Ep. 116 - Demystifying Physics, Pt 1

This is episode 116 of Patterson in Pursuit and it's a good one. I'm talking today with Shiloh and Anastasia of the Demystify Sai podcast. If you enjoy Patterson in Pursuit, I'm going to say there's a 100% chance that you're also going to enjoy the Demystify Sai podcast. In fact, there are two content creators which I patronize. One of them is the great Norman Wildberger, the mathematician who I think is doing very important work. And the other is the Demystify Sai podcast by Shiloh and Anastasia. I think their work is very very important. I think it's going to stand the test of time. It's incredibly fun and intellectually stimulating to listen to. So I was really delighted to be able to talk with them on the show. They recently wrote a book called Paradox Lost, the material principles of natural philosophy in which they're trying to make sense of physics and in particular they're trying to make sense of quantum physics, a notable generator of paradoxes over the last century. And on their show, they're interviewing a a huge range of different people and bunch of ultra elite physicists as well. And they've been developing this theory that they're coming out with now over like a decade or so. So very exciting. It's a very important work that needs to be done. And I I asked them to come on the show for a two-hour conversation and we wound up speaking for about five hours. So, this is going to be released in two parts. You're about to listen to part one here. I hope you guys enjoy it. I'll release part two in just a couple of days. Okay. So, a very, very special episode of Patterson in Pursuit today. I am honored to be joined by Shiloh and Anastasia of the spectacular Demystify Sai podcast. Thanks. so much guys for talking me with me today. >> It's our pleasure. We're glad to be here. >> Thank you. >> So, I want to start with a true story. The year is 2022. I'm living in Arizona and I'm in the bowels of YouTube listening to ridiculous videos about physics and math by bunch of cranks. And I c I see on the the the sidebar there's a I forget what it's entitled. some video that sounded like that people were going to complain about the usage of mathematics in physics and it was puppets and I'm like what is this? So, you know, had I don't know a few hundred views on it or something at the time. And I click on it and I'm like, "Okay, yeah, I totally agree. These puppets are like right right on." And I thought, I don't know who these people are, but I feel like I found spiritual brethren here, both, you know, similar criticisms of the perception of what's going on with the relationship of math and physics and an appreciation for utter absurdity. Um, so, uh, since then, since 2024, uh, 2022, I've been, uh, lovingly referring to you guys as the puppet people when I when I talk with my wife. So, it's literally on my calendar. We have a shared calendar for the home, and it's literally puppet people. 1 p.m. >> So, I I appreciate your uh I appreciate that. And I was actually looking for the video to see if I could find it. Do you guys have like a second channel or something? Because I couldn't I couldn't find Okay. Is that what it was? >> Yeah. Somebody jacked the name for our first channel, so we started a new one. Uh, we used to be called Demystifying Science, but I don't know. The puppet thing, the last video we made was something I'm quite proud of, actually. We'll send that to you. I think it's >> I think it was the video that he's talking about. It's like math is not a language. >> Yeah, math is not. It was this really ornate production where like the puppets at some point like steal a car and they go to a diner and it took us so much time and effort and just nobody watched it. >> I think we got a thousand views on it to this day. >> Yeah, we were not good. We're not good puppeteers. Like the puppets like the mouths didn't move correctly. It was very awkward. >> No, no, that made it perfect. That was like the level of absurdity was like the the matching, you know, the quality of the insight with the terribleness of the production value was just wonderful. >> Well, I tell you, we were honestly doing it in some sense to protect our identity at the time because we were still trying to work at universities and everything, right? We were teaching and you know, we hadn't quite figured out how to talk about these things con as constructively perhaps as now. And yeah, it was uh it was a failed attempt to conceal our identities, I suppose. Okay, so um here here's what I want to try to accomplish here. I I want to I want to go over the big picture of the purpose of the book and the why for the book. And I think that's going to be a fascinating conversation. And then I want to get into the specific claims that you guys are making. Let's say the picture that you're painting about how you think the the world is. And then I want to dive into I think the area I will be able to contribute the most would be an examination of some of the fundamental concepts and axioms that you guys are bringing to the table. And I love the approach that you're taking of the old school axiomatic method. somehow a question of what an axiom is and how it functions is turns out to be a really important one especially of the last century that the the old school approach is to say we're going to try to find some sort of self-evident axioms and then build up our our picture of reality from there which you guys have done and I think is uh I think is admirable. So let's start. I think the best place to start is is it's the big picture and uh I never do this um but I'm going to for this episode. I'm going to I got I've earmarked a bunch of pages here and I'm just going to go through and read some quotes to prompt uh the discussion. Page 361, paradox lost. You guys say, "There is no shame in getting things wrong. All attempts to map cause and effect miss the mark in one way or another. What matters is that despite knowing our limitations, we seek a legible model of the world. For it is impossible to tell if some theory is wrong or right if the common wisdom is that it cannot be understood. And here lies the central crux of modern physics. It is a framework that sets the ground rules for how everything else works. But even among the smartest people in the world, it is