Metaphysics

00:00:14 recording in progress good afternoon everyone welcome to the helix center's final um event for the spring of 2022 and again uh we're sorry to report it we've continued to have to be a zoom-only presentation but this is also available on youtube in perpetuity today i have the well i'm gerald hurwitz i'm the associate director of helix center and i'm here with this illustrious panel

00:00:44 of discussants who are going to discuss the rather uh large topic of metaphysics uh let me take a moment to introduce our panelists and then we'll get our conversation underway of course future um helix programs will be announced in due time which will start again start up again in the fall of 2022 and we're hoping that those will include live round tables so first i'll introduce harold hotmanspother who is a senior

00:01:16 scientist and staff member at the collegium helveticum university of zurich and eth zurich since 2007. after his phd in physics at munich university he worked as a research scientist at the max punk institute for extraterrestrial physics at garshing until 1998 then he served as head of the theory group at the institute for frontiers area frontier areas of psychology at freiburg until 2013. his fields of research are the theory of

00:01:48 complex systems conceptual and theoretical aspects of algebraic quantum theory and mind matter relations from interdisciplinary perspectives he is the president of the society for the mind matter research for mind matter research and editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary international journal mind and matter moving on elizabeth barnes is professor of philosophy at the university of virginia her research interests are divided between metaphysics social

00:02:20 philosophy feminist philosophy and ethics she's particularly interested in the places where these topics overlap she's written a book on disability called the minority body and is currently writing a book about the nature of health lately she's also been thinking a lot about metaphysics of social structures hans halverson is the steward professor of philosophy at princeton university he has written extensively on the foundations of quantum physics philosophy of science and the

00:02:51 relationship between science and theology with articles appearing in the journal of mathematical physics physical review and the british journal of four philosophy of science among others alverson has received a mellon foundation new directions fellowship a pushing memorial prize in the history and philosophy of physics best article of the year by a research phd and 10 best philosophy articles of the year both in 2001 and 2002. greg yeager

00:03:23 is a professor of natural science and mathematics at boston university after postdoctoral work in the history of science and experimental quantum optics physics i'm sorry quantum optical physics he assumed his current interdisciplinary professorship in 2006. he was awarded a cavil a kavli fellowship in 2008 for his work on quantum computing holding two fundamental patents and co-edited philosophy of quantum information and an ant entanglement

00:03:54 on cambridge university press he is the author of the monograph's quantum information entanglement information and interpretation of quantum mechanics and quantum objects most recently he co-authored quantum metrology imaging and communication and co-edited quantum arrangements his current work focuses on the ontological status of elementary particles in quantum field theory and finally our katy platnitsky is a distinguished professor of literature

00:04:26 theory and cultural studies program and philosophy and literature program at purdue university he has published nine books several edited or co-edited collections and about 200 articles on continental philosophy romantic and modernist literature the philosophy of mathematics and physics and the relationship among literature philosophy and science his most recent book is reality without realism matter of thought and technology in quantum physics his next his next book logos and alagon

00:04:58 the thinkable and the unthinkable in mathematics on the pythagoreans of the moderns is forthcoming from springer nature next year so with that i'd like to get things rolling i thought we might start by having each of our discussions make a brief comment about let's say what they think metaphysics is and what it's for i think would be nice it would be brief and then we can get the conversation going so whoever wants to volunteer they go first please go for it

00:05:41 do i have to pick someone hans you want to take a shot you look like you're making a move okay well i'll uh i'll start i'll say i'll say a couple words about my my own professional background because i've uh had the good fortune that although i am my primary field of study was philosophy as an undergraduate student and then i became uh interested in i mean it became very clear to me that that philosophical research i think benefits a lot from

00:06:12 looking at what's going on in science uh hopefully to learn for itself but also actually i hope the contribution can go the other way um but one of the main reasons for me that was important is as i was educated in the united states my entire life i got in in many ways what i thought was a good scientific education but i thought it was a scientific education that said stop at a certain point asking certain questions right because we need to we need to focus our time on calculations and new technologies and we

00:06:43 don't want to get hung up on these big questions about like why do we exist why is there universe things like this so that's what naturally led me into philosophy um but then i was fortunate enough that i was around philosophers that said hey these con these are really the same conversation so although i would not actually consider myself a metaphysician because within philosophy there there are some who have you know very special professional competence in metaphysics but i actually think that anyone who's um who's reflecting on the nature of reality is to some extent

00:07:15 uh doing metaphysics and i think even even scientists who may feel like it's important for them professionally to say what i'm doing is physics it's not metaphysics i think that's actually unfortunately not really true i mean i think they are doing metaphysics even if they're not being being completely honest about that so i'm glad that we're able to talk about this openly here um and that we have people with uh sort of both you know angles on this both coming from the sciences and from uh philosophy great if i could follow up on what han says um because uh i have a somewhat

00:07:47 different background i'm not as uh nearly as uh steeped in the sciences but i i agree with a lot of what he said in terms of what metaphysics is i mean if i uh i think it's kind of a foolhardy project to try to give definitions of any uh aspect of philosophy because it's uh so slippery but um i guess in a nutshell i would think of metaphysics as something like questions about the nature of reality um that aren't better or at least completely addressed

00:08:17 by empirical means um and of course it's a somewhat often fraught and indigenous question exactly uh what those questions might be or um the extent of what empirical inquiry inquiry can show us or what linguistic inquiry can show us or um that kind of thing but in terms of what metaphysics is for um my own background is that i came to metaphysics from a place of skepticism i didn't like it and i didn't want to do it and i wanted to do ethics and sort of the more humanistic

00:08:48 end of philosophical inquiry without doing metaphysics and i found that i i couldn't avoid it um i mean my philosophical trajectory has kind of been like me yelling at metaphysics i wish i knew how to quit you um and i haven't been able to it seemed to me that um one of the key aspects of metaphysics as a part of philosophical inquiry is just that these questions always come up it always comes up um you know what is the difference between

00:09:18 uh correlation and causation if we have these observed regularities what do they explain what do they say what are these things you know what parts of um this thing that we're saying is just an aspect of theory and to what extent does it represent reality and like all of these things inevitably involve metaphysical questions um and so i would say like i mean for me personally the primary role of metaphysics is most these ineliminable questions that are not primarily empirical questions but they are questions about what the world

00:09:48 is like there there seems to be this oh greg i think you're muted you want to go ahead that's right yeah yeah yes i was going to say i mean i think that this discussion's gone very nicely in the sense of people painting their own sense of what metaphysics is and why it's important for me um i i'm also someone who's studied different aspects of learning and have inquired about the nature of reality my entire life which is why i've

00:10:20 studied mathematics physics and philosophy my whole life and try to do them regularly and uh the thing which really drives me to metaphysical questions is the whole issue of precisely what is the relationship between our theory and reality and um that doesn't really matter what you know what science you're in a carnapian sense it doesn't really matter which science you're talking about which part of the humanities you're talking about you're trying to understand the world in a certain sense so i'm a physicist primarily uh or i'm interested in philosophy of physics and so when i

00:10:51 approach these things i always imagine the standard sort of thing a physicist would think which is well reality you know it's it's definitely physical in some way and the default position metaphysically for most physicists is realism so if there's an objective reality out there exactly how does the various sciences and methods of thinking connect with each other and in the sciences you know you have this natural tower of the sciences with presumably physics at the bottom and then chemistry and then biology and then perhaps mind

00:11:22 at a higher level and there's an attempt to reduce these things down to the lowest level so that's why i'm primarily focusing now on the ontological status of elementary particles because the default position in physics has been for a long time that if you understand the things at the lowest level then you can understand these other things so it's a sort of natural drive to metaphysics that physics and science in general natural sciences brings i think wow i know i was about to jump in and say i

00:11:52 know there there's this history that i think we seem to be passed i know i'd recommend it as a title for this uh round table originally is metaphysics dead because there had been this long you know reign of logical positivism uh and and the analytic philosophers who had sort of claimed that philosophy should be i mean metaphysics should be eliminated as best it can and so the job of philosophy is just to clean that up and make make metaphysics as minimal as possible

00:12:23 and now there's been a little bit of resurgence and uh i think it's really interesting to see why that is and uh where we're headed with that so um are katie do you want to make a comment about your thoughts sure uh yeah i'm kind of new to the world metaphysics although not to the subject because you know my i have a double trajectory in my intellectual life my i was originally trained in quantum field theory and mathematics uh

00:12:54 and my first graduate degree was on that specifically group representations and things like that and then i got interested in certain trends in continental philosophy and in both of these the metaphysics was i wouldn't say dirty words but just about and the and the reason for that part of the reason for that i think is that in in some of these previous comments it seems to me that there is a kind of sense of metaphysics while the term has

00:13:25 many various meanings for example the question what is reality and what is representation of reality and the difference of that type could be seen as metaphysicals or may not be seen as metaphysical depending how you define metaphysics i think in both of the trends uh to which i came into both of the subjects of my interests these questions were of course always asked but the reason that there was skepticism about metaphysics especially in certain continental philosophy apart from

00:13:56 uh one philosopher whom i know well she'll delete who use the word was not so much these questions which were always asked but the way we ask these questions i think that's that's the one thing which i wanted to say that the question is how we ask these questions rather than simply these questions as such in any way as i mentioned to greg earlier my thesis for today is there is no metaphysics there is only metaphysics so that's a

