The Completeness of Physics

00:00:02 okay thank you okay I'm at nursing director of the center the participants today or Josef Cohen who's professor emeritus of mathematics from Princeton University team maudlin was professor of philosophy at New York University

00:00:33 priyamvada an Italian who's professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University Jonathan Kramnik professor Maynard Mac professor of English also at Yale and Kara vane professor of philosophy at Columbia University we have one more meeting scheduled this year it will be in June and it's a combination of science and art and its own turbulence

00:01:04 and there will be an art show during that week and the meeting on unlike our usual meetings will not be on a Saturday but on a Thursday night I think it's June the second Thursday or the first Thursday you can find it on the website is everybody making it me

00:01:43 what are we what are we supposed to be talking about the completeness of physics I'm sorry I can't remember okay I'll start III will start just to give so so there's a kind of sense in the science community that physicists are a little bit uppity and a

00:02:17 little yeah just a little and feel like they're occupy some higher position in virtue of their subject matter than the other scientists and you know there's there's some manner of hostility around that it's certainly true that the physicists have been able just as a matter of fact to be incredibly successful at making white precise

00:02:47 predictions for certain experiments and testing them to many degrees many many decimal places and having them come out right in a way that the biologists are the economists or the chemists even never will give them as long as you want there will never be a biological thesis that gives rise to a prediction to 14 decimal places and check to that accuracy and so there's this this sort

00:03:18 of ambient sense that physics holds a primary in some sense of primary or foundational role among the sciences and and and at the height of arrogance of physicists might say well all of chemistry that's really physics just done a little sloppily and all a biology that's really chemistry just done even more sloppily and so on up the scale and

00:03:52 and that for a a perfectly trained mind everything would be clearer if it was reduced to physics and I guess I guess I can start at least with a comment about about that which is that there's something to it but not anything like what I just said and there's something to it is that physics alone of the sciences has programmatically the requirement

00:04:23 to cover everything in a certain sense within its own scope within its own vocabulary and within its own concepts so to give an example of the way the other Sciences don't have this think of medicine you go to your doctor and he examines you and he pronounces you're gonna live another 40 years and very happily you walk out of the doctor's office across the street get hit by a

00:04:56 bus and her killed and if you go to the doctor and say that was a pretty bad prediction the doctor quite rightly will say that's not my department [Music] my medical prognosis didn't cover collisions with buses that's out of my field and the difference is that the physicists can never say that every

00:05:27 medical event is a physical event every economic event is a physical event every biological event is also a physical event every astronomical event is also a physical event everything that happens in principle ought to be covered by physics using its own vocabulary and using its own set of concepts and it's never appropriate for a physicist to say that's not my department and the demand

00:05:59 also for complete precision and accuracy is unique to physics having said that it's just false that the other science is reduced to physics or are nothing but physics the other Sciences use their own conceptual systems their own vocabularies their own explanatory structures and give insight and understanding into events that you will never get study the physics as much as you want you know if you want to

00:06:32 understand what Joyce was doing when he wrote Finnegan's Wake we were just having a discussion about this a complete physical description down to the last detail of his brain will not help you study it as much as you want so there's an interesting question of how the sciences relate to each other and how different forms of understanding and

00:07:03 comprehension relate to each other and how independent the sciences the special Sciences can become of the physical basis which I don't think there's a general answer to physics achieved the kind of successes that it has and looking perhaps what the metaphysical

00:07:34 epistemological suppositions that were needed to understand sort of this success and this notion of being able to order phenomena to formulate laws and I think that's sort of one particular intellectual claim that physics would make right that that there's something deep about the nature of reality and the

00:08:07 order of the physical world that physicists in combination with mathematics have just found the right vocabulary to distil I would say that in this pecking order if you're gonna have a pecking order mathematics obviously goes on top [Laughter]

00:08:41 not only you can do you have to do something III just I just taught philosophy of science and the first day of class I said how do we divide we have the Arts and Sciences where does everybody go and of course mathematics was just off by itself because it doesn't it's not empirical it doesn't have laboratories it it doesn't fit with any of the other sciences although in some sense it's

00:09:14 from a physicist and I think he was something funny Niels Bohr said that there are two kinds of truths there the small truths and the great truths small truths have the property that the opposite of a small truth is false but the great truths have the property that the opposite of a great truth is also true so so I mean this is nonsense of

00:09:47 course in some ways but in some ways there's something to it and I want to say I want to say that what's what's in there is that I don't view I mean there's a kind of division about physics and biology and so on people say this is disciplines are divided inside a discipline there is cosmology in this solid-state physics I don't know what but I just want to look at the general picture a general picture how do people

00:10:20 what science what do people understand the science the science seems to me is taking something that's demonstrably false and model like in the early in the early days science was mostly plotting figuring out how large pots are and men doing architecture and so on the fossil science and so you start drawing lines

00:10:50 on paper and you say that that represents something real well there's no such thing I mean you point is not it's an abstraction any point if you look at closely nobody what is the point it's some kind of thing quarks or something I don't know you know it's so you know you start out with something that's what people call a toy model model and you say okay now we have this beautiful thing called complaint

00:11:22 geometry that seems to describe our world we can design buildings you can design pyramids in design cities using plain geometry well it turns out that if you try to design routes for airplanes the plain geometry doesn't work you have to use spherical geometry and then you say okay so this is part of our geometrical worldly where spheres and you know how to draw triangles on spheres and you have a spherical geometry okay but then after a while you

00:11:53 find out that that doesn't work here and you you have Romanian geometry or the Lorentz engine and so so it seems to me that all of science consists of having some kind of model which is usually a mathematical model or something and you know them well that's not the thing it's a model and then you make logical

00:12:24 deductions from that and lo and behold you find new phenomena when you look at the world and find that there is a word maybe I'll give an example of that but anyway but the point is that these idealized models right they're very powerful they're very powerful mixed very well and they come in very strange ways for example you know mathematicians had been for centuries trying to find formulas to solve equations the fame was a quadratic

00:12:55 equation formula to learn in high school it was a great achievement and then they then they worked very hard and actually found a solution of a cubic equation fifth degree equation and it was sort of mysterious what happens and then group theory was discovered and they find found that certain they found exactly what kind of formulas can be used for what equations from groups here from what's called Guevara theory and the develop a certain theory of groups which

00:13:26 means really symmetries of the roots of the polynomial it's kind of a symmetry thing groups okay so in back to order and so then came really one of the great mathematicians of all times emmy noether who noticed that the conservation laws of physics have to do their symmetry conservation rather the things you have to do with symmetries of space of certain group in certain group which

00:13:57 mathematicians call ratio three nevermind but anyway certain group an analysis of that predicts the conservation laws of classical physics and then using the same idea using other groups Hermann vile and Eugene Wigner and others developed a way of studying particle physics using those groups as these are ideas of group theory and they could do remarkable things they could

00:14:27 predict predict quarks predict new particles just from the study of group theory so it's a kind of a back and forth business it's ideas sometimes original mathematics sometimes originating in physics sometimes original somewhere else are then abstracted into some kind of model and you work with that and use mathematical methods and find certain consequences and then

00:14:59 you go in check in the real world if those consequences work and if they do then you have an explanation but then then somewhat later you may have you may find out that they actually kind of thing explains lots of stuff that theory right but at a certain point it doesn't explain something so you modify the whole works and start a new theory and so you don't the goal is to explain

