Based Camp - Free Will, Time, and Understanding Reality With Sabine Hossenfelder

00:00:00.000 Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone Collins, and we are joined by today, I think, one of the best

00:00:05.560 science communicators, if not the best science communicator on the internet, Sabina Hassenfelder.

00:00:10.740 You can go find her on her YouTube channel. I suggest you check it out and subscribe,

00:00:15.540 or you can check out her books, one of which, and when I read the title, everyone's going to know,

00:00:20.240 oh, that's why she's on. That's why you're excited to have her on. But she doesn't have a giant, 0.62

00:00:24.640 like 1.3 million followers, absolutely huge platform for hitting people with reality,

00:00:31.100 which I love. But the book's title is Existential Physics, A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest

00:00:37.340 Questions. And what I wanted to talk with you about on this episode is where you see the limits,

00:00:48.000 like what does physics answer? How have people misapplied physics potentially to try to answer

00:00:54.180 life's biggest questions, which I think a lot of people will sometimes try to do. And yeah,

00:00:59.340 just what are your thoughts on this field as someone who is so knowledgeable in the best

00:01:03.760 understanding of the fabric of reality that scientists have today?

00:01:07.180 Would you like to know more?

00:01:08.460 So maybe I should first explain what I mean with existential physics. So that's a little bit weird,

00:01:15.100 because actually, I didn't come up with the title. My editor did. So the original title of the book was

00:01:22.160 More Than This, because I wanted to say that physics is more than what you learned at school. It's not

00:01:27.620 just about how atoms move and the ideal gas law and switching the light on electricity, all that kind

00:01:34.760 of stuff. Physics is actually a tool that tells us something about our own existence, because it's

00:01:40.380 about discovering the fundamental laws that the universe works with. And we're part of the universe.

00:01:47.660 So it tells us something about us. And so existential physics, the way that I understand it now,

00:01:56.300 even though I didn't coin the word, is that it's about what physics tells us about these big existential

00:02:01.380 questions. Like, for example, does the past still exist? What really is time? What is this moment of

00:02:07.440 now that we experience? How did the universe begin? How will it end? Do we have free will? Are we really

00:02:14.160 just big bags of atoms? And so all those big existential questions? And sometimes I come to

00:02:20.660 the conclusion that actually physics can't really tell us anything about it. But in other cases,

00:02:25.900 I think physics does tell us something.

00:02:29.480 I would love to dig into your thoughts on free will from the perspective of physics,

00:02:33.840 because that's a topic we talk about a lot.

00:02:35.400 Yeah, so this is what got me onto the entire topic in the first place. Because I made a video a long

00:02:43.300 time ago about free will. I think it was titled, you don't have free will, but don't worry. And I think

00:02:50.580 it was one of my first videos that attracted some attention, mostly because it pissed off a lot of

00:02:55.620 people. It's always a good recipe.

00:02:59.160 But give us the short version here.

00:03:00.640 Yeah, the short version is, it's not a groundbreaking new insight. But I think everyone

00:03:06.880 who studied the fundamental laws of nature, which you find in physics comes to the conclusion that

00:03:12.540 it's basically a combination of a totally deterministic evolution law, like determinism all

00:03:19.100 the way down. And then you have this occasional random element that comes from quantum mechanics.

00:03:23.640 And that's it. So now I ask you exactly which part would you call free will? So to me,

00:03:30.420 it's like, there isn't anything that makes sense to call free will. And so this is why I'm saying,

00:03:35.960 I just forget about the thing with free will, it's useless. It just gets people upset, basically.

00:03:41.560 Now, I understand perfectly well that there are very renowned, renowned, I always mispronounce

00:03:47.260 this word, which is it? Renown or renowned?

00:03:49.520 Renown? Renown, yeah. English is a terrible language. Renown philosophers who have found ways to define

00:03:59.780 free will in such a way that it's compatible with what we've learned in physics and this is

00:04:05.000 reality.

