Sean Carroll, Daniel Dennett, & Steven Pinker: AI, Parapsychology, Panpsychism, & Physics Violations

when people tell me about possible parch parapsychological claims life after death things like that these are possible but I'm not going to spend my time digging into details about claims about near-death experiences giving evidence for an afterlife because I know that those claims are incompatible with how I think the physical world Works likewise for telekinesis or precognition or things like that the laws of physics don't allow that now the laws of physics as we know them might be wrong that's always possible but again if I'm comparing two possibilities some sketchy report of someone kind of had a feeling that something bad was going to happen and then it happened and I have to throw out all the laws of physics or someone just sort of you know reported something with a little bit of imperfect Fidelity then I'm going to stick with the laws of physics hello this is Robinson aart here with the introduction with the whole gang Mishka the visha and pins the podcast to an absolute Banger though it couldn't have been any other way in the form of Robinson's podcast number 200 and this episode is with Shan Carroll Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker Shan is Homewood professor of natural philosophy at John's Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute he's also the host of Shan Carroll's mindscape which is the best philosophy and Science Show out there and Dan is professor emeritus of philosophy at tus University where he was also co-director of the Center for Cognitive studies and the Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy he's one of the most recognized philosophers out there today not least in part because of his magnificent beard and Along With Sam Harris Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins he's known as one of the four horsemen of atheism and finally Steve is Jonstone family professor of psychology at Harvard University where he writes on on and researches the language mind and human nature so this is Sean's third appearance on the show he joined me and David Albert of Columbia on episode 10 six to talk about the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics entropy and boltzman brains in the fine-tune universe and then on episode 118 we spoke with slavo xek which was an excellent episode as well about quantum physics quantum physics the Multiverse time travel and a whole lot more for Dan this is his second appearance on the show on episode 194 a few weeks ago we spoke about Consciousness free will the evolution of minds and also a lot more and then finally again Steve is returning for another Centennial episode as he came on a 100 episodes ago for episode 100 to talk about rationality Enlightenment Enlightenment and Free Speech in this episode number 200 we talk about a lot of neat enduring but also topical topics from artificial intelligence large language models and whether or not they threaten democracy or even civilization itself to parapsychology and violations of the laws of physics pans psychism and Consciousness some of the philosophical lessons of darwinian thought which Dan specializes in among other things and then the relationship between science and philosophy and what philosophy even is Dan's latest book is I've been thinking Steve's latest book is rationality what it is why it seems scarce why it matters and Sean's next book notably is Quant and Fields the biggest ideas in the universe and that one will be coming out in May or on May 14th 2014 and there are links to all of these in the description you should absolutely check them out and you should absolutely absolutely pre-order Sean's book which I'm sure we'll be talking about soon so also in our conversation Sean mentions a paper on Quantum field Theory and its relationship to our everyday World which is particularly relevant to our discussions of Consciousness and parapsychology and I will quote this from the abstract to give you an idea of the conclusion just let me pull that up therefore we have reason to be confident that the laws of physics underlying the phenomena of everyday life are completely known and this paper is linked in the description as well there are also links to the past episodes these guests have been on their websites and twitters and and so forth but reviews subscriptions likes comments all these things are tremendously appreciated there's a patreon if you'd like to support the show get show notes for with every episode and listen ad free thanks for bearing with this lengthy EP introduction for episode 200 but finally we are 200 episodes in I still feel feel like I have no idea what I'm doing and the show is absolutely just getting started there's a lot good coming some of which I know about some of which I'm sure I don't so if you've been listening for a while or are just turning in now for the first time from the bottom of my heart really thank you and now without any further Ado I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it with Shan Dan and [Music] Steve before we get to physics or Consciousness or Evolution I'd like to begin with something quite topical for me since I just used chat GPT for the first time last week to create an image of Shawn actually as you guys know a a mortal battle with a recycling bin though I see he's recovered from the ordeal but Dan you wrote us that you think large language models are and I I'll quote you actually the most dangerous technology ever developed capable of leading to the collapse not just of democracy but of civilization and my experience with chat gbt is that it's the single most amazing technology I've encountered but not the most dangerous so I was wondering just why you put it that way large language models permit us to make counterfeit people we've never had to deal with counterfeit people like this before uh we evolved to use the intentional stance to treat anything that talks to us as another human agent and to deal with it we we're used to the fact that there are uh cheats and conmen and so forth out there but but this is different uh this technology can flood the World Flood the world with manipulative sake people and we're ill equipped to deal with it because we are unable to turn off the intentional stance when we encounter such a phenomenon and who controls your attention controls you and I think that we are in danger of losing our Free Will being turned into puppets by a Sorcerers Apprentice Army of fake people like the brooms and the Sorcerers Apprentice and that human trust will be jeopardized and civilization depends on human trust and I I appreciate the concern about counterfeit people and I agree with your um essay in Atlantic suggesting that there should be laws against counterfeit people but I'm wondering if the end of civilization might be a bit hyperbolic because uh when there are new threats there are new technologies they're also counter measures and there's a reason to believe that we humans as we evolved language also uh evolved a um kind of a built-in um suspicion of whether what we are hearing is credible or not Yugo marier wrote an entire book called non not born yesterday about the um skeptical measures he believes are built into human nature as a necessary prere as necessary accompaniment to language having evolved in the first place and so if we are uh as soon as we become aware that there are counterfeit people we'll be suspicious that the people we're dealing with might be counterfeit we'll look for more credible vetted sources uh the some evidence that that that that is already starting to happened is that despite predictions about six or seven years ago that the news media would be permanently polluted by Deep fakes once that technology became available recent article assessing the the Deep fake scare shows they've had virtually no influence on politics people just um are are uh alert to the possibility of deep fakes they don't believe them the news the reputable news agencies don't report them the fake news sites uh already cater to the most fanatical of the fanatical so it doesn't really matter they already they tell them what they wanted to believe in the first place but the whole news ecosystem has not been polluted by Deep fakes even though they've been Avail widely available for six or S years because of these countermeasures so with countermeasures for other kinds of counterfeit people can't we avert the collapse of civilization yes we can uh and I've been advocating for those countermeasures all along but one one particular Avenue that I don't uh think is very uh attractive is that we all learn how to unmask counterfeit people because I don't know about you but I don't want every time I talk to a friend on the phone or on a on a situation like this I don't want them pestering me with your questions and and tricky tricky paranoid issues to make sure that I'm real I just want is it any more than I want to look at every $20 bill I get to examine it closely to see if it's fake I want to trust the technology to take care of that I think technology can take care of it but only if we act quickly and vigorously and intelligent and if you look at Congress today quick effective intelligent is are not the terms that come to mind I think let me come in right in the middle here because I think that I agree with both of you guys uh the danger is real you know Robinson right now could have saved himself some effort by Conjuring up F AI versions of me and Dan and Steve and made a little podcast the technology is already good enough to do that in fact let me right now put in the mind of the uh listeners and Watchers are you sure that we are the real D dennet Steve Pinker Sean Carol Robinson aart I mean how would you know but I think at the end you know complex adaptive systems are adaptive and I think that like Steve says we will adapt a little bit it might be worse overall but I don't think it's going to be end of civilization worse yeah I've got a lot of accusations on comments that I that I conjured up you and slavo actually in our conversation and that wasn't the actual versions of you but I think what you talking about what what interview are you talking about when you and I spoke with slavo I have no recollection of that I don't know what you're talking about Robinson you got me you got not in my database I think the key word in that quote since I still have it of Dan is that it's capable of leading to the collapse not just of democracy but civilization um so you're not saying that it will just I'm saying it's something we have to guard against yeah Sean though if I'm correct I'm wondering whether you're more concerned about AGI for our long-term future than llms for me no um I don't have any special worry about AGI I think that in fact it's it's more or less the opposite I think that you know AGI may or may not happen it's not on the horizon in the very short term but you know the rate of progress is very quick so I'm not going to predict when it happens we don't have it now I'm concerned about the fact that uh intelligence of the human sort is apparently so easy to fake even when you don't