Episode 30: Unsolved Problems in Physics Part 1 - The Mystery of Time
- Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
- This transcript was generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor.
- Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes. Please check against the actual podcast.
- Speakers are denoted as color names.
Transcript
[00:00:07] Blue: I want to correct one thing I said in this episode. In it, I mentioned that Chiara Marletto is not a compatibilist when it comes to free will. After recording this, I had the interview with her and got a chance to actually ask her questions and found out that she was in fact a compatibilist, but of a different kind than I am. Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast. We have a great episode today. We have a guest with us, Saadia. Hey, Saadia. How are you doing? Fine. Thanks. How are you guys doing? Good. And we’ve got Camille and Tracy also. Hi, guys. Hi. Saadia is someone I befriended. She’s very active in paparian forms, like on Facebook in particular, but on Twitter. And I call her and her husband the first couple and maybe only couple of paparian philosophy. They’re both into it a lot and they’re both a lot of fun to talk to. And she is a PhD in physics from the University of Kentucky and very intelligent and I really enjoyed talking with her. So we wanted to invite her to the show. And just to give a little background on this, I was reading Chiara Mileto’s book about constructor theory and she mentions in it the problem of time and how it’s difficult. You can’t be solved in the conventional way of thinking of physics. And I had had several conversations with Saadia about the same subject.
[00:01:40] Blue: So her and I talked and we wanted to do an episode together and she chose to do kind of her thoughts about physics and how you might go about solving some of the problems that exist, in particular the problem of time, although she’s also motivated by other thoughts like free will, some of the same things that Chiara mentions in her book. So I thought she’d be an interesting addition to the show to talk with us about this. So Saadia, why don’t you give us an introduction to the topic you’ve chosen here.
[00:02:12] Red: All right, so the topic, we’re going to go into a whole lot of things here, but there’s going to be a running thread through it, which has been motivated, where I think that the problem of time, for me at least the problem of time is by far the deepest mystery we have right now. And I think properly addressing that might hold the key to a lot of problems, which I think are similar in kind as we go through it. Hopefully I can make a case for it. I’ve been interested in time for a long time now. I mean, when I first, when I took the general relativity course, I was introduced to general relativity, you know, one of the things that Einstein did, you know, Einstein talks in general relativity, it’s all about events. And then, you know, time sort of becomes relative. But I just felt like I left it a feeling that I still never, I felt like asking, you know, I kept asking this question, what is time? What is time? And I don’t, you know, it wasn’t really fully, I guess I couldn’t really get a good grip on it. And I kept thinking about it till one day I actually came across a book called The End of Time by Julian Barber that was a long time ago. And for the first time, I think somebody articulated that question for me that I recognize that, oh, okay, so this is what’s bothering me. And then for the longest time I thought about, you know, I thought along the lines of Julian Barber, but there are certain things that just didn’t add up. There was still something left out of that theory.
[00:03:56] Red: So my hope is that in this discussion, I’ll show you what are those things that I felt like left out. And only recently I’ve started thinking about it in a different way. And actually my motivation comes from having been introduced to Popper’s theory, Popperian epistemology. And one day there was this thing that popped up in my mind. And then that also brought me. There are other links here that Lee Smollin’s work suddenly became kind of more interested. I followed Lee Smollin, Julian Barber and David Doris. These are three people who have influenced me quite a bit in my life. But I think recently I started thinking that Lee Smollin was kind of, I hate to put it like losing it with age. But then there are certain things that once I start thinking about those, it one day just clicked to me that maybe he might have the key to the problem of time.
[00:04:51] Blue: You seem to enjoy him quite a bit. You’ve mentioned him quite a bit. And he’s definitely a creative, interesting thinker, I have to admit, even though I’m not sure what I think of his actual theories. But it’s something to be interesting. Like even if you’re wrong on something, if you can be interesting about it, that’s something, you know, so.
[00:05:11] Red: Yes, I think that the way he thinks about it and how, and he’s also made a lot of that work approachable even to non -physicists. I mean, he’s got awesome books. And as a matter of fact, when I started my PhD, I was interested in pursuing string theory, because I was interested in something called the background. There’s this type of, you can say a problem of background independence. Don’t want to get into that. But it’s kind of related to this whole issue of what is time. And I thought at that time that the string theory would be an interesting approach, roughly halfway through my PhD. It was a combination of reading him. And then I also came across Leonard Susskin’s book about, I forget, cosmic landscape or something like that. I forget the name. But, you know, I kind of started losing interest. And I realized that is not what I wanted to do. And I kind of really find it hard to convince myself to stick to something like that. And then I kind of settled for actually new pure physics at that time. I just it’s kind of a more complicated thing. But I ended up settling for nuclear physics, which I wasn’t really that interested in and finished my PhD in that. And I left academia after that. But but the problem has been with me ever since then. And I’ve been thinking about it in my own time. So
[00:06:27] Blue: how would you describe the problem of time? I, you know, just as someone who’s a non -physicist, it never really occurred to me that there was a problem with time. And that’s something I only recently came to understand from reading Kiara’s book and talking with you about it. It’s not immediately obvious to a layman like myself that that there’s a problem there that needs to be solved. And I suspect that a lot of people, you know, if you’re not, if you’re just a layman, it’s probably never even occurred to you that our physics doesn’t handle time well. In fact, I would have thought the opposite because, like, I know that Einstein’s general theory of general relativity does encompass time as a fourth dimension. And so I would have thought, oh, that means it handles time well. And just that’s how I would have seen it. So I was interested in realizing that there actually is a mystery around this that has never been solved. Yes.
[00:07:23] Red: Yes. So my hope is, I mean, I could try to put it in, like, few sentences, but I don’t think that would do it justice. And hopefully today, I hope to, at least by the end of our discussion, convince you that there is at least a problem of time, you know, and maybe some possible solution to it as well.
[00:07:41] Blue: It’s Kiara described it as it’s kind of like it’s an atom, right? It’s it shows up in our physics, but there’s no explanation for it. We rely on it. It represents the different snapshots that take place in order in physics where something moves from here to there following its trajectory or whatever. But
[00:08:00] Red: I’m going to describe to you that is a slightly different problem of time. OK, there are two things here. And I think that’s where I want to start actually by talking about something called emergence, which I’m going to say that there is such a thing as emergence and there are phenomena with your novel. So I’m going to make that distinction for that very reason, even though the world, I do believe, is a unity. But but I think that there is a class of phenomena that can be described by this, the thing that the word emergence is going to capture it. And I’m going to for start by saying what I mean by emergence versus novelty. And then I’m going to be using those terms in that sense throughout our discussion. OK. All right. So shall we get started in getting trying to make sense of this problem? Yeah,
[00:08:47] Green: take it away.