00:04:06.060 Yeah. And I don't have a big problem with that. I just think that it makes the entire phrase,

00:04:12.160 free will, meaningless. But yeah, so basically, that's the summary of the video.

00:04:15.940 So, yeah, no, it sounds very similar to videos that we've done on the subject where I often point

00:04:20.020 out, it's humorous to me that in the world that people who don't like my definition of free will

00:04:25.200 would want, I would feel like I have less control of my thoughts. By that, what I mean is I'm like,

00:04:31.540 so if the next action I take is not determined by my life history and my biology, then it's determined

00:04:39.480 by randomness. That isn't empowering. That's not an empowering thought. And people will be like,

00:04:45.720 you believe that, because I don't know if this is what current physics says, but my understanding is

00:04:50.680 that there's some level of randomness within quantum events. And so that doesn't mean that

00:04:54.400 the future is predetermined. And I'm like, yeah, but even if that's true, that doesn't augment the

00:04:59.020 fact that the decisions I'm making aren't necessarily heavily affected by any choice that the sentient

00:05:06.920 part of me has made affecting this probabilistic thing. Therefore, it is irrelevant from the topic

00:05:13.620 of free will. And I'm wondering, is that sort of your take, or do you have a different?

00:05:18.420 Yeah, yeah, that's basically, that's the core problem. Like, it's like, you can't have it both

00:05:22.660 ways. Like, it's either free or you wilt it. But, you know, it doesn't fit together. And I think the

00:05:28.620 way that most people try to accommodate it is that they have this idea that somehow, this random element

00:05:34.480 from quantum processes. So it's a question of whether these even play a role in the brain,

00:05:39.040 but that's another story. They were willing to buy them after all. Sorry.

00:05:44.640 I was just promoting your video on the subject. You did one on it recently.

00:05:48.720 Yes, about the quantum effects. Yeah. So that's quite a long story. Just exactly what's the role of

00:05:55.840 quantum effects on the brain. I'd say it's very controversial. Basically, how much does it play a role

00:06:01.840 for consciousness, these quantum computer states? Yeah, so it's an active area of research. Maybe

00:06:07.080 they don't open-minded about it. But either way, I'd say it doesn't really give you free will.

00:06:12.400 And the reason I keep talking about it, why it matters to me, is that because they believe in

00:06:18.300 free will, a lot of people seem to think they're much less affected by their environment. They're much

00:06:24.920 less influenced by what happens in society around them than is actually the case. And I've been trying to

00:06:31.760 convey the message. You have to be careful about what kind of information ingest, basically,

00:06:37.180 because once it's in your brain, you don't get it out. It'll be there forever. And it will affect

00:06:41.960 you. The kind of stuff that you listen to, the kind of stuff that you read, it will affect you. And

00:06:46.820 you also have to be aware that the culture that you've grown up in and the society that you find

00:06:52.560 yourself in will affect the way that you think about yourself and what's going on on this planet.

00:06:57.420 I really appreciate that you come to that conclusion and advise people in that way after

00:07:02.240 coming to this deterministic conclusion, because I haven't finished it yet. I've started Robert

00:07:07.500 Sapolsky's Determined. And there's a lot of people discussing this and a lot of people saying,

00:07:12.620 well, it's dangerous telling people this because it could affect their behavior.

00:07:15.360 But taking it that one step further and just saying, one, okay, you don't have free will,

00:07:20.200 but you do have control over every action you take. So functionally, depending on how you look at it,

00:07:25.160 you're still responsible for everything you do. And you can 100% shape who you become by choosing

00:07:31.620 what you're exposed to. And I like that you take a message that would make a lot of people feel

00:07:37.620 hopeless and make it quite empowering in the end. Yeah, that's an awesome summary of exactly what I

00:07:43.800 was trying to do with my book. I'd like to say, okay, so we have arrived at this conclusion. Like,

00:07:47.800 you don't really have free will because physics, blah, blah, but let's take it one step further.

