Within Reason - #132 Vsauce - Does Anything Exist?

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

Michael Stevens is the creator of Vsauce, one of YouTube's most popular channels. Alongside Hannah Fry he hosts the newly-launched podcast The Rest is Science.Timestamps:0:00 - Does Anything Really Exist?10:32 - Is Michael a Mereological Nihilist?19:42 - Are Philosophers Overcomplicating Function Behaviour?25:24 - Do “You” Really Exist?41:57 - Free Will and the Bicameral Mind Theory50:09 - Why the Future Isn’t Changing Like It Used To59:11 - The Scientific Mystery of Torque?01:17:46 - Consciousness

Get no frills delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at p.c.express.ca. Let me try this British diet, Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper Zero sugar. It's probably their newer formulation because there's also a Dr. Pepper zero sugar. Wow

Another wonderful British export I gotta say this is different than Diet Dr. Pepper in the United States Do you think? I think that it's a more modern formula. Hmm. It's more syrupy. That was what they couldn't quite crack in the 80s.

How do you make a sugar-free drink taste like it's got that sugar thickness? And how does that do? That's got it. Yeah. Are you sure it's not to do with the glass? Because you know how drinks taste different depending on what they're coming out? Yeah.

Yeah. Do you know why that is? I think it's probably a lot of things. Not just the container, but how much carbonation they can put in, how much of the syrup they can put in based on different technologies, whether it's a can or a bottle. A fountain drink is very different. It can be a lot more fizzy. But you can also crank the syrup up more than the manufacturer recommends. But the recommended amount is what's in the canned and bottled versions.

Oh, really? I wonder how far away you have to get from that for it to no longer count as Dr. Pepper anymore. I do wonder legally what you can do as a vendor. Yeah. Because you bought the bag. Yeah. You bought the syrup. How much you mix in with the carbonated water should be up to you.

It's up to the consumer as well because you've seen in a fountain the beverages come out and you've got like a dark band and a light band. Yeah. And that light, that's both of them mixing. They mix more in the cup. But if you push your cup on that machine and then scoot to the side so the lighter beam just falls and gets drained away, you're mainly getting syrup and you can get like super head. They call it heavy soft drinks. Yeah. But you're putting a label on it. You're saying this is Dr. Pepper. Yes. So if you, on the back end, crank up that syrup level, above where Dr. Pepper would like it to be, could you get in trouble? But who would you get in trouble with? Would you get in trouble with the consumer who's expecting Dr. Pepper or with Dr. Pepper who sold you a product that you have to sell in a particular way, you know?

Well, yeah, you would, I mean, depends how you define trouble. Yeah. Like the consumer might say, oh, this is too thick. Yeah. But you could actually be liable monetary. to the Dr. Pepper bottling company. Yeah, because if you're just like selling the wrong thing, I mean, if it's not Dr. Pepper and it's being sold as Dr. Pepper,

then presumably you can sue for your money back. But what counts? Right. Oh, yeah, a customer could say, I want my money back. Yeah. This machine isn't working. Yeah, but then I wonder if, you know, somebody who'd drunk a bunch of bottled Dr. Pepper

could just have normal draft Dr. Pepper and go, you know, this doesn't taste the same. I want my money back too. Yeah, this is mirology. Exactly. What is Dr. Pepper? Yeah, it is. Its recipe has changed a bunch over its history.

Yeah. And we're at the point where I fell down this rabbit hole for a while of trying to figure out how to make Coca-Cola flavor. Right. What is that secret recipe? Is it nutmeg and vanilla and toasted orange or like what is it? And I realized it's none of those. It is a concoction of laboratory byproduct chemicals. with names like oxyphenoline, seven,

and it happens to have like a cherry note when consumed by a human. But it's not cherries. It's not even based on cherries. It's just something that was found, and that's their secret. You can use equipment to analyze what the chemical components of something are.

And if you put in Coca-Cola or Dr. Pepper, you don't get like the computer doesn't spit out, oh, it's got fresh cherries in it. Even a cherry won't register as containing cherry, because cherry is a word we give to an incredibly complex suite of chemicals. Yeah, and I suppose ultimately those chemicals are themselves made up of smaller things, such that if you had a truly accurate ingredient list for Coca-Cola, it would just sort of say quarks, electrons, you know, mass charge. That's right. Yeah, I saw a meme once that was like, okay, here's what's in apple fruit snacks. And the ingredient list has a million things with hard to pronounce names.

But here's what's in an apple. Ingredients, apple. And then, of course, the retort was, okay, actually here's what's in an apple. It's like Iron 3, and there's all these chemicals that make up the very complex organic structure that is an apple. And then there was a third revision of the meme where someone just had fruit snacks and an apple. And then underneath it, they just had all the... subatomic particles in the standard model. And that's it. They're the same.

Who is it that said if you want to make a sandwich, you know, you start with the universe. Is that Carl Sagan? Yeah, Carl Sagan. Like, if you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe. Yeah. Somebody tried to do this once. I forget who it was, but as like a project, they tried to make a sandwich from scratch, by which they mean like, you know, growing the bread, like rearing a pig to get the bacon for

the BL and doing everything necessary. And I want to say it costs like $15,000 and took about two years or something, right? Yeah. And so I suppose the question that's being driven at here and it's a good way in actually is kind of when does something count as a part of something else? Like how far do we have to dig down into something's parts before we're satisfied to say we know what makes it up? You know, like if you've got a table, I can say what's a table made out of, it's made

out of a surface and its legs. And you could then say, but what are the legs made out of? What are they made out of wood? Well, what's wood made out of? And you can kind of keep on going. But it seems like that's a bit of an illegitimate approach. If I were to ask you what this table's made out of and you told me it's made out of electrons, you know. Well, yeah, I mean, I would just say there's no table there. There's a bunch of stuff. And it's tabling right now. And it can table in a lot of different ways. I can remove one of its legs and it's still tabling pretty well. There's some things it's doing that are atypical for a table, like missing one of its legs. But once you start asking about what the table as a noun is made out of, you're overcounting

the universe. You're saying, well, there's all this stuff. And then there's also what they make up. So there's all that stuff plus one extra thing. They're combined nounhood. And I say we can just reject that when we're being technical. Obviously, I don't walk around going, oh, man, I'm tired. And my friend's like, oh, sit down in that chair. And I'm like, what's that? There are no chairs.

But the only way to avoid a lot of these clever little funny paradoxes, like the ship of Theseus, the Sorties paradox. You just, you have to admit that, look, it's a fiction. We've cut the world up and we've added names of our own invention. Yeah, I mean, it seems like the solution is staring us in the face here. Like you take something like the Ship of Theseus. I read recently, I don't know if this is true, but I read online that apparently the Wikipedia page for the Ship of Theseus has had some, you know, two, three thousand edits over its history and that there's no single sentence on the Wikipedia page for the Ship of Theseus that was in the original Wikipedia entry for the Ship of Theseus. that was in the original Wikipedia entry for the Ship of Theseus, which I thought was quite a nice touch.

Yeah, it's a nice touch. And it's a great way to show what's really going on. Because if you said, well, you know, the Ship of Theseus article today isn't the same as the one in 2007. I'd be like, of course it's not. We know it's not. It has a different name. Yeah. Because the page has an actual like revision name with a timestamp and everything. Yeah. But when it comes to a boat, it feels more like, well, boats can't just change. So you see that the identity of something really depends on the context. Yeah. From a really far away perspective, it's the same. It's the Wikipedia page for the ship of Theseus.

Yeah, yeah. But you zoom in closer and you go, well, is that the same boat? Well, it's the boat that has been continuously registered to Michael Stevens. But if you're asking me, where's the original material the boat was made out? of, that could be somewhere else. Yeah, and it seems like the only non-arbitrary way to answer a question, like, well, which is the ship of Theseus? Is it the original planks that you've reconstructed?

Or is it the one you end up with all of the revisions? The only non-arbitory answer to that is that there is no such thing as the ship of Theseus. There's just matter that gets arranged in a particular way. And we put labels on it. In other words, it's whichever one you want it to be. Yeah, so it's really, it's much more legitimate to ask, where is the stuff currently being labeled the ship of Theseus?

Yes. Or where is the stuff that once was? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the ship of Theseusine. And that's when you have to get a bit technical and say, well, what do you mean when you say, which is the ship of Theseus? Because if you mean the matter that made up the ship of Theseus, well, those will be subatomic particles that are probably all over the universe by now. You know, they're sort of spread out all over the place. But I don't think that's functionally what you're interested in right now because you want to go to sea.

Yeah. So if you were asking, if the captain comes in and says, where's the ship of Theseus? You'd say, it's over there, sir, you know, here's your steering wheel or whatever they call them on boats. Whereas if, you know, Zeno walked in and said, where's the ship of Theseus? You'd say, it's nowhere and everywhere. Yeah, the question is a pseudo question. Depends on the context, right? And it's the same thing asking, what is a table?