[00:08:48] Red: All right. So the first thing I want to the first thing I want to talk about is emergence versus novelty. What I mean by that and I’m going to use these terms later on in that very sense because, you know, different people use this term in different ways. So when you’re when I’m talk about this, you have to go by by what I’m saying, emergence is right. Instead of saying, oh, what, what, you know, because there are different terms. Some people use weak versus strong emergence, but I’m going to stick to what I’m about to define it first. OK. So first of all, I want to highlight that reductionism, this view of science, which is called reductionism, and we kind of will understand that as we go along. I’m pretty much just going to say it outright. It really doesn’t stand a chance. It’s boring. And I think it’s about time we move beyond, you know, we move beyond just discussing whether the world is reductionistic or not, because it really doesn’t have much left to offer. There was a time when, you know, when, you know, in Newtonian era, when Newton was doing his physics, electricity and magnetism. Yes, you know, I could see it, you know, there being a point to it. But really, you know, the more you look at the world in general, just reductionism, this doesn’t do doesn’t really offer much. All right. So having said that, and I’m going to come back to this point as I go through this discussion. So the first thing I’m going to talk about is emergence.
[00:10:15] Red: OK, so emergence or what I’m going to call emergencies, there are aspects of the world which can be studied and manipulated by ignoring any type of generative process. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about what I mean, a generative process. And I think generative processes play a vital role in the presence in emergence. But but emergence is that aspect of the world, which we can pretty much just study without worrying about how they’re generated. So pure determinism has been pretty successful in science, right? Pure determinism has made decent progress in working with such features where we can study the evolution of the subsystems of the universe under immutable laws, which can be captured in the form of differential equations. And by evolution here, I don’t mean evolution is in variation and selection. I mean, like when a system evolves with time. And I’ll talk a little bit more about what I what we mean by immutable laws and physics. OK.
[00:11:24] Blue: Let me just clarify a couple of things. So when you talk about evolution of the system, you’re talking about how the system unfolds, given the laws of physics.
[00:11:33] Red: So and I mean, I can bring up that point now. I was going to later on mention it that, you know, so under deterministic laws, what we’re saying is if you think of the law of physics as some sort of a program, then you could set up a system and you could talk about the initial conditions of that system, the initial parameters that you set a system to. And think about it more in kind of like a way of running a computer program. So you input that into a program. The output could be like a prediction you made or something that the world and then we can check if the system actually does produce that final state that we get out. So so that’s what pure determinism is. And that’s what I mean by evolution here right now. But I’m going to later on use the word evolution in a different sense.
[00:12:20] Blue: And I know at the word, at least I believe I know what the word determinism is. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term pure determinism. Would that be as opposed to something that’s partially deterministic and partially stochastic?
[00:12:32] Red: Exactly. That’s why I that’s why I put the word pure determinism. I’m glad you asked. OK,
[00:12:37] Blue: stochastic stochastic meaning random.
[00:12:39] Red: Yeah. And the reason why I put that word in there is that because I have heard some crazy ideas, believe it or not, by recently, I came across this thing that John Wheeler, the famous John Wheeler, the physicist said it’s called law without the law, where he said that the world might at the most fundamental level be lawless and honesty. Sometimes you’re like, what could that even mean? Like, how could something totally lawless? And then David Doiches, you read a really good article and he changed his mind on that. You know, but but anyways, yes, so by pure determinism, like, you know, like, I mean that there might be certain things to the world which are purely stochastic.
[00:13:22] Blue: Yeah. OK.
[00:13:23] Red: But determinism plays a vital role, too.
[00:13:26] Blue: OK.
[00:13:26] Red: So and the part that where determinism plays the role is the part that I’m calling emergence.
[00:13:32] Blue: OK. Maybe you’re going to get to this. So if this is a bad question, I’m willing to save it for later. But the place that people usually try to insert stochasticity into everything in physics is quantum physics. And certainly from the point of view of an observer, there is a purely random element in quantum physics. But most Deutschians would point out they would sit because they believe in many worlds. They would say, well, it’s not actually random. It’s actually deterministic, too. It’s just that it’s it’s there’s a random element from the observer’s viewpoint, because it depends on what universe you actually end up in as that observer. Is that similar to what you have in mind or different than what you have in mind when you talk about purely random elements in physics?
[00:14:22] Red: So as of now, I’m kind of totally open to this. But I will say one thing that if it turns out to be a Deutschian sense versus a stochastic sense, where probabilities are truly an objective feature of the world, I think it’s going to have big implications for free will. I can just tell you that much right now. Creativity and free will, which I kind of look at is the same thing. So we’ll we’ll get into that. But, you know, and it doesn’t have to be stochasticity is like, for example, I don’t want to jump too ahead. But Kiara and Deutsch’s constructor theory, right? There, they talk about counterfactuals, right? So what I’m saying is in a way, I’m kind of saying that could it be that there are also certain things called counterpossibles and not just counterfactuals? I feel like that might be necessary for free will. Otherwise, we’re just going to have to settle for that, you know, free will as just being an emergent phenomena. Yeah,
[00:15:21] Blue: so just just to vocalize my view here, this is one of the things that Saudi and I have argued about quite a bit. I’m a compatible as what’s known as a compatibilist. So I believe free will is compatible. The type of free will I believe in is compatible with determinism. But there’s definitely a lot of people who feel uncomfortable with that position. I don’t feel uncomfortable with it. But I mean, like even Kiara in her book, she she talks about possibly trying to find new laws of physics using constructive theory as a way to understand free will better. So clearly she’s very bothered by the idea of compatibilism, too. And that was one of the reasons why that Saudi and I actually decided to talk about this episode is we’d been arguing back and forth about the compatibilist view of free will, which is what I buy into versus the idea that we would need some sort of new laws of physics to develop some new version of free will. Since right now, the laws of physics seem to only allow for the compatibilist version of free will.
[00:16:21] Red: Yes. And and that’s so what I would say is that emergence captures the aspect. There are certain aspects of creativity that can be captured, which which fall under this category of emergence. Oh, where, yeah, you know, determinism is at play. But I don’t think I’ve actually been a compatibilist for the longest time till recently, I’ve really started to become. I mean, my just to just to make it clear that I’m not trying to. It’s not that there is a wishful thinking that I wish the free really have the meaning that I’m about to say. My I guess my intuition and my motivation are coming from a very different place where I would like to solve certain problems in physics, but it seems like it has some interesting implications for free will as well.
[00:17:09] Blue: Yeah, no, that makes sense.
[00:17:11] Red: So you’re going to see that there’s going to be a running thread, whether we talk about life as I as I’m going to leave emergence behind and talk about novelty. Hopefully, you’re going to try to make this kind of a distance that there is some sort of, you know, first make this differentiation and how and what type of relevance it might have in solving problems. OK, so that that’s what I’m going to try to do.
