Free Will, Time, and Understanding Reality With Sabine Hossenfelder
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Summary
In this episode, we talk with science communicator Sabina Hassenfelder about her new book, "Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions." In this episode we talk about where we see the limits of physics, and how we misapplied physics to try to answer life's biggest questions.
Transcript
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Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone Collins, and we are joined by today, I think, one of the best
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science communicators, if not the best science communicator on the internet, Sabina Hassenfelder.
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You can go find her on her YouTube channel. I suggest you check it out and subscribe,
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or you can check out her books, one of which, and when I read the title, everyone's going to know,
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oh, that's why she's on. That's why you're excited to have her on. But she doesn't have a giant,
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like 1.3 million followers, absolutely huge platform for hitting people with reality,
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which I love. But the book's title is Existential Physics, A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest
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Questions. And what I wanted to talk with you about on this episode is where you see the limits,
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like what does physics answer? How have people misapplied physics potentially to try to answer
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life's biggest questions, which I think a lot of people will sometimes try to do. And yeah,
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just what are your thoughts on this field as someone who is so knowledgeable in the best
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understanding of the fabric of reality that scientists have today?
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So maybe I should first explain what I mean with existential physics. So that's a little bit weird,
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because actually, I didn't come up with the title. My editor did. So the original title of the book was
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More Than This, because I wanted to say that physics is more than what you learned at school. It's not
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just about how atoms move and the ideal gas law and switching the light on electricity, all that kind
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of stuff. Physics is actually a tool that tells us something about our own existence, because it's
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about discovering the fundamental laws that the universe works with. And we're part of the universe.
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So it tells us something about us. And so existential physics, the way that I understand it now,
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even though I didn't coin the word, is that it's about what physics tells us about these big existential
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questions. Like, for example, does the past still exist? What really is time? What is this moment of
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now that we experience? How did the universe begin? How will it end? Do we have free will? Are we really
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just big bags of atoms? And so all those big existential questions? And sometimes I come to
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the conclusion that actually physics can't really tell us anything about it. But in other cases,
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I would love to dig into your thoughts on free will from the perspective of physics,
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Yeah, so this is what got me onto the entire topic in the first place. Because I made a video a long
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time ago about free will. I think it was titled, you don't have free will, but don't worry. And I think
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it was one of my first videos that attracted some attention, mostly because it pissed off a lot of
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Yeah, the short version is, it's not a groundbreaking new insight. But I think everyone
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who studied the fundamental laws of nature, which you find in physics comes to the conclusion that
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it's basically a combination of a totally deterministic evolution law, like determinism all
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the way down. And then you have this occasional random element that comes from quantum mechanics.
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And that's it. So now I ask you exactly which part would you call free will? So to me,
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it's like, there isn't anything that makes sense to call free will. And so this is why I'm saying,
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I just forget about the thing with free will, it's useless. It just gets people upset, basically.
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Now, I understand perfectly well that there are very renowned, renowned, I always mispronounce
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Renown? Renown, yeah. English is a terrible language. Renown philosophers who have found ways to define
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free will in such a way that it's compatible with what we've learned in physics and this is
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Yeah. And I don't have a big problem with that. I just think that it makes the entire phrase,
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free will, meaningless. But yeah, so basically, that's the summary of the video.
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So, yeah, no, it sounds very similar to videos that we've done on the subject where I often point
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out, it's humorous to me that in the world that people who don't like my definition of free will
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would want, I would feel like I have less control of my thoughts. By that, what I mean is I'm like,
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so if the next action I take is not determined by my life history and my biology, then it's determined
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by randomness. That isn't empowering. That's not an empowering thought. And people will be like,
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you believe that, because I don't know if this is what current physics says, but my understanding is
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that there's some level of randomness within quantum events. And so that doesn't mean that
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the future is predetermined. And I'm like, yeah, but even if that's true, that doesn't augment the
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fact that the decisions I'm making aren't necessarily heavily affected by any choice that the sentient
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part of me has made affecting this probabilistic thing. Therefore, it is irrelevant from the topic
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of free will. And I'm wondering, is that sort of your take, or do you have a different?
