#120 — What Is and What Matters
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Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I talk to philosopher Rebecca Goldstein and physicist Max Tegmark about the relationship between science and philosophy, and the role of facts and values in our understanding of reality, and how they play a role in understanding the nature of reality. We also talk about what it means to be a scientist and a philosopher, and why we need to leave scientific rigor aside in order to make sense of reality and the things we think we know about it, and what we really know about reality. And we talk about the role that science plays in helping us understand reality. This episode was recorded at a live event I did in Boston a few months ago, and I introduce them both from the stage, so you ll be reminded of who they are in a moment, but we focus in this conversation on the foundations of human knowledge and morality, as well as a conversation about what is and what matters. And as is often the case with live events like this, there are some sound issues. The sound is definitely not perfect, but I think you ll find the conversation as interesting as I did, and hopefully you'll find the audio as interesting, as you did as well. Thanks for listening. -Sam Harris If you enjoyed this episode, please consider becoming a supporter of what we re doing here, and becoming one of our listeners! if you enjoy what we're doing here - we're making sense, please help us make sense by becoming a subscriber! - and if you like what we do here - please consider supporting us by becoming one! Thank you, become a supporter, and spreading the word to your friends and family about what we are doing here! . Sam Harris, Sam, by making sense. Timestamps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21. 22. 23. 25. 24. 26. 27. Intro Music: Intro and Outro Music: "Make Sense" by Ian Dorsch (featuring: "The Good Morning America" by Jeff Perla (feat. John McDade ( ) & Other) Music by Ian McKellan ( ) & Other ( ) - "Outro Music by Jeff McElroy ( )
Transcript
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Okay, so not much housekeeping here, just a few words by way of context.
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This is the audio of the event I did in Boston a few months ago with Rebecca Goldstein and
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I introduced them both from the stage, so you'll be reminded of who they are in a moment.
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But we focus in this conversation on the foundations of human knowledge and morality as well.
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It's really a conversation about what is and what matters.
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And as is often the case with live events like this, there were some sound issues.
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The sound is definitely echoey and not perfect, but I think you'll acclimate.
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Hopefully, you'll find the conversation as interesting as I did.
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And so, now I give you Rebecca Goldstein and Max Tegmark.
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I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
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My first guest is a philosopher and a novelist.
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She has written about the relationship between science and religion and science and values.
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And she's also just written wonderful books on some famous people, Plato and Spinoza and
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And she's received many awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the National Humanities
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He's authored more than 200 technical papers on topics ranging from cosmology to AI.
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And he's the president of the Future of Life Institute.
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And he's now one of my go-to guests on the podcast.
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I think this will be his third appearance, if I'm not mistaken.
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So as I said, I've really been looking forward to this because these are two people who I
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can really just dive into the deep end of the pool with without much concern about whether
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I say in the run-up to this, Rebecca sent me an email asking if I knew what I wanted to
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And then she sent me another email that had maybe a thousand words in it.
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And it was just the most amazing roadmap to my intellectual life.
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It's what I want to spend the next 10 years thinking about.
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So I'm going to use that very much to guide this conversation.
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And Max hasn't seen any of this, so he should just be terrified.
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So I want to talk about what we think we know about reality and why we think we know it.
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And I want to talk about the parts of reality that matter and what makes them matter and whether
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we have to depart from scientific rigor in order to talk about anything mattering.
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And so this conversation will take us onto terrain that I love, which is the relationship
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But to start, I want to talk briefly about the relationship between science and philosophy.
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And so, Rebecca, I'd like to start with you and just, I mean, there are many scientists
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who have said very disparaging things about philosophy.
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There's actually one who we both know who I'm having an event with in about 48 hours.
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He should probably remain nameless, but his name rhymes with Lawrence Krauss.
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But you repeatedly point out in your work that science is riddled with philosophy just from
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And that if you are not aware of your philosophical assumptions when doing science, you're very
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likely to be making illegitimate claims about how your science maps onto reality.
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So start us off with a little bit on the relationship between science and philosophy as you see
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So, yeah, I sent you this roadmap and now I'm trying to situate myself on it.