have it and so and I think that that is I mean even if it's not let me put on the the P hat now even if civilization in some sense adapts and is fine democracy is already very much fragile and a tiny little bit of perturbation can easily push it the wrong way so even though I think that you know humankind is not going to be beaten back by AI into the Stone Age we might very well have some tremendous upheaval in our political or social system just because the tendency was already there there and here's a new tool to hasten it along yeah I fully fully agree Sean I think I think you've you've put the issue very well and you know Norbert weiner was there many many years ago in the human use of human beings he said you got to remember that a tool is also a weapon and that if you make a powerful tool it will soon be in the hand of of of your enemies as well and uh defense is usually more expensive than offense Steve am I right though just to to put a bow tie on this that for you the development of llms might fit into your general framework of Enlightenment and the idea that humanity is making progress through rationality and this is just one of many technologies that sort of changes our way of life but maybe like the development of nuclear weapons that could pose an existential threat but in the end it doesn't through the sorts of counter measures yeah a couple things large language models aren't the same as artificial intelligence and I have some skepticism as to whether uh L large language models which capitalize fortuitously on the availability of human generated content on the uh the web and that that that itself might be limited by the uh the new copyright lawsuits filed by the New York Times um together with the the development of uh graphic processing units that just make it more feasible to Crunch unthinkably gargantuan data sets compared to to in the past and so I think we shouldn't the fact that for a couple of developments have made large language models the quickest route to some simulacrum of intelligence shouldn't uh confuse us into thinking that artificial intelligence and large language models are the same thing because large language models don't have propositional understanding of the world there are no facts there's no uh concepts of objects or people or things or places which is why they're so vulnerable to to hallucinations uh so putting aside the particular technology of large language models which is one way of doing artificial intelligence uh I think there is enormous progress for artificial intelligence to enhance human well-being simply because we know that in so many Realms the human mind is just not capable of dealing with complexity that is um that challenges us such as say medical decision-making you know I see my my my doctor why should I think that uh my entire genome my entire medical history uh the entire medical literature uh with all of its contradictions should be graspable by the guy that just happens to be sitting across from me in that room it's beyond the capability of any uh uh human mind and an ability to absorb all of the relevant data from genome medical history epig genome and so on together with all the contradictory data out there is something where there I think there's tremendous progress I'm speaking here also as a cognitive psychologist aware of the limitations of the human mind in dealing with large amounts of data going back to the 50s a simple regression formula uh outperformed any human expert in any area in which data were available artificial intelligence uh could uh supercharge the ability to extract useful knowledge out of data together with a lot of the human um suffering that is uh consequen the fact that we still use human labor and the the lower levels of human cognitive processing to do a lot of drudgery that could be automated to the uh to the benefit of humanity now I think there also there are also threats as there are with any technology uh I think the fears of AI takeover of it turning us into raw materials of collateral damage of um uh megalomaniacal AI seeking to subjugate us are all overblown but these might be uh topics for another conversation yeah yeah yeah C certainly there's a lot of overblown uh Fe Maring out there uh I think that um one way of looking at this is that the use of llms that might be really benign and useful is to use it as a generator in a generating test system where the tester is the editor is the judgment is the cherrypicker and we let the llm just generate a whole lot of St some of it'll be hallucinogenic some of it won't it might be a very good way of getting off-the-wall ideas that you wouldn't otherwise think of into the conversation it's a little bit dangerous but we have many examples of of human collaborations where you got a sort of wacky generator a person who has lots of ideas most of which should be uh thrown out and and a wise editor who who who does a a careful cherry-picking selection on those ideas I think that that's that's one of the areas where I think even llms could prove useful just as a as a source a a non r a non chaotic well as a source as a generator of diversity where the diversity will tend to have something to do with whatever you're interested in I guess although the large language large language models seem to have been engineered for banality more than for creativity so far so far but I think I think that's probably treatable yeah well it maybe again this this I think we shouldn't equate large language models with artificial intelligence and it could be that there's a form of artificial intelligence that does that that may just be more than soaking up massive statistical patterns out of gargantuan data sets actually speaking of off-the-wall ideas and creativity last week I in my experimentation with Chad GPT I queried it if it had if it could give me 10 ideas for curing vampirism with surgical methods uh and it gave me 10 great ideas one of them was intracranial Rune implantation where you take off the the top half of the skull of the vampire and you put in runes meant to to ward off the the vampirism but there were 10 really great ideas that I never would have come up with and then returning to Dan's original comment or worry about counterfit people the the main place that I've had a problem with this is with dating apps where which are now flooded with AI generated images and profiles but what I know that we didn't want to spend too much time on this one thing that I've been thinking about though since making this image of of Sean battling the recycling bin is that all of the times that I have needed to use graphic designers in the past even now for making podcast thumbnails all of this stuff is quite easily done through uh chat gbt or some of these other art generators like mid journey and also from I I I washed a a fancy pair of jeans on New Year's Day and I asked chat GPT for 10 different ways of washing Denim and the sorts of effects they would have and it and it gave them to me instantly which saved me a ton of research on on clothing sites uh Sean recently had a great interview with somebody with a fashion blogger and writer named Derek guy but I see this totally putting tons of people out of work over the next five 10 uh 20 years and I'm wondering I mean this seems like a very existential threat to the way Society goes now and I'm wondering what sorts of safeguards or counter measures you see for this in particular Steve since you brought up the counter measures oh there have been predictions of massive technological unemployment since the 60s probably before and it's it's never happened because new jobs materialize as quickly as old ones become obsolete so we haven't lo you we haven't missed the the the fact that they're no longer elevator operators or tele telephone switchboard operators because new uh new jobs like website designers have have Arisen and as Joel moocher put it we maybe all the unemployed truck drivers will become tattoo removal technicians or pet psychiatrists or video game costume designers we just can't predict what jobs might materialize now I don't want to this doesn't mean that they will so far there have been very few signs of technologically driven unemployment and it may be that I mean the the soft Landing would be that another fear namely underpopulation the fact that um uh industrialized countries and probably the rest of the world to follow will soon be at below replacement rate um of um uh fertility um with fears that there won't be enough uh people to do the work that that that has to be done might partly be compensated for by the fact that a lot of jobs that used to be done by humans will be automated to everyone's benefit Sean Dan do you have any thoughts on this I'll just say very quickly I did another podcast a couple years ago before chat GPT Etc with John danaher who's a philosopher who says look let's at least contemplate the possibility of a coming automated Utopia that yeah indeed technology Ai and robots get rid of a lot of the jobs and they're the jobs that we don't want to do and we get so much productivity from this that we can give everyone Universal income and just have a good time maybe the society does not really have the impetus or or gumption to make that happen but it's within our ability to contemplate making that happen maybe it's something to keep in mind as a goal I think the the problem that I'm pointing at though is we're living in a world now where chat GPT is not cleaning our sewers or toiling in the fields but now it's doing our art and it's doing our writing it's not doing the jobs that we hoped robots would do it's doing the jobs that we think humans should be doing and enjoying it's making music uh it's it's doing all sorts of the really fun things it'll probably be doing philosophy and cognitive science and maybe some of it especially when it comes to Art might run up against just the problem of people's uh hunger for authenticity for the um the fact that people really do pay more for uh a an original Picasso than uh a uh lifelike uh fake indiscriminate that can't be discriminated from the original people will pay more for Bruce Springsteen's guitar than for another guitar that just happens not to be Bruce Springsteen but otherwise is is indistinguishable people go to concerts they go to museums seems to matter to people where the what the Providence is of works of art we don't know much that will run up against the uh just the economic advantages of mass producing art with with these uh generative models uh and also the fact that they they're amazingly uh that they're surprisingly good not that many of them are so good that they as yet uh will replace human generated content in terms of what people really enjoy or willing to pay for that day may come it certainly isn't here yet and it's not clear that the uh generative model technology which involves just sucking up Ma statistical patterns from massive data sets will be the root to generating the kind of art or the kind of philosophy or the kind of essays that people find valuable Sean Steve mentioned to me and I Echo this question especially as I'm often asked to interview people like rert sheldrake on