to accept the primitive. That's not going to be convincing either. Um, but I do think that a lot of Santerio practice and think about theories and models and, um, uh, you know, how laws explain they don't fit into the human picture, um, a lot of cases when we think of a simple example, a Newtonian particle is flying around in one straight line in empty space, no forces on it.

So straight line, so three kilometer per second. And that universe, this universe by itself is compatible with Newtonian laws, is compatible with the law that everything moves in this velocity and forever. And for us, we think that both are possible laws given the same universe, but the human will deny that. So that's kind of one test case where we think, okay, yeah, in scientific modeling, in scientific testing, we have this kind of non-supervenience intuition we're trying to capture for the

laws of nature. And so we are now... You're not doing the intuition. But have you done the test? Okay, I know that Barry would disagree on the notion of intuition and testing intuition. Okay. Of course, you can't have not done the test. So don't make it sound like when you use we, be careful about the royal we here.

I'm not sure. We're thinking about the conceptual test broadly construed. We're trying to think about a conceptual framework to accommodate what we think. I disagree with you. You get into a discussion with a physicist, they get all confused. And many of them want to be you means they just can't abide your notions of constraint the way you want to understand it. That's my experience as a physicist.

Somehow my I do want to relay. I do want to relay from it. That's my experience as a physicist. Somehow my experience is opposite from that. That's okay. Of course. I do want to relay a story though, which probably is helpful here. I was once in another debate with another philosopher who started out somewhat in Eddie's camp, not the same view exactly, a different version of it. We stayed up all night at a hotel in Geneva, I think.

And we were arguing about this stuff. And then I went back to the United States. The next thing I knew, he not only became a Yumean, he became what he called a super-Yumean. At first, I thought it was just to embarrass me, but no, he was serious. Now his view is no good too, so I'm not going to get into it.

Okay. But so I'm not a super-Yumian, and I'm not a Yumian either, I'm a Pac-Age-Yil guy. Okay. But I do think that's an amusing story about convincing people when you're in a debate with somebody. I don't know if you got my convince that. On this point, I want to come back to maybe an earlier question Kurt asked, which is what would move me to closer to humanism?

I'm always very sympathetic to humanism. I learned humanism from Barry and from Dave and others. One of my first papers was defending humanism against quantum entanglement, and this wave function thing that's too high dimensional, how to make it reconcile with the no dimensional mosaic and its density matrix. I do think that non-humans have a lot to learn from humans because they constantly jettison all the crutches we seem to rely on production times direction. And so on.

Of course we disagree on the fundamentals. We're going to want to hold on to the primitive notions of, they say, laws or the relation of governing. But there's a flexibility in humanism that's making this a very illuminating view that I always try to put my human head on and think about a question and put my non-human head on and think about a question and see if I'm making, am I making peeling to intuitions that may be extraneous to the question at hand.

And I sometimes feel whenever I'm peeling to intuitions that are in common. So I don't, I know, but I don't like the word intuition, but think about considerations in common to humanism and non-humanism and a core cause solution. Somehow it's more robust solution. I think as one example of current joint work with Jeffrey Barrett, at UC Irvine, we're thinking about probabilities as constraints. They're getting very, very close to certain human views of laws and probabilities.

They're kind of implicit and maybe not quite precise, but when we make sense of them in a precise way we want in terms of randomness, then things become very much neutral between humanism and non-humanism. And that's I think how metaphysics of laws, metaphysics of science should proceed is to find the common ground and to solve problems in light of the common ground and see if you in light of the common ground and see if you can transfer back to the different views. But of course there'll be ultimate disagreements about the metaphysics

status of the solutions, but I think I'm always drawn to the neutral ground between humanism and non-humanism. And MIMP is a by-product in the sense that, um, when I think about, um, the various non-human views in literature, we're talking about Sheldon Goldstein, we realized there's a lot of baggage we have on non-human views, whereas human views naturally grabbed the baggage-free account, there's two lean, we don't want to use that lean, so you want some kind of structures. The rat baggage-free account.

Yeah. And that's how we came to MMP. Well, I have structures too. And who can reject common ground? I'm more in favor of common ground too. Okay. But we should sharpen our disagreement. I think bringing into the discussion, not about what physicists should do, we don't disagree

about that. And not about how they should practice. We don't disagree about that, I guess. We might in places disagree with, or at least disagree with among themselves. What we do is we disagree about, as you said, the metaphysics of laws. I have the view that we can give an account of what laws are, not what the laws are, but what laws are, without bringing in notions like constraint as a fundamental, or notions like temporal evolution as the fundamental, or notion like production as a fundamental.