considered to be completely inscrable. Please explain what you mean by that. Well, to start with, I think that we want to believe that there is some place that we can get to where we will finally be able to map all of the mysteries of the universe and say that we have arrived. We have completed the project. Everything is done. And I think that that is a really long ways away. Not only because there's a huge number of phenomena that need to be explained, but also because as you explain things, the world around you changes. And as it changes, you're going to have to find new ways of explaining the things that arise in this new world. And so it's this ever receding horizon. And so to stake the flag and to say we've arrived, we we are done. We've explained cause and effect to the ultimate end. I think is a hubristic approach to the sciences. And so, okay, we have to enter in with some kind of epistemic humility to say that, well, this is our best attempt. And if we're going to say that this is our best attempt, if anybody's going to say that, then we have to also be able to evaluate, okay, is this actually a good attempt given everything that we know or is it not? And it seems like the only way that we can do that is by being able to explain our ideas to one another. To have people that are not steeped in the conventions of a discipline actually examine the conclusions and say, "Okay, that seems like a reasonable conclusion or that doesn't seem like a reasonable conclusion." But in the world of quantum mechanics, the theories are so esoteric and really defy logic. defy the foundational principles of reality to such a degree that there is no way to do that for them. We're kind of stuck taking somebody's word for it because they're like, well, if you want to understand it, you have to spend your entire life studying the mathematics. And maybe then when you get there, you'll finally understand. But even the people who spend their lives spent studying the mathematics, you ask them and they're like, well, it's there's not really a a grounds of reality to to understand there. There's just these relationships and you have to take as given that they operate in these very strange ways and they defy expectation and they they they will always remain as these zen coins that you have to just consider and contemplate as opposed to grasp and put into your mind as something that you can then use to do something with. >> Yeah. the the le the biggest leak in the bucket is the axiom that it cannot be understood like that is where every single other little problem falls from the collection of knowledge right if you're starting axiom whether you realize it or not is that things don't have to make sense that it cannot be understood not that not that it not not even in some ultimate form right we're not talking about final cause or anything but that but that it is complet reality is inaccessible and that's your starting point I don't know how you can end up anywhere useful okay is it could is it possible to rephrase in the following way that you humans have a difficult time understanding what physicists are saying they're painting a sort of picture with concepts and words and you say hey guys I'd like to know what you're talking about it's not making sense to me and there's a couple possible explanations here. One is well you don't have the sufficient training or knowledge to understand what is being said so learn a little bit more and then you'll understand which seems totally reasonable. And then there's another idea here which is to say the reason you don't understand is because in principle this cannot be understood. >> Exactly. >> And and the claim that you're making is that our idea our contemporary ideas in physics are saying the latter that the reason it can't be un the reason you don't understand it and the reason nobody understands it is because this is not the type of thing that can be understood in principle. >> Well, I think we all started off with the former when we were little kids, right? And it's it's a believable story at first that you just need to take more higher level courses. But eventually you do that and then you start running up against the wall of the ladder which is the people that you actually look up to. I mean I remember sitting in in the office of some of my huge heroes from when I was a little kid. You know there was a blog I was a big fan of when I was a kid called Not Even Wrong which is run by this mathematician out of Columbia. I and I I eventually found myself in this dude's office and I I I finally had to confront the fact that this entire group of intellectuals really firmly does believe that reality can't be understood at the end of the day. And yeah, they they want uh rigorous approaches to it and they're maybe circling around this drain pipe, but there's this leak right at the end of the day which is there is nothing defined here. quite literally like there is not a foundational ground of reality that can be understood through the lens that we understand the rest of the world. There is a place where reality breaks and that place is a place where your intuitions do not matter that things that are paradoxical can occur that impossible events are common place and it's just strange. That's just where it ends. >> Okay. Now, you guys have some academic credibility to say that. I don't. In my world, I'm just uh one crank among many, you say these ridiculous sounding things. And if for somebody that doesn't have a background in physics to make the claim that after my careful examination, I have discovered that in fact there is such a profound intellectual crisis in physics that they're literally saying there isn't a reality that can be understood. That sounds preposterous and impossible. Like what's more likely? you're kind of confused about some things because you don't have the background or that actually people are truly at the highest level operating with a model that says reality cannot be understood in principle and might even be paradoxical. So, can you can you can you give maybe a little bit of historical context for the claims that you're making here? Both in terms of your personal history and in terms of maybe especially the last century to to back up this idea that really that is the claim that's being made is that reality can't