#132 Vsauce - Does Anything Exist?

27:30But if you die, you're gone. You left us. You passed.

27:39Michael Stevens:But being asleep and being dead are kind of similar in some ways in terms of like, hey, is he like listening to us right now? Is he like capable of doing things? The sleep and death thing encourages me to believe that it's not so much about a set of properties. It's about a set of potentialities. When you're asleep, you can still do some stuff later. But when you're dead, you can't. And that, I think, deep inside us is why we think of death as being you being gone. I was reading some surveys from doctors about like, when does a family accept that they have lost a loved one? And it's not when brain damage occurs.

28:24It's when the heart stops. and i thought that was is that just an old traditional kind of belief that well the heart is life and the brain is just like cools the blood i don't know if anyone from aristotelian

28:38Michael Stevens:times is still around but what i'm saying is deep inside of us we think of the heart as being once the heart's gone it's over what do you mean the brain death well well then you know they're still alive. We can keep them alive with feeding tubes and stuff. And I think that it comes back to the fact that your brain can change significantly. You can have brain damage and never walk again, but you're still you. But if your heart stops, there's no potential for you to do anything again, even in a different way like you would if you lost part of your brain. Yeah. I mean, like losing memory seems like a really important example here.

29:17Like somebody who can't remember what happened to them yesterday or five minutes ago there's this guy called clive something who has a seven second memory he was a orchestral conductor and he had some kind of some kind of medical thing it wasn't an accident it was like a virus or something that caused him to lose his memory every seven seconds right and so you would sit down with him and you'd say you know what what's going on like how are you doing and he'll be like you're the first person i've seen in 30 years yeah and he kept a diary where every day he wrote i'm alive for the first time and then he'd cross it out and go no no now i'm alive that wasn't the real one and he would he would tick off the correct ones and then he'd go back through and he'd cross off the and there is a sense in which you want to say even without that psychological continuity you could take out that part of the brain entirely there's still a person who's unified across that

30:12Michael Stevens:And others would think of it as being a continuous person. Like you kept calling him he, not them or they. And you also named him Clive. Like he's got a name, a single name. So that's why I kind of just lean on your identity is linked to everything that you could do. And after all, that is what leaves when you die. Yeah. When you die, you will never do anything that you could have done but didn't. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a really interesting question to me, which I think I have not thoroughly explored enough, is the link between these two things. Miriology, we were talking about before, and then this question of personhood and whether you can have a sort of similar philosophy of both.

30:57I mean, we said like, there isn't really this thing called a table. We just sort of decide when to call it a table and how much of it we'd have to take away until it's no longer a table. we're doing the same kind of thing with with people like you've kind of just got you can take away this and you can take away that and whether they're alive or dead or still the same person kind of just depends on your context and function yeah right like there's the whole like would you

31:21Michael Stevens:love me if i was a worm yeah that question is actually pretty deep because yeah well what do you mean does that even mean if you were a worm yeah and i think that the average person means if my conscious experience was inside the body of a worm. They just mean my body changed because they don't think of the body as being them. They can lose an arm. They can gain weight or lose weight and they're still them. They can be a worm and it's still them. The thing that isn't changing is the internal world. And so that's why I think that's like one of the best ways to define what consciousness is when you get into a discussion.

31:56And a lot of times people are talking past each other. Some are talking about awareness. Some are talking about interiority. I just say, look, consciousness is the thing that doesn't change for Phil in Groundhog's Day. Every morning he wakes up and everything's changed back to the way it was on 6 a.m. Groundhog's Day. But he remembers that thing that's not changing. His wounds go away. but yeah the thing inside that's what we're trying to get at when we're talking about if you were a worm what is what part of the worm is you it's that stuff it's that mental interiority i have a question then right like if we can conceive of my consciousness inside of a worm a lot of people who are like materialists about the world think that consciousness is just this thing that the brain does that conscious experiences are just the same thing as brain activity if that were the case then surely in order to put your consciousness into a worm, you'd need to literally take your sort of big human brain and put it inside of a worm.

33:00If we can imagine taking your consciousness and fitting it inside of a worm, like taking it out of your brain and putting it into the worm brain, does that tell us that at least the way we were thinking about it conceptually, that consciousness is not tied to the brain in that materialistic way? Or would it be that in order to have a worm with your consciousness, you'd need a worm with Michael Stevens brain literally inside of it.

33:24Michael Stevens:I don't know. I mean, I, I believe, but cannot prove that it could be, my consciousness could be replicated in a computer or with some much more space efficient system that could fit inside of a worm. But when I say my consciousness, I kind of just mean a thing that believes it is alive, believes it has conscious will, and also thinks that it is the continuation of my experiences. Yeah. I don't know if you could like build a machine that would just suddenly copy my brain and put it into this little special worm brain so that I like basically died. And this worm went, oh my gosh, I don't have any arms.

34:04Michael Stevens:I'm Michael though. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what, is there, is there like a soul of mine that continues on and is like, ah, I'm dead. I'm the thing in the worm is an imposter. I don't know. We'll have to just do that experiment Well, here's a question just to get an idea of your intuition here suppose that There's you and there's like your greatest enemy. I don't know who that is They shall remain nameless But you need to want bad stuff to happen to them and you want good stuff to happen to you and i'm some Sort of evil crazy doctor and I say here's what i'm going to do michael i'm going to i'm going to put you into an Operation i'm going to put you on a on a table and you're going to go unconscious I'm going to take all of your memories all of your conscious experience And i'm going to move it over to his brain and i'm going to take all of his and i'm going to move it over to yours So when you wake up you'll wake up with all of his memories You'll look down at your hands and you'll go gosh just five minutes ago.

34:55I remember being him And vice versa now before I do this operation I'm going to tell you that one of these after the operation i'm going to torture Who do you want me to torture? So good so good so good New markdowns up to 70 % off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Stock up and stay big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories, and more must-haves for summer. Join the Nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.

35:35Not the body I'm inhabiting. So you'd want me to torture the other guy's body because he'll wake up with your memories. Hold on, wait. So he'll wake up. He'll wake up. When does the torture happen? Afterwards. After the switch. After the switch. Right. So what I've swapped is all of the memories and all of this sort of continuous experience. Yeah. None of the physical matter. Right. Just literally sort of as if I can go in as if it's a computer and tap, tap, tap and get rid of your memories and put his memories into you. Yeah. Who do you want me to torture? I want you to torture my body containing his experience.

