All Episodes
Previous Next
June 25, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:35
1402 Physics, Philosophy, Free Will and Relativism

A conversation about the intersection between philosophy and physics.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat.
This is our good friend, Will.
And Will, who has headphones which are going to force me to refer to him as Princess Leia throughout the entire video.
Just so you know. And I think that a little later you will be showing us that gold bikini while I will be doing my best imitation of Jabba the Hutt.
That's the plan, right? That's the plan.
I tried to use speakers for the record, but Steph's voice was too much for them.
So we met when you came up to the barbecue, which is our shorthand for five days of philosophy.
And you said that you had invented physics.
That's right. That's a very interesting claim.
But you have studied some physics, and it is a topic which has some significant overlap.
In philosophy, particularly in the realm of subjectivism, relativism, and free will versus determinism.
I think you said you could clear all of those up in about 12 or 13 minutes, I think was your claim.
I didn't say any of that.
You forced me into this, technically.
People think that you get to leave from the barbecue, but you are currently in my basement, and you should be very happy to have a bed.
This is how I'm paying my way out.
Right, right. FDR listeners, they check in, they just cannot check out.
It makes me nervous actually to be doing this for...
Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
It makes me nervous to be doing this for FDR listeners because they're like way more...
I'm smart and nitpicky about things, so I don't want to get anything wrong.
Welcome to my life, brother.
I know. No, it's a tag of the nitpickers.
Well, you know, we need the nitpickers.
I certainly want my dentist to be a nitpicker, so we're fine with nitpickers.
No, it's fine. It's good.
So would you like to talk a little bit about your background in physics, just so that we can establish your rock-solid Mayo Clinic credentials before we start?
My background in physics is bailing out after three years of being a physics major, so it's that rock solid.
I studied in high school and then I was a physics major when I went to Bucknell University.
First semester of junior year, I decided I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life at all, and so I quit and ended up with a much better GPA than I would have had normally, and much more social free time.
A friend of mine took a math and physics double major when he was younger, and I did not see him for like two years.
It was just really brutal. It's like we were having, like, you know, six-hour homework sessions every weeknight, and it was terrible.
I'm done with it, though. Well, for most of the people who are in physics, it's not like that's interfering with their rumble lessons, right?
I know, and that's what the physics professors do.
Because that's like all their lives are, and they can't imagine that you don't have, you know, six hours to work on their homework set.
There is no sadist like an angry geek.
That is something I have learned throughout history.
I wanted to ask, and I'm certainly happy, I mean, you are the expert, certainly by far, at least relative to me, so I wanted to ask a couple of questions, but I'm certainly happy if you have something that you wanted to talk about beforehand.
I would like to certainly give you that chance to do so.
Not really. I mean, I wrote down a few notes about things that you might be interested in based on what you asked me, but nothing besides that.
Just the idea that I didn't actually learn most of this in my physics classes, some of it, but professors don't really talk too much about like The philosophical implications or kind of like the big grand theories that much.
I mean, we're pretty much doing math.
And so most of this stuff I learned because I was already interested and I was reading other books about it, like The Elegant Universe, which probably most FDR people have heard about before, and Brian Greene's other book, which I have here, Fabric of the Cosmos, which is an awesome book that everybody should read about physics.
Do you want to just hold that up so people can see the title?
Right there. It's a few years old, but it's really, really good, and it's where most of the stuff that I know about modern physics comes from, not my professors or anything like that.
Right. And it's totally readable by anybody.
And that's it, I guess.
One of the things that comes up quite a bit with people who have some scientific knowledge and science is the ultimate aspect of where a little learning can be a very dangerous thing and people will often grab at scientific theories and a misunderstanding of scientific theories, if not the scientific method itself, to justify philosophical positions for which they're having trouble finding a rational basis.
Right, of course. So you'll hear sometimes that reality is subjective because of quantum physics.
And that's not my understanding of quantum physics at all.