00:07:52.100 Yeah. And a point that I want to pull out here, because we've mentioned this a few times,

00:07:57.320 and I've noticed the way that this is often misapplied by people. And for me, it's one of

00:08:00.660 the most frustrating misapplications of physics is we will admit that quantum states can affect

00:08:08.160 potentially the way that neurons work and may even have like instrumental effects to the way neurons

00:08:14.800 work. But that doesn't mean that a soul or intentionality can hide within those quantum

00:08:21.760 effects. Those quantum effects are happening in your brain the same way they're happening all around

00:08:27.580 you, which is mechanistically, if randomly, if they are affecting your neural architecture,

00:08:35.320 it is in the same way they work within a quantum computer, which is with a level of... Anyway,

00:08:41.500 does that make sense what I'm saying there? Because that's something that always annoys me when I hear

00:08:45.160 this. Yeah, no, that's basically also my attitude to the thing. The one point where I disagree a

00:08:52.880 little bit is on exactly what those people mean with quantum effects on the brain. It's not just

00:08:57.680 anything that's quantum, because strictly speaking, everything is quantum anyway, so that it just

00:09:03.080 becomes a totally empty phrase. The brain is a quantum computer because it does something with quantum.

00:09:08.780 Oh, yeah. They're referring to normally certain types of coherent state or certain types of

00:09:14.740 entanglement. So part of the problem of this field, which is called quantum biology, is that everyone has

00:09:20.260 their own definition for exactly what they mean with the quantum effect. So in this recent paper,

00:09:25.340 which I talked about, it was some kind of big coherent state, loosely speaking. But yeah, like this isn't

00:09:32.220 anything that's specific to the brain. Like actually, I think in the paper that I talked about,

00:09:37.440 they didn't even do it in the brain. They just, they bought a box of certain molecules and put

00:09:42.500 them into a petri dish. And there's some chemistry going on. And I'm not much of a chemist, so don't

00:09:46.300 ask me. And so they produce these kind of bigger molecules, and then they shine light on them.

00:09:51.260 And it's nothing to do really with it. It's just quantum chemistry.

00:09:56.440 Yeah. Well, I would love to go further on your ideas around time in an area where I could use some

00:10:03.560 education on what the state of the field is right now. So what did you talk about in relation to

00:10:08.120 what we know about time right now? This is actually a really old story. This is all based on Albert

00:10:15.000 Einstein's theories of space and time. It's just that I think it's really hard to understand. And

00:10:21.420 just what are the consequences of this theory hasn't been really sunk. It hasn't sunk into society by

00:10:28.860 large, because the theory is much weirder than you might think. And one thing that Einstein worried

00:10:35.420 about a lot is that his theory doesn't distinguish the past, the present and the future. You just have

00:10:43.360 this one thing, this space time, and the entire universe is just one thing. There's a special moment

00:10:50.320 in it. And so this worried him a lot. It's now called the problem of now. Like, what's this thing that

00:10:57.420 we call now? And it's just mathematically, like, if you look at the theory and derive the equation

00:11:04.140 that's on it, it's quite simple to see where it comes from. Like, there is no way to consistently

00:11:11.260 define a moment of now that everyone agrees on. So that's the problem. Like, I can define my moment

00:11:17.820 of now, you can define one, and you can define one. But in general, we wouldn't all agree.

00:11:22.960 It's everything, everywhere, all at once.

00:11:26.220 Exactly. That's a brief summary. So now for practical purposes, since you and I said, I don't

00:11:31.700 know exactly where you are, but you're probably not moving with close by the speed of light relative

00:11:36.460 to me. For practical purposes, it doesn't make any difference. Our nows are pretty much the same.

