277 - Tim Maudlin: What Is Philosophy?

33:25He didn't think much. He thought rocks and things like that, yeah, they were natural, but they weren't very interesting because all they did was fall. Their only natural motion was to drop, whereas a fish or even an oyster has a whole lot of stuff going on in it naturally, and you want to understand how that's all unified and what it's all for and how it all works. earlier you described physics i think you described it as the most mathematized branch of the natural sciences and we spoke a bit about how as methodology and a set of questions and a community around them developed it it branched out of philosophy though even now as you pointed out physicists are interested in ontological questions and the two fields are closely related.

34:24But why does a discipline like metaphysics, or why did a discipline like metaphysics remain squarely in the philosophy department? And why don't we have departments of physics and metaphysics? Is this just like an uninteresting sociological question, or is there something deeper about the distinction between physics and metaphysics that has led to this disparity of outcome? I mean, it's a good question you're asking. I think it's largely sociological, and you could do kind of counterfactual histories and tweak things a little bit here and there and rearrange the institutional structure of universities and departments.

35:16Certainly you see that in biology, for example, there are philosophers of biology, and then there are biologists who we say have a philosophical temperament, and often their papers would be, you know, you couldn't tell the difference if you didn't look at the actual address the paper came from. You know, if you're asking questions in biology about the units of selection or something like that, you could be a philosopher of biology and you could be a biologist. Then you can ask, well, why do the ones sit in one department and the others sit in the other department? And that really, as I say, that does have just a historical, you know, a historical answer.

35:56If you ask particularly why the people who sit in philosophy departments sit in philosophy departments, you know, we're the dregs. I mean, we're the people who are left when when other people got up and and, you know, form their own department because they had narrower kind of narrower set of interests. Not much empirical work is done in philosophy departments, as you know. So the more you're interested in doing observations and experiments, the more you're going to need your own department to support that kind of activity. I mean, there was a brief flurry of experimental philosophy that went on.

36:36I think it's damped down a bit where the idea was that philosophers were going to be going out doing more empirical work in the nature of asking people questions about what they believed and so on. As far as I know, that's not quite as vigorously pursued nowadays. Nothing wrong with it. No reason why a philosopher wouldn't in the course of their normal work come up against a question that would be addressed, better addressed by doing an experiment or taking a survey or something. Doesn't often happen. So you do get this association of the sciences with experimental and observational method. and a lot of philosophers are doing work that observation doesn't bear on so directly.

37:31But then you have the weird thing that the math department's also in the science department and it's completely non-empirical, right? They don't do experiments. They don't do observations either. And what many mathematicians do, if it gets more abstract, goes over into mathematical logic, which goes over into logic. And it's the same thing that a logician will be doing in a philosophy department. So this departmental structure that's developed in the university is very, I think, historically contingent and couldn't be justified on some abstract grounds. i i can think of i mean some banal sociological reasons that the department that metaphysics might have stayed in philosophy i mean physics departments are earning a lot of money or they have at times and you're getting patents for them and as you said you need a lot of specialized equipment for running experiments nobody's really getting metaphysics patents or creating metaphysics inventions and earning lots of money.

38:34So that's one reason we can just leave it where it is. But something interesting about mathematics and about physics that isn't clearly the case with philosophy is that there is this agreed-upon methodology. So proof for maxioms for mathematics or experiment for physics. I mean, a lot of physics isn't experimental. But is there agreed upon methodology within metaphysics? Is that possibly another reason why it hasn't sort of matured into its own discipline? Yeah, there's no agreed upon methodology for sure. I mean, just historically for people who are interested in this, if you go back to Leibniz.

39:39So Leibniz had a view, very clear view that he pushed rather hard. And he said, well, there is a single principle, which is the principle of all of logic and mathematics, all of it. which is the principle of non-contradiction, which sometimes people call also the principle of contradiction, oddly enough. But OK. Anyway, it's the same principle. And he said from that, really, you get all of logic and mathematics. That turns out not to be true. OK, but that was kind of a neat package. And then he said, now, metaphysics, he said, up until the work of Leibniz, has been this kind of weird hodgepodge of people doing this and that and not quite knowing what they're doing.

40:23But he said, I have found the single fundamental principle of all metaphysics, which is the principle of sufficient reason. He just says this, right? He just argues for it. He says, look, you know, principle of sufficient reason goes beyond the principle of contradiction. and I'm going to put metaphysics on a solid foundation by showing how you can derive all of these results in metaphysics, that is in ontology, from the principles of fission reason. Now, if you know your Leibniz, he sure gave you a metaphysics. He gave you an ontology called the monadology, and he said ultimately the entire universe is made up of a bunch of monads and they're windowless and each one is different than the other and they all operate by an internal principle of dynamics and they've all been pre-established harmonically by God.

41:19I mean, this whole deal, right? But that was fundamentally answering the question, what is there? Answer, monads. That's what there is. What do they do? Well, they all, you know, things appear to them and they appear in a certain sequence and that's all determined by God. And if you got rid of all the monads except you, you wouldn't notice because they're windowless and there's no real causation. I mean, all of that is, A, ontology in your face, metaphysics in your face. And he said, I can reduce it all now to a single methodological principle, derive it all from the principle of fission reason.

41:58Now, why didn't that unify the field? Because it didn't work. I mean, You know, it's not right. He had the ambition to do that. It just was a failed ambition. And he ended up fighting with Newton and kind of being on the wrong side of many of those disputes. Kant, of course, had it. He complained that metaphysics doesn't make any progress and people are still arguing over what they were arguing about 2 ,000 years ago. And he was going to put it all on a new foundation and do transcendental arguments and blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden it would make steady progress again, right? That turned out not to work either.

42:40Why? All his arguments were all wrong and he makes all kinds of modal mistakes and blah, blah. I mean, you can go into the details. I don't think, quite honestly, if either Leibniz or Kant had succeeded in convincing everybody they were right, that then you'd move them out of the philosophy department. You know, I don't think it's as simple as if people are still fighting about it, then leave it in philosophy. And once enough of them agree, you know, let them set up their own tent somewhere. There's all kinds of very vigorous disputes in economics departments. And, you know, I mean, it's not that that's just too cartoony.

43:21And it's not because there's a deeper principle, but there's just a shallower principle. I mean, all of this is organized on very contingent historical grounds. I had a discussion about this issue of progress in philosophy with Heim Gaifman on maybe it could even be the first episode of this this podcast years ago. And he's very pessimistic, just in general, and said something to the effect that all philosophical programs fail. They don't end up giving us the right answers, but they give us insight. And that's very important. And maybe he would say that this gathering of insight and this refinement of questions is progress.

