Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Physicist Who Proved Free Will Using Thermodynamics

Episode Date: July 10, 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 Physicist and philosopher Jenann Ismael joins to unveil a radical idea: free will isn’t an illusion, it’s a physical reality grounded in thermodynamics and relativity. In this conversation, Jenann explains why no system, not even a perfect computer, can predict its own future, and how this inherent unpredictability opens the door to real agency. We explore the paradox of identity, the limits of determinism, the role of memory in selfhood, and why your choices truly come from you. This is the clearest, most rigorous defense of free will in the age of physics. Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:42 Free Will 29:16 The Limits of Predictability 41:45 Defining Free Will 59:42 Life and Cognition in the Universe 1:05:30 The Choices We Make 1:08:01 Dark Nights of the Soul 1:09:35 Philosophical Responses to Free Will 1:11:03 Personal Reflections on Life 1:11:54 The Weight of Loss 1:13:40 Patterns of Persistence 1:17:17 Understanding the Self 1:18:41 The Continuity of Existence 1:20:17 The Nature of Mortality 1:22:27 Time and Its Mysteries 1:51:42 The Nature of Existence 2:04:23 The Paradox of Newcomb's Dilemma 2:08:38 Lessons Learned from Suffering Links Mentioned: •⁠ ⁠How Physics Makes Us Free [Book]: https://amzn.to/44CcHr8 •⁠ ⁠Why Physics Should Care About The Mind [Paper]: https://www.jenanni.com/wp-content/uploads/Why-physics-should-care-about-the-mind-and-how-to-think-about-it-without-worrying-about-the-mind-body-problem.pdf •⁠ ⁠Diana Pasulka [TOE]: https://youtu.be/E5MuTHUbMUs •⁠ ⁠Leonard Susskind [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok •⁠ ⁠Sean Carroll [TOE]: https://youtu.be/9AoRxtYZrZo •⁠ ⁠Matt Segall [TOE]: https://youtu.be/DeTm4fSXpbM •⁠ ⁠Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fU1bs5o3nss •⁠ ⁠David Lewis’s Metaphysics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lewis-metaphysics/#Bib •⁠ ⁠Robert Sapolsky [TOE]: https://youtu.be/z0IqA1hYKY8 •⁠ ⁠David Lewis’s Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APAW62 •⁠ ⁠Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/0YRlQQw0d-4 •⁠ ⁠Roy Baumeister [TOE]: https://youtu.be/aXoK-C2c2AQ •⁠ ⁠Free Will Ontoprism [TOE]: https://youtu.be/SSbUCEleJhg •⁠ ⁠Michael Levin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s •⁠ ⁠Dark Night Of The Soul: https://basilica.ca/documents/2016/10/St.%20John%20of%20the%20Cross-Dark%20night%20of%20the%20soul.pdf •⁠ ⁠George Musser [TOE]: https://youtu.be/KVy3NeXpMaI •⁠ ⁠Tim Maudlin & Tim Palmer [TOE]: https://youtu.be/883R3JlZHXE 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

No frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Reality is incomplete. That is our view of the world can't be complete because reality isn't yet complete. Our common sense has no authority whatever about what the fundamental structure of reality is. Standard classical physics assumes an initial state determines everything thereafter. However, Professor Janan Ismail found something startling. Relativity makes such determinism impossible.

Why? The past light cone of any event never contains sufficient information to predict that event with certainty. In this episode, the professor demonstrates that reality, viewed from within, is fundamentally incomplete. Ask any system to predict its own next output and watch it fail, not from ignorance, but from an actual logical impossibility. And this is the beginning of the flame of free will. Ismail argues that over evolutionary time, organisms learn to exploit this openness.

This is a fascinating conversation that reconceptualizes you as a self-curating information structure that constitutes yourself via choices and beliefs. When you die, an irreplaceable pattern of information vanishes forever. We also explore consciousness, why time is experienced as coming into being rather than being revealed, and how thermodynamics grounds the arrow of causation. On this channel, I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Janan Ismail is an expert at making abstract concepts accessible, and this is the clearest explanation of the paradox of identity and free will you'll ever hear.

Which idea of yours has faced the most resistance? It's a really good question. You know, I don't write a ton, but I think of the things that I've written, it might be that, so I wrote this book on free will, it's now 10 years old, but I think what a lot of people thought was that I have a particular idea of what free will is, and that I'm trying to defend it in the book.

That it was about, it was called, "'How Physics Makes Us Free'." But that wasn't actually the way that I tend to approach things. The title was How Physics Makes Us Free, but part of that was, the question was, in what sense does physics make us free? The book was really about trying to understand in naturalistic terms what sorts of freedoms we really have. I don't have a dog in the fight at all about conceptual analysis of the notion of freedom. I mean, I tend to be attracted to those questions where you're just looking at the physical image of the

world and you're trying to understand within that image, you know, sort of broadly philosophical problems, what are we, what is time, what is space. I think, you know, the physics problem, I mean, the free will problem was like, what the fuck? How do we understand if you take seriously, I mean, and really let it land in the sense that this is what the world is like. How do you understand from within that in a way that you can make sense of what agency is and your experience of agency and the idea that when you sort of lie down on one of those dark nights of the soul without any pre-theoretic commitment to what free will is, but just you lie down on one of those dark nights of the soul and you're making a decision with the idea that this was all in some sense set

from the beginning of time. So I was just trying to understand what's going on and then taking it for granted that that's also partly what you know people who are worried about free will are tapping into. Have you personally had any dark nights of the soul? A thousand of them of course. I think every time we make a decision, I think from the first personal perspective, every time you make a decision, you really do feel like, and the best phrase that I found for kind of capturing the phenomenology of it, though in some sense language feels inadequate here, is William James's phrase when he says, you know, what one feels when one's making a decision. And in particular in those times when you feel like, you know, you're making a really

pivotal decision, like, do I accept the job over here? Or do I stay where I am? Do I get married? Do I not? Do I have a child? Do I not? You know, or do I let, you I let a partner walk out the door and close the door in a relationship? Or not? Where it feels really pivotal. William James says

about, I think he's trying to capture these sorts of moments when he says, when you feel that the scales of fate hang in the balance and it all comes down to the here and now. I think for me, it was, you know, I have many experiences like that. That's why we torture ourselves over difficult decisions because you feel in those moments that the future is really hinging, you know, on sort of what I do in the here and now. You said language feels inadequate here. Do you think it's the case that there are problems of existential import that the limitation of language isn't just a limitation of current language or current models,

but maybe a limitation of any model or any language? Yes. You know, so you're putting your finger on really difficult questions. So I think, you know, language is an interpersonal medium of communication. It's there precisely to allow the flow of information between different subjectivities between my mind and your mind. And in order to do that, it has to be objective in a very particular sense. It has to be objective in the sense that it has to detach from sort of features of my experience that you don't have. Like do you see what I mean?

So I can understand things in a way that attaches directly to features of my experience that I can as it, display in thought. You don't have that. It's like, you know, it's like sort of if I'm in one part of space and you're in another part of space, you're using a map and I'm using a map. The map is supposed to be the kind of, you know, embodiment of objective relations between locations in space, ways of representing things that don't depend specifically on how I'm related to them.

So the map is the embodiment of that objective relations between events that are invariant under transformations between spatial locations. It's our frame independence. So if you're in one part of space, I'm in one part of space. We don't want to use words like near and far because the meaning of those words depends on where the speaker is located. So if you're in Canada and I'm here and you say, what's nearby? And I say, oh, the store is a mile away. I just take, go down the road, go to the right. That's not going to mean much to you because you're in a different part of space.

It's not going to be a useful way of speaking. So that's why we have things like maps, languages like that. It lets us communicate with one another in ways that detach from specificities of our situation. So we are going to get to self-location and the nexicles and also the definition of free will and perhaps even definitions of free will as there are multiple. Before we do, broadly speaking, you were talking about attraction earlier. There are two types of philosophers. And again, this is a broad generalization. One that goes into problems

where they feel they already have a handle on it and they feel like other people find so-and-so confounding, but they don't. And then there's another that are sadistically drawn to being bewildered by a mystery, regardless of if it's considered even to be a solved problem or not. You strike me as the mystery sort. I don't know if that's the case. Let me know." 100%. So, I think I make a lunge for the mysteries. The things that I think I understand, I don't tend to get interested in. Or as soon, I mean, this is what makes me a person who doesn't write very much is because I as soon as I think I do understand something or you know like many of the problems in physics is you know don't understand it in detail but I don't see a mystery there you know sort of that's a problem that will yield you know a little

bit more calculation or filling it like the contours are there, I don't see. So it is the places where absolutely that I feel a real mystery, like a confounding one, the kinds of problems where if you think about them, you know, I don't because of the current way that I think about things, I don't see any way through it. That means what seeing my way through it, I'm going to learn something deep. I'm going to have to change something in the way that I think. But it doesn't mean like I approach them with a conviction that I'm going to understand them. It's much more kind of visceral than that. I think it's just I'm interested in and attracted to mysteries. You're just compelled.

Yeah, I think so. I think that's right. And I'll say one more thing, which is I always tell my students this, which is the way to make, the way that you're going to make a contribution is not that you have more brain power, but that you're more patient with certain sorts of problems. So focus on the problems that, that, you know, interest you because you're going to be more patient with of problems. So focus on the problems that interest you because you're gonna be more patient with those problems. And I think I have like this great tolerance

for being confused. And I sort of really like the things that confuse me. What else do you tell your students as advice? One is, I think, you know, people imagine. So what they do is they go into graduate school and they imagine, you know, sort of they're the people that they think of as either in the field, like sort of professional examples, or people among their peers that they think of, well, that person is clearly the smartest, I think the fastest, I calculate the best.

And there were, and all of the cool kids are working on these problems. So what I have the fastest, I calculate the best. And all of the cool kids are working on these problems. So what I have to try to do is emulate that. I have to get as good as I have to work on those problems because those are like the hardcore problems and have to, you know, sort of try to be what they are. Those are the paradigms of kind of a successful philosopher. That's exactly wrong. So you know once you're in the field, that when you're sort of choosing who to read or you're choosing who to hire, you always say, oh, that's an, you know, you don't say, oh, good, this person kind of, you know, in the ordinary kind of pecking order comes like, you know, high enough to the top. You say, who's doing something different?

Who's doing something interesting? Who are the really interesting people? And even when you're choosing who to read, I think, you know, once you get to a certain level of proficiency, you're not looking for more of the same. You're not looking for, you know, kind of who are working on the old problems and saying the smartest things about them. You're learning for something who's doing something a little different, coming from a different angle, combining approaches in a way that is sort of going to yield something

new. And I think physicists think this way. It's a kind of complex, rugged landscape. And, you know, sort of if you've got people starting in different areas and and and coming from different approaches, you're going to explore more to the landscape jointly. As a hirer, as someone who's hiring, how do you avoid the self reinforcing mechanism of Okay, you are championing theory A, and whatever is adjacent to theory A. But my student has an idea about some,

not even theory B, theory not A, like the opposite of theory A. Why would you, as a supervisor or as someone on a hiring committee, why would you want, sorry, why would you put any eggs in that basket? Now, I was speaking to Susskind and to Sean Carroll about how string theory in the early 2000s and 90s was extremely dominant in theoretical physics.

