Episode 30: Unsolved Problems in Physics Part 1 — The Mystery of Time

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:06]  Bruce: 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.

[00:00:32]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast. We have a great episode today. We have a guest with us, Sadia.

[00:00:40]  Bruce: Hey, Sadia, how are you doing?

[00:00:41]  Sadia: Fine, thanks. How are you guys doing?

[00:00:43]  Bruce: Good, and we've got Cameo and Tracy also.

[00:00:46]  Unknown speaker: Hi, guys.

[00:00:47]  Bruce: Sadia is someone I've befriended. She's very active in Popperian forums, like on Facebook in particular, but on Twitter.

[00:00:56]  Bruce: And I call her and her husband the first couple, and maybe only a couple of Popperian philosophy. They're both into it a lot, and they're both a lot of fun to talk to. And she has a PhD in physics from the University of Kentucky, and very intelligent, and I really enjoyed talking with her.

[00:01:15]  Bruce: So we wanted to invite her to the show. And just to give a little background on this, I was reading Chiara Marletto's book about constructor theory, and she mentions in it the problem of time, and how it's difficult—it can't be solved in the conventional way of thinking of physics. And I had had several conversations with Sadia about the same subject.

[00:01:39]  Bruce: 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 should be an interesting addition to the show to talk to us about this.

[00:02:06]  Bruce: So Sadia, why don't you give us an introduction to the topic you've chosen here?

[00:02:12]  Sadia: 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. 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.

[00:02:42]  Sadia: I've been interested in time for a long time now. I mean, when I first took the general relativity course, I was introduced to general relativity. One of the things that Einstein did, Einstein talks in general relativity, it's all about events, and then time becomes relative.

[00:03:07]  Sadia: But I just felt like I left with a feeling that I still never—I felt like asking, you know, I kept asking this question: What is time? What is time?

[00:03:17]  Sadia: And 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 Barbour. That was a long time ago.

[00:03:32]  Sadia: And for the first time, I think somebody articulated that question for me that I recognized that, 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 Barbour. But there are certain things that just didn't add up.

[00:03:52]  Sadia: There was still something left out of that theory. 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.

[00:04:06]  Sadia: 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 Smolin's work suddenly became kind of more interested.

[00:04:28]  Sadia: I followed Lee Smolin, Julian Barbour, and David Deutsch. These are three people who have influenced me quite a bit in my life. But I think recently I started thinking that Lee Smolin was kind of, I hate to put it, like losing it with age.

[00:04:42]  Sadia: 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]  Bruce: You seem to enjoy him quite a bit. You 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.

[00:05:01]  Bruce: 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.

[00:05:10]  Sadia: 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 written 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.

[00:05:28]  Sadia: There is 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.

[00:05:38]  Sadia: 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 Susskind's book about, I forget, Cosmic Landscape or something like that.

[00:05:55]  Sadia: 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.

[00:06:06]  Sadia: And then I kind of settled for actually nuclear 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.

[00:06:20]  Sadia: And I left academia after that. But the problem has been with me ever since then. And now I've been thinking about it in my own time.

[00:06:27]  Bruce: So how would you describe the problem of time? I 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 Chiara's book and talking with you about it.

[00:06:43]  Bruce: It's not immediately obvious to a layman like myself that there's a problem there that needs to be solved. And I suspect that a lot of people, 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 I know that Einstein's theory of general relativity does encompass time as a fourth dimension.

[00:07:09]  Bruce: 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.

[00:07:22]  Sadia: Yes. Yeah. 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.

[00:07:29]  Sadia: 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. And maybe some possible solution to it as well.

[00:07:41]  Bruce: Chiara described it as, it's kind of like it's an atom [word unclear], right? It shows up in our physics, but there's no explanation for it. We rely on it.

[00:07:51]  Bruce: It represents the different snapshots that take place in order in physics where something moves from here to there, following its trajectory or whatever.

[00:07:59]  Unknown speaker: But

[00:08:00]  Sadia: I'm going to describe to you, that is a slightly different problem of time. Okay. There are two things here.

[00:08:05]  Sadia: 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 which are novel. So I'm going to make that distinction for that very reason. Even though the world, I do believe, is a unity, but I think that there is a class of phenomena that can be described by this thing that, the word emergence is going to capture it.