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I think that science is our great arbiter in trying to figure out the nature of reality,
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And I think that this increment of science, the amazing trick that it eventually worked
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out sometime in the 17th century was that it gets reality itself to collaborate with us
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And so our intuitions about space and time and individuation and teleology and causality,
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all of these very deep intuitive intuitions we have turn out to be off.
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I mean, the nature of reality itself turns out that reality out there exists exactly as it's
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represented to us in our subjective experience is off.
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And so this is an amazing thing that we've figured out what to do to get reality, to prod
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reality so that it will answer us back when we're getting it wrong.
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So, oh, so you think simultaneity is absolute, do you?
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It seems intuitively obvious that two events are either simultaneous with each other or not,
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regardless of which reference frames they're measured in, moving relative to each other.
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So any question that we can figure out so that somehow reality itself can kind of smack us around
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and tell us that we've gotten it wrong, that's scientific.
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What philosophy, I think, is about is trying to maximize our coherence.
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I think for reasons that science is beginning to tell us why evolutionary psychology can tell us why we're such compartmentalized creatures.
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And it's philosophy's job to vitiate our happiness.
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And that's been the way of philosophy ever since Socrates was wandering around that agora in his dirty, chitin, annoying people,
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getting them, showing them the internal contradictions.
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It has to, philosophy has to take all of the knowledge that science is giving us about what is,
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about the nature of reality, and test it against other of our intuitions,
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and see which are compatible, which are incompatible, what the options are.
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So if philosophy is always dependent on science, a good philosopher has to know, has to keep up the science.
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But it's a different kind of skill set that's called for.
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It's not figuring out how to describe reality and then tell us if it's right or wrong.
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And it's not merely a matter of being the birthplace of science, because people, it's often said,
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and I think I've said it myself, that there was a time where all questions,
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virtually all questions of interest were philosophical,
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and then what's so-called natural philosophy birthed off these specific sciences.
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And I think in one of your papers you talk about just people in philosophy signaling,
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you know, we need some more science over here, you know, come help us.
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It happens in the course of asking these questions and trying to get our bearings in the world,
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that sometimes philosophers very often will put forth proto-scientific questions.
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The empirical means of prodding reality, getting reality to be our collaborator, doesn't exist yet.
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And often it's because the philosopher has asked the question that the science emerges.
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It's happening now in, you know, a lot of the fields that evolutionary psychology
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and cognitive neuroscience is taking over before psychology.
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But I think that that is a, that's not what philosophy is about.
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Philosophy is not about prematurely ejaculating scientific questions, right?
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It happens as a kind of accident, you know, in, in, in trying to maximize our coherence.
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On that note, I'm going to ask Max what he thinks about philosophy.
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I've been in many physics conferences where someone is, some physicist has accused someone else of being too philosophical,
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You know, to me, philosophy is really a synonym of clear, logical thinking.
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And if you look at the PhD that I have and ask, what does the PH stand for?
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You know, I have news for those grumpy physics curmudgeons.
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Because, well, natural philosophy is the phrase we used to use to describe what we now call science.
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And so within science itself, we often distinguish between theory and experiment.
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I guess in your words, Rebecca, you could say philosophy is the pure theory.
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Of course, all theory and no experiment, well, then you get string theory.
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And that might be too much of a good thing also.
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Generally, we've had the most healthy progress when we've had both,
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where you have those theorists who keep annoying the experimentalists,
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like pointing out inconsistencies and giving them new ideas for things to try,
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And at the same time, you have these experiments who keep annoying the theorists
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It's this interplay, which has always been at work,
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whenever we've had really great progress, I would say.
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I think that's the biggest laugh I've ever heard with string theory is the punchline.
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Let's just cut the enemies of philosophy a little slack here in that
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there's a difference in how we think about intellectual progress.
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So to say that there's been scientific progress is to say something
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What sort of philosophical progress have we made?
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I'm sure you will say that we have made some and that it should be obvious to us,
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but we rarely talk as though we're making and have made great progress.
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Before I address that, I just did want to say, in my saying that science is our best means
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of answering the question of what is, the nature of reality,
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for me to actually defend that view would take me outside of science.
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I would have to put forth a philosophical argument, which I'm very prepared to do.
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But I mean, there are other views about what science is all about, instrumentalism.
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I mean, that scientific theories never expand our ontology, our nature of reality of what is,
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but it's just, you know, it's a means of predicting future experiences.