And they just said, well, one of the reasons is simply why would you attach yourself to something that you don't believe in? So if they're string theorists, they believe in string theory. And if a student is coming with some other radical proposal, well, they're like, I'm sorry, I don't think that's going to work. It seems quite clear to me at this current time, given current evidence, etc., that quantum gravity is synonymous with string theory and string theory is the way to go. So how do you avoid that? And how do you think about that? So I'll tell you how I think about it is something I come up against a lot. So I'm on one side of this. I'll

tell you what I think about it. And I'll use the foil of people on hiring committees that I'm tending to argue against about this. So I think in philosophy, it's a little bit different than physics. So in physics, it is, you think there is a truth and you're committed to the truth and you want the field not to be looking in areas that you think are dead ends. In philosophy, people are working on problems. They recognize there's a number of views and you're looking to build a department that is able to teach students and where collectively will. What people do do is they take their set of views and in particular, I think their style of doing

philosophy. So, you know, I'm an analytic philosopher. I think like the height of intellectual achievement or intellectual prowess is exhibited and whether you can do logic or, you know, or the careful analysis. You know, I think a good paper looks like this. It involves a lot of careful analysis. I think a good paper looks like this. It involves a lot of careful analysis. People on other things, you know, I think it's about insight and intuition and somebody has a new idea, but they're not writing these tightly packaged, fussy little papers.

So the way that I think about that is you need all kinds. You know, the insight comes from different areas and different approaches. So I absolutely believe in diversity. You know, there are these theorems that show like effectively if you've got, you know, n number of people at the table. But they're all kind of, you know, proficient in one way of approaching things. So they all have the same sort of expertise. Brainpower, you increase the quality of the group for solving problems, not by just adding more of who you think are the smartest people, but by adding people who are doing different approaches, different things,

even if person by person, they're kind of lower quality thinking. So I think that's true in philosophy. I think you want a diversity, but you come up against colleagues who are doing the philosophical equivalent of your friends who are choosing string theorists because they think that's the going theory, which is we want smart people. Smart people do philosophy like this. And I'm looking out there and you're giving me someone who's kind of a foggy thinker, the analytic stuff isn't there. And I feel like, no, that's completely the wrong approach. If you're using your standards of the right way to do philosophy as the criterion of what a good philosopher is, you're going to just hire more of yourself.

And as a group, you're going to be weaker and the refusal to recognize that kind of humility, not to recognize that insight comes from a number of places. I think the analogy that I'd like to use is, it's as though I'm not going to be personal about it, it's as though you I'm not going to sort of be personal about it, it's as though you've got a lot of people who are trained at Oxford. They're really, really good at kind of analysis and they recognize what a tightly argued paper looks like and that's for them the height of philosophy.

You're bringing in people from other traditions that are doing existentialism or continental philosophy. What I would think of, I'm always willing to say, rich with insight, let's plunder it for what we can take, but they're like, that's clearly not good philosophy. I mean, look at this. Uh-huh, it's not well-defined. It's not analytically carefully argued. It's not embedded in a lot of- Hand wavy. Yeah, exactly. It's like a bunch of French chefs standing in a corner when somebody's

bringing in tacos from a different tradition and they're going, oh, the knife work is very bad. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. So I think how I approach it is I tell students, you know, follow where your nose takes you. You lean into your own talents, um, and see, you know, if you can come up with something new and something different and something helpful to, you know, sort of the problems

that you're interested in. So we talked about broad styles of motivation. And now here, there's the broad style of analytic versus continental. But there's also just, you mentioned your style. You said you have a style of doing philosophy. How would you describe your style? And if it's best to contrast it with someone else,

like let's say David Lewis, you say, David Lewis does his philosophy with style so and so here's how he tends to think about problems. Here's where I defer then feel free. So I think of, I mean, you know, Sean and Carolyn, I started this thing called the natural philosophy forum. And in so many ways, I think the idea of natural philosophy is very much the way that I think of myself.

So I'm much more of a philosopher than a lot of philosophers of physics. For a lot of philosophers of physics like Tim Modlin, David Albert I think is a little bit more like me, but a lot of the people who work in foundations of physics, they're really interested in foundational problems in physics. So they come from physics, they're recognizing that physics is bumping up against philosophical problems and they're kind of trying to understand those. Or they think that the physicists aren't engaged enough in understanding foundations, they're just calculating whatever.

I'm really a philosopher. I'm interested in, just by instinct, I'm interested in all of the big questions. Who are we? How do we fit into the universe? But I think by far, so many of those big questions, they were in the hands of philosophers for millennia and 17th century, they get passed into the hands of the physicists and we're making enormous amounts of progress. And partly what they're showing is that the method of sitting in the armchair and trying to reflect on our concepts doesn't work very well.

And indeed the kinds of progress they're making are by really rejecting all of our pre-theoretical common sense ideas. The way that David Lewis did metaphysics and Frank Jackson and that whole tradition was you sit down, you think about a difficult concept, whether it's modality, whether it's time, whether it's freedom, whatever it is, you know, freedom, whatever it is. Um, and you say, what are my big ideas? What are my kind of central ideas about that? So, uh, time is something that has these features and then you ramsefy it out. So you put in a variable wherever you say time, you take the picture of the world given you by physicists and you say, what is it in the world that satisfies

that, you know, that, That kind of Ramsey sentence with the X wherever the concept I'm trying to analyze. To me, I think, our common sense has no... The thing that physics has taught us is that our common sense has no authority whatever, you know, about what the fundamental structure of reality is. And you know, what physics has taught us is, you know, if you think of common sense as it's a sort of useful set of, it's a useful way of thinking, it's the embodiment of a useful way of thinking about the world for the purposes of creatures who need to kind of track feeding and mating opportunities. It's like a rough map that will direct us to the things we care about in order to survive. But it's certainly not made to be adequate to capturing the deep structure of reality.

I think the way that physics works is, you know, we used to sit in the armchair. We had like, you know, some rough ideas of the contours of experience, you know, over the course of a normal human life. And then the imagination gets to work on that. We imagine, you know, what could the world be like at the bottom. What physics does is collectively over generations, increasingly precise and increasingly accurate records of experience, not just in the kind of what you would get from common sense, but by deliberately going out and searching esoteric forms of experience, developing theories that are mathematically

formulated and precise that quantitatively match that and letting the fundamental concepts be the sole criterion is that they reproduce the full structure of experience in quantitative detail and they satisfy various kind of formal desiderata. So we find simplicity and symmetry as ways of kind of exercising kind of needless bits of the formalism. That seems to be working in remarkable ways for generating theories that are empirically adequate. And if we take the formalism and try to imagine ourselves into the formalism, what is it telling us about the deep structure of reality?

That's, I think, what I think of as characteristic of the method. And it's been, by all operational standards, remarkably successful, where, you know, kind of armature metaphysics wasn't, and philosophically fruitful. So... Just a moment. Don't go anywhere.'t, and philosophically fruitful. So. Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away.

Don't be like the economy. Instead, read The Economist. I thought all The Economist was was something that CEOs read to stay up to date on world trends. And that's true, but that's not only true. What I found more than useful for myself personally is their coverage of math, physics, philosophy, and AI, especially how something is perceived by other countries and how it may impact markets. For instance, the Economist had an interview with some of the people behind DeepSeek the

week DeepSeek was launched. No one else had that. Another example is the Economist has this fantastic article on the recent dark energy data which surpasses even scientific Americans' coverage, in my opinion. They also have the chart of everything. It's like the chart version of this channel. It's something which is a pleasure to scroll through and learn from. Links to all of these will be in the description of course.

Now the Economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means that you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments. I am personally interested in the more scientific ones like this one on extending life via mitochondrial transplants, which creates actually a new field of medicine, something that would make Michael Levin proud. The Economist also covers culture, finance and economics, business, international affairs, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, China, Asia, the Americas, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, China, Asia, the Americas, and of course, the USA.

Whether it's the latest in scientific innovation or the shifting landscape of global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage and it goes far beyond just headlines. Look, if you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a new understanding, a deeper one, of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist. I subscribe to them and it's an investment into my, into your intellectual growth. It's one that you won't regret. As a listener of this podcast, you'll get a special 20% off discount. Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer for less. Head over to their website www.economist.com slash totoe to get started.

Thanks for tuning in and now let's get back to the exploration of the mysteries of our universe. Again, that's economist.com slash totoe. Okay, so here, common sense, is that a synonym for folk intuition? Yeah. Okay, so what if a physicist says, look, Jananne, with you trying to preserve free will, you're trying to preserve a folk intuition, physics tells us that we're determined, even if it's randomly determined, but it's just, it's not us, we're determined by factors that are not us.

So where is this decision, and let alone a free will decision coming from? How do you respond to that? And what's the definition of free will that you use? Good. Okay. So this was the misunderstanding that I, that I meant to highlight it. It wasn't like I started out with an intuition about what free will. So that's the traditional philosophy. What is free will? That's analyze the concept. Let's look in the world, see whether there's anything that satisfies that. So I didn't do that. What I was trying to say is, well, let's take the physics as authoritative. Whether there's a quantum substructure or not, let's assume that the world is at least emergently effectively classical for things as big and slow as us. Always provisionally, because that's the thing about physics, everything is provisional,

you know, but let's start with that because the problem really takes a sharp form there. And let's understand what is a human being actually doing in physical terms when they lie down on one of those dark nights of the soul? What is a human? And then as soon as you pose the question, you have to dark nights of the soul. What is a human? And then as soon as you pose the question, you have to pose all of these others. What am I? When I think, when I'm thinking, it comes down to me who makes the decision. It's like, well, what am I? What am I in physical terms? What do I look like through the lenses of physics?

And how does that show up? So the question of what is a self is one of those mysteries. It says, I know there's a body there, but what am I? And so you're immediately in the realm of raising all of those deep questions. But the way that I raise them is not with pre-theoretical commitments about that a self is such and such and is there such a thing in physics or free will is such and such and is there such a thing in physics. I take it for granted that whatever it is that those folk intuitions are trying to capture or that are answering to, whatever use they're playing for us when we think about ourselves

and the world, it's something real. It's a phenomenon. Like when I lie down at night and when I use the word I, there's something that I'm meaning to capture. And I want to understand through physical lenses, what is that? What's going on in the person? What does the word I in my mind refer to? Is it in body? Is it a mind? What is a mind? How does it fit in? And so all of those questions arise, but you start with them as questions. You start with, what is that? And how do I understand that?

And I think there's this beautiful phrase that Peter Strassen, again, I sort of like it really, I read it when I was a graduate student and I think it really kind of landed for me. He said, the problem arises because the solution exists. And I take that to mean that the problem arises. The world is consistent. And if there's a phenomenon that you're trying to understand, looking at the, studying the way the world solved that problem and created that phenomenon is a really, you know, the problem has to exist if the phenomenon is real. So I think, you know, that's why I, you know, although I love reading philosophy, like David Lewis, of course, is a great philosopher.