[00:08:29]  Sadia: And I'm going to first 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. All right.

[00:08:41]  Sadia: So shall we get started in getting—make sense of this problem?

[00:08:46]  Unknown speaker: Yeah, take it away.

[00:08:48]  Sadia: All right. So 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 different people use this term in different ways.

[00:09:02]  Sadia: So when I talk about this, you have to go by what I'm saying emergence is, right? Instead of saying, 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. Okay.

[00:09:21]  Sadia: So first of all, I want to highlight that reductionism, this view of science, which is called reductionism, and we'll understand that as we go along. I'm pretty much just going to say it outright. It really doesn't stand a chance.

[00:09:33]  Sadia: It's boring, and I think it's about time 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 in Newtonian era, when Newton was doing his physics, electricity and magnetism, yes, I could see there being a point to it, but really, the more you look at the world in general, just reductionism doesn't really offer much. All right.

[00:10:08]  Sadia: 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. So emergence are what I'm going to call emergences.

[00:10:18]  Sadia: 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 [wording unclear].

[00:10:39]  Sadia: 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.

[00:11:01]  Sadia: Under immutable laws which can be captured in the form of differential equations. And by evolution here, I don't mean evolution as in variation and selection. I mean like when a system evolves with time.

[00:11:17]  Sadia: And I'll talk a little bit more about what we mean by immutable laws in physics, okay?

[00:11:23]  Bruce: 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.

[00:11:32]  Sadia: 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.

[00:11:59]  Sadia: 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 that's what pure determinism is.

[00:12:14]  Sadia: 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]  Bruce: And I know what 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?

[00:12:31]  Sadia: Exactly. That's why I put the word pure determinism. I'm glad you asked.

[00:12:37]  Bruce: Stochastic meaning random.

[00:12:39]  Sadia: Yeah.

[00:12:39]  Sadia: 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 honestly, sometimes you're like, what could that even mean? How could something totally lawless?

[00:13:06]  Sadia: And then David Deutsch actually read a really good article and he changed his mind on that. But anyways, yeah, so by pure determinism, I mean that there might be certain things to the world which are purely stochastic. But determinism plays a vital role too.

[00:13:26]  Sadia: And the part that where determinism plays the role is the part that I'm calling emergence.

[00:13:33]  Bruce: 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.

[00:13:48]  Bruce: 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, because they believe in many worlds, they would say, well, it's not actually random. It's actually deterministic too.

[00:14:05]  Bruce: It's just that 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?

[00:14:21]  Sadia: 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 it as the same thing.

[00:14:45]  Sadia: So we'll get into that, and it doesn't have to be stochasticity. For example, I don't want to jump too ahead, but Chiara and Deutsch's Constructor Theory, right? There they talk about counterfactuals, right?

[00:15:02]  Sadia: 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, free will as just being an emergent phenomena.

[00:15:20]  Bruce: Yeah. So just to vocalize my view here, this is one of the things that Sadia and I have argued about quite a bit. I'm a compatibilist, what's known as a compatibilist.

[00:15:30]  Bruce: 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.

[00:15:41]  Bruce: I don't feel uncomfortable with it. But even Chiara in her book, she talks about possibly trying to find new laws of physics using constructor theory as a way to understand free will better. So clearly, she's very bothered by the idea of compatibilism too.

[00:15:59]  Bruce: That was one of the reasons why that Sadia and I actually decided to talk about this episode is we've 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]  Sadia: Yes. 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 fall under this category of emergence, where, yeah, you know, determinism is at play.

[00:16:36]  Sadia: But I don't think I've actually been a compatibilist for the longest time [wording unclear]. Until recently, I've really started to become, I mean, just to make it clear that I'm not trying to. It's not that there is a wishful thinking that I wish free will really have the meaning that I'm about to say.

[00:16:57]  Sadia: 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]  Bruce: Yeah, no, that makes sense.

[00:17:10]  Sadia: 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 going to try to make this kind of a [unclear word] 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. Okay, so that's what I'm going to try to do.

[00:17:34]  Sadia: 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, 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.