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And it never, you know, so there's no reason to think that these theoretical entities
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that are used in scientific theories really exist,
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that there are fields or quarks or, you know, black holes or anything.
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And, you know, and some very good scientists in the past and some philosophers as well,
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So even to say what it is that science is doing, science, reality can't tell us,
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is it instrumentalism or is it realism, scientific realism?
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That, you know, depends on a philosophical argument trying to make coherent, you know,
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what we're getting, the input we're getting from science.
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So it's just to, you know, to argue, I can understand how, I call them philosophy jurors,
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you know, some of our most celebrated or certainly high-profile scientists who just really dismiss
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Their argument is, what else is our intelligence good for other than figuring out what is?
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Therefore, you know, there are questions that we haven't answered yet about the nature of reality,
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but, you know, just give scientists enough time and research grants and they'll get it.
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Well, there are other kinds of questions, including what is it that science is doing
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So you can't even make the argument without wandering into philosophy.
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So I want to talk about realism versus all of its enemies, like instrumentalism.
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But just briefly, it is often thought that we don't make philosophical progress because the
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same sorts of problems seem to come around, you know, and we're still reading Plato.
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If we made progress, why would anyone ever read Plato ever again?
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So if you could just briefly address that before we move on to realism.
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And one of the arguments that I try to make is, first of all, when you read Plato and Aristotle,
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I mean, you're really amazed at how good they were at spotting the questions, but how bad
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I mean, a lot of these, you know, answers have been disposed of.
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And a lot of, the other thing I think is that as we make philosophical progress, science
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has incorporated in a lot of the arguments about interpreting science that were really
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The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, right?
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The primary qualities are the ones that we captured in the language of mathematics, you
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So position and motion and weight and anything that can be described and measured in purely
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And then you can subject them to mathematical equations and make progress.
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And everything else was deposited in the mind, you know, so the way things look and the
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way they taste and the way they smell, that was all put into the mind.
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This was all a philosophical argument made in the 17th century that just sort of became
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incorporated into what we think of as a scientific point of view now.
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It's a philosophical interpretation, but it is philosophy and the arguments were philosophy
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and it is part of what we think of as a scientific, you know, world view now.
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I think that in general what happens, I think that there has been a lot of progress and I think
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particularly in moral philosophy, that these were moral, testing our inconsistencies, our moral
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inconsistencies, pointing them out, making arguments and moving us forward so that it's
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inconceivable to us now when we look back at our slave-owning, wife-beating, heretic-burning,
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And it was philosophical arguments that got us to see it so that now it just seems, you
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know, we don't see philosophical progress because we see with it.
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It becomes the very lens that we're looking at the world with.
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So yeah, it really is the water in which we swim intellectually.
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And so I want to talk about realism, which can be defined in a few different ways.
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But when I think about it, whether you're talking about scientific realism or moral realism or
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even introspective realism, just trying to figure out what it's actually like to be you in each
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moment, it's the claim that there are truths whether you know them or not, right?
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It's possible to be right or wrong about the nature of reality.
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And it's possible to not know what you're missing.
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There's an appearance-reality distinction where you're trying to get behind appearances.
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And science is arguably the most rigorous place where we try to get behind appearances,
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or it certainly has the most rigorous methodology.
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Max, how do you think about this appearance and reality distinction as a physicist and cosmologist?
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Because as Rebecca said, you can spend a lot of time as a scientist reconciling yourself
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to being an instrumentalist, which is just, you know, the math works out, we can predict
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the results of experiments, but who knows what we're actually probing into?
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One thing I've been quite surprised by over the years, actually, is how many scientists are
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even though you have an incredibly intelligent bunch of people to come to entirely opposing
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And often when you probe a little bit deeper, it's because they're quite naive about it and
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haven't even bothered understanding, you know, the various opposing points of views, and
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because they dismiss all of this as too philosophical, but then they have their own closet philosophy
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And some scientists take this very instrumentalist point of view that, hey, who cares about if
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We should just focus on building gadgets that work and so on.
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That's, I guess, really just a preference, a matter of interest.
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Some people like chocolate ice cream, some people prefer strawberry, you know, if someone
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It's this deep curiosity to try to understand more about the cosmos we live in that made
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Then there's a second school of dissent, you know, not the ones who say, I don't care about
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what reality is, but that deny its existence at some level.