00:14:27 double statement which i i think is is true depending on how you define metaphysics thank you so the king is dead along with the king [Laughter] all right anyway harold you want to make a comment oh you're beauty now yeah am i unmuted now yes okay good so um i want to connect up with what hans

00:14:58 actually said at the beginning and start with what i what i was studying and what what the problems were that our teachers actually confronted us with in our studies and um interestingly i think hans is completely right whenever questions came up to the meaning of this or that and then you know typically the response was um this is a this has become a wing to earn shut up and calculate right and um then i entered into the phase in

00:15:31 my studies when i met hans prima's at the eth in zurich he was actually a professor of chemist of theoretical chemistry but he was much more than that he was actually a mathematical physicist with strong philosophical inclinations and he would always say you know when scientists claim that they have no metaphysical position then they usually have a poor one because they are just unconscious of it and of course every scientist he would

00:16:01 say must have a metaphysical position otherwise he wouldn't be able to do science even the practic even practicing physicist in his lab goes with the assumption that there is something there that he does experiments with even though uh in in specifically in quantum physics we know that our empirical access to the system out there changes that system or the state of that system so we never see the reality out there we

00:16:32 just by trying to access it we change it this is this is pretty clear now in quantum mechanics but it's also pretty clear in cognitive science what we see out there is not what is out there there are very interesting experiments about that so um in my trajectory it became more and more obvious that the metaphysics as the study of what is there other than what we see there or what we

00:17:02 can empirically do um do experiments with this is an important question so that's that's why i got into that well there's this there's this issue of the uh the the fact of metaphysics being the foundation of a lot of physical a lot of physical science and uh this other interesting fact that some scientists seem to want to deny it

00:17:33 uh i wonder if and there are so many wonderful historical examples of scientists informed by their metaphysics and rightly and wrongly i think some of the examples are often put forward as being a wrong example of metaphysical sort of influence on science would be let's say uh alchemy i mean many other examples of course newton was completely observed with alchemy and yet produce all this wonderful science so and there are other examples where scientists obviously did have

00:18:04 some form of a metaphysical uh position and it really did help them very much in their scientific research so i wonder if there any thoughts you might share about that well i could say um that you know one of the examples that usually comes up when people think about the relationship between between physics and philosophy is heisenberg and heisenberg was of course the person who's most closely associated with this idea that you know looking upon something can influence it

00:18:36 and restrict potentially your ability to see it in itself and he certainly did bring in um philosophical ideas in order to try to move forward one of the most important things which i've been interested in is his uh investigation of quantum potentiality and when you start talking about the mathematics of quantum physics what you're really talking about is mathematical description of the thing in itself but you can never really access that thing but when you go and measure it you do see something real and there's a certain mathematical relationship between those two things that the

00:19:07 external reality has a potential but it's only actual when you see it and it takes a form which we can understand when you actually do to make that observation so i think that's a case of not a bad but actually a good uh example of somebody bringing philosophy into physics and he was a very thoughtful person obviously i think this is a great point and um uh greg because um in the in the beginning the pioneer phase let me say of quantum mechanics there was

00:19:37 an interpretation of quantum mechanics that was called the copenhagen interpretation and the copenhagen heisenberg was part of it and part of the founders and the copenhagen interpretation try to stay away as much as possible from saying something about the metaphysical or what you call the potential now heisenberg moved forward from that in his later years when he came up with the ideas that you just mentioned but um of course the the copenhagen

00:20:07 interpretation as a is a knowledge-based interpretation whereas many people in reaction to that in quantum mechanics tried to found enough to find an ontological basis for it and this was the starting point of of ongoing discussions about which one is the right interpretation the the epistemic the knowledge based interpretation or the ontological interpretation now the modern point of view now is that it's not really quite right to play

00:20:37 these interpretations out against one another the really interesting question is how they hang together how they how one plays into the other and maybe even find some some rules how something that is out there due to an experiment or due to an observation comes into into our mind dependent representation

00:21:08 i you know i have a little bit of difficulties with some of these terms because first of all there is no such a thing as a single copenhagen interpretation it's never been that's of course clear yeah because for example even from the very beginning bohr and heisenberg's interpretation were somewhat different it was also true however as harold pointed out that heisenberg changed somewhat his views of things in fact if you look into his earlier book in 1930 on

00:21:39 uh physical the physical principles of quantum theory there is a very interesting comment which bor shared with him that one of the reasons that we don't uh cannot see there was always a kind of anthology in the copenhagen interpretation that has to do with what we see in measuring instrument that was assumed to be real and in fact representable by means of classical physics the question is that classical physics could not explain how what we

00:22:10 see comes about and could not predict it so heisenberg then made a point in which he said look it's not so surprising because our brain evolutionary developed in dealing with the object consisting of billions of atoms etc so there is no special reason to assume that it can deal with how our nature is constituted at the ultimate level so his position in that way was saying that uh you know was much closer to war which bor sort of all this mountain and

00:22:42 for board was always central the classical description of measuring instruments later on in the book where he talks on potentiality especially physics and philosophy to which i presume greg in part refers he takes a very interesting position following in part responding to kant big part of this book is his response to kant idea that we cannot really know things on themselves they're you know i cannot go into the detail but he said it may be that for a physicist if things in

00:23:13 themselves exist they would at all they would be mathematical it was influenced by quantum field theory and group representational all these things and and xerox ideas so i think so from that point of view uh first of all so here's the somewhat different view but the second point which i want to make that in a way uh the things i agree with the point that the things epistemological and ontological are kind of mixed we also needs to

00:23:44 define to define these terms because anthology can have two meanings one is assumption that there's something outside us which is real and another one is the assumption that we could describe or represent or at least conceive of what it is outside so i think these are two different meanings of anthology and i think from within most people in copenhagen interpretation certainly born heisenberg there was an assumption of the outside material reality the question is to what

00:24:17 degree you could represent at ultimate constitution as opposed to the effects which it has on what you actually observe and i think in parallel development actually the psychoanalysis and freud's theory etc use the idea of unconsciousness the unconscious which had some of connections the word this line that we see the effects of the unconscious but not necessarily the unconscious itself so i think there's a lot of

00:24:47 very nuanced structures to this of the to this to this all this to this term so i think it's a little bit uh so difficult to so that's what i would want to add as a footnote to this comments i wanted to uh that's a lot of really interesting uh commentary i wanted to make my own brief interjection bring it down the ground a little bit i i always think of the uh quantum revolution as being a case where

00:25:20 perhaps and you can correct me if i'm wrong for the first time this sort of physical theory outstripped any sense of where it's connected to reality it reminds you a little bit of those cartoons where the character runs out over off the end of the cliff and is out in the air and doesn't know where it is uh how exactly to interpret the schrodinger equation whether or not it referred to some physical thing or not seemed to be to be a unique problem that physics found itself in and maybe that has something to do with the return of metaphysical thinking among some of the later generations

00:25:51 uh i i think that's is i would say that's a fairly unique situation where the science sort of insisted on a metaphysical interpretation whether you like it or not so to speak my comment on that would be that i believe that there's some historical momentum because of the success of classical physics that sort of presented this default that things would naturally work out very well if we just thought about the world as made up of core puzzles moving around

00:26:23 according to specific sorts of differential equations that we could make all the predictions we wanted and of course that wasn't actually the case but that was the sense and i think that that's why this feeling of going off a cliff was so severe in the case of quantum mechanics i think in the stretch of history maybe it wasn't so unique but certainly it's the closest and very dramatic so i would agree with you in that sense yeah

00:26:59 wonder if it might be okay to come back to something uh that greg mentioned earlier that i think i'm just i'd be quite curious i think we probably have a very different range of opinions about this was a greg mentioned the sort of traditional picture of like the layers with physics at the bottom and chemistry and so on and so forth um and uh i i i certainly as i mean i've done some physics myself and i understand that that sort of intuition i i would say though i think more recently i've started to think i'm not

00:27:30 sure i understand why we would think that way as a sort of descriptive layering just in the sense that you know it may be motivating in a certain sense to physicists and they think you know we're getting down to the deeper deeper deeper part of reality but i mean i would say i don't my sense is that we're not making more progress in sort of uh seeing the i mean this relates to the quantum thing it's not like we're seeing more progress now explaining the common sense world from the physics it's

00:28:01 actually kind of like the physics is getting so weird that we're getting further away from sort of you know making sense of the world around me like i mean it's it's not like now i can look around me and go well now it makes sense because i understand the schrodinger equation um it's sort of the opposite like the newtonian picture it was almost like oh i can just replace i can replace the the manifest image around me with the newtonian picture it's like okay that's better it's like it's hard for me to think i can replace the manifest image of the world around me with the quantum

00:28:32 mechanical picture um it starts to me to feel like okay that's a great you know it's it's a great story um or like sort of great painting of what's going down at the very bottom um it's very useful painting um it certainly does a good job of describing experiments but i'm not sure it's helping me make sense of the world around me better um anyways i'm just curious what the different attitudes were because i think that it almost divides people i found it sort of in terms of philosophical intuition i mean there are those who

00:29:02 just think yeah everything at the bottom is just the physical stuff and everything else kind of you pull it out of it and there are those who resist that let me just just say that that is i mentioned this is the default position certainly not my own position by any means and in fact i agree with you wholeheartedly except that i would say give a little bit of uh you know support to that idea not insane basis for that which is that you know the nature of science has been to spread our the scope of our knowledge and the scope of our knowledge has been where we've understood fairly well we