44:17But it seems like physics programs do succeed at times. Others fail. Do you think that there is progress in metaphysics? We can restrict ourselves to metaphysics. And if so, what does that progress look like? Well, first of all, the funny thing was when you said he's very pessimistic because he says all these metaphysical programs fail. And I just said Leibniz has failed and Kant's failed. And yeah, I agree with that. But, you know, there's this famous argument by Larry Loudon called the pessimistic meta induction involving physics. You say all the physical programs fail, right? Newtonian mechanics failed eventually.

45:07Maxwell and electrodynamics failed eventually. You know, so if the fact that these attempts at giving a kind of final theory haven't worked out, if that's enough to say it fails and say there's no progress, then there's no progress in physics either. It's not as if philosophy is unique in that respect. But no, I think, yeah, I think physics has not come to any final theory. Philosophy has certainly not. Metaphysics ontology certainly has not. I mean, as I said, physics is doing ontology. And certainly until the physicists have at least got that little corner knocked out properly, metaphysics won't be finished either.

45:57It's not like you could finish metaphysics without having a completed physics because physics is in part about what exists and what it is and, you know, what its fundamental nature is and so on. If you haven't worked that out, you haven't finished ontology yet. Is there progress? Sure, there's progress. I mean, the things that fail, A, you make progress when you understand why they failed. You correct some mistakes or some oversights or so on.

46:35I think that well-done metaphysics, ontology, by philosophers today is better than the best we had 100 years ago. I really think it is better.

46:58much more subtle, much more powerful analytical tools. That's not to say any of it's right, but I would say exactly the same thing about physics. Physics is in certain ways better than it was 100 years ago, but it certainly hasn't gotten to the end. And you might even say that it's in a much murkier situation now than it was. The theories out there are harder to get your head around, and there's no agreement about how to understand them. So I don't really see a lot of difference there. Of course, because the empirical sciences are in the business of making predictions, that you can quantify. And you can say, as everybody does, that we've figured out a way to predict the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron to 14 decimal places, and on top of that to measure it to 14 decimal places.

47:56And by God, those numbers turn out to be the same within error bounds. That's impressive, right? There's no, you know, I mean, a philosopher hasn't done anything that impressive. I don't know how they would. But then again, neither is a biologist. I mean, biologists have never predicted anything to 14 decimal places and they never will. Economists have never predicted anything to 14 decimal places and they never will. much less measure it and have them come out right. So, I mean, that is an impressive feat. And it does indicate that there's something about that predictive mechanism that must be onto something.

48:33I mean, that can't just be coincidence.

48:41But, I mean, if you want to get into a dark and pessimistic mood, you can get in a dark and pessimistic mood about all these subjects. right? People get in very dark and pessimistic moods about physics for sure. It's not making any progress anymore. We don't know what we're doing. And so on, all these same words. I don't think it's a good use of one's time to worry about that, because what you should be doing is focusing on some concrete problem where you think you might be able to make some progress. And there are concrete problems that come up in philosophy and there are concrete problems that come up in physics and so on.

49:28I was glad that when we talked about, I mean, we're exclusively talking about physics, I don't know, half an hour ago now, I asked you about quantum gravity and I asked you about what space and time are. I'd like to ask you before we move on from metaphysics, just about one particular metaphysical question so that, well, okay, let me ask the question. You mentioned physicalism earlier, and I take it that you're not a physicalist. And what I want to ask you is why are you not a physicalist? But in answering that, my hope is that you can tell me a bit about how this question even came to be and then how you think about it or how a philosopher thinks about answering the question that makes this distinctly a philosophical inquiry.

50:24Yeah, I'm not. I mean, OK, let me try. Right. So if you I mean, again, so what what tools do we have? We don't have laboratories. We we have we make fine distinctions. Right. And. The first thing, if you want to say, are you a physicalist, you want to say, well, what exactly is that doctrine that you're asking me to to to sign up for or reject? And you say, ah, well, that's the doctrine that everything that exists is physical. and therefore, I guess, depends on physics, right? That the physical, you know, whether it exists or not depends on physics. There's some kind of way that if physics had been different, then any physical thing might not have existed if the physics wasn't there, if you will.

51:23Okay, good. Let's call that physicalism, that everything that exists is physical. Now you say, all right, you think tables and chairs and cats and so on are physical? I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I even think human beings are, right? I don't think they have immaterial souls the way Descartes did. So I'm fine physicalist about you and me. I think we're both ultimately physical things. But on the other hand, I'm quite convinced they're mathematical truths, right? And they're just truths. and I'm convinced that any truth has to have, there must be something that makes it true. And whatever makes mathematical truths true isn't physical because if it were, then you could change math by changing physics and you can't change math by changing physics, right?

52:16You can't change the fact that, you know, two plus two equals four by changing physics. you know, Goldbach's conjecture is that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes. I think there's a fact about that. I think it's either true or false. And what makes it true or false has absolutely zero to do with physics. I couldn't say, well, if physics comes out this way, then Goldbach's conjecture would be true. And if it comes out some other way, then Goldbach's conjecture would be false. It doesn't make any sense, right? That it's not about physical objects. It's about the integers.

52:54And so, yeah, I think there are mathematical truths and in some sense, mathematical objects or mathematical structures that are not physical things. But there are facts about them. They are certain ways. Therefore, I'm not a physicalist. It's that simple. um and then would it be the further work of the metaphysician to determine okay so we've established ontologically that there are things about which statements like two plus two are true is it the further work of the metaphysician to determine what those things are like if they're not like physical objects or yeah i i mean insofar as you can it's it would be the job of someone interested in the foundations of mathematics now such a person might live in a math department they don't have to live in a philosophy department um if you're interested in the fundamental question of the nature of mathematical truth and mathematical items you are thereby doing ontology, you are thereby doing metaphysics, whatever department you live in.

54:08Now, I think some of the work there has been a little confusing and maybe not as rigorously stated as it should be. So just to take an example, you say, all right, there are all these, I just gave you a fact, or there's a fact about the integers, I claim, namely gold box conjecture is either true or false. I don't know which nobody knows which my my guess is that it's true but i don't know that it's true and for those of our listeners who don't know what goldbox conjecture is yeah so as i said every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes that's that's the conjecture um i don't see how it could fail to have a truth value i just if someone says oh it's just indeterminate i don't how can that be indeterminate i mean either there's an even number greater than two that's that's not the sum of two primes or there isn't.

55:00I mean, I don't really understand what they're thinking. But then you say, but what are the integers? That's a good question. How does one go about that? Well, part of it is to talk about the structure of the integers. What kind of structure do they have? Some of that was nailed down by a guy named Piano and what are called the piano axioms. And he says, well, the integers, the counting numbers have, here's some things that are true of them. Everyone has a successor, right? The successor of seven is eight. The successor of 12 is 13. The successor of zero, you start with zero. The successor of zero is one.

55:42And only one of them isn't itself a successor, namely zero, because these are just the, you know, positive, non-negative integers. So that's a fact about them. And, you know, he wrote down these axioms. Now, it turns out, I think all those, nobody questions that all those axioms are true of the integers. It turns out they're necessary but not sufficient condition because you can come up with structures that satisfy those axioms but aren't the integers, the so-called non-standard models. Okay, so this is starting to get at what is the nature, what makes, what is the structure of the integers, right?