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You get people who deny what I call the external reality hypothesis, this hypothesis that there
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actually is an external reality independent of us humans.
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Of course, you get some extreme folks like solipsists will just say that nothing outside their
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But you also get the very famous people like Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of
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quantum mechanics, who said, no reality without observation about his quantum theory.
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Which, when you think about it, means that humans, it's our observing that somehow makes
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And this, to me, feels extremely arrogant, I have to say.
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No offense to you folks, or you folks, but I'm pretty sure that if all of us disappeared,
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the Andromeda galaxy would happily keep doing its thing.
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Less of a thought-through, really, scientific position, or philosophical position, and more
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like just the continuation of this human hubris that set us back in so many other ways.
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You know, we used to be so obsessive about Earth being the center of the solar system,
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and then denying the idea that there could be other solar systems.
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We even burnt Giordano Bruno at the stake 400 years ago for saying that.
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And then there's now a resistance of the idea of maybe parallel universes, also this idea
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that somehow we're so special relative to animals or slaves or whatever.
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So now when we say, oh, we're so special that reality couldn't exist without us, I think
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it's silly, but it's a viewpoint I encounter quite a bit still.
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Yeah, so the interesting thing is, of course, if philosophical education was part of scientific
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education, they would find these kinds of viewpoints having been put forth.
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I mean, Bishop Barclay, nothing, you know, S.A.
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S. Perkipi, nothing exists unless you perceive it.
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You know, he was putting forth these views, and other people were criticizing them.
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I mean, there's a whole long history where these things have been argued out and its weaknesses
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It would be so stupid of me as a, you know, as a non-biologist to think that I'm just going
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to charge in and say what's wrong with, you know, evolutionary biology or something without
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educating myself, there is a discipline in which all of these views have been argued out and
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hammered out and their strong points and their weak points evaluated.
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And since physics and all science raises these philosophical questions, why not study the field?
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But you see, this is precisely where this anti-philosophical snobbery comes in as a psychological defense
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mechanism, because these scientists will say, well, I don't do philosophy.
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And then they will charge in and talk about all these philosophical questions, make up their
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own non-standard terms for things that philosophers have discussed for hundreds of years, and completely
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And then effectively, what they're doing is this bad, uninformed philosophy, right?
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And they justify it to themselves by saying it's all, that philosophy is somehow stupid.
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I don't think that philosophy can be avoided, not just by scientists, but by all humans.
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I mean, I, in fact, think, you know, one way or another, we're all trying to get our bearings
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in the world, figure out what is and what matters.
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There's, and you can't avoid, you know, some kind of philosophy in doing that.
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And unfortunately, there are impressive reasons to be skeptical that we're good at doing any
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And it's not just the sort of the outcomes we see around us.
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It's that if you take an evolutionary perspective, if you take the perspective of evolutionary
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psychology, it's pretty clear that there are two inconvenient facts here.
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It wasn't designed so as to be perfectly interpretable by us.
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And that's provided we're not living in a simulation that was run by the Mormons who actually
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I'm waiting to find that out, that Mormonism is in fact true in this simulation and everything
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I've been saying is going to consign me to hell.
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But there's also the fact that we have not evolved our cognitive toolkit, our intuitional
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toolkit, and we'll talk about the primacy of intuition in a moment, has not, it hasn't
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been tuned up by evolution to track reality as it is.
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It's just, that's just not the sort of apes we are.
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And so what do you, I think that's very astute what you're saying there, Sam, because
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the, one of the reasons that has caused a lot of curmudgeonly scientists again and again
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dismiss philosophers and often dismiss even other scientists, like who were a little too
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radical for their taste, you know, Einstein type, was precisely by saying, oh, these ideas
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And when they couldn't refute them with experiment, they would refute them by saying, that's not
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And, but what that really meant, saying that it was too weird, if you reinterpret that sentence
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in the context of evolutionary psychology, really meant that, you know, you know, obviously,
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as you said, we evolved our brains to have intuition for the things that were useful for our ancestors,
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right, like how to hurl rocks at people and not get hit by the parabolic motions and stuff.