Spinoza and Kant, it's just to me wonderful, but they might be wrong. The world is not wrong. If you study the world in detail, you're going to find that it is consistent. And if you're trying to understand a real phenomenon, the world has solved problems and solved them in ways that you wouldn't think of from the armchair. So what would it look like if the world was inconsistent? This episode is brought to you by Adidas.

When the frustration grows and the doubts start to creep in, we all need someone who has our back. To tell us we'll be okay, to remind us of our ability, to believe, because their belief in us transfers to self-belief and reminds us of all that we're capable of. We all need someone to make us believe.

Hashtag, you got this. I'm not sure. I mean, I, you know, I don't, sort of like, people who are attracted to sort of dialetism I'm not sure. People who are attracted to dialectism, for me that has no attraction. Logic and the world in the sense of reality, I don't know how to make sense of that. I've been thinking a lot about self-representation, so I have been thinking about paradoxes. But I think the people that are in any way attracted by saying, yeah, the world is inconsistent or reality is inconsistent or logic or attracted to logic that allow contradictions don't hold

any attraction for me. And it's partly because of, you think through the problem hard enough, you see, of course there's a solution. So you said you've been thinking about some paradoxes or self-referential paradoxes in particular recently? Yeah, yeah. Tell me what's on your mind. So a lot. I mean, I think, so I've been like, thinking a lot.

So, if you look at a lot of the problems that are kind of arising now in physics, so I should say some of the things that I think of as mysteries, they arise partly kind of within a physical theory because physics ignores things for a long time, makes a lot of progress, but then when it gets developed enough, some things kind of emerge as a little bit anomalous and needing work. And one of them is, you know, trying to, it's something that, you know, people talk about a lot, but a lot of places where what they call the observer seems to become important and we don't have a way of understanding that quickly. I think the agent is probably a, you know, a better description, but I think a lot of them have to surround the structure of a view of the world from

within. And without starting to think of, I mean, without starting from the idea that self-reference is going to be essential or starting with an interest in self-reference, I think what you find is that a lot of those problems, a lot of the places where we're having trouble understanding sort of the role of the observer or understanding time and it's, you know, the apparent conflict between the way time looks from within and the way it's represented in physics, even understanding free will, understanding, you know, why agencies are representing ourselves from the inside as, you know, when we're represented's very different from kind of what it looks like if you take the world as a whole and slice

it up and compare states and so on. A lot of these problems, the more that I dug around in them, the more that I realized it's something about the logic of the embedded view, like when you're representing the world from within, as opposed to the God's eye view, which is the one that physics traditionally takes, which is you're representing the world as a complete whole. And I've come to think that there's a very sharp way of putting those problems that has been formally well explored in the context of physics. So I'll give you an example.

Please. So it's going to take me a second to sort of think of how to put it sharply in the way. That's good. Take your time. Yeah. So, this is the kind of the cute little way of putting it, but suppose that we wanted to come up with a grand overarching database, complete database of physical fact. Okay.

So sort of it's just going to be a computer sitting in a room, whatever you like, or a person or an oracle, whatever you like. It's just going to be a system that's going to be such that we're going to feed into it the laws of physics and information about, I don't know, what's happening on a particular mountaintop on a particular day and about monkeys and bananas and all of it, which can feed it all of the information that we have. And the goal is that we're going to be able to ask it any yes, no question of fact, and it can deliver an answer. Make it easy for yourself. Imagine that the universe is deterministic and that the laws are

effectively computable. So you're just, you know so there's not going to be any problem about computation or about... There's always going to be questions that it can't truthfully answer. How do we know that? Just ask it. I mean, I can tell you this without knowing what its database looks like, what the memory looks like. Just ask it, is the question that's about to appear in the output channel? So the idea is you feed a question through an input channel, delivers an answer through

the output channel. Is the answer that's about to appear in the output channel? No. Right. I can't truthfully answer. What the fuck, right? I mean, this is a mundane question of physical fact. And again, we can make models of this

if you don't want to think about the actual universe. Oh, maybe the laws are deterministic, maybe, imagine a universe that you can completely control. Imagine a deterministic universe. So here's a little example. Imagine a deterministic universe with effectively computable laws. Imagine a Turing machine in the universe. So, and program it computable laws. Imagine a touring machine in the universe.

So, you know, and program it with the laws. So now you know, not only that the system, the internal system knows the laws, but you know that it's able to compute the laws because it's a touring machine. The laws are effectively computable. You can come up with a whole cluster of questions it can answer. First, what is the answer? Whether the question about the answer that's about to appear in the output channel is no, can't answer that. Can't even correctly guess the correct answer to that.

It can't answer truthfully. Can't answer truthfully. How about this one? It can't answer at all. Or well, can't answer truthfully, but won't answer at all. Feeded its own, if you might think it's a Turing machine, it should be, and the laws are computable, it should be able to predict whether there any system in the world will do if it started on a given state, right?

Feed it its own Turing number and say, do you halt? Right. When fed to someone. Can't answer. So what you see is that there's a class of questions that because of the structure, the logical structure of a system representing the world from the inside, it can't truthfully answer. So I've been thinking about that partly. It's not that I started thinking about that, it's that

I was thinking a lot about determinism, I was thinking a lot about counter predictive devices and I was thinking just a lot about these sort of little puzzles. And I realized that actually that's the clearest formal expression of what's going on in all of those puzzles. And it's a little thread that when you start to pull at it, you see has deep roots everywhere. So for example, there are lessons about determinism in that little puzzle. When you say, how do I understand physically? I have a little physical model, a mechanical model, you know, of a system inside a deterministic

universe. What's going on there? So that's one, you know, but also, like sort of a lot of stuff you can start to understand by just focusing in detail on what's going on with that model and how it can correct some of the kind of big picture ideas with which we approach, you know, physics and questions about ourselves. One of them is free will, you will, but one of them is time. How do we understand time from the inside?

Another one is what's going on with determinism? Why couldn't you have a Laplacian demon in the universe? Shouldn't a Laplacian demon be able to answer every yes, no question of that? What's going on there? So that's why I've been thinking about those questions. No temptation on my part to think that they show that reality is inconsistent. I think there are real lessons to learn from them. Do you find that most physicists who aren't trained philosophically believe in free will

or tend to not believe in free will? And then those who are trained philosophically, is there also a correlation there? So I don't know about numbers. For sure, you know, many of the loudest voices in physics, or the kind of thing that you get, you know, at the end of the day at the bar when people have had a couple of things to drink and they're kind of the loose talk is, yeah, they're very happy to dismiss free will. But I think what's going on there, so there are two things. And philosophers, it's a mix. There certainly are prominent philosophers who are happy to reject free will.

But I'll say a little bit about what the landscape looks like. So philosophers are a mixed bag. They really are interested in the concept of free will. I mean, they're thinking, you know, they have an idea of agency and it's embedded in questions about morality and they're trying to understand, you know understand how do we reconcile these ideas that I think a lot of them, like moral psychologists, they take as a datum that we are free and they're trying to understand how do I account for determinism. So many of them are developing notions of freedom that capture the aspects of freedom

that they're interested in, like moral responsibility and so on. So there's a lot of compatibilists, but they're mostly in, like moral responsibility and so on. There's a lot of compatibilists, but they're mostly working on the side of understanding the concept of free will in a way that accommodates the physics. They're not deeply embedded in the physics. They don't really understand in detail or they do. You get a one-sentence view of what physics says. They're assuming a classical world and they say what physics

tells us is that the initial state of the world fixes everything that happens thereafter. So they're trying to understand, you know, if we take that for granted, how do we understand for them? There are some people who don't. Some people who say, no, the physics is wrong, libertarians, and other, because I know as a datum better than I know anything about physics that I'm free. And those are called libertarians or libertarian free will. That's right. And then there are other people who bite the bullet. They say physics tells us we're not free. So we're not free where it's an illusion, this kind of vocabulary of illusion.

A lot of the physicists think that by freedom, we mean precisely the ability to break the laws of physics and that's an illusion so they reject it. They don't have a very sophisticated conceptual analysis of freedom. They take the idea that to be free is to break the laws of physics in the universe and they just say that's an illusion, we've been wrong about lots of things. I think the more interesting middle space is the one that doesn't start out with the fixed idea of freedom. And that also takes the physics seriously enough to say, no, I'm not going to take one line of physics. I'm going to take physics in detail

and a model of a human being in detail and try to understand how life and cognition emerges and what's going on with the onboard machinery and how is it affected by the stuff outside. I'm also not just going to take a Newtonian image of the universe, I'm going to take a relativistic image of the universe, I'm going to take relativity. I think you get nudges both in our understanding of the physics and in our understanding of ourselves in a way that brings them into alignment. It has to be that way way for the reason I said, you know, nature has found a solution to this problem and there need to be corrections on both sides of, you know, the naive understanding of what physics tells us and the naive understanding of what we're doing or what our place is in the causal order when we're making a decision. Okay, so this is a great time to get into your account of free will.

And then also, so you're going to define it. And then also, it would be great if you then state why this account of free will comports with an intuitive account of free will. Otherwise, there's no sense in even calling it free will, you could use some other name for it. It needs to have some concordance with the folk intuition that we use to develop the word free will. And then also, well, why do we have it then? Do we actually have this form of free will? So please.

Yeah. So again, so this can be unsatisfying in some ways. And I'm also going to say things that I didn't say in the book because my views were changed a little bit. It's not like I'm offering an analysis of what free will is. I'm happy to tell you what I think is going on with us and the ways in which it answers to some aspects of what we think of as free will. So it captures some elements of... So first I'll say the one thing about the physics. I think one of the things that's important and that's come from thinking about these sorts of puzzles like the self-referential one that I told you about, that is the idea

that there are questions of fact that we can't answer, even quite aside from physics and quite aside. How do you understand that? What you realize is that actually when you take relativity very seriously and you ask yourself, okay, I'm in a relativistic setting, I should say too, this comes partly too from thinking about counter predictive interactions. So give you all of the information you want about the world. Your task is to predict what I will do. You've got a perfect physical model of me, you've got, or even like a tabletop device,

you've got a perfect physical model of it. You know what the laws are, you know the initial conditions of the universe. It has a green light and a red light on top, or you're doing it to me, you know, I'm a deterministic system, predict will I raise my hand or will I not, or predict what this device will turn off or turn off. You might think you can do it, okay, let's suppose that I'm demanding that you feed the device your prediction. And it's programmed to do the opposite of what's predicted. Okay.

Device like that's perfectly possible. I mean, we can write down a model of such a device in a deterministic setting, right? It's just a tabletop device that takes a prediction. So now you can see the connection with a self-referential, perfectly deterministic device that takes a prediction and does the opposite, right? Just a moment. Yeah. Because that sounds like a predictive device, but you called it a counter predictive device.

Is the counter just because you told it to do the opposite at one point? Okay, so there's a predictor and a counter predictive device. So the predictor is trying to predict what this device is going to do. It has a perfect physical model. The system is a deterministic device. It's given as much information as you like. Give it the initial conditions of the universe, give it the laws that program the device, give it.