[00:17:33] Unknown: OK.
[00:17:33] Red: OK, so so anyways, there is no, I mean, there’s definitely emergence in the world, right? But what I’m saying is that emergence is part of the world, but it is an approximate feature of the world where we can whereby we can work with subsystems or if you want to say sub aspects of the world and they get beautifully captured in what we call emergence where determinism works. And I think because of how successfully it has worked in physics, particularly, I think the physicists tend to be reductionist and they tend to lean toward that type of full determinism. And, you know, we even have a fully deterministic again, the Everett’s, the many world interpretation of quantum theory takes determinism seriously and kind of see an expression of that in there, too. And it’s actually as far as quantum theory right now stands, it’s out of all the different variants. It’s it’s the most successful one,
[00:18:35] Blue: I think. Yes, I agree. I agree. Right.
[00:18:38] Red: OK. So so the examples that I would give of the what I’m calling emergencies are things like when we, you know, when you study rocks, rock formation, stars, you know, how you get geology and how, you know, you look at how the the geology has evolved, the evolution and geology, the stars, how they wall, how how star systems are formed, galaxy, how the galactic clusters evolve, all this type of phenomena. We’ve had pretty good success in physics and astrophysics and studying those. OK. So those are all kind of which I would put in the category of emergent emergencies. OK. So we made tremendous success there. But but when you start going into the question, why are there features? Why are there rocks? Why are there stars? Why are there galaxies? And, you know, why is the universe interesting? Why is there life? Why is there consciousness? All these are, you know, all these are interesting features about the universe. It’s when you actually ask that how come all these things can be there in the universe? That’s where you start to see that the emergence fails. There’s this whole way of looking at badly fails. And I’ll show you in a minute how it badly fails. So so anyways, I think that studying emergent phenomena has given rise to an incorrect worldview, according to which the world is fully deterministic. And that kind of goes hand in hand with timelessness as well. And I’ll see that when you start to become kind of like a reductionist like that, it’s easy to buy into the view that the world is timeless at the most fundamental level. And that the what we call time, you
[00:20:21] Red: know, that there are there is an emergent aspect of time, but it’s not fundamental. And I’ll make that clear as well. What I mean by that. Can
[00:20:28] Blue: I actually attempt to explain how I understand that? And you can kind of correct me if I’ve got something wrong here. So what you say rings true to me, right, that as someone who comes from the viewpoint of the universe being fully deterministic, there is a sense in which that would that implies that the universe or the multiverse is timeless. Time would be something from an observer’s viewpoint. It’s not something fundamental to how the laws of physics work. It’s it’s more of a perception that we feel even like it’s probably easiest to explain this in terms of Einstein’s theory. Einstein simply made time another dimension. And then you would imagine different slices of time as you moved from one point of the dimension to the next. And if you’re someone who’s like dealt with arrays in computer programming, imagine a four dimensional array, you would have multiple slices of 3D worlds. That is actually how Einstein laid out his laws of physics in general relativity. And that means that time already exists. There’s there’s no past and future any different than a present. We may perceive a difference because of our observer’s viewpoint. But in some sense, past and future both already exist. Period end of story. Is that what you’re getting at when you talk about this? Because if that is about the
[00:21:54] Red: emergent aspect of time, yes, so there is such an emergent aspect. Yes, but but what I’m saying is that’s actually a very narrow view of what’s what’s there. And it just does not explain. I mean, I think the reality of time is needed to explain why the world is interesting. As a matter of fact, Einstein, I was actually going to mention that later on. But but I can mention it now. So Einstein, actually in a letter that he wrote to his friend. Bezos widowed wife, he he actually said this. He said that now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. This means nothing. People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn stubbornly persistent illusion. So even Einstein, you know, at the back of his mind was thinking that, you know, that that time is not a fundamental feature of reality.
[00:22:49] Blue: Right? That’s that is what I was trying to get at that because it already exists. And we simply perceive it, then in some sense, there is no time.
[00:22:59] Red: And that will take me actually, I’m going to talk a little bit about what is a clock? What are clocks and rods? What is space time as you know, or how far we’ve come a little bit in physics and understanding what our space time what we make of space time and physics in a little bit as well. Alright, so anything else before I go on or?
[00:23:18] Green: No, no, it’s awesome.
[00:23:21] Red: So so anyway, so so so what I’m so first of all, I do want to emphasize that one of the things that I would say which I would describe as a physicist intuition that I share with other physicists as well, is that we all believe in a fundamental unity and an underlying unity in reality, right? So so at some level, unity, there is a unity in the world, okay? But but there’s also variety in the world, right? So when we talk about emergencies, emergencies are real aspect of the world. They are this variety that exists in the world. But the where I this variety is connected in a unity that which we call the universe. Now, if you’re a mathematician, right? If you’re a physicist who is really mathematically minded, then you’re going to confuse this unity in the world with a mathematical unity. But I think I, you know, for the longest time, I actually took that seriously. But I kept coming back. There was something about it, where my maybe my physicist intuition just kept kicking in. I feel like there is a big difference between the unity in a physical world versus a mathematical world. And even if the world isn’t fully deterministic, there is still a unity. But it’s but hopefully I’ll make it clear as in what sense there is this unity that exists.
[00:24:40] Blue: Okay, I was actually about to ask that because I’m not sure I’m clear what you mean by this is right now.
[00:24:45] Red: I’m just throwing it at you. It might sound a little bit like some mystic sage saying something. I’m you can you know, yeah, I’m going to describe what I mean by that. So so first of all, there is variety in this world, right? All this emergence that we talk about is a variety. Things are identifiable. Identity is a real aspect of the world. And it is an important aspect of the world that makes it interesting. In other words, you know, you hear some mystic sage is saying all is one this and that. And that’s it. Now I’m just going to meditate and become one with everything. You know, I have a big problem with that because what makes the world interesting is its variety. And the variety is there is a certain autonomy that all these different aspects of reality have. And as I go along, I’m going to talk a little bit more about identity. And I’ll try to explain what how identity, space, locality, as well as non locality, they’re kind of in interrelated concepts. All right. And then time is kind of like that glue that brings a unity in the physical universe. But I think physicists are missing that part. Some physicists are starting to confuse the physical unity with mathematical unity, which has given rise to a timeless view of reality. Okay. And interestingly, here’s other thing too. I don’t want to get too sidetracked. But you know how you hear a lot of physicists, mathematicians talk about beauty, like a mathematician can talk about how beauty serves as a good heuristic when they’re trying to come up with things. The physicists describe that too.