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We had no intuition whatsoever for anything that wasn't useful to them, like things moving
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much faster than us near the speed of light, or things much smaller than us, like quantum
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So what evolution actually predicts for science is that whenever we use tech to see things
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that our ancestors had no access to, it should seem weird.
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It should challenge our very notion of what the boundaries of science are.
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It should probably force us even to redefine from time to time, you know, what we mean
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So one could say, in that sense, that people who are being dismissive like this, of things
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just because they say they're too weird, or this is not science, or too philosophical,
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are really denying the fact that they're evolved apes.
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And they're taking this evolved evolution, and they're a notion of what's intuitive and
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what's weird, we're conflating that with some kind of truth.
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Listen, it's actually a point that we hit in a previous podcast, but I think it's worth
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reiterating, is that you would be suspicious of any final description of reality that was
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Because we know our common sense isn't fitted to timeframes in billions of years, or to
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the Planck scale, or to anything else that is at the frontier of your discipline.
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The common sense, we should assume from evolution that it should simply be a useful approximation
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for that very limited domain of reality that we had access to without microscopes, or telescopes,
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So that's, of course, I mean, of course, science has come too far, we could never go back to
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I mean, relativity theory, you know, general relativity theory, quantum mechanics, it's
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And so we know that reality does not correspond, so some of our deepest intuitions about space
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and time and causality, they've already been, you know, they're gone.
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Except for those people who believe that all of this was created by a person just like us
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who doesn't like homosexuality, for some reason.
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And I guess that's, I mean, you said that there are two great obstacles to our understanding
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the nature of reality, what is and what matters.
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I mean, to me, those are the two big questions.
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And, you know, and one is that, yes, obviously, unless this world was created by some designer
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who made sure that our cognitive abilities are up to the task, not much evidence for that.
00:29:49.300
But, yeah, this world, the laws of nature, they were not designed with our cognitive faculties
00:30:03.580
To me, when people talk about all that we don't know, I'm not amazed by that.
00:30:09.240
I'm amazed that we know anything, given that we are these evolved apes.
00:30:15.080
And the other thing that keeps us, and here is a little more about moral knowledge, that
00:30:21.960
keeps us from understanding nature of certain aspects of reality, including moral reality,
00:30:30.420
is, you know, our own self-involvement, our own way of privileging ourself and those we love,
00:30:42.780
And so, and that also is a tremendous obstacle in terms of, we've made very slow moral progress.
00:30:52.700
We've, you know, we've made it, but it's, there's a real, and there, it's not getting
00:30:59.880
It's more looking at the various things we believe and seeing the internal inconsistencies.
00:31:04.800
So we've got science to this great thing of just, you know, we need reality to answer
00:31:11.580
us back, because reality, you know, wasn't created with our, with our capacities in mind.
00:31:16.220
So we've developed this, these scientific tools.
00:31:19.340
And I say philosophy is these other different set of tools, thought experiments, and forcing
00:31:28.380
people to put all their premises out on the table, digging them out, going further and
00:31:33.340
further, what are the presumptions of your belief?
00:31:36.240
And the end game of that is to, the end of that game is to, to expose our, our inconsistencies,
00:31:48.900
That's, I'm really, that's, that's our saving grace, really.
00:31:53.000
If you, we find all sorts of ways of denying that we are internally inconsistent, because it's
00:32:00.080
usually working to our advantage to deny these inconsistencies.
00:32:05.200
But if you really keep hammering at it, and you push people's faces into it, eventually
00:32:18.000
It's not science, a different kind of reasoning activity.
00:32:24.080
It's humbling to consider just how ill-prepared we are for our modern circumstance by evolution.
00:32:31.280
When you think of something as simple and as obviously evolved and as fundamental to
00:32:40.080
Like, so we are, we've obviously evolved to feel pain, but we have not evolved to sense
00:32:45.620
pain in a way that is especially useful in a modern context.
00:32:49.440
For instance, you can feel excruciating pain or be at least seriously inconvenienced by
00:32:57.100
Which is, means nothing, but you can, your body can be riddled with cancer and you feel
00:33:02.920
no pain at all because we have not evolved in a condition with oncologists and hospitals.
00:33:07.980
But it would be very useful to feel pain associated with cancer.