[00:18:13]  Sadia: And, you know, we even have a fully deterministic, again, the Everett's, the many-world interpretation of quantum theory, takes determinism seriously, and you 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 the most successful one, I think.

[00:18:36]  Bruce: Yes, I agree. I agree.

[00:18:38]  Sadia: Okay, so the examples that I would give of what I'm calling emergences are things like, you know, when you study rocks, rock formation, stars, you know, how you get geology and how, you know, you look at how the geology has evolved, the evolution in geology, the stars, how they evolve, 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. Okay, so those are all kind of which I would put in the category of emergence, emergence, okay, so we made tremendous success there. But when you start going into the question, why are there features?

[00:19:25]  Sadia: Why are there rocks? Why are there stars? Why are there galaxies?

[00:19:29]  Sadia: And, you know, why is the universe interesting? Why is there life? Why is there consciousness?

[00:19:34]  Sadia: 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.

[00:19:47]  Sadia: This whole way of looking at badly fails. And I'll show you in a minute how it badly fails. So anyways, I think that studying emergent phenomena has given rise to an incorrect worldview, according to which the world is fully deterministic.

[00:20:02]  Sadia: 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 what we call time, that there is an emergent aspect of time, but it's not fundamental.

[00:20:25]  Sadia: And I'll make that clear as well what I mean by the way to do.

[00:20:28]  Bruce: Can 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?

[00:20:38]  Bruce: That as someone who comes from the viewpoint of the universe being fully deterministic, there is a sense in which 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.

[00:20:58]  Bruce: 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.

[00:21:15]  Bruce: If you're someone who's 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.

[00:21:32]  Bruce: That means that time already exists. 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.

[00:21:47]  Bruce: Is that what you're getting at when you talk about this? Because if that is, then I definitely...

[00:21:53]  Sadia: About the emergent aspect of time. Yes, so there is such an emergent aspect, yes. But what I'm saying is that's actually a very narrow view of what's there.

[00:22:02]  Sadia: 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...

[00:22:11]  Sadia: I was actually going to mention that later on, but I can mention it now. So Einstein, actually in a letter that he wrote to his friend Besso's widowed wife, he actually said this. He said that, Now he has departed from the strange world a little ahead of me.

[00:22:30]  Sadia: This means nothing. People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. So even Einstein, at the back of his mind, was thinking that time is not a fundamental feature of reality.

[00:22:49]  Bruce: 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.

[00:22:58]  Sadia: 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 in physics in a little bit as well. All right. So anything else before I go on?

[00:23:19]  Unknown speaker: No, that's awesome.

[00:23:20]  Sadia: So anyway, so first of all, I do want to emphasize that one of the things that I would say, which I would describe it 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 at some level, unity, there is a unity in the world, okay?

[00:23:46]  Sadia: But there's also variety in the world, right? So when we talk about emergences, emergences are a real aspect of the world. They are this variety that exists in the world, but this variety is connected in a unity that we call the universe.

[00:24:00]  Sadia: 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.

[00:24:17]  Sadia: 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.

[00:24:35]  Sadia: But hopefully, I'll make it clear as in what sense there is this unity that exists.

[00:24:39]  Bruce: Okay, I was actually about to ask that because I'm not sure I'm clear what you mean by it.

[00:24:44]  Sadia: Yeah, this is right now. I'm just throwing it at you. It might sound a little bit like some mystic sage saying something.

[00:24:51]  Sadia: I'm going to describe what I mean by that. So first of all, there is variety in this world, right? All this emergence that we talk about is a variety.

[00:24:58]  Sadia: Things are identifiable. Identity is a real aspect of the world. And it is an important aspect of the world that makes it interesting.

[00:25:07]  Sadia: In other words, you hear some mystic sages 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.

[00:25:20]  Sadia: 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 how identity, space, locality, as well as non-locality, they are kind of interrelated concepts.

[00:25:42]  Sadia: And then time is kind of like that glue that brings the 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.

[00:26:00]  Sadia: And interestingly, here's the 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.

[00:26:17]  Sadia: 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 an understanding of what beauty means. But I think it's, 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.

[00:26:43]  Sadia: I think they're confusing the two things. In mathematics, the beauty is more related with symmetries, like the more, you know, the more symmetry there is, the more beautiful it is. And symmetry has been very powerful in modern physics.