But the constraint is it has to feed its prediction, has to tell its prediction to the device, give it. But the constraint is it has to feed its prediction, that's to tell its prediction, to the device. Okay. What's going to happen? Right? Now you might think, well, it has to be right. If it's got the initial conditions of the universe and it can compute, it ought to be able to predict this device. But hang on, it's going to give this device its prediction and as long as this device works, well, it's going to not be right. So what's going on?

Thinking about that puzzle makes you think, well, hang on, is there a mechanism in our classical theories for giving a system enough information to predict what's going to happen in the rest of the world. I mean, naively, the way everybody presents determinism is yes, of course. What did Laplace say? Laplace said that if a system knew the positions and memento of every particle, it would, and this is his phrase, it would embrace in a single formula everything that would ever happen in that universe.

You think we can have information about the past. In principle, we ought to be able to establish the positions and memento of every particle. If I had that information, I ought to be able to predict what anything would do. This little tabletop device, a touring machine, another human being, right? We think that's the way that the implications of determinism are usually presented. But when you start thinking through in detail, in physical terms, whether even in principle, there's a mechanism for having enough information to predict the evolution of the universe. You find that it's not true.

Actually, I'm going to make a methodological point here. Again, this is why this method of thinking about philosophical problems is so fruitful. You're given, you treat it as a physics problem. You're not starting out with ideas about free will and as a human being a physical thing. You start out by saying, I've got a physical model of a system in front of me. I've stipulated that this is a deterministic setting. I can set up the physics problem. Now I've got a predictor and I've got a counter predictive device and I've got a physical model, a mechanical model. Is this a puzzle for like classical determinism?

But as soon as you start to investigate it in that kind of detail, you realize, well, hang on. There's no mechanism in the universe for generating predictions of that kind with certainty. And here's the reason. So again, this is why there's physics lessons. Well, looking at a Newtonian universe, it's kind of a little obscure, but you sort of realize, well, if you've got a system in the universe and it can check, they're like kind of, you know, in naturalistic terms, how do we check the positions and momentum

of this particle and that one and that one, but it never gets to a setting where it knows it's examined all of the particles that there are. It doesn't just have to establish the positions and momentum of individual particles, specifically in classical and Newtonian physics. Specifically in Newtonian physics, you need to know the total state of the world and there's actually no mechanism for determining that. That was always one of the problems with Newtonian physics because gravitational influence travels instantaneously.

Everything affects the force on this particle in the here and now. You need to know everything. Okay, so you might think, okay, so but that was always a bad thing about Newtonian physics, rectified in relativity. Now in relativity, we have an interaction by interaction, understanding of what's going on on the ground. And it's explicit in relativity. This was one of the big wonderful things about relativity. One of the innovations that made it a great advances for to predict anything. You don't need to know the total state of the world.

You just need to know it's backlight cone or indeed any cross-section of its backlight cone. Great, okay. So let's look at again in physical terms at this puzzle. You've got a system predicting another system, deterministic, perfectly deterministic. Let's give the first system all of the physically accessible information, knows entire contents of its past light cone. Trying to predict this next system, does it have enough information to do that with certainty.

No, it doesn't. Why? Because of the way that the light cones are nested inside one another. Never sufficient information in the past light cone of the earlier device to predict, indeed, not only to predict what this system is going to do with certainty, in fact, to predict anything with certainty, because you always need information outside the light cone because the later events. So weird, right? So there's a physics lesson there about what happens to determinism when you take relativity seriously. And it's one that falls right out of the light cone structure. It's something that happens directly And it's one that falls right out of the light cone structure. It's something that happens directly when you,

it's something that happens directly when the temporal orders brought into alignment with the causal orders. So that causal past, temporal past now means causal past. This little puzzle that Einstein certainly never thought of dissolves. So let me see if I got this correct. So you're an event in space-time,

and then usually when we're two-dimensional, one space, one time, we just show these light cones, and it looks like an X. I'll place an image of that on screen. So you're at the apex of this, and the past will be down and future is up. Okay, now you think, well, can I not just predict something that's even an epsilon in my future light cone? You think naively. Any finite interval, right? Right, you think, yeah, well, why not? Well, no matter how far or close you are in the future,

it will impinge on something that was outside your space-time, your light cones from that event. So you won't be able to. That's exactly right. Yeah. So another way to think of it that makes it kind of visually clear is take the contents of any past light cone. So take the full causal past. Ask yourself, how many models of my physical theory can I embed this in? And do they have different futures?

The answer is always indefinitely many and with very different futures. So, you know, it's again a lesson about determinism. So this physically naive idea that we have, which is the first line in every, you know, kind of line about the puzzle about free will is, sometime long ago in the past, initial state of the universe was laid down and since then, everything was fixed. So, total illusion. I don't need to know anything about give me a physical model of you and what's going on in your mind. Total illusion that anything hinges on your. The idea here is that actually if you take the physics seriously enough to think that that image of the universe

where there was an initial condition, if you really exercise yourself of that, then the, at least that naive version of the problem goes away. And so now you really do have a problem of understanding. You're in the space where you're, okay, so let's rethink what it is to be a system in universe and the role that that system plays in making the future what it is. Maybe that's a silly way to put it, but that's what I mean. You use the physics to get yourself out of the space where you think that your common sense ideas of free will and time and that you're trying to recover those.

It's like, no, you're in a completely different space and let's understand ourselves from within the space and see if we can make sense of life and cognition in a universe like that. How is that going to change our conceptions of ourselves? What's it going to rescue? What's going to go away? So, so far, what's been established is that you can't predict. Not only can you not predict because of some practical limitation, it's an in principle one. And it's not just you, it's an ideal device that could be outside you cannot predict what you're going to do. could be outside you, cannot predict what you're going to do. Okay, so that's been established.

Now, this seems like a necessary condition for free will, but it's not a sufficient one. So there must be more to this argument. So please. Of course. Yes, yes, sorry. So all this was doing was, you know, breaking down the naive ideas. So now we can ask, you know, so what kinds of system are we and how do we work? And what is our role in it? So now I'm going to give you like a little like sort of really silly baby schematic description of like huge contours of-

My middle name is silly baby schematics. Okay, good. So here's this big visionary description of- I'm going to ignore the quantum substructure of- I mean, I think it's important in all kinds of ways, but for now, just to talk about free will in a perfectly classical way, the relativistic. This is the way that I think of it. I know you've talked to lots of people about thermodynamics and stuff, so your listeners will have some sense of the big picture stuff I'm talking about, but this is the way to think of it.

The substructure of reality we're going to assume is classical or effectively classical. So geometry is Minkowski or it's GR. There's a matter distribution over that. The matter distribution over that obeys laws that are sort of temporally symmetric, but how do we get asymmetries? We get asymmetries from something like a thermodynamic gradient. What the thermodynamic gradient does is it creates this sort of asymmetry in the part of the universe that we live in that, and I'm going to set up how to think about life and cognition. What it does is it both creates the need for systems like, you know, living systems to

metabolize energy from the environment in order to maintain their own internal integrity, but it also makes information about the macroscopic past available for systems like that to use. So it creates opportunities for systems to use information to guide their behavior in a way that's going to promote survival. So I mean, if you want to have an image here, an evolution in all kinds of ways takes advantage of this. There are these little bacteria, magnetotactic bacteria that have little magnets inside them that point in the direction of magnetic north and they'll swim in that direction. Why do they do that?

Because that turns out to be kind of nutrient rich environments that they need to survive. So their nature in designing that system has effectively used information, namely about the correlation between magnetic north and where the nutrient rich environment is to construct a system that will behave in the way that it needs to promote its survival. So that system's design is in a way a record of the fact that that's where the nutrient-rich environments are. So in all kinds of primitive ways nature makes use of this, but also in much more sophisticated ways. So I think one of the things that you... So think of a deer, for example,

a deer responding to the smell of recently passed predator or a prey, like a sort of a fox following footprints in the sand. Both of those are making use of the information-bearing properties of their environment to guide their behavior in a way that's going to allow them to avoid prey and to get food. Right.

And why did you call that a thermodynamic gradient? Like in the case of the fox or the deer? Okay. So part of what happens in thermodynamics is the macroscopic state of a system that's kind of semi-isolated, adiabatically isolated system bears the traces. Any kind of ordered state of a system like that bears the traces of previous work that's done on the system. So the idea is you do some work in the environment and it's going to take a while for the state of the environment to relax back to equilibrium.

Footprints in the sand, cream in coffee, those are all, one thinks of as records of work that was done in the system. You always take a system if it's in a semi-ordered, any adiabatically isolated system that's in a semi-ordered, any adiabatically isolated system that's in a semi-ordered state, you can use kind of the ordinary kind of thermodynamic inferences to say, oh, this system must have been in a more ordered state in the recent past. It didn't fluctuate into that state, sort of randomly from equilibrium. So that's the sense in which thermodynamics makes the macroscopic state of the world rich with information.

So like scars on trees, footprints and sand, think in those terms. But even sort of the smell of recently, those are all records of things that have recently happened. In all kinds of ways, systems, living systems, because of the metabolic needs of survival, have to organize their behavior in a way that is kind of counter thermodynamics. It turns out information is a very rich resource for them. I think life from the bottom is making use of information. Cognition is a natural step on that. We start getting thinking systems more and

more of the kind of the burdens of using and processing information are, you know, put inside the system. So it's selecting behaviors now in ways that are... So you think about magnetotectic bacteria, nature is selecting response to that stimuli because of the information that that stimuli carries about the location of nutrient-rich environments. But what's happening with cognizing systems is the selection of behavior, the processing of sensory information, the selection of behavior is happening increasingly on board. By the time you get to systems like us, so a lot of my book, Unfree Will, is spent looking at what's happening with human cognition and how much of the burden of selecting responses

to stimuli is happening inside of us. So think about like, or another good, I'm going to give you a couple of model systems. So the magnetotactic bacteria, these are like huge landmarks, just think of these as kind of landmarks along the phylogenetic scale of complexity. So I think magnetotactic bacteria, a nice model system is frogs. So frogs have these like very sophisticated brains, but their brains are designed so that their tongues will snap out automatically at images of passing flies. So if a passing fly, there's a boom. It's incredible how fast and how good they are. That's because their brains are designed to carefully

filter, process visual information so that anything that looks has the right shape and the right speed and so on, they'll respond to it. So again, a much more sophisticated kind of brain, but again, the brain has been designed to do, designed, sort of every frog will do that. And the only way to get it to change that behavior is sustained pressure from the outside. There's adaptation, but it's slow and it's kind of costly. But we're not like that. You and I, same stimulus, very different responses. What's going on there? Here's the way, and I think this taps into something that I think is essential

to free will or essential to kind of the rich sort of free will that I think that we have. And that I think is specifically human, though acknowledging there's lots about other animals that we don't know. So I'm not at all wedded to this being specifically human, it is characteristically human, is that we don't just respond to stimuli. We come into the world with a brain that was designed to uptake information. We have language and all kinds of formal resources for storing information in complicated ways. We have memories and memories of a kind. You know, again, this is a very rich topic, but completely fascinating and all of it relevant to understanding ourselves and the types of agents we are. The sort of memory we have is not just that

we encode information about the past and the years. We have autobiographical memories. So we have language, we have formal tools, we have an explicit memory of ourselves into the distant past and explicit representations of the future. You say to me, what are you going to do on Christmas Eve 25 years from now? I can entertain a specific thought about a specific time on a specific day at a great distance from me. I have the capacity to do that. The mental technologies that we've developed allow us to do that. So we've got a lot of onboard machinery that's characteristically human and that allows us to have a narrative conception of who we are, where we came from, to store lots of specific

information about the things that have happened to us over the course of our lives. You and I come in, let's suppose that we come into the world, not true, but we come into the world, let's suppose, molecule for molecule, identical. Just to wipe out the sorts of differences that there are between us. Over the course of our history, as soon as we start having experiences and encoding those experiences, we're going to differentiate. All of that is going to, anything that makes an impact on us mentally is going to potentially make a difference to our behavior. Where the design of the frog's brain was really what was the fixed design of the frog's brain, though with acknowledging the

ways in which there's a lot of soft structure too. The fixed design of the frog's brain was what was responsible for it doing what it was. For us, it's the opposite. It's when we're deliberating about voluntary behavior, it's the stuff that's encoded in the soft structure of our brain, the information. And the way that that information is organised, our plans, priorities, hopes and dreams, that's stuff that all takes shape over the course of our lives, from internal processing of reflecting on our experiences and so on.