56:18What makes them the integers, if you will? But then people got a little confused, I think, and they started doing set theory. And they noticed that in set theory, you can create models of the integers. You can create structures that are made out of sets, but which satisfy these same axioms, right? So in kind of the simplest way to do it is in set theory, The amazing thing in set theory is you can kind of, as it were, create an entire infinite universe out of nothing. Why? Because you have the empty set, right? That's a set. It's a set with no elements. Then you have a different set, the set whose only element is the empty set.

56:59That's two sets of curly brackets. And then you have the element whose only element is that one I just mentioned. So that's three sets of curly brackets, and all of these are different sets. And you kind of immediately see, okay, there must be an infinite collection of sets. And furthermore, they satisfy the piano axioms. And furthermore, they really look like the integers. It's like the empty set corresponds to zero. And this element whose only, this set whose only element is the empty set, that corresponds to one. And the set whose only element is the set whose only element is the empty set, that corresponds to two and so on.

57:35I mean, there are different ways to do it. That's one way to do it. And then that's all correct. and you say, okay, I can, as it were, create models of the integers within set theory. Then some people said, oh, that shows that the numbers are sets. That, it seems to me, doesn't follow at all. It doesn't tell me that what the integer 2 is is a set. It just tells me that I can model the integers in set theory. I can model them in lots of other things too, right? It just says that if you're willing to accept the existence of sets, there's a whole bunch of stuff that has a whole bunch of structure.

58:13And a lot of it is mathematical structure. And some of that mathematical structure corresponds to the structure of the integers. Which are interesting results. How far can you go with that? How far can I go with these set theoretic constructions and so on? Those are interesting questions. I don't think they're exactly settling the question what the number two is by saying, oh, it turned out to be a set. You know, that doesn't strike me the right thing to say there. What is exactly the right thing to say, I think, is subtle and hard. And that's I don't do philosophy mathematics. And that would be that would be a full time job.

58:55Right. Leave all the physics aside and just try and understand the nature of mathematics and mathematical items and so on. I mean, that's a great, interesting to me, fascinating question. One with no empirical feedback. Right. You're not going to get a result out of the Large Hadron Collider that makes a difference one way or the other to it. And I maybe I could be pulled into becoming a philosopher of mathematics, but I wasn't. You know, I do kind of like to, I like tables and chairs and dogs and stuff, and they're all physical things. I really appreciate that answer. But before we leave metaphysics behind, I'm wondering if we can return to, I asked you a very big question with lots of moving parts.

59:47I'm wondering if it's possible for you to kind of analyze your answer and tell me what was distinctively philosophical or what the metaphysical sort of tools were you used in or you use in answering this question, why you're a physicalist? what the philosophical methodologies are that are involved, because you didn't appeal to experiment, for instance. Right. I mean, of course, any argument has to have premises that you find quite plausible, or it doesn't serve its function. um i for example i said look what i believe with all my heart is that this claim that goldbach considered is either true or false you know either it is the case that all the even numbers greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes or it isn't the case there's no middle ground there, right?

1:01:02It's not like there's no vagueness in that statement. There's no kind of, you know, concepts that you're not quite sure what you're talking about. So you can't get a kind of failure of truth or falsity as you sometimes do just because your terms are a little vague and so on. It seems a perfectly sharp question, and it goes one way or the other.

1:01:33Now, that's the first thing I said. And I said, well, if it's true, there's something that makes it true.

1:01:42What is that thing? That's a good question, but there's something, right? And that third point, whatever that thing is, it ain't physical. Because I can't imagine a change in physics altering the truth value of that statement. So whatever it is that makes it true isn't physical. There's something that makes it true. Therefore, there are, as it were, non-physical structures or non-physical facts. Therefore, I'm not a physicist. That seems to me to be a pretty straightforward argument. I mean, what tools did I use? I just used logic. You can try and get off the bus somewhere, but I'm not quite sure where you're going to get off.

1:02:23I mean, if you try to get off it by saying, I just think that Goldbach's conjecture could turn out neither to be true nor false. I just don't. I mean, it seems to me you're really obligated. That's a very strange thing to say. I mean, you're really obligated to back that up with something other than I just I don't know. I want to be a physicalist. You know, anybody can reject a claim because it conflicts with something they want to believe. But that's not an argument. So what are you going to say? If you say, yeah, it's either true or false, what makes it true or false? Are you going to claim something physical makes it true or false?

1:03:02How could that be? How could the structure of the physical world make a whit of difference to that particular issue? Again, you can say that, but man, I would need some very compelling, non-obvious answer, which I've never seen anything even in the neighborhood of. So that's the best you can do in any field. You put out arguments, you base them on premises which strike you as things that nobody would question without some very concrete, specific reason to question them, and you see what follows. And in this case, I think the falsity of physicalism follows. So that's why I'm not a physicalist. it's not not not it didn't you know i didn't come into the game wanting to be or not to be a physicalist right it's not like i'm aiming it aimed at that as a result i just go through that little argument in my head and i say yeah it seems to be trouble for a physicalism there is it safe for you to say that logic is the main tool of philosophers or philosophy as you practice Is it?

1:04:17Well, reasoning is, if you want to call reasoning logic, I mean, logic can have, again, now we'd have to go on, what do you mean by logic? That's not, you know, it's not a cut and dried question either. And there are different kinds of logic and modal logic and temporal logic and intuitionist logic and blah, blah, blah. It's not like logic is just some pristine thing. But reasoning, I mean, yes, it is a mark of philosophy, but of a lot of other things as well, to be based on careful, systematic reasoning, where you're trying to lay out in a very clear way the premises and lay out in a very clear way the steps that take you from the premises to the conclusion.

1:05:00Now, it might be a deductive argument where you think the conclusion just follows of necessity from the premises. It might be an inductive argument where you admit it doesn't, but nonetheless, it seems the premises make the conclusion very plausible. And you'd be inclined to accept the conclusion unless somebody brought some counter argument. I mean, this is just reasoning, right? And it is the only tool that a certain kind of philosophical question has because experiments and so on don't bear on it. So, you know, kind of the only thing you have to go on is very careful thinking. And this is what, you know, this is what motivated Plato.

1:05:49And it explicitly motivated him to look at geometry and say, my God, in geometry I can prove stuff. I know it's right. You know, in geometry, I can prove that the square built on the diagonal has twice the area of the original square. I can prove it. It's not a guess. It's not based on measurement. It's not, you know, something. Look, look at what, you know, look what Euclid did, as it were. Look at all the stuff he could prove. And then you say, but these squares you're talking about, are they physical? No, they're not physical. I mean, Plato was very clear about that. You can draw a thing you call a square, but it's not a square.