I mean, you made a video called What is a chair? Or do chairs exist, right? Yeah. And it's one of those sort of classic V-sorts. titles, right? The sort of like, who even knows what that question could even be getting at? Right. Why would you even ask?

But this is the kind of thing you're getting at, right? And this is, you use the word already, mereology, the study of parts and how parts relate to holes. Are you then a myriological nihilist in thinking that there are no real material object? There's just stuff that we arrange? If that's what that means, then yes. I don't remember all the isms and ists that exist in ontology, but I believe that there is stuff.

But I don't believe that there are any nouns besides the vague noun stuff. Interesting. So stuff for you is like, you know, whatever's actually there. There's just stuff like matter, particles, that kind of stuff. And when you put that together in an arrangement, like into this chair or into this table, that there's not actually some new thing called a table or a chair. It's just essentially a label that we're putting on an organization. And stuff does not mean matter.

because there are ways to put stuff together to make antimatter there's a way to put stuff together to make a dream Yeah, right, right, right. That does sound like some kind of nihilism, doesn't it? So maybe it is myriological nihilism. I really like, forget the guy's name,

big author in the field who, I think his whole thing, he called it Organicism. Peter Van N-Wagan. Yes. Okay. So his whole thing was that, and I could not put my finger on why he believed this. I read his book over and over again, but he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely there's only stuff, except if it's alive, then it's a brand new thing. And it almost felt like it just seemed like life, living things were a bit magical.

Yeah, right. But he couldn't really define when life began or not. Is a tornado alive? Yeah. It's always exchanging matter with its surroundings, and it's moving, but it also maintains its shape. A whirlpool is an even better example. Like, it maintains its position and shape, but it's made out of something different every second. But it's not alive. What about a flame?

Is a flame alive? And I think he came to a point where he was like, I don't know, but whatever counts is alive is a thing. Yeah. Above and beyond the stuff that it's made out of. And the reason I like that is that it can be summed up so hilariously as the belief that people exist, but they don't wear clothes. Yeah. Yeah, because clothes just being a material object are not actually existing things. They're just matter or stuff arranged clothes wise is the language that people use.

I mean, we could break this down for a moment because we're sort of in the deep end here a little bit. it, like, there is this question of, you know, if a table is made up of its top and its legs, why do we consider those put together as one object, but this glass of water that's on top of the table, we consider it a separate object. Well, maybe, oh, I can lift it up like that. Yeah. But I could, I could, you know, unscrew the legs and lift the top off as well. And you gave the example of a bikini in your video.

Yeah. That's one thing. But they don't touch each other. And is it like, if I put the top half of a bikini in a car and made it sort of start driving away, is there a point at which it's far enough away that we can't meaningfully say it's one bikini anymore seems like it's kind of just up to us. Yeah, it is. It's an art. It's not a science.

Yeah, right. You know, my favorite way of explaining that idea is to say, does the left-hand side of this table exist? Yeah, right. Because, like, yes, it does, but clearly its distinction as a thing is dependent on our minds. And where you're standing?

Exactly. The left side to me is different than what you would call the left side. Yeah. And, you know, the bikini is a really fun example to think about because one thing that ties the two parts of a bikini together is that they match, but they don't have to. Yeah. You can wear a different mismatched bottom and top. However, I still think like the folk philosophy, the folk philosopher would say, well, but that's not the same bikini. You've taken two different bikini parts and put them together.

So then all it takes is for a fashion designer to design a bikini that doesn't match. There is no missing half to missing half somewhere. That's just it. That's how it's sold. Now it is one bikini. And in order for it to be one bikini, we're having to rely on the intentions of an artist. And that's what this all comes down to. It's just what's the context and what's relevant and who's asking.

Yeah, I kind of want to ask like if you had two bikinis and you took the top. half of one and the bottom half of the other and you wore that how many bikinis are you wearing i guess you want to say i'm kind of wearing two halves so maybe i'm wearing one in total but it's not the same thing as wearing just one bikini one half plus one half doesn't equal one yeah it's a bit weird right it's weird to think about but okay here's my suggestion right so peter van in wagon says there's something about life that seems special and if we try to define what life is we might say that like it seems to be made up of stuff which like acts towards an end like all of the parts of my body broadly speaking are involved in you know keeping me alive and and you know

causing me to promulgate genes all of the parts of a tree seem to tend towards its sort of preservation a table kind of only does that artificially it's not naturally right like I have made it so that this leg and this tabletop sort of all move towards this end of holding up a glass. And so the table only exists as a sort of artificial version of this, but where that exists in nature, like parts that act towards a unified end, that's what gives us means to say that it's one thing, something like that maybe. Sure. Okay. I'm following that, but I don't agree because you still need to figure out where you draw the long. line, does a crystal have an end? Like, if you break the crystal and put it in the right solute, it forms again. Is it alive? Yeah. Um, a plumbob always hangs down. Yeah. It's always pointing down. It has a purpose. I just don't think we should use an ideological approach

to define a thing. Yeah. Because what its purpose is depends on who's using it. Um, a, um, a a beautiful silver knife from some antique piece its purpose is to be beautiful it's maybe not to eat with no no you can't eat with it that's too special but if I'm in an emergency situation and I'm locked in a burning room and I can't get the door open

it's a way to open the door is what it is that's its purpose right now yeah it does seem to me that the way we define objects is functionally you know this is a table because of what it does for us and that that is kind of how we tend to navigate the world. And that might be why, despite the fact that in reality,

we've just got a bunch of input data, there's lights and sounds and all kinds of vibrations in the air that are all sort of coming into my brain. Why is it that my brain divvies things up? Why is it that my brain sees this as a cup and this is a table and you as a person and this is a mic stand? Maybe it's because it serves the function. It means we can use it.

We can do stuff with it and it helps us to survive. and that that's the reason why we divvy things up. Yeah, I completely agree. And I'm not convinced that's the right answer or the correct answer, but I think that I'm going to always be biased towards, well, it's just natural selection. Yeah, yeah. There was a survival benefit to not going around saying, look at all this stuff. It's important and it's way more easy for us to just nounify all the properties that are relevant to us and say, look, it's just a chair. Yeah.

Yeah. That's so much easier. And it was someone goes, well, is a horse a chair? You can sit on it. It's got four legs. They go, look, dude. We call it a horse instead of chair for a reason because we've packed up an enormous amount of meaning in this one word. Yeah. Where by meaning, I mean, everything that we're not saying. When I say horse, I'm not saying a living organism that evolved on earth that eats this and that kind of diet with this kind of physiology. I'm just saying the word horse. and yet you know exactly what I'm talking about. That's what we evolved to do. That's how we, that's our niche. Like, we don't have big claws and we don't have a hump on our back to store a lot of fat. The thing that we do is we create meaning.

And we share that meaning. It allows us to cooperate. It allows us to use our minds to survive. And it's been quite successful. Humans can live anywhere on Earth, but a parrot can't. It does make me think about how much philosophers are just kind of over-complicating. I mean, I don't know which discipline you consider yourself most aligned with. You've just launched a new show.

The rest is science. Congratulations, by the way. I think that's extremely exciting, and you'll do a whole episode on talking about chairs and myriology and that kind of stuff. But like, you know, a lot of what we're talking about here seems to sort of land us in the realm of philosophy, and a lot of the time you have scientists who come along and say that, you know, atoms behave in this way and laws of physics are this way, and the philosopher comes along and says, ah, but have you thought about technically, couldn't this be this? And couldn't that be that? And you kind of just want to say, look, mate, go and do that on your own in a room if you're

interested, but it's not very functional here. You know, do you think that that's going on a lot of the time with these kinds of questions? Are we just sort of sitting around doing something that's totally useless and getting in the way of functional behavior? Yeah, well, that's the point. It's supposed to get in the way. Yeah. Like, a philosopher's job is to not find answers, but to find questions. Yeah. And sometimes it is so stupid.

It's so irrelevant to anything. But they've got to keep doing it because we need more questions. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. We actually need answers less than we think. And so the philosopher is a professional question asker. But yeah, that does mean that you don't need much to do philosophy. I'm reminded of this joke. Let's see if I can tell it, where, okay, yeah, right.

So the dean of the university is speaking to the head of the engineering department. And he says, look, we got to talk about how much your department spins. Your budget is way too high. Like, why can't you be more like the math department? All they need are pencils, paper, and waste paper baskets. Actually, no. Why can't you be like the philosophy department? All they need are pencils and paper.

It's like nothing's a bad idea. Yeah, it's all, it's fine. It's all philosophy. But that's its job. Yeah. Yeah, one of the perhaps competitors for least helpful contributions in the history of philosophy might be this idea about muriology. which you also discussed in that video, which is known as myriological universalism.

