Episode 32: Unsolved Problems in Physics Part 3 - Symmetry and Novelty
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Transcript
[00:00:10] Blue: Welcome back to the theory of anything podcast. I’m meeting with Saudi again and we’re continuing our discussion about physics and the mystery of time. How’s it going, Saudi?
[00:00:19] Red: Fine. Thank you, Bruce. How are you doing?
[00:00:21] Blue: Good. So we’ve had a lot of interesting discussions so far. We’re going to get into some conclusions now.
[00:00:28] Red: Yes, we’re really going to dive into what I call the hard problem of time and interestingly since I started doing this podcast with you. I’ve heard more and more people talk about this. So people are paying attention to this problem. I think in the physics community as well as people who are working on life, like understanding what is life, you know, they’re actually paying attention. So, you know, so I was kind of excited to see and sometimes you’re like the same sort of ideas you’re coming up with and you see people thinking along the same lines and you’re like,
[00:01:01] Blue: Hmm,
[00:01:01] Red: okay, you know, it’s kind of interesting. So, yeah, let’s dive down. I want to start with a game with the physics aspect of it and then we’re going to talk a little bit about life as well. Hopefully, I hope you’ll have enough time to get into that as well. All right, so
[00:01:16] Blue: last time I introduced you to, you know, I relationalism in physics. This philosophy was pretty much as far as I know I mean, I’m sure these people weren’t the first one but it’s associated with the philosophical Leibniz. And mock also pushed towards more and more of a relational view but Leibniz is pretty much, you know, the name Leibniz, Leibniz pretty much stands out. And then people who really took it seriously, I think it would be worth mentioning their names. It’s the Julian Barber, Lee Smolin, and Carlo Rovelli. So they pushed quite a bit towards a relational view and like I said, when I was a grad student I was really kind of fascinated by this idea of the role that background of space and time plays in a theory. And because personally I felt like there shouldn’t be some sort of a background and I knew that in Newton’s theory Newton took an absolute background of space and time. That kind of got me interested in string theory as well actually because I was pretty much interested in this idea of background independence. So in other words, I was thinking along the lines of relationalism, which kind of brought me into this and then I read Smolin Barber and, you know, kind of set me off in that particular direction. So, last time I kind of talked more about how clocks might emerge, right, dynamical theories, but the same can be said about space. It’s not just time but space or one can say space time can emerge out of a theory.
[00:02:55] Red: So that’s what the relationalists are kind of, the space -time relationalists are pushing towards that, that there shouldn’t really be any background structures, you know, of space -time. They should be part of our theory and not just that, the push is also that it should be part of the dynamics, so it should be dynamical in the sense that, you know, it shouldn’t be rigid, it should be part of the theory, it should evolve with the theory. So, so that’s where, you know, it has to be dynamical as well. Now, interestingly, and you might have heard me sometimes, maybe I don’t know you haven’t paid attention or, I’ve been kind of interested a little bit in non -locality as well, and I kind of want to just quickly mention why that’s been the case, because obviously when you look at the people who are into the many worlds interpretation, it’s a pretty much local theory,
[00:03:47] Blue: right? Yes. So
[00:03:49] Red: where I’m coming from, and I don’t know if how familiar they all are, but anyways, where I’m coming from is from a relational point of view, and what I’m about to present that, why we should take time as a serious concept. So the thing is, the emergence of space -time is what gives meaning to locality, okay, in special and general activity.
[00:04:14] Blue: Okay, that makes sense. So
[00:04:16] Red: if they are emergent, and if that’s all there was to space -time, if they were just emergent and part of the theory, then yeah, sure, locality, that’s it, we’ve got everything we need, and now we build up the, build our buildings on top of that, right? But as I’m about to present to you, I think the problem, the hard problem of time is really has pushed, at least, and I’ll present why I think we need to take this hard problem of time seriously. And then that makes you question that, okay, if that’s not our starting point, if our starting point isn’t just the emergence of space -time with our current dynamical theories, then what are we looking at? So let’s get into the hard problem of time, and as I’ll show you, I think what we really need is an evolutionary theory of the universe. This is just an overview of what I’m about to talk about. An evolutionary theory of the universe where the universe is actually a novelty generating, like when we talk about universe, this is one of the key features of the universe is that it’s a novelty generator. For that, we will need a notion of a global time, okay, and going back a little bit to Barber’s reformulation of general relativity from last time. Barber’s reformulation of general relativity has actually revealed a privileged kind of like a frame where, imagine if there were like observers scattered throughout the universe, there would be a privileged class of observers where you can give a
[00:05:50] Unknown: sense of
[00:05:50] Red: simultaneity, an absolute sense, but it’s relational. It’s not an absolute space. I
[00:05:57] Blue: remember you talking about this last time, yeah.
[00:05:59] Red: So then the question is, how is that even possible? Because the way we do physics right now, we were always talking about in general relativity, local inertial frames. You basically take the local inertial frames and you kind of put them together to get the bigger picture, right? Right. So here we’re talking about something global here. So there, that’s where you start to wonder because you feel like non -locality at a certain level should play a part. And the other thing is that we cannot, even though we’re saying here that according to Barber’s theory and formulation, if there is something to it, that so how do those clocks, right? How do they remain synchronized if there is this global notion of time? So the non -locality might be a feature at some aspect of the world to give a global, to have this type of a global notion of time, we might actually require this type of a non -locality. It might have to be a feature of the world.
[00:07:02] Blue: So let me, let’s talk about non -locality just for a second. And I don’t know that this is quite what you’re getting at. My initial impression of the idea of non -locality is my first thought that comes to my mind is, oh, wow, that’s very supernatural, right? It seems so kind of out there. On the other hand, I guess if the laws of physics said non -locality existed, then they exist, right? And I suppose that’s where you’re coming at this from, is that if that is necessary to solve some sort of problem in physics and that forces us into a theory of physics that is non -local, then it clearly isn’t supernatural at that point. It’s just the laws of physics at that point. So there’s kind of this first level, it feels kind of supernatural. And then there’s kind of a second level, though, like I understand enough of Einstein’s general relativity that the idea of non -locality doesn’t make sense to me from a physics standpoint, because I understand that there is no simultaneously between things that are at a distance and it depends on your speed. And there’s a number of factors there that seem like they make non -locality problematic. For one thing, like if you could travel faster than the speed of light, according to Einstein’s physics, you would arrive before you left. So you would literally be traveling backward in time under general relativity. And again, that seems like it almost eliminates any possibility of non -locality. But then again, you’re talking about maybe future physics that undermine Einstein’s physics at some point. So I can’t really argue with that.
[00:08:41] Blue: Kind of just thoughts on that, just from where you’re going with this versus kind of my initial maybe negative impression of non -locality.
[00:08:49] Red: Yeah, and I’m not even sure where this is going to lead us to. But like you said that if that is what’s required for the future progress of science, right, then we ought to, you know, like, we aren’t just doing that just because this concept just tickles our fancy for whatever reason. It’s really about whatever works really. That’s pretty much the principle I stick to whatever works. And then again, we’re not saying that there aren’t going to be rules and constraints on what we call classical objects. So we may not be able to travel faster than the speed of light. We don’t know, right? I mean, as far as, again, we’re saying that, you know, from what I’m thinking here is that locality as well as non -locality might be emerging features of the world. But there are certain layers of reality where the locality will still be the law of the land. And then there are other features of the world which we’re non -locality is doing its stuff. And that might be the place where the global notion of time emerges. And I will talk about this later, but in a minute as we go through it in understanding, in saying that the world is a novelty creator, there is stuff that has really, really pushed me to evaluate how deterministic the world really is. I’m having really tough time understanding where the novelty creeps into the world. But to get into that, let’s wait till I explain to you why I’m thinking along those lines and what’s in my chain of thought.