1:06:33It would have to have infinitely thin lines and be perfectly straight. And, you know, the thing you draw isn't like that. So what is the square I'm thinking of? Well, it's the one I'm thinking of. It's the one that I have access to through my mind. This is what the whole, you know, analogy of the cave is about, is turning your attention from the physical world that you get access through your senses. To this other world, the intelligible world, that you get access to through your mind, just through thought, sometimes aided by senses, aided by diagrams and so on that you can look at. But those are just aids.

1:07:11They're not really the subject matter. I mean, that's what Plato argued. I think that's all correct. And a lot of what philosophers do, if they're going to do it at all, is largely depends on this very careful thinking and and laying out arguments from premises to conclusions and going over the arguments and looking for gaps and looking for alternatives and alternative explanations and so on. And this is all kind of stuff you can do, you know, in your office without machinery around you. You just have to think hard. I actually think I do want to linger on metaphysics just a little bit longer. But before that, I don't think any conversation on this show about what philosophy is would be complete without this somewhat controversial question, which is, what is the distinction between continental and analytic philosophy?

1:08:12Is there such a distinction? Maybe even do you prefer one or think one is more or less valuable? but maybe we should start with what the two types of philosophy are for people who haven't heard of them. Yeah, I mean, probably everybody has heard these terms. I don't think there is any definition that can be given that's of much use here. I'll actually say something that might be useful historically. So there's a piece I teach a lot that was written by Carnap, Rudolf Carnap, when he was young and really gung-ho, called The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language. And the stated aim of that piece is to kill metaphysics.

1:09:07To show that metaphysics isn't merely false, it's nonsense, it's gibberish. It literally means nothing. Nothing. Flatus volcus, as the Romans would say. It's mere breath. Okay? Which you'd think it might be odd. Here I am defending metaphysics and I always start teaching elimination of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language. Well, you know, isn't Carnap your enemy? The question is, who is Carnap's enemy? What did he mean by metaphysics? Now, there's a footnote you have to look out carefully. I think he put it in later where he says something like, look, what I mean by metaphysics is just a kind of group of people.

1:09:51I'll give you some names like Heidegger and Hegel and you'll get the idea. That's what I mean. And he says, you know, there's other things that people might call metaphysics, which is fine by me, you know, scientifically induced stuff. And so, again, it's, You know, you had this sense, he had this sense that there were some people who were philosophers, who were writing things that were getting a whole lot of attention that he just thought were incoherent gibberish. And more or less, he's trying to give you examples. And I pretty much agree with his examples. I think what he cites from what Heidegger wrote is incomprehensible gibberish and no good.

1:10:35And I, you know, I don't like Hegel and I'm really not all that fond of Kant, which puts me in kind of a minority. But I think Kant made it popular to write in an impenetrable style. Let me put it that way. Hume wrote in a absolutely perucid style. So did Descartes. So did Leibniz. So did Galileo. So did Newton. Kant, uh-uh. and it was after Kant that you got a bunch of people writing in a kind of impenetrable, weird style. It's that part of what some people mean by continental philosophy is things written in that style or in that, that are kind of inherited from those people. And sometimes they add phenomenology, although I think phenomenology is, it depends on how it's done.

1:11:26That's a, much more questionable case. But it's not a doctrine, and analytic philosophy is not a doctrine. What I think is important, and what Plato already thought was important, was to be aware that language is slippery, that words can be ambiguous, that arguments that look on the surface to be valid can be invalid. There were all kinds of linguistic tricks and sophistical arguments. I mean, Plato talks about refuting sophistical arguments. Aristotle has a whole document, you know, a whole piece on sophistical refutations, bad arguments that sound good at first glance and that you can be taken in by.

1:12:18And so there's a turn of mind that's very wary about that and tries to make the claims as clear as possible, tries to define terms where they might be ambiguous, tries to lay out the arguments in a very systematic way so you can review them. There's a wonderful, at the end of Hume's inquiry, he talks about different kinds of skepticism. And he says a moderate skepticism is that. A moderate skepticism is where you're always a little doubtful. Maybe you've made a mistake and you try to say everything clearly and review your arguments step by step because you can make slips. And, you know, that kind of rigor and that kind of care and attempt at clarity.

1:13:04That, I think, is a great virtue and it's a necessary virtue. If you're dealing in a case where experiment can't hit you in the face and tell you you're wrong, because basically you're relying on argumentation. then the argumentation has to be right and you have to be very careful about that I think insofar as there's anything in this division it's between those people who are kind of coming out of formal logic where everything's really rigorous

1:13:36and like to have arguments with clearly stated premises and definitions of unfamiliar terms and so on, and everything laid out so you can check it. Just that turn of mind. As opposed to people who just are somehow attracted to things that are obscure and difficult and hard to understand. And you get all these Gnostic pronouncements, right? Like Bohr would give or Wheeler, you know, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, it's proof you don't understand it, which means nobody understands it. Or, you know, I mean, the, the, the, you know, Bohr used to say, I think Bohr or Wheeler, one of them, the mark of a deep truth is that its negation is another deep truth.

1:14:25And you're going, what the hell? I mean, that's, you're just, that's a contradiction, right? It's not a mark of anything true that if you negate it, you get something true. It's a mark of something true that if you negate it, you get something false. So there is this like, some people have a kind of attraction to this, what I would just say is obscurity and kind of semi-mystical. That's contrary to what I would say the spirit of what's called analytic philosophy is. But that's all it is. Another metaphysics problem that, other than like physicalism for instance that i think of as being very old and still a debate that is alive is this question about identity well it is an identity question it's a question about whether for instance if you have a statue is there just one thing there or are the clay and sort of like the shape or the form of the statue or are these two different things one or two and the reason that i i bring this up right now is we talked about logic maybe being one of the fundamental tools that a philosopher has and then couple you couple that though with these intuitions that people have about what premises we ought to select or or take as true for purposes for our argumentation And I'm wondering if we can look at that problem and think about maybe how you answer it and then how somebody who doesn't agree with you answers it and see if it really is maybe like a problem or a different use of logic there or just intractable and intractable disagreement about intuitions.

1:16:22intuitions. Yeah, I mean, this is an age-old question.

1:16:32The term that appears when you ask the question that I think you need to clarify is the word thing. In other words, you say, I've got the statue and I've got the clay of which the statue is made. Are they the same thing or different things as if the word thing itself there is entirely clear. Let's just go through some of the standard arguments for people who haven't heard this. So here's an argument, a pretty clear argument, to the conclusion that they can't be the same. I start with a lump of clay. It's not a statue. Then I form it. I need it. After a while, I say, voila, now I have a statue.

1:17:21it's made of that same lump of clay. We imagine all the clay is still there. I didn't carve any of it off or I just reformed it. Now I've got a statue. Then I squish it, you know, into a little disc. And now the statue's gone. Clay's still there. And then you say, well, look, of course, it can't be that the statue and the clay were literally the identical item because there was a time when one existed and the other didn't, right? There was a time before the statue came into existence and the clay was already there. And there was a time after the statue went out of existence and the clay is still there.