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Yeah, yeah, that's basically, that's the core problem. Like, it's like, you can't have it both
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ways. Like, it's either free or you wilt it. But, you know, it doesn't fit together. And I think the
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way that most people try to accommodate it is that they have this idea that somehow, this random element
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from quantum processes. So it's a question of whether these even play a role in the brain,
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but that's another story. They were willing to buy them after all. Sorry.
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I was just promoting your video on the subject. You did one on it recently.
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Yes, about the quantum effects. Yeah. So that's quite a long story. Just exactly what's the role of
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quantum effects on the brain. I'd say it's very controversial. Basically, how much does it play a role
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for consciousness, these quantum computer states? Yeah, so it's an active area of research. Maybe
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they don't open-minded about it. But either way, I'd say it doesn't really give you free will.
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And the reason I keep talking about it, why it matters to me, is that because they believe in
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free will, a lot of people seem to think they're much less affected by their environment. They're much
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less influenced by what happens in society around them than is actually the case. And I've been trying to
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convey the message. You have to be careful about what kind of information ingest, basically,
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because once it's in your brain, you don't get it out. It'll be there forever. And it will affect
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you. The kind of stuff that you listen to, the kind of stuff that you read, it will affect you. And
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you also have to be aware that the culture that you've grown up in and the society that you find
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yourself in will affect the way that you think about yourself and what's going on on this planet.
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I really appreciate that you come to that conclusion and advise people in that way after
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coming to this deterministic conclusion, because I haven't finished it yet. I've started Robert
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Sapolsky's Determined. And there's a lot of people discussing this and a lot of people saying,
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well, it's dangerous telling people this because it could affect their behavior.
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But taking it that one step further and just saying, one, okay, you don't have free will,
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but you do have control over every action you take. So functionally, depending on how you look at it,
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you're still responsible for everything you do. And you can 100% shape who you become by choosing
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what you're exposed to. And I like that you take a message that would make a lot of people feel
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hopeless and make it quite empowering in the end. Yeah, that's an awesome summary of exactly what I
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was trying to do with my book. I'd like to say, okay, so we have arrived at this conclusion. Like,
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you don't really have free will because physics, blah, blah, but let's take it one step further.
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Yeah. And a point that I want to pull out here, because we've mentioned this a few times,
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and I've noticed the way that this is often misapplied by people. And for me, it's one of
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the most frustrating misapplications of physics is we will admit that quantum states can affect
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potentially the way that neurons work and may even have like instrumental effects to the way neurons
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work. But that doesn't mean that a soul or intentionality can hide within those quantum
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effects. Those quantum effects are happening in your brain the same way they're happening all around
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you, which is mechanistically, if randomly, if they are affecting your neural architecture,
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it is in the same way they work within a quantum computer, which is with a level of... Anyway,
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does that make sense what I'm saying there? Because that's something that always annoys me when I hear
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this. Yeah, no, that's basically also my attitude to the thing. The one point where I disagree a
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little bit is on exactly what those people mean with quantum effects on the brain. It's not just
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anything that's quantum, because strictly speaking, everything is quantum anyway, so that it just
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becomes a totally empty phrase. The brain is a quantum computer because it does something with quantum.
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Oh, yeah. They're referring to normally certain types of coherent state or certain types of
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entanglement. So part of the problem of this field, which is called quantum biology, is that everyone has
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their own definition for exactly what they mean with the quantum effect. So in this recent paper,
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which I talked about, it was some kind of big coherent state, loosely speaking. But yeah, like this isn't
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anything that's specific to the brain. Like actually, I think in the paper that I talked about,
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they didn't even do it in the brain. They just, they bought a box of certain molecules and put
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them into a petri dish. And there's some chemistry going on. And I'm not much of a chemist, so don't
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ask me. And so they produce these kind of bigger molecules, and then they shine light on them.
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And it's nothing to do really with it. It's just quantum chemistry.