[00:26:58]  Sadia: And I think a lot of physicists, for that reason, have started looking at 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.

[00:27:10]  Sadia: It's actually, it's asymmetry that pretty much 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.

[00:27:26]  Sadia: But a physicist's notion of beauty has to be differentiated from a mathematician's. And I think we're starting to mix those two up badly.

[00:27:34]  Bruce: Let me clarify. When you say a physicist's notion of beauty, I mean, obviously physicists are also in some sense mathematicians. But 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?

[00:27:53]  Sadia: 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 physicist that you'll hear talk about beauty will always talk about something which is more to do with math, mathematics, symmetry.

[00:28:12]  Sadia: Because symmetry has been such a powerful thing in particle physics, in our theories, it has been a very powerful thing. I'll talk about this in a little bit. But I think we've kind of confused because the world isn't really about like, our world is actually far from symmetric.

[00:28:33]  Sadia: Yes, there are underlying deterministic laws and when you study emergence, there is an aspect of reality under that, what I'm calling emergence that you're going to find symmetry. But I think it's because mathematics has been such a useful thing to approximate those features. And I think somewhere down the line, we've totally confused physical beauty with mathematical beauty.

[00:28:55]  Sadia: And we need to start looking into this a little bit more carefully.

[00:28:59]  Bruce: By the way, are you familiar with John Polkinghorne?

[00:29:03]  Sadia: Sounds familiar, but no, maybe if you mentioned it, I'll remember.

[00:29:06]  Bruce: He's a physicist slash theologian who has written quite a bit about. So obviously he's looking at this from a largely theologian's 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 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.

[00:29:44]  Bruce: So two interesting viewpoints there that seem relevant to what you're talking about.

[00:29:49]  Unknown speaker: Yeah,

[00:29:50]  Sadia: 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're, we have some sort of like some innate knowledge, like, you know, that we could somehow use as a heuristic. I guess what I, the way I see beauty is that, you know, what we find beautiful, that is also something that we can be wrong about.

[00:30:16]  Sadia: So, but there is something there. There's 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.

[00:30:28]  Sadia: We aren't looking at something, you know, transcendent, right? That we could use, which infallibly would lead us to something. I'm not suggesting anything of that sort.

[00:30:40]  Unknown speaker: Okay, fair enough.

[00:30:41]  Bruce: I'll buy that.

[00:30:43]  Sadia: So anyways, 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 are not the same. I often tell this to my husband.

[00:31:00]  Sadia: 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 diversity. But there is a unity in there as well.

[00:31:13]  Sadia: And the two aspects together is what makes it really beautiful. 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 let's get to a little bit more specific stuff, I guess.

[00:31:27]  Sadia: So now I'm going to talk about novelty. So now I've given you an idea of emergence. Emergence is something that is captured by pure determinism.

[00:31:36]  Sadia: 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.

[00:31:49]  Sadia: 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, 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 speak in a language when you say certain things are adapted towards certain things.

[00:32:21]  Sadia: 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 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.

[00:32:49]  Sadia: Like, history is really important. Any questions on that? I don't know if I've clarified what I mean.

[00:32:55]  Bruce: Well, that makes sense, and you wouldn't know this, but our last, you know, 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, but most of them have an evolutionary process of variation and selection that powers them. And so that's how they come up with novel results, is by doing that. So it's interesting that you bring that up.

[00:33:29]  Bruce: And it's also interesting that I can show you what seem 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]  Sadia: Interesting. All right. So but anyways, for now, at least I do recognize, I feel like the evolution is a big aspect of this.

[00:33:53]  Sadia: What I'm calling novelty or generative is pretty much like the process matters. Okay. Which obviously means if I'm saying process matters and if I'm saying, maybe we'll go a little bit further to see what I'm trying to say here.

[00:34:10]  Sadia: Because I feel like we've 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 of a thesis.

[00:34:25]  Sadia: I think that the universe is generative, which means it is becoming. Okay. 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.

[00:34:39]  Sadia: 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.

[00:34:46]  Sadia: So see, that's where I'm kind of trying to make the distinction between counterfactuals versus counterpossibles. The future is all about possibilities. The past is no longer real.