[00:26:18] Red: And you know, it recently occurred to me that I think somewhere down the line, and there’s definitely, you know, when you’re a mathematician, there is there isn’t an understanding of what beauty means. But I think it’s it. But I feel like there is a big difference between what mathematical beauty is and what the beauty from the eye of a physicist is. I’ve heard more and more physicists talk about beauty in a mathematical sense. I think they’re confusing the two things. In mathematics, the beauty is more related with symmetries, like a more, you know, the more symmetry there is the more beautiful it is. And symmetry has been very powerful in modern physics. And I think a lot of physicists for that reason have started looking at as that as, you know, the beauty of the physical world, but it’s actually quite the opposite. I’m going to show you how the world is anything but symmetric. It’s actually that it’s asymmetry that that pretty much govern rules the world. And I think there is a beauty in that too, in that but that’s where I think the time plays a big part. So sorry if I got a little poetic here, but there is something there I think to beauty. But a physicist’s notion of beauty has to be differentiated from a mathematician. And I think we’re starting to mix those two up badly.
[00:27:34] Blue: Let me let me clarify. When you say a physicist’s notion of beauty, I mean, obviously, physicists are also in some sense mathematicians. But what is what you’re talking about physical beauty versus mathematical beauty? Is that what you’re really trying to differentiate here with physical beauty being often about asymmetry and mathematical beauty being about symmetry?
[00:27:54] Red: Yes. And the sad part is I think most physicists are not recognizing that this is something that I recently kind of recognized that that distinction needs to be made because pretty much any of any physicists that you’ll hear talk about beauty will always talk about something which is more to do with math, mathematics symmetry, because symmetry has been such a powerful thing in particle physics in, you know, in our theories it has been been a very powerful thing. I’ll talk about this in a little bit. But but but I think we’ve kind of confused because the world isn’t really about like our world is actually far from symmetric. Yes, there are underlying deterministic laws and when you study emergence, there is an aspect of reality under that, you know, what I’m calling emergence that you’re going to find symmetry. But I think it’s because mathematics has been such a useful, you know, thing to approximate those features. And I think somewhere down the line we’ve totally confused physical beauty with mathematical beauty. And we need to start looking into this a little bit more carefully.
[00:29:00] Blue: By the way, are you familiar with John Polkingworth?
[00:29:03] Red: Hmm, sounds familiar. But no, maybe if you mentioned it, I’ll remember. But
[00:29:06] Blue: he’s a physicist slash theologian who has written quite a bit about so obviously he’s looking at this from a largely theologians viewpoint, but he’s written quite a bit about how scientists, physicists in particular, try to determine if things are true or not based on the beauty that they see, they see there. And then of course, there’s a lady I suddenly can’t remember her name who wrote a book about how she feels that that’s the search for beauty in equations has misled physicists in her opinion. So two interesting viewpoints there that seem relevant to what you’re talking about.
[00:29:49] Red: Yeah, I feel like the whole thing about beauty is something that we’re also uncovering as we uncover the universe. It’s not like there is some sort of a transcendent thing where we have some sort of like some innate knowledge, like, you know, that we could somehow use as a heuristic. I guess what I what I the way I see beauty is that, you know, what we find beautiful. That’s that’s that is also something that we can be wrong about. So. But there is something there. There is definitely something there that why we find certain things more beautiful than others, but we can be wrong about that, too. We need to be open to that. There are in looking at something trans, you know, transcendent transcendent, right, that that we could use, which infallibly would lead us to something I’m not suggesting anything of that sort.
[00:30:40] Blue: OK, fair enough. I’ll buy that.
[00:30:43] Red: So so anyway, it’s going to that and actually the whole idea that I was talking about the unity and plurality. I think I would. I just somehow do want to just badly put Bono’s lyrics in there, one of my favorite U2 song one, where he actually says we are one, but we’re not the same. I often tell this to my husband, I’m like, you know what, you might think that I, you know, here and there, I do talk about this underlying beauty in the world, but we’re not the same like the beauty of the world is actually in its dial. But there is a unity in there as well, and the two aspects together is what makes it really beautiful. But but anyways, I think maybe as I go along, that is a little bit more of a skeptical thing that I’m talking about here. But but let’s get to a little bit more specific stuff, I guess. So so now I’m going to talk about novelty. So now I’ve given you an idea of emergence. Emergence is something that is kept captured by pure determinism. Novelty, on the other hand, has a generative element to it. And I think evolutionary processes are a big part of that. So when you look at evolution of life, it involves steps. The history is important. As a matter of fact, some of the things that I’ve recently come to realize has a lot to do with me having dived down a little bit into theoretical biology. And at first, it’s kind of weird when you start as being a physicist when you actually study theoretical biology.
[00:32:05] Red: It seems to talk in a weird type of a language, you know, like, you know, like, we’re all familiar with high school. You know, most of us have taken high school biology, biology about adaptations and stuff. But you start to start to speak in a language when you say certain things are adapted towards certain things. It seems like a lot of things tend to become more state dependent. Like, I don’t know how to capture it. I kind of wanted to get into this topic in more detail about what is life later on. But but it seems like the process of evolution. When I’m talking about novelty, I just want to clarify here that I do mean that there is a process of variation and selection involved. And in that process, history matters a lot. Like history is really important. Any questions on that? I don’t know if I’ve clarified what I mean. That makes sense.
[00:32:56] Blue: And you wouldn’t know this. But our last, you know, we took a couple of our latest episodes. We actually talked about this from the standpoint of machine learning, which is my area of interest. That a great number of the machine learning algorithms, but not all of them.
[00:33:15] Unknown: But
[00:33:15] Blue: but most of them have an evolutionary process of variation and selection that powers them. And so that’s how they come up with, you know, novel results is by doing that. So that’s it’s interesting that you bring that up. And it’s also interesting that I can show you what seemed to be exception cases. So it’s not clear yet if that’s the only way to generate novelty. That’s one of the things I would consider an open epistemological question based on machine learning at this point.
[00:33:45] Green: Interesting.
[00:33:46] Red: All right. So but but anyways, for now, at least I do recognize I feel like the evolution is a big aspect of this. What I’m what I’m calling novelty or generative is pretty much like the process matters. OK, well, which obviously means if I if I’m saying process matters and if I’m saying maybe we’ll go a little bit further to to see what I’m trying to say here. Because I feel like we already discussed this, that there are aspects of the world that cannot be captured, I feel, by strict determinism. I haven’t really fully explained that yet. And I also think that the universe. So first of all, this is a little bit more fatigues. I think that the universe is generative, which means it is becoming. OK, it isn’t just something that we’re just uncovering as if there was some timeless realm in which everything that could possibly happen is already there. And we’re uncovering it. But it’s actually there is a genuine becoming. It could have been one way, but it isn’t. It is some other way. So so see, that’s where I’m kind of trying to make the distinction between counter factual versus counter possibles. The future is all about possibilities. The past is no longer real. All that’s real is the present because we can affect present. We can affect our past. We don’t know anything about the future. So the future is open, which means that there are possibilities that are open. And I think that emergence lacks. Emergence simply just cannot explain the way the world is as I’ll go into my next little bit of segment. I’ll try to explain to you what why I think what deficiencies emergence has. But it’s it’s pretty. It’s been really successful.