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Yeah. Well, I would love to go further on your ideas around time in an area where I could use some
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education on what the state of the field is right now. So what did you talk about in relation to
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what we know about time right now? This is actually a really old story. This is all based on Albert
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Einstein's theories of space and time. It's just that I think it's really hard to understand. And
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just what are the consequences of this theory hasn't been really sunk. It hasn't sunk into society by
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large, because the theory is much weirder than you might think. And one thing that Einstein worried
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about a lot is that his theory doesn't distinguish the past, the present and the future. You just have
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this one thing, this space time, and the entire universe is just one thing. There's a special moment
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in it. And so this worried him a lot. It's now called the problem of now. Like, what's this thing that
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we call now? And it's just mathematically, like, if you look at the theory and derive the equation
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that's on it, it's quite simple to see where it comes from. Like, there is no way to consistently
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define a moment of now that everyone agrees on. So that's the problem. Like, I can define my moment
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of now, you can define one, and you can define one. But in general, we wouldn't all agree.
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Exactly. That's a brief summary. So now for practical purposes, since you and I said, I don't
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know exactly where you are, but you're probably not moving with close by the speed of light relative
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to me. For practical purposes, it doesn't make any difference. Our nows are pretty much the same.
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But if you want to understand it on a fundamental level, like, what is this thing called time? How can
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we make sense of it? You have to think about these sorts of problems. And so this whole line of
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thought, which comes out of Einstein's theory, just said that everything exists at once. This is the
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only way you can make sense of existence. And that is hard to swallow.
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It's interesting. One of the things that I actually forget which one of Einstein's theories this was,
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where he's, oh, the theory would predict this, but I'm just going to assume this never happens.
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And then it, because it would be too weird if it did. And then later it turned out the thing that
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he assumed never happened is something we observe. Yeah, that might be what it is. Yeah. And so even
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other places where he's, no, this is just too weird, but the theory predicts this, it may turn out
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that it's just right. It's just not the way we perceive things. And I think when we're talking about
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things like time and physics, it's interesting that when you went into science, you wanted to
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understand, I think like the nature of reality. And so you went into physics, but when I went in,
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I wanted to understand the nature of reality. So I go into neuroscience because I'm like, what are
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we? We're the brain. So I want to understand how that works so I can understand. But where these two
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fields differ is really interesting to me in that if you're looking at psychology or the way we perceive
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reality as humans, the ways that we evolve to perceive reality don't necessarily have to align
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with the physical reality within which we live. They just have to be optimal from an evolutionary
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perspective. So probably the most important factor here is humans neurologically appear
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just incapable of conceiving of emergent properties. And this is hugely important for understanding
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reality because a lot of reality is made up of emergent properties. So I'm going to quickly go
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over an emergent property here. It'd be something like you can conceptually understand the way that
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H2O molecules interact, but you cannot get from there to wetness within your own brain in the
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conceptual framing. This creates a lot of problems around questions like sentience or consciousness or
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big problems of the universe, because just there was no evolutionary reward for being able to
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understand these sorts of emergent properties. And the same is likely true as time. If time,
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like the past and the future, aren't particularly different from each other, if even a monodirectional
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pathway through time isn't particularly unique, there would have been no evolutionary reward for being
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able to conceive of that, which means that we would have an evolutionary bias against reality.
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And I think looking for the areas that we might be evolutionarily biased against reality is really
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Yeah. So I think I agree with most of what you said. I'm not entirely sure about the emergent
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properties because I think that what we do in physics, I mean, you might be saying like you can't
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intuitively understand it. Like you either have this one picture, like its molecules bumping into each
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or that, or you have this other picture and it's like a fluid and it flows and so on. But mathematically,
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we certainly have certain examples of emergent properties where we can understand how they come about.
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Now you could say maybe I don't really intuitively understand the mathematics, but I can certainly use it.
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I can use those equations. Like I don't know a lot about fluid dynamics, but an example that I'm more
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familiar with might be conductivity, the conductivity of a metal or the optical properties.