fundamentally be understood. >> Sure. Before before we talk about how this happened, uh it might be worth just putting a caveat out there that we are in no way, shape or form saying that mathematics is stupid and that mathematical physics is useless or anything like that. We just recognize that math is a way that you map your observations about reality and that a map is not the same as an explanation. It's just a relational network and you have to go the extra line. Science there. So you have to go the extra step scientifically and deduce explanations as a result of it. And the rest of science seems fairly well familiar and comfortable with this. It's just that we noticed there's a corner of science which happens to be one of the most elite corners which is this mathematical physics world where that seems to have gotten lost at some point. So maybe we can go back and look at how this happened. >> Yeah. And so I think that you can kind of pin a lot of the loss to a debate around something called the EPR paper. So this is the Einstein Pedulski Rosen paper where they proposed that the mathematics of quantum physics were fundamentally incomplete because inside of them there's this idea that you cannot know both the momentum and the position of a particle at the same time. And then they proposed this thought experiment where you were like, okay, so imagine that you produce these two opposite spin particles like an electron and a posetron because this was at the time the the realm in which they were thinking. And you you allowed them to somehow become correlated where they had the same their wave functions o overlapped for long enough that they basically became this resonant wave function and then you allowed them to move apart. The experimentter could technically if they allowed these particles to move apart for long enough could choose at any moment to measure either position or momentum. And by measuring the position or momentum of one would know exactly about the position or momentum of the other no matter how far apart it was in the world. And because the experimentter could choose to measure either position or momentum and get information about either one of these properties and immediately understand the state of the other particle somewhere else in the universe. It seems like the position and the momentum of the particles are actually true real qualities that are measurable. And yet the way of measuring them, the way of being able to treat both of them as real properties of the system does not appear in quantum mechanics because in quantum mechanics the Heisenberg uncertainty principle gives you a hard stop. It says no no you cannot know both of these qualities at once. Okay, just a quick question. Why why why would that why not? >> Well, um do you want the explanation given in quantum mechanics or do you want the explanation that is more in simpler terms? >> Uh let's do simpler terms and see if that works. >> Okay. Well, so imagine that you throw a baseball and you have a camera and your camera is a really weird camera. It's a camera that images things by throwing rocks at them. And so you throw a rock at the baseball and your your rock has like some telemetry in it, but the telemetry is stupid. It can only tell you one thing at a time about the system because it breaks the system once you measure it. >> Yeah. So your rock hits the baseball and you're like, "Ah, I know where the baseball is." But in order to determine how fast the baseball was moving at the time, you actually had to throw multiple rocks at it >> in order to be able to actually measure the system. >> So you cannot know because the systems that we use to know are destructive inherently. And so by the time that you measure one property, you have destroyed the system and you cannot know the other property. >> Okay? And then the the naive lay person like like me says, "Yeah, that seems obvious. So why would this be reflective of some deep deeper principle in nature when it sounds like you're describing a feature of how our measurement apparatuses work?" >> Neilsport, >> wasn't this earlier than uh the the discussion on the EPR paradox though? >> No. Oh, well the uncertainty principle was, but I think that it just falls out of the mathematics. And so it basically like as a function of the system of quantum mechanics, the position and momentum are quantities that cannot both be solved for at the same time. And so if you solve for one, the other disappears. >> Let's let's let's zoom right in on this. Okay, two claims. There's a there's an empirical claim, practical mechanical claim. These two values cannot be measured at the same time because the way that we measure something is destructive. Second claim, these two things cannot be measured at the same time because of a logical principle that there's something inherently conceptually impossible about measuring them at the same time. In principle, I get the former. Help me understand. help me understand why the lay simple response is that well why why would the latter just seems like if that's a artifact of math why why would we draw any any deep conclusions here like like why wouldn't we just be content with saying yeah this is an artifact of the way that we're measuring things >> I mean look the the math is based on it's fundamentally based on experimentation that's worth remembering so and what kind of experimentation So this whole idea of quantized the quantized universe in general goes back to a series of studies really on black body radiation which we don't have to get into but it's about light fundamentally right so there is a experimental platform where you're studying how light interacts with matter and you're grafting that onto the nent understanding of the atomic universe and a lot of the way that We understand the atom today has to do with the light that it emits, right? So as it go as the atom goes between different what they call energy states, it's electron jump around and uh you get light as a result of it. So these revelations were processed the the mathematical revelations were processed downstream of experimentation in the first place. So this does turn out to be true like Nasia said with the throwing the baseball at the football like you this is a real phenomenon. You could do this experiment and you would also end