[00:34:58]  Sadia: All that's real is the present because we can affect present. We can affect our past [wording unclear]. We don't know anything about the future.

[00:35:08]  Sadia: So the future is open, which means that there are possibilities that are open. And I think that 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 why I think what deficiencies emergence has.

[00:35:27]  Sadia: But it's been really successful, and there's much in the world that you can understand totally using emergence. Okay, so one of the aspects I'm going to give you an example, which I think is novel. Okay, so now let's talk about examples of novelty.

[00:35:46]  Sadia: 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.

[00:35:56]  Sadia: 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.

[00:36:12]  Sadia: 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 the whole biosphere or whatever as life has evolved. I think that whole phenomena is novel, and it just cannot be captured by emergence.

[00:36:33]  Sadia: So I think that Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution doesn't fully capture the phenomena of life. Now, when I say Neo-Darwinian, what we're specifically saying is that evolution happening at the gene replication level, right? But I'm also saying the novelty is evolution.

[00:36:50]  Sadia: I'm just saying that it's not restricted to just gene evolution. I'm saying that there is something else going on. In other words, I think life has been learning in other places, too, other than just genes.

[00:37:01]  Bruce: So, Cameo and I did an episode about this. I don't know if you had a chance to...

[00:37:04]  Sadia: 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 [unclear], right?

[00:37:11]  Unknown speaker: Yes, yes.

[00:37:13]  Sadia: 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 the hard problem of life. I don't know who originally came up with the idea, but Paul Davies and Sara Walker has written an excellent... There is an article that I can...

[00:37:35]  Sadia: 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 abiogenesis, in other words, when life originated from basic...

[00:37:51]  Sadia: In jumping from organic chemistry to replicators, and overall in evolution of life, there are certain aspects that become very improbable within the current theory of evolution that we have, in neo-Darwinian theory.

[00:38:04]  Bruce: Could I take a second to explain that, maybe? Because I actually think that's an important point.

[00:38:11]  Sadia: Oh, I would love for you to. Go ahead.

[00:38:14]  Bruce: 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?

[00:38:40]  Bruce: 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.

[00:38:57]  Bruce: And so you end up with this kind of counter trend 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.

[00:39:15]  Bruce: And there's this question of how did nonliving matter become replicators and then become what we would call living matter today in the first place, given that 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 about in the first place? That's my understanding of what the hard problem of life is.

[00:39:39]  Sadia: Exactly, because if you don't have replicators, then you can't have like, what is the theory of evolution about, right? You know, without a replicator. And that jump would seem really improbable, unless if there was some other way that evolution would...

[00:39:57]  Sadia: 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 now jumping ahead a little bit.

[00:40:08]  Sadia: But I think... 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...

[00:40:21]  Sadia: It 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.

[00:40:36]  Sadia: I'll try to make that clear, what I mean.

[00:40:38]  Bruce: So no, 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's not limited to life at all. And that's what we call universal Darwinism.

[00:40:56]  Bruce: It's the idea that there are knowledge 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?

[00:41:15]  Bruce: 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?

[00:41:28]  Sadia: Yes, yes. There are other selection, variation selection criteria in nature other than just the replicators, the organic replicators, I mean. So, yeah.

[00:41:42]  Sadia: So it goes deeper, I think. All right. 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 one of the ways to explain things.

[00:41:56]  Sadia: 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 understanding novelty.

[00:42:12]  Sadia: 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'm totally actually with you on that, as long as even if you have some pseudo-random generation, you know, yeah, I mean, it doesn't have to have, the probability doesn't have to be, the probability doesn't have to be something fundamental to physics for us to be able to have AGI.

[00:42:38]  Unknown speaker: But at the same time,

[00:42:39]  Bruce: That would be one of my main questions too, so I'm glad you clarified that. I've been having this discussion with several Deutschians and Popperians about pseudo-random numbers versus random numbers. To the best of our knowledge, the two can be used more or less interchangeably.

[00:42:55]  Bruce: 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.

[00:43:10]  Unknown speaker: I totally agree.

[00:43:11]  Sadia: And even in quantum physics, you know, when we're saying, I mean, yeah, there are processes, like if you see 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 what sort of things, you know, a quantum system might possibly become.