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Like this is stuff which people now heavily study with metamaterials, if you've ever heard of those,
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like the custom designed materials with very specific emergent properties, like the way that
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they react to certain sound or absorb it. And I'd say the people who work on metamaterials must have
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a pretty good understanding of emergent properties. Now that said, sorry, I know you want to say
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something, but I think you're quite right when it comes to this notion of time. It's something about the
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way that our brain works, that we have this experience of the moment of now being special
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because we need to deal with what's going on. Basically, we actually had a memory of the entire
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past. Like it'd be a mess. Like how would we know what to do? So I think there's a strong
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learning to blend out all this stuff which happened in your past, except for some very
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special memories that you need, traumatic experiences that you need to be able to call
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upon very quickly. Yeah. So by the way, I completely agree with you. The reason I was using the fluid
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example is because like we understand the math of fluid dynamics. Like you can mathematically describe
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something, but this becomes important in the field of consciousness, which is one that I'm really
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interested in, which is to say that even if we could mathematically and mechanically describe
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exactly how consciousness works, a person looking at that description wouldn't necessarily
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like immediately go, oh, and obviously this explains sentience because we would say, oh,
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sentience is downstream of all these equations and all these understandings of neural interactions,
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but it's not going to immediately click for most people, but it might for some like geniuses
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that I'm not part of that class. I think it comes down to the question, what do we even mean by
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understanding? I get a lot of people who are like, oh, we don't really understand gravity or we don't
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really understand quantum mechanics and that kind of stuff. And I'm like, if we do have the equations
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and we know how to use the equations and we can actually make predictions that agree with reality,
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what does it mean that we don't understand them? To me, this is what it means to understand
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something. You have the mathematics, you know how to use it. Like we can discuss how well
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the mathematics of quantum mechanics actually works, but that's a different story. So I don't
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necessarily, so I understand that people probably mean on an intuitive level, they look at the
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equation that doesn't tell them anything because you must have worked with them for a long time to
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understand how it works. But to me that I'm comfortable with that kind of understanding that
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we have the math and we know how to use it. I actually want to elevate this question here about
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what does it mean to understand something? Because one of the things that we've been building out,
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the Collins Institute, which is an alternative school system, and it's one of the questions
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that we've been asking a lot to ourselves is how can we get objective measures of understanding
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within subject domains? And the definition of understanding that we came to is that it is
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knowledge that helps an individual through understanding, through knowledge of an environmental
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context, predict future environmental states. And that the better, if you're judging better
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understanding, a person with more of whatever this measure is, can more accurately predict future
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environmental states. And this is something that is as important from physics as it is to more
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controversial topics like politics or economics. And it's why with our school, we're actually partnered
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with Metaculous, but we haven't done anything with them yet because we haven't gotten to that level of
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our development, but it's a prediction marketplace. So we use prediction marketplaces, students ranking
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within prediction marketplaces to then judge the quality of questions that we're asking them.
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It's a very... Yeah, I'm surprised, but I actually pretty much agree with what you say. I would
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have put it a little bit different. I'd say it's the ability to create a predictive model of a certain
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system system. You collect information by learning and you create a certain model of how the thing
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or the field or whatever you want to talk about works, and then you're able to make predictions
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from them. I think actually a good example of this is what psychologists call a theory of mind. I think
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basically the way that it works is that you observe other people and you figure out how do they react to
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other stuff and you create a theory of how their mind works. Absolutely. And if you study them for
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long enough, you develop a more or less predictive model about how this person is likely to behave in
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certain circumstances. Yeah. Oh, and this is actually a great thing to elevate here because it's one of
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the ways that evolution sort of messes with our brain. So we can think of a theory of mind, if you've
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worked with computers for a long time, it's like an emulator that's running a separate operating system
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and little sectioned off place of your operating system. But humans evolved to be very good at
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creating these emulators to the extent that in a video that I haven't gone live yet where I talk
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about because one of my fields of expertise used to be schizophrenia is that in schizophrenia, my thought
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is what's happening here is these are actually just hyper-stimulated little emulations that are
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running that we evolve for a theory of mind. But it also creates a problem with human, which is this is
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where a lot of magical thought comes from, where people intuit intentionality behind either global
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events which can lead to conspiracy theories or behind weather patterns which can lead to theology
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or behind the way things are arranged in a shop window, is that we always want to interpret
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unexplained patterns through a background intentionality instead of through alternate models
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because if your brain's a hammer, everything's a nail. Yeah, that's right. I think there are many
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other things coming in there, like a lot of people I think they don't like uncertainty, so they can't
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just let it out. We just don't know what happened there, we don't know, we can't explain it. And so they
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have this need to have an explanation. And I think this is also one of the factors that creates a lot of
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conspiracy thinking. Yeah. Here's a question I have for you. Do you think that like what is the state of
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physics right now on timelines? If you were to guess, do we live in a branching timeline or do we live in
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a single timeline? The person that I call me lives in a single timeline. So phrase this very carefully,
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because if you're talking about these branching timelines, the question, what do you even mean by you,
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becomes very difficult to answer. Am I the thing that would be branching over all these timelines
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if they exist? And then what does it mean that they even branch? All of them, so that's weird.
