Max Tegmark - What Exists?

Max you and I both in our very different lives have been obsessed with the idea of the nature of reality the nature of existence you founded fqxi focusing on the fundamental questions of existence but what I like to do sometimes is is to take stock and and to just make a taxonomy a a listing of of the big categories that we're talking about everybody has their different approach to it so I'd like to know how how if you think of this totality of existence what are the kinds of topics that you have as your major categories that ultimately you would like to explain so I'm I have a very radical View and we had a fascinating discussion this morning in a session called what exists where we really had the whole Spectrum there what's on the Spectrum well in in my opinion it goes from the most unambitious you might say the people for people who say that we should only talk with science about predicting experiments correctly and and it's not interesting to discuss whether additional things exist that we can't see or test to um the opposite end which I describ to that we should be more ambitious with science and actually ask the question about the true nature of reality whether we can actually observe it or not and I so my guess is that uh you have a broader understanding of science that science can ask questions you're saying if I heard you right science can ask questions that we may not ever be able to get data on or use the scientific method to assess but science as a category of science is still allowed to ask those questions well first of all I went into science not because um I wanted a paycheck but because I loved thinking about big questions so I'm not going to stop thinking about what exists just because someone else says that's not their definition science but second I think we even can apply the scientific method sometimes to talk about things we can't test because what we're testing isn't ultimately stuff we're testing mathematical theories so if I have a mathematical theory of what exists and it makes a bunch of predictions for things that we can observe and and it passes those tests we take it seriously then I'm also entitled to take seriously the predictions it makes for that which we cannot exist so I'm on the extreme end of the spect where I I think that there is this fantastic hierarchy of parallel universes that exists and um that make various predictions and um I think at the heart of many of the most thorny debates people have now whether it be about the interpretation of quantum mechanics or about the interpretation of inflation and pocket universes and so on is this very question again about ultimately what is is science supposed to be about is it just about correctly predicting our observations or are we truth Seekers who who who want to understand everything that exists so so you're a maximalist not a deflationist which which I I I I'd love to go with you on your ride so what's in your categories I mean give me the the the categories that are in your list of those things accessible to our questioning scientific way of thinking even if they're not accessible to the data that we can collect so my radical guess is that every universe everything that can be described mathematically exists so that we're ultimately part of this incredible mathematical structure of which we can only be aware of a small part and the challenge then becomes to take everything that exists and identify All The Observers in that and try to figure out okay which observers might be US based on what we've observed so far and then predict what we're going to see next so every everything that exists in in in your uh way of thinking uh has to have a mathematical uh Foundation this is what I think and it's very controversial but I I feel this is the strongest and loudest lesson that science has taught us in the past 100 years or a thousand years that that again and again when we've studied something really carefully we' found that it had a mathematical description so to me uh the best way to test this this radical Viewpoint and maybe falsify it is to take the Thor sore thumbs that stick out and have still resisted a mathematical description and see can we do them too mathematically and I know you've pursued Consciousness along those lines I think that's a terrific test case of can you describe something that seems Indescribable by normal science through a mathematical scheme I I think that's I think that's that's a very good project along those lines um you know may not be through our lifetime but you know I I hope so what about things like abstract objects U the forms of numbers and logic and ideas uh they don't on the surface seem even possible to be reduced to mathematics so do you have to be a So-Cal nominalist and saying that those really don't exist it's all fiction or linguistic outputs of the human mind I you myself as a radical platonist in the sense that so it seems contradictory if you're a platonist and wanting to reduce everything to mathematical for structures the mathematical objects such as the platonic solids for example the tetrahedron cuos they are things which some people would argue are just things invented by mathematicians but many of my mathematician friends don't feel that they invented them they feel that they discovered them that they have an existence and play and you know Plato himself when he realized that there were five of them he was free to invent whatever name he wanted for the doic aedin but he he couldn't invent the sixth one because doesn't exist and I I ultimately think that that sense of existence and non-existence that mathematics gives us is exactly the same as what we're up against in physics we don't say that we invented the planet Neptune we discovered it and um I think that ultimately it's all mathematical structures and that's what the laws of physics are gradually approximating and and begin un covering so thesis is that if it cannot be reduced to mathematical form that it doesn't exist ultimately the thesis and prediction and the way to falsify my conjecture here is to find some physical phenomena yeah that cannot be described I'm saying physical I'm not say I'm saying any kind of phenomena anything that exists not restricting it to physical because abstract objects and non-physical so I don't know why I'm in if it ain't mathematical that doesn't exist

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 24,895

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, max tegmark, what exists, cosmos, cosmology, metaphysics, space, science

Id: FIsD70ZLUbo

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024