00:29:33 can go to the moon with pretty lousy i would say physics in the sense of not very sophisticated and a computer which is you know like the cell phone that i have here and that can get you to the moon so that's pretty impressive right and so we developed all this technology for us to see at different scales and when we get to the atomic scale then we have this interesting thing where well okay it looks a little bit difficult to understand in our ordinary way of understanding what's going on there but at the same time if you look at the alphabet process for example building up the nature of the you know the periodic

00:30:04 table just from your basic mathematics of it's not so different from the classical version that you can actually see a structure build up and you can think of chemical things as built up of those pieces and then you can get biochemistry and you can explain biology and then you can explain the brain now i would say like descartes well mind is a different story perhaps um but you know there is some basis for thinking that the success of science is what i want to say but i agree with you otherwise oh well you know the anderson of course in 1973 famous article more is different

00:30:37 was anti-reductionist it's a very important article i agree entirely that it's i don't think we could even reduce chemistry to physics strictly speaking there is a lot of chemistry as greg just noted which could be explained by means of chemistry but it's very hard to reduce it to physics except a very simple case it has a basic explanation of uh with bohr's atomic theory of of the table in terms of electron levels etc but it doesn't mean

00:31:08 that it can do much of chemistry on the other hand i do think that that's the point which heisenberg and part made that we should not expect that quantum theory should help us to understand the world around us i think herman weil at some point said about mathematics actually and he said two relate the intuition of continuity in mathematics he was referring to cantor's theory to

00:31:40 our everyday intuition is meaningless it's but he said we can use this very abstract mathematics in physics including and relativity in quantum physics and a way you can say that the whole history of mathematics beginning with roughly the end of 19th century was a developing of abstract mathematics which had very little connections to the description of the world and remarkably enough if you think about that uh quantum theory heisenberg

00:32:11 of course he didn't use the language but he essentially used hilbert spaces over complex numbers it's not an object which in any way is related to our intuitive or other descriptions of the world and that's why i think uh that point about the connections between quantum physics or its story and etc and the relationships between the uh the world as we see it is it is really

00:32:41 complex and and maybe impossible it may be impossible i think behind professor halverson i see painting which is kind of abstract that made me think about kandinsky and other painters who were contemporary of quantum theory who created all these images which you cannot really connect to the world unlike somebody like picasso who always scrambled reality somebody like kandinsky just came up to totally a different uh of course he related to some spiritual

00:33:13 reality and commenting on the in this book on spiritual and art but i think the point is that i i think it would be hard to expect that a quantum theory has much connections to the actual world in fact to think so in terms of even classical theory was is is already complicated a classical physics is not necessarily it is was born as a mathematical refinement of our intuition this is true but by 19th

00:33:44 century it's already developed if you think about maxwell electrodynamics and things of that type very far from what we do and i don't think it can explain this different emergent level of how we do so we need different explanation and in a way you can say different metaphysics which operate at different levels of explanation i think it might be useful here to make a distinction between different senses of explanation um so there might be the question of like

00:34:15 does physics explain ordinary everyday reality as we encounter it in the sense of like if we studied a lot of physics would we be able you know to understand how to make dinner or uh things like that um so that sense of like would it give us epistemic insight and then there's a more metaphysically loaded sense of explanation which is like you know if we understood the nature of the fundamental physical particles or something like that would

00:34:46 that then give us the metaphysical grounding or would it like would it explain the nature of everything would you kind of get everything else for free you know if if you were god and you were creating the world would you basically just have to create the fundamental particles and the laws and say you know let it be thus um and then you would get the manifest image um so i guess the difference between like is there epistemic emergence are there some facts that you just couldn't know by knowing the fundamental physical facts and then

00:35:17 maybe is there ontological emergence is there some stuff um that isn't just some basic recombination of the fundamental physical particles or like you could understand everything there was to understand about the nature of that reality by understanding fundamental reality um and certainly like one of the things i've been interested um in thinking about the metaphysics of the social world social

00:35:47 ontology um is you know might there be um some interesting ontological and metaphysical claims about that the nature of the world as we have made it where we just need different explanatory tools we need different concepts we need um different ways of talking about what the world is like precisely because we're talking about reality that is in part social it's you know um part of the way that we have made reality to be that you

00:36:19 don't necessarily just get for free um by thinking about the nature of fundamental particles but you know that's a very very very complicated um metaphysical question that wouldn't necessarily be settled either way by settling whether you know if you did enough physics you would be able to understand what flamingos look like or something like that well elizabeth you mentioned earlier

00:36:49 this interesting uh issue of uh correlation and causation which often arises in these large ensembles like large groups of elements and then the question becomes how do you decide whether some sort of correlation is causative or that's just hanging together in some other sense and typically when that arises it also falls into question whether everything just comes down to billiard balls right because now you've got these the the action of all these uh ensembles

00:37:20 um i think it's a really interesting uh handle on this problem all right sorry quick so i would just say quickly you know the real question that comes to mind there if you're a true believer in this kind of physicalist view is you know can the mathematics do it and the answer is no the mathematics can't do it the mathematics will probably never do it absolutely but on the other hand you know we didn't really understand why the sky was blue until we did enough quantum field theory which is not very well

00:37:51 known fact but as a matter of fact this particular sort of scattering is something that is understood best and probably only correctly after quantum field theory so it's a very complex question and but i i was i would agree with you on the basic level that it's a fantasy to think that you're just understanding some elementary particles you're going to understand the mind or social reality or or anything terribly complicated my strong senses again i you know i speak as someone who's i hang around a lot of philosophers and even

00:38:21 metaphysicians although i don't think i would call myself from that position but my my sense is that you know so somebody you know physics when one is doing physics what the job description is is fairly clear it's i mean it's fairly institutionally fixed what a physicist does i think my sense is for metaphysicians their self description of their task is probably quite different from metaphysician to metaphysician and my sense is that the way elizabeth described her her way of thinking is

00:38:51 very different from some other metaphysicians who sort of think my job is to look at all the sciences and just tell you how everything kind of flows out from the bottom to the top right yeah i think it's like sociologically that's definitely right i mean one thing i've like personally been interested in criticizing is the idea of like the goal of metaphysics is to describe the nature of fundamentality or something like that so there's this idea that you know we figure out what's fundamental what the basic reality is um

00:39:23 that sort of uh you get a lot there's a lot of interesting word choice in something you get the language of like purity um so the pure uh the pure reality or the you know the ungrounded or the all this kind of stuff and so it's like if we could just describe that then the task of metaphysics is sort of carving the beast of nature at its joints or um is talking about the absolutely fundamental and then everything else is is maybe just kind of derivative on that or

00:39:53 grounded in that or explained by that or an ontological free lunch or something like that is the phrasing that you sometimes use and i think that's a very um common way of thinking about the project of metaphysics within at least analytic philosophy but i think it's also a way of thinking about project of metaphysics which a lot of people have been um critical and that there's a lot of really interesting metaphysics that's um not doing anything like that so two of

00:40:24 my uh colleagues at the university of uh virginia um who both self-describe as metaphysicians have just published books and one of them is about the nature of personhood and personhood over time like what makes you um the same person that you were 10 years ago 15 years ago can we give any sort of account of that um and the other um is about uh dependence and explanation and basically like um trying to criticize the idea to

00:40:54 criticize the assumption of foundationalism that explanation always has to come to an end so could there be you know infinite change of uh dissent could there be circular chains of explanations could there you know um so there's big discussions of explanation and non-well-founded set theory or um things like that and they both think of themselves as doing um metaphysics absolutely um but they're not trying to carve the beast of nature at its joints they're not trying to explain the nature

00:41:25 of fundamentality but nor are they doing something that they think of as just conceptual engineering um they're talking about you know what's reality like i think the real question is you know you just brought that up carving nature at its joints right does nature has you know joints primordially or is it our descriptions that produce joints that we chocolate that we try out to describe nature and and decompose it into into elements that are

00:41:57 connected by these joints so i think a very interesting proposal which goes along the lines of what you were saying elizabeth is already due to quine in 1960 something where he tried to relativize ontology so actually the article that he wrote has titled ontological relativity and the idea is and of course crying says that in much more detail that i can reproduce it now the idea is something like every domain of description that we choose for a

00:42:29 certain situation to describe it can be considered ontologically or not and um then we can have many ontologies which are connected to one another and actually quine um charges us that we should find translations between these ontologies and this is actually his program of ontological relativity and once you but once you look at a certain situation and find the best way to describe it then you should commit yourself to that ontology and not change

00:43:00 it during the description all the time hillary putnam actually had the same or worked this out with his idea of internal realism which is a little bit different in the nuances but essentially the same idea and that's that's the way to to um find a middle path between foundationalism which quite rejected platinum two and the other extreme of something like radical emergence where everything is possible and but nothing is connected with one another so complete arbitrariness of

00:43:32 descriptions i think this is a proposal which is still somewhat understudied and the sciences although it has become it has received some some serious consideration philosophy of course well of course if we look at the word meta to start with right aristotle's books on metaphysics which was not his title uh was added by somebody some say that means that it just means that the books come after

00:44:03 after physics next set of books i think the word meta implies in a way that you describe one system in terms of another uh which is can comprehend this system from outside to some degree so i think so from that point of view you can have a very different level of metaphysics the point depending what you define as physics so one of the main big contributions and my view in quantum of quantum mechanics especially in the bohr's interpretation or an early