Paras ology for insance uh that he he was curious to hear your thoughts on the relationship between our knowledge of physics and what we don't know about it on the one hand and then on the other our tendency to rule out parapsychology or other anomalous physical phenomena so maybe the Tic Tac UFOs are a good example though Steve if you want to add onto this please please do yeah I mean it's a it's a important thing and it's really why I wrote my whole book the big picture because we live in a world academically where we Silo each other into Humanities social sciences Natural Sciences and then subdivide then but it's all one world that we live in so these arguments about parapsychology or religion for that matter are not independent of what we know about the Natural Sciences physics and biology Etc uh arguments about Free Will Dan recently had a debate with Robert sapolsky and I I didn't see the debate but I presume there was some talk about Neuroscience I think that physics is relevant there too I don't ever think you can rule things out or prove that things are impossible in a metaphysical or mathematically logical sense but as good maians we can drive our credences to certain for certain things to very very small numbers so when people tell me about possible Paras psych P psychological claims life after death things like that these are possible but I'm not going to spend my time digging into details about claims about near-death experiences giving evidence for an afterlife because I know that those claims are incompatible with how I think the physical world Works likewise for telekinesis or precognition or things like that the laws of physics don't allow for that now the laws of physics as we know them might be wrong that's always possible but again if I'm comparing two possibilities some sketchy report of someone kind of had a feeling that something bad was going to happen and then it happened and I have to throw out all the laws of physics or someone just sort of you know reported something with a little bit of imperfect Fidelity then I'm going to stick with the laws of physics Sean can you say more cuz I've I've had to invoke uh your your book a number of times including in a debate that I had with a Nobel prizewinning physicist um uh Brian Michaelson um that uh why it is that say um uh Clairvoyance or uh extrasensory per uh perception uh are ruled out by by the laws of physics that is I I say that but of course I'm not a physicist and you are uh and you were more specific in uh the big picture as to why forms of energy that would be uh as yet undiscovered that could be the basis for say uh precognition or Clairvoyance we have actually positive reason to believe that they don't exist not just that our current physics hasn't yet discovered them no that's exactly right and that's a very good point in fact I'll pass on to Robinson and he can include the show notes um a more complete paper that I wrote making exactly that point a few years ago the point is that our best deep understanding of the universe right now is in terms of quantum field Theory and it's not just because it's what is the best fit it's because if you want certain cherished beliefs to be true like relativity quantum mechanics locality Quantum field theory has to be the way you describe the world uh at the fundamental level and that means everything is fields and we know what the fields are that we interact with so again it's not just that we found some but who knows there could be other fields out there we know that if there are other fields that we haven't yet found they're going to have certain properties they can't interact with us too strongly otherwise we would have found them already we have searched for all of the ways in which the fields that you and I are made of the electrons the protons the photons all the different ways they can interact with other fields they're not there so either they're too short range to be noticeable in our experiments or they're too massive to be con constructed or uh produced unless you have a large hyron collider in your pocket and of the fields that we know only two of them stretch over macroscopic distances electromagnetic fields and gravitational fields and gravitational fields are very weak and very dumb they can only attract other things they're very easy to notice so basically the short version of is that any physical effect that stretches over much further than the size of a big molecule has to be electromagnetic in nature except for very straightforward things like the Earth pulling us down gravitationally and so if you want to have some macroscopic Force to bend a spoon stretching from your brain to a spoon it has to be the electromagnetic force there are no other forces allowed in nature to do that so you could just test it I mean number one the brain does not have the capacity to make an electromagnetic force that will bend a spoon but also you could just like put a little electric mag magnetic field um detector in between your brain and the spoon to see it happening it's not going to happen because the brain doesn't have that capacity but the point is that the laws of physics don't have room for new Fields New forces that would let you change the configuration of matter are a short distance away perceive into the future Etc because if there were such fields we would have detected them already that's very cut and dried according to Modern physics so I quote this this little number quite often but this is just to recapitulate and and maybe summarize a little bit because qft has been confirmed to something like 14 decimal places if you were to be looking for precognition or Clairvoyance or something like this you would not be searching for a new form of energy or a new Force you would be looking in a framework that already includes Quantum field Theory well you know I I have to be honest so I I I I do want to make I want I'm not I don't care whether there is precognition or Clairvoyance or telekinesis or life after death I just want to follow what the evidence says if you violate the rules of quantum field Theory then all bets are off then any one of these things is possible the information in our brains is containing configurations of our neurons and how they tie together and how they fire and when you die all that information goes away there's no place for your memories and your legacy to sort of exist in some cloud of knowledge and some soul stuff unless you just say no modern physics is wrong Quantum field theory is not right it's something completely non-physical non-natural but then it is your burden to tell me exactly how that works how does this non-physical Soul stuff interact with the stuff that is definitely in my brain all the electrons and photons and neurons that are definitely clearly doing things I have a picture in the big picture of a an Meg that I was in uh you know a magnet magnetic andil graph so when I have thoughts little magnetic fields appear very close to my brain we can detect those fields how does that change how does that information convey itself into this spooky Soul stuff once you write down some equations for that happening I'll be much more willing to listen yeah I think because of course we're it real precognition or Clairvoyance would be some of the most interesting new phenomena to be inducted into our scientific picture of the world should I take it that the reason that you aren't interviewing uh people about this on mindscape is that you have not found thinkers that have compelling evidence or accounts compatible with your scientific worldview to talk about this right I mean to be super clear it's not even a close call it's not like there are some models out there of how the configurational information about electrons and neurons in my brain could be embedded and transferred to some non-physical Soul stuff there's just nothing there's no good ideas people don't even try so I'm just not for my own podcast mindscape I have people on where I disagree with them happy to do that but I want to have people where there's something to learn from talking to them even if that thing to learn is just how to think skeptically and carefully about possibilities that I don't personally agree with but stuff like this uh non-physical bending of spoons or life after death stuff that's has very very very very very tiny Credence in my mind it's not worth spending time on yeah can I add something because i' I did have sorry I I referred to Brian Michaelson I met Brian Josephson Joseph Bonafide physicist he's got a Nobel Prize and he takes the stuff seriously including things like dogs know when their owners are about to come home and people know when uh you're staring at them behind their back now again you know I'm I'm with you I you in terms of why this is physically implausible uh maybe even impossible but as a psychologist and and influenced by Dan Dan's own um exposition of the intentional stance is something that we humans are apt to take uh I it also strikes me that the the the desire to believe that the Universe makes these things possible comes from a a mismatch between the way we naturally conceive the world we human beings and something that physicists have discovered long ago but don't often articulate namely that the universe is um is not intentional is not teleological there are laws that uh predict the future based on the present but that that uh don't work backwards and take intended goals into account and channel physical events to bring them into existence so very h human uh convictions like there are no coincidences everything happens for a reason the outcome of an event was one of the reasons that the event uh happened which of course is true for events that we humans uh bring into being by our own actions but there is a tendency to project that kind of intentionality onto the universe that makes a number of these claims intuitively plausible but probably physically impossible my problem is I haven't been able to get clear statements from uh something that I think just physicists take a second nature and don't bother to articulate namely the laws of the universe just don't care about our goals our Concepts our values they just happen that seems to be the biggest breach between our intuitions and the picture of the universe given to us by by our best physics but there's but there's a point I've been following the development of this point now for some time and I think uh David he has put it wonderfully in his parable of the bathtub right there's no chology out there in physics but what there is is the ratchet of evolution and the ratchet of evolution has the effect of creating reliabilities setting up causal mechanisms that absorb chaos and that use chaos in interesting ways this this example of the bathtub is wonderful he let water fill a bathtub and it can come from all sorts of different sources rain and pouring pouring in a bottle of water and the tap and so forth however the water got there when you pull the plug it's all going out the same hole the the fates the fate of the water doesn't depend on its prehistory it depends on its current history in the designed structure that it's in and