It's like the opposite of the nihilistic approach. Because some people look at this problem and they go like, yeah, I mean, I do want to say that when I put a leg and a tabletop together, I get a new object called a table. Yeah, when I put a, when I put a bulb on a stand, I get a new thing called a lamp. And someone says, well, why isn't the table in this cup also an object? Yeah. And they go, huh. Yeah, I guess it is. Okay, so why isn't this table and the minute.

hand of Big Ben on the southern face a new object and they go it is it is and so you get this position that every single possible arrangement of objects is its own new object is its own new thing and when I'm sat in a philosophy classroom and I hear somebody talking about a view like that I do start to wonder if even if the cost really is just pencils and paper if we're sort of of if we're sort of wasting our time a little bit here. Well, I certainly don't think so because I find it really, really fun. Yeah. And as a member of a species whose niche is finding meaning, it can be found for its own sake.

That said, I think that there's like a therapeutic benefit to myriology, to asking, but like, what are you? Are you the sum of your parts? Are you the culmination of your past? Or are you something else? You can almost be whatever you become. I don't think it's necessarily helpful to explain whether a spoon exists or not. But a person, how many of me have there been? Is there just this one that's changing or is every moment a new me?

I don't know, but sometimes I choose one or the other to understand myself. Yeah, because there's a sense in which if you were speaking to like a medical doctor, you might say that five-year-old who existed all those years ago, that's the same person as me, as if to say, oh, yeah, I've had a chronic illness and, yeah, when I was 10. And so am I the same person I was when I was 10? Yeah, of course I would. But there's another context in which, in terms of who you are as a person, morally and your relationship to people, you might want to say, I'm a completely different person to who I was when I was 10. And I, most people sort of have to pick one of the other. It's like, well, what do you really think is the truth of the matter? Are you or are you not the same person you were when you were 10? Are you saying that you kind of just choose which answer to give depending on the context? Yeah, just depending on what makes me feel better. That's what we do. Yeah.

You know, that, and maybe there will come a day where, let's imagine that we answer this question. We figure out exactly what defines composition. We define exactly what things are and aren't and what a person is and what consciousness is. At that point, we cease to be humans. We're some new species that has those answers and doesn't live in the void of not knowing them. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Do you have like a hunch about, I mean, the question of personal identity through time is a big one.

on. But say like right now, right, like a sort of classic thought in philosophy might be that if I were to cut off your hand, you'd still be there. We could still have this conversation. You might be in a bit of pain, but I'm sure we could manage. Similarly, it feels like I could sort of just get rid of the lower half of your body. It feels like I could I could shave off your beard and, well, maybe you wouldn't be you in an important sense, but in a literal sense you would be. So maybe it's something to do with the brain, but then again, as you've pointed out in videos as well, you can sort of cut a brain in half and you still sort of get a conscious agent. Like, do you have a hunch as to what you are? Yeah, yeah, we're talking about

maximal amputation. How amputated can I be and still be me? At what point do you cut away a brain cell and it's like, oh, crap, he's gone. Well, my favorite way to approach it is to do like folk philosophy just what would a person say you look at how we talk about these things because in a way we actually have solved them we just don't know that we have or i shouldn't say solved we have found a way to cope with that question because if i'm trying to think where to begin i'll just say this if you're like asleep in the other room and someone says hey where is he i'm like who's in there okay but you're not consciously aware

while you're asleep but if you die you're gone you left us you passed but being asleep and being dead

are kind of similar in some ways in terms of like hey is he like listening to us right now is he like capable of doing things the sleep and death thing

yeah encourages me to believe that it's not so much about a set of properties it's about a set of potentialities. When you're asleep, you can still do some stuff later, but when you're dead, you can't. And that, I think, deep inside us is why we think of death as being you being gone.

I was reading some surveys from doctors about, like, when does a family accept that they have lost a loved one? And it's not when brain damage occurs. It's when the heart stops. Mm-hmm. And I thought that was, is that just a old traditional kind of belief that, well, the heart is life and the brain is just like, cools the blood. I don't know if anyone from Aristotelian times is still around. But what I'm saying is deep inside of us, we think of the heart as being once the heart's gone, it's over.

What do you mean the brain death? Well, then, you know, they're still alive. We can keep them alive with feeding tubes and stuff. Yeah. And I think that it comes back to the fact that your brain can. change significantly. You can have brain damage and never walk again, but you're still you. But if your heart stops, there's no potential for you to do anything again, even in a different way like you would if you lost part of your brain. Yeah. I mean, like losing memory seems like a really

important example here. Like somebody who can't remember what happened to them yesterday or five minutes ago. There's this guy called Clive something who has a seven second memory. He was a orchestral conductor and he had some kind of, some kind of medical thing. It wasn't an accident. It was like a virus or something that caused him to lose his memory every seven seconds. Right. And so you would sit down with him and you'd say, you know, what's going on? Like, how are you doing?

And he'll be like, you're the first person I've seen in 30 years. Yeah. And he kept a diary where every day he wrote, I'm alive for the first time. And then he'd cross it out and go, no, no, now I'm alive. that wasn't the real one and he would he would tick off the correct ones and then he'd go back through and he'd cross off the and there is a sense in which you want to say even without that psychological continuity you could take out that part of the brain entirely there's still a person who's unified across that time and others would think of it as being a continuous person like you kept calling him he got them them they and you also named him clive like he's got a name a single name um so that's why i of just lean on, your identity is linked to everything that you could do. And after all, that is what leaves when you die. Yeah.

When you die, you will never do anything that you could have done but didn't. Yeah. You know, a really interesting question to me, which I think I have not thoroughly explored enough, is the link between these two things, myriology, we were talking about before, and then this question of personhood and whether you can have a sort of similar philosophy of both. I mean, we said, like, there isn't really this thing call the table. We just sort of decide when to call at a table and how much of it we'd have to take away until it's no longer a table. We're doing the same kind of thing with people? Like, you've kind of just got, you can

take away this and you can take away that. And whether they're alive or dead or still the same person, kind of just depends on your context and function. Yeah, right. Like, there's the whole, like, would you love me if I was a worm? Yeah, right. That question is actually pretty deep. Because, well, what do you mean if you were a worm? Yeah. And I think that the average person means if my conscious experience was inside the body of a worm, they just mean my body changed because they don't think of the body as being them. They can lose an arm.

They can gain weight or lose weight and they're still them. They can be a worm and it's still them. The thing that isn't changing is the internal world. And so that's why I think that's like one of the best ways to define what consciousness is when you get into a discussion, and a lot of times people are talking past each other. Some are talking about awareness. Some are talking about interiority. I just say, look, consciousness is the thing that doesn't change for Phil in Groundhog's Day.

Every morning he wakes up and everything's changed back to the way it was on 6 a.m. Groundhog's Day. But he remembers that thing that's not changing. His wounds go away. But the thing inside, that's what we're trying to get at when we're talking about if you were a worm. What is, what part of the worm is you? It's that stuff. It's that mental interiority.

I have a question then, right? Like, if we can conceive of my consciousness inside of a worm, a lot of people who are like materialists about the world think that consciousness is just this thing that the brain does, that conscious experiences are just the same thing as brain activity. If that were the case, then surely in order to put your consciousness into a worm, you'd need to literally take your sort of big human brain and put it inside of a worm. If we can imagine taking your consciousness and fitting it inside of a worm, like taking it out of your brain and putting it into the worm brain, does that tell us that at least the way we're thinking about it conceptually, that consciousness is not tied to the brain in that materialistic way?

Or would it be that in order to have a worm with your consciousness, You'd need a worm with Michael Stevens' brain literally inside of it. I don't know. I mean, I believe but cannot prove that it could be, my consciousness could be replicated in a computer or with some much more space efficient system that could fit inside of a worm. But when I say my consciousness, I kind of just mean a thing that believes it is alive, believes it has conscious will, and also thinks that it is the continuation of my experiences.

Yeah. I don't know. if you could like build a machine that would just suddenly copy my brain and put it into this little special worm brain so that I like basically died and this worm went oh my gosh I don't have any arms I'm Michael though yeah I don't know what is there is there like a soul of mine that continues on and is like ah I'm dead I'm the thing in the worm is an imposter I don't know we'll have to just do that experience Well, here's a question, just to get an idea of your intuition here. Suppose that there's you and there's like your greatest enemy. I don't know who that is. They shall remain nameless, but you need to want bad stuff to happen to them and you want good stuff to happen to you. And I'm some sort of evil, crazy doctor. And I say, here's what I'm going to do, Michael. I'm going to put you into an operation. I'm going to put you on a table and you're going to go unconscious. I'm going to take all of your memories, all of your conscious experience, and I'm going to move it over to his brain. And I'm going to take all of his. And I'm going to take all of his. And I'm going to take all of his. And I'm, I'm going to move it over to yours. So when you wake up, you'll wake up with all of his memories. You'll look down at your hands and you'll go, gosh, just five minutes ago, I remember being him. And vice versa.