I think we can give an account of that. Now, we, of course, do have some basic axioms and basic thoughts or basic concepts. Everybody does. And we start, and I don't think you really reject them, because in the end of the day, you won't have the same mutification view I have. It's not like your view. I don't know, what would you say if God said, you know, there are a lot of constraints, but they're incredibly complicated and so complicated. In fact, there's only, actually, it's not complicated. There's another God. It's really, there's just one constraint.

The constraint is that Eddie never gives up non-humanism. That's the constraint. Everything else, there's no law. It just, well, that can happen on human views too, on your view too. If the mosaic so vast and so huge and so many levels, we have access to only what's in front of us, the macroscopic domain. Yeah, but I don't believe in the mosaic. I don't believe in the mosaic. So I can't have the mosaic.

Let's say reality has a lot of, reality is huge and has lots of facts. We don't, we have access to at most 1% of all the facts. Okay. That's even that is generous. Right. So in that case, we have lots of epistemic limitations of physical reality. These even beyond the metaphysical laws. It's like, suppose you have a package D account or the best system account

or minimal primitivism account, then we pass on the physical reality what we want, but we have to acknowledge that we don't fully access the physical reality. So the kind of cases you have in mind that we are systematically wrong about physical reality can happen regardless of the amount of physical flaws. Absolutely. I completely agree with that. Nothing about my view that says that that can't happen. Right. But you're saying this sounds like some special problem for minimum primitivism. No, no, no, no, no. I made perfectly clear.

I don't think your view is incoherent. There's no logical contradiction in your view. There is for me a kind of like understanding problem and understanding what the word, what constraint can really amount to other than the metaphor that's left over from the, the, the, the cart's idea of the laws being enforced by God. But you may have something in mind

and so more power to you. I just don't think scientists really need this crutch. And the scientists could pick and choose their philosophies of science. They would go about doing science the same way, whether they go for me or for you about this, as you say, and that's right. So this is a philosophical dispute.

And like people often say, philosophical disputes are the most useless in a certain way. But in another way, they're not useless because we understand things better when we have a discussion like this. I understand what different views are. Yeah. I do think that is, um, it can be fruitful philosophically too. And scientifically thinking about, um, non-humanism,

to and scientifically thinking about non-humanism, menopremism and constraints, because you're really at this level, you have to, if you want to think of probability, for example, then there will be theoretical pressure to think of them in a way that leads you to certain views and not others. And that can make a difference. I mean, like maybe like, like comprehensiveness, simplicity? Right. How do you cash out comprehensiveness, simplicity, how you cash out probabilistic laws in general,

how you think about the principle principle, how connection between criticisms happen to chance, all of this. Oh, very important. Oh, very important because I go along with all of that. When you sharpen a disagreement, I think there's going to be convergence of the views, but also there's going to be open questions on how we feel on the details of various views. Perhaps you have a lot of details for package deal account, but you know,

primitivism, there are questions, a lot of questions about, you know, probabilities and chances and credences that I get very exciting and open questions. Yeah, well, Louis is self-addressed, speaking for Louis' view, Louis addressed how probability fits into his account into the best systematization account. And it's been written about a bit by me among other people and trying to explain what Louis was up to.

Because Louis thought that one way of systematizing, maybe you might notice this because you brought up Kalman-Garv complexity earlier, take a long sequence of H, T, H, T, H, T, T, T, H, T, T, T, T, it goes on for a long time. You might say, what a headache. How can I systematize that? But then you notice that in any segment of 20 or 30,

you get about 10 or 15 heads. Furthermore, if you just want to pick them out in that group, just pick them out so to speak, I'm going to use the phrase that ran them, but you know what I really mean because we're talking about algorithms here. We just pick them out. We'll also discover that they'll be, but you know what I really mean, because we're talking about algorithms here. We just pick them out. We'll also discover that there'll be, unless we pick them out according to the rule,

just pick out Hs or pick out Ts or something like that. We'll also, as long as we don't use a rule like that, we'll also get about half. And that indicates that these are what one might say, independent events, each with probability one half. And that gives a lot of information about that sequence. It tells you what degree of belief to have in any big long sequence.