Not that my understanding is particularly deep.
But what I do understand is that that's not anything close to it.
Or you'll hear that because the origins of the universe...
that there is some confusion about that, and therefore there's room for God to elbow his way into the cosmos and so on.
Right.
And also you'll hear, of course, that people who don't like that grinding cogwheel determinist viewpoint will say that free will enters in through quantum theory or an uncertainty principle, or they'll toss around Schrodinger's cat like a mountain lion, And so I just wondered if you would like to talk a little bit about your understanding of, because I mean the way that I work with philosophy is that philosophy works at the perceptual level, not at the atomic level.
Philosophy works particularly in the realm of ethics, where this stuff seems to be very important.
Philosophy does work at the superatomic level.
It doesn't work down there with the quarks and bits and pieces.
My understanding of Quantum physics is that quantum physics certainly does have some uncertainty or lack of predictability down at the atomic or subatomic level, but at the level of perceptual, at the realm of human perception, it has zero effect.
That is perceivable or measurable.
Now, that's a statement I got out of a book called Quantum Physics Cannot Hurt You.
And you know what's weird about that?
Totally got a paper cut.
So... Anyway, we'll get back to that tragedy.
Can you talk a little bit about that, quantum physics and the relationship between that and what we would call perceptual reality, which is where philosophy lives?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's just...
I mean, the basic explanation is it's just way too small to have any effect on...
The kind of, like, really big things, except for when you're talking about, like, origin of the universe, where you have, you know, really small, really massive things, same thing with, like, black holes and stuff like that, where quantum mechanics might play a part, but it doesn't, it's called,
I think, decoherence is where, like, the randomness from it comes out, and it doesn't even, I mean, I don't know for sure, but what research is saying, it doesn't even, there's no way it could even affect things like neurons in your brain, so having free The way that I sort of looked at it was that if you take static,
like a sort of randomly, if you go down fine enough within static, like you zoom into the audio, you will see particular ups and downs.
But when you zoom out, it all just becomes static again.
And at the macro level of our sense perceptions, we have zoomed out from where quantum mechanics has any relevance to the point where All of the fluctuations cancel out and provide us that remarkable stability.
I mean, if you think of the amount of electrical energy and quantum phenomenon that is going on in this particular show, it's all, well, I guess as stable as windows, which, you know, is relatively stable.
But there's not a lot of flux.
I don't occasionally turn into a reptile, or at least if I do, I will certainly edit those parts out.
And I will sort of respect it when you can say, you know, let's say you get convicted of a murder because you're placed at the scene, and you can say, well, no, I was at the scene, but I was also somewhere else because of quantum mechanics.
Right. Oh, right.
Okay. Or I was there, but if you know I was there, you don't know how fast I was moving through the scene, and so therefore I couldn't I fluctuated in and then out.
It could conceivably happen that out of Brownian motion at the atomic level, all of the oxygen in my room could go up to the ceiling.
It could all drift that way, but it's never going to happen.
There's just as many odds keeping that from happening as the There's just as many fluctuations happening that would prevent that from happening as would enable it.
So the random motion keeps air relatively distributed in a room, because what's occurring at the atomic level just evens out at the perceptual level, and that's my understanding of what happens with quantum phenomena as well.
Again, that's cheesy amateur hour, but is that fairly close to… No, that is.
It is fairly close. I mean, there are ways it affects it, but as far as the stuff, like, it makes somehow, like, senses not apply or reality not apply, I don't know if you've heard the same stuff from, like, hologram theory or information theory that says kind of all of, like, the world we see is kind of like a projection of information that's stored on lesser dimensions.
Which might end up being true.
I mean, I don't know, but it doesn't make kind of like the senses or...
It's like saying that because, you know, animals are made up of atoms, biology is wrong.
Right, biology is just physics.
Right, right. Right. Or saying that, I mean, the most that it could do ever, I think, and even this is a stretch as far as like...