[00:35:31] Red: And it is there. There’s much in the world that you can understand totally using emergence. OK, so so one of the aspects I’m going to give you an example which which I think is novel. OK, so now let’s talk about examples of novelty. I gave you the examples of emergence. I think life is novel. Now, when I say life, I’m not talking about any particular organism that you pick it up and you’re like that, you know, if I just want to study an organism, I can totally do that as some emergent feature of this world. I can use, you know, like I can pretty much study many things, even using chemistry, you know, and understanding of the biology. That’s all fine. But when I say life, I mean life as a phenomena. The whole thing where the unfolding this whole thing of the evolution of life as a phenomena, you could even think of that as a whole biosphere or whatever as life is a wall. I think that whole phenomena is novel and it just cannot be captured by emergence. So I think that neo -Darvinian theory of evolution doesn’t fully capture the phenomena of life. Now, when I say neo -Darvinian, what we’re specifically saying is that evolution happening at the gene replication level, right? But I’m also saying the novelty is evolution. I’m just saying that it’s not restricted to just gene evolution. I’m saying that there’s something else going on. In other words, I think life has been learning in other places too, other than just genes.
[00:37:01] Blue: So Cammy and I did an episode about this. I don’t know if you had a chance to say that. Yes, yes, I know. And that has been really interesting, you know, of a lot of interest to me as well, that worm that we’re right. Yes.
[00:37:13] Red: Yeah. So so anyways, the aspect that I’m saying is not captured by just studying, say, organisms or emergence, right? Is I think what is captured by something called a hard problem of life? I don’t know who originally came up with the idea, but Paul Davis and Sarah Walker has written an excellent there is an article that I can I don’t know if you have some place on your podcast. Maybe I could share the link to that where he explains the hard problem of life. And he’s not the only one who’s highlighted that there are aspects of which are related to a biogenesis. In other words, when life originated from basic in jumping from organic chemistry to replicators any overall in evolution of life, there are certain aspects that become very improbable within the current period of evolution that we have in Germany. In theory, or
[00:38:05] Blue: could I take a second to explain that maybe so to because I actually think that’s an important point.
[00:38:12] Red: Oh, I would love for you to go ahead.
[00:38:14] Blue: We were yeah. So once you have replicators, once you have life, the theory of evolution does a good job of explaining how it is that life can continue to maintain itself against what seems like a contradiction. It’s not a contradiction, but might seem like a contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. So how is it that life can, you know, some species get more complicated over time? How is it they can hold themselves in low entropy states when it should be that entropy is growing on a regular basis? So evolution does a good job of explaining that. It’s a good theory that because the not as good models die out, you end up with the ones that are able to do that. And so you end up with this kind of countertrend of low entropy. But how do you actually get to the point where that jump to having replicators takes place in the first place? The second law of thermodynamics seems to make that not possible. And there is there’s this question of how did, you know, non -living matter become replicators and then become what we would call living matter today in the first place, given that they’re they didn’t make you know, there wasn’t life there to turn it into something that would be an infinite regress to try to explain it that way. So how is it that it came up out in the first place? That’s my understanding of what the hard problem. Exactly,
[00:39:39] Red: because, you know, if you don’t have replicators, then you can’t have like what is the period of evolution about, right? You know, without a replicator and that jump would have would seem really improbable, unless if there was some other way that evolution my guess is that the evolution is working. See, I’m going to make the case that the theory of time is actually a theory of evolution. As you’ll see, I’m kind of not jumping ahead a little bit. But I think but but so it’s basically taking the theory of evolution and saying that that goes deeper than just life or knowledge. And actually that the theory of evolution gives us might be our only hope to explain why the world is interesting in general. And there are some other problems, deep problems in physics that may only be solved by taking a theory, some sort of a theory of evolution. And I’m not talking about evolution of life. I’m I’ll try to make that clear what I mean.
[00:40:39] Blue: So no, I but I get what you’re saying here. So to reference the machine learning episodes that we did, I’m making the case that evolutionary theory applies all over the place, that it has is not limited to life at all. And that’s what we call universal Darwinism. It’s the idea that there are knowledge creating creating processes that exist all throughout nature. And I think where you’re going with this, I don’t quite understand where you’re going with this, but I think where you’re going with this is that maybe the existence of replicators doesn’t need, you know, it needs an explanation. How do the replicators come to be? But that explanation might be that there were evolutionary processes that existed in physics to begin with, ones that we don’t really understand yet. And if that’s the case, maybe that’s where the replicators came from. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?
[00:41:29] Red: Yes, yes, that there are other selection variation, selection criteria in the late in nature, other than just the the replicators, the organic replicators, I mean. So yeah, so it goes deeper, I think.
[00:41:44] Green: OK. All right.
[00:41:46] Red: So and I’m going to come to that, like, I’m going to make a case for why I think we should take something like this seriously, at least as a, you know, as one of the ways to explain things. So another thing that I think is novel is creativity. I think creativity is also novel in the sense that it is an evolutionary process and it is capable of creating novelty. I don’t think there has to be any type of quantum mechanics involved in understand understanding novelty. I think as long as and you and I kind of had a little bit of a back and forth on Facebook about this too, and I am totally actually with you on that, as long as even if you have some pseudo random generation, you know, or yeah, I mean, it doesn’t have to have the probability doesn’t have to be the probably doesn’t have to be something fundamental to physics for for us to be able to have a GI. But at the same time, my main
[00:42:40] Blue: questions to so I’m glad you clarified that I’ve been having this discussion with several Deutschians and Poparians about pseudo random numbers versus random numbers. To the best of our knowledge, the two can be used more or less interchangeably. You sometimes get some advantages with true randomness over pseudo randomness because like in machine learning, it creates a little bit of a bias, but there’s no algorithm that we know of that requires true randomness over pseudo randomness.
[00:43:11] Red: And
[00:43:11] Blue: I totally agree.