00:11:42.220 But if you want to understand it on a fundamental level, like, what is this thing called time? How can

00:11:48.820 we make sense of it? You have to think about these sorts of problems. And so this whole line of

00:11:55.500 thought, which comes out of Einstein's theory, just said that everything exists at once. This is the

00:12:01.080 only way you can make sense of existence. And that is hard to swallow.

00:12:04.620 It's interesting. One of the things that I actually forget which one of Einstein's theories this was,

00:12:09.260 where he's, oh, the theory would predict this, but I'm just going to assume this never happens.

00:12:13.280 And then it, because it would be too weird if it did. And then later it turned out the thing that

00:12:17.960 he assumed never happened is something we observe. Yeah, that might be what it is. Yeah. And so even

00:12:22.680 other places where he's, no, this is just too weird, but the theory predicts this, it may turn out

00:12:27.440 that it's just right. It's just not the way we perceive things. And I think when we're talking about

00:12:32.680 things like time and physics, it's interesting that when you went into science, you wanted to

00:12:38.060 understand, I think like the nature of reality. And so you went into physics, but when I went in,

00:12:43.500 I wanted to understand the nature of reality. So I go into neuroscience because I'm like, what are

00:12:46.720 we? We're the brain. So I want to understand how that works so I can understand. But where these two

00:12:52.980 fields differ is really interesting to me in that if you're looking at psychology or the way we perceive

00:12:59.920 reality as humans, the ways that we evolve to perceive reality don't necessarily have to align

00:13:07.860 with the physical reality within which we live. They just have to be optimal from an evolutionary

00:13:14.220 perspective. So probably the most important factor here is humans neurologically appear

00:13:23.800 just incapable of conceiving of emergent properties. And this is hugely important for understanding

00:13:33.020 reality because a lot of reality is made up of emergent properties. So I'm going to quickly go

00:13:37.780 over an emergent property here. It'd be something like you can conceptually understand the way that

00:13:43.400 H2O molecules interact, but you cannot get from there to wetness within your own brain in the

00:13:50.820 conceptual framing. This creates a lot of problems around questions like sentience or consciousness or

00:13:58.800 big problems of the universe, because just there was no evolutionary reward for being able to

00:14:03.780 understand these sorts of emergent properties. And the same is likely true as time. If time,

00:14:11.000 like the past and the future, aren't particularly different from each other, if even a monodirectional

00:14:15.580 pathway through time isn't particularly unique, there would have been no evolutionary reward for being

00:14:22.880 able to conceive of that, which means that we would have an evolutionary bias against reality.

00:14:29.360 And I think looking for the areas that we might be evolutionarily biased against reality is really

00:14:36.080 important when engaging with physics.

00:14:40.240 Yeah. So I think I agree with most of what you said. I'm not entirely sure about the emergent

00:14:46.460 properties because I think that what we do in physics, I mean, you might be saying like you can't

00:14:51.960 intuitively understand it. Like you either have this one picture, like its molecules bumping into each

00:14:56.820 or that, or you have this other picture and it's like a fluid and it flows and so on. But mathematically,

00:15:01.920 we certainly have certain examples of emergent properties where we can understand how they come about.

00:15:08.460 Now you could say maybe I don't really intuitively understand the mathematics, but I can certainly use it.

00:15:14.100 I can use those equations. Like I don't know a lot about fluid dynamics, but an example that I'm more

00:15:20.140 familiar with might be conductivity, the conductivity of a metal or the optical properties.