00:15:30 everything but step by step you don't explain everything in one one blow the goal of physics is to account for all physical phenomena which includes all empirical phenomenon but this is not all what does it all mean all is a function of reality but it is a

00:16:02 function of time reality it's a function of time if you once I discover a new electron microscope or something I'll find you or enjoy a new a new cyclotron or more powerful cyclotron I'll may discover new things and so and then all would have to include that and the previous theory that explained everything before that may not explain that one but the reality exists whether or not whether you have an electron microscope when you are able to see viruses or not viruses exist

00:16:35 somebody has to discover them before you say they exist in two points that you're making that seem to be in a kind of interesting tension with each other on the one hand of the goal is to provide an account for everything all of reality all the physical reality at the same time there's much that physics can't explain is outside of physics it seems like you're committed and I am to - I mean to the degree to

00:17:06 which I understand propositions I think I'm also committed to each one of those things but it also seems to me that there is an interesting tension between the two and perhaps we could just sort of spill that out of it because I think that's lies at the heart of what it is that you know animates this question yeah you know can I give a really simple example which I don't want to I one thing I don't want it to do with sound mister so let me he mystify it as much as possible I have an object in front of me on the desk and there is a pattern of

00:17:38 light coming right at me from it and I say to the physicist wave physicists can you please predict what's going to happen with this pattern and they take the object and they subject it to complete physical analysis and they say all right what you have is a spectrum of light that's shifting in a certain pattern way from our analysis it will continue doing this for exactly two

00:18:08 point eight three years and then stop good and I can't describe to you how difficult what I'm saying would be to do that is you take this thing you have to analyze it down to the level it's electrons and solve impossible equations so I'm giving the physicists all kinds of powers he doesn't have but in principle physics could do and then I asked the computer scientist to come into the office and he walks in front of

00:18:40 the same object he doesn't even look at he glances at it and looks at the sheets of paper that are sitting next to it and he says he what what you're seeing is this little spinning disk of death that comes up on your computer right when it's just thinking and he just glances down at the papers and says you idiot step 12 and your program is go to step 18 and step 18 is to go to step 12 you've built a loop into your program

00:19:12 and that little guy is gonna spin forever that is your program will never stop now he makes a prediction - he says that this little light will go on forever he's wrong it's actually gonna go off in 2.8 3 years when certain circuits burn out of the computer which the physicist is fine with right but the computer scientist has given me a heck of a lot more insight or understanding or comprehension of what's going on then

00:19:46 the physicist has and he there and this test exactly to do with building a model the computer scientist has an abstract model of the computer and of the programming that he says I don't care how you realize this thing in physics right I don't care what kind of chips you're using I don't care what kind of elements there are as long as what you've realized is described well by this abstract model I can tell you what it's going to do and so this is again

00:20:18 this is the example of bringing so there's no tension between right I think I understand this better now so in a sense Sojin zooming out even further if you imagine this as being like a still-life anything using your example from the arts from earlier so it's a still-life painting of a table with a bottle on it you can give a physical account of it and so far as you're describing you know the properties of light and the way you just did but that account so it lies within physics in that sense but that account probably will not tell you very much about the painting itself

00:20:48 predictions yeah the future of that object right so it's a it's a description that's valid for a moment of time sure snapshot yeah and in terms of our understanding is valid in if you were interested in the questions that it answers I suppose but doesn't go very far to answer the question well tell me about this painting tell me what tell me about its aesthetic properties tell me about its historical meaning and so on right we're even even let's go to prediction you rather you've taken the

00:21:18 painting into some of these mm-hmm first and you say I would like a prediction for how much someone's gonna be willing to pay for this object next week the physicist is not going to have a chance of that right no way right and this person may very well be able to look at it and say yeah this looks like an authentic you know and I know the market and I know what I'm thinking and there's my prediction for how much it's gonna go for I don't get this line of argumentation are we talking about I

00:21:49 mean this program scissors were talking about possibilities in the future I say today the fish is nothing to say about anything that's physics can't say anything about choice or something like that but we're talking about future mankind right show me physics and science has existed for 200 years but and it's developed enormous Lee and I don't think you can limit just by saying because you don't understand what the physics can do today you can't say that

00:22:21 physics or science can't do it they can't do something in the future you don't know what it'll be able to do you don't know what you don't know what kind of understanding of the market forces there will be so that so that you can really know was everything I said was perfectly sincere being concessive about anything oh you mean you don't think you're being concessive when you say that there are

00:22:52 lots of purposes and explanatory enterprises that we pursue which look right now as though they give us information that it would be hard to get just doing physics right I think that yeah we'll never give us that information right well I think that we should just be oh you know it's odd so I want to jump in here I think it's really interesting how much certitude there is in these discussions rather than agnosticism so so okay and and the very

00:23:23 idea of the completeness of physics is ambiguous between a lot of things and that's why the conversation had a hard time getting going and I've heard a number of different things already come up you make there you don't think it is the case that every truth you might want to know would be a truth that counts as the truth of physical theory right because we might have other other enterprises that's one way in which you could think about an incompleteness of physics and then you say oh well but it turns out it's complete because there's

00:23:54 no event that takes place that doesn't come within the purview of sort of question how did it happen where the answer would get a physical explanation so that's another notion of completeness which looks ontological almost then you have fundamental order that's your notion and so there's some notion of fundamentality there okay so my colleague David Albert says things like you know what if we've discovered all the fundamental particles and all the fundamental laws that govern the fundamental particles then that's everything now but what notion of

00:24:25 everything is that you've already so I think there's a concession about how if you know that there's much you still don't know right literally don't know if the descriptions of James's work or the truth about a program that's about possibilities and not physical facts at that point once you know all the fundamental forces you know all the fundamental particles and you know how the forces are mediated then what you don't know is the relationship between

00:24:57 those between those there tortures in the relation though there's a thing's already tracked by physics and then there are things that we describe in not not in the terms of physical theory not in terms of those fundamental particles and so on so there are two related I mean there's no it's about the previous layer like even within physics one there is an argument about whether you can have a theory of energy totally unified okay so that's another sense okay so good all right so that's another sense and then we could add in I think your

00:25:30 further sense about what's unknowable by human beings right so everything's of the aspiration to a kind of complete true theory of the world at least in the sense that the physicist is interested which might be concessive about what doesn't fall inside the theory and what's not reducible to it and I would just say for the record there that I would plump for that's where I stopped being agnostic I guess I think it's a very theological picture of ourselves that we can know everything and if we really believe we've evolved and we

00:26:02 believe that we have cognitive abilities that are products of evolution I think it's it's a small step to say that they're limited yeah I mean I you know and it's a small step also to say that they're various and that what they deliver might not be integratable into a single unified theory right so there might be things beyond those capacities and what those capacities deliver might not all fit together in a unified theory I think that's just stepping far back

00:26:33 from the details of physics I think those are just things to bet on sure okay so so the pretensions of the completeness of physics and have to be specified much more carefully so you don't sound like you're just saying something pretty obviously not true and the other thing that I would just inject into the conversation is if you want to step back and just say well we have physical theory we have the goals of physical theory as Tim described them and as you've described them not as just

00:27:04 modeling but actually purporting to get at fundamental ontology fundamental laws fundamental order and that things in space and time can always fall under the net of physical explanation I think that's that's a sense of completeness of physics that's consistent with us not knowing everything and consistent with maybe not everything that we think take ourselves to know being integratable into a single theory unified reductive or whatever once you get that far with