Undermining reality, and it wouldn't even undermine it, would be making it more like viscosity or opacity.
When you get to the atomic level, viscosity of a liquid doesn't mean anything.
Even so, it might have some effect on the viscosity of a liquid, but not to the point where it would affect your sense of perception.
Oh, no, I'm sorry. I was trying to make an analogy.
That was terrible. Oh, okay.
Hey, you know what? Nothing but the highest quality analogies allowed on this show, because it might not go wrong.
What was I talking about? Bowels in New Hampshire or something like that?
They absolutely can go wrong, so no problem.
No. Do you know how, like, we measure things like opacity of solids or viscosity of liquids, but how those things don't really apply on an atomic level?
Like, what would it mean to say the viscosity of just a bunch of atoms?
Right. But it doesn't mean that that's not an accurate description or that that's not useful or that it's not true on the macro level.
It just means that Right, right.
And... Wait, I actually don't understand what that means.
I'm sorry. Then let me stop trying to help you with my metaphors and let the expert continue.
I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, it's fine.
I mean, does it make sense to say that, like, viscosity doesn't really apply once you're at an atomic level?
That I totally understand, for sure.
I mean, I guess there would be, what, carbon atoms in oil?
And oil has a viscosity, but carbon atoms don't, right?
Because carbon atoms aren't coated in oil.
But they are components which go to make up the viscosity.
And same thing with things like opacity.
Like, if you zoomed in enough on a glass window and you would just see the atoms, it wouldn't mean anything to say, like, oh, this has this level of opacity, because it would be the same as zooming in on a drywall and seeing all the atoms.
Right, so I guess there is, and I don't know what, silica or sand is in glass.
And so there would be a particular atom...
I'm sorry, I should know that. What is the atom that goes into silica?
It is silica. Oh, silica, okay.
Yeah. It's some atom or component, and because that atom is not opaque, or that atom can exist in things which are translucent and opaque, that there's no difference between translucent and opaque, right?
Okay. Right, and so it's the same...
I mean, like, if you got to a level where space and time didn't really apply, it would mean that it's somehow irrelevant for...
You know, our level or macro level, it would just mean that you just have to find different descriptions for those interactions that are resulting in what we call space and time.
But it would certainly not mean that, you know, space and time don't exist or they're just conceptions.
It would just mean there are descriptions of interactions that don't line up at a certain level.
Right, okay. I mean, I don't know.
It's kind of weird. You know how you always say the principle of the argument applies to the argument thing?
That totally exists in physics.
Physics can't invalidate itself.
You can't have a discovery that physics is no longer valid.
Because physics has to be about objective and reproducible scientific measurements.
And if everything is then subjective, then physics has just eaten itself, which is kind of a contradiction.
And you would have to say everything is subjective relative to What, right?
And so when you look at the subatomic at the atomic level, and you'd say, well, there's some freaky stuff going on down there, where you'd say, well, it's different from what happens at the perceptual level, because at the perceptual level, things are stable and absolute.
And so we compare it to the stability at the perceptual level that goes on at the subatomic level and say, well, there's some freaky shit going on down there.
But we only know that it's freaky relative to what happens at sense perception, which is very stable.
Yeah, exactly.
And if you ever got to somewhere in quantum physics where you're like, oh, this somehow invalidates all of physics, then you're just sort of faced with the question of, well, then how did we discover this?
How did we get it? It can't invalidate the scientific method because...
Yeah, you're using the scientific method to violate the scientific method or invalidate the scientific method, which would be anti-UP and therefore complete it.
That's true. And it's not just a...
I mean, Brian Green actually talks about it in this book a few times.
Where, I mean, physicists actually use that to, you know, make discoveries and know whether or not they're on the right track.
It's not just like, you know, some philosophical language game.
And one of the notes I took down, too, was about...
I don't know if you want to hear this, but it's a good example of that type of principle being applied.
Where the...