Now, before I do this operation, I'm going to tell you that one of these after the operation, I'm going to torture. Who do you want me to torture? Not the body I'm inhabiting. So you'd want me to torture the other guy's body because he'll wake up with your memories. Hold on, wait. So he'll wake up, he'll wake up with all of... When does the torture happen? Afterwards.

After the switch. Right. So what I've swapped is, is all of the memories and all of this sort of continuous experience. Yeah. None of the physical matter. Right. Just literally sort of as if I can go in as if it's a computer and tap, tap, tap and get rid of your memories and put his memories into you. Yeah.

You know, who do you want me to torture? I want you to torture my body containing his experience. Yeah. that's interesting because now if if everything about you physically stays the same everything physical that makes you up stays the same and yet you say well I'd rather that this physical self be tortured because I'm going to be over there yeah does that give us an argument for like the immateriality of the mind or the or the or the self because all of the material is still the same but you are not identifying yourself with it anymore you know yeah it makes me really

question things like the emotion of revenge yeah Because if you made a clone of my worst enemy, and then you said, well, you can torture the clone we just made, it wouldn't give me the same pleasure, even if it had all the same memories and everything, really. Yeah. And it's hard to pinpoint why. But then it makes me question, why would I even enjoy torturing my worst enemy if they hadn't been cloned? Because they also change over time. In one second, they will be a clone of who they were a second to go. But I get more pleasure out of their suffering than like, hey, we made a thousand clones of them that all think that they're the real one. You can pick one to beat up. I'd be like, that just doesn't feel bun. anymore anymore yeah it's like maybe maybe it's because all the other clones are not getting the punishment that they deserve yeah that would be an interesting scenario but i know what you mean like it doesn't feel satisfying i this came up once in a video i was doing where someone suggested something like you know making a perfect clone of hitler and sort of punishing him for right war two and whether that would satisfy our sense of justice would we feel that justice had been done

because we've got this figure who wakes up and goes, yeah, it's me. I remember doing that. Yeah, this was, this was me. I did it last week and we punished them for it. Would we be satisfied? So it wouldn't feel very satisfying. Yeah. But it should in a way because that person who is being punished thinks that they really are.

Yeah, right? So someone who did what he did is experiencing the consequences. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And yet it doesn't change what happened. so you're missing that piece. Yeah. Because also there's a reverse question here.

If we want to say, well, he didn't do it, but as long as he thinks he did it, that's a good reason to punish him. Does that mean that if someone does commit a crime and then they forget about it and they genuinely don't think that they did it? Do we now not punish them? Because the thing that matters is that, you know, whether or not they think they did it. Yeah, I know, I know. So what you've got to do is wipe your memory and you can get away with any crime. Yeah, right.

So the only way I can kind of feel about it is that maybe we should make punishment less cruel. Like, okay, look, you did it. You don't remember that you did. Or you didn't do it, but you really think you did. Let's just, okay, and the first example is better. You did it, but you don't remember that you did it. Or you did it, but you're actually a clone of the consciousness of the real. bunch of matter that did it. I just think we still, we need to separate them from society,

but make sure that they're happy. Don't execute them or punish them, but just because we want everyone to be safe, we're going to put you guys on the clone planet. Yeah, because it's purely preventative. It's just preventative, but we want it to remain, like, fair. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking a second ago, we mentioned Peter Van Inwagon, who has this sort of weird and wacky view about life being unified. There's this sort of argument that derives from his work about consciousness and about the immateriality of consciousness. Because you know this view of myriology that you have, that there's no such real thing as a chair, there's just stuff, and it's arranged chairwise, and we've put a label on it. But there's no real distinction

between a chair and the table, and it's all just stuff that we've just arranged. And NMwagen has this thought of like, well, okay, here's our first premise then. There are no real distinctions between material objects. There are no distinct material objects that exist. Premise two. Minds are distinct. My mind is distinct from your mind. Your mind is distinct from my mind. Conclusion, if there are no distinction between material objects, but minds are distinct, then minds are not material. Wait, why is there no distinction between material objects? Because for this view of myriology, it's like you don't actually have a chair and a table. Yeah. You've just got a bunch of atoms. Yeah. Or fundamental stuff,

as you like to put it. And we've just sort of put a label on that and put a label on this. Yeah. But it's all just one big soup of stuff, right? That we're just... Well, yeah, but it's different stuff. Mm. The stuff here that you're sitting on is different than this stuff. Yeah. And the properties they're exhibiting are different, different colors, different hardnesses. Like, so I guess that would be my response. Yeah. But it does sound like a pretty. clever little funny way of going I think it's great fun this I've just proved that the mind is immaterial yeah with two with two little sentences yeah two relatively controversial sentences but once that once you've sort of got on that bandwagon it becomes an interesting I think that might be

part of his thought because what you were saying earlier it's a bit of a weird view I think there is this element to which we can look at like you know is that a part of that and is this one object or many objects there is a sense in which we feel unified as a sense in which I feel like I am a person and so there's an intuitive force to saying that well life like me there is some real unity going on there yes yes um and i think that you feel that way and i feel that way about myself not because it's correct but because it has an enormous survival advantage i think the story of human evolution is among many other things the story of us becoming more and more sovereign and identified with something very specific so even it's not just

This is me and my body, but also my will. Like, that thing that I just did, did I decide to do that or not? Does a cat or a lobster make conscious decisions and then, like, regret them and explain itself and feel a certain, like, self-authorization for what it does? I think that's something that came even later in the human history than you might think. What do you think about conscious choice and decision making? I mean, you've probably been asked before, but do you think that there is such a thing as free will? Ooh, that's a very good question for me to answer after I go to the bathroom.

I'm sorry. The Dr. Pepper. Cut to the Dr. Pepper commercial. No, what was it? Zero is just going right through me. I'll be right back. Yeah, sure thing, man. We're back.

We're back. I'm back. Do I believe in free will? will. I don't know what I will eventually decide. I think today, if you asked me today, which you did, I would say, I don't think so. I really don't think that we do, but because we're all so ignorant, we get to pretend that we do, and it's really incredible. That I can say, golly, I'm responsible for things. There's something called I that has authority over this body. and is responsible for what it does.

And I think, though, that really it's a fiction that was created in order to make our species more fit to survive on this planet in the niche that we had to take on in order to continue. I think that we have an enormously intelligent, non-conscious brain that decides how we feel about. things and decides what we should do and we listen to that who's we what how can i listen to it isn't it me well we developed a feeling of a separation between the non-conscious instinctive responses to stuff and the agent that does it um i think that it just helped us as life became more and more complex. I'm sure you're familiar with the bicameral mind theory. Julianne and Janes.

No, I don't think so. Well, I'm currently really deep into this. You should get Brian McVeigh on your podcast. I've listened to everything that he's ever said, and his books are really fascinating too. In a nutshell, the bicameral mind theory, its most bold claim is that humans did not have consciousness in the sense of like I am self-aware inside my head until about like a thousand B.C.

Really? Yeah. So what did they have? They had voices in their heads. And those voices told them what to do. If you look at the Iliad, no one decides to do anything in that book. It's always Athena then filled me with the courage to fight or or and then the fates of hunger made me eat. There's absolutely no like, well, you know, the soldier started to feel like maybe he should call his mom because he missed her.

Interesting. Yeah, but then go forward to the Odyssey. And now we've got fully fledged people with opinions and desires. And it can't be, well, this whole way of thinking starts to explain why dreams appeared to be different in prehistory and even early history. So glad you said that. Why people reported hearing voices all the time, right? The Bible, I think the Bible is very much the story of humans becoming conscious. It began with, oh, yeah, God's like walking around with us all the time and telling.

me to build an arc and then it becomes oh um where to go hmm that's so tell tell me about the dreams thing dreams changed so dreams we read in in very old literature dreams are almost always like oh i'm i an angel came to me in my bed where i happened to be sleeping um dreams are are never described as oh well so okay it was really weird like there was really weird like there a horse, but it was like my mom and we were on the beach. No, the dreams are almost entirely in the oldest literature we have. I fell asleep in the barn and then a spirit spoke to me or something. They're in the barn. Yeah. It's like it's, it's, it's very sort of direct and communicative. It's not like imagistic and narrative. That's right. That's right. And I just got a book

about consciousness as being explained through the dreams of children. And I haven't read it yet, but I'm so excited because children's dreams also change over time as they become encultured into our world where you have will and you are an individual sovereign person locked inside your head. And that changes how they maybe experience dreams, but I think definitely it changes how they report dreams, what they think happened. while they were asleep. The reason why this will sound immediately suspicious is because like biological evolution doesn't work that quickly. So if dreams and our sense of like consciousness and all of that like changed that quickly, it kind of been like a evolutionary adaptation or something to do with the brain. So what changes? It was cultural. Right. It was about how you were raised. It was about how your parents

like interacted with you. I mean, I think that it's hard to do experiments like this. Like, oh, hey, let's take some newborn babies and like, what, never speak to them. Just like, I do have an idea for a movie that I call Motherland where some scientists do this. They take newborn babies and they put them into this room that is just a soft, warm room where there's like spickets where they can slurp the nutrients they need. and it can embrace them and hug them like the floor can move. And they're raised there as babies. They can never get hurt.