00:44:35 heisenberg i'm not sure about copenhagen is that we in and i think it can you extend it can be at least in physics we never disco we always deal with our interaction with the world to some degree clients different level of anthology describe different levels of this interaction so in that in that sense uh it if you take an extreme position which i actually like and we're not completely taking it that everything is

00:45:06 metaphysics in terms of it so we can only have a human description or anything part of heisenberg's point was as i said with which i started here that there is no reason to believe that we could describe the ultimate level of reality or maybe some other level of reality but here that that we were fortunate that mathematics is to some degree free of limitations of common language and concepts and it can predict what happens in quantum mechanics but we don't

00:45:36 necessarily can hope that it could work uh in any other set of areas i think it's true that the metaphysicians in part for that reason define this task very differently from most uh physicists beginning with galileo and after who could think in terms of mathematical description of predictions of what is going on because technically that's why the origin of the so-called the heart problem of consciousness we really don't have a

00:46:08 physicalist functional interpretation of our conscious experience in terms of quality so i think that really tells you that it may not be possible to describe many things to which we relate to the word through our mind in mathematical terms so i think that seems to me that that is the it's very hard to believe that that program of from bottom on the other hand i'm not quite sure who would subscribe to that

00:46:38 extreme view that everything uh it really doesn't matter there is all these connections and there is always some sense of systematicity in description and the interaction between various levels since you're talking about the meaning of meta arkady do you know what what karnap said about that yes i do yes i know whatever you whatever you do i can do meta yeah but exactly true because there is always

00:47:09 there is always a system which uh you know allah has an interesting comment on that as well you know but allah you know it's it's a great statement of lack of that all physical theory have the same probability to be true namely zero right so in in a certain sense it's always our engagement with the world in in different domains through mathematics and technology and physics which produces because while the

00:47:42 ultimate likelihood the theory is to be true even though einstein believe that thermodynamics will probably always be true is the local possibility of how it works so in in that sense uh it is a kind of workable theory which is at this giving moment is we accept but it doesn't necessarily mean that it continues to be and therefore uh from that point of view when i say there is only metaphysics i

00:48:13 mean by that that we don't have any description except the ones which produce by who we are as evolutionary developed by biological beings with the brains which produces the mind which we don't know how it does either and only briefly my second my second comment to what you said about the heart problem of consciousness it's only brief comment i'm just coming back from the consciousness conference the big consciousness conference in tucson which is which takes place in tucson every

00:48:43 other year and you would be astonished how many neuroscience people still believe there's only the brain that we have to talk about right no i'm not astonished i know that yeah of course i know that yeah that's true yeah i yeah going to say i look i i think i need to to um defend those who uh who take a slightly more hardcore view about you know we just want to describe you know reality like it is not i mean i completely agree

00:49:14 with the phrasing for example that you know every description is a human description but the thing is i think it's also can be interpreted a negative way where somebody says okay so then there's no more standards right i mean like my description is my description your description is your description um so you know i think that that taken in the wrong way it can just it can it can sort of destroy the the grand scientific project or even the minor individual pro seeking truth projects we have as individuals

00:49:45 right where you somehow always have to tell yourself my view the view that's influenced by who i am is probably in many ways very wrong because of who i am because of my perspective because of various things inside me so what's you know i think i i feel that i think that longing that some people have they said but there's just that description of the way things are is because they're trying to say remember not every description is equally good so i think that's one thing we're missing here is we you know what what is that standard we're trying to live up to oh no that's that's very true but i

00:50:15 don't think you need to everyone need to take these positions also some do that meaning that every as you say you agree that everything is a human interaction doesn't imply because within each giving domain there are reasons you can you can still do quantum mechanics under the assumption of all the constraints which are involved without necessarily assuming that you strictly uh describe the ultimate nature of reality i don't think anyone like eisenberg in fact bohr

00:50:46 you know as a great statement says about complementarity he says the complementarity actually contrary to einstein fulfill all the basic principle requirement as science as a mathematica experimental engagement with nature science including institutionally has this type of rules and constraints which tells us something about that is to say we may not know things about reality but our interaction

00:51:18 with reality is not free you know it's not it's not strictly free it's not it's a matter of how it plays itself out so i cannot you know come out and say without any constraint look as i i think that there is uh some universal consciousness somewhere et cetera it's not a scientific statement so from that point of view we are governed by this rule some of which could be personal the

00:51:49 question is what you believe as a ground on which you stand and for many people as you say to believe that you describe reality give you such a ground but such a ground is not necessary if you think about people like nietzsche and to some degree they they believe in each famously say long live physics because it it gives us the sense of integrity right but at the same time he believes in a certain in the radical perspectivism so i think it's a i i you

00:52:20 know i think your comment is extremely good because it is a very complex landscape of negotiating between how you ground what you say about your interaction with the world so that's that seems to me is a crucial point you can ground in in reality but you don't in the ultimate constitution of reality but you don't necessarily need to in my view but just to follow up on what hans uh the point that hans was making no i do think there is like there's something about

00:52:52 and you don't have to go as far as like scientific realism but something about like the metaphysical assumption that there is an external reality that we are attempting to describe um that we are attempting to you know uh to describe with scientific theories um this may be different uh and that that's a different type of project than we might be doing in other types of humanistic inquiry that does seem to be an important constraint on the practice in some cases um or at least like

00:53:23 a hopeful aspect of the practice and of course you can distinguish between thinking that it's what we're trying to do and thinking it's what creatures like us are able to do like you know in my everyday life i'm trying to treat everyone equally and everyone fairly um in order to try to be a moral person i also kind of don't believe that someone like me um is actually capable of doing that you know i think inevitably i am going to be influenced by bias and influence my nepotism and influence by

00:53:53 being grumpy um and like all these sorts of things and yet nevertheless it's what i'm it's what i'm trying to do and it's also what i think that someone like me um is never going to be in a position to do so we might think that like our theories are trying um to describe a structure of reality and yet are never in a position to actually do that because they're done um by limited fallible creatures and because it's really hard to distinguish between what's the element of the theory and what's the element of you know the thing being represented and so on and so forth

00:54:24 but it does seem like sometimes we want to be able to criticize practices for having gone wrong whereas if we thought like all you need to do is have like ideological presuppositions and a coherent way of viewing the world and then get your theories to work out right there might be places where it's hard to provide a critique that we want to be able to provide so this isn't um physics obviously but um you know there's these famous cases in um psychological research where um studies of whether esp

00:54:55 is real um and what seems to be the pattern in the research on this is that like people who believe in esp design all these really great well-organized studies and they go and they find esp um and they find evidence that esp is real and then people who don't believe that esp is real are like that can't be right and they go and they describe design all these really well organized uh you know great well-designed studies and they prove that esp is not real um and so you've got this practice going on

00:55:27 where you've got two sets you know you've got different communities that have different assumptions and you know different ideological stuff affecting what they think the world is like and then they're doing scientific practice but it seems like what we want to say in this case is look either esp is real or it's not and something's going wrong when science is like this um we need to be able to figure out what's going wrong here but if you don't have that assumption that like either esp is real or it isn't and the

00:55:58 goal of scientific practice is somewhat imperfectly to figure out what the world is like then you can't kind of make that external critique um in a way that seems important in an epistemic situation like that well it depends on the essence it you know it interacts with what i said it depends on the level on which you assume ontological reality i don't have to make an assumption in physics in principle you know i make an assumption and most physicists do it's

00:56:29 very hard to do without at all possible some there are four layers of berkeley and fundamental physics that there is exist an eternal external reality in the sense that the world existed before we came on the stage and will continue to exist after we are gone from the stage which is going to be very soon by the standards of uh the scale of the universe but that does not mean that i can make any unambiguous so meaningful statement

00:57:00 about how world really is ultimately but i can make an ambiguous and correct statements about the interaction with the world through technology and mathematics through which i can predict what's going to happen and in the case of extra essential perception you can pose it in a similar way you can check to what degree these things correspond to the experiments of which we conduct it

00:57:30 doesn't really undermine that on the other hand even in physics there is still always disagreement between people who take ontological position and who don't don't take ontological position or there is still different theory you know there are people who are strong believers in so-called bombing mechanics and you cannot really they will not be convinced on on kind of similar girl there's always to some big radiological but my point is that you could conduct science without making an assumption

00:58:00 that the ultimate nature of reality could be represented by your theories but there always will be levels which will need to be so represented as for example in physics we need to describe uh measuring instrument because otherwise we cannot really do it so i think it's not uh there are different level it's really the level of as harold pointed out black mind it's at the level of anthology and reality which you have to assume and if you deal with kind of

00:58:31 social metaphysics as you pointed out it will be different from doing the metaphysics and physics that this this that would be my position on that that you don't have to assume that something is real there uh you assume that something is real but you don't have to assume that you could describe even in principle what what is real you don't have to make this assumption but after all we have no idea what elementary particles are in terms of the physics we can only observe the

00:59:03 effects on measuring instrument nobody ever seen an actual elementary particle on its own accord you can only see the photographs which they live by collisions with instruments and things there's uh yeah please i was going to say arcade what so what would you say then though is that i mean if if one thought okay i think there's a reality but it can't be described what should the goal then be so what should the scientists be trying to do