the same thing is true of us look at us four people here we have each of us is to oversimplify there are four entities that have over a trillion moving Parts each their names are Steve Sean Robinson and Dad and we were darn sure that we were going to show up here today in spite of the fact that all sorts of interferences and noise and Chaos was going to go on but we we would have bet good money and we would have won we have show up to do this here there why because we're responsible because we're determined because we have agreed we're going to do this now those are facts that you can't explain at the level of atomic physics or subatomic physics those are facts that can only be EXP explained at a at an evolutionary level and a post evolutionary level where that is we have to we have to look at how each of us is an amazingly designed thing made of design things made of design things made of design things made of design things right down to the motor proteins right down to the ribosomes but but also right down to the circuits in our brain that decide what promises we're going to make and the way that we can recover from unforeseen disasters that happened on the way to this meeting all of these things are explicable only at a high level yeah uh David ha has a has as the um uh epigraph for his little Parable in the bathtub uh uh probably the most important sentence I ever wrote and I made the stupid mistake of putting it in parenthesis and that is if you make yourself really small you can externalize virtually everything what seems just inuu to human thinking is you know the first person point of view which gradually recedes into the cartisian theater where there's a an agent an ego that is not Material if you're de card it's not Material it's a it's a it's a a Ras Cog at hands it's very small and it's almost impossible for us to avoid adopting that first person point of view where there's me and then there's my body with all of its complexity and what we have to realize is no that body with all its complexity and not just the brain as Tony deasio Antonio deasio has insisted the body itself is is a plays a big role in the modulation revision decision of all those parts we we're large and it's because we're very very very large things with trillions of moving parts that we have this breakingly useful predictability but we also have to recognize that our predictability can't be perfect and we don't want it to be perfect we want to have we want to reserve a layer of unpredictability so that we will not be taken over and controlled by other agents and it's this balance between predictability and unpredictability that is the control problem that is known to philosphers into everybody actually is the problem with free will we all have free will you're all responsible for being here you're responsible for keeping your promises I trust you you're safe but I can't read your minds perfectly and it's a jolly good thing that I can't yeah it's it's a an intriguing idea that I I borrowed in in uh rationality that because there are game theoretic situations we often face ourselves are faced with outg guessing standoffs captured in the the game of scissors paper rock where the only the best strategy it's not a winning strategy because there isn't one but the best strategy is to be completely and utterly random because any deviation from Randomness will be capitalized on by by your opponent and there are many out guessing standoffs in life uh I mean in in sports like a penalty kicker and a goalie uh in a volunteer situation who is going to actually get up and empty the trash or or report the the uh the crime everyone wants to be done but everyone hopes someone else will do it and the best strategy is to volunteer to do it with some probability but not when it's too predictable otherwise other people will exploit you into always being the one but anyway it is an intriguing idea that some of the phenomena we call Free Will are an adaptation to not be out guest in out guesting out guessing competitions by being by Design uh in aimin random we we want to be practically unpredictable but that doesn't mean that we want Randomness in the quantum sense yeah and of course there has to be physical chaotic the the unpredictability of a coin flip is all we need all you have to do is keep your coin flip secret yeah and of course we want there to be there has to be enough predictability that we can have incentives that we can have laws yeah allow enough predictability that if you make robbing a liquor store illegal fewer people will rob liquor stores and if you pay people a good salary more people will put in the work or choose that line of work so we're not completely random either but there must be some mixture of responsiveness to incentives with a ra enough of a random element that you can't be gamed yeah yeah exactly you know I I am amused by the title of Robert spolsky's book determined and I think nowhere in the book does he draw attention to the fact that in everyday speech determined is sometimes used as a word of Praise she's so determined okay you can count on her you can count on her to do the job she'll she'll overcome every obstacle that's actually one of the key features of Free Will is to be reliable so that other agents will treat you as a free as a politically free agent that they can trust the way I trusts you you know I would uh it would be nice to win the Nobel Prize in physics someday because that any old nonsense that I would spout would have to be taken seriously uh just for that reason but and and many people have taken advantage of this nice feature of it but let me quote a different Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg who said The more we understand the universe the more it seems pointless and I think that this goes to Steve's point that there is something to be explained here and it's it's to me absolutely fascinating and important that the laws of physics don't care about the future they don't know where we're going in fact uh I I bang on in every single book I write about the leian Paradigm for physics which if you know the state of the universe right now you can predict where it's going to go at least statistically and where it came from there's details and footnotes there but the point is all of the information about the state of the universe is contained in the present moment the uni physics does not work by saying here we are and here is where we want to go it just works by saying here we are but nevertheless as as Dan has written about in other people we talk at the macroscopic human level as if we have goals as if we have purposes intentions desires and that's nowhere to be found in the laws of physics the only difference between the past and future that is relevant to physics is that the early Universe had low entropy it was orderly it was in a very very specific kind of state and ever since then there's no special future State there's a special fact about the past so there's an interesting research level question one of the things I'm very interested in myself right now which is how in the course of cosmic Evolution despite the fact that the only specification that we need to say what the world does is in the past not in the future how did subsets of the universe start thinking in terms of future goals how did tileology evolve how did it come into existence in a purely physical way the answer has to be that there are you know things about sustainability and stability and reproduction and fitness and things like that that arise from the fact that the entropy was low in the past but it turns out that the best way to survive is to predict the future it's not mystical it's not magical it's not in against the violating the laws of physics but there is some details there are details to be worked out there that I'm very excited to think about yeah I think that's good have you spoken about this at all with your colleague Janan Jan Janan isil she was just on the show and we talked a little bit about this and then her work uh building off of David and David Albert and Barry Low's mentaculus and the past hypothesis and all have you talk to her at all about this yes very much I mean Jan and I are very uh sympatico in these questions so she's a great person to talk to I just think that all of them Janan and David Albert and and Barry loward all these people they need more equations in what they're doing I think what they're doing is exactly right but it's a little philosophical less their hearts and so I I would like to quantify it a little bit more you know we we have a revolution is going on right now in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and Barry Barry lower had this great quote that I'm GNA repeat ad nauseum in the future which is he says I was so surprised when I finally realized that all of the interesting problem in philosophy could be solved by looking at statistical mechanics and I think that's right at least slight exaggeration but it's in the right track and I think that thinking harder about statistical mechanics in a modern sense is going to just open a whole bunch of doors onto understanding emergence and complexity and goals and teolog and intentionality and agency and all these things that were we have some good ideas about right now but they're not yet quite firmed up I think tell me if you agree with this Sean uh Donal mcai one of my heroes of late Donald and maai a Scottish cybernetician and physicist um said uh leus demon can have if you like total information about the future of the world for the usual appi and Demon reasons but you can't interact with that world and you can't exploit that information and that is I think part of the uh I think that's a key point that helps explain why we have the world of agen and persons because our knowledge is strictly limited because we are part of the universe we're outside the Universe I think it's a good point I think when when you tell people about determinism uh in the sense of physics or philosophy people who are not professional physicists or philosophers will often get it confused either explicitly or implicitly with fate right with predestination I'm going to grow up to be the princess right you know even though I'm struggling to sweep the fireplace out right now there is a prophecy that I'm and and that's not what physics determinism is like because all of the relevant information to make those predictions about the future is completely hidden from us so the analogy I use is it's it's not like uh you re you meet uh three wisened crn over a bubbling cauldron and they tell you what's going to happen to you in the future it's like you meet an annoying little kid who says I know what's going to happen to you in the future and you say okay what's going to happen and the kid says I'm not going to tell you and then something happens and the kid says I knew that was going to happen how how would this affect your life even if the kid really did know it right if the kid cannot tell you if there's no way to extract from the universe this knowledge we have to in practice differently for example by acting as if there's free will spolski does quote at length and