00:33:12.920
There's almost certainly intellectual equivalence to that sort of disability where it would be,
00:33:18.280
it would be so much nicer to be able to do something intuitively or effortlessly that is in some
00:33:30.920
And so we're now talking about the prospect of building minds better than our own at doing
00:33:36.880
Do you spend any time worrying that there are certain questions that can be posed that are
00:33:41.340
interesting, but take string theory as an example.
00:33:44.720
Is string theory just a intellectual dead end that has absorbed the careers of now a full
00:33:54.020
I don't want to be able to make you any enemies here, but if not string theory, do you worry
00:33:59.500
that there is something very much like that where we are just, we're playing with tools
00:34:03.560
that are too blunt or not shaped appropriately for that corner of the universe?
00:34:08.540
Well, let me say two things, first about string theory, and then more broadly about what we
00:34:16.600
For string theory, even though I was joking about it earlier, and even though Sheldon on
00:34:21.420
the Big Bang Theory has now broken up with string theory, hope I'm not spoiling it for anyone
00:34:26.780
So the fact of the matter is that most physicists today who say they're working on string theory
00:34:32.900
are actually working on much more broad questions than just fundamental theoretical physics.
00:34:38.600
And string has just been kind of the thing they call themselves to sort of have a little
00:34:43.900
But it's more like what was the theory formally known as strings.
00:34:48.860
And I think there's a lot of promising avenues in there, for sure.
00:34:53.260
That doesn't mean every physicist should work on it, obviously.
00:34:56.100
But it's good to take swings for the fences sometimes.
00:34:59.140
On the broader question about what we can and can't do with our evolved mind, I think as
00:35:04.860
an antidote, we had a lot of negativity here where we were lamenting, oh, evolution has
00:35:13.420
And we're no good at putting it be great if we could have better pain sensors for this.
00:35:17.660
And so the flip side of that is I think there's a lot we can be very grateful for also that
00:35:25.420
And as you said, that's in a way worked way better than expectation.
00:35:30.660
It is a kind of a miracle that it works as well as it does.
00:35:37.380
And first of all, if you think about what we actually evolved for, our bodies haven't
00:35:49.080
Now we're sitting, we're in a big giant wooden stone box with weird artificial suns here
00:36:00.540
Everything is about, we spend large fractions of tangles.
00:36:08.520
I just want to remedy this problem because civilization is not working as well as advertising.
00:36:23.300
So, but on the optimistic side, first of all, it's remarkable how adaptable we are.
00:36:30.580
And second, I do think it's actually really remarkable how much better we've been able
00:36:37.220
to do with science than one might have thought.
00:36:40.700
We are actually the masters of underestimation is, I think, the summary of what we've learned
00:36:46.200
from science in the past many thousands of years.
00:36:48.880
First, we've, of course, underestimated dramatically the size of reality and everything we thought
00:36:53.920
existed with just a small part of a much grander structure, right?
00:36:56.580
A planet, a solar system, a galaxy, galaxy cluster, universe, maybe more.
00:37:01.280
But more fundamentally, we've also underestimated our own potential as humans to figure out our
00:37:10.580
I think when Plato and Aristotle and so on were trying to understand a little bit of physics,
00:37:19.260
And there were just a few things they thought they could find some formulas and regularities
00:37:24.360
And then it turned out that was also completely wrong, what Aristotle had.
00:37:26.900
And it took 1,500 years until Galileo fixed it.
00:37:29.660
And yet today, we can turn it around and note that actually, you know, whereas Galileo, he
00:37:36.720
could have a grape and a hazelnut and tell you how they would move if you threw them, right?
00:37:40.100
But he couldn't tell you why the grape was green and the hazelnut was brown and why the
00:37:46.260
Now, we can answer all of those questions with electromagnetism, with quantum mechanics.
00:37:51.700
And we have managed to bring into the domain of science almost all aspects of the physical
00:37:58.560
world now, except for consciousness and intelligence.
00:38:02.440
And continuing just on the optimistic, you know, gratitude side of this, this understanding
00:38:08.640
has been wonderful, not just for satisfying our philosophical curiosity, but it's precisely
00:38:14.740
this deeper understanding, which has, of course, given us the technology, which has transformed
00:38:21.420
That's why our life expectancy isn't 35 anymore, right?