00:59:35 well i as i just said you describe and predict what's going to happen in experiment which you observe right or describe reality at the level where you can't describe them i mean it was really a crucial nuance that you cannot describe the ultimate nature of reality but it does not mean as harold said that you can or they must describe so you have plenty of goals look i my goal is to develop listen i think paul dirac was quite interesting about that

01:00:06 because he was very mathematical so he's he wasn't even thinking one of the people who didn't he didn't probably have metaphysics although i can't be wrong about that but the goal was to write an equation which predict what's going to happen if a relativistic electron hits the screen right so he writes the equation which leads to the discovery was a positron but what are the positron it's another assumption of something which if you hit the screen in a particular way you have this and that

01:00:36 type of data that's a pretty in a pretty good task to perform it's it's a good task but i'd say i i want to come back to sort of for me the very beginning like i'm a little bit afraid that that that sort of idea is what led to a lot of what i see in science education no no no listen i'm not in disagreement with that look you can if this idea is just little bit forgiving for that comparison that's why somebody like nietzsche could be very dangerous as he

01:01:08 said himself because you can use these ideas in all manner of the wrong way you know like you have some so-called postmodernist philosophers people like derek who called the losers etc whose ideas were quite complex and controversial but the way they were used including an education is sometimes ridiculous you know but they try to base them with these philosophical principles fair enough fair enough yeah i think it'd be interesting to outline for people for our audience especially too

01:01:38 that you know because there's a little bit of a caricature of the history of analytic philosophy that sort of leaves out some of the struggles with foundationalism uh and this also goes over into the philosophy of mathematics where you know a number of them including rudolph karnap who's been mentioned here several times in twine uh have moved along toward saying having this sort of naturalistic posture whereby they say okay well look science is we're going to assume science is largely correct right and now how do we proceed now because

01:02:10 we're going to not assume it says something foundational about the about the anti-ontological reality but we'll say it does provide true statements so let's what could we do from there and from there things like quan quine's relativized uh uh uh ontology relative eyes comes out and then we're moving along to sort of like a little bit of a lazy susan of ontologies like you know pick the ontology one uh arcadie made this interesting comment earlier about the difference between i think it's what heider called ontic versus ontological

01:02:43 whether you could argue within science about what are the fundamental elements that your field is interested in which is more of an on-tech consideration what are the the the things that are relevant to what we're doing and they may not be objects they might be physical objects and then what is the meta what is it at the meta level can we say something about that naturalizing uh uh metaphysics has had this benefit of holding on to what we know within science and seeing what we can do from there not necessarily to

01:03:14 produce some sort of ultimate foundation is that and finally davidson like carnap had this notion that collaboration between people and having everyone debate this the scientists involved in these various disciplines was the way to arrive at some sort of like quote unquote real truth of what's going on rather than to be completely relativized

01:03:46 i'll say one one thing about my own my own educational experience like i think i think that has had some very positive effects um so because i i think in in philosophy of physics one of the things people do is they think i mean actually it's come to be that there's sort of two camps here um the camp that i was sort of trained in was yes you take it to be largely correct but probably not fully understood and so the philosopher's job is to go and dig deeper and say what really is going on here so for example with non-locality and quantum mechanics you know is that

01:04:18 really cause and effect stuff like that there's another camp of philosophers of physics though who think you know maybe it's not largely correct maybe because they're sort of cutting corners maybe they're not actually doing their ontology properly we should probably try to improve upon what they've done or maybe even try to try to urge them to do it differently i'll just say i think that first of the way the i think that's been a very positive influence in philosophy it's given you know many people kind of a fun interesting careers doing science that's

01:04:49 a little bit more sort of metaphysically oriented i would say certainly in terms of the influence that it would have on uh metaphysics i think like so much of i so much of the trajectory of contemporary metaphysics could be seen as a response first to the you know you have the the skepticism of the sort of like uh

01:05:19 the new the the positives the pun sorry i can speak the positivists um the carnapian era that kind of thing um and then you have quine where this is sort of rehabilitation um of ontology but like ontology light rays it's not not not the kind of uh ontology that liveness was into um this very very very sort of minimal thing um and then from there you have this building back up of the

01:05:50 field of metaphysics but in this very i mean especially with david lewis right with this very very intensely naturalistic spirit right so like can we do metaphysics in this way that is um cohesive with the practice of the natural sciences or maybe even much more strongly like and i don't think this would have been what lewis thought but what a lot of people think like in service to the natural sciences um

01:06:20 can be like metaphysics can like trim around the hedges at the places where the you know the science is going to get a little bit confusing or you need someone to uh you know to come in and and do some cleanup or say oh what exactly does this mean or maybe metaphysics can um i guess like so ted cider has argued that one thing that metaphysics can do is just provide like um explanatory tools or resources that could be useful um in the discussion of the natural sciences to try to figure out exactly what we're doing um i think

01:06:51 though that there is increasingly um strands of thought in metaphysics that push back against that and say well that's like we're we're doing a lot more than that um you know there's a lot uh that's uh that's going on in metaphysics that isn't necessarily related to the you know the sort of foundational claims or isn't necessarily just in the spirit of like like highly minimalist ontology or things like that that is more just like again

01:07:21 questions about what the world is like the nature of reality which might be questions about the fundamental but they might not but that aren't necessarily going to be addressed by empirical means um and sometimes that might be with an assumption of realism sometimes it might be with uh like more to trying to argue for a certain type of deflationism but the cool thing about any of these debates is that they all kind of end up being debates about metaphysics right so you can have philosophers like nelson goodman who tried to give this like incredibly metaphysics-free view of the world and

01:07:52 ends up with like one of the craziest metaphysics out there um so it is it does end up always being debates about the nature of reality that aren't empirical uh one way or another even if you're trying to argue that you know there's no there there sorry i'm sorry about that i was on mute um

01:08:23 has been a fantastic conversation i wonder if people feel it would be a good time to open up questions from our audience because we do have some that have accumulated does that sound okay to everybody sure right great all right that's the cue for alex to come in okay yeah uh people you could write questions in the q a in the bottom panel or if you're on youtube write in the comments on the live

01:09:00 schwartz um i guess sort of referencing was said earlier so from elementary zilch particles to persons what about the other way given what we are able to do what we take ourselves to be does our understanding slash claims about the elementary particles allow us to get to us emergent properties emerging from what and then they also add maybe maybe a zilch particle is a person with almost everything left out top down rather than bottom up so any any thoughts to that

01:09:30 question that that sounds like liveness to me that's right well i mean he was i mean he was a fantastic metaphysician i think i mean so it's you know it's not his ideas leibniz's ideas sound pretty wild to us today but it's sort of it's it's interesting to take someone like leibniz and compare him to what people are metaphysicians are doing today um you know leibniz in certain sense you know he was like his age as great as physicist and then thought he

01:10:02 just needed to go further and so he thought the only way you can really under you know the only way you can sort of really explain all the stuff you know in physics is by having this additional layer the monadology and there boy not that i understand that stuff at all but it certainly does you know he ends up having you know mind and body come together in the fact that the fundamental things are these mental things the monads now i take it actually i'm no expert on this but is that i'm sure someone else here knows

01:10:34 is this not somewhat similar to like chalmers for example uh today david chalmers it's related to some degree because monarchs are the kind of atoms of the soul so they uh windows into the or other windows without windows if i can put it that way but in lebanese as opposed to somebody like let's say others coming from quantum theory or even in mathematics uh there is uh such a thing as in

01:11:04 in uh topos theory as uh things without points you know so the they're monarchs that they uh it monarchs could be read not by leibniz himself as the image of our interaction with the world leibniz of course made an assumption which was metaphysical and realist you are absolutely right in terms of his problem program but i doubt that we can never get as greg suggested earlier

01:11:36 from elementary particles uh to the uh this other kind of level i think at the time of leibniz there was a little simpler picture of the layers of reality i think right now we have this incredibly complex picture of of the layers of reality because even in fundamental physics we obviously cannot reconcile quantum field theory and relativity which is a huge problem and nobody knows

01:12:06 uh how it's going to happen but i but i do agree with you that bringing up monarchs is a very very interesting point that leibniz who was very different from newton in terms of his calculus and things like that type but his idea of monarchs is quite a remarkable idea which try to push it obviously beyond and see how we uh there is a metaphysics on that side so leibniz is metaphysics as soon as you

01:12:37 come to the monodology is of course an idealist of course no of course no it's completely the opposite of a physicalist metaphysics which starts with that as reporting yeah and that is that it becomes somehow because the question was about the relationship between persons if i got that right and elementary particles so we are talking about two different domains here which are which are very hard to reconcile shakespeare line such welcome and unwelcome thing at once it's hard to

01:13:08 reconcile you know that's a really the question is and do we need to necessarily reconcile it that's yeah that's the question yes well but to go back to han's this question about chalmers or any way that that pan psychism seems to constantly re-emerge in these conversations right every so often we hear more of that again and i guess leibniz leibniz was one of the most colorful proponents of that sort of approach right well i i don't think he he was a

01:13:39 pun psychist in that way as some of the uh people who come from chalmers problem do not all not everyone i think or you know no no lebanese i think uh was more idealistic as harold just said that it doesn't mean that he projected any form of consciousness on material things you know berkeley was contemporary of lebanese so i think i i think it was a somewhat different view from point psychiatry in my view