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But as I go on in my book, Existential Physics, which we started out talking about, is that you can't
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ever confirm that these other timelines exist. So to me, it's a little bit pointless to even go on about it.
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Yeah. So Simone's theory on this particular topic, or the way that she conceives of herself,
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which I found to be very useful because it wasn't the way that I did when I met her,
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is to only think of herself as existing in any particular frame of time. And all future iterations
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of her are fundamentally a different person. But this is just a framing. Obviously, the concept of self
00:22:42.820
is a semantic construct that we use in terms of communicating with people to compress information,
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which is another problem about how we communicate a lot of these concepts, is that as humans,
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because we verbally communicate, we need to collapse ideas, which perhaps could be more nuanced,
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or just there's this definition of self, and there's this definition of self, and neither one is
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superior. But people need to choose one to more efficiently communicate with other people,
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which causes disagreements. But you may disagree with that.
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I would just add that I think the more important thing is how the framing that you choose affects
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your behavior. To your earlier point, like the point of the book, is depending on how you view
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yourself, you are going to behave very differently. Like psychology studies have found, of course,
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I don't know if they've been replicated, but they found that when people are primed to think
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about their future selves, they make different decisions in the present. When they see older,
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aged versions of themselves, or they've gone through an exercise in which they're encouraged
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to think about future Sabina, future Malcolm. And so I think it does matter how you ultimately
00:23:47.700
choose to frame things, because it will significantly affect your behavior. And if you see yourself as
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one ephemeral person in service to a larger identity, which is what I do, it helps me make more
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responsible decisions, versus sort of things just being like, I'm me here and now.
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Yeah, I agree, it's certainly important. I'm going to give an example of where it could matter
00:24:08.580
tremendously, in that it could lead to the destruction of life on Earth, if we don't
00:24:14.420
consider this question. It turns out that the physical models that we're dealing with right now
00:24:20.980
point to a branching reality. If you try to create an aligned AI, and you align that AI around a topic like
00:24:29.780
maximizing human happiness over time, and that AI then comes to the conclusion that we live in a
00:24:35.220
branching timeline, it would exponentially rate the happiness of humans in future states over the
00:24:42.420
happiness in humans today, because those humans would exist in multitude compared to humans today,
00:24:49.700
leading it to make decisions that no human would ever make, given that we experience timeline as a
00:24:55.540
single throughfare. Yeah, that's basically the problem that long-termists have run into, right?
00:25:02.820
So yeah, you come to the conclusion that basically it doesn't matter what we do now,
00:25:07.700
because there'll be hundreds of billions of people coming later, and those are much more
00:25:12.020
relevant. Yeah, so this is a big can of worms. Like, how do you even quantify happiness? Is this
00:25:17.940
something you even want to maximize? Is this a good thing to strive for? There are lots of
00:25:22.980
big problems that I think we're not going to sort out. We argue no very strongly on our podcast.
