Roger Penrose - What Things Really Exist?

roger if i ask the question what things really exist to most scientists they would say the physical world that's it why'd you ask me such a silly question yes i suppose they would um well i think often people take the view that that there is a another kind of reality which is the real mental reality certainly philosophers might yes view and some would even regard the mental mental world as being in sunset's primary physical world is somehow to be thought of as a construct from mentality i don't particularly like that view uh but in my view you have to think of a third one i sometimes accused of being not just a dualist but actually a trialist which is even worse you see some point of view but i think it's just a useful way of talking about things in particular mathematics seems to have its own kind of existence it's very important in understanding the physical world that our way of describing the physical world certainly at its most precise has to do with mathematics and there's no getting away from that and that mathematics has to have been there since the beginning of time it has an eternal existence timelessness really it doesn't have any location in space it doesn't have any location in time some people would take it not to have any location or not any existence at all but it's hard to talk about science really without giving mathematics some kind of reality because that's how you describe your theories in terms of mathematical structures it has this also also this relation to mentality because we we certainly have access to mathematical truths but i think it's useful to think of the world as not being a creation of our minds because if we do then how could it have been there before we were around somehow the if the world has been obeying mathematical laws with extraordinary precision since the beginning of time well there were no human beings and no conscious beings of any kind around there and so how can how can the mathematics have been the creation of minds and still have been there controlling the universe so i think it's very uh valuable to think of this platonic mathematical world as having its own existence so let's allow that and say that there are three different kinds of existence maybe others but three kinds of existence the normal physical existence the mental existence which seems to have a in some sense even greater reality it's what we directly are aware of what we directly perceive and the mathematical world which seems to be out there in some sense conjuring itself into existence it has to be there in some sense um and then there's the relationship between these three worlds which i regard as all three of them are somewhat mysterious or very mysterious so i think these i sometimes refer to this as three worlds and three mysteries and mystery number one is how is it that the physical world does in fact accord with mathematics not just any old mathematics but very sophisticated subtle mathematics to such a fantastic degree of precision so that's mystery number one mystery number two is how is it that when you have physical structures of the right kind and here i'm referring very specifically to human living human wake for healthy brains probably many other animals i would say also have this quality of mentality and somehow it's evoked when the structures have the right have the right character whatever that is so there is um mentality seems to have this deep relation to certain kinds of physical structures and then that's mystery number two that's mystery number two mystery number three has to do with our access to the world of mathematics and why it's a mystery is is perhaps not so clear but it's something that you certainly can't um describe in terms of purely computational activity there's something outside that involved in in our appreciation of mathematics even even just knowing what the the natural numbers 0 one two three four i could say that you see and you can explain to a child and you can have sesame street things with different things and they get the idea they know what they're talking about they know what numbers are but yet you can't characterize simply by axiomatic procedures what the natural numbers are this of theorems and logic to say that yet how do you know what they are if you can't describe in a finite set of rules what these numbers are so it's it's uh there is a mystery there too that's mystery number three there's another feature about this which is that in each case it's only a small part of one world which encompasses ever seemingly the entirety of the next world so okay it's only a little bit of mathematics okay a very subtle and beautiful and powerful part of mathematics but there's that whole world of mathematics if you look at any mathematical journal pure mathematical journal it's full of things have absolutely no relevance to physical activity okay maybe the odd thing turns out to have but most of it there seems to be no relation to physical reality and that's not the point of it you do it because you're interested in mathematics for its own sake so it's a small part of the mathematical world which seems to encompass the behavior of the physical world and it's a very small part of the physical world which seems to evoke mentality okay there are far more rocks and things dead planets around than there are conscious brains around so it's only a very small part of that it has to be organized very subtly in sophisticated way to give rise to mentality whatever it is and it's only a small part of our mental activities which relate to mathematics i think most non-mathematicians would appreciate that more than mathematicians but even mathematicians are most of the time doing thinking about other things so it's only a small part of our mentality so i'd like to draw this picture in almost a paradoxical way you see each world is a small part of it which seems to be it encompasses the total of the other of the next one as you go around okay there's some prejudices of mine involved in drawing the picture that way but but it seems to be give you a good now the typical scientific response to that would say okay the mental world is just an expression of the physical brain and so it's uh it's an artificial phenomena and it does it's not real it's just something that's that's evoked by the by the uh by the physical brain and the and mathematics is very nice but it's something that human beings have invented to sort of describe the physical world so there really is only one world the other two are kind of derivative or imaginary well you see you could take that view or to a mathematician you might take the mathematical world somehow is is the only because somehow it has to be there you see it's it sort of creates itself out of nothing and and it has to be there and then the physical reality you might think has its source in there or you might say well no no it's mentalities that's where all all our knowledge comes that's everything ultimately is to do with our our our consciousness and and everything else is then explained in terms of it so it's just each one of the worlds can can feel its own predominance of the others i think that's right yes and it's it's uh i'm trying to make it look a little more kind of symmetrical and even-handed and to a mathematician the mathematical world has a has a kind of reality out there it's it's if you like the reality of the mathematical world the platonic world is an expression of of the objectivity of mathematics it's something outside any particular individual i mean mathematicians strive for that you see they don't often achieve it you see you can get things wrong you can only partially appreciate what's going on different mathematicians have different ways of appreciating these things but there is outside of us something there which is beyond any individual mathematician it's beyond the the totality of all mathematicians when you look at these three worlds to you you're obviously doing it more than metaphor but is it is it just as a description of reality or is that there's some sense of real independent existence well they're not independent because each one does okay relation to the next even though it's each relationship i regard as a mystery so maybe we will understand these relationships better in the future i don't necessarily regard this as a sort of ultimate picture i think that in some sense they're different aspects of reality and that they're the true reality in some sense encompasses the whole thing in fact i i tend to draw the picture in a deliberately paradoxical way there is this you look at it and it has this sort of feeling of one of these impossible triangles to see and and that's deliberate actually like it's it's in it's deliberately impossible that that there is another mystery hiding behind that which is how all three of these worlds can somehow coexist in some deeper reality that's not expressed really in that picture you

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 224,795

Keywords: Closer To Truth, Roger Penrose, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Physics (Field Of Study), Existence (Quotation Subject), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Metaphysics (Field Of Study)

Id: H9Q6SWcTA9w

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 25 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/DonOntario]

"What is Kiri-kin-tha's first law of metaphysics?"

[u/vondage]

this is the mathematical discovery/invention argument - if it existed before we recognized it. definitely a question for philosophy or number theory, not physics.

[u/rebelyis]

Shouldn't the first question be "what do you mean by 'really' and what do you mean by 'exist'?"