01:14:10 oh yeah i just want to add wynn wrote as hans was talking about chalmers they mentioned nagel i think they're referring to thomas sneagle yeah yeah um okay well thank you uh wynn um so you have a question from uh team music on youtube tv wrote a few things i'm just gonna get to one just because other people are writing in questions so i um they wrote um how do you define consciousness and then uh which aspects do you focus on when you try to define it and with yeah

01:14:40 anyway so it's a small question yeah keep it to keep it to keep it to a few words please yeah simple as possible can we all just think the answer it would show and not tell i i guess just to add because i know there was a comment made about like neuroscience and i guess the limitations of metaphysics within how neuroscience is currently applied and so um having done uh i'm currently a research

01:15:10 tech within a neuroscience lab um yeah we're the lab i'm is generally using more behaviorist techniques to try to deduce um depression and satiation with regards to anedonia um so i'm not obviously i'm not uh like a distinguished panelist here but um it's definitely hard from a neuroscience perspective to sort of answer that question given that it's very much complementalized and limited to whatever field that the neuroscience is looking in um in terms of their in terms of their research

01:15:41 i also didn't want to belittle that question it's a perfectly great question actually oh yeah i just needed just a gigantic one that's awesome if if i was to answer honestly and succinctly i would in terms of like how do you define consciousness i would say i don't um like i i i don't make that attempt i think it's also perhaps one of these areas um there may be quite a few um in metaphysically rich areas of philosophy where there might not be a single thing that we're talking about here there might be multiple overlapping things

01:16:12 that we care about that sort of give rise to this you know cluster of features that we care about and there are great um you know phenomenological and normative importance to us so um i wouldn't even i mean i'm not a philosopher of mine but i wouldn't even begin to know where to start uh trying to define um consciousness and i sometimes these definitional projects seem like the kind of thing that that are that are doomed to failure um so um for for for something as rich as con as

01:16:44 consciousness you haven't gotta have no idea you there is certainly no no single agreed upon definition of consciousness when you look into all these consciousness studies related fields of research and even if you go back into 1904 there's this very influential paper that william james published which had the title does consciousness exist question mark and he even would deny that consciousness exists in the sense that it has no ontological

01:17:14 uh quality to it it's it's something very superficial you would say 1904. well freud started as a neuroscientist and a regionally scientific project of scientific psychology was a kind of attempt to relate memory to your neurons of course he gave up because he knew that's not possible you're you're a mute oh yeah i could go

01:17:46 to the um next question uh thank you team music um constance old uh on zoom wrote would it be possible to use a metaphor from another discipline i use word metaphor in another field of study okay can you repeat the question yeah they maybe constance could rewrite i could go to the next one but they wrote would it be possible to use a metaphor from another discipline for example use a word metaphor in another field of study

01:18:18 i i can go on the next one and ask her to flesh it out if i wonder whether whether that refers the idea that you know for us to understand something we often borrow metaphor or anyway analogies from other disciplines uh it seems that physics is often the favored one because based on our earlier conversation it's thought to be the foundational science let's say and we borrow some ideas from physics and import them to chemistry and biology and computer science and

01:18:49 neuroscience etc and then the question is can you is it always should it always be barred in that direction from what used to be considered a lower tier like physics than the upper tier is there such a thing as bar with the other direction that's how i that's the sense i make of the question i think working with metaphors is very important and also useful but you have to memorize that it's a metaphor because if you don't do that at the end of the day you think everything is

01:19:20 physics if you use physical metaphors that should be avoided well then of course physics uses a lot of metaphors all of them it's just a question that i harold has complained right you have to keep in mind the level of its application because it could be useful to explain some of these things at this certain level but it has limits but it's extremely productive analogy and metaphor and it goes in both direction i mean it's quite

01:19:52 clear you know if you read uh people like heisenberg hermann weil all these type of people a very rich metaphoric field from all manner of things but the it's a level of explanation which you have to constantly keep in mind the limits of its application because there's always temptation to think that metaphor explains it right it nails it but it doesn't there's an interesting discussion about this actually with the uses of

01:20:23 teleological metaphors um in the naturalistic sciences so a lot of scientific research or scientific papers will uh avail themselves of taylor's like strongly teleological language so they'll say like you know uh the x wants to fly or it's designed to fire like all this kind of stuff talking about things as though they're purposive or that they have intention or and if you ask people about this they will say oh well of course it's just a metaphor um it's just a metaphor it's

01:20:54 not to be taken seriously but then sometimes if you dig down a little bit into the details of um the theory it looks like actually the teleological explanation is pulling a lot of weight it's not obvious just how metaphorical um the teleological language is because some of the explanations that are being offered in the theory are sort of relying on the idea um that because the explanations are counter factual in some way they're relying on the idea that um there is

01:21:26 this almost sort of explanatory oomph to the idea idea of teleology that's it's not clear how naturalistically supported that is so um i think it's a good example of a place where sometimes the metaphors that we use we can kind of dismiss them and say oh it's just a metaphor i'm not taking it seriously but in the actual practice of giving explanations here it's not clear just how seriously people are taking the metaphors which which i think is really interesting well that's very true because at the early stages of quantum theory the

01:21:56 phrase nature makes a choice was really very big in this discussion yeah it took a lot of time to explain it on the other hand einstein of course is a brilliant reiteration he was anatomist but he knew that to say that god played dies makes your statement immortal if you just say nature played guys nobody will pay attention yeah also you know it's interesting to go back to this very quick reference to daigle which i think which is nagel uh

01:22:26 that he referred to in his discussion about consciousness what's it like to be a bad and it's interesting to think how much metaphor is a lot of what consciousness is about in some way right because we we if if what it's like to be is sort of asking a metaphor a question about a metaphor isn't it ultimately um and actually what nagel wanted to point out with this is uh that the the the um experiential quality of a

01:22:59 mental state is different from the neuroscientific description of a mental state yeah absolutely so he was a he was a sort of precursor of what later dave chalmers called the heart problem of consciousness or other people called the explanatory gap between uh qualitative experience on one side and and brain functioning on the other side yeah and this was i mean tom nagel's paper was a was a was a very important paper historically because the term

01:23:30 consciousness was actually out of discussion it was almost like a forbidden term from the beginning of the behaviorist school like skinner and others right they didn't talk about consciousness at all so between the beginning of the 20th century and 1974 i think when tom nagle's paper appeared consciousness was not it was just like exorcised even from psychology right where it intrinsically belongs to action right

01:24:00 um constants also commented uh to consider political science uh they reference justice as an example any comments you add to that given what else has been said about metaphors the topic of justice yeah yeah like with regards to we just discussed with with metaphors if there's if there's not much do you think he could add i could go into the next question i just thought to mention it because she wrote that as you

01:24:30 guys were talking okay go ahead okay i'll go to the next one um let's see uh don't worry scott uh i see your comments i'll get to you there's one question on youtube before you from johannes owecki i hope i didn't bungle your last name they wrote is physics necessary for metaphysics well in what sense of necessary amenities in some sense physics is necessary for reality and well yeah they

01:25:03 well so they wrote is it well they run in the sense of like can you study it without a good understanding of physics but i think there's also that other that other realm that you're sort of referencing that's also i think quite interesting uh to discuss i i mean i think that the answer that question has a lot of google we discussed earlier about different different methods in metaphysics because i i actually do think that my sense is there is a movement among metaphysicians where they're like yeah we really got to know our physics because otherwise you know

01:25:33 we at least need to have uh you know know enough about the things we say latch up to it in the right ways but when i take it there's other metaphysicians who think you know the part of reality i'm focused on yeah it's not really physics so it doesn't really matter that much that i'm not you know very up to speed in physics so i think it kind of depends on the meta physicians methodological presuppositions yeah i mean speaking just as someone who does metaphysics for a living like i don't know very much physics at all and

01:26:04 i i could just be bad at my job um but um um i think it i think it depends exactly as khans was saying on like any field there's disputes about how you know the best methodology uh for practicing in that field and so there are definitely people who think yeah i know we need to we need to be able to understand um what the science is saying so that we can understand um how to make

01:26:36 our metaphysical theories not only consistent with the science um but also know like at what at what point is it time to hand over the mic to the metaphysician um to say like here's where empirical inquiry runs out and so the metaphysician might have something to say i mean a lot of the work that i do is um on stuff about the nature of social reality like can we make sense what do we mean if we say that something is socially constructed like is that can we make sense of that claim there's

01:27:07 about 10 different things at least that people seem to mean like at the same time when they say that um are social kinds real are they different from natural kinds for me doing that it i don't necessarily think that knowing a lot of physics would be helpful to me for that explanatory reason that we talked about earlier um i need to know a lot more about uh areas of the social sciences um and so i think it partly depends on the fun thing about

01:27:38 metaphysics is that there's like metaphysics of x for most any x um so partly depends on what kind of metaphysics that you're doing it partly also depends on what you think the project of metaphysics is and what the task of metaphysics is i have an interesting follow-up question i'd propose both to you elizabeth well all the panelists i want to hear what howard has to say about this as well but uh when when one performs an experiment on let's say in any particular scientific field that

01:28:09 may test different metaphysical views of the of the world is that does that turn the metaphysics into physics or neuroscience or social science like does it move it across the line from what was formerly metaphysical if you're able to distinguish with two two different forms of metaphysical understanding well clearly not necessarily because in uh some aspects of psychology and sociology you do that in a different way i think