00:25:29.620
We're hugely anti-utilitarian. I don't understand basing your life around things that were just like
00:25:36.180
environmental rewards that caused your ancestors to have more surviving offspring than their competing
00:25:41.220
individuals. I often tell people that a human optimizing their life around happiness, or like a
00:25:46.340
group of humans saying, okay, we're going to be general utilitarians, is like a group of paperclip
00:25:51.140
maximizing AIs, creating a moral system off of how many paperclips exist in the world. But that's my
00:25:56.740
thought. I'm wondering what your thought is. How do you judge moral good? I try to stay away from
00:26:03.060
discussions about morals. I have my own ideas what is good and isn't good. I guess I'm more focused on
00:26:09.540
trying to avoid evil, trying to avoid suffering. But I'm aware that this also has. You don't want to
00:26:16.980
optimize avoiding suffering because if there aren't any people, then no one will be suffering. But yeah,
00:26:22.660
I guess in my personal life, I think it's like first do not cause any harm. It's certainly something
00:26:28.580
that I live by. Live and let live. I tend to be fairly flexible about. Other people have grown up in
00:26:36.580
other societies, other cultural contexts, and they just judge things sometimes dramatically,
00:26:42.660
differently. And I'm trying to be tolerant of it. Yeah. Yeah. And it reminds me a lot of like one of
00:26:49.540
the core things we dedicate a lot of our channel and our personal thought to is how do we create
00:26:54.580
cultural systems that have external rules, but that these rules harmonize with the current state of
00:27:02.340
physics and can evolve as the state of physics evolves, but still lead to positive action. I'm wondering
00:27:10.180
if this is a topic you've ever thought about in terms of raising your own kids, because I know that
00:27:13.620
you've been lucky. When it came to raising my own kids, I have not exactly thought about the rules
00:27:19.940
dictated by physics, to be honest. If you're talking about the rules of science more specifically,
00:27:27.380
more generally, I actually think that society generally has a problem with incorporating new scientific
00:27:34.580
knowledge. And it's something that I certainly try to instill in my children, like a general desire
00:27:44.180
to find out how things are going on. So like, we're certainly nourishing this natural curiosity,
00:27:50.580
I'd say. So my husband's also a physicist, so it's not that difficult.
00:27:56.740
I love it. Yeah, no, I'd love it if you could talk more about where we as a society, because I have my
00:28:01.620
own thoughts on this, but I'd love to hear yours, fail in terms of the way we engage with cutting edge
00:28:06.740
science and overly incorporating it into our cosmological frameworks.
00:28:14.180
So it's a little country dependent. So I think in the United States, there's a lot of effort being
00:28:20.500
made in the direction of science communication. And in Europe, we see far less of this. And I think it's
00:28:25.940
a big problem, because there are lots of people, they just get left behind, they want to understand
00:28:31.060
how science works, there's really a lot of desire. But there aren't enough people to explaining it to
00:28:36.500
them, in such a way that they can actually understand it. And I recently made a video about
00:28:41.620
this, why I'm worried about flat earthers, because to me, they're like the cannery in the coal mine.
00:28:47.300
Because I think what's really driving this problem, like, how can people believe that the earth is
00:28:52.820
flat, like we're living in the year 2024? How can this kind of thing happen? And I think they're
00:29:00.500
just totally disconnected from how modern science actually works. They just have no idea how far
00:29:06.980
behind everything they are. And the issue is now that flat earthers are just an extremely weird example.
00:29:15.540
But we also see the same thing with vaccines, of course, new methods of vaccinations. People are like,
00:29:20.580
I've never heard of this before, it's certainly some evil stuff. And lots of other things like
00:29:25.140
genetically modified crops, and all this sort of things where people are just like, don't understand
00:29:29.700
how it works, I want nothing to do with it. And this is a big problem, which is only going to get
00:29:34.420
bigger. And so we need to find some way to at least communicate the basic stuff somehow, and not on a
00:29:43.380
level where we just say, don't worry about it, go away, just believe us, it's not going to work.