determined I talked to him about it a little while ago and then I talked to Dan uh right afterward but he quotes a lot of the literature and psychology that knowing that or believing in determinism and having an undermined sense of Free Will does not actually impact anyone's Behavior people do not run a muck if they're given that sort of sense but I think this might actually be where Dan and I disagree because about that fact whether it's true or not I could not possibly care less I think the Free Will is important to talk about because it's the best way to model human beings I don't know any actual human being who does not get annoyed with other human beings when they act in certain ways there are no human beings who just say well I guess what the wave function of the universe would have predicted was going to happen all along we think in terms of Free Will whether it makes us better people or otherwise I'm sorry Steve that you had to run away when I was giving the answer to your question but I I talked a lot about entropy and the fact that to me it's a super interesting research level question how did localized subsystems of the universe start to care about the future start to act in terms of goals and predictions and things like that even though the laws of physics themselves just care about what the current state is I think you know there's an answerable question but I think that we're still very much along the way to providing those answers I mean I'm glad this came because I was actually was going to bring it up uh a couple of minutes before uh Dan alluded earlier to Norbert Weiner and U the the uh human use of human beings and more generally his invention of a field that we no longer call cybernetics but I think he did address that Paradox in the not and and try to answer it in the in the language of of uh control systems that is of feedback and probably our pre-theoretical idea of an A system that is goal directed in a universe where the the laws just work forward not not backward they can't U nothing gets determined in terms of how good or bad the outcome would be it just happens but but we do and uh I think a key is that there you can uh specify purely physical systems that have a goal state that is a a representation of uh that they can that can be sensed they have some uh input measurement of the current state they have an inventory of actions with predictable consequen of the world and the system can be set up so that when there's a discrepancy between the goal State and the current state an action is affected that on average reduces that difference there could be if there are many of them we consider it to be an intelligent system like like a brain uh there are aspects of natural selection that work that way that is that the uh consequences of uh a physical event can feed back on the likelihood of copies being made which gives us the illusion of tileology or of gold directedness even though it's just a a feedforward process and that there' be I think a place for uh a field of study that George Williams called tonomy that is systems that look as if they're teleological that they're goal directed that the future can affect the past while of course conforming to the feed forward laws of of uh physics and natural selection um cybernetic systems like uh cruise control on your car or a thermostat uh the the human brain with many qualitative combinatorial means of bringing about events that would reduce the difference between a goal State and and a current state would all be examples of these toonomic systems it's a it's some it's amazing that um George Williams found found need to talk about tonomy because thology had such a bad press in the sciences and uh maybe that's the way to go maybe we should simply uh drop the wordology and go for otomy but there's nothing illusory about it it's just control theory and I like to use the example of a you know a rock dislodged in an earthquake rolling down a mountain and it's let's say it's determined where it goes it's determined it's determined by all the the forces that act on it gravity where it bounces Etc now have a skier racing down the same Mountain she is under control they're both determined syst systems but the skier can is much more likely that to arrive at the same place within a small degree of error no matter how many times she does the Run whereas the rock is not and it's that it's that's the difference between being in control which the skier is and not The Rock isn't controlled by the past because the past has no feedback The Rock's path is The Rock's trajectory is caused by the sum of all the events that uh lead up to its trajectory but there's no feedback mechanism as soon as you add the feedback as soon as you add the control you change the nature of the phenomenon in precisely the way that matters and if we we can call that tonomy we can call it thology but it's everywhere in biology it's not in physics as although we tend to We tend to project it onto uh outward onto the laws of the universe which is why creationism and astrology and uh synchronicity and the vague sense that everything happens for a purpose is so compelling yeah and philosophers I'm afraid have not done a good job of dissuading uh us from doing that uh but people ask like questions like why do you know why me why do bad things happen to good people and you know the answer is why not why why would you ever think well there is a problem here philosophically uh I mean Dan alludes to this there's there's this thing called the principle of sufficient reason right this idea that comes down most uh famously from live Nets that everything happens for a reason and sometimes this is interpreted very innocently as not anything goes right there are laws there's you know a causal chain of uh interaction in in physics or whatever but as I like to point out if you pick up a book on classical mechanics or quantum mechanics or general relativity the words cause and effect never appear in these books because the laws of physics don't work that way they're patterns they're differential equations that say one damn thing after another a specific thing after another but they work equally well forwards and backwards they don't attribute causes to things so when I debated William Lane Craig and he wants to say the anything that begins needs a cause the universe begins therefore the universe needs a cause therefore God exists and he expects the cosmologist to argue about whether or not the universe had a beginning but I argued about whether not everything that needs to begin that begins needs to have a cause because I think that the idea of cause is purely emergent macroscopic human scale not something that should be found in the fundamental workings of the universe yeah Berard Russell said that the concept of causality survives because like the monarchy it is mistakenly believed to do no harm lovely that's a subtle it's a subtle idea that that I think we should try harder to get across let me let but let me make another Point uh you say look through the books of the physicists and the books and articles and you won't find the word cause and I have recently been asking inviting students and others that I've been talking with about this see if you can find a an article peer-reviewed article in the most hard-bitten scientifically tough biology Journal you can think of but you choose it see if you can find an article that doesn't at any point talk about function and in effect tonomy and well or cause or cause I mean what what causes AIDS what causes Co yeah but but I'm I'm more concerned that so many biologists seem to have uh a certain false consciousness about this they think they're Ardent anti- teist and they're Engineers they're talking about mechanisms everywhere the you can't you cannot talk about the ribosome for instance without talking about all the functions that the parts do why they do the part the things they do and so forth and that's just well there's a sense in which human psychology and this is something that I've I've written about in the in the stuff of thought where there are huge mismatches between our intuitive physics and real physics are are our concept of time is having a past present and and uh future our concept of uh matter as stuff that is stuff all the way down at at any scale uh that of objects as as discreete uh entities of uh causation as a kind of oomph or impetus that gets transfer to things these are all a concept of discrete places and paths all of which are reflected in language fairly directly our nouns our verbs our tenses our prepositions don't have counterparts in real physics but do have counterparts in engineering that is at the macroscopic level of physics combined with human goals you can't avoid things like cause and container and substance and uh present versus future and I I I I suggest that human cognition involved not to deal with regularities at the levels that physicists document them but regularities at the levels that Engineers including the human intuitive Engineers have to deal with the world which you can't avoid Notions like function cause purpose agency uh uh objects this is yeah this this is where Judea pearls were comes in very valuably and uh there's that lovely quote from Thomas pin's novel uh gravity's rainbow where somebody says uh uh nothing does anything things just happen no that's physics it's not engering world and the biological World things do things yeah I'm going to have to say goodbye now it been a pleasure talking to all of you Robinson thanks for thanks for having me on nice to talk to you Dan nice to talk to you Sean bye thanks Steve well uh I think this calls for a slight maybe change of of subject for a moment I wanted to go back to a couple of things uh just I wanted to flag Dan's example of the four of us now three of us showing up here despite the fact that were uh composed of each a trillion very complex little objects and it just reminds me of something I read a long time ago I don't know if it was in one of your papers Dan or or or one of your books but an example that really jumped out at me and it was something along these lines if a martian that takes the physical stance sees me opening a chocolate bar they have to do such or this Martian would have to do such an enormous calculation it would need so much data just to be able to determine that I'm going to eat this chocolate bar whereas a human taking the intentional stance does it in the blink of and I with uh to use uh one of your terms uh maybe vanishingly low data in comparison to the Martian and I just loved this yeah I think um my original example was the Martian is in somebody's house the phone rings the the woman of the house answers the phone and you and he's hi I'm bring Joe home for supper and she says okay stop off and buy a bottle of wine on the way uh and sure enough half an hour later her husband shows up and he's got a bottle of wine and a guest now the Martian leian has predicted all this but only by tracing out all the atoms in the intervening space no no you don't have to do that you can cut to the chase you know what's going to happen because the intentional stance is that