36:13Yeah, that's interesting. Because now, if everything about you physically stays the same, everything physical that makes you up stays the same, and yet you say, well, I'd rather that this physical self be tortured because I'm going to be over there. Does that give us an argument for the immateriality of the mind or the self? Because all of the material is still the same, but you are not identifying yourself with

36:38Michael Stevens:it anymore you know yeah it makes me really question things like the emotion of revenge because if you made a clone of my worst enemy yeah um and then you said well you can torture the clone we just made it wouldn't give me the same pleasure even if it had all the same memories and everything really yeah um and it's hard to pinpoint why but then it makes me question why would I even enjoy torturing my worst enemy if they hadn't been cloned? Because they also change over time. In one second, they will be a clone of who they were a second ago. But I get more pleasure out of their suffering than like, hey, we made a thousand clones of them that all think that they're the real one.

37:23You can pick one to beat up. I'd be like, that just doesn't feel fun anymore. Yeah, anymore, yeah. Yeah. It's like maybe maybe it's because all the other clones are not getting the punishment that they deserve. Yeah, that would be an interesting scenario. But I know what you mean. Like, it doesn't feel satisfying. This came up once in a video I was doing where someone suggested something like, you know, making a perfect clone of Hitler and sort of punishing him for World War Two. and whether that would satisfy our sense of justice. Would we feel that justice had been done because we've got this figure who wakes up and goes, yeah, it's me.

38:01I remember doing that. Yeah, this was me. I did it last week and we punished them for it. Would we be satisfied?

38:08Michael Stevens:So it wouldn't feel very satisfying. Yeah. But it should in a way because that person who is being punished thinks that they really are Hitler. Yeah, right. So someone who did what he did is experiencing the consequences. And yet it doesn't change what happened. So you're missing that piece. Because also there's a reverse question here. If we want to say, well, he didn't do it, but as long as he thinks he did it, that's a good reason to punish him. Does that mean that if someone does commit a crime and then they forget about it and they genuinely don't think that they did it, do we now not punish them?

38:47Because the thing that matters is that, you know, whether or not they think they did it. Yeah, I know. I know. So what you've got to do is wipe your memory and you can get away with any crime. Yeah, right.

38:57Michael Stevens:So the only way I can kind of feel about it is that maybe we should make punishment less cruel. Like, OK, look, you did it. You don't remember that you did. Yeah. Or you didn't do it, but you really think you did. let's just okay in the first the first example is better you did it but you don't remember that you did it or you did it but you're actually a clone of the consciousness of the real bunch of matter that did it i just think we still we need to separate them from society but make sure that they're happy yeah don't execute them or punish them but just because we want everyone to be safe we're gonna put you guys on the clone planet yeah because purely preventative it's just preventative yeah but we want it to remain like fair yeah yeah i was thinking a second ago we mentioned peter van inwagon who has this sort of weird and wacky view about life being unified there's this sort of argument that derives from his work about consciousness and about the immateriality of consciousness because you know this this view of muriology that you have that there's no such real thing as a chair there's just stuff yeah and it's arranged chair wise and we've put a label on it but there's no real distinction between the chair and the table and it's all just stuff that we've just arranged van in wagon has this thought of like well okay here's our first premise then there are no real distinctions between material objects there are no distinct material objects that exist.

40:32Premise two, minds are distinct. My mind is distinct from your mind, your mind is distinct from my mind. Conclusion, if there are no distinction between material objects, but minds are distinct, then minds are not material.

40:49Michael Stevens:Wait, why is there no distinction between material objects? Because for this view of muriology, it's like you don't actually have a chair and a table. here. You've just got a bunch of atoms or fundamental stuff, as you like to put it. And we've just sort of put a label on that and put a label on this. But it's all just one big soup of stuff, right? That we're just - Well, yeah, but it's different stuff. The stuff here that you're sitting on is different than this stuff. And the properties they're exhibiting are different, different colors, different hardnesses. So I guess that would be my response, but it does sound like a pretty clever little funny way of going, I think it's great fun.

41:29I've just proved that the mind is immaterial. Yeah.

41:31Michael Stevens:With two little sentences. Yeah. Two relatively controversial sentences. Right. Once you've sort of got on that bandwagon, it becomes an interesting... I think that might be part of his thought, because you were saying earlier, it's a bit of a weird view. I think there is this element to which we can look at, like, you know, is that a part of that? And is this one object or many objects? There is a sense in which we feel unified. There's a sense in which I feel like I am a person. And so there's an intuitive force to saying that, well, life, like me, there is some real unity going on there. Yes, yes.

42:05And I think that you feel that way and I feel that way about myself. Not because it's correct, but because it has an enormous survival advantage. I think the story of human evolution is, among many other things, the story of us becoming more and more sovereign and identified with something very specific. So even it's not just this is me and my body, but also my will, like that thing that I just did. Did I decide to do that or not? Does a cat or a lobster make conscious decisions and then like regret them and explain itself and and feel a certain like self authorization for what it does? I think that's something that came even later in the human history than you might think.

42:54What do you think about conscious choice and decision making? I mean, you've probably been asked before, but do you think that there is such a thing as free will? Ooh, that's a very good question for me to answer after I go to the bathroom.

43:07Michael Stevens:I'm sorry. The Dr. Pepper. Cut to the Dr. Pepper commercial. What was it? Zero is just going right through me. I'll be right back. Yeah, sure thing, man. We're back. We're back. I'm back. Do I believe in free will? I don't know what I will eventually decide. I think today, if you asked me today, which you did, I would say I don't think so. I really don't think that we do, but because we're all so ignorant, we get to pretend that we do. And it's really incredible that I can say, golly, I'm responsible for things. There's something called I that has authority over this body and is responsible for what it does.

43:56Michael Stevens:And I think, though, that really it's a fiction that was created in order to make our species more fit to survive on this planet in the niche that we had to take on in order to continue. you. I think that we have an enormously intelligent, non-conscious brain that decides how we feel about things and decides what we should do. And we listen to that. Who's we? How can I listen to it? Isn't it me? Well, we developed a feeling of a separation between the non-conscious instinctive responses to stuff and the agent that does it um i think that it just helped us as life became more and more complex i'm sure you're familiar with the bicameral mind theory uh julian janes no i don't think so well i i'm i'm currently really deep into this um you should get Brian McVeigh on your podcast.