It tells you if you had a sequence of a hundred of them, your degree of belief should be just about one that you get between 48 and 52 H's. You won't go wrong with that. Eddie disparaged my account of things by calling them merely semantic earlier. I might do counterfactuals are merely semantic because the kind of counterfactuals connects them with other things.

My kind of laws is merely semantic. It's word merely semantic. I have a question for Eddie. Is money merely semantic? When you go to the bank, you say, give me a little semantic please. No, it's not really semantic. Money is not really semantic.

Merely semantic hides a lot. It's a term that we've created in order to characterize an aspect of reality. Reality comes into the story too, both the money and a complicated way, that's what I'm going to go into, and with laws and objective probability. So speaking of semantic, I want to linger here, Barry, with you, please, and then I would like to hear, Eddie, your view as well, about how philosophical disputes can be both

useless and fruitful. And the reason is that many of the people who are watching the audience comprises faculty in computer science, math, physics, and philosophy, and also a general audience. I've been among them. And they will both be frustrated and enriched. So they'll feel like, okay, this is just quibbling over semantics like you mentioned. They'll feel like maybe this is just going in circles. Yet at the same time,

they're still watching two hours later. If you were to ask them, they'd say, actually, I feel somehow enriched by this. I feel like I understand something deeper, and I feel like my eyes are opening slightly, but I can't quite pinpoint why. So that's an excellent question.

So it's a very good reason, thought provoking question. It's really good. So what I think is this, I definitely know that there are useless disputes in philosophy for me. I can give an example of one in a minute. I'll probably give an example of one in a minute. I probably give example of many This is not one of them. Although it's a used up Dispute to some extent. I'm not sure there's gonna be much new on the horizon after the package deal account

But you know who knows what other people come up with I didn't think I would come up with that so so it's it's not useless, but it might be used up. Okay, now here's the useless one. Maybe you've interviewed some of the people about it. Some people have argued of how many objects are there in this bowl. Well, you have a bowl. There's a ball bobbing up and down in the water.

Is there one object, the ball? Two objects, the ball and the water. Or a lot of objects, because of all the molecules. Maybe many more objects, because they're all the photons. Many, many more, all the particles. I think this is completely useless, the how many objects dispute. But grown philosophers have banged their heads

against the wall about it. Some have thought it's useless, but it is useless. On the other hand, the issue between so-called humanism and non-humanism, it was useful to me because it caused me to come up with the package deal account, which I think is a better deal. So it's useful to me. I know, of course, people can say individually what's useful to them. That's a very deep question. So I'm thinking about how do you, um, speaking from my experiences, I think that, um, in thinking about intellectual history of laws of nature, for example, and problems of induction, Hume's problem, Gouman's problem, and, um, can have debates about

the future of physics, foundations, quantum mechanics, foundation, set of mechanics, all of these things get intertwined. Um, can we make sense of probability is tied to, can we make sense of entropy? What kind of entropy is it? Is it Boltzmann entropy, Gibbs entropy, Von Neumann entropy? And then how do you make sense of laws is tied to how to make sense of the wave function and quantum state. And also the minimal, sorry, the basic mosaic structure is a high dimensional structure, a low dimensional structure.

So some many things are at stake. And I think the convergence of views, where convergence of clarification of disagreements, sharpen those arguments, give us some kind of fixed point to refer back to that if we disagree about this, it means we may be disagreeing about this too. So it's traced back to the fundamental disagreement on what laws are, what probabilities are, what explanations are. And if there are no scientific difference between say, Barry's view and

my view when we come to scientific practice, we can rest a bit more assured that the differences in those fundamental notions don't kind of percolate up to differences how we think about foundations of physics. And that could be a ratio because we can just think about differences will be traced back to something else, maybe scientific differences, empirical differences,

but not to the conceptual difference between what laws are. That's a really good point, Eddie. Do you know of any? You gave an intuition before, but that's not the same thing. Case of what? Example of what? Of a scientific claim, you know an experiment that could be done, which could tell the difference

in your view and my view. I don't think there is an experiment. Right. But I think in answer to your question, that's why I thought it was a really good question. I don't think there's any practical difference between our views, which is why I think you could say we don't need the crutch. I think you can be agnostic about the existence of crutch, but not say there is no crutch

or there is crutch based on just practice and empirical experiences. And that's the, that's the kind of more conservative inference from that. I just want to continue this thought, if I may, with Kurt. So regarding laws of nature, this seems like a very historical debate, going back to hundreds of years. But if you think about the contemporary developments of machine learning or AI, there are many side effects of this are really harmful and we have to be careful. But one of the marvelous achievements is that AI has become really good at picking up some patterns. Simple patterns that are informative across the board, not just on training

data, but also across test data. So you can see new things and you can still perform well. What is that? It's a form of induction. And what is the ground for that induction? Or some people say, well, some kind of uniformity principle, some kind of things happen in the same way over and over again. And we know that's not true because nature is not uniform.