00:27:36 the question of the completeness of physics then I think I would just suggest that one good way to proceed is to ask are there things we haven't yet put on the table that look like they're not promising candidates for understanding in physical terms and that they're so distant from it that starts to look that then you start to worry about the completeness of physics so the

00:28:07 example I would give is first-person point of view now there are many ways to think about it there's bodily point of view from not from which you perceive and move there's phenomenological point of view from which that's something and like it's like to feel things and there's also a normative point of view from which you can reason and deliberate and they're not the same thing at all but there are questions about whether I mean I suppose physicists now say that there's something fundamentally respectable about reality itself right

00:28:39 so but anyway I would I would start by just sort of trying to think about what are the features of things accessible we're inclined to say only from a first-person point of view and and is there a tension between thinking about things under that description accessible only from a first-person point of view and bringing it under the physical explanation that's one place where I would push and explore that sounds right to me I think this is

00:29:10 compatible I believe with the point that Tim and I were working out earlier which is that you could perhaps give something like a physical account of that there wouldn't be an explanation of it I suppose there would be a satisfying explanation of what something is like from a first-person point of view I would just add to that that there's most of the questions and topics that I think people care deeply about who aren't working on physics probably would fall under that broad domain which is to say you could give it you know they're not outside of the scope of physical reality but they nevertheless can't really be

00:29:40 given a physical explanation and I would not I would add to first-person point of view most of human culture that was my example of the arts earlier but that's just one piece of it I mean most of human history most of human culture most of the kind of questions that people you know care about and are interested in who are not actually working physicists there is not which is maybe to be sort of consensus from the others the other side yeah which is to say that there's you know physics is obviously very

00:30:11 powerful in the ways that it that we've been just been told but it's also it's it's the way that it could actually provide knowledge for us about much of what we care about is actually quite limited and and there's I think probably a pretty deep relationship between those limits and its power if that makes sense in a sense yeah it's I guess what I've I take that point what I'm looking for is

00:30:44 perhaps an exploration of the features of the first-person point of view that are detailed enough that so not like broad things about the kinds of things we care about and being acculturated and so on and products of history and having lots of purposes besides physical explanation all of that's true but if you just think of the nature of the first person that nature threw out the first person points of view so to speak you know just think about some of their most fundamental feet

00:31:14 and ask what would it look like to try to tackle that in a physicists spirit that's what I'm looking for and I'm kind of agnostic but I have places where I have doubts anyway that's what I am inviting look I sort of agree with the sentiments you're expressing but I still don't want to stick to the thing is a situation like this that we are talking about science science is something that's very young and just starting and the and it's not just models it is only

00:31:47 models I would say science is only model you don't have there's no way of doing something without presupposing some kind of simplified object which we wish you were then work with you don't if you say the distance from this point at that point is so much yeah there's no such thing as a point no this this is some some sort of models at you that you can describe very precisely and it has some

00:32:18 sort of relations to this through what we call distance but it's all models that's what I say model my first that's my first let me just make another little point so I think science is models I agree with other things that the sentiments expressed I think we're at the beginning of science but I don't think we can a priori put on limitations and say science will not be able ever to explain such and such you don't know

00:32:48 it's been historically has been proven that many things that were for completely unexplainable suddenly became explainable by science science is an evolving thing you don't there's no such thing as a if something has been completely established your history is that you you find a certain of model that corresponds to a certain situation and it's very good if it corresponds to further stuff that you didn't expect but you can't say that it's not going to be

00:33:20 good forever because history has shown that usually you find something the model doesn't apply Thrun and yet to change the model I mean the provisionality is sort of a given but I wanted to sort of make two points the first is that you know this question in itself to make it an interdisciplinary one requires sort of a few rounds of the merry-go-round before we can really get to the question but I think that the but the key point for me right is it's

00:33:53 really the nature of reality so the nature of reality that that complexity of the nature of reality so for example I actually disagree that you know the only things we care about are the painting or representation we care about the physical world the fact that you can make predictions with physics we care about that that's part of the things that we care about it's not separate it's not separate the way you were sitting it sounded like that's the separate thing other than the light you know going back to Tim's example that

00:34:24 there's the representation of this object or whatever so I think the first issue is you know reality and the descriptors of reality be they subjective or mathematical descriptors so let's just collapse all the model mathematics let's just make it mathematics right so that kind of description of reality the individual person there is something obviously

00:34:55 innately universal within quotation marks where you know it doesn't matter if I don't like two plus two equals four it's not a matter of my subjective desires or particular perspective on what the sum of two numbers those two numbers is right the I think to me the the fact that there is this domain of

00:35:26 reality a description that we can all agree upon and demarcating that from the domains that we cannot agree upon because of each individual haptic experience of reality right I think I think introducing the idea of the first person point of view suggests this notion of subjectivity and disagreement but it isn't what I meant okay I think it's quite possible that that what we think

00:35:59 about when we deliberate and ask what it would be best to do is not a matter of what I like and it might be that there aren't in the end really truly irresolvable disagreements about that it might be that there are real matters of value to investigate and find out about but the point about a deliberative point of view is that you have to ask the question from the first-person point of view what would it be best for me to do given all that I think now thinking isn't the same thing as thinking from

00:36:31 the fact you have to think from what you think ok so that's where the subjectivity comes in those thoughts are still answerable to reality whether there are evaluative thoughts or cognitive attitudes I would say yeah Tim's been writing I'll try and be very brief I just want to reframe some of what was said you know in a way at least I find helpful so here are some things that I think cannot and never will be reducible to physical truth the big one

00:37:03 with respect to first-person point of view is consciousness that's the mind-body problem I see no prospect of physics ever solving the mind I'm agnostic I'm just this is my credo ok what else is there that's not physical truth I think there's such a thing as mathematical truth it's not physical truth it's independent of physics the mathematician may well disagree with me curiously enough I think there are ethical and moral truths some of them which are not physical truths and are completely unaffected by physics then

00:37:34 I think that I think some of them are fixed okay this is controversial I'm just laying it out there okay objective moral realist okay I map latest in mathematics and the last little point just conceptually just to make sure we don't drift there are two questions that that got compressed at a moment oh I'll make one more point of this which was how much can fizzes explained and how much can science explain in my homework was that there's lots of science that is in physics and I

00:38:05 was talking about the limitations of physics those are not the limitations of science how far science goes and what in principle can be brought under a scientific method insofar as there is one is it into is it quite a different than consciousness in that well it could there be a science of consciousness that's you know so you see how these intersect the last point I'll just make it very quickly is just a point of disagreement I don't believe that that physics or science has to always be

00:38:35 models and so on I think that when you could wrote down the rules of Euclidean geometry he was under the belief that he was describing the physical world he was describing the thing I'm waving my hands around in can I finish and he thought it was accurate and perfectly correct and he could have been right it just turns out he wasn't but he could have been right and if he was right then geometry would have been done period and I think physicists think that can still happen and I believe it can still happen as I

00:39:12 would have predicted predictive accuracy let's see now well I don't know through all of this but it seems to me first of all that when you have a discussion like this you can't differentiate between science with science or physics what's this this is not something called a scientific method and everywhere that's what we are I think talking about and it seems to me that scientific method is something that's been it's been very successful up to a certain point and we

00:39:43 we can hope that you continue to be more and more successful and whether we practice the scientific method doesn't quite work coming from outside of philosophy the most interesting work in the philosophy of science that I've read has been about establishing relations between physics and this special sciences there's interesting questions or not I think the