[00:43:11] Red: And even in quantum physics, you know, when we were saying, I mean, yeah, there are processes like if you see a quantum processes happening, you know, you take into account all sorts of possibilities, but they’re not equally contributing. I mean, I guess what I’m trying to say is there are constraints on on what sort of things you know, a quantum system might possibly become. I mean, they’re not like strict constraints, but approximate constraints, but still, you know, it’s not that any time any type of a process is always working with some sort of a constrained landscape of possibilities, I guess. Yeah,
[00:43:52] Blue: let me take a second to explain pseudo randomness, because I kind of use we’re using that term, but not everyone’s going to know what that means. So think about like a computer, a computer is an entirely deterministic device. It has no randomness built into it. It’s intentionally built to not allow for randomness. That’s like the whole point of its existence is to try to remove the random aspects of physics and do, you know, that’s why they have an off on switch where it’s clearly the switch is off or on, sorry, not for the computer, but like for a bit for the memory in the computer is what I’m referring to. They use it through an electric charge where there’s either enough of a charge, you know for sure that one was intended or there’s a small enough charge, you know for sure that a zero is intended. And the randomness in charges, it never is close to the middle where you don’t know if it’s a zero or one and they intentionally build computers to try to avoid random effects. So then you think about like you’re playing a video game and you’re playing, let’s say an RPG and you’re fighting a monster and it’s randomly determining if you hit the monster or not based on in part on your skills or something like that. How does a computer that has no randomness, how does it mimic a random role of a die? Well, it can. Right. And we’re all familiar with that. You probably never really thought about the fact that that’s actually a contradiction. So the way they do it is they have something called pseudo randomness, which is an algorithm that creates numbers with an, you
[00:45:26] Blue: know, so let’s say you’re trying to create the numbers one to 10, it will evenly split between one and 10 and it will do so in a way that has no obvious pattern. Eventually a pattern will emerge, but it will be over a long enough period of time that a normal human wouldn’t be able to notice it. And they do and then they’ll like, they’ll have something where they call a seed and the seed determines what that distribution is going to be. And here’s the thing that people don’t realize. It’s entirely deterministic. If I give it the same seed, it will produce exactly the same supposedly random numbers in exactly the same order from start to finish. And it’s completely determined upfront what the result is going to be and they get around that by seeding it from, say, the time like the time you actually booted up your computer, it’s never going to be exactly the same time. So they they grab a little bit of a random element from real life and then they use that to seed the pseudo random numbers. And then from that point forward, for all intents and purposes, you’re going to perceive it as a random number that it’s generating because that there’s that initial randomness and then the distributions are made in such a way that they’re basically indistinguishable for humans from truly random numbers. If you were to look at them over a long period of time, you would start to see a pattern emerge that makes it look different than true randomness. But as far as we know, any algorithm that you can write that uses a random element, you can use a pseudo random element and it will still work.
[00:46:58] Blue: And so we don’t really know of any programs that require randomness. And so that’s why when they define the Turing machine, which is supposed to be the ideal computer, they don’t in theory, they could include like a randomizer and that you could build a Turing machine that has a randomized, they do that in real life, they’ll put a randomizer into the computers that are used in Las Vegas, let’s say. But they don’t actually include that in computational theory, because it’s perceived as being as not increasing the power of the computer power, meaning the types of algorithms that it can produce. So that’s kind of what pseudo randomness is. And so it’s entirely deterministic. And yet it has the perception of randomness, basically.
[00:47:41] Green: That somehow I have this conversation all the time with my teenager about Spotify listening to music on random. He always says, hey, it’s not random. I go back and play and hit random on the same playlist and it’ll play them in the same order. Which is I’m sure exactly what you’re talking about that that seed is the same that they don’t they really probably don’t care. But I also always point out to him that humans are not great at random anyway. We’re not even great at what it like our expectations for what random is are often incorrect. And we’re we’re not good at perceiving random.
[00:48:23] Blue: Yes, that’s true. And all sorts of experiments that prove that when humans are asked to like say, pick a random number between one and 10 and like do a bunch of those, it’s really easy to tell that a human did it instead of either a computer or a true random like role to die, because humans are not anywhere close to random.
[00:48:45] Red: And I think in this as far as I can tell, I can see that how in coming up with AGI, I don’t think that’s going to be an issue. But I’m still calling creativity novel and for one that I think that how creativity came about, that’s where the novelty plays. But there is another aspect of it. But I don’t think that’s going to be of relevance to AGI. I think that creativity, you know, creative beings such as us, we can perform experiments, we can do quantum experiments so we can tap into other types of randomness in nature. And then so what I’m thinking now, let me kind of give you a little bit of what I’m thinking about for you all now. All right, so I
[00:49:30] Blue: before you do that, can I tell a joke quickly? My wife and I, when we were young, we used to play rock, paper, scissors to determine who had to like say, change the diaper. And I always won. It was nowhere close to random. And in fact, cameo knows this too. I got a reputation at the place that cameo and I used to work as being very good at rock, paper, scissors, because I beat people so often at it. And it turns out that humans pick rock as the first as their opening move, way more than one third. So
[00:50:09] Green: all you have to do is your secret.
[00:50:11] Blue: Yeah, that’s all you have to do is pick paper as you first move, and you will win vastly disproportionate a number of times. But anyhow, so I just wanted to bring that up.
[00:50:24] Red: But but anyways, I don’t know what I’m thinking here is that and I don’t know, this is probably the most skeptical aspect of what I’m going to say here as to what why I think there might be something to free will, which is more novel than, let’s say, the people who are obviously saying that it’s emergent in the sense of being compatible with determinism. Well, I think that we are we might be or us or other creative beings like us are the only entities that could tinker with reality in the sense that we’re not only just playing at classical level with randomness, as in our brains, you know, when we are trying to. But we can actually now that we know about quantum theory and stuff, we can tinker with reality at a different level to and we’re already creating like we have created new laws. But all of those things maybe we could fully capture in, you know, aspect of that can be captured in a fully deterministic theory. But I think it seems like if you look at the humans like creativity as a phenomena again, not as just looking at one human in their lifetime and understanding why they do certain things. Why do I wake up every morning and want to have a cup of tea with my granola bar or something like that? I’m saying creativity, the evolution of creativity in general as it was at what evolution again, now I’m using it in the more the other sense of just how it, you know, what it does in the world with time.