What is really out of mind, underlying all of that is this kind of simple, informative laws of nature that can be uniform in some cases, may may not be uniform in all cases. But this is a manifestation of laws of nature give rise to effective descriptions. They're still very lawful. And I think so all those achievements in AI can be thought of as a foundational way as connecting back to these conceptual questions

of laws of nature, how they relate to induction and explanation and what is different between pure prediction and understanding. Well, of course I partly agree with a lot of that. Where I disagree is I don't think you need the crutch. I do think that nature is uniform in some respects and not uniform in other respects. My guess is you agree with that. And what science is looking for is looking for the uniform D

in the right respects. And that's what these AI programs are constructed to try to build to. And they've gotten pretty good at it in certain areas. So if we're interested, I know, with some programs, for example, in finding patterns of chemical recombination, they're good at doing that because they start out with a vocabulary of chemical recombination, given a lot of

examples. They're trained, they're trained maybe by using Monte Carlo methods, things like that. And they are able then to get better, better at recognizing patterns, the right patterns, the patterns that set as for the criteria. Yeah. You don't need a crutch to guarantee those guarantees.

Good, good. So yeah, so, but the kind of implicit biases, the inductive biases here are very implicit and I'm not saying this is an argument for non-humanism over humanism, they're saying that it brings together questions about metaphysics of laws and the epistemology of laws with contemporary practice and machine learning. There are lots of open questions here, understanding why AI is working so well. And it seems like when we don't build in something explicit by hand, it's a transformer model, still they're doing really well on things they have not been

trained on and that's a miracle. It kind of goes back to the marvel of the universe, that why is the universe just in general so nice to us that we can discover so much from so little? So it seems. Now, I also distinguish epistemology from metaphysics. But you're right that my metaphysics is a closer friend to my epistemology. And people who have you like yours,

always have a big problem making the friendship up between epistemology and metaphysics. Okay. But mine start out, my metaphysics starts out already by nature, friendly to epistemology. I think there is going to be the same gap. I'll give you a metaphysical piece knowledge, it just says on minimal primitivism, we have to partially a similar kind of epistemological principles that connect our evidence to physical reality.

It's a big inference, big jump. There's no guarantee. Of course. There's no probabilistic bias. But I'm glad we agree that there's no guarantee. That's surely my bottom watchword. I never give a guarantee. But you say closer.

What you must say is closer. The mid-pessimology and metaphysics. Well, I think it's guaranteed. But I think as the history has shown, it looks like it's gotten better and better and better. Maybe we're wrong. Maybe something's... No, no. So is there a difference between MinP and your view of laws,

a PaxTio account that brings the piece of biology closer to the metaphysics that given the metaphysics, we're more likely to be successful in the limit of inquiry in science on your account. And MinP is minimal primitivism. Use the word MinP, which is something that we know, but the audience doesn't have minimal primitivism. Use the word minP, which is something that we know, but the audience doesn't know minimal primitivism. That's his view. Yeah, minimal primitivism versus package deal account.

Right. So Eddie didn't come up with this catchy name like I did. You know, I'm very good at naming. I'll sell you a name, Eddie. So... Mentaculous. Mentaculous. Well, it's not mine originally. But, um,

we didn't, we're not going to get into that. You can do another session if you want. You can do that one with Ethan Cohn if you want, actually. Sure. My favorite film is No Country, there's two, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Both released in the same year.

Great, great, great movies, but Serious Man is where that term comes from and that's also a good movie for a physicist especially. So okay, I'd like to end with a question to both of you that's more human, not humianism, not humianism, not humian human. Clearly you have different views. And I want to know what it's like, Barry, to teach and guide someone because you were Eddie's PhD supervisor, for those who just skipped forward and didn't watch the introduction. So what is it like?