[00:10:21] Red: Because I was pretty much all sold on locality, many worlds interpretation and, you know, stuff like that, but I have recently kind of reevaluated and hopefully that’ll be clear why I’m kind of thinking, looking in other places now. So first of all, even in relationalism, I would first say that there are some people who might, you know, one could say that there is a type of relationalist, which is a more purist type of relationalism, whereby you think that all of physics could be done in a purely relational way. But and then there is another impure where I kind of lean towards the impure relationalism after having thought about it quite a bit, where I feel like that even though we may be able to remove the background structures such as space and time and make it part of the theory, but we will still need to assume some intrinsic properties which we add axiomatically. In other words, you can just say that all the physics could just be done purely in somewhat purely relational way. Like as we progress in science, there will always be some intrinsic properties that you have to, you know, assume and which may not be explained relationally. And it is possible that as we progress the ones we assumed intrinsic might turn out to be relational as well, but we have to kind of, you know, So, so I, I’m kind of starting to lean, I lean, you know, I used to lean more towards the relational purist type, which is what I had in mind, but I’m starting to lean more I’m thinking about impure relationalism. So,
[00:11:54] Blue: okay.
[00:11:55] Red: All right. So now let’s dive into the hard problem of time. All right. So, so as we discussed before that the fundamental laws of physics are time symmetric invariant, right. That means that there really isn’t any arrow of time they really don’t care about past or future any of that, right. We arrive at those things as we experienced the world but it isn’t all just experiential. There are actually objective other arrows, other asymmetries of the world that actually point to which I would call the arrows of time. All right. And we need to take them seriously. It isn’t just about our experience. It is some there’s something else going on here that we need to pay attention to. But the fundamental laws really do not give us any arrow. All right, they don’t, they could care less if the world started just going, you know, backwards if you run the video backwards a little bit more complicated you have to reverse the arrows of motion momentum, but but they don’t really care. Okay, whatever you put in as the input data, they’ll give you an output but they don’t they’re not going to say that output is the future or the past, right, they don’t care.
[00:13:05] Blue: So one question on this though, is that still true for quantum physics upon an observation.
[00:13:13] Red: So interestingly actually last night when I was going in and out of consciousness I was because I actually noticed that Sean Carroll did an interview with David Wallace, who was a philosopher who’s one of the most like he’s my probably one of my favorite living philosophers of science. Who is an Everettine. They kind of talked about it and even there the sense you get is that okay even if you have the many worlds it seems like there is an asymmetry but but it’s still pretty much based on time symmetric and marine, you know,
[00:13:47] Blue: Okay, that’s true. If you’re looking across the many worlds, then yes, they’re quantum physics is symmetrical. But if you’re looking
[00:13:56] Red: improbable that that the that the different branches may come together again right. Yeah, but but it’s still like, you know, improbability doesn’t mean that you know there is some. Okay, so we still need to explain this asymmetry. So arrow of time basically when I say arrow of time it’s basically an asymmetry in the evolution that we in the evolution of various processes that we see. Okay, nature seems to select so when we solve our equations of motion. You know we get different solutions and some solutions in some equations you will have a solution that represents what we might recognize as moving forward in time the other, maybe somewhat of a reverse process by seems like nature is selecting out certain solutions and ignoring the others. And that’s where so we need to understand where that asymmetry is coming from and I’ll talk about the various arrows in a minute. Okay, so let’s let’s identify these so called arrows of time, which highlight the hard problem of time. The first one is the experiential era of time. We all remember the past right but we don’t have any access to the future. You know so our memories are always of the past. So there is an asymmetry at least in our experience that we should we need to explain that. Okay, might sound trivial but I think I don’t think it is it’s really we need to think about this thing. There’s also you mean
[00:15:20] Blue: you don’t remember your future like me. Nope. I’m different. All right, sorry, continue.
[00:15:30] Red: No, that’s okay.
[00:15:31] Blue: That’s okay.
[00:15:32] Red: Yeah, that would be an interesting one if somebody comes up. Supposedly Nostradamus might have remembered something. This question that I am
[00:15:40] Blue: really not interested in.
[00:15:43] Red: Anyway, so then there’s the electromagnetic era of time. So anytime we look at an object like when we look at the sun right we’re looking at the sun has appeared eight minutes ago. So light always moves from the past into the future that’s how I’m putting that. Okay, so light entering our eyes only gives us the glimpses of the past but never the future. Right. I mean even if it might be milliseconds for the objects that are right, but it’s always the past and not the future. So, so even if you have a charge that’s accelerating, you always see, you know, accelerating charges emit electromagnetic waves in the radio part of the spectrum but the thing is that you always see the wave spreading out of a charge. We never see the waves going into the charge which could again be looked upon as a solution, another solution based, you know, laws of physics. Okay, so then there is another arrow, the cosmological arrow of time. Universe is expanding and not contracting. Okay, so that’s another arrow. Then there’s also gravitational arrow of time which is kind of similar to the electromagnetic except that it applies to gravitational waves. So if you see two neutron stars colliding or some really catastrophic event that generates gravitational waves, you always see those coming to us from the past, right? Right. Kind of like the electromagnetic waves. But never, you don’t see any gravitational waves going into an event and then the event which you’re seeing as an explosion starts to, you know, the two neutron stars that have collided start to uncollide, we don’t see that. And then there’s also a black hole arrow of time.
[00:17:30] Red: White holes, by the way, there are these objects that are solutions, time or worse, solutions of general relativity that are predicted by general relativity. But we don’t see white holes, we only see black holes. White holes are these objects where anything could literally just come out of a white hole. And I really don’t know that much about white holes, I’ll be honest. I haven’t really explored them that much, even though it sounds kind of fascinating. Like
[00:17:52] Blue: literally anything, like, you know, a goldfish and just
[00:17:56] Red: coming out and you’re looking at it and yeah, they could surprise me. So yeah, that kind of doesn’t even make sense. I don’t know what to make of white holes, but anyways, we only ever see black holes, right, in the universe. And not just that, I mean, as far as we can tell the black holes came much later in the history of the universe. I mean, maybe there were a micro black holes. I know that I think, I forget that I think that there were some theories, particularly maybe string theory that certain particles might be able to collide and create black holes too, but anyways, I’m not going to get into that. This is just taking us off topic, but we see black holes much later. The type of black holes that are formed at the center of the galaxies are from supermassive stars in their later as they
[00:18:48] Blue: evolve.
[00:18:49] Red: All right, so now we get to the really interesting one because I want to talk a little bit about this the thermodynamic arrow.
[00:18:55] Blue: That’s the one I’m the most. I hadn’t actually heard of these other asymmetry. This is the one that I knew about. So
[00:19:01] Red: before we get into this and all sorts of other interesting things related to that I want to point out that there are other types of asymmetries that we observe in the universe too that require an explanation that based on purely time symmetric laws might seem problematic. So there is the matter anti matter asymmetry. I mean, we haven’t really found any super symmetric particles which I think was supposed to solve this problem. But basically, we look around us and obviously the universe, you know, we see a lot of matter, making up stuff. There is also anti matter, but seems like so basically if you think about the Big Bang then obviously there must have been more matter than anti matter. Otherwise, it would all have annihilated unless if there was some other process that separated it but but there is a matter anti matter asymmetry that we need to.
[00:19:52] Blue: The issue here being that matter and anti matter when they they meet they turn into energy. And so the fact that we have very little anti matter and a whole lot of matter means that there, there could have been way more matter and anti matter sometime in the past and they’ve eliminated themselves since then so what we seem to be left with as a net positive of matter.
[00:20:11] Red: Exactly. Yeah. So we really don’t know what happened right we need to understand that. And then there are also these processes. There’s something called spontaneous symmetry breaking that I don’t want to get into but it seems like there are certain theories which have an overall symmetry but have some solutions where there’s an asymmetry and seems like as the solution rather than another, and we call this spontaneous symmetry breaking in some cases I really haven’t been able to make sense of what breaks this, this symmetry. It’s just something that literally it’s kind of like the collapse of a wave function type thing that suddenly, you know, like over time you know the theory settles for a certain vacuum or, you know, and so we have that thing in physics which, which always intrigued me like I couldn’t make as much as the collapse of the wave function intrigued me. So I don’t know if the many worlds will offer any, anything there, but we’ll see. Okay. Okay, so, so those are some of the asymmetries now let’s get into the thermodynamic era of time. Right. So the thermodynamic that’s related to the entropy. So the entropy whenever you have an isolated subsystem of a universe. So if you have an isolated subsystem of the universe where matter or energy cannot flow in or out of that system. And if you leave it to naturally evolve, then either that the entropy of that system will go up where it kind of reaches some sort of a maximal value or it will stay there. I won’t change if it’s in the thermal equilibrium. So, so that’s basically the second law of thermodynamics.