And you know, it's not just that, okay, my experience, which is not up to me, impacts what I will do. It's much more complicated than that. When I'm young, of course, I get carried around and I eat when I'm fed and a large part of what I believe and know and think and hope and so on is a product of stuff that passively happens to me. But that stops as soon as you're in the position of making choices about what to read, who your friends are going to be, who you're going to pay attention to, you educate yourself.

So you over the course of your life are constituting yourself by making those choices. When you're making a decision in the sense that it's calling on your plans, dreams, hopes and priorities, I think that's the product of your own choices. You have made yourself and put yourself there in a position on the dark nights of the soul to make the choices that you do. In that sense, I think it does come from me. If you ask me, what's the problem of free will? The problem of free will is getting myself into the causal chain in such a way that those

choices come from me and not from something outside me. I want to say, of course they come from you. In physical terms, they come from the onboard machinery, you know, and the onboard machinery is encoding all of the information that you've not just stored over the course of your life, that you've curated and organized. And so, to me, when I make a choice, it comes from me. I'm an essential and integral part of the causal chain that produces it. Right.

And then when I'm making, you know, one of those dark nights of the soul, it really does come down to the here and now. Not determine my past like cone. Over the course of that night, I'm turning through the information in my head and that when it's a difficult decision, I'm organizing it in a way that it wasn't organized when I let down because what are the difficult decisions? Maybe I have to make a choice about, I don't know, I'm getting like a, you know, I have to make a choice, I have a choice between like a risky surgery for a daughter and a chronic condition that's gonna, and so I don't

know what I'm going to do when I lie down because I have competing commitments. I love my daughter, everything that over the course of my life has led me to this point is I love my daughter and I that over the course of my life has led me to this point, and I love my daughter and I want her to survive. On the other hand, I want her to have a good life and how risk tolerant am I and what are my obligations to her? I don't want to impose my risk tolerance on her." You're over the course of that night, you've got a kind of utility function that's not

articulated enough to make that choice, you're turning to it and you're articulating that function. You're saying, okay, when I finish this night, I will have made the choice. I will now have organized priorities in a way where before it wasn't clear which one, I've made a choice. Now, okay, I'm going all in on the risky, whatever it is. But again, so I think that's the sense in which it does come down to the here and now, when you're making choices, you're always over the course of your

life, constituting yourself in that way. And nature has kind of organized things in such a way that when it comes to your voluntary behavior, it's not the stuff outside, it's not the fixed structure of your body and brain. It's not your genes, but it's you That makes that decision. So that's the way that I think of it So what's the common response from other philosophers or physicists to this Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that no anybody reads myself

I think you know, I think everybody has their own ideas about free will and you know, I think when I think everybody has their own ideas about free will. Again, I'm not really bad at that kind of thing. I tend to be just in my own head. I think when you talk to people about this, they already have settled ideas. So physicists, they don't have the patience to sit down and listen to a long story. They think, free will, of course it's an illusion. I'm a physical thing. I think a lot of philosophers who have thought about the problem, I never thought it was

incompatible with determinism. I think freedom is... I think it's one of these things that most people, if they think about it at all, if they're not just dismissive of the problem, they made their own choices about what freedom is. So for me, this was a personal trying to understand. But I do think, again, it's one of those problems where there are lessons. I came through it changed because I had much better understanding of what determinism does and doesn't entail, new things to think about that I hadn't been that interested in before.

Better understanding of myself. I didn't, you asked me, what are you? I don't know. I think a better understanding of the, and what's special about human cognition? Hi, everyone. Hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy,

along with my personal reflections, you'll find it all on my sub stack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the scenes insights, and the chance to be a part of a thriving community of like-minded pilgrimers. By joining, you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here, hit subscribe, and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, KurtJaimungal dot org.

So how has it affected you personally? You just mentioned it affected your view of physics and maybe your philosophy, but what about your day to day life? That's a good question. That's a really good question. I don't know that, I don't know that like it's a, I think I, so maybe, oh, this sounds so totally maudlin, but I guess, you know, one of the things that all of this does is put you a little bit in awe of nature and sort of what incredible constructions we are. Maybe things like that is a little bit reflective about how incredible it is that we make decisions and what's going on, how complicated it is, what's going on in us. It the sense in which, so it makes you think about things like loss, like the sense in which, so everything I just said.

I get my parents died like all in the last couple of years, so this is something I was thinking about. So this is a kind of daily life thing. So when a frog, you know, sort of is gone from the world. Something is lost, a living being is lost, but I think when a person is lost in the world, because of what I just said about what we're doing over the course of our lives is we're pulling information and we're processing it and it's this kind of incredible structure of information that that person over the whole course of their lives, everything they've read, everything they've done, all of the kind of reflection that they've done, that's

completely gone. And it's not made up for by the birth of another person. The sort of loss that there is, because it's a loss of information that happens when a person dies, is I think it's absolute, it's irretrievable, it's not fungible with other people coming, you know, with other people. So I think for me that's a real lesson. That every person is a kind of unique structure of information, their whole inner world. And when one person is lost, they're lost. So I don't know if you've read Gertrude Lescher Bach. Of course. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. In it, well, actually outside of it, there's another book called You Are a Strange Loop or I Am a Strange Loop. I Am a Strange Loop. Right. Hofstadter then argues that what makes you is somehow related to the patterns inside your brain and that Even if your parents are gone or some other loved one is gone That their patterns still persist in minor ways in the way that you now hold your cup of coffee in the way that you think through Events in the lessons that they imparted to you. So to Hofstadter, and he articulated this in his book about his ex, well, his dead wife. He said that, no, actually, in his model, she does persist.

There's a low resolution version of her that persists. Do you, does your conception of what you are or what person is, or what I am, the self. Does it comport with that? So he's certainly right. So that in one way, I'm disagreeing deeply with him. He's right in one way. So one of the nice things about this view of what a person is, is that it's reproducible. Patterns are reproducible and they're generative in the ways that he says. It makes persistence

non-persistence much more a matter of degree than it would if you were a primitive locus of mental life. That part's correct. You know and I know that what's left after a person, even a person you know really well, is a tiny fraction of what they are. Ask yourself, what's going to be left of me when I'm gone in the memories of the people who know me. Ask yourself right now, what is there of me in the, take your closest person who knows you best, what is there of me in them and it's a shadow. So I think he's right in some sense, but a very weak sense. I mean, I think one of the, yeah, I guess I'll leave it at that. One of the amazing things about another person is the kind of endless genericity of, you

know, a mental life. Like, I don't mean that in the like, but of the kind of structure of information that allows that sort of reflexive grasp of itself and how much information is built up over the course of a life. So I think it's, yeah, it's very little that's left. I mean, I don't know, very little. Something's left, but yeah. So, Jinen, who are you? Who are or when am I? I don't know who am I.

I mean, I could give you like autobiography stuff. I don't know. I think I'm a structure of information. Yeah. I think so there's a couple of things about the use of I. So here's my form. I am a virtual object, the subject of mental states and a mental life. What does that look from the outside? It's a structure of information.

So I think I'm an embodied mind and that's what I think the I is when we use I reflexively like that. I think it's a proper subject of mental states and when Descartes says, you know, what am I? What is this I whose existence is made known to me in the very act of denying that it exists and that can persist without the body and so on? That's what I think. I think that that's the answer you should say.

I'm a virtual object. I'm something that's supported by the machinery in a head, but I'm a certain kind of cognitively organized structure of information. So this I is what created you now. So that implies that there is some continuity of the self. 100%. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

The continuity is exactly that. I mean sort of, so this is why I think you asked me actually sorry I'm going back to a previous one. You asked me you know how is it changed, how is this, so not so much the freedom stuff but one thing that did change me in practical ways was I was a vegetarian for many, many years and that was partly because I didn't think that this is going to offend all of your, you're going to get like hate letters where you could. Okay. But it did, partly because I didn't know what was the difference between the loss of a human being and the loss of a cow.

I think, you know, creatures like cows are primitive creatures that aren't doing quite as much as we are. So they're not storing information. They don't have a conception of themselves over time. It's not the same kind of loss. It's still a loss and suffering is bad no matter what for any living thing. But I think for a human being, there's a kind of loss, not just human being, but anything that has the sort of sense of continuity over time. This is how it connects to your question. Sense of continuity over time that comes from, you know, sort of this view of oneself that spans, you know, the past and the future, where, you know, you're not just, you know, kind of retaining records

of what happened yesterday in your dispositions and feelings and stuff, but you're explicitly have an idea of yourself in the past and you're making plans for the future. You're doing things now that are meant to be contributions to projects that you have this holistic commitment to. So that kind of narrative conception of oneself and sense of oneself over time and commitments and plans that span long periods of time, that is a deep kind of continuity. So when I say, I don't mean the momentary, you know, kind of time slice. I mean, I have a writ conception of myself as an extended agent and an extended agent

that will end when I die. You know, I think if you asked Hofstadter's wife, you know, when do you end? She would have said, well, there's going to be traces of me left, but I end, you know, my, this continuity, this continuity of this particular inner stream of information will cease. There will be records of it. There's this part, sorry, I'm talking so much. Please, no, no, no, continue. I love every word of what you're saying and the audience is hanging on to every word as well. So please. Okay. So there's this beautiful passage in, um, in death of Ivan Ilyich, where, and then this was where this kind of this aha moment came for me about, about what, what's lost when a human dies,

where, you know, he's talking about his death and, and he's sort of, it's landing on him, you know, he's talking about his death and, and he's sort of, it's landing on him, you know, that he's signed this, like this long excruciating passage is where he's really kind of hitting him that he's going to die. And he's, and he says, a famous passage where he says, you know, you know, all men are mortal. I'm a man, therefore I'm immortal. I kind of knew that applied to me, but I mean, I can't die. Like it works for Socrates and it works for Kurt, but it doesn't work for me. How can I die? And he says, I mean, if I die, who's going to remember? And he's got these beautiful, like, who's going to remember the rustle of my mother's