01:28:40 it has a lot of historical and ideological back baggage this debate because together took greg's friend aristotle because the term physics coming from physics in nature emerged through modern science acquired this type of uh meaning because you know in 18th century the word nature referred as much to human nature so i i think that what was said about different levels of

01:29:11 metaphysics that you could certainly have a metaphysics in a real sense of explaining nature without physics if you give nature a broader meaning which nature deserves incidentally so from from that point of view i think the answer is it really has a big historical and cultural uh baggage because of the dominance of science in even relating to the forum to terms of nature and understanding

01:29:44 nature it goes back to as greg's at the reductionism problem that you know when i was young so much younger than today i you know i talked to my physics professor that i have difficulty with chemistry and he said of course you have difficulties with it because chemistry does not exist so it's only it's only physic but it is wrong you know it's not true so i think that uh i i do agree that the and uh harold that its metaphysics is

01:30:14 defined what your system x is which i mentioned before the metaphysical say x additional level of destruct of the system acts and your system could doesn't have to be physical it had to be it can be social ethical moral or whatever and and that's why i think as it was said before by professor halverson i believe that physicists tend to have a kind of agreement in terms of demarcating the feel they do but the metaphysicians

01:30:46 have a much more complex stratification of what they do as a field you know they do different things under the name of metaphysics i wanted to add something to to jerry's question which actually i thought greg might respond to because um abner shimoni and i think greg you were working with abner shimoni for a long time he coined the notion of experimental metaphysics

01:31:17 which seems to be contradiction in terms because experiments are never metaphysical experiments or experiments that provide knowledge so they are epistemologically grounded but what i think what shimoni meant to say what they were meant to describe with this idea is that you can if you have a good theory that that comprises something that you would ascribe to a metaphysical domain and also comprises

01:31:47 uh something how the metaphysical domain might might appear to us when we do an experiment then you can do the following you can test two different theories with which have metaphysical which have different metaphysical presuppositions and also have different experimental realizations by doing the experiment and then you can backward infer by the result of the experiment which was the correct metaphysical

01:32:17 assumption within that theory right so this is exactly what happens in in bell type experiments you have two different metaphysical assumptions we have the assumption of local realism and non-local realism both assumptions give you different predict predictions for bell type experiments and then what you find is that in the experiments one of the assumptions is violated right this is a nice example of this seemingly

01:32:49 contradictory notion of experimental metaphysics no well so i mean i agree and that really you know gets down to the question of what is metaphysics like so for example clearly ontology is part of metaphysics so if you're a physicist and you say well i'm with newton i believe that things are corpuscular or i'm with the other people who believe that there are waves and those are the fundamental things and so which is right and then that changes your ontology but that you know the extent to which that's really metaphysical and suspect i mean there is

01:33:19 an overlap and that's the interesting place if there's an overlapping experimental physics if you can't there isn't you're not going to reject an entire deep metaphysics by any experiment of course which is the whole point of seeing it as being oxymoronic on the other hand that's one of the reasons i'm interested in ontological status of elementary particles because physicists endlessly speak about elementary particles it's been going for 50 years past the time when many people said no they're only quantum fields i happen to believe that there are both and you need to understand the relationship between them but you know this is this is you know

01:33:50 the the shimoni thing which makes a lot of sense and i think when you find yourself at the certain point in dealing with your physics is sufficiently difficult or novel you're faced with this question of how deeply do i need to go into the boundary to define my at least my ontology and many of their paradoxes come from bad ontology bad ontological assumptions which is you know part of this whole reaction that we don't want to do any philosophy like it messes up physics well that's you know quite wrong right but so yeah this is very interesting i totally agree yeah

01:34:21 and isn't it true the physicists are keen to reconcile their own theories with what they understand uh uh or or if metaphysicians are keen to reconcile their views with what they see is current date physics there must be some interplay between them right or at some point so i think that there's there's always going to be interplay but it's not going to i i think um just to follow up on what greg said like i'm skeptical of the idea that you could just like wholesale you could have a metaphysical theory and then you would have like an experiment that could just

01:34:53 tell you that it was wrong or something even just for the simple question and you know the fact that data always under determines theory choice or things like that there's always going to be these added philosophical questions um that you have to contend with which is not at all to say that the empirical stuff is just unrelated um so i'll give you an example that's not anything to do with physics but um uh again this is more in my wheelhouse so like a lot of the work uh that i have

01:35:25 done recently is on the relationship between disability and well-being um and the question of like does um having a disability uh automatically reduce um a person's well-being or their quality of life or can we make sense of claims about disability that are made within the disability rights movement that it's like just a way of being different but not necessarily being worse off now psychologists are also interested in this claim they're very interested in the question of the relationship between disability and well-being and there's a ton of empirical data on

01:35:57 it and so you might think well isn't that just an empirical claim like you should just go and look at the science but of course when you go and look at the science for one thing the way that they do you know the way that the experiments are structured it's kind of like you go and you survey people and you ask them rate your happiness or rate your life satisfaction on a scale of one to ten right um now that is really interesting data what it actually tells me about what i as a philosopher i'm interested in when i'm thinking about well-being is a very

01:36:27 complicated question and there's all sorts of things about like comparing different people and there's also different things that they might mean by disability and different you know study populations that they're looking at so i think it would be a mistake for me as a philosopher interested in disability to just pretend like that data doesn't matter that data is incredibly interesting and important to me but i also think it would be a mistake for me to be like oh this thing that i'm interested in it's just an empirical question because psychologists are studying it too

01:36:58 i need to look at their data and be like okay what do i think any of this means and how if at all does it relate to this philosophical question that i'm interested in and might there be ways that i as a philosopher might be critical of some other methodology or say i don't think that this shows what you think it shows or um various things like that um so i think similar things can often be said about the relationship between a philosophical and great and an empirical inquiry i'm sure hans has thoughts on this

01:37:30 i mean i think this all i mean i i'm actually sort of coming up with new thoughts as we go because those very interesting inputs i i was also really grateful to hear uh greg's reflection i mean shimoni is a great administrator he's a great hero in in philosophy of physics um and he's also a great hero for really trying to i mean in one way reviving the philosophical spirit in physics sort of you know physics is exciting because physics tells us stuff about what metaphysicians have been asking

01:38:01 about for ages um so i the one thing i'll just say is like i mean i what this is just sort of off the cuff a little bit i don't i don't know where the line is between empirical science and metaphysics or even just philosophy in general in some sense it often has to do i i'm just going to be an oversimplification but often i think has to do with the the normative right so the the uh you know what should be the case i think they can come up in a lot of

01:38:31 different ways one one is this the simple way of language engineering in other words like we have choices about how to use words and the thing is though it's in science often i think that's kind of forgotten right because you have these sort of you know the terms are fixed you know you ask a person you make a survey you say how do you feel you know is your pain level you know 10 or whatever but we don't say like what should we mean by you know the term well-being or things going well stuff like that so i think that's something we're philosophers we have a bit more of a degree of freedom to say

01:39:04 maybe we should change the way we're talking about this and then also i think we're always sort of looking over our shoulders and thinking in philosophical inquiries like and so so i i you know elizabeth brought out the key word that you know in philosophy always say what does it mean and the thing is i think that often is like what should i do about it right so it's like it's not just the data sitting there it's like so i wake up tomorrow what shall i do in the light of this fact so and that's true an experiment can't tell you what to do right i mean

01:39:35 experiment you could okay that's the result of the experiment you can hold on to the old world view if you want to um you know that's again the theory under theories under determined by data so i think it's a super interesting question you know but it's man i this is maybe one of the things again where you just say maybe we should we shouldn't try to give a shark you know this is where the science stops and this is where the the metaphysics begins um although i think it's it's also bad to sort of like look there's of course territorial battles sadly

01:40:09 in current culture the humanities whatever counts as humanities usually lose right so in other words like people think oh just science dude all you can do is the science and the rest of that stuff is like you know somebody somebody has to you know sit in those chairs that exist in the humanities buildings but in my sense is really good to remind to remind people that the experiments there's a lot more to discuss after the results come in great you want to move on to the next

01:40:39 question yeah uh so how many more are you feeling because i have uh four from people have an ass so um how are we feeling about four is that okay or i think four might do it let's see okay yeah so it's gonna be scott and walter then uh you know just so uh people know because i saw walter was posting a few times just to make sure he knows um i i i got him anyway so scott uh thank you scott for writing a question um it's kind of a run-on so i'll try to fix it up he could lamp ask me later

01:41:11 he's my friends so if i get it wrong he could critique me later but i'll try my best um so he wrote is there any middle ground between the idea that science and mathematics are our human interpretation of the world and that there is only the human perspective on the world and that there's no view from nowhere and then as an aside i think because that's sort of a question in terms of i guess ideal an idealized world but he seems to then suggest that in terms of how it's actually done there seems to be only a human view of the world and a scientific realism

01:41:43 that seems to be the default attitude for most americans in the 21st century that science and mathematics are the fundamental structure of reality and our study of these fields therefore allow us access to such structure um well this is a little bit what hans brought up was bringing up raising earlier as a concern right this this idea of what what what what has been unleashed when we think of scientific studies being a social construct right it doesn't seem to be a question

01:42:15 about so much social construct that's an additional level of that discussion because you could uh use the view that we only have human interaction with the world through mathematics and technology and the social dimension poses additional question uh in in in all these debates in the so-called social studies of science a few years back and social constructivism that was involved to what degree uh you know there is a symmetry