00:29:48.260
I actually find the three groups that you highlighted here, something that I could do
00:29:52.740
even a whole other video on, because so interesting, the ways that they're different from each other and
00:29:56.740
their motivations. The flat earthers, I don't know if you've ever looked at them, but the thing I
00:30:00.580
actually find most interesting about the flat earthers is that they are really dedicated to the
00:30:05.460
scientific method. If you watch the ways they try to prove the earth is flat, they rely on traditional
00:30:12.980
scientific method and experimentation in their attempts to prove the world is flat. They just
00:30:19.220
disregard all expert consensus. And if you look at something like the GMO people, they often seem to
00:30:26.500
have more of, okay, I'll use as a middle ground, the anti-vaxxer people, they seem to have, anti-vaxxer
00:30:32.740
and GMO are actually very similar. They have often almost theologically driven concerns, which are driven by
00:30:39.540
a desire for things not changing or a suspicion of change, combined with a suspicion of the way
00:30:46.340
that powerful interest groups that have the ability to make a lot of money if certain things
00:30:53.540
You're missing a key point though. And just like in between Christ, just getting hungry. I just wanted
00:30:58.100
to point out that I think all three of these groups have been empowered because of a crisis of reality
00:31:04.660
where they feel like they have been lied to. And there have been real instances of misrepresentation
00:31:09.700
or obfuscation of information or just well-meaning groups and experts coming to the wrong conclusion in
00:31:16.340
the middle of trying to figure things out, like during the pandemic. And so because there was this one crisis
00:31:21.460
of faith, now suddenly they feel like they cannot trust any expert consensus. And I think that's the one
00:31:27.380
unifying bond that they all have. And I'll think you're absolutely right, and they have these different
00:31:30.660
little flavors. But still, I think that that's a really major factor.
00:31:33.620
This is something we talk about in the terms of what we call the academic reformation, where we say that
00:31:38.820
in society today, we have structured truth in a system where you have a large bureaucracy
00:31:45.300
which certifies and affirms individuals that have better knowledge of what's true.
00:31:51.300
And then you have another group that says, yeah, but that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption.
00:31:55.380
I don't hate the scientific method. I'm just pointing out that the central bureaucracy is prone to
00:32:00.260
negative externalities and corruption. And we went through this before, and that was the reformation.
00:32:05.220
And one of the things I talk about is the negative externalities of this particular battle we actually
00:32:13.220
saw was the reformation itself. For example, the Protestant groups would go much more extreme in
00:32:17.860
their witch trials because they didn't have a centralized organization to prevent sort of
00:32:22.180
conspiracy theories from spiraling out of control, which is what with the academic dissident groups now
00:32:27.460
with things like Q and stuff like that. But anyway, I'm not going to pontificate too much further.
00:32:30.980
But you are a guiding light in this, in that you are so, if you watch her channel, she is so
00:32:37.940
unafraid to just say, this is what the evidence actually says, without any pandering towards any type
00:32:46.100
of audience preference or anything like that. So I see people like you as the light through this tunnel
00:32:52.660
that's not taking sides. But thanks for the kind words. There's another aspect of this, if I may
00:32:58.980
briefly mention this, which is that it's actually true that there are things going wrong with academia
00:33:04.500
and with science. And a lot of scientists don't want to talk about it exactly because of the problem
00:33:10.020
which you just mentioned, because people will throw out all the babies with the bathwater.
00:33:15.940
Like, was this one scientist who said the wrong thing? Therefore, all of science is wrong.
00:33:19.780
Right. And so every time I talk about problems with science and academia, I get emails from physicists who
00:33:30.100
are like, you shouldn't talk about this because people will just distrust scientists. And so I insist
00:33:37.460
on talking about it anyway, because I think that the attempt of sweeping it under the rug just makes things worse.
00:33:43.300
This has been an absolutely spectacular conversation. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time.
00:33:49.300
And I really hope people check out your channel as a good place to learn what is cutting edge in science
00:33:56.020
these days, which can feel like we know some friends were just like, I don't trust any science after the 80s.
00:34:01.460
And I'm like, no, you go to her channel and you can get a fairly honest and sober minded view of what
00:34:06.260
specifically that is science with Sabina. Check that out on YouTube. Also check out Sabina's books.
00:34:12.580
They're existential physics and lost in math. Existential physics is what we were discussing today.
00:34:17.620
The lost in math is also fascinating in its premise. And then of course you can find Sabina on Twitter
00:34:22.740
at S K D H Sabina. Thank you so much. You are amazing.