skirt when she held me on her knee? Who's going to remember, you? I think that's the sense in which there are things that I know from the inside, the kind of most precious things that only I really know the inner. My parents are gone now, and there are things about them that I know, things that we experience together that will be lost when I go. Lost, lost. So I think that kind of continuity you carry with you over the course of your life. You cull and curate and pull treasures from your experience and pains and it all becomes

part of who you are in the particular kind of configuration that no one will ever know. Like even Hofstadter doesn't know in the heart of hearts. He knows his image of his wife and the things about him that he loved most. He doesn't know what she loved about herself most. He doesn't know the little things that she remembers from her childhood. So the continuity of that stream, what gets carried forward, what gets left behind, that kind of continuity is, I think, a rich part you know Einstein famously was consoling a grieving friend who lost a loved one by making an appeal to the block universe and saying that while it's akin to

being etched in ice, so they're there. Now you don't have access to them currently, but they are there somehow in the universe if the universe is this block of ice. What do you make of the block universe? So, I like that quote. I don't think it's a commitment to the block universe, at least in the sense that, so there's some feature, I'm going to say something about that quote, but there's some feature of the block universe I want to reject in the end. The part of it that's right is, yes, of course course it's always there in space and time. And there's this like, real cup home where he says, you know, having been, you will always

have been. That's right. That doesn't go away. Like sort of, you know, my parents are gone, Hofstadter's, like Hofstadter's wife is gone, but she always will have been. It is, you know, so in that sense, nothing is temporary, everything is permanent, subspecies, ternatatus, everything you do is etched in eternity. I love that. I think it's right.

I want to build on that. So Victor Frankl, who has the book Man's Search for Meaning, he was saying that the fact that you are only here for a glimmer, well, relatively, and that you can't come back to it actually implies your permanence because you can't be re-etched over. That's right. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So your temporariness implies your permanence. Right. And in fact, that's one good thing about death too, is there's some sense in which you don't write over, but you do overwrite in the sense that later events kind of, you know, always

color what happened. Like so if somebody's living and they were generous in their youth, but they've done bad things, it's like, nah, do you know, like the overall is that you can, there's no closure. Like you can always redeem yourself. You can always, you know, the meaning of a person in some senses is written over by later events. But when someone dies, you do get closure. There's a final assessment of who they were because there's no more of that. I think that's right too.

So I think it's all of those things and it's illuminating to look at it. So you were expanding on Einstein's quotation. Yeah. So the part of the block universe that I don't like is this idea that that that we do have a well defined, a well defined idea of the totality of facts. So it goes back to the self reference stuff. But very often when people say talk about the block universe, they say, there is the totality of fact, past, present and future. For the self-reference reasons I was

talking about before, the very same thing. I think for any embedded creature in the world, there is no such totality. You can diagonalize it. I mean, you can show that there are contradictions involved in it. And I think what that shows is that it's actually a mirage, this idea that when we try to take the God's eye view and say that there is this totality of fact and the incompleteness of the universe is just because we don't see the whole of it at any time, we're looking from a limited... I think that's a mirage. is just because we don't see the whole of it at any time. We're looking from, you know, limited. I think that's a mirage, a perfectly useful mirage, you know, to have when we're doing physics and stuff,

but not to be taken fully seriously. So I thought that the mirage is that a particular person inside the universe can't take the God's eye view, but not that the God's eye view doesn't exist. So do you think that the God's eye view doesn't actually exist? Okay, what do you mean by exist? Like where exactly? What does that mean? So I mean, and this is a good way.

So there's no question that that it seems to be a very intelligible idea. We can write down models of complete universes, right, and look down at them from a God's eye point of view, right? But the universe, our universe, do we have a well-defined conception of that? Well, there's nothing formally wrong with saying, well, we can formally construct a point of view outside, even though we can't take that kind of point of view on our own reality for self-reference reasons. We can formally construct a point of view. This is what God's supposed to be outside of space and time, who looks down at our reality,

right? That's what you might think. But now you see, yeah, but God can make our reality take it in as a totality, but that's only because He's outside of it. He can't do that with His reality, right? But there is only one reality. There is no all encompassing view of reality itself. I mean, that's the thing. Reality is supposed to be the totality of all that there is. You can take any subtotality of it. And yeah, you can formally construct a point of view outside of that totality. But if reality is supposed to be all of there is, then this idea of all of it is a mirage. There is in reality no point of view

that encompasses the whole. Interesting. So I was having this debate off air with some friends last night or a couple nights ago about I don't believe you can just take a set bracket around everything and just say that that's everything as if it's a well-defined set. So some people say, well, reality is just all there is. I don't know if you can have

a well-defined notion of all there is. Good. You can't. And here, I mean, this is what the formal paradoxes are about. So the version, the little paradox I gave you is actually a version of that. But you can show formally that there can be no such set of all sets. Why is that? Because you can construct a set, the set of all non-self members, which can either be in the set or not in the set. So here, do you know these formal paradoxes? Yeah, we've talked about it before on this channel a few times, actually.

But feel free to outline it again if you think it's necessary. Yeah, we've talked about it before on this channel a few times actually, but feel free to outline it again if you think it's necessary. Yeah, so formally it was precisely trying to come up with a well-defined notion of what it is to take a plurality as a single thing, and that's what set theory is all about. So the idea is we need to have rules. At first, people thought that you can take any plurality or any kind of meaningful linguistic statement that applies to some things and use that statement to define a single thing, a totality, the set of all things that satisfy that statement. And it was what these set theoretical paradoxes were showing that that's not in

fact so. And it was precisely because when you say something like the set of all things that there are, so you're trying to take the things that there are and making of them a totality. When you talk about something being a totality, you mean there's a definite fact of anything about whether it's inside or not inside it. Right? So now you say, okay, so assume for reductio that it's a totality. Now construct a set, namely the set of all sets that are not self-members. Is that itself inside or outside the set of all sets?

It can't be inside that self-contradictory because it's not a self-member. Can't be outside because then it would be inside because it contains all non-self-members. Did I say that right? I think I said that right. But anyway, so it was precisely the idea of an all-encompassing totality that the set theoretical paradoxes were putting, showing us couldn't exist by constructing this sort of paradoxes. So what did people do? Again, formally, we know how to do this.

What you say is, okay, we know about the paradoxes. So what we do to have a well-defined notion of totalities, we can have a kind of unending hierarchy where each level of the hierarchy can take the things below it in the hierarchy as totalities. It can make totalities, but it's not a candidate for, but then there can be another level that takes it because it will fall below. So what you do is you get these hierarchies, none of which allow self-inclusion on pain of inconsistency. So what we're always trying to do is a very natural psychological move, but take a transcendent view of reality itself. But as soon as you do that, you've slipped the net. You've taken yourself outside of reality.

Now you know there's at least one thing, namely you, that aren't in the reality that you're looking at. The subject of that thought that's trying to take reality into its grasp. So I think these are connected to the self-referential paradoxes that, you know, and I think they, in a weird way, they come up again, well, come up again and again. When you dig, you'll find that they come up in physics. If you take them serious, you shouldn't think that there is a transcendent view of reality because that you would have to be outside of reality. And in particular, you can't have such a view because you're part of reality.

So why do self-referential statements feel paradoxical? And it's not all self-referential, but the ones that we discussed. So one view is that language evolved for object-level communication and not some meta-level reflection. And so maybe the confusion isn't in logic, it's just in our current cognitive architecture. Maybe it reflects something deeper.

What do you think? So I guess, you know, language is a living, breathing thing and we can, you know, sort of, so it's not a question about language as it exists. It's a question partly about any possible language and these paradoxes are inherent in any possible language. I don't think they show contradictions are true, but they do show that any representation of a system from the inside is incomplete. So I take that horn of the dilemma, which was exactly what Gödel thought. By the way, if you're interested in Gödel's theorem, I did a deep dive on the misconceptions

of Gödel's theorem, as well as what it actually says. That video went somewhat viral. The link is on screen and in the description. I take that horn of the dilemma, which was exactly what Gödel thought in the mathematical case. And why do I say that? And what does it show about physics? So again, this is why thinking about this in physical terms is really illuminating because in the formal systems, there's two things that you don't have that you do when you can think about a physical system. So go back to the little puzzle I started with, the system that's going to be a grand overarching database of all possible, of all physical fact, you can ask it a question.

Is the answer that's about to appear in the output channel? No. It cannot truthfully answer that. Okay. But there's no inconsistency in reality because reality is perfectly consistent. It can say yes, it can say no, it can say nothing. Those are all perfectly consistent the ways the world can be. No matter what it does, it won't be answering correctly. So its view of reality has to be incomplete. So that's why I say it shows something about incompleteness, not something about reality. But what does it show? Well, we have a nice mechanical model of what's going on there. It has two features that the formal puzzle doesn't. One feature is that there's an uncontested notion, a kind of ground layer of physical fact that we're going to take for granted.

In the formal cases, in the mathematical cases, people were precisely trying to lay mathematics on a firm foundation. This incompleteness was worrisome about the ontologies. The second thing is the role of time. You're not in any way inclined to think that reality is inconsistent because you see, well, I can just wait a minute and answer that question truthfully. So it's not a problem about the fact. So I think the right way to think of this is at any given time for us, for systems in the world, reality is incomplete. That is our view of the world can't be complete because reality isn't yet complete, so to speak.

Because anything I say right now is going to add to reality in a way that's going to undermine the description I just gave. So I think the right thing to say here is reality is perfectly consistent, but if your system inside reality, your view of reality has to be incomplete on pain of saying something false. So I'm paying not inconsistent, not logical inconsistency, but on pain of inconsistency with that. And how are you supposed to understand that?

It's in the most mundane way. We can create this sort of negative interference is the term that I use for it between what you're saying and what you're doing. And because you're part of reality, no matter what you do here, if it disagrees with what you say, it's going to make what you said false. So we're finding the point where you're representing reality from inside and what you're doing is what you're saying. So you're finding the fixed point in the representation relation,

and you're creating negative interference between what you're doing and what you're saying. That's formally the way to describe what you're doing. You say, I can always find a question you can't answer truthfully because in the very act of answering it, you're going to be doing something that undermines what you said. But if you look at all of the formal puzzles too, that's what you're doing with touring incompleteness. You're saying, okay, you think you have a general method for answering all questions. Let me find a question where you can't answer it without doing the opposite of what you're

saying, namely halting, if and only if you don't halt. So they all find that spot where there's a fixed point in the representation relation and they create negative interference. Prime Day is here. With great kitchen deals, greatness is a deal away. So if you love baking, you can get a deal on a new mixer, transforming you into the Lord of the Loaves. Hear ye, hear ye, make way for the barren of Priosh,

the salty enough sourdough, the Lord of the Loaves, Prime Member Dave! Yeah, uh, hi? Shop great Prime Day deals now. So in your account of free will, I want to get back to that. What makes you say that you made a choice, like you made a choice rather than the next event happened? You see what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. You could say I made the, or we can just say, well, the next event occurred, and there's nothing about choice making, it just happened. Okay, so that was one question, and we're going to get to that. I just want to say my second question before it escapes me. Is consciousness required for free will? Because the account that you described of free will seems to also describe my computer. My computer can do something that makes itself across time and then I can imagine it making choices and then we would say the computer has free will from my understanding of what

you've described as free will. So that's, we'll start with the first question about what is it that makes you make that choice or makes you say that you made the choice and then consciousness? Good. Okay. So again, this goes back to what am I? What is a choice and what is it that makes me say that I made it? It's all the things I said before.