[00:21:58] Red: So the entropy of isolated subsystems of the universe will either increase to some sort of a maximal value the maximal value being where it’s in thermal equilibrium. So entropy a little bit about entropy it’s an emerging concept, which in statistical versus the classical we’re just going to focus on the statistical thermodynamics it’s based on a comparison between. We kind of think about it sounds kind of almost subjective but it doesn’t have to be I think it’s fine, but it’s you’re basically comparing macro state a particular macro stage so for example you may have a gas at a certain pressure temperature and has with certain density. And you asked yourself because the gas is made up of some molecules or Adam, and you asked yourself how many different possible configurations and here I’m talking a little bit more. It’s not just the configuration in terms of position we’re also talking about which direction they’re moving so momentum is part of that too. So you’re saying that how, how many different possible macro microstates lead to the exact same macro state and when you compare it to some other. That kind of that’s how we kind of calculate that’s how we calculate entropy so so a macro state which corresponds to more microstates would have a higher entropy.
[00:23:19] Blue: So I don’t think I quite got that see if you can explain that a bit a bit further the microstates. Oh, so I’m familiar with the idea that microstates it’s unclear what entropy even means.
[00:23:30] Red: Exactly. So it’s a it’s an emergent process where you have to compare micro versus macro state, you’re, you know, people really physicists will talk about fine greening and core core screen but but you’re looking at different levels right. You’re at one level you’re looking at things like pressure temperature and density which we talk about saying classical thermodynamics, and you’re trying to relate it to what’s happening at the atomic or molecular level. Right. So then you’re asking yourself so for example. So what I’m trying to say is that, let’s say you have a gas and thermal equilibrium. Right. So all these molecules are bouncing into each other and moving in all sorts of random directions, because there is that much randomness you know the, you can imagine all sorts of positions of the different atoms and moving in different random directions which would correspond to the same pressure temperature and density.
[00:24:25] Blue: Sure.
[00:24:26] Red: But if you have a gas where there’s a small region where there may be a region like let’s say you have a gas in a jar and somehow, you know, because of the way we initially set it up. There is a region in there which is at a lower density or maybe really cold region compared to the rest. Then there will be fewer microstates that correspond to that thing. So it will have a lower entropy.
[00:24:51] Blue: Oh, I’ve always wondered about that that makes sense though. So yes. So there’s a lot more that at the point of maximal entropy, there are many states that could make it up, but they would be indistinguishable from another because they’d all have the same pressure that I’ll have the same temperature.
[00:25:08] Red: Exactly. So there is a kind of like what we say a degeneracy there, right? So there is one state corresponding to multiple different microstates, one macrostate. And not just that, whenever, so before something reaches, you know, the thermal equilibrium or the maximal entropy, basically we can talk about the flow of heat, flow of energy, right? There is a flow of energy. Once something reaches thermal equilibrium, it’s almost as if the whole concept of heat just falls apart. It’s like, you know, it’s only meaningful when we’re talking about there’s flow of energy and stuff. So then the thing becomes boring. Once you’re in thermal equilibrium, nothing interesting is happening. Okay, maybe, you know, just a random molecular motion. So here I’m sticking to just more of the molecular level. I’m not going to go into.
[00:25:54] Blue: And that’s the same as heat death, right?
[00:25:56] Red: Exactly. It’s interesting that the heat death, you know, it sounds as if, you know, something, we’re just going to super, you know, heat up or whatever, but it really, it’s the death of heat basically is what the heat death is.
[00:26:09] Unknown: Right.
[00:26:10] Blue: Temperatures and now temperature becomes a meaningless concept. And for that matter, time becomes a meaningless concept.
[00:26:16] Red: Exactly. Yes. So, so as a matter of fact, so if we look at the current paradigm, what we’re really going towards based on second law thermodynamics and time symmetric laws is where we’re going towards if the entropy keeps increasing eventually we’re just going to be timeless. Right.
[00:26:33] Unknown: Well,
[00:26:33] Red: or there is going
[00:26:34] Unknown: to
[00:26:34] Red: be no time there will be no clocks. Right. It seems strange that time would be defined by clocks.
[00:26:43] Blue: And that’s something that I mean I’ve read that multiple times now. But if you’re just a layman listening to this show that may not seem obvious at all that why time would be defined by clocks themselves rather than clocks are measuring it.
[00:26:57] Red: You bring up an interesting point and sometimes I feel your layman have a better intuition than most physicists because things and we put them in boxes and then we proclaim that everything in the universe is supposed to be like, you know, followed by these. But a layman is going to tell me that look are you trying to tell me like I’m experiencing these things I don’t see you know, there are these asymmetric things that we’re I’m experiencing right. So but if you give them this view that I have given to you of how clocks emerge and what is the clock. Most of the people will think we’re crazy. But sometimes you know a layman’s intuition is better.
[00:27:40] Blue: So what we could probably say here though is that physicists choose to define time in terms of clocks because that makes it a meaningful physical concept to them. And therefore heat death, you can’t even build a clock in principle. Therefore there’s no time would be probably the simplest way I’ve at least heard it explained by physicists trying to talk to layman I don’t know how accurate that is mathematically but.
[00:28:05] Red: And I think we should also be cautious that sometimes because it’s only getting something meaningful it’s being defined meaningfully in physics doesn’t mean that we ditch any other like I mean I understand that you know like. We should stick to or you know there is something to be said about our best explanations, but then we shouldn’t lose sight of what we can’t explain. And what sort of suggestions are we getting at least, and at least have that mindset right I think sometimes you become a little too religious about our worldview and then somehow just, you know proclaimed that that’s how you know, just just projected to the universe. Oh, this is how the universe is.
[00:28:47] Blue: Yeah. Well, you’re talking about physicists and, you know, I don’t know I’m not a physicist. But if you spend any time around philosophers people who have actually studied philosophy like in school, they are almost guaranteed to be dumber than a layman on. They’re so difficult to talk
[00:29:06] Red: to sometimes like it’s like, you feel like beyond a certain point you can’t even make progress because they, they have such narrow lens through which they view things. That’s right. Then they did anything that just doesn’t make sense through their lens as meaningless almost. Yes,
[00:29:26] Blue: and they’re incredibly hard to talk to even about really simple things. And it’s not because they’re making good points.
[00:29:34] Red: Not to get too sidetracked by recently I had this discussion with somebody who was a physicist about morality, right and wrong. And after about an hour of discussion we kept nudging that defined to me what is morality what is right and wrong. And I kept talking to him about those things and he what he really I don’t even know what he was looking for. And I’m like, you know, part of me is like what are you not getting like do you want me to give you specific examples of what is right and wrong. I’m trying to give you a general idea what morality is about. You can’t even do, you know, science without some ethical type of a commitment without some moral commitment to truth and integrity. So, you know, but anyways, I don’t get too sidetracked by it’s kind of those type of things are just so counterproductive that people get too stuck in just defining everything to the point that you just things just disappear out of existence. Yeah,
[00:30:34] Blue: that’s actually why Popper was so strongly against trying to worry about defining your terms. Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:41] Red: All right, so, so anyways, going back to all the the arrows we’ve talked about the existence of these arrows and these asymmetries require an explanation. And a timeless picture based on these times symmetric and varying laws simply just doesn’t explain these right. So the current paradigm that we’re in. You know, when when they look at this thing. And they look at all these asymmetries. It’s pretty puzzling there right that how does that come about so the best we’ve done so far is what David Albert, the philosopher David Albert called the past hypothesis. I don’t want to trivialize it too much but the basic idea is this that. Okay, so obviously we see that there are asymmetries in the world, but if all our laws are time symmetric invariant. Then I guess there must have been some very special asymmetric initial condition at the big bang that gave rise to all this asymmetry. Not just that the thing that boggles my mind is right, we are seeing it isn’t just that there are asymmetries, there are levels of explanation, right, there are levels there are law like behaviors and consistent things that you can see at the level level of human phenomena at the level of life. There are these different levels, and the reason was didn’t have to be this way, the universe didn’t have to make sense of having any law like phenomena at the level of humans at the level of life or whatever. It could have just been the laws of physics. So to me it seems like not only is there this asymmetric initial condition it has to be really fine tuned in the way to give rise to these layers of
[00:32:24] Red: where there’s law like behavior, like there are these things that we can call laws laws of economics laws, you know when we study you know political science or you know all sorts of things that we do there there is some, you know we’re working and the sad part is there are many people will just say oh well that’s just a human construct but even if it’s a human construct why is it that there are certain things that lead to certain outcomes whereas others lead to quite different ones such as you know a progressive society where we’re making progress we’re coming up with all sorts of new things and other society where they might just destroy each other and just you know have a violent death or something like that. So we can’t ignore these things we are part of the universe and we require an explanation for ourselves. And we have to tie it in to this problem.