[00:43:35]  Sadia: I mean, they're not like strict constraints, but approximate constraints. But still, you know, it's not at any time, any type of a process is always working with some sort of a constraint landscape of possibilities, I guess.

[00:43:51]  Bruce: Yeah, 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.

[00:44:05]  Bruce: 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.

[00:44:22]  Bruce: 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 a 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.

[00:44:42]  Bruce: And they intentionally build computers to try to avoid random effects. So then you think about like you're playing a video game, 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 roll of a die?

[00:45:10]  Bruce: 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.

[00:45:16]  Bruce: So the way they do it is they have something called pseudo-randomness, which is an algorithm that creates numbers with an, you know, so let's say you're trying to create the numbers 1 to 10, it will evenly split between 1 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 what they call a seed, and the seed determines what that distribution is going to be.

[00:45:51]  Bruce: 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 up front what the result's 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.

[00:46:18]  Bruce: So 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 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.

[00:46:43]  Bruce: If you were to look at them over a long enough 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. And so we don't really know of any programs that require randomness.

[00:47:02]  Bruce: And so that's why when they define the Turing machine, which is supposed to be the ideal computer, in theory, they could include like a randomizer, and you could build a Turing machine that has a randomizer. They do that in real life. They'll put a randomizer into the computers that are used in Las Vegas, let's say.

[00:47:19]  Bruce: But they don't actually include that in computational theory because it's perceived 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.

[00:47:35]  Bruce: And so it's entirely deterministic, and yet it has the perception of randomness, basically.

[00:47:41]  Cameo: 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 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.

[00:47:59]  Cameo: That seed is the same. They really probably don't care. But I also always point out to him that humans are not great at random anyway.

[00:48:11]  Cameo: We're not even great at what it... Like, our expectations for what random is are often incorrect. And we're not good at perceiving random.

[00:48:22]  Bruce: Yes, that's true. We've done all sorts of experiments that prove that when humans are asked to, like, say, pick a random number between 1 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, roll the die, because humans are not yet anywhere close to random.

[00:48:45]  Sadia: 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.

[00:49:08]  Sadia: 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 free will now. All right, so I think-

[00:49:29]  Bruce: But before you do that, can I tell a joke quickly?

[00:49:31]  Unknown speaker: Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.

[00:49:32]  Bruce: 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.

[00:49:44]  Bruce: 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.

[00:49:59]  Bruce: And it turns out that humans pick.

[00:50:02]  Bruce: Rock as their opening move way more than one third. So all you have to do is pick paper as your first move, and you will win vastly disproportionate a number of times. But anyhow, so I just wanted to bring that up.

[00:50:25]  Sadia: 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 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 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 when we're trying to, but we can actually, now that we know about quantum theory and stuff, we can tinker with reality at a different level too. And we're already creating, like we have created new laws, but all of those things maybe we could fully capture in, aspects of that can be captured in a fully deterministic theory.

[00:51:24]  Sadia: 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, 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.

[00:51:53]  Sadia: It seems like we come up with, you know, if you look at human history, we have made progress in economics. Our laws, the laws that govern, whether it's the economic world, whether it's politics, how we run our societies, they've all evolved and changed. We're not stuck.

[00:52:12]  Sadia: So it seems like, I guess, the best way to say it is with the state space of possibilities, there isn't an upper bound on it. It seems like we are 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 might be able to understand free will is that we can also do quantum theory, right?

[00:52:42]  Sadia: We've 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 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.

[00:53:11]  Sadia: I think the only way we could ever really make any sense of free will, other than saying, I think, compatibilism, I really am not satisfied with that. That just means determinism. I think the only way we could really say what free will is, is if we could have a causal influence on the nature itself.

[00:53:31]  Sadia: In other words, what if in the future we could do experiments which could maybe lead to the death of the universe, or maybe we could prevent the death of the universe. So by choosing the experiments we do, by choosing how to tinker with nature through our experimentation and with science. But I think if it's fully deterministic as in the multiverse, then I really don't think, I mean, I really don't think.

[00:53:59]  Sadia: We can make ourselves feel happy, but yeah, if we're going down the route of every way where we could have saved the universe and not saved 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.