A choice is something that when it comes from me in all of the senses that I care about is something that draws on my hopes and dreams and memories and fears. That's what it is to make a choice and that's all I believe in when I believe that the choice comes from me. People say sometimes, okay, but your choices themselves, they come from your genes and your history and your experience. And that's where that whole bit about, you know, yeah, that stuff is all the physical encoding of me that I had a role in constituting over the course of my life. And you shouldn't have any notion of free will that doesn't

make that enough to be free. I mean, some people do for sure, but I'm happy to say, okay, you do. I mean, that's a notion of free will that's well lost. It's not one that we need. You shouldn't inflate it that way. Okay, the question, does that answer that question? Yes, yeah. Okay, so the consciousness one is,

it depends what you mean by consciousness. So if you mean phenomenal consciousness, so that notion of consciousness that has really come, that's become the focus of the hard problem and that a lot of people write, like Chalmers introduced it and a lot of people write, you know, like Chalmers introduced it, and a lot of people that are engaged in that debate are really interested in, then I don't think consciousness in that sense is needed for free will. Nothing that I said hinges on it being phenomenally conscious.

And indeed, the very notion of phenomenal consciousness is one that makes it physically inert. So, the hard problem is set up so that they say, look, the hard problem, the reason that you know that nothing physical can constitute consciousness is because you can describe to me a complete physical and functional description of a brain, including its role in producing motor responses and so on, and even all of the things that you can say about how it stores information and processes information. All of that stuff can be done in a computer or a non-conscious thing. You can settle all of those questions and not settle whether it's conscious. Therefore, consciousness can't be physically reducible.

So that notion of consciousness is quite specifically one that can't play any role in guiding behavior. It's completely inert. And everything that I described to you about storing information and self-constitution and then bringing that to bear on behavior when you're making a voluntary choice. All of that stuff was physically and functionally characterizable in terms of what brains are doing. You have a recent paper called Why Physics Should Care About the Mind. I'll place it on screen and in the description. Tell me about that paper and what mind is and how that's different than consciousness,

a conscious mind, if it is. So I'm thinking of the mind here as a kind of virtual machine running on physical hardware that guides the movements of bodies, whether human or other cognizing systems around space. Why should physics care about it? Because minds and bodies move matter around. If you think physics should describe the movements of matter, there's all kinds of things that happen in the natural world and all kinds of things that happen in the part of the natural world that we occupy that you cannot explain

without minds. So why is there a car in my driveway? Why am I sitting in a house? Why am I talking at a screen where it's talking? Those things do not happen without minds. Cognition and mental activity is essential and integral to producing certain kinds of movements of matter. I think of them as entirely a part of the physical world and entirely part of the progression

of sort of complexity from simple systems up through living systems. So that's why I think physics should care about mind. I think I also talked a lot in that paper. I can't remember, but I'll tell you why I think. I think increasingly in physics, partly because physics, to its credit, makes progress on all of the easy problems that it can do without thinking about hard philosophically difficult problem, made a lot of progress without thinking about minds or observers. But because it's made so much progress now and because we've got this developed picture,

highly articulated picture, there are little places where it's emerging as an important anomaly because minds are involved in one way or another. One of those, I think, not everybody will agree with this, is quantum mechanics. So clearly there's something about the interaction between information gathering systems and the quantum world that's mediated by what we're calling measurement interactions that we do not know how to understand well. So that puts what's often called the observer, I would call the agent, in the foreground of needing to be understood.

Other places where, again, observers are emerging as important, cosmology in various ways, understanding probability distributions and anthropic reasoning and those kinds of things. They're putting observers into the focus. But in terms of understanding minds, I think, so that the first answer I gave you is really, you know, we need to understand minds because they're part of the physical world. And indeed, they're a big part of the physical world in the immediately salient parts of our, you know, everyday experience. Tell me more about why you say agent and not observer. Because it really matters that we're not just looking passively at reality,

but actively using information to move ourselves around, but also to manipulate our environments. If all we had were passive observers, you know, two things. First, nature would have never made just passive observers. Nature constructed observation partly to guide behavior. But also, too, I think for the reasons I just said, it's really the agent of aspects of cognition that make a difference to the physical world. So we are by our nature, information utilizing systems.

Did you say at one point that you don't like counterfactuals? Yeah. Okay, let's hear. Did you say at one point that you don't like counterfactuals? Yeah. Okay. Let's hear. Okay. So, um, a lot of this is a legacy. One of those like bad legacies of the kind of the way that philosophy around. I'm, I'm all about, I love modality.

I'm all about hypotheticals, but, but, um, a lot of modality in philosophy is expressed in terms of counterfactuals and people think that they need to understand, for example, the modal aspects of physics by trying to understand the truth, the truth's conditions for counterfactuals, but counterfactuals turn out to be as soon as you try to address. So we want to know what's possible, what's not possible. That's what modality is. We try to understand what physics tells us about what's possible and what's not possible or what can happen in a given situation, what can't happen in a given situation.

And if we're in the space where we think that needs to be understood in terms of counterfactuals, then what do we need to do? We need to get the truth conditions for counterfactuals. And then what do we find? We find that the truth conditions for counterfactuals are very difficult. You need to talk about, you need to consult your intuitions and you need to talk about a space of possible worlds

and which worlds are closer to you and which weren't. And then you find you're fully in the kind of realm of this weird semantic exercise where there are intuitions about counterfactuals in my view are really just guides for what people have in mind in ordinary conversations when they're asking about what's possible and what would have happened, what they're holding fixed and what they're not.

They're just those sorts of linguistic conversational rules, nothing about the deep structure of reality. I believe what physics does tell us is it gives us definite truth values for hypotheticals. What would happen under some fully specified physical setting? Our physical theories will tell us that without any intuitions about semantics for counterfactuals. Very often we're interested in what would happen if the world had 20,000 more tons of matter. So I don't know.

But there what we do without talking about counterfactuals, we can consult our physical theories. We explicitly say what we're holding fixed about the actual world. We explicitly add what, you know, what features of reality we're transforming or adding to that. And then we evolve forward our best, you know, tell us, use our best physical theories to model that and see what would happen under those conditions. I don't think we need to talk about counterfactuals What keeps drawing you back to the mystery of time

I think because it's a mystery. I mean, I think it's one of it. So first it's a really beautiful topic so it's one mystery. I mean, I think it's one of the so first it's a really beautiful topic. So it's one of those topics that it's not just physics, it runs to every single field. So you know, you talk to physicists, you talk to a biologist, you talk to a historian, you talk to someone writing novels, you talk to a human being, all of them. As if the previous weren't human beings. Oh, yeah. No, sorry. I mean, like, yeah.

Biologists aren't human beings. Yeah, yeah. Historians are. No, no, yeah, yeah. But you know what I mean? Like someone who's none of those things. I've met some who, it was tricky to discern. But like, time is just a topic that runs through through every field of human inquiry, but also just

through human life. So I think it's one of these unifying topics that at once sort of unifies, but also distinguishes the ways in which these fields of inquiry are organized. So time to a physicist is something different than time to a biologist and something different than time to a historian. And I think understanding the relationships between time as it appears in those different fields of human inquiry and also time, you know, in our everyday experience is a really, a kind of really fruitful vein to mind for trying to understand kind of, you know, the architecture of the world as a whole.

But also just because I think it's, it's, yeah, I don't know how to, it is a central and very mysterious, I think, thing. It was like a useless answer, but. So earlier when I asked about does the block universe exist, you rejoined, well, what do you mean exists? Right. And then you'd said, well, exists where? And I can't give a space time location of where the block universe exists because I don't think that would be meaningful. So anything

that exists, must it exist in space slash time or in space time? Oh, good. Okay. Yeah, you made exactly the right correction. Yeah. So it's quantifying over everything rather than over any individual thing that's problematic. So I don't think so. No, I mean, numbers, Sherlock Holmes, God, you know, those are perfectly well-defined ideas and they don't, at least some of them don't exist in space or time. Where the in part is crucial, so, you know, we make references to them from within time, but they don't themselves exist in space or time.

I heard you say something about Herman Weill, where Herman Weill says, there's a mountain that's out there and we change our gaze, we cast our eyes, and then it's as if we're revealing properties about this mountain that we're seeing now from different points of view. Whereas time is somehow experienced as coming into existence. I want you to expand on that. Okay, so I think the quote you probably have in mind is this idea, again, you know, I'm sort of always on the lookout for ways of characterizing kind of the difference between space and time, it is very hard to put your finger on that.

That vile quote was a really nice one. He said, sort of, if we cast our gaze across the landscape, we experience the landscape as a fixed object coming into view in stages. So we think that it's being revealed in our experience in stages, but the object itself is there, there independently of our gaze. And so the idea is that we don't experience time that way. We don't experience, although people who defend a block universe often think that we should, I don't think we experience it that way and

I don't think we should. So I'm describing something that I think of as characteristic of the phenomenology and illuminating and revealing to take seriously. But what he says is, you know, when you do experience space in that way, but you don't, when you think of the future, think that, oh, the future will come into view, rather, you experience the future is coming into being as it's experienced. So it wasn't there already and now you're just seeing it, it's coming into existence. I think that's right.

So I think that's the right way to understand becoming. So that's how we experience time, but is time like that? Good. Okay. So now, in the attempt to say what that might mean exactly, how to characterize that difference is where this idea of interference that I introduced with the self-referential puzzle is helpful. So think of what was going on in the self-referential puzzle. The reason that the machine couldn't truthfully answer whether the word that's about to appear in the output channel was no.

This is a phrase that I've deliberately developed to describe this phenomenon. I'm going to use it when we come to time. It can't stabilize the fact that it's trying to describe independently of the description it gives. That's crucial to why there's a paradox there. If there are an object there that were detached from the representation, then the object could be correctly described. But it was precisely because those two things were tied together, that it couldn't.

Now think about us in time. Okay. We are part of the world. Some of what happens is stuff that we do. Right? So that means that there's at least some features of the world that are tied to what we're doing in the here and now, including in particular our representational activity. So, it was a fact in the case of the computer that it was producing a representational act

that was describing itself that was problematic. So the representational act was tied to what was happening. That was the problematic thing. But we're in the world, we're representing the world. The purest form of self-referential paradoxes that are going to arise are ones that describe our own representational activity. This thought is false. The problem there again is the same. In the very act of saying it, I'm producing a false statement. Or in the very fact of affirming it, I'm making it not false. Or asserting

it, I'm making it impossible. So you can't detach the representational act from what it's asserting. So you might think, okay, so fair enough. We know self-referential puzzles arise when you're describing your own representational activity, blot out your representational activity. Why should it matter if we're just looking at the public physical landscape? Well, it matters because my actions are guided by my beliefs and my beliefs guide my actions in such a way that when I make a prediction about things that are... So this is the way... So there's a lot more to say here, but I'm going to give you a little scheme of it.