Do you try to foster that tension or do you try to convince your student that their dissent must stem from a misunderstanding because obviously you know what you're talking about and the student is you. No, no, but I don't think that. But what first thing is about Eddie is if there ever was a self-motivated student or self-motivated philosopher, Eddie is it. He's much more motivated than I was at his stage and much more accomplished than I was

at his stage, and much more accomplished than I was at his stage. So he has motivation all over the place. He's very well motivated. He knew what he wanted to think about. Now, it's true he developed his view with a colleague of ours, Shelley Goldstein, who's a mathematician. I don't think Shelley believes the view with the same fervor that you do for my conversations with him, but I'm not sure Shelley may show

deference to me about these philosophical matters, I'm not sure. But so as far as teaching it, well, I had him in classes and I interacted with his dissertation, but he really would motivate it, what he was doing. And he had a co-director and he knew exactly what he was doing. He knows exactly what he's doing today. So I don't, it was no problem.

The problem I have is with students who are not motivated. I do have some students like that and it's so hard to get them to get, they're just worried that that's not right, that's not really doing right. Eddie just decided to view it and he wants to defend it. I think that's great. Now, Eddie, how is it that you didn't succumb to, because you're a student, to just believing or conceding to whatever your elder wants and your elder holds your academic fate?

Well, I mean, you hold in some sense the future of Eddie in your hands. So Eddie, tell me about that process, what it's like to still retain your original point of view, maybe even sharpen it or increase that divide with your supervisor. Yeah, so it was a very special environment for me when I was doing PhD at Rutgers interacting with Barry and David Albert my co-supervisors and Sean Goldstein the math department team and other Royalty to Mocha people at Princeton and CUNY. It's a very diverse intellectual environment.

And I felt very, you know, I tried to bear this view at first. And I tried to read everything and understand everything from the inside out. And I think for a few years, I was a human. And I, for a few years, I believe in even the high dimensional view. Um, but I realized, you know, there are arguments for against, and I wasn't quite sure if my arguments were so worked out, so it's during those years.

I try to develop my own views, trying to defend those views and trying to work out, you know, what I should think about laws and quantum mechanics and probability. I never knew I would write on laws of nature because I know it's hard and it's a deep issue. And for this discussions, it's very hard to resolve them by empirical experiments, right? You cannot do experiment to test them. So all of this boiled down to some kind of the central arguments that really, yeah, are hard to resolve.

But I realized when I tried to develop my views on quantum mechanics, I had to say something about system mechanics and the past hypothesis and the laws of nature and vagueness and everything come together into one thing. So I realized later on that I am a nonhuman and I had this non-human inclination anyways and try to develop you as scientifically motivated as can be and also as minimal as can be. So but I, you know, I gave you the minimalism. You gave the minimalism and you gave me the encouragement to develop this too and all the best arguments of objections. I think what really helped me was all these objections from Barry and David.

Anything I say, which really helped me to train an ear for questions and things I should watch out for in writing papers. Yes, the criticism is a blessing and a curse because in the moment you don't like it, but then even when you're on your own, at least for me, I, as soon as I have a thought, I play out all the criticisms from different figures in my head. Yeah, that's very helpful. It's sometimes can be paralyzing, but sometimes because Barry is so nice, you know, the objections and questions you raise are just very wonderful and helpful. So Eddie, it sounds like you had her on the road to Damascus moment.

You started out as a Yumean, you're on the road to Damascus. Let me tell you, it's always possible to come back. To the darker side. Okay. But at least you didn't become a super Yumean. That would have been a disgrace. That's an interesting view too. The view that Michal Esfah is developing. I think all of those views are like sometimes they're like almost logical extremes,

but you can see even though you disagree with them, there are things you can incorporate into your own views. Like what is the minimal structure of space and time? What is relations you need to build a theory of everything? So Kurt, do you like philosophical musicals? Musicals? I don't think I like regular musicals. Well, I don't sure.

What about Gilbert and Sullivan? I don't think so, no. Well, I was in Gilbert and Sullivan when I was in the sixth grade. So I remember that HMS Bennefour. So I still don't like Gilbert and Sullivan, but I'm thinking that we could have a philosophical humian saying that everyone is born a little humian or a little non-humian. I'm not going to break out of this song because then

your audience will flee as fast as they could go. But it does what it sounds like to me, it's sort of Gilbert and Sullivan. I appreciate you both spending so long with me. Thank you so much, Barry and Eddie. It's great talking with you, Kurt, and hopefully we can meet in person someday. Dude, you're a cool guy, and it was a lot of fun. Thank you.

I like your channel a lot. Very, very rare to see someone engage so deeply with philosophy, with physics, with everything. New update. Started a sub-stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else.

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