They get everything they need, but they never see an adult. They are never exposed to any culture. And the experiment is, what do they wind up believing? Yeah, yeah. Did they wind up going, oh, I think therefore I am, or what? Yeah. Yeah. So dreams, you said children's dreams also change over time.

And so that would give us an indication that, I mean, I guess you could say it's cultural. Like, it's not like cultural shift on a societal level, but as some kind of cultural view gets put into a person, the way that they consciously interact with the world is adapted. Yeah. Yeah. And the way the world pushes and pulls them, uh, causes certain parts of them to emerge. And it causes them to think about themselves and what it is to be conscious, what, they're actually experiencing in their own minds i think that's something that we learn yeah and i i think that and i cannot say too much about it because i don't know enough yet but i've got this

whole stack of books i think that interiority which is really what i'm talking about because i know consciousness can mean a lot of things i'm talking about feeling that you are in your own head um trapped on all alone okay i think that has risen and fallen through time i think that in the after the fall of Rome individuality went back down for a long time until the Renaissance and this isn't just like

oh I thought of this this is something that Brian McVeigh has talked about I don't know if it's true or not I do think however that the work that he and Julian Janes and many others have done

has allowed us to talk about and investigate consciousness in really fruitful ways even if they're completely wrong A slight tangent. It's just you said there, you know, I don't know if this is true, but I think it's interesting. And I suppose so much of the essence of who you are and what you do is to raise some interesting questions. And at the end of a V-source video or something, you might go.

And, you know, who knows? Like, thanks for watching. Like, go and think about it. Have you approached one of these topics, one of these big, consciousness and myriology and all the stuff that you talk about? And ever come away being like, actually, you know what? I've read the books. I heard this person's opinion, and I think, I think that's right. Like, you know, you do a video about free will and you come away from it going like,

yeah, no, it doesn't exist. Or, you know, if you'd have done a video about consciousness and come away being like, yeah, integrated information theory, that's, that's the one. Has that ever happened? Or is it always this sort of open-ended, you know, who knows? Yeah, well, it needs to stay open. Again, that's the job of philosophy. But I definitely think that I've taken a question, like, do chairs exist?

And I've been like, oh, my gosh, like, of course. they do. But then by the end I go, well, no, obviously they don't. However, I will forgive all of us and myself for constantly talking about chairs. I think that in my episodes, I tend to leave it open, but then take like an oblique path to say, well, what does it even mean that we can ask this and that we can't answer it? Like maybe there's something bigger or some analogy we can make that will make us appreciate the mystery because I don't like ending by saying well we may never know yeah right the world is full of mysteries see you next week yeah i've heard you say before that in finding ideas like this you kind of just do a bunch of interesting reading

and then afterwards you go like yeah so what's the video going to be about i'm interested in this and interested in that has there ever been an abandoned project in the sense of being like here's a really interesting question and then doing the reading and then either because it doesn't make sense or it feels like something you won't be able to easily communicate or because you don't have enough to sort of say on it or whatever that you thought I'd love to have made a video about that but I had to give it up no I've never given up I've never abandoned anything but sometimes they sit for a long time because I don't know either where to go, or how to make it an episode with a spine.

Yeah. And not just a whole bunch of like, well, and here's another cool, like, thing, whether it's a piece of trivia or just like a, here's a cool thought experiment. Like, I've been working really hard for a long time on an episode about stuck culture. This is the feeling that artistic innovation in our society has, like, reached a standstill, that television shows and music just aren't innovating like they used to. And this feels like a very subjective thing. It feels like a real generational thing.

You reach a certain age and you go, oh gosh, the music when I was younger was way more innovative. Or it was good back then. Or how come movies all look the same nowadays? I think that's part of growing up. But it's also true that like in the 90s, a 20-year-old television show looked like it was 20 years old the fashion the the grain of the film it was shot on like all these

things were really different but today a 20 year old show from like 2005 that's like the office it's like may as well have been made yesterday yeah right I'm watching a lot of Gilmore girls right now you forget that that show is as old as it is but you could not watch a show

in the 90s and forget that it was as old as it was so what's going on we also just have way more remixes and reboots than ever before. I mean, that's not even an opinion. That's just like very true. Yeah. And I think a lot of people like to try to pinpoint one cause, whether it's capitalism or some other big ism. But as I looked into this really hardcore, I'm like, man, there are 18,000 reasons for this feeling.

And obviously, Mark Fisher is one of the biggest philosophers who's investigated this with the idea of hauntology. You should, you should look some of his, just look up some of his lectures and speeches he's given. But then his book, Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life, really goes into this. He kind of frames it as saying that the future has been stolen from us. that there was a time when the future was like this brand new thing. And in the future, guns are going to go, pshu-p-sue, guns in the future still go they haven't changed. The future isn't changing like it did a hundred years ago.

Yeah, I mean, intuitively, and I haven't read about this at all, but I've got sort of two suggestions here, right? one is pessimism. One is that if you ask someone in the 1950s to draw the future, they would draw silver cars flying through the sky. And if you are someone to draw the future now, they show nuclear wastelands or environmental catastrophe. Like guns in the future will actually be, you know,

people throwing sticks at each other because the whole world would be destroyed. They don't go pew-pue, they go. Yeah. But the thing about particularly with television technology and music technology, people forget how recent this is. And there is like a diminishing returns thing, right? Like in the first 10 years of technology, the increases will be noticeably crazy. Think about the iPhone.

The jump from the first iPhone to the second iPhone would have been pretty significant. And then every iteration, it's like a diminishing return curve, right? And so maybe that's why if you're in the 90s watching a show from the 60s, there's this huge technological gap, might even be in black and white. Whereas from the 90s to, you know, 2010, it's still changing. It's just the rate is reducing. So maybe there really is a difference. Really is like a plateau that's reached. I mean, in the 50s and 60s, people didn't even really know what television was yet.

Yeah. You watch the Dick Van Dyke show, episode one. It's not a TV show. It's a play. Yeah. It's a play. I mean, that's what a live to tape sitcom was. you had a live audience and you had a third wall or a fourth wall that they looked through.

Yeah. Right. And in that first episode of the Dick Van Dyke show, he and his wife go to a dinner party and they all sing songs together because the show is just a musical, like, variety show. Yeah. And later on, they were like, we can actually do like storylines that exist within this universe and isn't just a show for an audience. And I think, yeah, before the iPhone, people didn't know what a phone was supposed to be. We haven't figured it out yet. So there were phones that opened in all these weird ways, and they would swivel open.

And then now we're like, it's a black rectangle. That's what a phone is. I know that there's folding phones now that are kind of resemble that clamshell idea. Yeah. But they still, what do they fold out into? A mirrored rectangle, you know? So I think sometimes that happens. And I think when there is innovation, we don't realize it's happening until we look back and go,

Oh, man, yeah. There was a time before I could order a burrito to be delivered to me. Just with like a box in my hand. There's a time before the internet. I was alive for it. But during that transition, I wasn't like, guys, things are changing. I was like, oh, MapQuest sucks. Yeah, you know.

But we're a bit more attuned to that now, perhaps, in that when something like chat, GPT, gets released. and people are immediately, perhaps uniquely, in sort of a historical, from a historical perspective, going like, this will change everything. You know, when the mobile phone was invented, I'm sure people thought, this is really neat. Hey, I'll be able to call someone when I'm on the go, but they could not have possibly imagined. I mean, who even uses a mobile phone to be a phone anymore? You know, it seems to be the least important part of the phone's technology, but maybe there's something just genuinely more radical about the new technology, or maybe we are just becoming a bit more. more tuned to realizing the butterfly effect of technology. Yeah, I think it's become really calcified in our minds, that expectation that things will change and get better and be perfect.