up with a Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It's >> but but what you've said is so important. You're saying the math is downstream from the experimentation. >> Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean that's why they get away with calling it physics, right? And it turns out to be extraordinarily predictive. That's the this is the real mindbending part of the the pickle we find ourselves in. Mathematics is extraordinary at parameterizing an experimental system in a way that you can predict what's going to happen next. And the reason that that is what everyone is obsessed about is because it allows you to build Zoom meetings and airplanes and everything else, right? And you don't have to know I don't have to know anything about what the atoms are doing inside of my computer right now. I mean, there's so many abstraction layers. Even if I was the software engineer, which I'm not, but even if I was, I still wouldn't have to know how my hardware work necessarily. I might need to know how it touches the hardware at the abstraction layer right beneath me. But ultimately, these maths are so useful, right? When you inscribe characteristics that are manipulable to an experimental system, you gain powerful knowledge about how to manipulate that system. And the the interlocking of the technological world with the scientific world has become so blended that most people couldn't even tell you the difference between science and technology, >> right? Uh okay. So, so couldn't one say then, well, were we to have more sophisticated equipment to measure things, perhaps the Heisenberg uncentry principle disappears if this comes from experimentation and not from some sort of law of the universe. Well, unfortunately, I think what we what we find when we start to build material models of fundamental reality is that uh there is a material basis for the quantization and and and that is the uh the discrete ability to observe something a change in the atom let's say uh which is deeply intertwined with its wave nature and the quantum mechanical equations capture this really really really really well. They're very very very accurate descriptions of that. And so yes, you could further refine it, but without a actual substance to bind it to, without giving it a structural picture, uh no amount of experimentation is going to get you closer to an actual scientific understanding of what's happening. >> Let me ask you a quick question here. Um this is going to come up a lot later in the discussion but um is there a connection here between the uncertainty principle and the discret discretization of uh of nature is there actually I didn't realize if if that's correct is that does that sort of is there some connection there >> yeah I think 100% of the paradoxes come down to misunderstanding what that discretization actually is right so even the word particle is serious subturfuge and the word photon is serious subturfuge too although that one could be forgiven a little more easily because I don't think that most people have really arrived at an understanding of what that descript I can't even say that word >> I stumbled on discretization yeah what that one means but everybody knows that I mean everybody working in particle physics recognizes that a particle is not a mode of dust and that's what the word means and that's what it's always meant uh colloquially and even in science prior to quantum physics. So by taking a momentary collection of attributes which are measured and parameterized into some relational equation and calling that bundle of information at that point in time a particle. you have already raified a highly abstract relational network into a unit that you can now start to treat I mean you can't but people do it's become quite popular to treat that as a physical body which means you can apply physical processes to it all of a sudden you can deform it and move it around but you know we all we all recognize you can't move abstractions around like I can't just you know be like hey can you hold on to my happiness I got to go to the bathroom really quick Right? It doesn't make sense. It's just that's not a rational statement to make. But for some reason uh this momentary property bundle is totally fine to be passed around uh at the level of mathematical physics and that's where a lot of paradoxical thinking emerges from. >> Okay. Okay. So, let me let me try another let me could I rephrase this way that um were it the K let's say um the Heisenberg uncertainty principle pops out inherently of the way that we're thinking about atomic phenomenon. So if one were to accept the general um ways that we conceive of atoms that you do end up with something like the Heisenberg uncens principle inescapably being there. Is that correct? It has to do with the way that the mathematics of quantum mechanics work out, which is that if you solve the wave function equation for position, it changes the momentum and if you solve it for momentum, it changes the position. So it's considered that >> in the solving of it >> in Yeah, exactly. Because it's like when we deal when when quantum mechanics is processing the behavior of a system, you got to remember that the um the the the wave function represents some complex system of properties of a higher dimensional like mathematical entity. Like the Copenhagen interpretation has a really hard line which says that like look the wave function does not have a physical correlate in reality. This is kind of what we're talking about where there's this break in the scales of physics where you get to a place and Jacob Barendes calls this the Heisenberg gap where there's a place where there is not a physical corate there's not a system that has known properties physical properties normal material body extension type of stuff. It can only be described mathematically. And so >> when you're solving the the equations, there is an order of operations that require that you have to follow in order to get information about the momentum or if you want to get information about the position, you have to solve the equations in a different order. And so when the Heisenberg principle, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes out, it emerges not purely from a a an experimental basis, even though there's plenty of experiments that go