[00:33:15] Blue: Yeah, no. Can I do an aside here for a second Roger Penrose in his books he points out that the big bang the past hypothesis but going back in time. It must have been that there was one point of singularity based on our current understanding of cosmology that’s where the whole idea of the big bang comes from, but he points out that the universe is in a very improbable state in terms of entropy that the universe started off in an incredibly low entropy state is still in an incredibly low entropy state.
[00:33:53] Red: We’re actually going to talk about this in a minute. Okay,
[00:33:55] Blue: okay. Anyhow, I’ll wait till you bring it up, but I found that really fascinating. I had never even occurred to me before reading Penrose that that is the case that the universe happens to be in a really low entropy state.
[00:34:07] Red: That’s one of the great things Penrose has done I think he’s really pointed this out and now physicists are starting to pay attention. So, so first going back to this whole idea, hopefully by now from our last episode you might have gotten an appreciation that you know how when we start when we think about things evolving under static laws that type of a dichotomy that we’re making that here’s the system here the laws that you know go in the behavior is a little bit artificial it’s something that we do all that’s really happening is that there are systems and they’re evolving. Right. But in some cases they are systems where their evolution can be understood in terms of static laws like that don’t change over time. Right. But that’s not the case everywhere as I’ll kind of talk about this in but but the physics deals with those type of systems with that where we’ve been able to do that where we’ve been able to study systems where you can kind of make that dichotomy. And then the other thing is a little bit about symmetries, right. So all these symmetries we’re talking about the time asymmetry symmetries only makes sense symmetry seems to be one of the things that has been almost like a driving force for a lot of progress in physics over the last hundred or so years. When you look at a high energy particle physics they’re looking for more and more symmetry more and more unifications in our understanding of the world. So, but the thing that most people don’t realize you have to think a little bit more cosmologically right symmetries actually only make sense for the subsystems of the universe.
[00:35:49] Red: And let me explain to you what I mean by that they seem to lose meaning for the universe as a whole. So, for example, if I symmetries are very much related to what we call or the conservation laws we have like the law of conservation of energy momentum angular momentum, they’re very much related to this idea of symmetry. So let me just quickly explain that so if you have a small system. And you assume that there is some sort of background of space, and you take that system maybe you have an experimental setup, assuming that experimental setup is isolated from the rest of the world so there aren’t any outs acting on it. If you take that system and put it, you know, a little bit to the left or right, or, you know, in other words, you’re translating in into space you’re moving it around in space, that should not affect the results of your experiment. So this is to do with homogeneity of space, like, and obviously the emphasis is it’s an isolated system so I’m not saying like if you take the system somewhere where gravity is stronger than obviously you’re going to see some, you know, effects of gravity, I’m saying isolated so in other words, we’re just assuming that we’re moving it around in a background space. Alright, so for that symmetry and that leads to the law of conservation of momentum. So the law of conservation of momentum is basically an expression of that that there is the space is homogeneous. Law of conservation of energy actually follows from an invariance in under translational translations in time.
[00:37:22] Red: So time is homogeneous, but again to make sense of the symmetry you’re kind of assuming like a background time in which you’re translating. So, and then there’s also the conservation of angular momentum which is to do with isotropy of space which means that there isn’t a privileged direction in space. So your experiments shouldn’t really deter, you know, so the directionality shouldn’t make any difference. So all of these symmetries do assume they only make sense when you talk about the subsystems isolated subsystems of this of the universe, and no system is perfectly isolated but still we can make sense of it. Now, let’s, let’s talk about the universe as a whole. I mean, I don’t even know if that’s something that we should be doing but we should try to extend this picture and say okay, if you talk about the universe as a whole, the universe is supposed to be the totality of everything that exists. We were not assuming again being a relationalist. We’re not assuming any outside absolute or whatever type of space time, right. Then that that whole concept of symmetry starts to become meaningless for the whole universe. So, but interestingly this whole idea of symmetry has been one of the biggest driving forces in physics. That should tell us something that should tell us the type of lens that we’ve been looking at the world through and then when we take that view and we try to extend it to the whole universe and try to make some statements about the universe. We’re bound to miss something out there and if you look at the universe around us we know we’re missing out something there are asymmetries in the world.
[00:38:55] Red: So again going back to this whole idea of laws of nature right as we discussed last time these laws of nature are kind of like, you know, these differential equations. So if you do an experiment and you have some sort of an initial setup, you look at that as some initial conditions, you put that into the law, you know, the differential equation. Which could be written as a program. So take the initial conditions put it in a program and then you get some sort of an output that corresponds to some other state. So the output is logically implied by the input plus the program. Right.
[00:39:32] Blue: Yes,
[00:39:32] Red: this has led to kind of like that whole view if you want to think about it even to the universe, you know, the whole computational you know to view the the universe as kind of like computational. Yes,
[00:39:44] Blue: and is related to the concept of computational universality.
[00:39:49] Red: Yes, exactly, exactly. But as we’ve noticed that there is so much outside of like these time symmetric laws, which are just, you know, and we’re also assuming that they’re they remain the same throughout, you know, like they don’t change over time. So if that was the case, yes, then this would be a really nice picture and, you know, and then we just keep working on this, but there are these asymmetries of the world that are pushing us to understand like pushing us like, you know, we want to understand these. So in this current framework, it seems to me that there isn’t really that much wiggle room it’s strictly so when I say something is strictly deterministic this is how I’m from the business viewpoint. So, now, that’s your laws of physics. There are principles as we discussed like the, you know, sometimes you call it the law of conservation of energy but it’s more of a principle, which is more to do with what are the sort of things that are allowed or forbidden and constructed theory kind of talks about that too. But those are different. So now you know when I say something is a law of nature to a physicist what that means. It’s kind of like you have to think in terms of differential equations and and what I just mentioned, any comments or any questions or
[00:41:05] Blue: No, no.
[00:41:06] Red: So basically this whole way of viewing things has been so successful. And the success goes back all the way to the ancient astronomers which were also astrologers because they were predicting astronomical phenomena such as eclipses they wanted to keep up with the seasons. So this whole paradigm has been so successful and not to mention the success of general relativity Einstein’s theory I mean our GPS our phones are modern technology is inconceivable without knowing. So I think that has what strengthened this view in our in this particular world we think that this is what the universe is all about. Right. That’s why the physicist is so confident and proud that look we are the one who’ve given you the most successful theories in this world, the quantum mechanics, general relativity and so guess what we get to tell you what the world is like.