This idea of interference is really about when you can't detach what you're representing from your representations of it. Why are we in that position sort of natively by being creatures that deliberate about the future? Well, because we're always representing the world from a particular point in space and time. When I'm looking into the future, I have knowledge of the past. I think about the future, I make predictions about what's going to happen tomorrow. But when it comes to my own behavior, I make conditional predictions.

And then I act in such a way as to if I predict this would happen if I acted that way and I predict this would happen if I acted that way and I don't like that one, I do this thing. So my representational activity is deliberately designed to act against predictions that I don't like and to promote futures that I do like. So I'm not describing, I'm not explaining this very well, but the idea is that you're always in a position where your predictions are interfering with themselves because they're guiding action that's meant to counter predictions that are going to lead to unfavorable outcomes. So this concept of interference, the idea that I'm producing predictions and then the

predictions are going to produce counter predictive physical responses in me. That's kind of the native position of the system that's using information to guide its behavior. Another example of this, think of, you know, sort of poll predictions or stock markets. There what you have is predictions being made, but then the system is responding to those predictions in a way that, so we're sort of always, that's what a mind is, it generates- That's a great, easy to understand example. So we're always doing that, you know, oh no, this will happen if I act that way.

I'm going to do this way. Oh no, that's going to happen. I'm going to do what I can to counter it. So we're, we're always acting in a way that's going to sort of feed back and counter predictions we don't like. And so we're in this regime of interference. And because of that, the future is going to be inherently unsettled because any prediction that we

make is subject to our own actions, trying to influence the system in a way it's going to feed back into the system and affect what happens via our actions. Newcombe's paradox is germane here. So why don't you describe it and then tell us your potential resolution of it, or if you think it resists being resolved and why? Good. Okay. Yeah.

So it's perceptive of you to see this. So I am going to back up a little bit. So there's a lot of apparatus here that I didn't describe, but part of what this apparatus does is it introduces this notion of interference. This notion of interference is precisely characterized by this idea that you get this funny phenomenon when you can't stabilize the fact that you're trying to describe independently of the description or prediction that you give of it. Now normally when we're in the position of making decisions, that's what characterizes

the difference between our relationship to the future and the relationship to the past. My representations of the past are indifferent to how I represent them. My representations of the future aren't because predictions I make are going to guide my behavior and be subject to being undermined by how I act. The idea is my representations of the future are kind of... Okay. Here's what's weird. And interference, I mean, again, I can have paper on this, but this is partly meant to use the thermodynamic arrow to describe what's different between your relationship

to the future and the past in a way that's not merely captured by thinking we know more about the past than we do about the future. It's meant to describe that. No, no, our representations of the future have an influence on how the future goes. So normally, in the ordinary deliberative situation, the facts about the past, our beliefs about the past don't have any probabilistic effect on the past in a way that's not screened off by the present state of the world. So all probabilistic influences

that our beliefs have into the past are screened off by other facts about the world. Not so in the future for the reason I said said because the beliefs I have about the future are going to guide how the future goes by way of having influence on my actions. The way probabilistically to characterize the ordinary choice situation is exactly that. My choices, which are representations of the future, are correlated with what happens. Yes. Think about the structure of a Newcombe's problem. You're given these warring intuitions.

You're told on the one hand, whether you choose one box or whether you choose two boxes, highly correlated with whether there's a million dollars under the one box or not. But you're also told, ah, but there's no causal connection. Why? Because the demon or whatever puts the money there before you make your choice. So you're put in this situation where, as I would describe it, there's interference between your choice that is non-screened off probabilistic correlation between your

choice and whether there's a million dollars there, but then you're told, but there's no causal link. So you're kind of put in this position where normally I think in the normal choice situation, what are causal relations? Causal relations are probabilistic correlations between interventions and the fact that you establish that there's a causal link between A and B just in case interventions on A retain a correlation with B. They're correlated with what happens at B. So the ordinary choice situation is one in which you have causal influence over the future but not the past.

Newcombe's paradox is precisely putting you in a situation where your choice is going to be probabilistically correlated with what's there and then you're told, but there's no causal link. And then intuitions are wheeled in to say, of course there's no causal link because, you know, the choice was made in advance. And so this whole cluster of things that normally conspire together to make you think that the future is subject to your choices and you have an influence over the future and all causal relations run in that way, they're deliberately fooled with.

I want to put interference at the bottom of that. I want to say, you know, what the right way to see this whole cluster, the relationships between this whole cluster of concepts is this. There's always been this mystery about how do we get the direction of causation out of physics. If physics gives you these laws that are temporally symmetric, here's the way to do it. You take the physics, you take the geometry, the matter content, and then you take the thermodynamic error, and then you notice that your own actions are going to have the status for you of interventions in the world. And then you notice that in a situation where there's a thermodynamic arrow,

all probabilistic effects of interventions are going to run into the future and leave the past untouched. So that's where causation comes from. Intervention is at the root of it. The asymmetry comes from the thermodynamic gradient. So here's what's going on in Newcomb's paradox. You're given the situation where you're told probabilistic effects of intervention without being given any mechanism. Probabilistic effects of intervention run into the past, but there's no causal link. Now make your choice. Like sorry, it sets up a...

Janen, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you. I can tell that you care not only about me through this conversation, thank you, but to the audience as well, and how simple and clear your explanations are. You're an expert explicator. Thank you so much for spending over two hours with me now. It's been really fun. Thank you for having me. Now one question.

What one lesson, if you had to pick one, from someone else was given to you or imparted to you that's had the most positive influence on your life? Can I say anything? Can I say anything? Yes. Or does it have to be? Okay, so, Basvan Trassen, my advisor, just said like a year or maybe a couple of years after I graduated, told me this story. It's going to be a little bit of a long story, but it's worth it because it really did make

a huge impact. Please. So he tells this story about there was this guru and there's this guru, this kind of mystical guru that was supposed to have this amazing influence, like this kind of amazing effect on people who are troubled. There's this guy who's really troubled and it was weird because by all external circumstances, I mean by all external observations, he had everything. Beautiful wife, beautiful family, super successful career, really good looking guy. He just looked like a superstar, but he was really deeply troubled inside. Nobody understood it because he looked like he had everything in him.

His life was easy, but he was deeply, deeply troubled. So he decided to go see his guru. His guru would go travel around and you would have to line up for hours to see him and the guy would just be sitting on a mat, but he would speak to anyone who wanted to speak to him. Sitting in a room, you know, and what would happen is people would line up and one by one they would go in. Front door, there's a back door to the little kind of plot.

People would walk in one by one. Sometimes it would take like long, long time, you would talk to someone and then they would go out the back door. Another person comes. Sometimes it would be like really quick. Someone go in, they go out the back door, the next person come in. There's like a little ding that would happen. So someone would go in, you'd wait a while, sometimes an hour, sometimes three seconds, ding, next person would go in. You wouldn't see the other person going out. So he goes when the guy's coming as close, you know, a couple of hours away, goes there. He takes the whole day off, he's the first person to line up, but there was already like

hundreds of people there, so he lines up. And he's really sure that this guy is going to understand him. He's like really worked up about it because, you know, nobody really sees like the suffering that he has in his soul. So he waits and he waits and he waits. He waits as one person goes in, ding, goes out. One person goes in, ding, goes out. And he's getting closer and closer to the front and he's becoming more and more emotional

because he really feels like he's got this thing that he needs to unburden himself of and he feels sure that this is his last resort, he's going to understand. He came closer and closer to the friend in line, guy in front of him goes in, he's completely overcome with anticipation, waits and waits, ding, that guy goes out. And he sits down in front of the Guru and you can see looking into his eyes that the guy's going to understand him. And he looks up at him and the Guru looks at him with just unfathomable gentleness and he says to him, you have much pain. And he just sobs because he feels this is the one person that had just done it.

And he looks up at him, you know, chiseling. And the guy looks at him and says, get rid of it. Ding! So I think that to me, that is like, there are optional forms of like, suffering and you don't really have problems a lot of the times that you think you do. You don't really have problems a lot of the times that you think you do. So for me, I swear to God, that changed the suffering of my soul in a lot of ways. Well, why don't you tell me about a problem that you thought was something externally caused but then you realized it was internally and that you had control over it. I couldn't care. Okay, so this is probably personal. and that you had control over it. I couldn't care. Okay, so this is probably personally,

you'd be super, I don't care a lot about things like professional success and when things like external status stuff. I think realizing that made it much easier for me to think about the things I wanted to think about and sort of have the sorts of freedoms that I wanted to have. That for me was like amazing. And I don't know whether that's what Bas meant to teach me in that, but as soon as you get rid of all of that and you're fortunate enough to have your health and you know, sort of enough money, all you need. So you mean to say that you don't care about getting these appointments or fellowships or what have you,

but does that eliminate your intimidation by someone else who is critiquing you and they have a 20-year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study or something like that? None of it matters that much to me. So I neither seek it nor, I mean of course that stuff is hurtful, but you know, in some ways I don't, I don't seek to be like sort of, you know, a tall poppy. So it makes me less of a target. I think. Yeah. So all that's true.

Yeah. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. This has been lovely. I really's beautiful. Thank you so much. This has been lovely. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Hi there.

Kurt here. If you'd like more content from theories of everything and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my sub stack at kurtjymungle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time. You also get bonus written content exclusively for our members. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org. You can also just search my name and the word sub stack on Google. Since I started that sub stack, it somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, sub stack for those who are unfamiliar is like a newsletter, one that's beautifully formatted, there's zero

spam. This is the best place to follow the content of this channel that isn't anywhere else. It's not on YouTube, it's not on Patreon. It's exclusive to the Substack, it's free. There are ways for you to support me on Substack if you want and you'll get special bonuses if you do. Several people ask me like, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the field of theoretical physics, of philosophy, of consciousness. What are your thoughts man? Well while I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics.

And it's the perfect way to support me directly. KurtJaimungal.org or search KurtJaimungle substack on Google. Oh, and I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors and researchers saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students. That's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer or what have you and there's a particular standout episode that students can benefit from or your friends, please do share. And of course, a huge thank you to our advertising sponsor, The Economist. Visit Economist.com slash Toe, T-O-E, to get a massive discount on their annual subscription.

I subscribe to The Economist and you'll love it as well. Toe is actually the only podcast that they currently partner with, so it's a huge honor for me, and for you you're getting an exclusive discount. That's economist.com slash toe. And finally, you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on all the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. I know my last name is complicated, so maybe you don't want to type in Jymungle, but you can type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gain from

rewatching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comment that toe listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on one of those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever podcast catcher you use. I'm there with you. Thank you for listening.