1:18:01And so they can't be the same thing, right?

1:18:07And then you say, that seems right. And then you say, well, go to the time when the statue does exist. Do you really want to say there are two things sitting in front of you, the statue and in addition, the clay? Now, it's this this and in addition that that that doesn't sound quite right. Right. Because then you'd say, well, but gee, the statue weighs four pounds and the clay weighs four pounds and I've got both a statue and a clay weighing four pounds. I guess I've got eight pounds in front of me. Well, that's wrong. You only got four pounds in front of you. So surely that's not the right way.

1:18:37if you want to say they're different, if you want to make a distinction between the piece of clay and the statue, it's not the same kind of distinction that you make between a statue and a copy of the statue, where if you've got the statue and the copy of the statue and each is four pounds, you got eight pounds, right? Okay. Now, I guess, you know, a lot of this is then just trying to state clearly how to use this language, like same thing, different thing. In everyday life, usually there's no ambiguity there and you know what you mean. But here you're starting to use the word same and different thing in unusual ways.

1:19:24And you need to try to make clear how those work. And then when you're done with all that, which I think you can do, then some smart alec is going to come along and say, okay, fine, but what if I didn't have the unstructured clay before and the unstructured clay after, but the piece of clay itself came into existence in statue form and went out of existence. It all just disappeared in statue form. So I can't say, well, there's a time when there was the clay, but no statue. So your argument there, two things there doesn't work anymore. And, you know, I'm probably going to say, look, if you if you understand the sense in which in the first case there were they were different things, even when they both existed, that'll be true here, even though there isn't a time where one exists and the other doesn't blah, blah, blah.

1:20:17OK, now we're doing a lot of philosophy. Right. We're just trying to clean, clean up all this way of speaking so it doesn't lead to manifestly idiotic things. Right. I mean, to say that if I have a piece of clay that's four pounds in front of me and it also happens to be a statue in front of me that weighs four pounds, I have eight pounds in front of me. That's idiotic. Right. That's wrong. So for sure, you need to clean up and make clear the sense of identity and distinctness you have in mind. Right. So you don't get bad results like that. And, you know, if you're clever, you can keep coming up with weird situations where you're not quite sure what to say.

1:20:59And then if you're if you have this kind of analytic tendency, you say, well, let me try and really get clear about how to use this language. So I don't get into any of these contradictions or don't end up saying kind of anything idiotic. I'm not sure. I don't really see myself that there's anything deeply at stake in the statue clay issue, right? I mean, it seems manifestly to be, we know what's going on. There's a bunch of clay. At a certain point, it got put into a certain form, and at a later time, it got put out of that form. That's what happened. The rest of it is how you talk about it, and I don't see that anything hangs on it, right?

1:21:40I don't think that anything ontological really hangs on it. You might want to regiment your language so you know how to say the things you'd want to say. And you would normally want to say, before the statue was made, the clay existed and the statue didn't, right? I mean, that's a normal thing to say. So you just notice that if you're not careful and you say some of these things you want to say and you follow what look like arguments, you end up with weird conclusions. But I don't think there's any actual interesting ontological question here. I don't see any. I think this is a case where the kind of language hygiene has gotten a little out of control because there's not an interesting question you're clearing up anymore.

1:22:28You're just clearing up a kind of puzzle thing that people have made just for the sake of making puzzles. Anyway, that's my view about that. No, that's a very fascinating answer. And it's not the way that I was like, I mean, I thought you were going to have this belief, but I didn't know how you were going to answer it. And maybe we've uncovered, ooh, exciting, a different tool of philosophy, which is just linguistic and conceptual clarity that I think is a bit just distinct from logic as a tool. So with the physicalism-Platonism problem, you'd say that that is a genuine metaphysical question that we need to address.

1:23:11But here we have something masquerading as a metaphysical problem, but analysis reveals to just be some linguistic and conceptual confusion. Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's exactly—and that's what motivated Carnap. Okay, that's what motivated Russell. That sort of motivated a lot of these people, even James. I mean, they said there are certain things you're wasting your time arguing about. Because by clarifying the way you're using the language, the problem evaporates. And the evaporation of the problem isn't a grand new discovery or anything. It's just you are getting confused by sloppy use of language.

1:23:58so yes absolutely you have to clear away the underbrush of this unnecessary confusion now when you clear it away it's not that all of a sudden everything is clear there's still sharp questions right i mean the platonism question is still there i don't think it rests i don't think that rested on a linguistic error there are other ontological questions that'll still be there when you've cleaned up the language. But the first thing you need to do is to triage, is this a problem, is this, as it were, a substantial problem that needs a theory, or is it just a linguistic problem that just needs some, as it were, linguistic hygiene?

1:24:40And you can give clear examples of both cases. I mean, I'm sure I've given you, I'm sure I've told you, but I'll remind people this example of James, which is, he's making exactly this point that he's out at somebody's country place and a hunting party has gone out hunting and he stayed at home to read his books or whatever. And they come back and they say they've been arguing, arguing, arguing all afternoon. And he says, arguing about what? And they say, well, they were in the woods and there was a squirrel on a tree. And the squirrel, of course, saw them and ran to the opposite side of the tree.

1:25:20So you couldn't see it. And somebody wanted to see the squirrel. So he walks all the way around the tree. And as he walks, the squirrel stays opposite him all the way around the tree. Right. That's what happened. Yeah. OK. Question. Everybody and everybody agrees to this. The man walked around the tree. Right. Everybody agrees. The man walked all the way around the tree. Question. Did the man walk all the way around the squirrel? and they've been arguing for two hours about this. And Jane says, what the hell are you doing? I mean, there's no issue of fact here, right? There's no, everybody agrees about what happened.

1:26:00You're just talking about words. It depends on what you mean by walk all the way around. If you mean you walk all the way around X, if you are successively to the south of, to the east of, to the north of, to the west of, to the south of again, for example, then yes, he walked around the squirrel. If you mean successively you're in front of, to the side of, to the back of, to the other side of, to the front of, then he didn't walk around the squirrel. And if you think about what's going on with the squirrel and the man in the tree, yeah, you see, in this sense, he walked around the squirrel. In that sense, he didn't.

1:26:35And you guys are just wasting your breath arguing about it, right? There's no deep fact whether he really walked around the squirrel, whatever that would mean, you just have to clear up, you know, the different senses of to walk, what you what it can mean to say you walked around something. Now, usually those senses go together because usually it's, you know, the unusual situation is that the squirrel keeps moving. So you never get behind it. Right. It always has its stomach to you, as it were. You never you never are behind the squirrel. Even though, you know, you circle it. that was an example that he gave of look this is one thing philosophy needs to do you need to just not waste your time right clarify your concepts not waste your time in emptying argument this was hume was doing too with his empiricism he said look sometimes you get into these merely verbal arguments there's no content to them you have to go back and ask yourself what do these words really mean what ideas are they associated with and so on and this was also a lot of what Socrates was doing.