00:40:16 two questions here yeah there's a question about reductionism inside each specialty a very question about reductionism inside mathematics because there are various parts of mathematics how they relate how they're reduced to each other and in physics and inside and bhayya how is biology can be reduced to fit those are deep in my field those are details the question the whole philosophical question seems to me is how far science can reach to explain

00:40:47 things scientific scientific method which is everything that we call science and there it seems to me you cannot right now it reaches only a certain extent a lot but at the same time it's lots of things that we have no idea about but and even it's true for mathematics too for that matter but then so beyond that the question is can you say point to something and say

00:41:18 this will never be understood or enlightened to by the scientific method I say that's just false we don't we we it may be it may be true in that particular case but you cannot assert that with an in certainty that you never understand I understand that as a kind of faith and I admire it but I think also at the same time that there are dimensions to the world that require really to understand them ways of interactive investigating and that really or not that are not scientific or

00:41:50 don't follow the sound that much and then again just just to follow up on that point they I think much of what not all of what we care about but much of what we care about and actually would would fall under that an example of acting which agrees with you with your point but it was Michael McCaul so yeah and then we many years ago I was in a very situation where we had a person in South America who a kid

00:42:27 who was taken to a hospital and infection on his foot and they decided to do amputate the leg and this person 16 your kid ran away from the hospital went through mountains to the shaman or something and they treated him with some kind of thing and his foot was saved okay so obviously this sort of points you pointed that in some situations you should get away from the scientists and

00:43:00 have people who have experience in such and such but later on if you investigate that it was sure to be shown that the that the shaman applied something that before antibiotics were discovered it was really--it antibiotics with boiling is a who knows what together so it seems to me that it's true that any any given moment of time there are lots of things which are not going to be understood from the point of view of science of

00:43:32 scientific reasoning and you have to rely on experiences traditions and guesses of all sorts and intuitions etc but to say a priori that such-and-such will never be understood by scientific method I think is just you and I think that and where and why I call it worldview is you can come from a worldview like the one that probably Tim and I share which is of epistemic

00:44:04 humility which is why should this gelatinous thing between our years give us the capability to figure everything out including itself okay saying never is not another sign of humility brief and very controversial intervention here

00:44:36 yeah I'll go out of character for a minute I don't think I don't think as a philosopher of science and I think very few I think the general agreement of all philosophers of science at this point there is no such thing as a scientific method that's just a myth there is no method that all Sciences use and so to say we just have to use the scientific method is is is empty there are certain there are some good experimental techniques there's double blinding

00:45:06 there's some things you can guard yourself against that are fairly general but there's no you know take the scientific method and do economics what does that even mean it's just there is no no book of the scientific method you can look at what particular Sciences do and ask for the particular evidence they have and criticize it but there there there just is no such thing okay so I think that there is such a thing is scientific method and it's something give us some something that all of us

00:45:37 know and agree with deep inside if I think about it the scientific method basically is that you observe the world or observe or think about the world and in some way organize ideas about it and then check it out whether it's true or not that's basically the same method that actually covers at least all the

00:46:11 disciplines in which case I entirely agree with you that yes that means rigor means you know aiming at truth dis accounting for the world and sure I mean that's the same kid the same for my Department of English literature the same for the anthropology department another way of saying but I don't think any of us are going to be physics another way of saying it is that you you're thinking about things you're forming a certain model and then you check it against reality okay so one thing that for sure according to you

00:46:43 does not follow the scientific method is mathematics no no it's part of science and you know the science you know the scientific method is to construct this this concept and that's usually done by using mathematics but but you don't check mathematics in pure well no welcher no you you have a

00:47:14 something is something called you have language and mathematics and fingers are the things to communicate with it's this and those who understand the science of our time as well as the mathematician here a question about the significance of our mathematical capacities since you know one of the really exciting things about physics that everybody's been emphasizing is that the world became mathematically tractable in a new and

00:47:44 exciting way with the rise of physics and it continues beyond expectations and it continues beyond expectations ok so so so that is exciting I even remember in high school physics I was in a school where it was progressive science so you actually were supposed to figure out scientific theory which was silly but anyway I was taking calculus at the same time that I was doing physics experiments and loading carts with stones and timing their velocity and

00:48:15 plotting acceleration and I got to this point where the graphs I was learning to plot in calculus were identical with the graphs I was plotting about velocity and acceleration and I got goosebumps it was like oh you know this R priori thing it's not just a model it seems like our capacity to work with these uh priori concepts was enabling us to mainline features like very stable features of change in space and time and that was like an incredibly exciting moment in my

00:48:46 17 year old life left an indelible impression ok so but so so when I think about the fact that you know if you're not a non naturalist all together about about human beings and human capacities this capacity to do mathematics which gave us a capacity to track so many interesting features of things in space and time just looks like it calls for some sort of study right so and I'm sure people have done it this is not my field

00:49:16 I came to inject stuff about point of view today which I'm not even do very much of maybe we'll get to it later but but you know some of the capacities were born with I think arguably aren't helpful for doing science so I think personally that our disposition to to track things in terms of essence is to say you know what's the essence of a table whatever it's necessary and sufficient property yeah conditions for being a table is not very useful for science biology got rid of it we no

00:49:47 longer look for the essences of species right so but we are all essentialists in in our cognitive development we just think in essentialist terms and I think scientifically we've learned to transcend that capacity we've learned to transcend the way things look in order to get deeper physical explanations of some of the things we learned by sight and so there are these questions I have about which of our psychological capacities are our best tools for actually the project of the tracking mind independent reality of them and

00:50:17 it's most elevated you know ambition right you know to do that and so what wouldn't it be interesting if there was a physical explanation of an emergence of a capacity to truck in these structures so that you're kind of of what you're tracking in some sense right and that to me looks like in a sort of interesting way of completing physics right to sort of understand how the capacities you need to do in

00:50:48 mathematics would have interestingly possibly some kind of physical explanation because of the way in which the physics of the brain enables these these funny structures to be constructed mentally which then are useful for as you say modeling or predicting or whatever else things outside it right you know that just looks like a really exciting domain of study to me and that's part of psychology which I wouldn't say is the first-person point of view that's a capacity to to compute

00:51:19 certain things it's not got to do with the first-person point of view so anyway so I'm just wondering what like I'm sure you we all marvel at how the fact that we can do mathematics seems independent of induction and empirical methods and yet it drives them when science gets good right that's like an interesting and exciting fact and so what would it be to be open-minded about a way in which physical understanding could complete our understanding of ourselves as having a capacity for mathematics I can give a really quick

00:51:54 sketch of something that is in the area of what you just said and is highly speculative look the the the Greeks divided mathematics into arithmetic and geometry and arithmetic they really meant the theory of whole numbers as we would say counting numbers those were the only numbers there were and geometry the theory of magnitudes and in particular what we would call spatial structure that we have a capacity to

00:52:25 think about spatial structure especially kind of Euclidean base is explained perfectly well by evolution on the assumption that we live in a sort of spatial structure which is pretty nearly not quite Euclidean and so to survive any animal would have to evolve a really efficient map way to map and think about and predict because you think any animal that's gonna make a decision has to make

00:52:56 a prediction if I do this this will happen if I do that that'll happen all of this is model in this geometrical arena so that we can do that well is not so surprising visual processing this is all again bringing things into a kind of spatial representation the the interesting thing that happened in math was that at a certain point the arithmetic part that had to do with numbers what they kept doing was inventing or discovering more and more