01:42:48 between social sciences and natural sciences from that point of view and there is much more complex view on the on this point now but i you know i'm i'm always a little bit uneasy with people looking for a third way or way sort of in between because it seems to me that one could perfectly do well science under the assumption which as i said people like niels bohr and that it is about our interaction with

01:43:19 the world through the experiment the technology etc rather than making the claims concerning making such a claim that the nature even in the physics level is described by mathematical equations and things of that type even though i do know that many people do believe in that but i would call this uh unfalsifiable uh metaphysical assumption because you you know look von neumann made a similar

01:43:50 type of thing that he believed that quantum mechanics described the independent behavior of the and only experiment interferes with that unbreaking probability etc but i think it's an unfalsifiable anthology the only thing we can falsify is what we see the experiment and how well our theories predict that but i don't think we can the advantage of seeing the world in terms of interaction

01:44:21 in scientific theory and technology is falsifiability you know for me even the theory of relativity even though most people believe that it but not all there are philosophers of science who i think kush or some don't believe that general relativity actually describes it's an idealization which enables us to predict very important effects right so i think this position allows us to do science and it is you can say it is a

01:44:53 form of metaphysics because it makes an unfalsifiable ontological assumption about the fact that we cannot describe or represent the universe but it's different from making assumption that we can because there is a symmetry because that assumption is non-falsifiable there is no way in my view to falsify the assumption that the nature is described by any mathematical equations apart from our existence on

01:45:23 the other hand i can perfectly well falsify theory such as quantum mechanics classical physics which can pre which can predict experiments some of which has a kind of metaphysical flavor not only belt theorem rightly brought up by harold but even the double slit experiment initially schredinger and heisenberg's views of quantum mechanics were very different uh metaphysically so it's all uh so in any event i don't i don't think

01:45:53 i understand the temptation of the third way orientation of scientific realism but i don't think they're necessary and it's not made a matter of welcome raiser it's it's a totally different question why why one take one position or another on that i cannot explain why i take this interactive position versus scientific realism i don't know that i think it's very difficult to explain maybe elizabeth can explain that because she

01:46:24 deals in in her domain you deal precisely with this question they are psychological historical philosophical they are not mathematical there is no explanation why i believe in that type of position i can offer some but i could be a scientific realist but i'm not okay thank you scott fishbein you didn't give him full credit yeah uh he said he's not on the train so i'll relay him later if he missed out um he'd tell me later if i

01:46:55 didn't mess up how he wanted that asked um so thank you scott so next we have three more so this is from walter k lew thank you walter they wrote i'm going to use the the latest one he wrote which he wrote as meta linguistic and meta perceptual activities respectively to what extent are poetry and cinema both physics and metaphysics in the census discussed today wow

01:47:29 that's an interesting one well i mean right they partake of uh of metaphysical subject matter right or or their subjects might encourage a metaphysical reflection is that a fair way to frame it out everybody also like what comes straight to mind is a lot of movies both very popular and even i guess more was seen as high art are using the multiverse um concepts in in in their storytelling now right like everything everywhere all at once the recent movies and i was mentioning to

01:48:00 you earlier yeah yeah and then another one i was thinking um so obviously it's being used in the marvel cinematic universe for the more uh pop culture reference and then another one i thought of as you guys were talking was it was a short series by uh the guy alex garland on hulu called devs which um was about a sort of a silicon valley company making a computer that sort of predicted sort of predicted how

01:48:30 you just i guess some examples that come off the top of my head with the flesh out the cinema aspect of that question yeah so i think actually one really interesting way and maybe where these places can uh interact is that uh maybe especially speculative fiction um to pick up on that can give really really interesting thought experiments for thinking about um metaphysical theories that could sort of this is again one way in which uh i think you can think about the way that metaphysical inquiry goes

01:49:01 beyond pure empirical inquiry um because it's like you're thinking about situations that you know by their nature don't exist but nevertheless might tell you something interesting about um the the nature of reality if they if they give problems for your theories so um you know uh very often when we're talking about the metaphysics of persons for example somebody's gonna mention something that happened in star trek the next generation here's the thing that happened when there are two rikers after they go through the transporters and what like

01:49:33 which one is the real riker or that they um and i think i don't just think that that is people goofing off i think it's the like interesting questions about how we think about ourselves can be raised by um purely fictional scenarios that allow us to sort of like filter out the noise of the everyday world a little bit and just think about like well what is the nature of what do we care about when we care about personhood what do we care about when we care about survival um there are also really interesting questions just about like you know what

01:50:05 is the nature of fictional representation like how is it both like true that uh frodo took the ring to mount doom and also true that frodo doesn't exist because there's no such thing as hobbits and things like that so like well these are the kind of puzzles that philosophers worry about um so there definitely is like interesting overlap um it's great great stuff all right we're going to move on i think we want to get through these last two if possible yeah yeah so it's just ruth and um ena so ruth wrote a comment a question the comments i think pretty funny was not a question it was um

01:50:36 i like the point that those claim to have shed the metaphysics often have the wildest implicit metaphysics i just like to add also that um when i heard that i generally think of neil degrasse tyson um because i think it's unfortunate a lot of science communicators kind of resort to those viewpoints i think like him also lawrence krauss i think he's been kind of discredited though due to me too but then also sam harris a little bit when he talks about philosophy i kind of uh tune out because it's not uh it's not great anyway um to their question they wrote um why would metaphysicians

01:51:07 need to know physics rather than chemistry i think as a comment made to the previous question without already assuming that chemistry reduces the physics which is a hefty assumption any quick answers to that i it doesn't hurt to to know chemistry and physics that's good you're you're muted arcadie you're on mute but you can stratify it you can have metaphysics of chemistry uh

01:51:38 as you have you know it's true that the philosophy of chemistry was a very marginal aspect of the history of philosophy of science but actually it is an extremely interesting or even history and philosophy of uh chemistry so you can certainly have a metaphysics of chemistry and or you can have i i do think that if you take the emergence view you would you would qualify that any claims you make concerning the

01:52:08 metaphysics in terms of fundamental physics could have limit in other domains so i think you have two approaches there and that from that point of view uh just like you can have metaphysics of biology or then consciousness or whatever you know or sociological things i think you can perfectly well have metaphysics of chemistry or philosophy of chemistry without assuming that it is reducible to physics even though at some level you can make this

01:52:40 assumption it just practically is not true because a lot of chemical phenomena cannot be explained by terms of physics in very practical terms and it has its own history and its own scientific thinking which is very long going all the way back to alchemy and things of that time just to pick up on the bit from this question that i think was really interesting this this idea of uh metaphysical inquiry is kind of inevitable like you just always end up doing it it's like even

01:53:11 just the very question of whether metaphysicians need to know metaphysics i'm sorry they do need to know metaphysics um whether metaphysicians need to know physics is itself this really substantial metaphysical question like you just um the annoying thing about this these questions but also kind of the cool thing about them is that like you you just run into them constantly um you can't get away from them okay i'd also just like to add i've heard sort of the the same thing uh talked about physics from mathematicians where they say oh physics isn't real math is

01:53:43 right because usually they nitpick the fact that in physics you make a lot of assumptions well you just have to build from the ground up in in math so the cycle continues i guess they say um and then i guess last but not least so i have to find it on okay ina galdina ah thank you ina they wrote in what is the role of language in metaphysics another small question yeah very in the beginning there was such an important yeah it's important right anyone want to take a shot at that

01:54:20 well i maybe we can reference some we made a number of references to sort of the tradition of analytic philosophy which is all about that question um uh well by the way i made a reference earlier to karnap and davidson as uh people who are seeking consensus within the discipline i meant richard rory not donald davidson when i mentioned that comment about different how different fields can you rely on the democratic process among their participants to settle on what the truth

01:54:51 might be or anyway what they're they're striving for the truth um so i just interject because um walter i think one more of the emphasis in poetry and cinema as inherently inquiries into language and perception in and of themselves so i think i can kind of add to it to what you know was asking also to maybe better answer what walter wrote previously sorry so anyone else want to say something about linguistics and uh it's a big

01:55:21 topic wittgenstein in the end of three theaters my language is my world you know so i think it's irreducible because there is no language without thought and there is no thought result language so the language plays a huge role and actually uh in the history of quantum mechanics there were people including heisenberg who reflected as well as boar on the necessity of even common language that you cannot avoid it you know so i think that that's the but it will be used differently

01:55:53 i i'd love to uh i love the mention of wittenstein in this context because we've mentioned how so many people so many thinkers have said they want to do without metaphysics and then develop their own terrible metaphysics or rely on in any way i think that concerns a wonderful and elegant uh example of someone who tried as darndest to sort of get rid of metaphysics or any way to be an anti-metaphysician and yet he's created an industry of metaphysics so

01:56:24 which is a lot more elegant and sophisticated than some of the other folks we've touched on um anyway i want to thank everyone i think we've had an incredibly stimulating conversation and i'm not surprised to find that i'd love for it to continue on further uh i want to thank you all for participating and i hope you all will consider coming back in the future for other felix talks to be determined uh we're going to be starting up again as i said in the fall and we will be sending out announcements to all of our audience

01:56:55 members about when that will take place almost certainly sometime in september anyway thank you all again that was been wonderful thank you i missed it thank you thank you everybody bye it's unmessable if you say that so how how do we get out of here you just i i

01:57:32 people

01:58:04 you