into forming the wave functions of quantum mechanics. This represents a time where fundamental physics has gone into a deeply mathematical realm because they're talking about systems that they cannot measure. Like when uh the EPR paper is published in 35 they don't have the capacity to work with like a single electron or a posetron. Like posetrons are still like theoretical particles. We're 50 years away from somebody being able to even do the experiment in like a single photon regime. And so the conclusions are fundamentally theoretical conclusions. They're mathematical conclusions. And the reason that they're so effective and they capture people's minds is because they work really really well inside of the mathematical system that demonstrabably seems to model the way that these experiments come out like >> but can I add one thing there is an there is an important experimentally derived >> piece of that equation which is the har this comes from direct experiments with black bodies and with light. So when atoms change they do it in a very discreet way and we find this to be the case with the concept of the electron and the concept of the photon which are both deeply rooted in this equation as it comes forward. Right? So the discretized nature of it is built into it. >> Problem is it's treated like it's a material body phenomena as opposed to a transition. >> Let me one more question. This is more in the weeds than I wanted to go, but I'm just so curious. Would it be incorrect to interpret what you were saying in the following way that well, the reason the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't um can't be clearly expressed is because our normal everyday expressions are operating in a three-dimensional space or four-dimensional space if you want to include time. And really what's going on is analogous to to the rotation of a higher dimensional object. So that so so actually there is some sort of a reality external reality thing going on but we're just glimpsing weird patterns because this is a higher dimensional thing that's moving in a way that when it gets projected down on 3D space it looks paradoxical and weird but it's actually not. I'm not sure that that was the that was the condition under which they were operating. I have a sense after doing a lot of this reading that >> I think he's asking if that's what what we think. >> No, I I think that um >> I'm Does that make sense? Would this be a paradox resolver? Oh, well, the reason the Copenhagen interpretation pops out weird things is because there's actually some higher dimensional thing that's doing something and we're just seeing the projection of it in lower lower dimensional space. >> Are you asking if that's what they thought or are you asking? >> No, I'm asking I'm asking if like could we could we steal man argument and say, "Oh, that's what's going on." They just didn't express it clearly. >> There is a angle that looks a lot like that called hidden variables in quantum mechanics. Um the the the bringing the word dimension in is a very uh it it gets people in the weeds really quickly. But I do think that there it rhymes a little bit with what we are saying which is that there is a different coupled abstraction to this which is actual materials in motion which are acting out that which you observe as this discretetized transition. And you guys are saying those materials are in 3D space >> and and and and how would you respond if one one were to say, "Yeah, I I like I like that model of materializing things, but it's a 4D space." So like and and just for the just to just to further try to strengthen this argument, though I don't agree with it. Um so this is like the flatlander idea, right? You're if you try to imagine you're only operating in two dimensions and you're and somebody's talking about a sphere and you're you know you're looking around how do I understand a sphere when you have the projection of a sphere that's moving through or being projected onto 2D space you get really weird mysterious magical patterns but then you move up a dimension and you go oh this is just a sphere you don't have the concepts to understand what's going on so could we try to steal man the argument and say well really There there is a material explanation and all of and all the math is pointing to higher dimensional objects that we don't have all the faculties to see. >> People do try to do that. >> I mean can I this dimension where it's really funny I saw an article a long time ago that was called like the 168 dimensions of benzene something like that. >> Okay. >> And it turns out like what is a dimension in physics or chemistry physical chemistry? It it's l it's a it's essentially a matrix row another level of abstraction and qualities which you can describe and make predictions about with some spatial continuity. Right? So you can have as many you can mathematically parameterize something indefinitely as far as I'm concerned as long as it's something that you can measure or point to. Um, I think that fundamentally we're making the case that math isn't enough to actually give an explanation. So, math will give you unending descriptions of, you know, you can put it into as many higher dimensions as you want and that might be really helpful actually to do that because you might be able to see a better map of what could be happening. But at the end of the day, to have a real scientific explanation, you have to have natural language. you need to actually paint a cause and effect narrative for the phenomenon that you're describing which in the case of physics has to involve materials doing stuff because if materials aren't doing stuff what is going on what what is this science I mean who's doing that science if they're not doing it >> the idea is this coupling then of the math with the explanation and the concession that the explanation is not in the math math doesn't speak for itself in physics or in any other domain and what and so you need natural language to express what's going on with the math >> and you need simple natural language as well. So something that I've been really struck by while doing the research for this book was how far we have fallen from the light of God when it comes to this. Because if you read the papers prior to the heavy mathematization of physics, every you you