This is about the arrow of time.
is a big section in this book about how time seems to have a direction, but as, like, we see events unfolding in one way over and over again, you know, like eggs breaking apart but never putting themselves back together, but all physical laws, all the equations that describe physics are but all physical laws, all the equations that describe physics are time directional, like, insensitive, they don't care what time,
There's no direction. There's nothing more likely in physics of an egg breaking apart than it coming back together.
Like, the physical laws just describe what would happen, the motion of it, all that stuff.
There's nothing that says it has to happen in this way.
And so the fact that we do see it in that way, there's a couple explanations for it, but it's pretty much entropy.
We kind of started in a very ordered state, and now we're tending toward more and more disorder, and that's why, you know, the sun is giving off heat, and we're decaying and giving off energy and everything.
But this was, have you heard of Boltzmann?
Of who? Like the Boltzmann constant?
Boltzmann? I don't think so, no.
Okay, well, he's a physicist. It doesn't matter at all.
But anyway, he kind of came up with this idea at one point.
Second law of thermodynamics, about entropy always increasing, and realized that that itself was also time independent as far as direction goes.
So he said, statistically, it's more likely that everything we see around us right now, all the order that we see, which is pretty high, just coalesced out of complete random disorder of the universe two seconds ago, rather than having super, super, super high order 14 billion years ago.
So this was kind of like a weird thing of like, well, what if, you know, what if our memories, our records, everything we know just came into existence a second ago?
And now, but...
That sounds very close to, sorry, that sounds very close to creationism.
You know, and I say, well...
Carbon dating is put there as a test of faith, you know, like the dinosaurs are buried down there as a test of faith.
It certainly is true, but of course it would be a non-falsifiable premise, right?
Because everything you would just falsify could be absorbed within the axiom, right?
And that was the same thing with this, was physicists were kind of like, it technically would We have to assume that the previous second was the one that had coalesced out of nothing.
And we would also have to throw out all of physics and all of everything, all of the reasoning that brought us to the point to say that it would be more probable.
Right. Which is what I was talking about before, and so you can't accept that, you can't throw it out, which is why we realize the universe must have had to start it from kind of a super high-ordered point originally, and then physicists are tasked with the explanation of, well, how did it get like that?
Now, since we're talking about the origins, sorry, was there more you wanted to add on that?
No, this was just an example of how kind of like the physics of the theory has to also apply to the theory itself.
Right, right, right.
So, the origins of the universe.
Now, of course, I'm out of date with this stuff, so I'm sure that new stuff has come along.
But the last I heard, you know, the last I heard, there was this garden, see?
This talking story. But the last that I heard was that there was a point of singularity, the stuff comes into existence, there's a big bang, and it all starts scattering, and there was some debate, and I think that debate is still going on, about the degree to which the universe may continue to expand, or the degree to which there's dark matter at the middle, which will cause it to, you know, go out and then sort of come collapsing, Back in.
And I think, the last I heard, they were, you know, I don't know, nanoseconds or milliseconds or seconds after the Big Bang, but they couldn't get quite back to the beginning.
And do you know where the expanding versus expanding and contracting is?
I'm just curious where that stuff is these days.
I know some of it.
The kind of like standard Big Bang theory has been replaced with inflationary cosmology.
I don't know if you've heard of that. Fiat currency cosmology, right?
Sorry, go on. Where instead of, because nobody really knew what banged at that point, of like, that's why they could get to, you know, a few nanoseconds or whatever, trillions, trillions of a second after whatever banged, but they wouldn't know actually what banged.
Oh my god, my screensaver just went on.
Sorry. Thank you for not staring.
What was I going to say? You were just saying that they could only get to a few milliseconds or nanoseconds after because they didn't know exactly what banged.
I think Martin actually banged, but I don't think that helps too much.
The renowned physicist Dr.
Martin. There was never kind of an explanation of what was actually banging, just what happened after the bang.
Which was cigarettes and pillow talk.