00:15:25.800 Like this is stuff which people now heavily study with metamaterials, if you've ever heard of those,

00:15:32.600 like the custom designed materials with very specific emergent properties, like the way that

00:15:38.020 they react to certain sound or absorb it. And I'd say the people who work on metamaterials must have

00:15:43.140 a pretty good understanding of emergent properties. Now that said, sorry, I know you want to say

00:15:48.600 something, but I think you're quite right when it comes to this notion of time. It's something about the

00:15:54.720 way that our brain works, that we have this experience of the moment of now being special

00:16:00.020 because we need to deal with what's going on. Basically, we actually had a memory of the entire

00:16:06.900 past. Like it'd be a mess. Like how would we know what to do? So I think there's a strong

00:16:13.580 learning to blend out all this stuff which happened in your past, except for some very

00:16:19.960 special memories that you need, traumatic experiences that you need to be able to call

00:16:25.060 upon very quickly. Yeah. So by the way, I completely agree with you. The reason I was using the fluid

00:16:30.500 example is because like we understand the math of fluid dynamics. Like you can mathematically describe

00:16:35.960 something, but this becomes important in the field of consciousness, which is one that I'm really

00:16:40.100 interested in, which is to say that even if we could mathematically and mechanically describe

00:16:45.540 exactly how consciousness works, a person looking at that description wouldn't necessarily

00:16:52.040 like immediately go, oh, and obviously this explains sentience because we would say, oh,

00:16:58.260 sentience is downstream of all these equations and all these understandings of neural interactions,

00:17:02.260 but it's not going to immediately click for most people, but it might for some like geniuses

00:17:07.880 that I'm not part of that class. I think it comes down to the question, what do we even mean by

00:17:12.760 understanding? I get a lot of people who are like, oh, we don't really understand gravity or we don't

00:17:18.100 really understand quantum mechanics and that kind of stuff. And I'm like, if we do have the equations

00:17:22.320 and we know how to use the equations and we can actually make predictions that agree with reality,

00:17:27.480 what does it mean that we don't understand them? To me, this is what it means to understand

00:17:32.840 something. You have the mathematics, you know how to use it. Like we can discuss how well

00:17:37.680 the mathematics of quantum mechanics actually works, but that's a different story. So I don't

00:17:42.100 necessarily, so I understand that people probably mean on an intuitive level, they look at the

00:17:48.060 equation that doesn't tell them anything because you must have worked with them for a long time to

00:17:52.400 understand how it works. But to me that I'm comfortable with that kind of understanding that

00:17:58.640 we have the math and we know how to use it. I actually want to elevate this question here about

00:18:03.120 what does it mean to understand something? Because one of the things that we've been building out,

00:18:06.700 the Collins Institute, which is an alternative school system, and it's one of the questions

00:18:10.420 that we've been asking a lot to ourselves is how can we get objective measures of understanding

00:18:16.320 within subject domains? And the definition of understanding that we came to is that it is

00:18:23.660 knowledge that helps an individual through understanding, through knowledge of an environmental

00:18:30.180 context, predict future environmental states. And that the better, if you're judging better

00:18:36.820 understanding, a person with more of whatever this measure is, can more accurately predict future

00:18:42.740 environmental states. And this is something that is as important from physics as it is to more

00:18:48.660 controversial topics like politics or economics. And it's why with our school, we're actually partnered

00:18:55.540 with Metaculous, but we haven't done anything with them yet because we haven't gotten to that level of

00:18:59.140 our development, but it's a prediction marketplace. So we use prediction marketplaces, students ranking

00:19:04.900 within prediction marketplaces to then judge the quality of questions that we're asking them.

00:19:10.580 It's a very... Yeah, I'm surprised, but I actually pretty much agree with what you say. I would

00:19:14.980 have put it a little bit different. I'd say it's the ability to create a predictive model of a certain

00:19:20.740 system system. You collect information by learning and you create a certain model of how the thing

00:19:29.620 or the field or whatever you want to talk about works, and then you're able to make predictions

00:19:35.060 from them. I think actually a good example of this is what psychologists call a theory of mind. I think

00:19:41.460 basically the way that it works is that you observe other people and you figure out how do they react to

00:19:47.540 other stuff and you create a theory of how their mind works. Absolutely. And if you study them for

00:19:53.540 long enough, you develop a more or less predictive model about how this person is likely to behave in

00:19:59.540 certain circumstances. Yeah. Oh, and this is actually a great thing to elevate here because it's one of