can read that paper and you can understand it. You can follow the story. You can evaluate what it is that they're talking about. if you go even up to the 1980s. And so in in the book, we address a lot of these canonical quantum paradox experiments like wave particle duality and entanglement. And the papers from the 80s are super easy to read. You can with a, you know, a little bit of focus and a free afternoon wrap your head around absolutely everything that's in that paper. um from 2022, a paper that attempts a replication in a much higher tech system. It reads like a foreign language. It is much more technical. There's way more jargon. the systems are far more intricate and there's a higher paradigm load where it's expected that the reader arrives already being deeply specialized to the degree that now there's this inherent barrier to entry because they're like, "Well, we don't have to explain all this stuff because you've already got it. We've got a word limit and so we're just going to get right down into it and we're going to use as much of the specialized language as possible because it allows us to densify the explanation to a great degree. >> Okay, two things you guys are going to love. So, um I remember reading a story. My gosh, I wish I remember the specifics. It was a mathematician. Maybe it was somebody I spoke I might be I'm blurring multiple people together, I think. two two things that will be funny. I remember reading or speaking with somebody um about who had a PhD from Oxford in mathematics. Um and okay, yeah, it was two separate people. I believe this the former is uh was written about here. He was saying he revisited his dissertation. This is a mathematician revisiting his own dissertation like 10 less than 15 years after writing it. and he and he didn't remember the the meaning of his own dissertation after 10 or 15 years. He's like, I stopped using these math muscles and I can't even follow my own effing dissertation. That's in math. That's not in physic. That's even in math. Okay. I was talking with another gentleman on my show who has a a PhD from Oxford in math and he told me off record he said Steve while I was I I was doing uh I was well I won't even tell you what I was talking to him about because I don't want him to be identified but he was saying Steve um it was kind of well known that at that level that level of elite mathematics that it's a game that if you're trying if you're trying to do the exercise of finding meaning in the math, you failed the game. They know that it's they there's sort of a culture where they know it's >> Shila has a really about this. >> Oh, do I? I was going to say that I think games are great. Uh I think you should know the rules of the game that you're playing and and I hope we can talk about that because I think physics uh doesn't know its own rules exactly right now. And and that's that's cool because once we set up some rules to play by, we can discover extraordinary things. What what what was the story? >> I was thinking about the story that you told about your dissertation defense and the mathematics. >> I I don't know if I'm going to get into trouble for this at some point, but uh well, it's out there now. Um no, I it was Yeah. So, when I was doing my defense for my PhD, you have to get somebody from another university. uh and I I won't name the guy but he was a very high level physicist from a material science physicist from Harvard no sorry from MIT and >> yeah exactly yeah I hadn't either at the time funny thing uh but he you know he's at the defense very friendly guy very smart um actually done a tremendous amount of work in an adjacent field regarding elastic mechanics and there was some point there was an equation he got hung drop on in my defense in in my thesis and he kept asking me about it and I kept trying to explain it to him. I think it was related to some diffusion equations, some Stokes level stuff and I kept going through it with him and this was just dragging on. Everybody in the audience is kind of like h what's going on? like we're just hung up on this one equation and uh you know at some point he just is like all right well whatever like we'll come back to this and I'm kind of thinking like oh man this is bad he's going to have all these rewrites for my dissertation and all of this and I believe I ended up getting an email from him later where he basically just said you know what I don't get it but that's not unusual like I haven't studied this as much as you don't understand these mathematics uh but I'm sure they're good to go. And that was a real light bulb moment for me uh when I started to move into all this other stuff because I realized that it's not uncommon for people who are really good at math to be really good at one particular form of math. >> Mhm. >> And when you introduce now you bring physical components into it like evaporation. I mean I was studying evaporation as it related to the material properties of this material of this biioaterial as it transitioned between hydration states which is really boring but it brings in evaporation which is this unbelievably complex physical phenomenon that's you know extraordinarily diverse in its behaviors and depends on all these parameters and you just kind of have this realization like oh man nobody's able to check anybody's work at some point >> like you're going to reach a points if you keep doing this, dude. I'm talking to myself like where you're going to be your own boss because nobody's going to be able to talk you out of your ideas at some point. And that was a pretty I I don't want to say scary or anything, but it it it's an interesting moment to stare into the abyss like that. >> I'm going to say that exact pattern that exact pattern in the abstract is repeated across every domain. And uh so I' I've come to the conclusion that we've been living in a dark age for a little bit more than a century be a fun conversation for another time. And part of the reason is because I see that pattern repeated over and over and over that there's a there's something happens with technical expertise where it becomes so esoteric and hard to grasp that we end up with networks of trust. We say why do we believe that this uh mechanism we think we figured out in medicine for example works? Well, you know, we we're appealing