[00:42:00] Blue: So let me, let me ask some questions around that. So, from a certain point of view I would agree with you that that putting it that way it almost sounds inductive right we’ve been so successful in the past, using this approach of looking at static laws and regularities that, you know, therefore that’s why we think that’s going to continue to be a successful approach. But I don’t think you have to take it in an inductive way like that even though people may intend it that way at times. You can almost say that this is a conjecture, right that we’ve got this sort of conjecture about reality that may or may not be true. But the conjecture is is that there are regularities that there are static laws, and that’s been a very successful conjecture up to this point it’s it’s been highly corroborated by the fact that that’s all the successful theories at this point we’ve never actually needed dynamical laws to be able to solve any problems up to this point. Obviously you’re talking about a problem that may require it but but based on that you could look at that in a more paparian way and you could you could think of it not as inductive but you could think of it as that is our best theory at the moment thoughts on that.
[00:43:22] Red: No, I totally agree with you. It’s just that when something has been so successful. There comes a point sometimes people take certain elements of that framework or what I’m calling the paradigm as almost given to the point that most of your working physicists don’t question that they’re more interested in working stuff out within that framework. And I think that’s gone on too long and not just that it has been pretty successful. And there is something to be said about it. It has taught us about a certain aspect of reality that there are these type of, you know, there are systems which can be studied in that way. Where you can look at it as if there is some sort of a static law, but but it fails miserably, it just fails miserably when you actually look at the overall asymmetry of the world. So we have to be open to that we have to, you know, for the science to progress. The problem is, you know, when you’re working physicists, unfortunately, as much as you know, people may want to look into it. You got to have a job, even as a physicist, you know, you got to earn your living from that to and not just that you want to publish and you want to maintain, you know, keep doing what you enjoy. And unfortunately, a lot of times you don’t get that much, you know, when you venture out into ideas, which are so hard, like where you’re literally looking at the entire framework and questioning the chances of making some progress start to go down, because it’s such a joint activity like a lot more physicists were working on it.
[00:44:53] Red: You know, then together the community could make a lot of progress just because the sheer numbers and people coming up with all sorts of different ideas. But it’s really hard to do something like that. If, you know, I mean, you can come under ridicule by your department, whoever you’re working if you’re postdoc, you know, you may not get a job if you want to work on something.
[00:45:15] Blue: Do you know, I have to mention Coon here. I really enjoy Coon’s book. Can’t remember the title now, but about scientific revolutions. And I know that he’s at odds with Popper and insofar as he is at at odds with Popper, he’s, he’s wrong, in my opinion, he actually does make a few good points against Popper, but, you know, that’s a different story. But he makes so many valid points, right. I mean, like you really can, even as a Popperian learn a lot from Coon. And one of the things that Coon points out and remember this is quite a while ago now. So this isn’t merely a matter of big science has made it this way. But he points out the degree to which scientists just can’t accept new ideas and really struggle with that. And he tries to explain everything in terms of that, which I think is a mistake.
[00:46:10] Red: It’s a sociology, right? It’s, yeah.
[00:46:12] Blue: Well, science is a sociological phenomenon. He’s not wrong about that, right. All the prejudices that come out of a sociological any other sociological phenomenon that you have to deal with with human beings, those are all part of the scientific community. And they matter. They’re an important part of the scientific community that you’re not going to just overcome, right. The thing that Coon gets wrong is that he therefore concludes that is all that matters that reality in no way impinges upon what happens and that’s ridiculous. And the
[00:46:49] Red: idea of how revolutions take place is kind of weird. It’s almost as if kind of it would almost sound like, you know how Popper says that we should let our ideas die in our place. Coon’s thing would be we should let the scientists die so that the idea dies away. Right.
[00:47:05] Blue: Well, and again, he’s not entirely wrong there. If you were to go back in time and look at what had happened up to that point, he’s sort of right that that scientists dying out was how we made scientific progress back in the early 20th century. I don’t think and that is still true today in some cases about that look at what Einstein did like. Well, and yes, and I agree. And so that’s the problem though is that we’ve seen it that it’s become less and less of a problem the standard model got accepted very quickly by the scientific community. Right. I mean, it’s, we’re actually getting better at not waiting for the old scientists to die out. And I don’t think it’s ever been 100 % true, but we’re getting better at it. The acceptance of new ideas is starting to come faster. Some things are still taking way too long. You know, I personally think that it’s taking way too long to accept many worlds interpretation, for example. But I think that the problem is is that he’s kind of assuming it’s a static thing that it will always be that way just because in the past it has sometimes been that way. And I think the
[00:48:13] Red: biggest mistake he makes is that he literally doesn’t understand how knowledge is actually created.
[00:48:18] Blue: Like
[00:48:18] Red: the biggest thing that Popper did was literally he shows how creation takes place. I mean, I’m just going to literally just call it how creation happens. Yeah, I mean, it’s in knowledge, but it’s much more deeper than knowledge. I think overall, you know, in the case of knowledge, we understand what are the elements that are varied. But then, you know, you look at a special case, not a special case, but you see that the evolutionary, the new Darwinian evolutionary theory as a matter of fact, I’m going to actually talk about that. I think we need to push that idea and take it to a different level now. So I’m kind of getting back into Popper in a little bit.
[00:48:50] Blue: Okay. I just want to throw that out because this is, you’re right, we should accept that scientists are always going to be a little closed minded, maybe not always, but up to this point I’ve always been a little bit closed minded that they do have a hard time breaking out of the paradigms at times. And so you’re right about that. And there are sociological reasons why people tend to be that way, you know, and there may even be good reasons why people tend to be that way. And
[00:49:20] Red: there’s a value in that too, like if we forget about science in a minute and we think about society for a little bit, sometimes if you bring about a change really fast, that could actually destroy that platform which is giving us this opportunity to build the building. So there’s this fine type of it’s kind of hard to know how to strike. I mean, I hate to use the word balance, like I don’t know what else to say, but to find that right place between the two things where we don’t lose the platform on which we’re building our building. So, you know, so yeah, so anyways. You
[00:49:55] Blue: know, Popper actually did come to, he says this in one of his books, he came to realize the value of being dogmatic of having a dogmatic attitude. And I think that that can’t be overlooked either the fact that scientists are a bit dogmatic. That’s not entirely bad. Right, it’s, there are some positives to that. I read
[00:50:18] Red: what you wrote on that. And you
[00:50:21] Blue: find the actual, the actual quote. So that I could read it. But yeah, he actually does say that and clearly when when I wrote that on Facebook I didn’t have the quote handy so that I went and like looked it up later. But here’s the actual quote I’m pulling it up right now. He says, I also later realized the opposite the value of the dog of the dogmatic attitude somebody had to defend a theory against criticism, or it would come too easily. And before it had been able to make its contributions to the growth of science. There is value in having scientists hold too strongly, even dogmatically to their ideas, so that the idea stays alive long enough to find so that we don’t kill it before it’s had a chance to survive criticism, right. And there’s value in even having people defend ideas that will turn wrong because they don’t know which ideas are going to be right and which ones are going to be wrong. So there is value in the fact that scientists are a bit dogmatic. And there’s even value in the fact that they’re dogmatic towards things that are too far outside the current paradigm that they become suspicious of it. If you were to go look at how often do ideas come along that they reject, we kind of keep track of the ones they reject that then turn out to be true. But you just forget about the ones that they reject that turn out to be false and there’s probably a huge number of those that exist that we just don’t have any memory of.
[00:51:53] Red: Oh yeah I mean I was actually today I was talking to my husband I was like you know isn’t that interesting that if some idea some crazy idea turns out to be true we call this person a genius. But if it doesn’t then they get to be known as a crackpot right I mean yes. So, but before the genius and crackpot differentiation, you know, before one, before we know what, whether the person is a genius or crackpot. There is no way to know what what is going to turn right. You know, that’s the way it is in economics to right if somebody has an idea for a business, and they go off and they make a bunch of money.
[00:52:28] Blue: We consider them a genius, you know with business. But if they don’t go off and they go off and they don’t make a bunch of money. We don’t say, wow they tried really hard that was a good idea it just didn’t happen to work or something like that. We tell them they’re fools, right we say wow how did you lose all that money that’s for horrifying, you know you should have when gotten a regular job. So we kind of do the same thing for everything, I think, right we determine things by based on the outcome we don’t really look at the fact that it’s necessary for people to go out economically and try ideas and have them fail to have the economic system work.