00:53:27 numbers start with the integers then you get the rational numbers and you get the real numbers then you get the negative numbers and you get the complex numbers and then there was this amazing thing of being able to translate between geometry and algebra and and take geometrical problems and put them in algebraic form and have these powerful ways of solving the algebraic problems and then translating them back into the geometrical language and and then geometry itself got pushed to a smaller smaller corner and everything grew the

00:53:58 other way all of that I think is extremely interesting I mean that's a kind of magical part there's interconnections among mathematical concepts themselves that you don't think are going to be there that that turn out to be true which is just astonishing but our ability anyway to think geometrically I think has a pretty clear explanation and the basics of counting do to infinity and to do mathematical induction and other things the question

00:54:36 is is the following and I think that's the reader position is that okay there are all these intuitions that we have about space and so on that comes as you say but the real thing that that makes mathematics mathematics is the fact that you can have rules for deduction which have been and that's the great discovery of the Greek city beyond beyond geometry that you feel you have a rule of the rules of logic and that really hasn't been that's been developed over the

00:55:07 centuries and hasn't really been understood completely until girdle where he actually has a completes all these various books that are from Aristotle on that he wrote on these different ways of different logical principles and different reductions in this and all of that can be has been something called get completeness theorem II showed

00:55:38 exactly or the complete system of rules that you can ever use to deduce things and that is I think the important how can the human mind have ever got into that fix to hundreds of years and there I think is the essence of mathematical the reasoning is that you have these these things of proofs you've started with certain assumptions and you have proofs which are sort of incontrovertible everybody agrees that that support everybody agrees that this

00:56:10 follows from that and I think that's the question which is probably which but yeah which i think is really one other question that you would be very hard to forget some insight maybe you can get some insight by some understanding of the brain and so on but but that's the kind of a very hard question still

00:56:42 though sorry to keep harping about reality and our capacity to comprehend that reality beyond just sensory comprehension right model it to abstract it use Mathematica do we still the most intriguing question met a question that you know given what you pointed out is why the heck is mathematics why does it work so well not just our capacity to do

00:57:14 it but in its explanatory power about physical phenomena what is it about physical phenomena right that's why it's so tempting to write so it's not really just a language so you can't just abstract it to the level of language learning which again you know one could easily say evolutionarily advantageous and so on right but beyond that there's a deeper to me it's what's intriguing is there appears to be something deeper than that right which is why it has the

00:57:46 explanatory power that it does right right there is is there something deeper about the nature of reality itself that is organized in such a fashion that this is the framework that allows you to access it and therefore the kinds of questions qualia that you might be interested in that this framework is not automatically adaptable to mathematical framework they don't give you the same

00:58:19 glimpse of reality right so I think that's one way to frame so of course they are around because in many ways mathematics comes out of physics like for example well not only from the you've started doing these things by these measurements on but almost anything like for example a very powerful thing that was in the 19th

00:58:50 century something was discovered or the Dirac Leah principle which basically means so that that you can do it a certain way of proving existence of things by anyway so this principle and then amazingly enough Rieman use this to prove all sorts of mathematical theorems geometry which are very powerful

00:59:22 topology and then came virus trials and said this principle doesn't work and we gave examples where the principle doesn't work if there was then there was a period of about 50 years where people try to figure out what what's really going on there and found out exactly under what circumstances that principle works and they developed the theory of partial differential equations and and also rimas work applied to close analysis liquid flows so this is kind of

00:59:55 complete you know something may somebody I may come from physics then it gets I mean I'm not as intrigued about the positive connections I mean yes sometimes this comes back in February but to me still the question is with that mystery that that sorry you wanted reality physical reality seems to be so uniquely explainable by or fit with

01:00:26 mathematical rules formula and that as just that's I'd like to hear more about that that sounds fascinating to me this is not nothing I know anything about it except for that it seems to be in some potential interesting again tension with what Carol was describing earlier as are moving away from essences since you're talking about things are somehow kind of boiling down to form or order perhaps a term that you used earlier so there's something intrinsically orderable about the physical world that seems to fit up

01:00:57 with the formal order of mathematics those are the kinds of things that might be of interest to us yeah that rubric of mathematics might be what limit those points of view from being income passed into physics work and a description of reality yeah I I'm gonna again I'm sorry I'm gonna make it kind of weird thing here because I feel like Jonathan's been sitting here very patiently and and

01:01:29 something went by quickly and then I just want to come back and ask you about this so there was the idea that the essence of scientific method is there in science you come up with a theory it makes some empirical predictions you go and check and the world can push back on your theory because the empirical predictions can just turn out to be wrong and then no and this is certainly

01:01:59 part of the understanding of why physics is at a certain point was so successful because they got lots of data that would push back and you said well then that's sort of everything and I'm just curious about how far you think that goes I mean I certainly a historian right the world can push back a literary theorist do you think the world can push back or of course so can you just yeah the world can push back and so far is that the corner of the world that literary theorists or

01:02:29 literary scholars or those who work in in that section of the humanities are concerned with is the world of texts or artworks they push back all the time in some ways I think actually my section of the humanities is is perhaps you know the most important of the of the Academy insofar as we are constantly trying to make our interpretations or explanations of our phenomena adequate to it - to the material that we're engaging texts artworks what-have-you

01:03:00 so so they push back in the sense that something seems wrong about what we are saying or attempting to describe so what let me just be sure I understand it's not my understanding and I would be curious to know so they're their literary theories I don't know them well I'm Way out of my depth sure but at some point deconstruction was a totally ordinary doll was it yeah oh yeah is it that you could go into a library and find in a dusty corner a text and open

01:03:33 it and say hey Jared I was wrong look this text is incompatible right with whatever it was he was doing can we kill off literary praises theoretical crazes yeah kara Khalil Icke that or no probably wouldn't they wouldn't work exactly like that but I think it would be more along the lines of certain schools of thought in that guided interpretation seemed like they were over time less compelling or convincing with what they

01:04:05 had to say about the world that we were endeavoring to explain there may be dimensions to them that actually one wants to hold on to but but I think that I think that actually literary proud literary critical practice wasn't on the ground very rarely taking like a set of ideas from from a theorist or a philosopher like Derrida and then just using it to just like smoosh whatever we were engaging at least not when it was done well no but isn't the kind of the notion of validation yeah we have your

01:04:36 own science is fundamentally different of course well depends yes in a sense of prediction for example yeah no no I mean there is no expectation that a literary theory could be proved or disproved by showing into a library and opening up a pub yeah right exactly norfolk's where you go to South Africa and you put on the same experiment and you don't get the same result right and you go to India noodle you don't then it's not valid yeah no I think that would be and again I think this probably is the case

01:05:07 for most of not just the literary humanities but most of the most parts of the most of the rest of the humanities and also the humanistic Social Sciences anthropology parts of sociology as well which is that you know things tend much less to be sort of conclusively proven or disproven then to yield interesting or adequate explanations of a phenomena and and do you think is it about closure that there is no completeness I think

01:05:40 it's about it's a partly about closure it's partly about keeping questions open I think it's also probably about expecting there to be less progress in the sense of like you know aiming over time slowly to some is not just a different lens to view provisionality in science it very well could be no I mean because III think that there are lots of ways in which there are saying you know all the disciplines are aiming at truth and are