45:13Michael Stevens:I've listened to everything that he's ever said, and his books are really fascinating too. In a nutshell, the bicameral mind theory, its most bold claim is that humans did not have consciousness in the sense of like, I'm self-aware inside my head until about like 1000 BC. Really? Yeah. So what did they have? They had voices in their heads and those voices told them what to do. If you look at the Iliad, no one decides to do anything in that book. It's always Athena then filled me with the courage to fight or or and then the fates of hunger made me eat. There's absolutely no like, well, you know, the soldier started to feel like maybe he should call his mom because he missed her.

46:06Michael Stevens:Interesting. But then go forward to the Odyssey and now we've got fully fledged people with opinions and desires and it can't be. Well, this whole way of thinking starts to explain why dreams appeared to be different in prehistory and even early history. So glad you said that. Why. People reported hearing voices all the time. Right. the Bible, I think the Bible is very much the story of humans becoming conscious. It began with, oh yeah, God's like walking around with us all the time and telling me to build an ark. And then it becomes, oh, where'd he go? Tell me about the dreams thing. Dreams changed.

46:55Michael Stevens:So dreams, we read in very old literature, dreams are almost always like, oh, an angel came to me in my bed where I happened to be sleeping. Dreams are never described as, oh, well, so, okay, it was really weird. Like there was a horse, but it was like my mom and we were on the beach. No, the dreams are almost entirely in the oldest literature we have. I fell asleep in the barn and then a spirit spoke to me or something there in the barn. Yeah, it's like it's it's it's very sort of direct and communicative. It's not like imagistic and narrative. That's right. And I just got a book about consciousness as being explained through the dreams of children.

47:46And I haven't read it yet, but I'm so excited because children's dreams also change over time as they become encultured into our world where you have will and you are an individual sovereign person locked inside your head. And that changes how they maybe experience dreams, but I think definitely it changes how they report dreams, what they think happened while they were asleep. The reason why this will sound immediately suspicious is because like biological evolution doesn't work that quickly. So if dreams and our sense of like consciousness and all of that, like changed that quickly, it can't have been like a evolutionary adaptation or something to the brain.

48:31So what changes? It was cultural. Right.

48:34Michael Stevens:It was about how you were raised. It was about how your parents like interacted with you. I mean, I think that it's hard to do experiments like this. Like, oh, hey, let's let's take some newborn babies and like what never speak to them. Just like I do have an idea for a movie that I call Motherland where some scientists do this. They take newborn babies and they put them into this room that is just a soft, warm room where there's like spigots where they can slurp the nutrients they need and it can embrace them and hug them like the floor can move. And they're raised there as babies. They can never get hurt.

49:15Michael Stevens:They get everything they need, but they never see an adult. They are never exposed to any culture. And the experiment is what do they wind up believing? Yeah, yeah. Did they wind up going, oh, I think therefore I am or what? Yeah. Yeah. So dreams, you said children's dreams also change over time. Yeah. And so that would give us an indication that, I mean, I guess you could say it's cultural, like it's not like cultural shift on a societal level, but as some kind of cultural view gets put into a into a person yeah the way that they consciously interact with the world is adapted yeah yeah and the way the world pushes and pulls them uh causes certain parts of them to emerge and it causes them to think about themselves and what it is to be conscious what they're actually experiencing in their own minds i think that's something that we learn yeah and i i think that and i cannot say too much about it because i don't know enough yet but i've gotten this whole stack of books, I think that interiority, which is really what I'm talking about, because I know consciousness can mean a lot of things.

50:26I'm talking about feeling that you are in your own head, trapped and all alone. I think that has risen and fallen through time. I think that after the fall of Rome, individuality went back down for a long time until the Renaissance. And this isn't just like oh i thought of this this is something that uh brian mcveigh has talked about i don't know if it's true or not i do think however that the work that he and julian james and many others have done

50:59Michael Stevens:has allowed us to talk about and investigate consciousness in really fruitful ways even if they're completely wrong a slight tangent it's just you said that you know i don't know if this is true but i think it's interesting and i suppose so much of the essence of who you are and what you do is to raise some interesting questions and at the end of a v-source video or something you might go and you know who knows like thanks for watching like go and think about it have you approached one of these topics one of these big topics consciousness and miriology and all the stuff that you talk about and ever come away being like actually you know what i've read the books i heard this person's opinion.

51:38And I think that's right. Like, you know, you do a video about free will and you come away from it going like, yeah, no, it doesn't exist. Or, you know, if you'd have done a video about consciousness and come away being like, yeah, integrated information theory, that's the one. Has that ever happened? Or is it always this sort of open-ended, you know, who knows?

51:55Michael Stevens:Yeah, well, it needs to stay open. Again, that's the job of philosophy. But I definitely think that I've taken a question like, do chairs exist? And I've been like, oh my gosh, like, of course they do. But then by the end I go, well, no, obviously they don't. However, I will forgive all of us and myself for constantly talking about chairs. I think that...

52:36to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

52:47In my episodes, I tend to leave it open, but then take like an oblique path to say, well, what does it even mean that we can ask this and that we can't answer it? Like maybe there's something bigger or some analogy we can make that will make us appreciate the mystery. because I don't like ending by saying, well, we may never know. Yeah, right. The world is full of mysteries. See you next week. Yeah. I've heard you say before that in finding ideas like this, you kind of just do a bunch of interesting reading and then afterwards you go like, yeah. So what's the video going to be about? I'm interested in this and interested in that.

53:25Has there ever been an abandoned project in the sense of being like, here's a really interesting question and then doing the reading and then either because it doesn't make sense or it feels like something you won't be able to easily communicate or because you don't have, you know, enough to sort of say on it or whatever that you thought. I'd love to have made a video about that, but I had to give it up.