[00:51:54] Red: It seems like we’re we come up with, you know, if you look at human history, we have made progress in economics, our laws that we the laws that govern the whether this the economic world, whether it’s politics, how we run our societies, they’ve all evolved and change. We’re not stuck. So so it seems like I guess the way best way to say it is be the state state of space of possibilities keep there isn’t an upper bound on it. It seems like we we’re able to create new constraints then come new problem. Then we can create new possibilities based on that and we can keep going forward. But where I think we will where we might be able to understand free will is that we can also do quantum theory, right? We discovered quantum theory. We can do quantum experiments. So maybe if there are aspects of nature that are truly random, like they’re not deterministic in the sense of the many world interpretation, then maybe the choices when we make would have such a strong causal effect on the world. This causal autonomy we have. Then we can fully proclaim that we’re part of that nature that can actually change the future evolution of the universe. I think the only way we could ever really make any sense of free will other than saying, I think, compatibilism. I’m not just I’m really I’m not satisfied with that. That’s just means determinism. I think the only way we could really say what free will is is if we could have and have a causal influence on the nature itself. In other words, what if in the future we could do experiments
[00:53:36] Red: which could maybe lead to the death of the universe or maybe we could prevent the death of the universe. So we could by by choosing the experiments we do by choosing how to tinker with nature through our experimentation and with science. But I think if if it’s fully deterministic as in the multi worse, then I really don’t think I mean, I really don’t think we can we can make ourselves feel happy. But yeah, it’s you know, if you’re if you’re going down the route of everywhere where we could have saved the universe and not save the universe and they all happened. Then I don’t know if I can call it free will. It’s fully deterministic. It’s emergent.
[00:54:15] Blue: Interesting. OK. So this is definitely something that you and I disagree over, but I’m going to I’m going to pass over this one for now. And I definitely understand that’s my
[00:54:23] Red: most skeptical view like I’m saying. I think I will ever
[00:54:27] Blue: concern over this. So I definitely understand people’s, you know, emotional concern over this. I think that this is very common for people to feel very uncomfortable with the idea of a deterministic free will.
[00:54:41] Red: I think and I know that you’ve you know, I’ve actually kind of looked into it. Stephen Wolfren’s definition of how most of the emergent phenomena is actually computationally, you know, irreducible. Even then, having looked at it somehow that just doesn’t really satisfy me. I think as long as reductionism is there, I don’t think there is any escape from that. We don’t, you know, I think we are. I mean, I guess you could say that saying that something is let’s go forward. I’m going to talk about this in a little bit more detail. OK, I think I’m going to try to I’m trying to squeeze in too much here.
[00:55:19] Blue: Let me let me just clarify one thing that you said, though, because it’s interesting. Stephen Wolfram, he his theory on this, he points out that determinism and predictability aren’t the same. So we we you might be tempted to think that if something’s deterministic, it’s predictable. And then you could imagine, well, because all my choices are predictable, I don’t really have free will. You might say that to yourself. Wolfram points out that that’s just a misunderstanding, right? That actually a deterministic process, the only way to find out for the vast majority of deterministic processes, the only way to find out what the result is, is by performing them. You have to actually do the computation to find out what the result will be. There’s a few exceptions. There’s like certain things in science, like, let’s say, the fact that the orbits around the sun are periodic. There’s a shortcut computation you can do where you can say, I want to know where the all the planets will be on some very specific date 2000 years into the future. And you can you can predict that in some meaningful sense, assuming that there’s not some sort of outside force that changes things. You could predict what those would be like, because that happens to be a computation that has a shortcut. But the vast majority of computations according to Wolfram have no shortcut. Therefore, the fact that it’s deterministic does not equate to being predictable and the two aren’t related. So that’s kind of the theory that she was referencing there.
[00:56:46] Red: But I guess where I just have this thing where I’m not satisfied is that, well, OK, so, you know, I’m thinking more from the the the many world’s interpretation, too, that, you know, OK, you can’t predict what I’m going to do next. But but, you know, the choices that I have, if I mean, I don’t know, maybe later on, we’re going to see stricter constraints on the many, many worlds. And it doesn’t happen that maybe we do have somehow more causal autonomy than we see right now. But if I’m going to go both ways of eating my dessert and not eating the dessert and both happen, then choice really is kind of emergent, in a sense, illusion, kind of like how time is looked at as an emergent property, but not fundamental. In other words, the choices are not fundamental. They are emergent, right? That’s what I think that that deterministic view leads to. And I think it’s just not satisfactory for me, then. I mean, I understand what you’re saying in that Wolfram’s viewpoint. It still doesn’t satisfy me. I think the only way where I will see that we have free will is if we truly have a causal autonomy to the point as if we are almost reflective, like we become almost like a little reflection of the universe itself. In other words, that universe has created new laws, universe is learning. And now to us is the next ways where it’s not just the next phase, universe is still learning, but we can actually affect what the universe might do next. We will have a say in it, too.
[00:58:22] Red: I think that’s the only if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, then, you know, I’ll still be a compatibilist and just it’s just not satisfactory as we will. Yeah. So
[00:58:32] Blue: I don’t want to I don’t want to derail where you’re going with this.
[00:58:36] Red: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that this is more of a skeptical place. But yeah,
[00:58:40] Blue: let me just say that there’s a there’s a weak form of that that I think is already true of the many worlds. I won’t go into describing exactly what I mean here. But I think you’re looking for a stronger form than what the many worlds interpretation of quantum, but there’s kind of this we because we are error correcting entities, we do affect what the probabilities of quantum physics are because
[00:59:07] Red: actually, I’ve kind of contemplated that too. And I’m also wondering that the direction in which I’m going into it might actually end up once we take time seriously as an evolutionary process. Again, I don’t want to get too off topic because it will hopefully eventually come like I’m thinking along those lines that the multi -worse the many world sorry eventually might be might turn out to be true. But but but what we’re going to see is a more constrained multi -worse when time becomes when we truly take time as a fundamental concept, we’re going to see a more constrained multi -worse. I’ve actually thought about that before that. You know, I used to wonder that OK, when the universe when the humans came about in the universe or entities like us were creative, does that put constraints on the many worlds? You know, I’ve really always thought about I think it does. I think it does in a week. I don’t think many worlds as it stands can can address it. But I think a true theory of time might be able to address it and many worlds might turn out to be an approximation to that.
[01:00:19] Blue: OK, OK.
[01:00:20] Red: And I also think in the same case, I know I’m jumping ahead, but I have a feeling constructive theory in that sense also might turn out to be an approximation. I
[01:00:28] Blue: don’t know.
[01:00:28] Red: But constructive theory is very much based on locality and so I don’t know. Again, I’m kind of thinking maybe non locality even might be one of the more fundamental aspects than locality. But I’m again jumping way ahead now. OK, OK,
[01:00:44] Blue: so what I was going to mention, Joe, just the weak aspect of many worlds where humans do affect the outcome is really the fact that the existence of universal explainers causes the many worlds to converge. And that’s something that David Deutsch does talk about in his books. But if you actually like work out just the way the process works, that is something that is just true of any time you have creative beings that the many worlds will start to converge because they want to hold the state of the world in in a fewer number of states than what would just naturally evolve out of quantum physics on its own absent intelligent beings. I don’t think that’s really what you’re getting at.