01:06:11 aiming to four you know with with disciplinary humility to provide an account of the phenomena that they engage and to do so within norms that are established within a disciplinary framework and that are in some ways driven by something like consensus I want you to follow the difference between what I would think of as critical disciplines right like literary

01:06:42 studies and literature itself or truth in truth in art Johnson fiction and so on yeah and so I I don't know I guess my working view is that my working view is that yeah you can learn things from art you know they're the truth there and and but I might the problem might be that I'm a bit of a pragmatist and pragmatists are quite comfortable with the idea that you've got a truth so long as they'd helped you solve a problem or figure something out and it was useful right and Henry James famously said in

01:07:13 the art of fiction that fiction is true when you can use it to ride one bit of your experience to another and that sounded just like his brother William yeah and anyway I just was wondering because I would think that a critical discipline might not have that same empirical burden that Tim was asking about as art itself was my father I thought a critical critical discipline could be could be aimed at all kinds of

01:07:46 things besides that I think whereas the art itself maybe not oh yeah again I thought I thought you were gonna go in the other direction you know yeah art is interested in all the other things besides truth is interested perhaps just in duty or in or in some other more subjective experience on the part of a reader or beholder and that's what makes artworks valuable and interesting and why one tends to go to what you want to read them or to view them or whatever which is you know you're not necessarily interested in truth you're interested in say the experience of beauty or some

01:08:17 version of the sublime or something like that but I agree with you and there that I think actually the aesthetic domain is a domain that can produce certain kinds of truth I can tell you things about though he cared deeply about about our world and about our culture and about ourselves sure but I think most again I mean this is maybe this also is a sort of version of pragmatism too which is I think like most of the time we are living in a world with what we care about is lowercase truths rather than

01:08:50 uppercase truths although I think that what also the two are fundamentally compatible but I but I think on the other hand to take the other example the critical disciplines that is to say the the humanities like perhaps living philosophy out of it for a moment and the humanistic humanistic Social Sciences I think are truth oriented disciplines I mean in the sense that they you know they have internal standards they have norms they they in

01:09:23 the interpretative work that they that they try to do is subject to these norms and they try to provide an account of the phenomena that is true accurate compelling but often quite you know limited and hedged I mean in the sense of like you know aiming for answer a particular set of questions about a range of texts or other kinds of cultural phenomena that you are in the business of interpreting I don't know if I totally understood you

01:09:56 said we will never understand in scientific film consciousness in physical terms I said why not because ultimately I think it's this this would be an entire panel on its own I'll try and say it briefly ultimately physics is the theory of matter in motion that's sort of way you could and that's why I said it has you know everything an economic you know the the the Depression was certainly matter in motion right

01:10:27 there were these bodies falling out of buildings so physics had to cover that any phenomenon that you see at least in some part is matter in motion roughly physics is gonna have to handle the idea that my pain feeling pain the experience of pain that fundamentally first-person subjective ouch eNOS could be a matter of being explained in terms of matter in motion

01:10:59 it the the the explanatory gap there I don't see how it could in principle be this is I this is not a scientific assertion yeah hypothetically if I brought your thyroid hormones down mmm-hmm you will start feeling sad then you'll sort of feeling down and

01:11:31 eventually very depressed yes and everything that you're experiencing would look bleak yes then I put you back on thyroid hormones and you suddenly are feeling fine yes so that's a physical explanation of what happens to your emotions by virtue of this chemical reaction it so my conscious states clearly are intimately

01:12:02 connected to my physical state right and so I can predict but pain I said there I can make perfectly good predictions if I drop a bowling ball on your toe which is a physical state that you're gonna go into a state of extreme pain assuming everything is it is normal that is not a physical explanation of pain itself may be the simple way I can do it is say this if I tell somebody program a computer so it plays a really fine game of chess that's a hard thing to do but

01:12:32 you pretty much have an idea what you're going about to do it and how to approach it if I say good now program the computer so it can carry on an apparently normal human conversation people can do that they have done it and so on now I say okay here's your computer now program it so that when I hit the F key it hurts right the computer feels pain in the same same way we do that is that it would be morally unacceptable to hit the F key okay it

01:13:03 would be you would be torturing an actual sentient object when you hit the F key program your computer to do that and any computer scientist is gonna say I haven't got a clue but it doesn't have to be programmable into a computer to be physically no I'm just making a point you just ask yourself what the resources are be able to do this but that's not obvious but isn't there an answer to that I mean I agree with you actually on the point that you're making but couldn't for that particular example couldn't you imagine some future of some

01:13:35 some you know many many years from now some advanced computer scientists some advanced computer science where someone could actually make that program figure out precisely what's happening you know or build a brain so like you know I've we've mapped the neural karlitz of pain perfectly so that I can actually create a brain that would experience pain if I no banged it in a certain way but even then actually you can also imagine the same brain not experiencing pain there's no relate that you don't understand the relationship between the structure and

01:14:06 the experience itself obviously speculative I mean why we've just started a little bit about understanding a little bit of Medicine and about things like that what why I don't see why why it follows that you can say for

01:14:41 example there isn't going to be a particular formula for anger which is all the neurons that all the neurons that have to fire and all the calcium levels that have to be at whatever whatever in order to define anger and that whatever suppose even first of all there's stochasticity in all those pathways right I think the point is that if those neurons fire just in the same

01:15:14 way for her and for me the result may not be anger for both of us it might be experiential II so it's that mapping that we again like even if it is understanding what or why why this particular pathway produces the subjective experience of anger is still yeah that's still an unanswered question that's the explanatory gap and that's

01:15:44 what you're saying is in principle actually my own intuitions are so what you are saying is if I have an excellent if I say this particular pathway we leads to my big toe moving yeah that's different than if I say this explanatory pathway leads to anxiety yes yes or leads to the subjective experience experience filter of a

01:16:19 personal point of view yeah but since objective experience is connected to the same neural pathways I don't know why you would make a distinct what what you would separate the problem is privacy but you see I don't think I think that it's overblown why privacy is unincorporated belen physics this is one of the things that I was hoping we would get to obviously you know your legacy okay so you only know these things from your own case what it actually feels managed access yeah privileged access

01:16:51 privileged access isn't only privileged access its exclusive access and exclusive access is privacy so you know philosophers talk about the mind-body problem in the problem of other minds and they'd like to start with these qualitative dimensions of consciousness where there's something it's like to see read something it's like to feel pain and if you don't have color vision then you don't have the right kinds of sensitivities you will never know because you've never had the experience in your own case so that's privacy and and it feels and there's a good case to

01:17:25 be made that that's a kind of quintessential example of subjectivity though I'm I don't think it's the most central and important one I think it's way overblown but the idea that there's something it's like has emerged in nature it has for some creatures and we have pretty strong evidence that it requires a working brain and working neural circuitry in certain sensitivities there are deficits when those things are not there and it is mysterious why there's this inter

01:17:57 qualitative dimension to life it's true but it doesn't seem to me like it's not a good thing to study scientifically I'm just you know I can only for instance as going back to the big toe there's a problem of other bodies I can only control my body I can't control your body right it's just what it is to be the single organism that you are you have bodily boundaries you have motor control within that body and you also have a kind of sentient access to things going on within it which you're locked into because you're a separate organism and you have a

01:18:27 self-contained nervous system but that it's a hard problem of consciousness that physics couldn't ever take on strikes me as I mean these events do occur in time it looks like they occur kind of in space because they're located inside people who are spatially located so they look like they fall under like when you said there's no event that happens that a physicist shouldn't be able to take on and think about I would think these would then be among them and and oddly I don't really think that the