53:44Michael Stevens:No, I've never given up. I've never abandoned anything, but sometimes they sit for a long time because I don't know

53:59Michael Stevens:either where to go or how to make it an episode with a spine yeah and not just a whole bunch of like well and here's another cool like thing whether it's a piece of trivia or just like a here's a cool thought experiment like i've been working really hard for a long time on an episode about stuck culture. This is the feeling that artistic innovation in our society has like reached a standstill, that television shows and music just aren't innovating like they used to. And this feels like a very subjective thing. It feels like a real generational thing. You reach a certain age and you go, oh gosh, the music when I was younger was way more innovative or it was good back then or how come, how come movies all look the same nowadays?

54:51I think that's part of growing up. But it's also true that like in the 90s, a 20 year old television show looked like it was 20 years old. The fashion, the grain of the film it was shot on, like all these things were really different. But today, a 20 year old show from like 2005, that's like The Office. It's like may as well have been made yesterday. Yeah, right. I'm watching a lot of Gilmore Girls right now. You forget that that show is as old as it is. But you could not watch a show in the 90s and forget that it was as old as it was. So what's going on? We also just have way more remixes and reboots than ever before.

55:31I mean, that's not even an opinion. That's just like very true. Yeah. And I think a lot of people like to try to pinpoint one cause, whether it's capitalism,

55:48Michael Stevens:or some other big ism. But as I looked into this really hardcore, I'm like, man, there are 18 ,000 reasons for this feeling. And, obviously, Mark Fisher is one of the biggest philosophers who's investigated this with the idea of hauntology. You should look up some of his lectures and speeches he's given. But then his book, Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life, really goes into this. He kind of frames it as saying that the future has been stolen from us. That there was a time when the future was like this brand new thing. And in the future, guns are going to go pew, pew. Guns in the future still go pew, pew.

56:38They haven't changed. The future isn't changing like it did 100 years ago. Yeah, I mean, intuitively, and I haven't read about this at all, but I've got sort of two suggestions here, right? One is pessimism. One is that if you ask someone in the 1950s to draw the future, they would draw silver cars flying through the sky. And if you ask someone to draw the future now, they show nuclear wastelands or environmental catastrophe. Like guns in the future will actually be, you know, people throwing sticks at each other because the whole world will be destroyed. They don't go pew pew. They go. Yeah. But the thing about particularly with television technology and music technology, people forget how recent this is.

57:20And there is like a diminishing returns thing, right? Like in the first 10 years of technology, the increases will be noticeably crazy. Think about the iPhone. the jump from the first iphone to the to the second iphone would have been pretty significant and then every iteration it's like a diminishing return curve right and so maybe that's why if you're in the 90s watching a show from the 60s there's this huge technological gap might even be in black and white whereas from the 90s to you know 2010 it's still changing it's just the rate is reducing. So maybe that really is.

57:56Michael Stevens:Maybe there really is like a plateau that's reached. I mean, in the 50s and 60s, people didn't even really know what television was yet. Yeah. You watch the Dick Van Dyke show, episode one. It's not a TV show. It's a play. Yeah. It's a play. I mean, that's what that's what a live to tape sitcom was. You had a live audience and you had a third wall or a fourth wall that they looked through. Yeah. Right. And And in that first episode of the Dick Van Dyke show, he and his wife go to a dinner party and they all sing songs together because the show is just a musical variety show. Yeah. And later on, they were like, we can actually do like storylines that exist within this universe and isn't just a show for an audience.

58:40And I think, yeah, before the iPhone, people didn't know what a phone was supposed to be.

58:45Michael Stevens:We hadn't figured it out yet. So there were phones that opened in all these weird ways and they would swivel open. And and then now we're like, it's a black rectangle. That's what a phone is. I know that there's folding phones now. Yeah. That are kind of resemble that clamshell idea. Yeah. But they still what do they fold out into a mirrored rectangle? You know, so I think sometimes that happens. And I think when there is innovation, we don't realize it's happening until we look back and go, oh, man, yeah. There was a time before I could order a burrito to be delivered to me just with like a box in my hand.

59:23There's a time before the Internet. I was alive for it. But during that transition, I wasn't like, guys, things are changing. I was like, oh, MapQuest sucks. yeah you know but we're a bit more attuned to that now perhaps in that when something like chat gpt gets released and people are immediately perhaps uniquely in sort of a historical from a historical perspective going like this will change everything you know when when the mobile phone was invented i'm sure people thought this is really neat hey i'll be able to call someone when i'm on the go but they could not have possibly imagined i mean who even uses a mobile phone to be a phone anymore you know it's like seems to be the least important part of the phone technology but maybe there's something just genuinely more radical about the new technology or maybe we are just becoming a bit more attuned to realizing the butterfly effect of yeah i think it's become

1:00:15Michael Stevens:really calcified in our minds the that expectation that things will change and get better and be perfect yeah and so when there is a major step forward there's probably something that's not perfect about it. And we go, not impressed. This isn't the future yet. I'm like, guys, it's been the future for a long time. Yeah. You know, you're hosting this new show, The Rest is Science. And I've got to say, we've spoken about issues like consciousness and free will and objects and atoms and how they all go together. But we haven't been talking about scientific concepts and we haven't been talking about laws of nature and stuff.

1:00:54I wonder how much of your work previous to this particular show you consider to be a work of science or a work of philosophy or psychology or sort of what box you would best sort of describe yeah so i just i just

1:01:09Michael Stevens:call it entertainment right i i think to try to whittle it into like oh so you're a science youtuber i'm like i don't know i talk about language a lot too yeah right word games and poetry and art and math and philosophy it's just whatever it's all it's all just stuff dude yeah yeah and we put labels on the stuff and we pretend that it's a noun but it's all just entertainment it's myriological nihilism about about my career about yeah about the it's it's nihilism all the way down it seems or all the way up maybe um which i suppose is the position um but then you know you you have spoken about science a ton as well and it's always really interesting did I hear you once say that you spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of like talk yeah and like why it sort of it sort of does that yeah because I feel like a lot of the time this is something I really resonated with because a lot of the time whenever a scientific explanation comes along to you know describe the relations between objects there's always this remaining question of but why is it doing that yeah so like Isaac Newton I give this example all the time he discovers gravity, right?