Yeah. And so when there is a major step forward, there's probably something that's not perfect about it. And we go, not impressed. This isn't the future yet. Yeah. I'm like, guys, it's been the future for a long time. Yeah. You know, you're hosting this new show. The rest is science. And I've got to say, like, we've spoken about issues like consciousness and free will and, you know, objects and atoms and how they all go together. But we haven't been talking about, like, scientific concepts and we haven't been talking about laws of nature and stuff. I wonder how much of your work previous to this particular show you consider to be a work of science or a work of philosophy or psychology or sort of

what box you would best sort of describe. Yeah, so I just call it entertainment. Right. I think to try to whittle it into like, oh, so you're a science YouTuber? I'm like, I don't know. I talk about language a lot too. Yeah, right. Word games and poetry and art and math

and philosophy. It's just whatever. It's all just stuff, dude. Yeah. Yeah. And we put labels on the stuff and we pretend that it's a noun, but it's all just entertainment. It's myriological nihilism about about my career yeah about

it's nihilism all the way down it seems or all the way up maybe which I suppose is the position but then you know you have spoken about science a ton

as well and it's always really interesting did I hear you once say that you spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of like talk and like why it sort of it sort of does that because I feel like a lot of the time

this is something I really resonated with because a lot of the time whenever a scientific explanation comes along to, you know, describe the relations between objects, there's always this remaining question of, but why is it doing that? Yeah. So like Isaac Newton, I give this example all the time, he discovers gravity, right? And he brilliantly, in an unprecedented manner, describes exactly how planets relate to each other. He realizes the same thing that makes this glass fall to the ground is the same thing that keeps the planets in orbit around each other.

and there's an inverse square law that if they're this far away it will be this amount of mass and this kind of attraction and he writes all of this in the Principia Mathematica and in the scolium to the second edition

of the Principia Mathematica he writes quite explicitly but as for what this gravity thing is as for like why it does this and why the objects behave in this way hypothesis non-fingo

is what he writes I frame no hypothesis he doesn't know he's got no idea And I feel like a lot of the time, that's kind of what's going on in science. So when I heard you say that you really wanted to get to the bottom of talk. Yeah. Like, I understand that if I move further away with a long lever, I can apply less force and lift something heavy.

But like, why, right? Yeah. Like, do you think that, I mean, my feeling is that a lot of what science does is it just describes. Right. It just describes that if you, you know, move further away from the sort of pivot point, you'll, you can apply less force and the object will go up. But it doesn't really go much further to telling you why. But I don't know if you agree with that assessment of science. Yeah.

I mean, I agree that the job of science is to, you know, describe and predict. Yeah. And so if I can describe a lever using a formula, I can predict what a lever will do in the future. and I can build a lever that'll lift something and it'll work as soon as I make it. But then that's not about asking why it works. Newton, it was very right to say, I don't have an hypothesis for what it is.

I can describe it. I can write formulas and you can just plug in whatever you want. I've condensed all of this behavior into one equation. But what is force? It would be very easy to have had a totally different history of science on this planet where we never even invented the concept of force. A force is not a thing. I can't fill this glass up with force.

Force is really human-centric. It's about how it feels to push something. You could have just as easily have said, well, there's mass and there's acceleration. But Newton said, ah, but what if we called their product force? I mean, that's what F equals M.A. was. It was a definition. It was, hold on, let's just say that there's this thing called F and that its relationship is the product of mass and acceleration. Because mass is this like thing that's out there. Today, we still don't really know. Are there two kinds of mass? Is there the inertial mass and the gravitational mass? Are those different things or the same manifestation of the same thing? We don't know. But we do know how to calculate what the thing will do. does. So when it came to torque, I spent years trying to get this. And other people have asked this question, too. Give me an intuitive physical origin for mechanical advantage. Because whenever you ask, why can I lift a car with a lever? I'm not that strong. I can stand on one end of a lever and lift an entire car up. You get kind of two answers. One is, well, it's not that surprising because force is not conserved. I'm like, I still don't have an answer. Or they'd say, well, you're trading force for distance.

Yes, it's not taking very much force to lift that car, but you're having to move a large distance. And I'm like, how the heck does the car know what's going to happen? Does the universe go, hold on, guys, he's going a long distance. So we don't need the force to be as high. Are there some physics police out there that are telling matter which way to go and what laws to follow? So it was one night, I don't know. how I found this, but I found a paper titled The Physical Origin of Tork, and it was a breakdown of exactly where that mechanical advantage comes from and why. And I've made my own models of it,

both physical and digital, to kind of show this off. I mean, we understand that TORC comes from the properties of rotation, that if something needs to move a certain distance, like a certain you know, linear distance, but it's rotating through it. The further out it is from the center of rotation, the, I guess the smaller that angle is going to be to cover like one inch out here versus one inch circling around here. But moment of inertia, which is how hard it is to rotate something, depends on that, but also on something else. Because the formula for moment of inertia isn't a MR mass times radius

torque is force times radius but inertia in the rotational sense is MR squared so if I've got like a turntable and I put some weights on it and I use a force to pull it like maybe there's just a string on a pulley

and then some weights and I let go of it it's going to start spinning it'll accelerate if I move those weights twice as far from the center I need not twice as much torque to get it to accelerate the same but four times as much.

Why? Okay, every answer online and every answer I got from the people I asked was, well, let's do a derivation of the formula. Yeah. And they would do it and sure enough, two R's pop out. And I'm like, I don't want it to pop out.

It popped out the second I touched a crowbar. Yeah, you're just describing it with symbols. Exactly. And so to describe the answer as given in this paper, the physical origin of torque, I kind of need some like visuals. Yeah. But the long and short of it is that not only is there the angular advantage, there's also the efficiency a force has when it pushes closer or further from a pivot point. The efficiency it has at rotating all of the mass that it's affecting. And that efficiency is not 100% because the speed of sound is finite.

Because forces don't travel instantaneously. Objects bend. There are no perfectly rigid objects. And if you allow your rod to bend, you realize, hold on a second, the geometry of the lever arms for the force application point and the load are different. And it doesn't matter how much that object bends. But when you do the trigonometry on these angles, what falls out is MR squared. And are you satisfied with that as an explanation? Yes, I am.

And it's hard to probably satisfy you because I haven't yet made this video. Right. And so I don't have the like a honed toolkit for explaining and showing it. Yeah, I get it. But that's what I'm currently working on. Well, I've got to say, I mean, you've got a talent for that, clearly. I mean, I think your video on spinning is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. I mean, I think it's my favorite video that you've made.

Oh, thank you. Because it's so weird. I mean, it's so weird that if you, like, you know, spin a bicycle wheel, it will stay up. And if you, if you, you know, turn it over like that, then you'll start spinning around on a spin. It just, and it's, again, that feeling of like, you know, when I watch someone sat on like a spinny chair, and they spin an object and then they go now watch this when I turn

when I turn the object I'm going to start spinning and again it's sort of like how does the universe know how does the chair know that I've done that and it's a it's a wonderful so which video are you talking about

the one whose thumbnail is a gyroscope I think it's probably that one I think it's called spinning and there's another one called laws and causes I'm talking about the first one okay okay yeah in laws and causes I double down on that even more where I'm like, if I'm spinning with two weights in my hand and I pull them in, I spin faster. Don't just tell me that it's about the conservation of angular momentum.

Because that's just describing what happens. That's not an explanation. Now, I don't know if you can ever totally explain something. That's one of the problems with explanations. But you can draw out some diagrams and you'll start to notice that when you pull something in, you're actually pulling it, well, forward or backward, I guess, depending on which way you're you're already spinning. And that is what you're, oh, I see, because if you're spinning, then when you pull inwards, the motion is actually a kind of forward.

Yes, the path, so if I'm spinning around and I've got two big weights in my hand, and I pull one in, the path that that weight takes is this arc. Yeah, it's not just curved path. And I'm, let me think. Oh, man, I need to remember this. The direction of my force to pull it directly into the center is actually pulling, like, myself around. I'm not just pulling the weight in.

I'm pulling myself towards the way, yeah. I'm accelerating myself. It's almost like you're grabbing an, like an object and sort of giving yourself a push on it. it's exactly like reaching out to a wall and pushing off the wall because I'm able to do that I'm able to move myself when I push the wall

because the wall is so much heavier than me in fact it's not just the wall it's the entire earth because the wall is like attached to the earth probably that I move because my mass is so much smaller but when I pull a weight in I'm also pushing off of that weight

it's just that we don't think that you can push off of something that you're holding in your own hand but oops you can if you're rotating Yeah. And spinning makes all the difference. Yeah. And I think, I mean, for what it's worth, I think that explanation sort of can only go so far. Like, I think that what people end up doing is just describing something at a slightly lower level, right? Yeah. And for some people, that's kind of satisfying. I spoke to a physicist on this podcast who was very much, because there's this sort of debate among scientists. I guess you'd call it like functionalism about physics, that it only tells you what stuff does. It only describes it. And then there are people who think, no, it. It sufficiently explains why stuff's happening. And I was speaking to somebody who was very suspicious of functionalism. And I said, okay, well, suppose that I, like, blew a trumpet and that light turned on over there.