I'm sorry. We have three more jokes with that each and then we better get back to serious business.
Okay, four. Go on.
Okay. But inflationary cosmology, and it's also kind of moved away from the idea that that was the origin of the universe.
And it's kind of toward like a multiverse type of idea now where there's like periods of expansion and then The same type of conditions that cause the expansion of that universe will happen again and branch off a new universe, and that will happen again and branch off a new universe.
Now, sorry, and I hate to sound all kinds of empirical, but when physicists start talking about new universes, I really do have an urge to check their pockets for bagged vegetation.
And this is probably just my naive empirical rationalism which is not sophisticated relative to some of these scientific theories for sure.
But when I hear sort of new universe, I always get confused around that because I sort of hear matter cannot be created or destroyed.
I can only be transferred from energy to matter and back, right?
And so when I hear new universe, I think I hear a whole bunch of new matter being created and I'm not sure how that fits into this conservation.
Yeah, I'm actually not sure how that fits with the law of conservation of matter and energy either, but it used to be kind of that all physicists thought the way you were, that it was kind of like, you know, just a random theory that nobody really liked.
I don't know. I mean, it's kind of useful in some ways because of, like, the anthropic principle explaining how certain constants got the way they are is if you have, you know, a bajillion, bajillion universes, then it's not that weird that they are the way they are in our universe to support life.
Not that weird, but still a little weird.
And I understand that mathematically they've got, you know, what, 30 dimensions for some superstring stuff.
And mathematically it works out.
But I do feel that there must be...
Again, this is not any kind of intelligent critique, right?
It's just a gut feeling, which means nothing, of course.
But I do sort of feel that if you have to invent...
30 universes or 50 universes or whatever, there might be something wrong with the theory.
I'm just saying. If I have to write a business plan and I say, well, my business plan requires that there be 30 different universes, my investors might have a problem with that.
Again, I understand this is an idiot thing to say, but that's...
No, it's not an idiot thing to say.
It totally makes sense. A lot of people miss the point that If that was true, that there was a bunch of universes, then it would kind of just push the physics question back farther to explaining all of it, the whole multiverse.
Right, so math works, but where do all these universes come from, and then we've lost conservation of matter, so you sort of pushed in one side of the balloon, and out comes the other side in terms of stuff we don't know again, right?
Right, and I'm not sure, that's a good question, because I've never thought about the conservation of matter thing.
I don't know. I have no idea, actually.
No, that's fine. And I don't think there is an answer myself.
I really don't. I mean, because I think if there were, we would have heard about it by now.
But, and of course, I also am aware, and this is, again, a critique from mere ignorance, and so I just toss it out there.
I am sort of aware that there is an aspect to physics that It has nothing to do with customers.
There's engineering, right?
Which is making stuff more useful for people.
And then there's physics, which is, to some degree, a statist self-occupation.
And like the statist things, it tends to overcomplicate and it tends to be really obtuse, like economics theories of Keynesianisms versus the Austrians are really convoluted.
You know, the old top-rate system where they tried to figure out where the retrograde motion of Mars came from and they invented six million circles within circles.
That seems to me a little bit like where some of modern academic physics is coming from.
But again, this is with no knowledge of all of the math.
It's kind of held off longer than the social sciences, but there's definitely...
I mean, if you have these ridiculously specific, like, field of studies, just if someone can be an expert and then get federal funding for it, you know, like...
Feminist geography of indigenous peoples in, you know, Bolivia or something ridiculous.
Yeah, or like the effects of moth populations on global warming.
Hey, look! And physics is definitely not immune to that at all.
Sorry, when something doesn't have a customer base, which is...
I mean, I have a huge respect for science, and I'm not going to sit there and say these physicists are wrong because I have a degree in history.
This is nothing, right? But there is a tendency within non-customer-driven occupations...
To overcomplicate rather than simplify.
Just look at the tax code, right?
As opposed to the checkout process of a hotel, right?