1:02:20And he brilliantly, in an unprecedented manner, describes exactly how planets relate to each other. He realizes the same thing that makes this glass fall to the ground is the same thing that keeps the planets in orbit around each other. And there's an inverse square law that if they're this far away, it will be this amount of mass and this kind of attraction. And he writes all of this in the Principia Mathematica. And in the Scolium, to the second edition of the Principia Mathematica, he writes quite explicitly, but as for what this gravity thing is, as for like why it does this and why the objects behave in this way, hypothesis non fingo is what he writes.

1:02:59I frame no hypothesis. He doesn't know. He's got no idea. And I feel like a lot of the time that's kind of what's going on in science. So when I heard you say that you really wanted to get to the bottom of talk, like I understand that if I move further away with a long lever i can apply less force and lift something heavy but like why right yeah like do you think that i mean my my feeling is that a lot of what science does is it just describes right it just describes that if you you know move further away from the from the sort of pivot point you'll you can apply less force and the object will go up but it doesn't really go much further to telling you why, but I don't know if you agree with that assessment of science.

1:03:43Michael Stevens:Yeah. I mean, I agree that the job of science is to describe and predict. And so if I can describe a lever using a formula, I can predict what a lever will do in the future. And I can build a lever that'll lift something and it'll work as soon as I make it. But then that's not about asking why it works. Newton, it was very right to say, I don't have a hypothesis for what it is. I can describe it. I can write formulas and you can just plug in whatever you want. I've condensed all of this behavior into one equation. But what is force? It'd be very easy to have had a totally different history of science on this planet where we never even invented the concept of force.

1:04:32A force is not a thing. I can't fill this glass up with force. Force is really human centric. It's about how it feels to push something. You could have just as easily have said, well, there's mass and there's acceleration. But Newton said, ah, but what if we called their product force? I mean, that's what F equals MA was. It was a definition. It was, hold on, let's just say that there's this thing called F and that its relationship is the product of mass and acceleration. Because mass is this like thing that's out there. We don't, today we still don't really know. Are there two kinds of mass? Is there the inertial mass and the gravitational mass?

1:05:15Michael Stevens:Are those different things or the same manifestation of the same thing? But we do know how to calculate what the thing will do. What it does. So when it came to torque, I spent years trying to get this. And other people have asked this question to give me an intuitive physical origin for mechanical advantage, because whenever you ask, why can I lift a car with a lever? I'm not that strong. I can stand on one end of a lever and lift an entire car up. You get kind of two answers. One is, well, it's not that surprising because force is not conserved. I'm like, I still don't have an answer. Or they'd say, well, you're trading force for distance.

1:05:58Yes, it's not taking very much force to lift that car, but you're having to move a large distance.

1:06:02Michael Stevens:And I'm like, how the heck does the car know what's going to happen? Does the universe go, hold on, guys, he's going a long distance, so we don't need the force to be as high. Are there some physics police out there that are telling matter which way to go and what laws to follow? So it was one night, I don't know how I found this, but I found a paper titled The Physical Origin of Torque. And it was a breakdown of exactly where that mechanical advantage comes from and why. And I've made my own models of it, both physical and digital, to kind of show this off. I mean, we understand that torque comes from the properties of rotation, that if something needs to move a certain distance, like a certain linear distance, but it's rotating through it, the further out it is from the center of rotation, I guess the smaller that angle is going to be.

1:07:02Michael Stevens:to cover like one inch out here versus one inch circling around here. But moment of inertia, which is how hard it is to rotate something, depends on that, but also on something else. Because the formula for moment of inertia isn't MR, mass times radius. Torque is force times radius. But inertia, in the rotational sense, is MR squared. so if I've got like a turntable and I put some weights on it and I use a force to pull it like maybe there's just a string on a pulley and then some weights and I let go of it it's going to start spinning it'll accelerate if I move those weights twice as far from the center I need not twice as much torque to get it to accelerate the same but four times as much why why okay every answer online and every answer i got from the people i asked was well let's do a derivation of the formula yeah and they would do it and sure enough two r's pop out and i'm like why i don't want it to pop out it popped out the second i touched a crowbar like yeah you're just describing it with symbols exactly and so to to describe the answer as given in this paper, The Physical Origin of Torque, I kind of need some visuals.

1:08:26Michael Stevens:But the long and short of it is that not only is there the angular advantage, there's also the efficiency a force has when it pushes closer or further from a pivot point. The efficiency it has at rotating all of the mass that it's affecting. And that efficiency is not 100 % because the speed of sound is finite. Because forces don't travel instantaneously. Objects bend. There are no perfectly rigid objects. And if you allow your rod to bend, you realize, hold on a second, the geometry of the lever arms for the force application point and the load are different. And it doesn't matter how much that object bends, but when you do the trigonometry on these angles, what falls out is mr squared and are you satisfied with that as an explanation yes i am and it's hard to probably satisfy you because i haven't yet made this video right and so i don't have the the like a honed toolkit for explaining and showing it uh yeah i get um but that's what i'm currently working on well i've got to say i mean you've got a talent for that clearly i mean i think your video on spinning ah is one of the greatest things i've ever seen i mean i think it's my favorite video that you've made oh thank you because it's so weird i mean it's so weird that if you like you know spin a bicycle wheel it will stay up and it'll and if you if you you know turn it over like that then you'll start spinning around on a spin it just and it's again that feeling of like you know when i watch someone sat on like a spinny chair and they spin an object and then they go now watch this when i turn when i turn the object i'm going to start spinning and again it's sort of like how does the universe know how does the chair know yeah that i've done that and it's a it's a it's a wonderful um so so which video are you talking about the the one whose thumbnail is a gyroscope i think it's probably that i think it's called spinning and there's another one called laws and causes i'm talking about the first one okay okay yeah in laws and causes i double down on that even more yeah where i'm like if i'm spinning with two weights in my hand and i pull them in i spin faster don't just tell me that it's about the conservation of angular momentum yes that's just describing the description that's not an explanation now i don't know if you can ever totally explain something that's one of the problems with explanations but um you can draw some diagrams and you'll start to notice that when you pull something in you're actually pulling it um uh well forward or backward i guess depending on which way you're you're already spinning and that is what you're oh i see because if you're spinning then when you pull inwards the motion is actually a kind of forward um yes the path so if i'm spinning around yeah i've got two big weights in my hand and I pull one in the path that that weight takes is this arc.