00:38:24.860
And so even though, yeah, it kind of sucks that I'm so dumb and, you know, that evolution...
00:38:39.420
You know, actually, things were not mysterious to Aristotle.
00:38:44.640
I mean, he had a complete worldview that seemed to answer everything.
00:38:52.980
It was a completely wrong methodology of explanation because teleology was at its center.
00:39:01.340
I mean, the incredible thing that happened in the 17th century with Galileo and then even
00:39:05.480
more with Newton is that this marriage of mathematics with empirical observation and prediction, this
00:39:16.820
It's not at all intuitively obvious that you take this, you know, what philosophers call a priori
00:39:25.880
It's not at all dependent on experience, right?
00:39:29.940
And you marry it to observations and you get this powerful methodology for exploring reality.
00:39:39.920
And for Aristotle, you know, the quantitative was just one of the 10 categories of description
00:39:52.360
What processes have an end and we understand a process, a physical process, all processes,
00:40:00.440
by understanding what it's supposed to be accomplished through it.
00:40:04.100
So it was a, you know, it was a way of explaining, but it just didn't work.
00:40:09.200
And so, you know, it was, so really, you know, science, we haven't been at work in science,
00:40:17.460
I'd say we've been at work since the 17th century.
00:40:20.340
So it's even more amazing how much progress we've made.
00:40:22.620
May I just add a little bit to what you said there, Rebecca?
00:40:25.980
I think this is also a tribute to modern philosophy where the key word, I think, is humility.
00:40:32.040
The idea that to get things right, we first have to be open to the idea that we might be
00:40:36.840
wrong and actually question everything, in particular, question our own prejudices.
00:40:41.700
And that's what was really missing in Aristotle's time.
00:40:45.320
And once we got used to this idea that not only were we often wrong, and it was a good idea to question it,
00:40:53.320
but often when we questioned ourselves, that's precisely when we were able to get great new breakthroughs,
00:40:59.360
which helped ushered in the modern revolution, the Renaissance, science, and all the tech.
00:41:08.120
There's a kind of collective humility, I think, in both science and in philosophy,
00:41:13.580
which very fortunately doesn't require that the actual practitioners be humble.
00:41:24.060
Yeah, but there's a kind of collective humility.
00:41:28.040
And I, yeah, so I often think of, to me, the very definition of me being a scientist
00:41:33.160
is that I would rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question.
00:41:43.580
So I want to talk about the concept of possibility.
00:41:51.120
So much of what we talk about in our personal lives and in science and in philosophy takes
00:41:58.040
as an assumption that there is a world of possibility.
00:42:01.580
To talk about counterfactuals, things that might have been different make sense.
00:42:06.740
To talk about certain things that could have happened, but in fact didn't happen.
00:42:11.540
What gives us license to say that we might have done this event yesterday as opposed to today?
00:42:17.660
And is this necessarily a scientifically or philosophically meaningful statement?
00:42:24.420
I guess there are two views in philosophy and science that seem on their surface to be almost the same.
00:42:33.000
So I wanted you to describe what's called modal realism in philosophy.
00:42:39.620
And I wanted to connect that up with this picture of the many worlds interpretation of QM and then just talk a little bit about what it means to think in terms of possibility.
00:42:49.660
Because my default setting now is that it may not make any sense at all to talk about possibility.
00:42:56.900
That what is actual is in fact all there is and ever is and ever will be.
00:43:03.200
And that possibility is just a fiction that we have spun in our conversation about what is in fact unfolding or seems to be unfolding.
00:43:16.000
Actually, Max would be better about modal realism because I think he believes in it and I don't.
00:43:25.160
Well, you're more of a card-carrying philosopher than I am.
00:43:32.780
But if you loosely speaking take it to mean that everything that could exist does exist, I find that an interesting idea, but it's a little bit too wishy-washy to be really scientifically testable.
00:43:45.220
And the various theories of physics that give you some kind of multiverse, whether it be distant regions of space that light hasn't reached us from yet, which are predicted by some versions of inflation that gave us a big bang, or the ones of quantum mechanics or something else.
00:44:09.700
It's not like everything I could think about after I had too much wine exists, but rather if you have some particular equations, physics have this solution, you know, if they have another solution too, maybe that exists.
00:44:24.280
That's the kind of alternative realities that these theories tend to give in.