[01:01:29] Red: No, and I feel like my worry stems from a deeper problem in physics, which kind of makes me question actually the current quantum theory. So I’ll have to explain that to you. I can almost in a way, again, just dealing at an emergent level and not addressing those deeper problems. I could buy into that. But since now I know those deeper problems, I just cannot overlook that I think something different. I think that those constraints that maybe they’re in the many worlds will have to come from a deeper theory. I don’t think I just don’t think quantum theory might be might be. I may be wrong, but I think it’s it’s an approximation to a deeper theory. But anyways, let’s let’s move forward. So so other things that are emergent are clocks and rods are sometimes called clocks and rulers. I for some reason, I don’t know why we always use the term clocks and rods. I’ve heard that used quite a bit. But so clocks and rulers, which basically are references to time and space, some sort of measure, right? Clocks and rulers are emergent, but that that’s not that that’s all that that doesn’t capture time. That’s what I’m going to say there. The clocks and rulers are emergent, but time is a different beast. So when I’m thinking time now, I was actually kind of becoming convinced because I thought that some of our best theories are hinting at how clocks could emerge from them as well as rulers, how space and time are emergent. You’ll hear a lot of physicists talk about that. So I was starting to get in a very comfy place.
[01:03:06] Red: But then when I came across some of these deeper problems, it literally shook me down to the core. And I kind of started thinking again that no, there’s something missing. Maybe clocks and like talks and rulers can emerge. But when I’m saying time, the novel thing is a different beast altogether that I’m going to talk about. It’s something generative. It’s a generative aspect of the world which cannot be captured in any type of a static configuration of reality. So, so, so I wanted to kind of talk about, let me see what I elsewhere. So, so I guess what I’m what I’m capturing when I say novelty, I think it’s, I came, I don’t know, suddenly I not too long ago, it came to my mind a quote by somebody. And then I looked it up and I realized it was Mark Twain. It says time is what keeps everything from happening at once. I think that really kind of almost suddenly resonated at that time in my mind. I’m like, wow, it was almost like an epiphany. Again, the focus there is the history, the process. Novelty, when I’m talking about novelty, the history and the process matters a lot. And there is no other way. There are no shortcuts that you have to go through that. So, so I’m going to stop there now. I think I would like to go a little bit more into the problem of time. So I’m going to ask,
[01:04:34] Blue: yeah. We probably need to wrap up for this episode and then continue. Yeah, it
[01:04:38] Red: seemed like I was hoping that I could actually talk a little bit more about the whole emergence of time. But yeah, I don’t think we’ll be able to cover all.
[01:04:45] Blue: By the way, Doctor Who did an episode about that concept. Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. So they had an episode about where time broke. So everything was happening at once. So it was humorous. Yeah, it was humorous. You know what? It probably was based on that quote from Mark Twain. I didn’t occur to me at the time. I didn’t know that this was a Mark Twain quote. But funny now to realize that might have been the inspiration for the episode.
[01:05:15] Red: Interesting. I’ll have to look that up actually. I’ve never really, for some reason, I love sci -fi, but I’ve never really watched Doctor Who for some reason. I don’t know why, but I’ll try to find that episode now.
[01:05:26] Blue: Turn in your nerd card, you’re done.
[01:05:30] Red: So yeah, I do want to, so just to keep you, you know, some of you come back, I haven’t really given you the big kaboom here where the problem that lingers in my head is this problem of very special initial conditions of the universe that the apparent fine tuning of the universe needed to explain for a strictly deterministic, reductionistic theory to explain why the world is interesting. So I mean, I think we should make a differentiation between reductionism. I mean, you could be a determinist, but not necessarily a reductionist. But I think even then there are certain problems there because then you may ask yourself, okay, so there are laws of nature. If I’m not a reductionist, then in what shape or form do those laws exist? So now that the humans are here and there are those laws gone, okay, did they come out where the, you know, did the laws where the laws created or were they always there? I mean, where do they live? So I think I would like to kind of address those questions that I’m going to go to the question, what are actually laws of nature? And I’m going to show you that how the current way of looking at it, whether it’s pure, whether it’s just reductionism or whether it’s even a reductionist who’s, oh, sorry, let me go back again and say this again. Whether you’re a determinist who is not necessarily a reductionist or you’re a determinist who is a reductionist has to address this question because this whole thing of the dichotomy we make between laws of nature and a state on which it acts pretty much just breaks down. It has some fundamental flaws there.
[01:07:07] Red: When we try to apply it to a theory of cosmology like the universe as a whole. So I would like to kind of, that’s the meek of what I’m trying to discuss here that why are these laws and why initial conditions? If I could pretty much put it in a question right now which hopefully next time we can come into and talk about why, you know.
[01:07:30] Blue: Are you familiar with what Penrose has said about this because he actually points out the ridiculousness of the current way of thinking of things with initial conditions. So I don’t know if he’s been - Oh yeah, and
[01:07:42] Red: there are quite a few people who’ve talked about this and there are many physicists who recognize it but they somehow just say, well, okay, I guess we’re just gonna go back to doing what we’re doing. We can’t do anything about it. But I kind of consider myself as a useless physicist so I have the time and
[01:07:59] Blue: whatever to
[01:08:01] Red: think about this. That’s why I kind of left academia, I don’t care. I mean, I’m just gonna keep thinking about the things that are fun for me I don’t have to hold a job and keep publishing and keep my job in that way. So I can afford to, I can also put my reputation on the line if by venturing in two directions that other people might be scared to do, but anyway. So that makes sense. That’s what I enjoy doing. So that’s why I did physics and, you know.
[01:08:28] Blue: Well, Sadiq, we appreciate you coming on. You’ve injected a lot of interesting thoughts into the discussion. So we’re gonna be excited to have you back and to continue this. I suspect we’re gonna have at least three episodes here, maybe more that we invite you back.
[01:08:43] Red: Yeah, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed doing this and even preparing for it. It’s just that there’s just so much that goes into this that sometimes you just feel like you’re all over the place. Like right now my study table is full of books anywhere from like theoretical biology to, you know, quantum theory to general. It’s like, it’s all over the place. And sometimes I find myself going back and forth depending on, you know, what I’m thinking at that point. It’s tough, but there is a running thread to all of this that we need to pay attention to. And I think that points to the problem of time.
[01:09:17] Blue: All right. Well, thank you for coming on. Thank you, everybody.
[01:09:21] Red: All right, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. All right, bye -bye.
[01:09:33] Blue: The theory of anything podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player or you can Google the theory of anything podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system and giving us a five star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that. The first is via our podcast host site, Anker. Just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands, F -O -U -R -S -T -R -A -N -D -S. There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you wanna make a one time donation, go to our blog, which is four strands.org. There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you.
Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor. Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes; please verify against the actual podcast.