01:18:57 features of the first-person point of view that might resist physical treatment include the qualitative dimensions of consciousness I think they're more likely to be tractable physically than dimensions of value personally I think I think valuing normative truth is it is separate and untouchable by physics yeah exactly yeah I know there's no problem at all

01:19:33 understanding physically why I can control my body and not exactly so that's trivial right but this is a problem that bit and when you sort of imagine proto physics imagine I'm a Democritus and all I believe there's this empty space these atoms that float around they bang into each other they little hooks and eyes and and then you say in principle can such a theory explain nutrition right why an animal can eat things and grow and you say well

01:20:03 sure in principle you could imagine these kinds of shaped atoms get taken in and they hook up to these that are in the animal when it grows out that's not actual theory but it's you see clearly how the resources are there in principle connections and to explain the phenomenon that you're trying to explain it's the the problem of consciousness is that you just don't see in principle which is not to say you can't get all kinds of correlations that you could make even predictions that you could

01:20:34 bring it under a certain kind of scientific discipline but that there's an explanatory okay well I guess but that ompletely explained it okay that's the question what is an explanation yes yes because inductive correlations do darn well from Newton and a lot of things right when he doesn't have deep ultimate explanations of a lot of things he just found out some basic laws right you know so you know maybe those things can be found here by the absence of the

01:21:19 discussion well let me start over so there's been there's sort of like an intuitive argument here and a back-and-forth among the panelists about whether certain explanations will ever be available like with enough time like why why not be agnostic about it maybe we will ultimately have an explanation it would be interesting that I thought it'd be interesting to consider the idea of like algorithmic complexity that is how long and how much of an explanation

01:21:50 was prior to give a relevant explanation that's a little bit of what I think Tim touched on a little bit when you talked about the computer person and the physicist describing how long a certain computer program will run I think it's interesting to their relevance ties into perspective I think so so the idea would be if you have an explanation even in mathematics you've explanation that runs 300 pages and someone's able to condense it to two pages we normally say well that to page one gives the explanation

01:22:21 no we say someone well normally as people say at the same time but it also provides more our understanding is increased by the shorter explanation not the variable depends on what those on those okay so but the idea is just the support hey this is support you yeah my objective yeah okay right even but even if one explanation is extremely long and the other is shorter and it's more relevant to what you're what you're trying to explain then you could argue

01:22:53 that the long long explanation is really irrelevant or it doesn't really provide much for next pages it's as long in terms of complexity as the very problem you're trying to explain I mean the the notion of explanation has been floating yeah through the conversation and never become the target right and it's a really really complicated and difficult thing and I can't say anything brief I'm you know maybe I'll just make a couple

01:23:25 points which is we've talked a lot about science wanting to provide explanations and that being part of the aim of science and that even being an indication of truth those things can come way apart for example and and now I can really be offensive here one of the things that bothered popper when he was worried about the nature of science the things that he that claimed to be scientific that he rejected were one of them was Marxism and one of the most

01:23:57 Freudianism and his objection to Freudianism as it were wasn't that it was incapable well you put it a funny way it wasn't that it was incapable of explaining anything it was it was capable it was capable of explaining literally anything that any human behavior you could come up with some Freudian story that had the hallmarks of being explaining but exactly because it was completely unconstrained by the behavior it meant you were just telling

01:24:27 it just so story there's no reason to think any of it was true so the room first what an explanation is and the relation between explanation and truth and explanation and evidence of truth these are very very very difficult so those are the challenge that people who believe that there could be a complete physical theory for everything is to explain how you would get to condensing and over long and overly to high dimensional as you know you have a

01:24:59 valid theory of everything right that's the challenge I think that that I can make it to be a real quick comment on about brevity and the completeness of physics so many physicists who believe there should be an ultimate physical theory which I believe they often say and and one of the indications you've gotten it is that there's an equation you can write on a t-shirt right there's the t-shirt standard you can't get much briefer than that okay this equation in

01:25:29 principle explains everything now to actually work out any particular one of those explanations like why does the water bottle do that from that equation could take billions of pages to work out of the mathematics and you'd say that's that's irrelevant as long as it follows deductively and this comes back to as long as it follows from that equation that's that could be the correct physics thank you just to make a remark about

01:26:01 equations somebody somebody and I forget who made the observation that all of mathematics can be described by the equation a equals zero there's a specified what a is so brief explanations if something funny about them well I want to throw out a sort of an example of expert

01:26:32 explanation which i think is interesting and that is that von Neumann in the 30s later the 40s maybe even developed a very interesting theory about how to design what be required for a computer to be able to reproduce itself and he sort of you know mathematically so every action mata is what would be what what's the right conditions I'm gonna find then

01:27:05 he found four NL elements I've rewritten down here but I think I know they're not but roughly is found four things that a computer will have to have in order to reproduce itself or kind of things and then if you have them you can theoretically design a computer okay then ten years later or something DNA was discovered and so on it turns out that we've exactly found they found

01:27:36 exactly those things in nature which which sort of explain in quotes reproduction so so I mean what I'm trying to say is that we're at the beginning of it's some sort of adventure here in three hard to put down limits a priori okay thank you for very stimulating conversation and I favorite

01:28:08 of questions but probably can ask only one and I would like to ask about these mythology of mathematics success because let's talk for example let's calculate my movements and I will be moving only mathematically I would not be able to even once there you see but my body calculated without my conscious awareness and I could do whatever I want

01:28:39 and these who follow to the question that evolution created us during million years with very intricate and very slight progression and our successful science mostly successful in destructive creation when we remove everything that was created during millions of evolution

01:29:11 and proliferate ourselves like remove everything and build a pyramid or build a nuclear bomb or do something that destruct destroy everything that we could move and make something convenient only to us which is actually working against us like we did for example mitigation they remove all our microbiome we remove everything and it's we create destructive bacteria who who

01:29:47 actually in these situations that established on our success in science actually create situation they're very destructive even for us what is the question yes is there is our science more destructive or more creative

01:30:18 atomic our hydrogen bomb warfare within the next 100 years then it's more destructive but if we continue to make energy not just nuclear destruction carbon extraction I mean it is used for

01:30:52 both so the question is which what is it used right for right it was bad science is it I mean this comes back to values and so on science is a kind of tool mm-hmm and it's like asking our hammers more destructive or constructive and it depends on what people use them for right that's not the the hammer is not responsible for the hammer user hopeful well-constructed science gives us true accurate predictive abilities and

01:31:23 therefore tensity expand our technological abilities but how we use that and whether we're wise enough to see that there will be unintended and unforeseen consequences and also that were kind of idiots all the time that's on us answer I think some of what she was asking is that perhaps you know we as human beings have focused too selfishly just on ourselves and the

01:31:53 impact of the science and technologies that we create on ourselves and that we need to have the ecosystem the larger world and impact on the planet and all of that be part of the playground in which we do the evaluation of a technology for example yeah I'm for there's one unfortunate thing I mean I agree with everything

01:32:23 everybody says more or less but there's one unfortunate thing that unfortunately I mean a person may make a hammer in order to for good purposes but there are things that people make like the atomic bomb which are done presumably for good purpose of defense of the nation of something and when they do that unfortunately they have two things they produce this horrible possibility but is