1:27:43And, you know, go back to antiquity. And there were philosophers who were very aware of the slipperiness of language and thought they needed to be very careful about different senses of terms. That is one thing you have to do. It doesn't solve all the problems. It just keeps you from pointlessly arguing over stuff that there's no real contentful issue there. I think that discussing physics and metaphysics has been very helpful for not just elucidating what philosophy is, but elucidating how philosophy is done maybe. But there are other branches of philosophy, I mean, what are known as the core branches of philosophy that I think would be interesting for us to discuss.

1:28:33And again, metaphysics has this fun history with Andronicus, the cataloger. But what is epistemology and where did that come from? Was it already a discipline in antiquity? Well, for sure, look, epistemology Again, you've got to know your Greek. Ology, the account of episteme. So there is a Greek term episteme. And epistemology was attempts to give an account of what exactly episteme is. That was certainly going on in antiquity.

1:29:22Plato writes the dialogue Theatetus. on precisely this question. He doesn't answer it as, you know, most platonic dialogues make certain attempts and then the attempts are shown to fail, and that's true here in Theotetus. But that there was a question, what is episteme? Now, most modern English translations translate translate the Greek term episteme as knowledge. And then the question would be, what is knowledge?

1:30:03It's probably not a great translation, especially if you look at when you get into Aristotle and his account in posterior analytics. Maybe a better translation, although it's clunkier, is understanding or explanation.

1:30:28Anyway, there's a valuable mental state you can be in when you have episteme, and it is associated with what we would probably normally call comprehension or insight, maybe even better. When I say that, I mean, there are certain things which you can know, but you can't have that kind of insight or comprehension into, right? You might, as it were, know in the normal sense of know what the capital city of California is. But there's nothing that would count as having deep insight or comprehension of that or understanding of that, right? It's just a kind of random fact. It's not the kind of thing, I mean, Plato is very clear.

1:31:15He doesn't think it's the kind of thing of which anybody can have epistemic because there's no fundamental explanation for it. Whereas if I say I can know or understand that the square built on the diagonal of a given square has twice the area, that's the example in Mino, it's not that I can memorize that and just parrot it back to you. That's not episteme. Episteme involves comprehension so that I can explain to you why it must be so. I can give an explanation of it. This is very deeply tied to what Aristotle does with his theory of the four iti or explanatory factors, or what's, again, sometimes often translated causes, but that's a bad translation.

1:32:06What is it to explain something or comprehend it or grasp it, to have this intellectual insight into it? That's associated with the term episteme. And then epistemology is the question, well, what do you have to do to have that? What constitutes that kind of comprehension? Now, because the word knowledge is used in other ways in English literature, sometimes epistemology is the theory of knowledge covers some of these other things which aren't really comprehension. But that's where it began. I mean, that's that was what the original question was about, this very desirable state of really understanding things.

1:32:46And it was that kind of understanding that gave you wisdom, right? That gave you Sophia. And that's what the philosopher wants it, right? The philosopher wants Sophia, wisdom, and wisdom is understanding or comprehension. And you show you have wisdom when you can explain things. Whereas, as I say, you can't explain to me why Sacramento, right? There's no deep explanation of why Sacramento is the capital of California. It could just as well have been San Francisco, right? It was just kind of a historical accident. There's no deep reason for it. The way there's a deep reason why the square on the diagonal has twice the area.

1:33:28So, yeah. So epistemology, I mean, that's what originally epistemology was. People often say, which is true, the word no in English, in many other languages, there are different terms that we translate no. In German, wissen, können, können, right? in French, connaître, savoir. Okay, I mean, they make distinctions that we kind of lost in English because we say, oh, yeah, I know so-and-so, meaning I'm familiar with him or I met him, not that I comprehend him or grasp him, right? Or I know how to do something, that's a kind of ability, but it doesn't have to be accompanied with comprehension. And then there's this other thing, which is, you know, this and connaître or savoir, you know, this kind of understanding, this grasp, this intellectual grasp of something as knowledge.

1:34:31That's the really valuable state that the philosopher wants if they were doing pure theory. Well, we discussed, I mean, what sort of physics questions would be answered in a physics department today and what sorts of questions, physics-related questions might be answered in a philosophy department and how they overlap and how their approaches differ. Is there a department that is not philosophy that you think overlaps with epistemology or is epistemology something that is just exclusively really done in a philosophy department? I think epistemology as, as it were, this taking a step back. I mean, in every department, there are people who want to have this kind of understanding, right?

1:35:28That that's their goal, is to understand something, right? I mean, if you're in a genetics department, if you're doing genetics, there's stuff you're trying to understand, right? If you're in a chemistry department, that's all over. Then there's this kind of step back and say, well, when you say you want to understand it, what is that? What mental state or what do you want that will give you comprehension or understanding? I don't think anybody except in a philosophy department spends their time on that abstract question, right? One where you would see a similarity between what the geneticist wants, what the physicist wants, what the philosopher wants.

1:36:09they all want some kind of grasp or comprehension or understanding. Now, sometimes in a physics department more than other places, the physicists will deny they want that. They'll say, no, I don't care if I understand it. I just want to be able to predict. I want to calculate and predict. That's a kind of instrumentalism. And I think it's, I mean, if that's all you want, that's all you want. But I think that's a sad little life you lead if all you want to do is be able to make predictions and not understand things. And, you know, a typical thing, you know, you say, you know, what could be asked in a physics and a philosophy department?

1:36:51Here's a plain physical question. You know, there are things we all believe there are things that are electrons. OK, are they particles? Do they have locations at all times or not? That's just a physical question. It's not a philosophy question. many physicists would decline to answer and further say they don't care. Right. They'd say, look, I don't, I don't, that's not an interesting question to me. I just want to be able to predict the outcome of this experiment and whether an electron is located and moves around or it's smeared out or whatever. I don't care. Now I, if someone says they don't care, maybe they don't care.

1:37:27I did not, nothing much more I can do about that, except that's, that's a kind of, that's kind of pitiful to me. I think that's, what's interesting. yeah yeah yeah

1:37:39well when we were talking about metaphysics we said that i mean two big tools that a philosopher uses are logic or just reasoning and then conceptual clarity and linguistic precision Are there different tools at use in epistemology or just the same, or is it really just a difference in subject matter? Yeah, I don't see that the tools are any different when you're doing epistemology. Yeah, I think they're basically the same. I mean, there's a part of epistemology called formal epistemology, which is trying to mathematically model inference, right? Good inference, Bayesian inference, for example.