[00:53:07] Red: Yeah, but I think that the problem is even though I totally agree with you on the dogma part the only thing is that the part where the new ideas come in. It seems to me that right as of now I mean there are some grants that are available whether it’s the Templeton Foundation you know which will fund you if you have an idea. The problem is that those of us who are kind of thinking about these deep problems, like for example you know I’m interested in some of these problems. But I really don’t feel like at any point I have something so concrete to offer that you know these things take time. And then you know and then, then there are those people who have the luxury of having that time but some of us who are tied up with our jobs and other things. So it seems to me that there is that struggle for those of us who really do sometimes come up with those ideas because of not knowing whether you’re going to be the genius or the crackpot and most of the time it probably is the crackpot. But it’s kind of like a hard fact of the way things work. I mean I don’t know how else we could go around that.
[00:54:13] Blue: Yeah, unless
[00:54:14] Red: maybe in the future as we get the machines to do more and more of this stuff that we need to get done in our society, maybe we could more time to the individuals, or all for them to be whatever they want to be you know whatever we pursue rather than having such a tight thing where we just have to work our nine to five or longer jobs so.
[00:54:35] Blue: Yeah, so.
[00:54:38] Red: This
[00:54:39] Blue: is this is an example of how economics does determine a lot of these things, right it’s the fact that we have to, we have to survive. You know I had someone on Twitter some somebody on Twitter she she said I hate the fact that capitalism, you know forces me to go and have to work a job instead of doing what I enjoy or something like that. And I responded back and said maybe not so much capitalism as entropy. But anyhow it’s, you know it’s, there are things that we have to solve we have multiple problems. And sometimes you solve those by giving up your time, you know it’s to go do the nine to five job when you exactly
[00:55:23] Red: platform to right on which we can keep building so we have a need for people to be filling in all sorts of different niches to do that but hopefully maybe in the future we could start to free up more time, as we have already I think in the future we could have more free time, I think, than in the past but but hopefully will improve on that.
[00:55:55] Blue: All right, that was a bit of an aside. Sorry for that that that was kind of interesting discussion though but.
[00:56:01] Red: I think so I think it ties into my topic because I’m about to talk about creativity and and not just human creativity I think the universe itself is has a creative expression like this part of. I mean again I’m using anthropomorphic terms I don’t want anybody to think that in any way I’m thinking there is some mind of the universe or anything like that. It’s just that because right now I don’t know how else to talk about it. But you know, so I’m using the terms that I’m familiar with, but hopefully I’ll make it clear what I mean by that.
[00:56:31] Blue: Okay. All right.
[00:56:32] Red: So, so going back to this old, you know, again talking about, you know, the systems where we’ve seen the progress for physics to progress. You know, I would make a differentiation so there are some systems that I’ll say are simple systems. And I’ll try to make that distinct distinction as what I mean by simple versus complex systems. So simple systems are understood by simple rules or correlations. But as systems get more complicated, then they can have, you know, some more complicated systems have parts, which may be governed by different rules. Okay, such as life, for example, an organism, you know, organism is made up of atoms and molecules. By the same time, there are what people call you know some people call is the emerging level. There are rules that govern, you know, like if an organism is trying to get food and what sort of things govern whether the organism survives or not, you know, that has nothing to do with the laws of physics it’s a different level of rules operating at a different level. So, and then it seems like it becomes particularly problematic for, you know, right now I think there’s a push, or even if there isn’t a push that a lot of there are people who are thinking as if these rules ought to be unified in some sort of one big rule. So, let me just tell you where this is coming from this kind of goes into the whole idea of reductionism. So in physics, one of the things that I mentioned before that has worked beautifully is that we’ve been able to unify previously known phenomena where there was electric versus you know electric phenomenon magnetic, and then we realize well it’s going to be like
[00:58:19] Red: the two sides of the same coin we call it electromagnetic, so that was one unification, and then electric and weak, electroweak unification. So again, there has been a push and there’s been a lot of success in going towards unifying previously the phenomena that we thought was previously unrelated into a unified theory where a simple single rule explains, you know, those rules. So that type of mindset has now taken physicists and not just physicists people who call themselves science lovers to think that somehow, you know, there should be some sort of a unified way of thinking using maybe physics, or maybe there is some sort of an underlying rule that just governs the behavior of everything. And then, when you look at life, or, or human creativity, those are looked upon as I talked I think in the first episode that those are those are defined as emergent. So emergence would be pretty much same as when I said clocks emerge. So we’re looking at these things that emerge but, but these rules aren’t looked upon as fundamental. These are just kind of looked upon as, oh, it’s kind of like we have building blocks of physics, which could be quantum fields or whatever and we make, we start to build. And then at a certain point there is a level where now we’ve got something we recognize another layer of building blocks and then using that we build another layer, but really it is all following through some sort of a strict determinism down to the level of physics. The world is pretty much all based on, you know, where the physics is the most fundamental level.
[01:00:02] Red: So quantum fields, for example, as of now, many would say is the most fundamental stuff of the world, and everything is just built up from that. There is no not like the emergence is more often, you know, when we think that there are some new laws here, that’s just an illusion from our point of view, it’s really pretty much all. Even it’s in practice at me it’s not reducible, but in principle at least we have some sort of an idea that oh well it all follows from physics.
[01:00:31] Blue: So let me, let me talk about this just for a second. The reductionism. I sometimes don’t know if when I think of the that word, I’m thinking of the same concept that you’re thinking of but the way you just described it that’s pretty close to what I had in mind. The issue here though is that we can even take what you just said and we can split it into two things, one of which is actually true, and one of which isn’t. So reductionism in the is the truth side is that it’s been very successful to explain things by reducing them and to try to figure out what are the parts that make it up, and can we explain it for those parts. And there’s even something to be said about the idea that in principle, if not in practice, you could theoretically explain everything through reductionism, right. But I’m not sure that that in any way really implies the second part of reductionism which is not true, which is that in some way that means emergent phenomena are second class citizens. The most obvious example of this is computational universality, right there’s something really interesting there in computation universality, which allows you to talk about programs and logic without reference to any physics at all, because it’s an emergent phenomenon you can literally talk about multiple different substrates that would produce a computer. That doesn’t really mean reductionism in the first part is wrong though you probably could in principle, explain a program by reducing it to the parts of the computer. That wouldn’t be a very efficient way to explain things, and you would lose something in the process because emergent phenomena are just as real as physics, right.
[01:02:24] Blue: It doesn’t seem like you have to have that extra philosophical baggage with reductionism. And when we talk about reductionism in a negative way we’re really referring to the extra philosophical baggage the idea that emergent phenomena are second class citizens, what in fact they’re not second class class citizens they’re something absolutely as important to explaining the world as physics is.
[01:02:50] Red: I would say that as long as you’re sticking to the computational universality, you are still assuming that there are static laws as kind of like how I talked about the logic of the whole thing. Because if you weren’t, then you would also be open to the fact that there might be certain things that may not fit in that type of a framework then then you would have an openness if you really thinking that there might actually be which the word I’m using is novel phenomena, which, you know, which aren’t in any way, I feel like computational universality does take kind of like almost like an underlying unified type of a view, even if we can’t access in any sort of way. You’re right,
[01:03:34] Blue: it does. So
[01:03:36] Red: it’s more timeless, universal. And as I’ve shown you how the physics right now as we do it has led, rightly so to the view that we live in a static timeless reality that all change in motion and everything is just illusory, and we just need to explain that illusion. And, but it’s,
[01:03:56] Blue: and I guess that’s the part I’m disagreeing with I’m not disagreeing with the idea that the current implications of our current theories is that we live in a that there’s a way to view the universe as timeless. It’s really I don’t see time as I don’t see novelty as illusory. I understand what you mean when you say that. But I think that that’s, in some ways, making the emergent phenomena a second class citizen and that’s unnecessary.