01:32:54 a byproduct of these kind of investigations all sorts of things that are good can come out and unfortunately a lot of very powerful and good science has come out from a research on on war like things like the internet for example which may be good or bad I don't know why it could be very good but it's come being able to fly you know across

01:33:24 the Atlantic and in five hours to you know to go to a conference in London is a fine thing for you know ever advanced Western democracies to have at the same time that's actually destroying a planet so I mean the yes then you know yes exactly I integrate I know okay reductionism I think that was the real subject I think the leap from physics to

01:33:57 consciousness is a huge leap and may be too hard for us to bridge here but let's just take very small leaps so for example in biology of concept of gene it's a purely biological object or you have DNA for example can you ever ever explain or derive the concept of a gene from physical principles I think that's the really one of the fundamental questions let me even go into a sublevel within physics you have the fundamental laws of physics and then you have thermodynamics or the second law of thermo thermodynamics you have to

01:34:28 introduce new principles in order to get a symmetry in time because the fundamental laws of symmetric in time so even within physics you have levels that are very hard to bridge those levels and so the question is can you really really extend in an explanatory way bridge these levels in any way as long as the constructs are different can you ever can you ever develop constructs in one level that are emerged from constructs at a level that's lower yeah trying and look the gene is a

01:35:02 perfect example Mendel was looking at his peas and seeing how they grew and he knew that characteristics were passed on from the parents to the offspring they didn't know how he had no idea of what the physical basis of that was but he could do he could have a really good theory by just saying well let's assume that there are some things I'll call it a gene one comes from each parent and

01:35:35 there's this dominant and recessive and there's independent assortment and so on and I can make then predictions about if I cross a true breeding smooth pea with a true breeding you know other P and then they'll all go to this and they'll all do that makes these predictions are absolutely right can physics ultimately explain that sure it's just a matter of finding a physical system that does what the gene is postulated to do

01:36:07 functionally and we did it yeah fine and so there's no explanatory gap there at all I mean what the physics will tell you is limitations on the model so you can say Mendel's model was very simple-minded and if you look deep into the physics you'll find that this very simple mathematics isn't going to work in detail because the genes just don't are more complicated and their interactions are more complicated but I think that's a very clean case of a physical

01:36:37 explanation giving the physical underpinning of something that that was okay go ahead a little bit of a variation since I'm in the arts and I heard you speaking about ideas of ultimate truth and beauty and today in the arts that doesn't seem the primary goal at all it seems almost the opposite the goal in the arts today seemed to be I'm also talking particularly maybe the visual arts multiplicity communications

01:37:13 variability mutability bounder lack of boundaries porousness come strange combinations of things that haven't existed before but I wouldn't speak of it as a search for truth or beauty it seems more a different kind of search I don't want to give a word for it I mean I sort of like to leave it open and not give it a category but actually this seems to be in search really of the mystery and the unknowable rather than

01:37:43 the finding of the knowable that what seems to be attracting is the elusiveness of things I'm not speaking about all the branches that have come out of the are on the Arts have gotten into all kinds of hybrid combinations but I don't think youth or Trudi a truth is is part of the vocabulary anymore of this particular search and I just wondered what you think about that in terms of the search and science and the search in the arts I mean I agree with

01:38:17 much of the way that you characterized the sort of the rationale for the contemporary art world I think I would only add to that that a lot of the language you use mutability boundary crossing and blurring or subspecies of a certain kind of beauty and that to use the term from the grace Russian literary critic viktor shklovsky from the early 20th century what the artworks are

01:38:48 trying to do there is to defamiliarize our experience to show us dimensions to the the world by taking them out of our common perceptions and common interactions with the world and there I think actually much is learned in that process about about the world that we live in and and about ourselves I think that it's just not a memetic truth that is to say the artworks are not representing the world they're not holding a mirror up to it they are in some ways deep familiarizing the world and doing that in virtue of their form

01:39:20 the particular kind of shape that they have and the certain devices that they use I for me at least that's a that's compatible with understanding that what works of our are often beautiful or the sublime to go back to categories of aesthetic theory that developed in my own period of the 18th century which I think do a pretty good but not complete job of accounting for the aesthetic domain I was curious whether you had there was a political dimension to your

01:39:52 question at all because I think what is being contested now for the last I guess 30 years or so in all forms of art is also who gets to define truth and beauty and is there a single step gets to which cultures which genders or who whose lenses define truth and beauty and that is rupturing everywhere right yes so I wonder if you were asking that bit more political sorry for that's just one aspect no I'm speaking about all the

01:40:23 idea of ultimate questions and I know that's a more sociological and that's something happening out of our history I'm talking about maybe no but even in the the creation of artworks right I mean of its one branch I wouldn't call it you know a total branch of what's really occurring and I think communication I would say communication instead of truth because truth in the arts very often is a very difficult very difficult phenomena and beauty is also

01:40:53 very difficult word I find it very difficult isn't it just because they are such subjective notions very different from the kind of truth Beauty we're talking about in science like the 20-page proof versus the three line proof there's a there's an agreement that we can get at there's a process to reach agreement I'm not saying that you can't agree that you know you we can't agree that Caravaggio was an amazing artist I mean then obviously but the question is there's a process by which you arrive at what is

01:41:26 truth and beauty has that been disrupted I'm just offering a suggestion do you reckon that's what's happened I'm just curious curious also about the nature of your resistance I mean the that is like what's motivating the question there seems to be I mean something about and I agree with you that the overt language of beauty might have somewhat retreated but I still think actually there's a tacit understanding of it insofar as art works demand a certain kind of valuation and there are a domain of value which you

01:41:57 know has to have some substance to it some accounting for it well I was thinking of the word communication which you if you want to find communication beautiful well if I want communication I can also just like you know I can just read the newspaper no central communication what what distinguishes an act of aesthetic communication from an act just of like ordinary communication and I would say that it's something having to do with its form and something to do with the way in which the form D familiarizes the kind of the dimension

01:42:30 to the world that is trying to illuminate once you go that far I think actually that recognizing that what we're talking about falls underneath some broad conception of the beautiful is actually a pretty easy step to take but if but the but I find your resistance of that interesting well I think a lot of words are overused over the centuries and what's happened to them is they no longer seem to have a certain potency and I think we have to we have to renew many things and maybe

01:43:00 vocabulary has to be thought of too because vocabulary had there are traditional thoughts about beauty traditional thoughts about truth maybe then we have to find out how we're going to redefine these these questions because it doesn't relate to the kind of beauty we thought of yeah a very deflating comment here I don't think our trys to

01:43:32 do anything I don't think that actually is what we call in philosophy a category mistake art is incapable of attempting or intending or trying to do anything artists are an individual artists I think have many many many different entirely diverse aims some of them are trying to make a political point some of are trying to make a good buck some of them are doing their art for their own sake entirely and don't care whether anybody sees it some are trying to communicate something some are have have

01:44:04 read some science and say this is true I want to depict this truth some are saying I want to imagine something that nobody ever thought of I don't really see that there's anything very useful about asking what is art for I think it's useful to understand what was this artist trying to do and appreciate but the only but the only way to that you can answer that question is to actually look at the works of art I mean that's the nasty art you can ask the artist and you'll get almost almost always the

01:44:35 wrong answer in no way was I now of course there's multiplicity of you and of course that's the wonderful thing about art we have all this multiple different psyches that are all investigating things and I was just speaking about when one was speaking of truth and beauty it made me jolted me a little because I thought hmm my god that's a word that you know will have to be you know die bet it's it just doesn't hold a power thank you

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