00:20:04.180 the ways that evolution sort of messes with our brain. So we can think of a theory of mind, if you've

00:20:08.580 worked with computers for a long time, it's like an emulator that's running a separate operating system

00:20:13.220 and little sectioned off place of your operating system. But humans evolved to be very good at

00:20:18.820 creating these emulators to the extent that in a video that I haven't gone live yet where I talk

00:20:23.860 about because one of my fields of expertise used to be schizophrenia is that in schizophrenia, my thought

00:20:28.100 is what's happening here is these are actually just hyper-stimulated little emulations that are

00:20:32.820 running that we evolve for a theory of mind. But it also creates a problem with human, which is this is

00:20:37.140 where a lot of magical thought comes from, where people intuit intentionality behind either global

00:20:43.860 events which can lead to conspiracy theories or behind weather patterns which can lead to theology

00:20:50.180 or behind the way things are arranged in a shop window, is that we always want to interpret

00:20:56.340 unexplained patterns through a background intentionality instead of through alternate models

00:21:03.380 because if your brain's a hammer, everything's a nail. Yeah, that's right. I think there are many

00:21:10.020 other things coming in there, like a lot of people I think they don't like uncertainty, so they can't

00:21:14.820 just let it out. We just don't know what happened there, we don't know, we can't explain it. And so they

00:21:19.940 have this need to have an explanation. And I think this is also one of the factors that creates a lot of

00:21:25.460 conspiracy thinking. Yeah. Here's a question I have for you. Do you think that like what is the state of

00:21:32.340 physics right now on timelines? If you were to guess, do we live in a branching timeline or do we live in

00:21:40.180 a single timeline? The person that I call me lives in a single timeline. So phrase this very carefully,

00:21:52.020 because if you're talking about these branching timelines, the question, what do you even mean by you,

00:21:57.060 becomes very difficult to answer. Am I the thing that would be branching over all these timelines

00:22:03.140 if they exist? And then what does it mean that they even branch? All of them, so that's weird.

00:22:08.340 But as I go on in my book, Existential Physics, which we started out talking about, is that you can't

00:22:14.500 ever confirm that these other timelines exist. So to me, it's a little bit pointless to even go on about it.

00:22:21.380 Yeah. So Simone's theory on this particular topic, or the way that she conceives of herself,

00:22:26.820 which I found to be very useful because it wasn't the way that I did when I met her,

00:22:30.420 is to only think of herself as existing in any particular frame of time. And all future iterations

00:22:36.100 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,

00:22:50.260 which is another problem about how we communicate a lot of these concepts, is that as humans,

00:22:55.060 because we verbally communicate, we need to collapse ideas, which perhaps could be more nuanced,

00:23:01.860 or just there's this definition of self, and there's this definition of self, and neither one is

00:23:05.300 superior. But people need to choose one to more efficiently communicate with other people,

00:23:10.580 which causes disagreements. But you may disagree with that.

00:23:13.220 I would just add that I think the more important thing is how the framing that you choose affects

00:23:18.980 your behavior. To your earlier point, like the point of the book, is depending on how you view

00:23:23.540 yourself, you are going to behave very differently. Like psychology studies have found, of course,

00:23:28.740 I don't know if they've been replicated, but they found that when people are primed to think

00:23:32.900 about their future selves, they make different decisions in the present. When they see older,

00:23:37.940 aged versions of themselves, or they've gone through an exercise in which they're encouraged

00:23:41.220 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

00:23:52.020 one ephemeral person in service to a larger identity, which is what I do, it helps me make more

00:23:57.060 responsible decisions, versus sort of things just being like, I'm me here and now.

00:24:01.860 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 1.00

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

00:30:51.460 are communicated as true.

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. 1.00

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.

00:34:28.580 Lovely to talk to you.

Based Camp - June 04, 2024

Free Will, Time, and Understanding Reality With Sabine Hossenfelder

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