1:38:31And that leans a bit on some real technical math. But there's formal ontology and metaphysics. Yeah, I just don't know. I think it's the subject matter. I don't think it's the tools. I think those are the basic tools of what goes by the name analytic philosophy, and they would be the same if you're doing epistemology. Well, then let me ask you a big heated epistemological question that I'm just independently curious how you think about it. But the problem of global skepticism, Is there an external world? I think that's a pretty classical or classic epistemological question. How do you go about dissecting and then answering that for yourself?

1:39:25Of course there's an external rule. I mean, I don't even understand, I don't really understand. Okay, so there's something that goes by the name Peronian skepticism or radical skepticism, which you can associate with Pirro in antiquity. people falsely believe that you can associate it with Descartes and something called the evil demon argument, which is false because he never gave such an argument. There is no evil demon argument in Descartes.

1:40:05Peronian skepticism, radical skepticism, was a claim that reason undermines itself. that if you try to be careful, I mean, the picture of the ancient skeptic was you started out in a state of distress, mental anguish, because you were curious about certain things and you couldn't figure them out. Right. You just stayed up at night trying to work out the facts and you just, you know, were just driven by this.

1:40:43and that the Peronian comes to a point where their reasoning undermines itself.

1:40:57And you might say you draw the conclusion, but that's the wrong words because the idea is that you're not using arguments at all. You sort of give up, okay? The right thing to say is you give up. you kind of reach a point of despair. But then out of that despair, you suddenly become calm. You reach a mental state called autorexia, which is calmness, where you no longer, you don't claim you know, you haven't settled these issues. You now sort of think they just can't be settled. And you're okay with that. You just kind of say, okay, I'll just live my life. I'll just go enjoy life and I won't torture myself over these questions now I guess that could include the question whether there's an external world although as far as I know that wasn't one of the ones that the Peronians talked about much

1:41:53and if anybody asks you a question like I mean often they were ethical questions is this good or bad And your answer is, is no more, meaning no more one than the other. It's no more good than bad. This is no more true than false. You're just in this kind of state of, of amorphous indecision and you don't care anymore. Okay. That was Peronian skepticism.

1:42:22Now, in the same, actually the last section, section 12 of Hume's inquiry on skepticism, he walks through these different types of skepticism. One of them is this radical skepticism, this Peronian skepticism or academic skepticism. And Hume just says, no, you can't do that. That's just psychologically impossible. It's just, A, people can't do it. Right. You can't fail to believe things. You can't fail to believe there's an external world. You can't fail to believe that, you know, if you get up and walk over to the refrigerator and open it, you'll find something to drink in it. And you can't fail to believe that, you know, you can pour it into a glass and drink it.

1:43:02You know, you're never going to be if you were really in a situation where you were you thought it no more likely than unlikely that the glass of water will kill you. He says you would die. You would very quickly die, which is true because you wouldn't do anything. And he says nobody's ever been in such a state of global skepticism. And he says, and if you manage to get yourself in such a state, you'd never get out of it because there's nothing to work with. Right. There's how could you ever get out of this kind of global skepticism? And then Hume says there's this more moderate skepticism and moderate skepticism is just fallibilism.

1:43:41You admit that even for things you very strongly believe you might be wrong, you keep a kind of open mind if someone wants to give you reasons and you'll consider them. But it's not that you don't believe it anymore. I mean, now, Hume made a mathematical error at a certain point. And this is in the treatise where he thought that. If I take any question. I can raise a question about it. Now I give you an argument, but you can question whether the argument's any good. And that raises a kind of meta question. And then I can question whether that's any good. And that raises a meta question. And all of these add to more uncertainty at every step.

1:44:27And then since this never ends, it means all of your certainty will be reduced to nothing. That's just wrong. That's just mathematically. long, right? Because we all know you can have an infinite sequence of increasing quantities that add to a finite amount. Okay. He was just wrong about that. But is there a doubt that there's an external world? No, there's no reasonable doubt. On what grounds would one have a reasonable doubt there's an external world? What would be the grounds? I'm just trying to understand where Where is this doubt supposed to come from? Well, I suppose you can't ever tell that you're not in the matrix or something like that, that what you're experiencing isn't all in your head.

1:45:12That's just fallibilism. Again, I granted you that. So this depends. Now we're back to the definition of knowledge. If what you mean by knowledge requires absolute 100 % certainty, then fine. I don't know there's an external world. Right? I'm not absolutely 100 % certain, but I'm so certain. I mean, as it were, if I were to put it on a scale, I would put it at 99.99999 % or whatever. And I'm not going to, of all the things I need to worry about in my everyday life, I don't need to worry that I might be wrong on that count. Right. There are other things I can more profitably use my time, you know, worrying where I think something's the case and it might not be the case.

1:45:54So if all you mean is, yes, it is, as it were, logically possible that I'm wrong, fine. But that's not a serious doubt. When we ask people to convict people in court, okay, this is a serious thing. I mean, somebody can go to jail. You ask to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond all possible doubt. Maybe you can't be convinced beyond all possible doubt, but you can be convinced beyond all reasonable doubt. And that's good enough, isn't it? You know, do I need to be convinced beyond an unreasonable doubt? Why? It's unreasonable, that doubt. You know, doubts need to be backed by something.

1:46:45This is a point that Descartes made in meditations, that he says the doubts that I'm raising, I'm not raising out of levity or lack of consideration. When Descartes raises doubts in meditation one, every doubt is grounded in something he already believes. When he says maybe I'm asleep and dreaming, that's a reasonable doubt because he does believe he sleeps and dreams. right that's why there is no evil demon argument there is no such argument because there's no ground to believe in an evil demon the the the most hyperbolic doubt that descartes raises in meditation one is not based in an evil demon it is based in god in god and the reason he raises that he says, I think God is omnipotent, so I think if God wanted to, he could deceive me.

1:47:44But then the answer to that is, yeah, but God is good. God is benevolent. God wouldn't trick you. And then you go through a whole series of move and counter move, and he's not quite sure what to do at the end. But the point is, Descartes begins believing in God. That's part of his given set of beliefs at the beginning of the meditations. And his hyperbolic doubt is based not in an evil demon, but in God. Maybe God could do this to me. And if you go to meditation six, where he finally answers it all, he answers it by showing why God would not do that. Not that an evil demon wouldn't do it. But there was never an evil demon argument.

1:48:28The mention of an evil demon there is not as an argument. It is a meditative practice for certain specific psychological purposes. It is not an argument. So Descartes never has to answer it because he never raises it. He has to answer the God argument, which he does. The entire structure of the meditations is answering the God argument in meditation one. anyway descartes is very clear it's not just any old doubt you need grounded doubts you need reasonable doubts you need doubts that have something to back them if someone says i doubt the world exists and i say why and they say i don't know i just why should i take you seriously why should i take that seriously mm-hmm i hadn't planned on going in this direction but i think maybe it is a good direction to end with but i always hear or i often hear people just go oh what are the the biggest outstanding philosophical problems the most difficult ones and the three that i think i hear most often are probably the problem of induction the mind-body problem and then this problem of global skepticism And before I ask you what you think are some of the biggest outstanding problems, I just want to clarify, am I right that you would say that this global skepticism problem just doesn't belong on that list?