[00:54:14]  Bruce: Interesting. Okay. So this is definitely something that you and I disagree over, but I'm going to pass over this one for now.

[00:54:21]  Bruce: And I definitely understand.

[00:54:22]  Sadia: And that's my most skeptical view, like [unclear].

[00:54:25]  Bruce: I definitely understand people's concern over this.

[00:54:29]  Unknown speaker: Sorry?

[00:54:29]  Bruce: I definitely understand people's emotional concern over this.

[00:54:33]  Bruce: I think that this is very common for people to feel very uncomfortable with the idea of a deterministic free will.

[00:54:41]  Sadia: I think, and I know that you've... I've actually kind of looked into it. Stephen Wolfram's definition of how most of the emergent phenomena is actually computationally irreducible.

[00:54:53]  Sadia: 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... I think we are...

[00:55:08]  Sadia: 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.

[00:55:15]  Sadia: I think I'm going to try to... I'm trying to squeeze in too much here.

[00:55:19]  Bruce: Let me just clarify one thing that you said, though, because it's interesting. Stephen Wolfram, his theory on this, he points out that determinism and predictability aren't the same. So you might be tempted to think that if something is deterministic, it's predictable.

[00:55:35]  Bruce: 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?

[00:55:46]  Bruce: 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.

[00:56:02]  Bruce: 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 all the planets will be on some very specific date, 2000 years into the future. And you can predict that in some meaningful sense, assuming that there's not some sort of outside force that changes things.

[00:56:27]  Bruce: 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.

[00:56:43]  Bruce: So that's kind of the theory that she was referencing there.

[00:56:45]  Sadia: But I guess where I just have this thing where I'm not satisfied is that, well, okay, so I'm thinking more from the many-worlds interpretation, too, that, okay, you can't predict what I'm going to do next, but the choices that I have, I mean, I don't know, maybe later on, we're going to see stricter constraints on the many-worlds, and it doesn't happen that maybe we do have somehow more causal autonomy than we see right now. 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.

[00:57:36]  Sadia: They are emergent, right? That's what I think that deterministic view leads to. And I think it's just not satisfactory for me.

[00:57:46]  Sadia: 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.

[00:58:04]  Sadia: In other words, that the universe has created new laws, the universe is learning, and now through us is the next phase where it's not just the next phase, the universe is still learning, but we can actually affect what the universe might do next. We will have a say in it too. I think that's the only, if that doesn't turn out to be the case, then I'll still be a compatibilist, and it's just not satisfactory as free will.

[00:58:31]  Bruce: Yeah, so I don't want to derail where you're going with this.

[00:58:35]  Sadia: Yeah, yeah. And like I said, this is more of the skeptical place.

[00:58:39]  Bruce: But let me just say that 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 physics allows.

[00:58:55]  Bruce: But there's kind of this weak form because we are error correcting entities, we do affect what the probabilities of quantum physics are.

[00:59:06]  Sadia: 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 multiverse, the many worlds, sorry, eventually might turn out to be true. But what we're going to see is a more constrained multiverse when time becomes, when we truly take time as a fundamental concept, we're going to see a more constrained multiverse.

[00:59:49]  Sadia: I've actually thought about that before that, I used to wonder that, okay, 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 that. I think it does, I think it does.

[01:00:06]  Bruce: In a weak form.

[01:00:07]  Sadia: I don't think many worlds as it stands 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. And I also think in the same case, I know I'm jumping ahead, but I have a feeling constructor theory in that sense also might turn out to be an approximation. I don't know, but constructor theory is very much based on locality.

[01:00:31]  Sadia: 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.

[01:00:43]  Bruce: What I was going to mention [unclear word], 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 anytime you have creative beings, that the many worlds will start to converge because they want to hold the state of the world in a fewer number of states than what would just naturally evolve out of quantum physics on its own absent intelligent beings.

[01:01:26]  Bruce: I don't think that's really what you're getting at.

[01:01:28]  Sadia: 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.

[01:01:48]  Sadia: But since now I know those deeper problems, I just cannot overlook that. I think something different. I think that those constraints that may be there in the many worlds will have to come from a deeper theory.