to u a fancy paper that was published and everybody respects. Okay. Well, then you look at the paper and you read, okay, what about this assumption, that assumption, this assumption. That couldn't possibly be wrong because the the experts in the field have, you know, figured this stuff out. But you keep digging and you keep digging and then you find actually there's like a whole bunch of uh dependent arguments that are built on top of certain assumptions that are uh uh either not true or not not thoroughly thought through or just purely taken on trust that the big brains have sorted out a bunch of fundamental stuff and And therefore we're going to do science which is building on the work of other people and nobody's actually re-examining which whether fundamental ideas end up being true or highly technical ideas being true. Even in mathematics there's this idea that it's like total rigor in this domain of mathematics. And I think evidence is suggesting that trust ends up playing this critically important role in all of our areas of knowledge including those which are supposed to be you know logically deduced like in mathematics. one just one example here. Um, I was talking with some friends out in San Francisco and there was a lady, I believe she had a master's or was studying for her masters or something in mathematics and she told we were having a similar discussion and she told me that I think she left the program because of this if I recall. I don't know if she actually got her degree, but she said she was working on some math problem and was really hitting a wall. And then she in a moment of insanity, she thought to herself, well, I wonder if this conjecture that was proven is false because if this con this thing I forget all the details, but this conjecture ends up being false, then I can solve the problem. And so she thought, okay, maybe the thing that was mathematically proven isn't actually true. Turned out to solve the problem. Went to her adviser, told told him the circumstance. And his response was, who do you think you are? She was she was like reprimanded for saying you're not in this you're not in the hierarchy such that you can comment on the reliability of mathematical proof. There are these great >> That's the weakness of the adviser though. I mean that is true that that happens a lot but it's hard for me to not see that as being a deep fault of the professor because the professor should at that point if the goal really is to nurture a scientist and to nurture a mathematician and a new mind should say okay let's go through it give me your argument and then needs to consider it because if you look back through the history of of the sciences. That's exactly what happens. There's there's so there's this one guy, his name is Arnold Somerfeld and he was running a lab that has the greatest number of physics Nobel laureates that came out of it of anybody's lab. I think there's like 30 laurates that came out of his lab or something. I might be exaggerating. Might be 13. I have a tendency to to be off by a factor of 10. But it's astounding because in many cases the stories that you find is that people will discover things and they don't necessarily know what to do with their discoveries. like Goodmeck and Oland are a really great example of this where they derived the spin 1/2 motion of the electron >> and they published a paper on it >> and they acknowledged as they were publishing it they were like we don't know how this is possible we don't know what this means but Somerfeld was like it seems reasonable write it up and put it out into the world because people need to consider it and they need to see it and so the story that you're telling to me seems like the you know it's like a petty tyrant that has risen to a position of a professor and instead of realizing that perhaps the things that he himself has become convinced of may warrant re-examination instead treats it as a given that the greatest minds of our generation have already solved it and it is not for you to reconsider. That's a very weird thing that does seem to show up a lot and >> it's very common too like I don't want to downplay how common that is. But we have a probably half our guests have been through an experience like that. And to be honest, we we talked about our ideas with every physicist we could find for years. And I can think of one super high level physicist who actually sat back two super high level physicists who sat back in their chair and were like that's really interesting actually. And uh and other people I see them their eyes roll back in their head where they also have that experience. We're like this is really interesting and then they immediately can it right? it contradicts it contradicts everything that they're they've built in their lives to an extent that they're just like, "Nope, that's not getting air time in my brain and they just move on." Right? So, it's there's two ways you can handle when you when you hear something disturbing, right? You can either try to integrate it or you can just try to spit it out and stick your head in the sand. And it's obviously a lot easier to to do the latter. >> Yes. So, there's definitely a deep institutional and cultural problem here. There's a there's a further issue which is hang on this is happening in math. So if if I as an outsider would say okay well how many of these rock solid mathematical proofs aren't proven and if if we don't if the answer is I don't know >> like who who's checking if you have a culture in which if you discover that a mathematical proof ain't so and you're reprimanded for it and the the word doesn't get out the red button isn't pressed alerting other mathematicians by the way this conjecture or this thing that we thought was true is actually false. If there's no institutional corrective thing going on and it's about trust ultimately in math uniquely that seems to me to be uh a deep scandal. I mean, you have this inevitable coupling of elite thinkers to an incentive structure that reinforces this fantasy that they have to have all the answers, right? You're not going to get a grant pass by being like, "Well, we don't know what's going on. I don't know." Right? So, there's a climate of not saying, "I don't know." Which is unfortunate. I mean, it's gotten to the point that it's formalized