breathtakingly usable uh and largely accurate and reliable way of anticipating what's going to happen next and that's what life is all about is anticipating what happens next and and dealing with it you know I would emphasize that this to to me this I I agree with absolutely everything that both you have just said to me it's an example of emergence it's not special to human beings or even the intentional stance it's it's an example of a real pattern to use another one of Dan's phrases if you ask the Martian who is uh standing in for lelo's demon here's the Earth so here's what time it is now what time will the Sun be seen to rise tomorrow and they say well okay I've got to write down the position and the velocity of all of the atoms in the earth and evolve It Forward in time using the laws of physics and this is going to be this going to take me a while but I'll I'll do it whereas we can do something much simpler because we treat the Earth as a solid sphere and it's rotating at a certain right yeah and this is a real pattern that is a feature of the physical world that we can find predictabilities with again V inly small fractions of the total available information that might be out there and human beings absolutely take advantage of that they're much more efficient than Theus demon yeah that's good uh I just what I add because I'm so used to being confronted on this SC you've used the word emergence yes but in the sense of innocent emergence uh uh for many people emergence is a sort of code word for almost mystical you know it is and and I you wanna you w to turn that off there's nothing there's nothing woo woo about this sense of emergence at all no in fact very much the opposite and this is a battle that I've been fighting I would love to just find a different word honestly than emergence because I completely agree with you in certain corners of the discourse basically you don't have emergence unless it's magical and impossible to understand and I want to make it be exactly the opposite of that exactly my my one of my favorite examples of emergence is all the amazing forms in John uh Conway's life world I said look these are emerging phenomena but they are absolutely deducible predictable from the rules of the game it's just that they're surpr surprising and uh it's just amazing there are these higher level regularities but it's no no mystery about I mean they're real patterns yeah good just checking but while we're on the topic um Illusions are real too they're real Illusions okay um you know my current name for my theory of Consciousness is illusionism I don't a lot of people a lot of people hate that you do I do well but I'll tell you let me let me defend it let me defend it think of your telephone your smartphone think of the user illusion on its face that's real you're not the victim of it you're the beneficiary you don't want to know all the billions of details behind the scenes that make those apps do what they do that's what illusionism is conscious what you and I and Robinson have all the rest of the people paying attention to this is we have an extremely limited somewhat metaphorical and uh extremely useful manipulable valuable helpful amount of know know about what's going on inside us we don't know what's going on in our brains except via this illusion now when one of my favorite quotes from John surl because I always like to I don't like to shoot Straw Men I like to get real people who say things that are wrong but like now I have a proper Target and he says at one point remember always insist on the first person point of view uh and I think that's the worst single worst bit of advice anybody working on Consciousness has ever offered because if you insist on the first person point of view you never get to ask the hard questions about how the heck it works because from the first person point of view we're clueless you don't know how your thoughts come to you you don't right now you don't know what processes are churing in the background that are vying for which words you're going to speak next thank goodness you don't you have a you're the user of your own brain and you are able to use your brain as well as you do because of this wonderful use or Lo which is consciousness well we have to make sure that people realize this doesn't mean that there's a little homunculus in there looking at all the show because the homunculus is part of the user illusion too you don't need the screen you don't need the theater you just need the oversimplification and a occasional Distortion of the information that you have about what you're doing in your own in your own thinking that's why I call it illusionism do you are we are we to take it that you think that Consciousness is an illusion or just that something like qualia are Illusions well qualia are the properties that philosophers insist conscious has and I say no there's there's no place for those quality for those properties because the properties that do the work have to be functional properties they have to be the properties that get you to act to prefer to lament to jump to cry to and qualia by philosophical tradition aren't those kind of properties they're in inic properties you don't need any intrinsic properties those those aren't real at all quality just aren't real but Consciousness is perfectly real it's just not composed of quality but is it an illusion Consciousness yeah so just to to clarify on my end is what so Dan what's elusory is just the idea that the first person view of what's going on in the brain is all or really what's happening inside our SK but that is just a simplified model of what's happening in and my guess about what you think Sean is that you don't like the connotation of the name illusionism that Dan to tell me whether he thinks Consciousness is an illusion all right I will address that question completely directly Consciousness is the name of a whole variety of phenomena that extend down to amibas and trees and sponges and dogs and cats and robots and the idea that there's one phenomenon which is you know the light is on or off either you're conscious you're a zombie or you aren't that's one of the worst ideas that is currently fashionable that idea of Consciousness as a super califragilistic hex alidocious property that divides the universe in two that an illusion Consciousness is real it just isn't what you think it is so I'm I'm going to maintain my position that believing Consciousness is real and calling your stance illusionism about Consciousness is asking for trouble there got to be a better name well well let's let's talk about that because it um uh I've um notice I I say the same thing about free will sure it's real but it isn't what you think it is and I agree and no you see philosophers like to uh inflate things this philosophical inflation or they want to go for the absolute and so they they think Consciousness divides the universe in two what it's like to be something and everything else or they want free will either you've got absolute free will even God couldn't tell whether Eve would bite the Apple uh or or free will is is an illusion those are just bad philosophical ideas and they're bad for the same reason they're bad because they have not learned the darwinian lesson and that is that anything interesting has gradual edges there there's uh there's no sharp line between the things that are alive and the things that aren't there's no sharply between the things that are conscious and the things that aren't there's no sharp line between the things that have Free Will and the things that are that doesn't mean that there isn't free will I I love David Sanford's argument about mammals he says if you take it as essential that every mammal has a mammal for a mother then there are any mammals because there'd have to be an Infinity of them which there aren't what gives now to my amazement some philosophers go hunting for the prime mammal in effect there has to be one mammal the only the first mammal the only mammal that didn't have a mammal from other and they think that unless that's true there aren't any mammals at all you and I know better this is just the sries Paradox but the same thing is true of free will the Libertarians think unless there's this moment when an absolutely uh Quantum undetermined Choice happens then you're not responsible for anything that flows thereafter nonsense Free Will is is an accomplishment not a metaphysical gift some of us have free will we grew into it and the same thing is true of Consciousness we grew into consciousness and we can grow out of it gradually so since the so many people view this as just repugnant they really don't like the idea the Consciousness is comes in degrees or the Free Will comes in degrees mostly I think they've abandoned vitalism they're happy to agree that there's no sharp line between what's living and what isn't look at look at biologists know what life is they don't bother try to Define this some of them some of them well some do but but but you know a sort of Scholastic Enterprise of of no real importance and the same thing is true philosophers should stop trying to define consciousness you know find the essence of cons essentialism is a bad idea we've known that ever since Darwin and and so I I think it's important to stress that the very common assumption even self congratulatory Assumption of people that they know what Consciousness is and by God it's not an illusion I want to I want I want to rub their their noses in the mess that they make with that with that idea because I think it's wrong and they just refuse even to consider that it's wrong they just they they won't they say no no I block my ears I'm not going to hear that well give it a try you'd be amazed Dan you mentioned something that I think is important so I want to make sure it's emphasized and you referred to something called the darwinian lesson and I think it was that most interesting phenomena have gradual edges and another phrase that comes to mind that I probably picked up from your work is uh NATA non fak salus so nature doesn't make jumps but I was wondering you could just be explicit about precisely what the darwinian lesson is yeah um the darwinian lesson is that and this was back to the question that Sean was dealing with back when he was talking about what is it that that lets this happen in physics where we move from low entropy into high entropy and yet somehow along the way we get things that are stable that are better at reproducing than the opposition and that's that creates life where do you draw it the first thing that reproduces is that life who cares who cares um um eventually it's the accumulation of all those little things that have been designed by their own history of reproduction of replication that things that can detect something you can use information in their immediate environment to do better at Staying Alive at at reproducing at persisting differential persistence becomes differential reproduction and that leads to living things and there's a the physicist David Deutsch has a wonderful Ted talk about this where he talks about the great monotony and how for billions of years sort of nothing happened