Hotels have customers, so you just do it through your TV in three minutes, whereas the tax code doesn't, so it gets ridiculously complicated.
And I just, I wonder, and I, of course, I have no way of knowing this, and it's unfair to put you to answer this, because there's no way to know it for sure.
Oh, it's fine. But I wonder the degree to which, if physicists had customers, the degree to which they might start whittling down these n-dimensional solutions to something that was a little bit more usable.
It would be a ton.
I mean, it definitely would be like, because like you said, when you have customers, I mean, you cut all the fat, you cut all the kind of wasteful research that isn't going anywhere.
And I don't know.
I mean, I don't know what stuff is completely wasteful and isn't stuff like, I mean, I don't know how much we need to know about the origin of the universe.
Yeah. I think it's interesting.
I think it's cool.
I don't think it's going to solve anything to do with religion.
And I certainly think that people find it a kind of hard-on topic, you know, because it's just kind of sexy.
You know, like to be the guy who discovers the origin of the universe would be pretty cool.
I mean, that's some serious nerd cred, right?
There's no question for that. So it is really cool to pursue how much would I pay to know it.
I mean, how much does that affect the price of tea in China?
Well, not very much, right? It's like knowing astronomy or, I guess, economics.
It's part of the language of a civilized man and woman, but it's not really essential to most of the things that you'll make your life decisions on.
But it certainly has significant nerd cred, and I think that's one of the reasons why they pursue it.
And there is, I think, this fantasy that says...
If we can come up with the origins of the universe, we will strike a blow against religiosity.
I don't think that's the case.
There's already... I mean, religiosity and superstition are already so ridiculous a set of positions to maintain that one of the scientific proof...
You know, because you would have thought the same for evolution, but still they hang on.
But sorry. Right. No, I mean, you're totally right.
And I think that some physicists do it for that.
It's also the...
The origin of the universe is the same with black holes and the center of them or whatever.
It's kind of like a really good test subject for combining relativity and quantum mechanics, which is what all physicists want.
It's like the holy grail of physics right now.
I know Einstein spent a lot of time on this.
Is that what they call the unified field theory, which explains strong and weak and electromagnetism and gravity and explains all of the attraction and repulsion forces?
Right. From atomic all the way to interstellar, right?
Right. It would make quantum mechanics agree with relativity, and so you could explain huge, super-fast, super-massive things and the tiniest, most massless object of interaction that happens.
I could imagine that would have a huge impact on just about everything.
I mean, that's not esoteric because it's not 14 billion years ago.
It's stuff that we could use right now.
But of course, that's where they come up with these 30 dimensions and stuff, because making that stuff all fit is horrendous.
Right. And that's what string theory is, one attempt to do that.
And I mean, the way string theory does it, it's kind of nice.
It also is kind of weird.
Like, I think the main thing that string theory does as far as combining those two is just say that there's a limit on how small you can get and it's like the Planck length, which is like...
10 to the negative 33 meters or centimeters.
I can't remember the actual number anymore, but it's the Planck length, so it says basically, like, you can't get any smaller than this, and that kind of settles the quantum fluctuations that would be happening at a smaller level than that, which would be really, really ridiculous and really, really high.
Well, if you can't get any smaller than that, then the fluctuations can only be so great.
And then that's also where the hologram theory comes in, because then they're like, well, what happens if you look underneath that plank length?
What happens if you go smaller and then it's like, well, it's just information.
But anyway, all that stuff.
Sorry, tell me a little bit more, if you don't mind, about this hologram theory, because, again, it sounds a little bit like pass the bong, but, again, that just could be my naive empiricism, but tell me a little bit more about that.
It comes from, I think it was Stephen Hawking's, I'm sure people on the FDR board are going to know a lot more about this, random people, but it comes from Stephen Hawking finding out that in the two-dimensional event horizon of a black hole, there was enough information to describe everything.