1:11:38Michael Stevens:Yeah. It's not just curved path. And I'm, let me think. Um, oh man, I need to remember this. The direction of my force to pull it directly into the center is actually pulling myself myself around. I'm not just pulling the weight in. I'm pulling myself around. You're pulling yourself towards the weight. Yeah. I'm accelerating myself. It's almost like you're grabbing an object and giving yourself a push on it. It's exactly like reaching out to a wall and pushing off the wall. Because I'm able to do that. I'm able to move myself when I push the wall because the wall is so much heavier than me. In fact, it's not just the wall.

1:12:25Michael Stevens:It's the entire earth because the wall is like attached to the earth probably yeah that i move because my mass is so much smaller but when i pull a weight in i'm also pushing off of that weight it's just that we don't think that you can push off of something that you're holding in your own hand yeah but oops you can if you're spinning yeah and spinning makes all the difference yeah um yeah and i think i mean for what it's worth i think that explanation sort of can only go so far like i think that what people end up doing is just describing something at a slightly lower level, right? And for some people, that's kind of satisfying.

1:13:00I spoke to a physicist on this podcast who was very much, because there's this sort of debate among scientists. I guess you'd call it like functionalism about physics, that it only tells you what stuff does. It only describes it. And then there are people who think, no, it sufficiently explains why stuff's happening. And I was speaking to somebody who was very suspicious of functionalism. And I said, okay, well, suppose that I like blew a trumpet and that light turned on over there and then i realized that if i blow it louder the light turns on louder uh the brighter brighter yeah and and vice versa and maybe the different notes are different colors and i sort of map this all out and i say okay i've got this mathematical model now where i know that if i blow the trumpet with a c sharp at this volume it's going to be an azure blue at this you know brightness and i do it perfect prediction and then i was like do you think that when someone asked why is the light turning on and i said oh because i blew the trumpet and according to my laws of you know trumpet i've explained it and do you know what she said she said yes yeah she said yeah you've explained it and i think it's a sort of it's a mentality thing like i look at that and say what you've done is you have described comprehensively the relationship between the trumpet and the light but you haven't even moved it's about prediction you know yeah

1:14:12Michael Stevens:how to cause what you want and and you know what had to proceed what happened yes um so then i I would like to ask that person, well, what if you were then told that there's a microphone in the room that analyzes the sound and then feeds it into a computer that translates that into a brightness and a color for the light bulb? What is that? What's now happened? Has it been explained in a different way? Yeah. Because there's got to be a word for that because that's a very different thing. Exactly. But even then, like I would then want to say, OK, so maybe you discover that there's a microphone and the mic.

1:14:51Then you might want to ask, well, you know, why does why do vibrations in the air cause an electrical signal to get set? And you can kind of keep going.

1:14:58Michael Stevens:You can always keep going. And eventually you're going to say, well, who put the microphone there? Yeah, right. Yeah. Who decided that C sharp means Azure? Yeah. And so explanations never end. And that's one of the reasons for the illusion of explanatory depth. Yeah. This is a great psychological phenomenon. I'm sure you've read about it. I've heard of it. This is the thing that if you ask people, do you understand how a helicopter works? They're like, of course I do. And you go, okay, so how does a helicopter go from hovering to moving forward? And they go, oh, yeah. Why does a helicopter have blades on the tail that are like perpendicular to the ones on the top, the big ones?

1:15:44Michael Stevens:And they're like, oh, I don't. I guess I don't really know how a helicopter works. partly it's that there's just no end to what you would need to know to fully understand something and so we just have to default and say yeah i do i get it i got it it depends on the level that you're that you sort of that you're looking for right like if if i sort of walked into this room and i was like the architect and i turned to the to the to the decorator and said why are the walls blue they say oh because you know johnny and in the wallpaper department told us it's like oh well, okay, cool. That makes sense.

1:16:17Whereas if it were a physicist saying, why is the wall blue? And you say, well, because the decorator said this. Yeah, but why is it blue? And you say, oh, because of the wavelength that's bouncing off. Okay, great. And then you ask the philosopher, says, why is the wall blue? Oh, because there's this electromagnetic wave that's bouncing off. Yeah, but why am I experiencing an electromagnetic wave? And you can keep asking why. Yeah.

1:16:39Michael Stevens:Why is blue blue? How come when I look at that wall, the wavelengths don't cause me to taste hamburgers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. That's the philosopher's question. Exactly. And it's actually kind of a continuum. It's not like you've got three different questions going on there. I think you've just sort of got a slightly deeper level of explanatory depth. So like with the helicopter, well, the helicopter flies because the blades rotate. Cool. Or you could say, why does that? Well, because of lift. Yeah, but why does lift? Why is air there in the first place? What is air made out of? What are atoms, you know?

1:17:11Right. And ultimately, I think that the scientific method tells you what things do that it describes things to the extent i mean philip was just sat in the chair that you're in now and he's talked about this a lot about the fact that ultimately when you break down what something is say the table is made out of wood the words made out of atoms the atoms are made out of electrons and quarks and you say well they've got mass and you get to these foundational qualities of the universe like mass and charge and you say ask a physicist what is mass yeah what is charge and they'll define it in terms of what it does and And there's never actually, at the very root, there's never an answer to what is the universe made out of?

1:17:52What is the reason why this is happening? And that science is essentially just describing. So you're left with this. Maybe I'm just trying to justify the existence of philosophy, which sometimes you have to do amongst scientists. But I think there is this ontological gap at the bottom of science. Interestingly, Philip Goff fills that up with consciousness. Okay, yeah.

1:18:13Michael Stevens:consciousness is the thing itself yeah well consciousness could be uh like a third thing yeah there's there's matter and there's consciousness and there's uh what what's what's what what else am i thinking of i don't know maybe like form um you could say that it's a foundational property of the universe you've sort of got mass and charge and yeah right right Right. Consciousness is just one of those foundational features. It doesn't it doesn't come about when matters arranged in just the right way. It's there and we just need to include it in our standard model somehow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that might happen.

1:18:53I I'm still too much of a reductionist. Yeah. Except that I'm like, I don't know.