or nothing different nothing new happened and then life got started whether it started on one planet or many but when life gets started now of a suddenly you have all these Novelties all these new compounds I hadn't realized so I watched that how many of the large molecules on the planet they didn't exist before life did life creates well bio chemistry yeah of course but biochemistry is a wonderful novelty it's it's not out there everywhere in the universe it's a very and it changes it changes the pace it changes what's possible Stu calman has the term the adjacent possible ever since life got started the adjacent possible has changed and changed and changed and Chang changed and there are many things that are possible now that were possible even yesterday or a thousand years ago or 10,000 years ago and that's the darwinian lesson going back to that question I raised of Steve's about uh parapsychology Clairvoyance Sean you said that generally you don't want to spend too much time on these areas because there are no sort of plausible ways that these phenomena could be instantiated as far as you know but there is one particular area that you do discuss where if I'm right again to use that trific neologism of Dan you have vanishingly low credences low Credence in and naturally this is a good place for Dan to weigh in but so I've never spoken to Philip Goff but my loose understanding is that the hand psychist believes there are non-physical properties of the mind which as a physicalist you you totally reject and yet you spend lots of well I don't want to say a lot of time but I know I think you've debated him recently you've talked to to Phil and there there are many other sorts of crackpots who think the laws of physics need to be totally changed to accommodate accommodate uh Consciousness and Phil Phil's not Philip's not but there are some so I'm wondering why this is an area that you think is important to talk about even if you don't have any Credence in it well two things um one is the amount of time I spend talking about pans psychism in particular and Consciousness and Free Will more generally is not at all representative of how much time I spend thinking about these things almost all the time I spend talking about these things is not my fault or at least not my idea originally people drag me into it and I I tell them I say like the only I only have one thing to say is that if it violates the laws of physics I'm not interesting and interested in it and apparently it does therefore I'm not interested and all I can do is say that one thing over and over again and they keep wanting me to say that one thing I mean I literally got a there was a YouTube comment on my debate with Phillip that said like Sean Carol's just saying the same thing he always said yes really all I got to say and I'd be perfectly happy to say it again I turn down a whole bunch of invitations that you don't know about to say the same thing over again so that's one thing but the other thing is uh there's it's a I I put a lot of effort into thinking about what are the ideas I don't agree with that I should at least pay attention to or allow to have time in the discourse right like how do you divide the line between those ideas you think are wrong and those ideas you think are so wrong you're not even going to listen right blah blah blah blah blah like you could say exactly the same thing about non- edian formulations of quantum mechanics I in my research I am not spending time thinking about other interpretations of quantum mechanics I think I know the right one and I move on with that but I'm not so sure about it and and part of that not being sure is there's a whole bunch of smart people who believe otherwise so I'm going to give them time uh on the podcast or whatever or in talks to to state their case there's a whole bunch of smart people who think that Consciousness is not purely physical I don't get it I I'm completely unpersuaded by everything they have to say but I'm I'm humble enough to know that I've been wrong before so I want to keep listening to what they have to say I I doubt that they're going to change my mind but you never know yeah um very much in agreement with you uh on that I I have several one stroke signatures on my email where people send me unsolicited manuscripts they want me to read and I look at them just enough to see what it's about and then I apologize for the fact that I don't have time to delve into their particular version and many of them take that very well good for them I'm Happ that it's funny that some of them get very irate about this think who are you to not look at my 300 Page disposition on Consciousness and I think well who are you now when Philip gof puts forward pan psychism and a point that I like to make about that is it's not a theory it's a slogan nothing follows from it as far as I can see it does not suggest any experiments to run it doesn't make any predictions it's just the slogan and philosophers most actually actually most philosophers theories are just slogans and a lot of philosophy is just slogan honing getting the slogan right so it's counter example proof and there's no objections to it but there it sits makes no difference I've I've suggested my own pan Theory pan Nifty ISM everything's Nifty every electron every Photon every string every brain every that everything's Nifty what follows from that nothing and what follows from everything's mental nothing because whatever that whatever Philip means by mental it doesn't have much to do you know if the coffee Cup's mental then doesn't have much to do with the mind that I'm interested in which is the kind that people like you to have a largely thanks to the trillion moving part brains that you have and uh saying that everything as that property is seems to me to be just comically uninformative so I I don't spend my time on it when I went to um when I did that debate with Philip Goff who I truly like as a person and what I one of the things I one of the things I like about him the most is his absolute eagerness to engage with people who disagree with him by a lot um but when I did that debate it was that in the context of a workshop on pan psychism and afterward I I said it's like visiting a Reddit Message Board full of fans of a TV show you've never watched and they're they're debating in in with true passion about like this or that and I'm like well I don't even know what any of these words mean but I do want to you know I I and and I I give I I think that there are things that could be true but to which I give sufficiently low credences that I'm not going to spend time thinking about them during the day and pan cism is one of those um but I I absolutely recognize the difficulty in being right about those judgments sure that some of my cherish beliefs uh are going to be wrong 100 years from now now if you went down the list of all of my cherished beliefs I'm not going to give up on any of them there's this funny rhetorical device where people say like so you admit you're going to be wrong why don't you admit you're wrong about this well no I have that cherished belief for good reasons one of my cherished beliefs might be wrong but I can't predict ahead of time which ones they're going to be know I try my best to navigate this levels of credences issue but you know It's Tricky we're all going to judge slightly differently and and let me just point out that what we're doing right now because I agree completely with that is we're not following dayart deart in the meditations digs a hole for himself a hole of skepticism systematic skepticism and then he decides that the only way out is if he just make sure his ideas are clear and distinct enough God will not let him be wrong about them so he passes the buck to God and then of course he has to prove that God exists and uh he doesn't succeed in that of course and I think right there is a fundamental tactical error made by a great scientist what he should have done is said I want to avoid the error I I want to be as sure as possible I think the best I can do is find the smartest people I can find and deal constructively with them and see if they can change my mind about any of this and it it's a call for modesty of A Sort I'm I'm ready to be taught show me but do show me if I'm quite prepared to listen if you've got ideas that you think will sway me but you can't sway Me by just pounding your fists and saying but it's just got to be this way no I'd like to see some evidence I'd like to see some arguments I'd like to see a surprising result that your theory predicts that mine doesn't that's what I want to do and it's I yeah and you know I think this is true even in mathematics um Andrew Wilds proved fairmont's last the now if you think you've proved fairmont's Last Theorem you really have to consider a disjunction either I've proved fairmont's Last Theorem or I'm going crazy and many many very very smart people thought they'd proved trma last theum and were wrong so it's it's an either or you have to take seriously Andrew WS couldn't know that he proved F's last ER couldn't comfortably say he knew until the mathematicians who were competing with him for this glory and whom were his fellow experts they went through his proof they found some problems and he fixed them and when they conceeded when they agreed that he proved it then then he he could believe it's it's a social fact and it's a social fact that you can't you can't get around that you can't ask God to guarantee your clear and distinct ideas the best you can do is ask your fellow human beings who know lots of things that you don't know and understand lots of things that you don't understand you got to see what they think and when you get agreements there's always a good chance no there's a small chance maybe not Vanishing but small that you're all wrong you've LED each other down the Garden Path we'll find out in 100 years or 200 years but in the meantime that's the best we can do since since this is the exciting though A bit chaotic 200th episode of the show I thought it would be uh given the the most recent comments it would be nice to get a little bit meta and given Dan your comments on pan psychism as you said it's kind of just like a slogan philosophy is a lot about slogan making nothing follows from it I thought I ought to ask about the two of your views on philosophy just more generally and Dan it seems like you think of philosophy quite broadly as continuous but and maybe separate from the Sciences but be continuous and separate just are actually uh antonyms but how do how do you see the relationship between science and philosophy well different from the way a lot of philosophers see it um I see philosophy at its best as an arena of thinking where in one sense Anything Goes but it's only useful if what goes is part of a of of an inquiry that's already going on and that has lots of facts so it's I've said without embarrassment I think philosophers are better at questions than answers and I love it when I can meet with scientists and think that I am helping them shape their questions better and cast off some assumptions that they had realized that they were making