1:49:56yes and i don't think i i don't think the the problem of induction you have to separate it into two things there's one thing that goes by the name the problem of induction which is can i derive a principle of induction from deductive logic to which the answer is no you can't as we know you know as we've proven over and over again and proven by by a human and proven in a different way by Goodman. But I think Goodman, the answer is correct there. I mean, some inductive practice is justified. I mean, part of what we mean by being a reasonable person is that you accept some inductive arguments as at least making their conclusions likely or probable or credible.

1:50:45If somebody didn't do that, we would think they were insane. We wouldn't say, oh, look at how clever they are. We say this is a lunatic, right? So there's not a problem of justifying induction by deriving it from something else. Now, there is a problem in clearly articulating inductive rules, and that's what Goodman insisted on when he said, look, there's really the problem of justification and description are really the same here. And exactly how the best inductive rules work, and Bayesianism is an attempt to answer that, for example, in a very specific way, that's still a problem. But it's not the problem of induction, like why should we believe in induction?

1:51:30That's just a bad problem. That's like global skepticism. If you didn't accept any inductive arguments, you'd be insane. Could I convince you of that? Well, why should I care if I can convince you of that? You're insane. Probably I can't convince you of anything. I probably can't convince you to, you know, leave through the door rather than the window if you don't believe in induction. I don't know what to say, right? You're a lunatic. You know, you need to be put in a hospital, not in a philosophy class. The mind-body problem, of course, is a great problem. I don't work on it because I see no prospects for solving it.

1:52:04I think it's a real problem. It's not a pseudo problem. The problem of making clear good inductive practice, that's a real problem, but it's not the radical problem. and global skepticism, I don't think that's a problem at all. Okay, well, then the last question I'll ask is, what, other than the mind-body problem, do you think are some of the biggest genuine philosophical problems that are outstanding right now?

1:52:33I'm reluctant to even comment for the simple reason that most of my work is in foundations of physics and most of the things I think about are in foundations of physics and nature of space and time and the nature of matter and how to understand quantum mechanics. I think these are all great problems, but they're not what would pop to most people's minds as philosophical problems. And in fields outside of those I work in, I'm just not familiar enough with what people do to make judgments about how interesting or uninteresting I think what they're focusing on is. I'm just not familiar enough with it.

1:53:14I would be reluctant to judge it. Can I ask instead then why you think the mind-body problem is such an important big problem and why you see it as intractable at this point? Well, it's a big problem because we do have minds. We feel pains. I mean, again, the best example has to do with feelings like pains, you know, what Nagel calls what it's like to be something. We all know there's something it's like to be a person with a toothache and it hurts and it's bad. Right. And it's something you want to avoid and you want to not induce in other people. And so there is consciousness of that sort. It exists.

1:54:02If someone were to deny it exists, I wouldn't, you know, they're just playing a game. then there's the question how does it come into existence i mean not everything i think is conscious i don't think tables and chairs and rocks are conscious again some people are pants i guess i you know come on i mean i just i have very little time for somebody who says a rock is conscious we know that we're conscious and we know that our consciousness has something to do with our brain activity, our neural activity. But nobody knows how to articulate just what it is about a certain kind of neural activity or brain activity that creates pain, that unpleasant sensation, that unpleasant subjective sensation.

1:54:49That's the mind-body problem. I think that's a great mystery. I mean, again, it's more of a mystery if you do a lot of physics because you realize you can do the physics without any consideration at all of that question. And the physics seems to go fine, right? I mean, if I just want to analyze part of your brain from a physics perspective, the fact that there's pain there or not has nothing to do with anything. It's just electrons and, you know, ions moving around. And we think we have the physical laws that pretty much get that. Why should all of this be associated with any kind of consciousness?

1:55:28and more specifically, which sorts of physical processes are associated with any sort of consciousness. As far as I, we have no answer to that and I don't see how you could get an answer. My problem is I don't even see a route to anything that would count as a satisfying explication, a satisfying understanding where you'd say, oh, now I see why.

1:56:05I don't even know what I wouldn't know what the connective tissue for that explanation would be. Even if I just make tried to make one up, it just, you know, there I could see you could get more information about a correlation. You could say, oh, it seems as though when the brains are doing this, it's painful. And when they're doing that, it's not. But why the one and not the other? I don't even see what an explanation would look like. And so that's why I don't work on it. I wouldn't know how to make progress on it. I think it's a great, in a way, a great mystery that there is anything conscious at all.

1:56:41And the kinds of consciousness and what specifically is conscious and what specific sorts of consciousness they have, all of that, I just don't think we have any good grasp on. and I don't know of any research program that would lead in the direction of an explanation. That's just my feeling about it. Well, it's now getting late in New York City, so let me finish by asking, as we must in every episode, what is going on with the John Bell Institute and the Foundations of Physics these days? Yeah, so I think I reported to you, We found a location in Split, great location for putting on summer schools.

1:57:23We put together, it was largely Angelo Bassi, who was the motor of that last year, one on the Foundations of Physics, and it went great. We're doing one this year, end of August, on space and time, and that seems to be coming together well by the time this comes out. I mean, I can't suggest people apply to it because the application period ended. But I can say that we have enough funding to keep this going at least a few more years. And next year we will do again at least one in split on probability and statistical explanation and thermodynamics, that kind of stuff. That's the plan. What does a summer school look like or summer program look like?

1:58:12Well, what I want to do with this is to be a proper school. So it's not like a conference. It's not you get together a bunch of people who work in the field and everybody just gives their most recent paper. I mean, there are things called summer schools that more or less work like that. This is an attempt to be a much more systematic introduction. And at a level that, because we want to have philosophers, physicists, mathematicians all there. So that means you can't assume any particular background. So kind of everything presented from zero with some mathematical rigor, right, with some philosophical rigor in a systematic way by a core faculty over two weeks, basically.

1:59:06together with some other you know kind of more speculative or you know edgy things and maybe some visiting people but the idea really is to run it as as an introduction to fundamental issues from a philosophical mathematical physical perspective altogether and who is it that should be looking into attending? Like, what's your target audience? I mean, this sort of, it's a little hard to say. I would say, you know, the immediate target are graduate students and early career faculty. But these are questions that are not treated in most physics programs or in most philosophy programs for that matter, because, you know, philosophy of physics is a little boutique-y.

1:59:59so it's very easy to have people who are much older who still have never had any of this material and they're perfectly appropriate right but you know the idea is the main idea is to get people who are kind of earlyish in their careers here's here's the foundations if you want to think about these issues in a foundational way here's a bunch of foundational stuff that should be helpful well Tim this has been another solid entry in our saga on this show so thanks again as always so much for doing this with me