1:18:57Michael Stevens:I feel like I could just I feel like I could arrange. mechanical levers and pendulums in just the right way and it would it would suddenly have opinions and think and believe it existed yeah well i think you know someone i'm philip goff is what's known as a pan psychist yeah and i've been i've been exploring this view too myself the view that sort of consciousness is more foundational and ubiquitous and and more simple for that reason i think you could say that yeah like if you did put a bunch of you know levers and and and nodes and stuff together that you would give rise to some kind of conscious experience, but that's because it's there at every level, you know?

1:19:34So of course you can take conscious foundational stuff and put it together in a way and get a big conscious thing, but that's explained by the fact that consciousness sort of... How does he define consciousness? In the same way that everybody does ultimately, which is to first say, well, it's a difficult thing to do. And then I think, I don't know if he would endorse this definition, but the most popular one is Thomas Nagel's that he gave in the 70s that to be conscious if something is conscious there is something it is like to be that thing okay so it's like experience okay so so to a panpsychist yeah there is something that it is like to be an electron an electron yeah then how how rich is that being extremely simplistic so so the idea is that like conscious the big mistake that people make for the panpsychist is that consciousness requires complexity.

1:20:29When instead, all you need complexity for is some of the really complex things that consciousness sometimes does, like memory or like persistence of self through time or emotion or desire or anything like that. But so suppose, for example, that you're conscious right now, I presume. Imagine I took away your eyesight, right? You couldn't see anymore. You'd still be conscious, but you couldn't see. Imagine I took away your hearing. You're still conscious, but now you can't hear. So whatever the sight is just a form of conscious perception, but it's not what consciousness is. It's just one of the things that consciousness does.

1:21:03If you take it away, you're still conscious. Yeah. Consciousness deals with that sensory input. So now imagine that I took away memory. And I don't mean like we were talking about earlier. I don't mean like, oh, like, where am I? I mean, like, there's no such thing as memory. So in every single instant, nothing gets laid down. What would that be like? Imagine you were falling through the air and there was no such thing as memory. So in every instant, you didn't know that these were your hands. You didn't remember a microsecond. Would you even know that you were falling? It seems really difficult to imagine, but it still makes sense for me to say that that thing is experiencing.

1:21:39It's conscious. And so I think if you strip away all of the things that aren't actually consciousness itself, the thing you're left with is actually quite simple and rudimentary. And so the kind of experience that an electron would have for a panpsychus would be something extremely rudimental, but maybe just enough to do things like, I don't know, repel other electrons. Maybe that's all that the conscious experience consists in. Interesting. And that's what we get that breathes life, as Stephen Hawking says. Do you have a recommended reading list for panpsychist thought? Oh, yes. I mean, Philip Goff is the panpsychist guy.

1:22:13He's got a great book called Galileo's Era. Oh, I have that book. I literally, I just got it and it's on my stack. You should have brought it. He could have signed it for you on the way out of the book. I didn't know that he was here before me. Yeah, yeah. So he wrote that book. And I think there's an academic kind of version of the case for panpsychism that he's written, which I think is called something like Consciousness and Foundational Matter or something. I don't know. I'll send it to you. but okay i've got a whole i can look it up too a whole list of stuff thomas nagel's what is it

1:22:42Michael Stevens:like to be a bat yeah i've read a lot of nagel i've got uh the view from nowhere and mortal questions which are just also awesome to read for all kinds of other reasons so good consciousness more immortal questions the essay after what is it like to be a bat is an essay called panpsychism did you know that i haven't read that one where he makes the case so you should read that okay you should read that well maybe i did because i think he did spell it out in a pretty nice way where he was like, I'm just saying that there could be like a third thing besides matter and form or whatever the, these two things are.

1:23:17Yeah. Uh, okay. So I mean, I think it's well worth exploring, but that's why the confusion arises in saying that, you know, the thing that you need for consciousness is complexity. Like consciousness is just this one very simple thing in the same way that if I asked, I like using the example of something like the empire state building compared to a rock right imagine i got a rock in the empire state building and i asked you which has more materiality you'd say like neither like they're they're both like as made of material as each other but i could say but look at the empire state building look at it's got like elevators and light switches and automatic door and you're like yeah but that's just it's just a more complex arrangement of what's actually quite a fundamentally simple thing interesting and they you consciousness and minds in the same way i mean i've gotta i've gotta read up on this because i i could only read so much at a time so i stuck to um a lot of like evolutionary approaches that's where i started with consciousness like if whatever it is that we call consciousness it's it must have some purpose or maybe it had some reason it made us as an organism more fit yeah

1:24:33Michael Stevens:um and then i looked at a lot of like information theory and uh i have not yet dipped into panpsychism yeah so i think it'd be up your street yeah i can't say too much about it but i have galileo's error yeah on that list i've read a lot of nicholas humphrey and um caruthers we know the reason he calls it galileo's error is because what galileo does is kick-start the scientific revolution. And he famously says that, you know, maths is the language or math is in the American translation, is the language of the universe. And in trying to say that everything which like is everything which exists and is something that we can apprehend is mathematizable into the language of essentially science of, you know, like this equals this.

1:25:23He's just precluded the ability to talk about consciousness because consciousness is the one thing that resists consciousness is by definition first person and science is by definition third person you know yeah so that's why it's galileo's error because he's sort of he's told us that like

1:25:37Michael Stevens:look consciousness like whatever it is it's going to be going to be explainable through math exactly physics biology it's it can be reduced to the language of nature which is just math yeah so there's a weird coincidence here which is that i mean we spoke a moment ago about how if you really push the scientist they're only describing and describing and once you get down to the very bottom they're just describing and there's this ontological gap or what is the thing and then you think about in terms of our experience there's only one thing that we really experience in itself like as a thing in itself and that's awareness itself and so maybe if we're missing this sort of ontological isness at the foundation of science but we also only experience you know experience directly as as a thing in itself that plugs in that gap you know i guess that's kind of the idea So there's something that it is like to be an electron.