And then I realized that if I blow it louder, the light turns on louder. Brighter, yeah. And vice versa. And maybe the different notes are different colors. And I sort of map this all out. And I say, okay, I've got this mathematical model now where I know that if I blow the trumpet with a C sharp at this volume, it's going to be an azure, blue at this brightness

and I do it perfect prediction and then I was like do you think that when someone asked why is the light turning on and I said oh

because I blew the trumpet and according to my laws of you know I've explained it and do you know what she said she said yes yeah you've explained it and I think it's a sort of

it's a mentality thing like I look at that and say what you've done is you have described comprehensively the relationship between the trumpet and the light but you haven't even moved it's about prediction

you know yeah how to cause what you want and and you know what had to proceed what happened. Yes. So then I would like to ask that person, well, what if you were then told that there's a microphone in the room that analyzes the sound and then feeds it into a computer that translates that into a brightness and a color for the light bulb? What is that?

What's now happened? Has it been explained in a different way? Yeah. Because there's got to be a word for that, because that's a very different thing. Exactly. But even then, like I would then want to say, okay, so maybe you discover that there's a microphone and the mic, then you might want to ask, well, you know, why does, why do vibrations in the air cause an electrical signal to get, and you can kind of keep going with this? You can always keep going. And eventually you're going to say, well, who put the microphone there?

Yeah, right. Yeah. Who decided that C sharp means Azure. Yeah, yeah. And so explanations never end. And that's one of the reasons for the illusion of explanatory depth. Yeah. This is a great psychological phenomenon.

I'm sure you've read about it. I've heard of it. This is the thing that if you ask people, do you understand how a helicopter works? Right. They're like, of course I do. And you go, okay, so how does a helicopter go from hovering to moving forward? And they go, oh, yeah. Why does a helicopter have blades on the tail?

that are like perpendicular to the ones on the top, the big ones. And they're like, oh, I don't. I guess I don't really know how a helicopter works. Partly it's that there's just no end to what you would need to know to fully understand something. And so we just have to default and say, yeah, I do. I get it. I got it. It depends on the level that you're, that you sort of, that you're looking for, right?

Like if I sort of walked into this room and I was like the architect and I turned to the to the decorator and said, Why are the walls blue? They say, oh, because, you know, Johnny and in the wallpaper department told us, and it's like, oh, okay, cool, that makes sense. Whereas if it were a physicist saying, why is the wall blue? Right. And you say, well, because the decorator said this, yeah, but, but why is it blue? And say, oh, because of the wavelength that's bouncing. Okay, great.

And then you ask the philosopher, says, why is the wall blue? They're like, oh, because it, you know, there's this electromagnetic wave that's bouncing off. Yeah, but why am I experiencing an electromagnetic wave? And you can keep asking why. Yeah. Why is blue blue? Yeah. How come when I look at that wall, the wavelengths don't cause me to taste hamburgers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. And that's a great way to putting it. That's the philosopher's question. Exactly. And it's, it's actually kind of a continuum. It's not like you've got three different questions going on there. I think you've just sort of got a slightly deeper level of explanatory depth. So like with the helicopter, well, the helicopter flies because the blades rotate. Cool. Or you could say, why does that? Well, because of lift. Yeah, but why does lift? Why is air there in the first? first place? What is air made out of? What are atoms? And ultimately, I think that the scientific method tells you what things do, it describes things. To the extent, I mean, Philip Goff was just

sat in the chair that you're in now, and he's talked about this a lot about the fact that ultimately when you break down what something is, say, the table is made out of wood, the wood's made out of atoms, the atoms are made out of electrons and quarks, and you say, well, they've got mass, and you get to these foundational qualities of the universe, like mass and charge. And you say, Ask a physicist, what is mass? Yeah. What is charge? And they'll define it in terms of what it does.

And there's never actually, at the very root, there's never an answer to like what is the universe made out of. What is the reason why this is happening? And science is essentially just describing. So you're left with this. Maybe I'm just trying to justify, you know, the existence of philosophy, which sometimes you have to do amongst scientists. But I think there is this like ontological gap. at the bottom of, of science. Interestingly, Philip Goff fills that up with consciousness.

Okay, yeah. So his consciousness is the thing itself. Yeah, well, consciousness could be, like, a third thing. Yeah. There's matter, and there's consciousness, and there's, uh, what, what's, what else am I thinking of? I don't know, maybe like form, um, you could say that it's a foundational property of the universe. you've sort of got mass and charge and yeah right right consciousness is just one of those

foundational features it doesn't it doesn't come about when matters arranged in just the right way it's there and and we just need to include it into our standard model somehow yeah yeah i mean i'm sure that might happen i i'm still too much of a reductionist to accept that i'm like i don't know i feel like i could just i feel like i could arrange mechanical levers and pendulums in just the right way and it would it would suddenly have opinions and think and believe it existed. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, someone, I'm Philip Gough is what's known as a pan psychist. Yeah. And I've been, I've been exploring this view too, myself, the view that sort of consciousness is more foundational and ubiquitous and more simple for that

reason. I think you could say that, yeah, like if you did put a bunch of, you know, levers and and nodes and stuff together that you would give rise to some kind of conscious experience but that's because it's there at every level you know so of course you can take conscious foundational stuff and put it together in a way and get a big conscious thing but that's explained by the fact that consciousness sort of how does he define consciousness

in the same way that that everybody does ultimately which is to first say well it's a difficult thing to do and then I think I don't know if he would endorse this definition But the most popular one is Thomas Nagels that he gave in the 70s, that to be conscious, if something is conscious, there is something it is like to be that thing. Okay. So it's like experience. Okay. So to a panpsychist, there is something that it is like to be an electron.

An electron. Yeah. Then how rich is that being? Extremely simplistic. So the idea is that like conscious, the big mistake that people make. for the panpsychist is that consciousness requires complexity. Yeah. When instead, all you need complexity for is some of the really complex things that consciousness

sometimes does, like memory or like persistence of self through time or emotion or desire or anything like that. But so suppose, for example, that you're conscious right now, I presume, imagine I took away your eyesight, right? You couldn't see anymore. You'd still be conscious, right? But you couldn't see. Imagine I took away your hearing.

You're still conscious, but now you can't. aren't here. So whatever the, like, sight is just a form of conscious perception, but it's not what consciousness is. It's just one of the things that consciousness does. If you take it away, you're still conscious. Yeah, consciousness, like, deals with that sensory input. So now imagine that I took away memory. Yeah. And I don't mean, like, we were talking about earlier. I don't mean, like, oh, like, where am I? I mean, like, there's no such thing as memory. So in every single instant, nothing gets laid down. What would that be like? Like, imagine you were falling through the air, and there was no such thing as memory. So in every instant, you didn't know that these

were your hands, you didn't remember a micro-second? Would you even, like, know that you were falling? It seems really difficult to imagine, but it still makes sense for me to say that that thing is experiencing. It's conscious. And so I think if you strip away all of the things that aren't actually consciousness itself, the thing you're left with is actually quite like simple and rudimentary. And so the kind of experience that, you know, an electron would have for a panpsychist, would be something extremely rudimental, but maybe just enough to do things like, I don't know, repel other electrons, you know,

maybe that's all that the conscious experience consists in. Interesting. And that's what we get that breathes life, as Stephen Hawking says. Do you have a recommended reading list for panpsychist thought? Oh, yes. I mean, Philip Goff is the panpsychist guy. He's got a great book called Galileo's Era. Oh, I have that book.

Yeah. I literally, I just got it, and it's on my stack. He should have brought it. He could have signed it for you on the way out of the door. I didn't know that he was here before me. Yeah, yeah. He's, um, so he, he wrote that book, uh, and there's, I think there's an academic kind of version of the case for panpsychism that he's written, which I think is called something like, something like, I don't know, I'll send it to you, but I've got a whole, yeah, I can look it up too. A whole list of stuff.

Thomas Nagels, what does it like to be a bat? Yeah, I've read a lot of Nagel. Yeah. I've got, uh, the view from nowhere and mortal questions, which are just also awesome to read for all kinds of other reasons. So good. Immortal questions, the essay after what is it like to be a bat is an essay called panpsychism. Did you know that I haven't read that one? Where he makes the case.

So you should read that? You should read that. Well, maybe I did because I think he did spell it out in a pretty nice way where he was like, I'm just saying that there could be like a third thing besides matter and form or whatever these two things are. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I think it's well worth exploring, but that's why the confusion arises in saying that, you know, the thing that you need for consciousness is complexity. Like, consciousness is just this one very simple thing in the same way that if I asked, I like using the example of something like the Empire State Building compared to a rock, right? Imagine I got a rock in the Empire State Building.