that's I think a good role for philosophers my my favorite definition of philosophy is Wilfred sers which is that philosophy is uh uh I want to get it word for word if I can about how things in the widest sense of the term hang together in the widest sense of the term now that seems almost trivial but let me give you a small sample of the things there are in the widest sense of the term there's there's atoms and molecules and and uh uh the fields and gravity and and uh uh cells and uh molecules and voices and democracies and words and pictures and voices and minds and baseball games and home runs and money what's money made out of what are baseball games made of what's democracy made of these are things in the wider sense of the term and some of them are just as real just as important more important maybe than the things of physics the old it's all atoms in the void that simplification well if that's your ontology if that's the kind of only kind of things that you tolerate you got big problems because there's lots of things in the world that then you have to declare to be illusory so uh for me philosophy looks pre-theoretically at the candidates for thinghood and decides which ones to take seriously and what follows from the fact that we're taking them seriously this description of philosophy is an arena where anything goes modulo some restrictions reminds me of a a conversation that I had with the philosopher Michael strevens at at NYU about what science is and he seemed to think of science as an arena where anything goes but there are some restrictions and the most important important restriction is that one has to reason around evidence that is available for everybody to potentially reproduce or observe and and this immediately brings to mind pan psychism what we were just talking about where there there is no evidence of this sort uh since it's non-physical but Sean did you have anything to add to to Dan's thoughts on on what well when you said you were going to start getting meta at the end of the podcast I thought you were going to encourage Dan to start his own podcast since you know you and I have been very successful here like maybe Dan could become famous if he actually just had a podcast or maybe Dan and Steve could team up I don't know but about philosophy and science look I think that they're continuous with each other I think that most human knowledge is of a Continuum right I think that physics and philosophy do not have a sharp right line between them maybe that's the darwinian lesson also but physics and chemistry and biology don't have sharp right lines between them and biology and psychology and sociology don't have sharp bright lines between them these are categories we invent to make universities they're not things that are out there in the world uh and I but there are stylistic differences in practice that are absolutely impossible to miss I mean Dan is right that philosophers are much better at questions then it answers if you're a physicist and a philosopher explains to you why you've made a mistake you should absolutely take them seriously but if you're a physicist and a philosopher says here's my theory you can more or less tune them out you very unlikely that that's going to be helpful and I think that you know it the the stylistic differences the fact that we have reified these differences in Academia is a bigger problem than we let on you know I'm very very privileged right now at John's Hopkins to have this position where I can do both physics and philosophy and call it natural philosophy and I since I've arrived I've been getting a lot of emails from undergraduates or high school students saying how can I do that that's what I want to do I want to ask these big questions about the nature of reality but take science seriously blah blah blah blah and I have to be honest I have to say look in the real world if you want to become a professor and do these things for a living you have to get a PhD in either physics or philosophy and those two processes are utterly different the required courses are different what you have to learn is different there is no in between and you have to make that choice and and and that's too bad once you make that choice and while you're in that path on that path you can try to become good enough in your specific field to get a job and then you can broaden out your actual interests and then that's fine but we don't give nearly enough encouragement or opportunity to people who want to do these things and I think that our intellectual life suffers because of that yeah yeah I think you're exactly right um I think though that doing what you'd like to do to encourage that has its risks too there's a certain sort of curse of interdisciplinarity that leads to fcil oversimplification and faddishness and uh uh last thing I would ever want to be is the dean of interdisciplinary studies but I'm all for interdisciplinary study but I don't want to institutionalize it like that well the s Institute though is a terrific example lovely example lovely example done right I I spoke with I know you you've spoke I mean you probably know him very well Jeff Jeffrey West uh about his work I mean he's a string theorist a physicist and he does he's absolutely not a string theorist by the way well he's done String Theory I think he did Super Symmetry and high energy physics yes but these little differences matter the narcissism of small differences isett sure though he did say that he was working on string theory I could be totally wrong uh we'll check I'll email you I'm curious now maybe it's a new interest of Jeff he's a I think he's probably said super symmetry okay but he has done also of course this very interesting work in biology complexity Theory scaling of cities but scale wonderful book yeah by the way uh at at kins in our natural philosophy Forum which Janan isma and I uh have founded every year we have a distinguished lecturer and last year our lecturer was Dan Dennett and this year our lecturer is Jeffrey West oh i' I've got great company on the show then that's great um well then I one thought about the the continuity of Science and philosophy I I asked this question to a professor here at Stanford his name is Nadim Hussein but he pointed out to me that a lot of the special Sciences started with philosophy so with Aristotle I mean Aristotle I think was the the first biologist in a sense I recently learned I probably mentioned it a number of times that he was the person who discovered that Dolphins aren't fish but once the and and Dan you said that philosophers are are better at at questions than answers what seems to be the case is that or one thing that has been the case historically is that philosophers have clarified the questions and the concepts and then once there's a an agreed upon methodology for answering or thinking about these questions they get doled out to the special Sciences but of course uh philosophy is still very important when it's done well and involved in those Sciences continuing to clarify the questions yeah well you know there's there's fossil evidence of that the American philosophical Society is a scientific Society it's not philosophers at all really it it started out that way but so yeah philosophy when it gets questions straight enough to be answered turns them over to others but if you look at the history of philosophy you will see that many of the best philosophers have been the scientists themselves I mean they cart livits uh for that matter uh uh uh the best philosophers of math yeah yeah right Aristotle himself so so as as Sean says the line between philosophy and science is has always been a a uh not a draw of a line it's been there's been a joint which has had much traffic going in both directions yeah I mean there's a joke that once philosophy starts making progress in some area you stop calling that area philosophy anymore you give it a different name and remove it to a different department but not for not for nothing not for nothing is the is the psychology department at Harvard in William James Hall famous example a profess who was a professor of philosophy but but they rightly named the psychology building after him yes you know I I I have often said that you can't not do philosophy as a scientist you can only do it badly uh or you can only not be aware that you're doing it but in most science you can do it badly and you get away with it fine it's just not necessary right if you're doing a certain integral or calculating a certain reaction rate who cares about the philosophy behind it I think that the important the relevant fact is that there are always these subsets of science whether it's biology or physics or psychology or whatever where the philosophical issues are front and center the the example I like to use because it's not the most famous One or the one that people think of is we built a large hron collider in Switzerland right uh a giant particle accelerator that cost $9 billion and has cost more money since then and you know for good reason but one of the biggest single reasons one of the biggest single motivations for doing that besides you know it's something else to do was that we had what is called the naturalness problem in physics we thought that there had to be something called the higs boson and the higs boson had to have a certain mass approximately and that mass is way lower than we expected so part of the motivation the justification for spending $9 billion on the Large Hadron Collider was to find the higs but an even bigger part of it was to find all of the other new physics that would help us account for the naturalness problem and number one we haven't found anything beyond the higs boson we were wrong in our expectations and number two whether a Theory of physics is natural or not is very obviously a philosophy question and philosophers haven't faced up to this one frankly like we haven't neither the physicists nor the philosophers have really thought deeply about what is meant by these questions even though we spend literally billions of dollars being motivated by them so I think there's lots of room for being more serious about the uh overlap between science and philosophy okay well I think that's a terrific place to end this Monumental 200th episode of the show I mean thank you Sean thank you Dan thank you Steve for being such I don't know Wonderful voices to have had the past a few times the past couple hundred episodes well thank you for organizing it yeah thanks for doing a great podcast [Music] Robinson

Channel: Robinson Erhardt

Views: 49,448

Keywords: sean carroll, daniel dennett, steven pinker, consciousness, ai, panpsychism, parapsychology, artificial intelligence news, sean carroll joe rogan, sean carroll william lane craig, sean carroll debate, sean carroll quantum mechanics, sean carroll mindscape, sean carroll biggest ideas, sean carroll lex fridman, sean carroll many worlds, sean carroll god, daniel dennett free will, daniel dennett consciousness, daniel dennett debate, steven pinker rationality, steven pinker language

Id: gh2dgsaNY3A

Length: 120min 11sec (7211 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024