Okay, sorry, just for those who don't know, and I'll give a two-second explanation, tell me if I'm off-base, the event horizon is where the gravitational well of the black hole sucks light and everything else in, right?
It's the point of no return.
It's the point of no return, and for those who don't know, a black hole is not a hole at all, as far as I understand it, it is a...
It's a super compressed chunk of matter where the atoms have collapsed in on themselves.
It's the densest matter that you could imagine.
I think the Earth would be the size of a sugar cube in black hole dimensions, but it's super compressed matter.
The reason it seems like a hole is that radio waves and light and other things cannot escape its gravity well.
Is that fair to say? Right.
I mean, the hole is the kind of Dip in space-time that that massive amount of gravity is creating.
So that's how... But, you know, it's not like a rip in it or anything.
And yeah, so on the event horizon is kind of where, like, the radiation, the small amount of radiation that a black hole gives off does come out.
And I guess it's only, like, two-dimensional information, but for some reason you can tell all things about the three-dimensional area of the black hole.
It's something like this. I'm going to be retarded.
What is two-dimensional information?
It's... because it only comes from the surface of it, I think.
I mean, I'd have to read more, but because it only comes from the surface instead of...
I don't know.
I don't know why it's only two-dimensional information.
We'll throw a link. We'll wiki it and throw a link off to the right.
That's, again, stuff that I just get kind of...
So I just want to check on that.
It's super kind of cutting it.
Hologram theory is like the newest thing that everybody is kind of obsessed with in physics.
At least, I mean, that's what it seems like.
So I don't really know that much about it.
But it's that all the three-dimensional, everything that we see that is three-dimensional could technically be described using information, which somehow counts as two-dimensional.
And then so hologram doesn't mean like It's not a Star Trek hologram where it's not really there.
It just means that the information to describe it isn't necessarily contained in three dimensions.
Right, okay. And who knows what kind of effect that would have.
It's one of these unfortunately named theories that people think means it's like Pascal's demon, you know?
Right, of course. Like the theory of relativity was one of the most unfortunately named theories in history because...
Oh, everything's relative. It's like, no, no, no, it means everything is constant.
At least the speed of light is constant.
Right. No, and it's not a hologram, like, pretend.
It's just, like, based off information that you don't need all three dimensions to store or to understand, something like that.
Right. But, again, it doesn't have anything to do with, like, making the senses invalid or anything, all those conclusions people jump to.
Right, right. But, yeah, okay, so anyway, the studying the physics stuff that I'm sure that half of this stuff would just be thrown out immediately.
But I have no way of knowing what is kind of irrelevant to it.
Twenty years ago, we might have said that quantum mechanics, why do we care about stuff that's super, super small, but now we're going to have quantum computing and we're going to have all this stuff in 50 years or 100 years.
We might. These things are always held as, well, it's going to be a big breakthrough, like the CERN supercollider.
Oh, it's going to be a big breakthrough, but...
I mean, I have, I mean, again, naive skepticism.
I just, I do have some skepticism.
Because it always seems like the government programs are about to pay off in some monster way that's bigger than time.
Right, of course. But I still, you know, I wait to see.
No, I mean, I have no way of saying.
I'm not the one, I'm not the type of person to be like, no, this has to be figured out now.
This is super important. Don't offend me by talking about physics being irrelevant.
Because I don't really care at all that much.
It's interesting, but...
You know, if people wanted to pay for it to fund it, then that's great.
And if they didn't... Absolutely.
Right. Now, again, I don't want to go too, too long because some people may be interested.
And I'm sure that we'll get more questions when we post this.
And I will, of course, glibly slide them over to you.
Thank you. But is there anything else you wanted to add just now?
I think let's post this and then watch everybody shred both of our levels of confidence.
I know. That's what the people like to do.
No, I mean, the basics, I think, as far as going for explanations for things like space not being real, or perception not being real, or I mean, the scientific method will never invalidate the scientific method.
And some physicists wrote once about people who said that quantum mechanics invalidated sense perception.