[01:04:27] Red: I don’t see it as a second class but I’ll tell you why not. But but at the same time let me take you back to where I talked about non locality. What if there isn’t, there is a layer of the world, which operates in a non local. I don’t know if we all I don’t know how else to put it like there the non locality is a feature at a certain level layer of the world. How would computational universality deal with it and what if all of that is playing some sort of a vital role in the evolution of the universe, where the novelty arises right. I think at that point I would feel that computational universality would fail. Because I think computational universality. I may be mistaken on this I haven’t really thought about this clearly but I think is based on kind of locality would be an important.
[01:05:17] Blue: Yes, I would think so too. So, and I agree with you, right. If we’re talking about new laws of physics, computational universality is challenged. Right. I mean, it’s, it is based on our current understanding of the laws of physics. Basically the
[01:05:35] Red: paradigm that I’ve given you that is what it’s based on. Right. Yeah, but if that paradigm is, which I think there are good reasons to challenge it, then we don’t know what we’re in for and I really don’t know at least my hope is that in this podcast I will try to actually point out what the problem is. And I think where the current paradigm is failing as even in doing science and what I feel like the science should be doing. If we hope to have something that is actually explaining and not merely going into some sort of almost like a religious type belief, which I feel like the current paradigm right now is kind of going in that direction.
[01:06:13] Blue: Okay.
[01:06:15] Red: All right. So, so yeah in the current paradigm as I’ve kind of discussed that when I use the word emergence, I’m using it in the sense again that it’s somehow, you know, as in the current paradigm. There is strict determinism, even though, even though we are recognizing oh there are these higher level laws, you know, but there is something under, underneath it that assumes this type of a static type of a reality, timeless laws. Okay, so in this view, I feel like what I’m about to describe that there is no room for novelty for newness for surprise there just isn’t it’s all pretty much. In a way, if you really took this paradigm seriously as some have like Julian Barber and there you know I think Sean Carroll has kind of been thinking about it and then there are people like Max Tagmark. When you start to really take the seriously and you dive down into the sort of metaphysical implication, you really arrive at the sort of reality, those multi versus not just many worlds but the sort of stuff that’s been. I mean yeah some of those could be thrown out even on the base of bad explanations even within the current paradigm. But this idea of where anything that logic implies, you know it doesn’t even have to have any consistency like could exist. You know there’s a crazy type of multi worse, which is much bigger than this or that we live in a timeless reality which is basically a mathematical reality.
[01:07:41] Red: Right, because this would go nicely with that that maybe everything could be explained by some sort of a mathematical object or even if there isn’t an ultimate theory that it would always be some mathematical things that underlie reality. So in this case you know Matt would rule the world rather than physical physics or physical reality.
[01:08:01] Blue: One math to rule the world role. Yeah.
[01:08:04] Red: So Matt would be the underlying, you know the reality of abstraction would be primary in a weird way, you know, which is another topic I would love to get into that actually the different.
[01:08:14] Blue: Yeah, that’s that’s like mind blowing I don’t you’re talking about Max, Max Tagmark talks about that is. I mean to me when I look at the world.
[01:08:21] Red: I always see physicality is always being prior to abstractions abstractions are always require some sort of a physical substrate to be right. So, I mean one can make the case that oh well isn’t everything that is instantiating can also be caught off abstractly yes you can but in this world. It seems like no matter what like if you do this exercise you will always find physicality always coming before. So in this case. Yeah, so physicality to me always comes before the abstractions. So, so, having mentioned that. So what I would say that when I’m talking about emergence so the way I would define the difference between the current paradigm and what I’m talking about would be a difference between the universe where the current paradigm would see the universe as being it’s just being as it is it’s set, you know, whatever whether it’s for eternity who knows, but it’s all laid out and somehow either our consciousness is maneuvering through it on who knows what like but but it’s set. But the idea that I’m going to talk about is that I think the universe is actually becoming. We don’t know what the universe is future is going to be, and it’s in there the future is open. And it’s in no way anywhere like there isn’t any math that kind of somehow lays it out for us which we’re just uncovering, but it’s genuinely becoming, and it’s tied to this asymmetry in the world.
[01:09:52] Blue: So,
[01:09:52] Red: so being versus becoming. This isn’t something new people have talked about being and becoming. I’ve heard philosophers talk about
[01:10:00] Blue: it for.
[01:10:03] Red: Okay, so now one of the things that I’ve seen why I’ve one of the things that I’ve seen with the current paradigm is, I think the current paradigm has been pretty successful. And I think it has revealed to us something about the world which will hopefully which will, you know, a big part of it is going to be carried into the next paradigm. But I think we’ve reached a point where it’s starting to lose its explanatory power, because you know we’re trying to we were extending this current paradigm into the domains where it wasn’t originally designed and not just that it actually is failing miserably. This whole idea of the multi all sorts of multi versus popping up time, you know, mathematical universes. These are all these these side effects that should, you know, there’s a good reason to think that what the reason why I feel like whenever some sort of theory starts to fail, kind of like how instrumentalism in quantum theory when that failed guess what happened. All sorts of new age religion started to emerge right new sorry new age spirituality. People were using quantum physics to tap into this reality all sorts of weird stuff came out. Well, that’s
[01:11:12] Blue: a that’s a natural consequence of the lack of explanatory power right and the fact that the fact that they’re trying to they’re trying to not make quantum physics, an explanation means that every explanation is equally viable.
[01:11:28] Red: Exactly, but the thing is then yeah you could fill in those gaps those people were filling in the gaps when their own explanations right because the people who were actually seriously taking this theory should have actually done that themselves they should have explained they should have taken it seriously because they knew quantum theory better than anybody else.
[01:11:45] Blue: So
[01:11:45] Red: I think that in this case what we’re seeing is that the physicists themselves are taking this kind of a paradigm. And actually, what they’re extrapolating now should actually reveal to us that how it’s actually using its explanatory power it’s and that should make us think that we need to we need to do something. So why do I say we’re losing explanatory power, because look if I look around the universe, I see these asymmetries if I’m trying to explain the world. It doesn’t help that if somebody just gave me a past hypothesis that I have to live with right that there was this special initial condition. It’s not enough for me to know that oh well anytime you discover anytime humans come up with something new or anytime you in your life and life originated all of these novelties that I’m calling novelties. Well they are in some way, we’re already there existing in a timeless realm, and we are just kind of somehow. It’s almost like there was a landscape that was already there that’s always been there and we are just the travelers through the landscape in some sort of a way. All right, to me, that is not very good of an explanation. I, what I expect is a good explanation would be something that should open up new research programs into asking the question that, you know, what it, you know, that why is there asymmetry. We need to address the question of why you know that this whole thing of special initial conditions we need to address that question we need to ask these questions and not just kind of push them under the rug and keep going.
[01:13:27] Red: So then the next question is, is there something that could actually explain, which is also testable which could also lead to new new research programs. And I think there is such a thing and the conjecture being which I’m kind of boring from Lee small and it actually kind of occurred to me. When I was thinking about poppers theory and then I actually returned to Lee small work and all the stuff that I had ignored suddenly just lit up in my head, and I ended up reading his papers. What occurred to me from popper was popper said that all life is problem solving. And it occurred to me when I was thinking about this whole asymmetry issue and the initial conditions and I was like you know what. And people have talked about it. David always talked about it briefly, you know that what we really need is an evolutionary theory, we, you know, an evolutionary one when I say we need that is that if we have a theory of evolution that it could explain all this kind of appearance of design that we see in this world right. Isn’t that what happened in the theory of evolution right the new Darwinian theory of evolution. Yes, all this appearance of design was explained to a theory, you know, which shows how systems evolve.
[01:14:38] Blue: So this is what Lee small and this this is what led him to come up with his. I know he doesn’t really believe this anymore but he came up with this kind of initial theory about the idea of universe is evolving as a way of trying to explain the appearance of design of the universe itself right just as we explain the appearance of design of biological organisms through evolution. He tried to have this idea of variation and selection of universes that would explain the appearance of design of the universe that we’re in.