1:26:29Michael Stevens:According to the panpsychist. And there's something that it's like to be me. Yes. But what it is like to be me is just many more things because I've got memories and hearing and sight and I've got nerve endings. And if I lived with no memory, like every single instant was a whole brand new thing, I might still know that I was falling because I could feel that there was no G-force on me. I'm weightless in all of those moments. but an electron doesn't have internal parts no it couldn't experience weightlessness it couldn't experience motion if i'm imagining that it has no memory it's going to just be like i'm here i'm here i'm here i'm here and it's not going to go i'm here now yeah i was there yeah right okay so so it's a bit weird right and that's why i think like it's it's it's a it's growing in popularity um and but it is it is really weird and it sounds kind of insane but then the the pan psych is kind of here's the here's the charge and goes yeah okay like i think that it's just found in the way that you break it down and you say well what's mass to a physicist a physicist and they say well that's just a foundational thing and you say well so what kind of it's just like well it's just a foundational unit of experience and they say okay i know i sound crazy and insane but i've spent the past few hundred years hearing you guys say that if you take a bunch of atoms this like lifeless stuff and you just sort of put them next to each other in the right order then you get the taste of a burger like to them that's going to sound insane too and i think one of the challenges that something like panpsychism faces us with is to realize that it all like anytime you try to explain where consciousness comes from you have to recognize that it's it's just it's a bit of a sort of crazy insane thing that it exists in the first place so yeah how do they answer the question how do how does a conscious continuity come about like i'm made of a lot of electrons yeah but i'm not made of a zeptillion different things it's like to be exactly why does it become a actually i'm the one in charge i'm the overarching thing.

1:28:43I'm the myriological composition of all this matter. And I say what we eat, not you, proton number 8 billion. Well, the reason I think that you would be fascinated to read this and why it's up your street is because you've just immediately hit on what is known as the biggest objection to panpsychism, the so-called combination problem. Why do these individual units of consciousness combine in some cases, like a human mind, into one unified experience rather than billions and billions of individual experiences in a way that they don't seem to do sort of everywhere and all over the place. And interestingly, to come full circle, it's a sort of similar question to the parts and the holes.

1:29:25You know, why is a leg and a top put together a table, but that doesn't unify with the cup? But it's a lot more difficult to answer when it comes to minds because we experience ourselves as a oneness. And I think that's what motivates Peter Van Inwagen to say that, well, life and people are just, you know, we don't know how or why, but we know that they are actual individual things. But the problem is, the materialist has a combination problem too, right? So you want to ask the panpsychist, well, why do you put all of these individual conscious entities together and you get one big unified consciousness?

1:30:00Why does that happen? But I want to say to the materialist, you've got a combination problem too. You take a bunch of inanimate matter and you put it together and it combines into one conscious experience. But you've also got the problem of it combining into a totally different kind of thing. So that is a problem for panpsychism that needs to be addressed. But I think it's a problem plus some for a materialist, if you know what I mean. But you're right to ask the question because it's the question that is the biggest question mark over panpsychism. And I would very much like to go back into academia and specifically study the relation between miriology and philosophy of mind for this reason.

1:30:39I think it'd be really interesting. They're so related. Yeah, I think so. But I think definitely worth checking out. But I want, because you made a video about consciousness, like, do you, you said you were a reductionist earlier. Do you have like a sort of favorite theory of mind, like where you're at now, like where you, what you think it's, it's all sort of doing? You think it's just information

1:30:57Michael Stevens:processing um memory related so i mean look i'm i'm persuadable in any direction at the moment yeah i feel like there's an evolutionary explanation i think that it becomes like just fit for an organism to start going ah all right so i'm creating a lot of meaning i'm creating a lot of symbols and abstract thoughts and concepts that are kind of like furniture up here well i'm also manipulating that furniture in my mind i'm thinking about the future in my mind's eye well where who's witnessing this and so the fiction of an internal person comes about. Now, I guess I've jumped way ahead, though, because where do the experiences come from in the first place?

1:31:58How does blue come about? We know that there are lights, photons with certain wavelengths, but then how did our organism decide to assign the experience of blue to that? like we were saying about the wall why isn't it the taste of hamburgers yeah um why doesn't coffee taste like grapefruit how did that get sorted by all of our brains assuming we have the same qualia how did it decide aha chocolate is going to taste like this you ready when it just does something in our brain and we go oh yes chocolate yeah yeah yeah it's weird right like because you want to say why isn't it that when a wavelength hits my eye i don't suddenly hear the sound of a trumpet yeah and the only answer that some people want to say is like well because that's not what that's not what eyes do that's what ears do but again the question is always like but why like why is that the case and it's a complete mystery and this is the so-called hard problem of consciousness right like you can explain everything about the brain and the way it's processing information and the way that wavelengths of light trigger this neuron to fire But the question is, why does that come along with an experience?

1:33:15You know, why doesn't it just sort of happen? You know, I've got a physical explanation as to when I, you know, bang into that table, the atoms vibrate and it causes the glass to fall off and gravity pulls it to the ground. Yeah. All that explanation is there. You've just got this added thing called experience. Yeah. It just seems like totally and utterly mysterious. Right. What advantage do we have as sensing things that experience that a robot version that could do everything that we do don't

1:33:51Michael Stevens:have? That's the concept of a philosophical zombie. Yeah. Right. Because people want to say, well, by experiencing the world, we've got an evolutionary advantage. I feel fear, so I run away from the predator. Right. But that reaction could happen. You don't need to feel fear to automatically run away when you should. In fact, you could feel amazing. And running could be how you express that. Right? It's like, how come it's that feeling? Nicholas Humphrey's whole kind of approach was to say that

1:34:30experience like qualia tastes and and enjoying this internal theater that's created is what made us fall in love with life that literally humans reached a point where they were like hey i could end my own life and solve a lot of my problems and that that could have literally been a moment in human history where our species could have gone extinct but because of the emergence of but actually i kind of like the sunrise i kind of like the way the water moves when i run my fingers through it i think i'm going to stick around it literally made us fall in love with being with having a self yeah well whatever the case, I think, I don't know, do you think we'll, do you think we'll be able to settle

1:35:20Michael Stevens:matters like this? I don't know. I mean, there are people who believe that actually we are in a position to never be able to answer these fundamental questions about consciousness and experience because of the fact that we're the ones who have them or something. Maybe it's just impossible. I don't believe that. I think that we really could have answers. And I think that when we do, we will become a different kind of species. Well, Michael Stevens, thank you so much for that quick detour about the diet. Dr. Pepper, should we start recording now? Good energy in. Good energy out.

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