00:44:28.140
But the shocking thing is that those alternative realities are still, in those cases, very many.
00:44:36.480
So, for example, my colleague Alan Guth here at MIT, when he and others came up with this inflation theory, which is the most popular mainstream theory of science right now for what caused our Big Bang, you know, what it basically says is, yeah, you took something smaller than an atom and it kept doubling its size over and over and over again until it was vastly larger than all the space that we can see, that we call our universe.
00:45:03.460
And it also predicts that all this other space is also kind of uniformly filled with stuff initially.
00:45:09.560
We know that in this neck of the woods, that stuff, those atoms and so on, gradually coalesced into form, among other places, the Milky Way galaxy, our solar system, and Sam Harris, respect Rebecca Goldstein, and me and you, and here we are, you know.
00:45:23.700
But we know that the probability that this would happen in some random place isn't zero because it happened here.
00:45:32.200
And inflation typically predicts you actually have an infinite amount of other places with stuff.
00:45:36.760
So if you roll the dice infinitely many times, of course, it's going to happen again.
00:45:40.840
And the shocking prediction is then that if you go far enough away, you're going to get to another place where this identical conversation is taking place.
00:45:53.980
The first one you come to, the person wearing the red sweater is going to be named Max Schmegmark, and he's going to be speaking some incomprehensible different language, whatever.
00:46:03.740
But if you go far enough, you'll even find someone who speaks English and has the same memories.
00:46:12.040
But you can't dismiss it just by saying it sounds too weird, right?
00:46:16.080
The way you dismiss it would be to falsify this physics theory, Alan Guth's equations.
00:46:21.880
And there are people building experiments right now to try to falsify it or test it better.
00:46:27.820
And that's how we're ultimately going to sort it out, not by having prejudice about it.
00:46:33.740
So the philosopher who argued very strongly for modal realism was David Lewis.
00:46:45.200
Yeah, no, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, he was actually on my dissertation committee.
00:46:59.740
I never met him, but he was supposed to be very smart.
00:47:02.440
He was a formidable philosopher and a very sweet man.
00:47:05.460
I actually have a very strong mental image right now.
00:47:08.580
He had a train set in his basement, and he would only take people he liked very much down there.
00:47:18.660
That sounds kind of sketchy when a professor says, hey, do you want to come down to my basement?
00:47:27.760
So, anyway, yeah, you really stole the thunder from this David Lewis story, I have to say.
00:47:38.320
But, anyway, when he was running the train set, he put on this little engineering cap.
00:47:44.520
And it was just the cutest thing I ever saw, right?
00:47:48.000
But, yes, he took, you know, very, very seriously.
00:47:54.120
You asked, is it meaningful to talk about, you know, had I not gone to college, then I would not now be a philosopher or something.
00:48:04.600
You know, what are the truth conditions of that?
00:48:09.140
And the way he did it was by reifying possible worlds and saying, you know, that there are a whole bunch of possible worlds and they really exist.
00:48:20.000
And you go to the nearest possible world, in which I didn't go to college, and you check it out.
00:48:27.800
You know, we can check it out, but what would make it true is if that antecedent, you know, were true, would I not be a philosopher, right?
00:48:39.860
Or, you know, if I didn't go to college and I wasn't a philosopher, then I'd be a millionaire now or something.
00:48:48.520
So he really took possible worlds very, very seriously in order to formulate what he took to be the truth conditions for counterfactuals.
00:49:01.220
He got there for none of the probability reasons that Max just...
00:49:06.640
No, it was about, you know, counterfactuals make sense, right?
00:49:12.240
You know, if I, you know, if you hadn't called me right then, I, you know, would have missed the most important phone call of my life or something.
00:49:21.380
You know, we'd say these things all the time and they seem meaningful.
00:49:27.420
And he thought that the only way to do it was to say that all these various possible worlds in some sense really exist.
00:49:36.120
And, you know, so when I didn't get hit by that truck this morning, which was a very near miss, there is a counterpart in a very close possible world of me who did get hit, who did get killed.
00:49:55.380
It is funny that it is strangely convergent with the many worlds interpretation.
00:50:01.660
And I reflected a lot about that because I was almost hit by a truck going biking at school one day and I was wondering...
00:50:08.440
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