He said, they're welcome to contest that theory by stepping out of my window on the 12th floor and see how well they're going to obey the laws of physics.
So I think that there is this kind of naive...
Barely educated people, and people who really like Deepak Chopra, and if you've ever seen him getting grilled by Richard Dawkins about his use of the term quantum, it's pretty embarrassing.
People will take a few little stitches here and there and try and knit together some mystical weave, but this is not valid in the realm of physics at all.
I don't know why people do that.
I mean, that's even a thing like, have you heard about the Templeton Prize?
Dawkins always complains about it, and it's kind of like a well-known thing.
I've forgotten what it is. It's like a million-dollar prize for someone who, for a physicist, it's usually a physicist, sometimes a mathematician, I think, who kind of like bridges the gap between like the unknowable and what science can't explain.
And all the physicists that accept it are kind of like, they're usually considered kind of like sellouts.
Because they'll always be like, I think one of the guys who, I can't remember who won it this year, but it's always some guy who's like, oh, you know, there's a limit to what science can know, and because we can only go so far that who knows what might exist beyond that, and then they can be like, like, "Oh, well that's where there's God," and then they get a million dollars, and that's the Templeton Prize, and it's pretty ridiculous.
And I don't know.
But it's just people just want there to be something that science can't explain.
Oh, they're still desperate for that, don't they?
They're so desperate for that because it allows them to keep their irrational fantasies alive by pretending that the science...
And it doesn't matter how far science goes.
You know, the fact that science has explained the origins of life, the fact that science has explained the development of the universe, the fact that science has given us an accurate model of solar systems and galaxies and gravity, and the fact that science has, you know, done nuclear fission and fusion and I mean, it doesn't matter how far it goes, there's still going to be some idiot out there and probably many, many idiots out there who are going to say, ah, yes, but it hasn't gone all the way and that's where God lives.
The fact that it's gone 10,000 times further than at any point in history just means that one guy out there is saying, ah, but 10,001 is where God lives.
And when you get to 10,001, he moves it to 10,002.
I just think you have to accept that science is going to keep moving, and what's beyond science is not God, but just the necessary ignorance of a finite lifespan and the linear development of knowledge.
Yeah. No one even claims that science will discover anything, or we will be able to know everything, just that this is the methodology to figure stuff out.
It's not that they don't like this.
They want to stop it where it can't go any farther.
And it's the same thing with rational empirical philosophy, too.
They want things to be outside of reason.
They want things to be non-empirical, but I don't know.
Yeah, it's like math, you know?
I may not off the top of my head.
I don't know what... 722 times 697 is but I know that the answer is not a unicorn and so even though I don't know the exact answer I know what it's not and it's not going to be you know bleeding Jewish zombies or unicorns or ghosts or gremlins or Zeus's beard or anything like that but it is really tough and of course religion has really been on the losing side science is just one aspect of it physics as we've talked about of course medicine has provided infinitely more gains than all of the nonsense that went on from religiosity with regards to helping human beings heal I mean,
so religion is definitely on its way out because relative to the efficacy and certainty that science brings and the productivity and utility that science brings, it's really on a losing edge.
So it is kind of sad to see it go down like a hairball in a sink, but it is sort of inevitable to free us up to have a more rational future.
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time.
Let's post this. Let's get the inevitable harangues about our lack of knowledge.
Fantastic. You know, if you would like to do it again, we can forward difficult questions to you.
And we can bring in more people, too.
It's Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're out there and you're watching this and you have, you know, better answers than us and certainly better answers than me, which isn't hard, then please, by all means, email host at freedomainradio.com and let's set up a multidisciplinary geek fest.
That would be absolutely fantastic.
And thanks so much. I really do want to take the time.
And bring headphones that are bigger than mine, please.
If you have headphones, you're going to need a neck brace.
I think that's right.
So I guess the guy who looks like Uranus and Princess Leia, we are out.
▲
Export Selection