And I asked you, which has more materiality? you'd say like neither like they're they're both like as made of material as each other but I could say but look at the Empire State Building look at it's got like elevators and light switches and automatic door and you're like yeah but that's just it's just a more complex arrangement of what's actually quite a fundamentally simple thing interesting and they view consciousness and minds in the same way I mean I've got to I've got to read up on this because I I could only read so much at a time.

So I stuck to a lot of like evolutionary approaches. That's where I started with consciousness. Like if whatever it is that we call consciousness, it's, it must have some purpose or maybe it had some reason it made us as an organism more fit. And then I looked at a lot of like information theory and I have not. not yet dipped into pan-psychism. Yeah. So, I think it'd be up your street.

Yeah, I can't say too much about it. But I have Galileo's error. Yeah. On that list, I've read a lot of Nicholas Humphrey and Carruthers. Well, you know, the reason he calls it Galileo's error is because what Galileo does is kickstarts the scientific revolution. And he famously says that, you know, maths is the language, or math is in the American translation, is the language of the universe.

And in trying to say that everything which is, everything which exists and is something that we can apprehend is mathematical into the language of essentially science of, you know, like this equals this, he's just precluded the ability to talk about consciousness. Because consciousness is the one thing that resists. Consciousness is by definition first person and science is by definition third person, you know. So that's why it's Galileo's error because he's sort of kicked out. He's told us that like, look, consciousness, like, whatever it is, it's going to be explainable. through math, physics, biology, it can be reduced to the language of nature, which is just math. Yeah. So there's a weird coincidence here, which is that, I mean, we spoke a moment ago about how if you really push the scientist, they're only describing and describing. And once you get down to the very bottom, they're just describing. And there's this ontological gap. But what is the thing? And then you think about, in terms of our experience, there's only one thing that we really experience in itself, like as a thing in itself. And that's awareness. It's. And so maybe if we're missing this sort of ontological is-ness at the foundation of science,

but we also only experience, you know, experience directly as a thing in itself, that that plugs in that gap. You know, I guess that's kind of the idea. So there's something that it is like to be an electron, according to the panpsychist. And there's something that it's like to be me. Yes. But what it is like to be me is just many more things because I've got memories and hearing and sight, and I've got nerve endings.

And if I lived with no memory, like every single instant was a whole brand new thing, I might still know that I was falling because I could feel that there was no G-force on me. I'm weightless in all of those moments. But an electron doesn't have internal parts. No. It couldn't experience weightlessness. It couldn't experience motion. If I'm imagining that it has no memory, it's going to just be like, I'm here.

I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. And it's not going to go, I'm here now. Yeah. I was there. Yeah. Right. Okay. So. So it's a bit weird, right? And that's why I think like it's, it's growing in popularity. And, and, and, but it is, it is really weird. And it sounds kind of insane. But then the panpsych is kind of, here's the charge and goes, yeah, okay. Like, I think that it's just found in the way that you break it down and you say, well, what's mass to a physicist? And they say, well, that's just a foundational thing. And you say, well, so what? So what? So what? kind of, it's just like, well, it's just the foundational unit of experience. And they say, okay, I know I sound crazy and insane. But I've spent the past few hundred years hearing you guys say that if you take a bunch of atoms, this like lifeless stuff, and you just sort of put them next to each other in the right order, then you get the taste of a burger. Like to them, that's going to sound insane too. And I think one of the challenges that something like panpsychism faces us with is to realize that it all, like anytime you try to explain where consciousness comes from, you have to recognize that it's just, it's a bit of a sort of crazy, insane thing that it

exists in the first place. So, yeah, how do they answer the question, how do, how does a conscious continuity come about? Like, I'm made of a lot of electrons. Yeah. But I'm not made of a Zeptillion different things it's like to be. Exactly. Why does it become, hey, actually, I'm the one in charge. I'm the overarching thing. I'm the myriological composition of all this matter. And I say what we eat. Not you, uh, proton number eight billion. Well, the reason I think that you would be fascinated to read this and why it's Surp your street is because you've just immediately hit on what is known as the biggest objection to panpsychism, the so-called combination problem. Okay. Why do these individual units of consciousness combine in some cases,

like a human mind, into one unified experience, rather than billions and billions of individual experiences, in a way that they don't seem to do sort of everywhere and all over the place. And interestingly, to come full circle, it's a sort of similar question to the parts and the holes. You know, why is a leg and a top put together a table, but that doesn't unify with the cup? But it's a lot more difficult to answer when it comes to minds, because we experience ourselves as a oneness. And I think that's what motivates Peter Van Inwagon to say that, Well, life and people are just, you know, we don't know how or why, but we know that they are actual individual things because, but the problem is, the materialist has a combination problem too, right? So you want to ask the panpsychist, well, why do you put all of these individual conscious entities together and you get one big unified consciousness? Why does that happen? But I want to say to the materialist, you've got a combination problem too. You take a bunch of inanimate matter and you put it together and it combines into. one conscious experience, but you've also got the problem of it combining into like a totally

different kind of thing, you know? So that is a problem for panpsychism that needs to be addressed. Yeah. But I think it's a problem plus some for like a materialist, if you know what I mean. But you're right to ask the question because it's the question that is the sort of the biggest question mark over panpsychism. Wow. And I would very much like to go back into academia and specifically study the relation between myriology and philosophy of mind for this reason. it'd be really interesting. They're so related. Yeah, I think, I think so.

But I think, I think definitely worth checking out. But I want, because you made a video about consciousness. Like, do you, you said you were a reductionist earlier. Do you have like a sort of favorite theory of mind, like, where you're at now, like where you, what you think it's, it's all sort of doing? You think it's just information processing? Um, yeah. I think. So, I mean, look, I'm, I'm persuadable in any direction.

At the moment, yeah, I feel like there's an. evolutionary explanation. I think that it becomes like just fit for an organism to start going, ah, all right. So I'm creating a lot of meaning. I'm creating a lot of symbols and abstract thoughts and concepts that are kind of like furniture up here. Well, I'm also manipulating that furniture in my mind. I'm thinking about the future in my mind's eye.

Well, who's witnessing this? And so the fiction of an internal person comes about. Now, I guess I've jumped way ahead, though, because where do the experiences come from in the first place? How does, you know, blue come about? Yeah. We know that there are, you know, lights, photons with certain wavelengths, but then how did our organism decide to assign the experience of blue to that?

Like we were saying about the wall. Why isn't it the taste of hamburgers? Yeah. Why doesn't coffee taste like grapefruit? How did that get sorted by all of our brains? Assuming we have the same qualia, how did it decide, aha, chocolate is going to taste like this. You ready? When it just does something in our brain and we go, oh, yes, chocolate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird, right? Because you want to say, why isn't it that when a wavelength hits my eye, I don't suddenly hear the sound of a trumpet?

Yeah. And the only answer that somebody will want to say is like, well, because that's not what eyes do. That's what ears do. But again, the question is always like, but why? Like, why is that the case? And it's a complete mystery. And this is the so-called hard problem of consciousness, right? Like, you can explain everything about the brain and the way it's processing information and the way that wavelengths of light trigger this neuron to fire. But the question is, why does that come along with an experience? Right. You know, why doesn't it just sort of, how? happen. You know, I've got a physical explanation as to when I, you know, bang into that table, the atoms vibrate and it causes the glass to fall off and gravity balls it to the ground. Yeah. All that explanation is there. You've just got this added thing called experience. Yeah. It just seems like totally and utterly mysterious. Right. What advantage do we have as sensing things that experience that a robot version that could do everything that we do

don't have. That's the concept of a philosophical zombie right? Because people want to say well by experiencing the world we've got an evolutionary advantage I feel fear so I run away from the predator right but that reaction could happen you don't need to feel fear to automatically run away when you should exactly um in fact you could feel amazing and running could be how you express that right it's like how it's that feeling

um nicholas humphrey's whole kind of approach was to say that experience like qualia tastes and and enjoying this internal theater that's created is what made us fall in love with with life, that literally humans reached a point where they were like, hey, I could end my own life and solve a lot of my problems. And that could have literally been a moment in human history where our species could have gone extinct, but because of the emergence of, but actually, I kind of like the sunrise. I kind of like the way the water moves when I run my fingers through it. I think I'm going to stick around.

It literally made us fall in love with being, with having a self. Yeah. Well, whatever the case, I think, I don't know. Do you think we'll be able to settle matters like this? I don't know. I mean, there are people who believe that actually we are in a position to never be able to answer these fundamental questions about consciousness and experience because of the fact that we're the ones who have them or something. Maybe it's just impossible. I don't believe that. I think that. we really could have answers. And I think that when we do, we will become a different kind of species. Well, Michael Stevens, thank you so much for that quick detour about the diet, Dr. Pepper. Should we start recording now? Two tours.