[01:02:01]  Sadia: I don't think, I just don't think quantum theory might be, I may be wrong, but I think it's an approximation to a deeper theory. But anyways, let's move forward. So other things that are emergent are clocks and rods, or sometimes called clocks and rulers.

[01:02:20]  Sadia: For some reason, I don't know why we always use the term clocks and rods. I've heard that used quite a bit. So clocks and rulers, which basically are references to time and space, some sort of measure, right?

[01:02:33]  Sadia: Clocks and rulers are emergent. But that doesn't capture time. That's what I'm going to say.

[01:02:42]  Sadia: 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.

[01:03:02]  Sadia: So I was starting to get in a very comfy place. 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 rulers can emerge, but when I'm saying time, the novel thing is a different beast altogether that I'm going to talk about.

[01:03:23]  Sadia: 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 I wanted to kind of talk about...

[01:03:37]  Sadia: Let me see what else I... I guess what I'm capturing when I say novelty, I think it's... I came...

[01:03:48]  Sadia: I don't know, suddenly, 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.

[01:04:06]  Sadia: 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.

[01:04:21]  Sadia: And there is no other way. There are no shortcuts. You have to go through that.

[01:04:27]  Sadia: 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]  Bruce: We probably need to wrap up for this episode and then continue.

[01:04:37]  Sadia: Yeah, it 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 of it.

[01:04:45]  Bruce: 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.

[01:04:56]  Bruce: So everything was happening at once. So it's humorous. Yeah, it was humorous.

[01:05:01]  Bruce: You know, it probably was based on that quote from Mark Twain. It didn't occur to me at the time. I didn't know that this was a Mark Twain quote.

[01:05:09]  Bruce: But it's funny now to realize that might have been the inspiration for the episode.

[01:05:15]  Sadia: 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.

[01:05:22]  Sadia: I don't know why. But I'll try to find that episode now.

[01:05:26]  Bruce: Turn in your nerd card. You're done.

[01:05:30]  Sadia: 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. The apparent fine-tuning of the universe needed to explain for a strictly deterministic, reductionistic theory to explain why the world is interesting.

[01:05:57]  Sadia: 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.

[01:06:08]  Sadia: 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, right? So now that the humans are here and those laws govern, okay, did they come out?

[01:06:22]  Sadia: Were the laws created? Or were they always there? I mean, where do they live?

[01:06:28]  Sadia: So I think I would like to kind of address those questions. I'm going to go to the question, what are actually laws of nature? And I'm going to show you how the current way of looking at it, whether it's just reductionism, or whether it's even a reductionist who's...

[01:06:46]  Sadia: Sorry, let me go back again and say this again. Whether you're a determinist who's 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.

[01:07:04]  Sadia: It has some fundamental flaws there. 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 meat of what I'm trying to discuss here.

[01:07:18]  Sadia: That why 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.

[01:07:30]  Bruce: 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 you know.

[01:07:42]  Sadia: And there are quite a few people who have talked about this, and there are many physicists who recognize it, but they somehow just say, well, okay, I guess we're just going to 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 whatever to think about this.

[01:08:02]  Sadia: That's why I kind of left academia. I mean, I'm just going to keep thinking about the things that are fun for me. You know, I don't have to hold a job and keep publishing and keep my job in that way.

[01:08:12]  Sadia: So I can afford to. I can also put my reputation on the line by venturing into directions that other people might be scared to do. But anyway, that's what I enjoy doing.

[01:08:23]  Sadia: So that's why I did physics.

[01:08:28]  Bruce: Well, Sadia, we appreciate you coming on. You've injected a lot of interesting thoughts into the discussion. So we're going to be excited to have you back and to continue this.

[01:08:38]  Bruce: I suspect we're going to have at least three episodes here, maybe more.

[01:08:43]  Sadia: 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…

[01:09:00]  Sadia: 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.

[01:09:07]  Unknown speaker: It's tough,

[01:09:08]  Sadia: 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]  Bruce: All right. Well, thank you for coming on. Thank you, everybody.

[01:09:21]  Sadia: All right. Thanks.

[01:09:22]  Unknown speaker: Thank you.

[01:09:23]  Unknown speaker: Thank you.

[01:09:25]  Unknown speaker: Bye bye. Bye.

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