[01:15:14] Red: That’s right. And in that case you would just have these universes come up with, you know, with different laws and stuff and then there is the selection criteria which is based on the generation of black holes, not to go into whether there is a multi worse or not. But the idea is that whether it’s a multi worse or singular universe as what small is going for the singular that creation is an ongoing process. It isn’t something that only happens when black holes arise and new universes pop out that it’s actually the universe itself is a creative phenomena. So new laws, you know, so you would think that he used the word laws are evolving but then he also talks about when there are these some that novel things come about. And I kind of start thinking along those lines thinking about poppers theory because it occurred to me that, you know, maybe it’s not just the life that is problem solving maybe the obvious ones being life and and then the emergence of humans with thought, you know, to keep thinking that somehow all that information, somehow all of that stuff was already there in this landscape that we’re exploring. To me that just doesn’t explain things. So if I want to explain the world, I want to come up with a mechanism of how the universe generates it, and then hope that I can actually test the idea in some shape or form.
[01:17:02] Red: I think this is why I think small and idea is is interesting because I think it hopes it gives us hope to further progress science rather than just settle for some sort of metaphysical crazy idea where anytime we discover anything novel which we might think, oh emergence, then we’re like, oh well we’ve just explored more of that same landscape, you know, which already exists we just didn’t know about it, you know, so. And not just that I think the asymmetry of the world really does push us in that type of a direction.
[01:17:33] Unknown: So,
[01:17:34] Red: so what I’m going to say is that, you know, right now the physics only deals with what what we call effective approximate theories, and that is, you know, very much compatible with a deterministic view which has led to this whole idea of reductionism.
[01:17:49] Unknown: And
[01:17:49] Red: what what we really need is a theory, when we extended to cosmos to the entire universe, we need a theory that explains the those, what we call that past hypothesis special initial condition that we see in the current paradigm that problem when it’s just a way if you have an evolutionary theory, because if the universe is an ongoing process then we’re not really relying on some very special fine tune initial condition to explain the richness of the world.
[01:18:18] Blue: I agree with that. I actually do believe that the universe has the appearance of design. I believe that we don’t have an explanation for why that is any current existing good explanation for why that is.
[01:18:34] Unknown: And
[01:18:35] Blue: so I can completely understand why trying to explain it in terms of evolutionary theory which is the only theory we have for how something like parents of design can come about makes a great deal of sense. Yeah, because that allows for testability.
[01:18:51] Red: So even in like theory of new Darwinian theory of evolution, we can’t really test it in the sense that okay,
[01:18:57] Unknown: you
[01:18:57] Red: know, in the sense of like, okay, like, you know, it’s not like we could make some predictions of what the theory what the evolution of the life would have led all the way like, you know, with certain thing coming about. But I think there are other ways of testing that period.
[01:19:15] Unknown: I mean it is the best explanation we have.
[01:19:18] Red: But at the same time, we know the mechanism right we know how it operates to the variation on what elements does that variation and selection occurs. In the case of life we know that it’s DNA right there. Although we didn’t know that at the time. We didn’t know it at the time. So it isn’t just the best explanation. In a sense, it is kind of testable, not in the sense that so the testability isn’t that Oh, you need to tell me what’s going to evolve next out of a certain organism that’s not what I mean. Testability is in the sense that do we have elements do we see mutations do we see does all of that fit together. And I think in the same way, the smallest theory should also be testable, because if there is novelty being generated. I mean this is really preliminary right this idea and looking in this direction so preliminary preliminary that you know we’re really I feel like scratching the surface right now. Some of the things he suggested is that look as as we push more and more towards creating more and more novel phenomena like whether it’s higher two bit states. And I’m also thinking myself that what if in condensed matter physics and some sort of a combination of condensed matter physics and quantum theory like we sort of come up with some sort of new novel states. Could we test the ideas of how the universe might be learning, because right now to me the biggest puzzle is in my conjecture or which is also the same as small in that the universe is actually learning.
[01:20:46] Red: We want to really I think this is the time know, I mean it’s always been an important question but more so than ever before now, because of the different places where it’s applicable, we need to ask the question what is learning. I listened to your podcast about machine learning right so you’re asking those questions we’re asking the questions are that what what sort of things are required for something to learn.
[01:21:09] Blue: Yeah,
[01:21:10] Red: right.
[01:21:11] Blue: Right, it turns out it’s not necessarily an easy question.
[01:21:15] Red: Exactly. So in terms of life right now we have a restricted view that is to the random mutation of genes but is it possible the life, excluding the humans for a second. That it’s actually learning at different levels, because at least in humans we know that we’re learning at a different level to in right
[01:21:32] Blue: right
[01:21:32] Red: that there are some other places. Kind of like one of your podcasts you mentioned, you know you talked about that or that little. Maybe you can explain that worm with the. Yes,
[01:21:44] Blue: the worm. So, yeah, let me, yeah, let me just explain that I have mentioned this in past podcasts but people junk between podcasts so I should make it a little bit self contained. So Neo Darwinian theory is based along based around learning inside of genes in DNA. And then we accept the fact that humans are able to learn. We also accept the fact that animals can learn, although we think it’s like really limited you know classical conditioning type things so these would be like three kinds of evolution that are widely understood and accepted. There’s this idea, and I don’t know if Donald Campbell came up with it he’s just the first one I read it about it from where he talks about this hierarchy of evolution. He’s really suggesting that there’s a lot more than just these three right that all throughout nature there is ubiquitous learning algorithms that exist all over the place that existed many different levels that interact with each other. And then Levant, I can’t remember the guy’s name but the, with the, the guy who discovered the worm where you can, he has the operating system that happens between the cells and that it looked like there was learning at the level of the cells. So that they could communicate and they could figure out how to error correct where the eyes supposed to go as the tadpole turns into a frog, things like that, right. This would be one of those levels but they, they went on to that whole line of thought and then the nobles is another one that I’ve mentioned.
[01:23:17] Blue: They’re suggesting that it’s not a straight hierarchy like Campbell suggested that’s top down, but there’s actually interactions that happen between the levels that allow for an almost purpose of evolution, where one level determines how the other level is going to go about doing its evolution. And they gave the example of the immune system which is actually a well known example so we know at least in that case, they’re right. So there’s a lot that we just don’t know about evolution and we probably are looking at it too narrowly. And then of course there’s this Lee Schmullen idea that the laws of physics themselves. Sorry that the universe itself has evolved based on the laws of physics, and you’re actually doing one more level now getting this from Schmullen also where the laws of physics themselves may be evolving.
[01:24:07] Red: That is what small and is saying actually. Yeah, so I mean I have taken that idea seriously but kind of you know I started thinking about that actually after reading that poppers thing and just thinking about some of the current issues, but small is of course saying the same thing. Yeah, but I think to the biggest right now if you really ask me, thinking along this line what really boggles my mind. Where is the novelty creeping in from right I mean, you know some people again if you’re in the current paradigm you might think of, you know, like exploring the landscape of possibilities where the possibilities are somehow like they are constrained. So, but the thing is, at any time, yes, the possibilities that life may explore are constrained. But if you look at overall the history of life, all the way up to even humans. There is something it seems to me that the landscape of possibilities is expanding. It’s not a static thing again we have to go away from this view. So the question is what leads to this expansion like there is someplace and, honestly, I never thought I would think of this way. But I’m also wondering if, even though you know I think in physics right now or in science in general we’re too fixated in some sort of in law like phenomena, somewhere there has to be something. There’s some sort of again this is going to be really skeptical and I’m kind of skeptical I’m really thinking about these things right now. Some lawless type thing, you know, there is something lawless that’s operating, maybe in the universe. There is some openness to the universe, and we don’t understand how it’s generating this novelty.
[01:25:52] Red: We can just simply ignore it and keep saying that every time something happens that it just exists somehow in a timeless way and somehow, you know, think that I think really need to take this seriously. As a matter of fact, having taken the current paradigm seriously I also want to point out why it’s actually a bad explanation like I’m going to point out a few failures I don’t think that’s always a good way to make your own point to show the failures of the other because everything somewhere has some errors right every point. But I think we should realize a little bit we should take this current paradigm a little bit more seriously.
[01:26:38] Blue: 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 Anchor. Just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands f o u r dash s t r a n d s. There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you want to 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.
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