to the extent that mysteries are given physical form in much of fundamental and astro cosmological astrophysical science, right? You have something that doesn't make sense. Well, it's dark matter or it's a black hole or whatever, right? You actually package the mystery as if it is a solution because it's so uncool to say this is a mystery and we're trying to figure it out. that's just that's not the culture that's being reinforced. There's also there there I think there is a little bit of a a light here which is um there's a really interesting blog written by Adam Mastriani about what he calls the strong link problem in the sciences and he's like we spend a lot of time really worrying about bad conclusions and bad science and really focusing on you know how do we get rid of all of the bad stuff and he's like maybe it doesn't matter that there's a lot of bad ideas out there because the ideas that are good are going to be the ones that are able to be linked together to carry us into the next stage. And so over time, the bad ideas do fall away. The question is how much time? And so if the problem is just in mathematics and in these esoteric higher level abstract mathematics, you could kind of I could talk myself out of it and say, well, it's not really that big of a deal because they acknowledge that they're playing a game where it doesn't have a physical correlate and so they're just galaxyrained mathematicians that are spending all of their time playing this weird esoteric game. Let them play it. But I think that you are pointing to the fact that it's not just in mathematics there is a sense that at the highest levels it is possible to state that the world works in a certain way and if it catches enough people's imagination and it works well enough for whatever place you're at in the development of your field it kind of sticks around and sometimes it does stick around for a long time but I don't know I have the sense that the the arc of history bends towards us making more sense of things rather than less sense of things even though we do periodically go through these really stagnant periods. >> I think that is a very optimistic view. I hope that ends up being true. >> Can I can I add one thing to it? I think it is true. It's just that rising above the noise is no easy task. I can't tell you the number of people that I've talked to who had a discovery very early in their life and then were completely floored by how much effort it went into actually getting that >> idea despite how brilliant it might be to actually get it to rise above the noise. So, it's not quite as simple as the noise doesn't matter. It's just that it's a given and I you know there's no point in getting hung up on it. You're never going to clean the house, but but you you can actually uh see an arc from good idea to good idea to good idea. Uh and sometimes there's a step back. But >> yeah, go ahead. >> Let me give you an analogy. So uh part of my interest is in economics. That was one of my earlier interests and became very persuaded by hardcore pro-arket arguments that the market if allowed to be free and prices allowed to correct um up and down on net over the long run produces extraordinary amounts of material wealth and I I do believe that is still the case. However, something I overlooked is that the long run has to be really long. And in the in some of those cycles, you can have extraordinary levels of destruction, material, spiritual, biological destruction. So, for example, if you're talking about uh um uh medicine or you're talking about let's say uh in a agriculture, there's some new pesticide. Um my old self would have said well you see the dangers of u uh bad pesticides bad bad pesticide usage that will be corrected for because of the profit and loss um incentive. So if you have a dangerous pesticide that gets produced people will eventually realize well they're being damaged by it. there will be a bunch of lawsuits and so the company will end up being sued into oblivion because they will end up making losses due to harming people and so there's an incentive to keep things safe safe and effective maybe um for financial uh reasons and I thought yeah that's that sounds right I think that's right unfortunately those like unfortunately we live in a world in which um first of all the complexity of trying to figure out cause and effect of a new product is extraordinarily high. So like who is trying to figure out the effects of these new pesticides and how and by what mechanism? That's a preposterously hard thing to figure out. How do you know that your pesticide has a 38% increased risk of you know cancer, you know, skin cancer over 15 years? It's like that's really hard to find out. But also the the profit system allows for these corrective cycles to take several decades to unfold. So it might be that the the company does go bankrupt after 80 years of producing a product that's harmed millions and millions or billions of people if we're talking about novel um medical technology that has re recently been released for example. So, so while I agree with you, I think that the long arc of the history of ideas is pointing upwards in the right direction. I also think I would not my my focus at least is on the the disastrous consequences of bad ideas even across multiple generations. I mean fortunately we're working in physics and in the world that we're working in you can log a lot of knowledge that is misinterpreted but it still becomes quite useful later. I think the >> sort of cliche but still valid example is the TMIC astronomers, right? They logged so much information about the motions of bodies in the sky and the system that they had grafted those observations onto turned out to be completely wrong. But all that information was quite useful. Furthermore, the mathematics they were developing became useful. It was good to have an institution that was developing that sort of logic. And so a slight reframing on one hand could be seen as completely rewriting and what a waste of the last thousand years that we were thinking that the earth was at the center of the solar system. But on the other hand, it wasn't that big of a deal. It wasn't this huge trauma. >> And I think that with paradox lost and the work that we're doing on the material atom, it's very similar. It's like look, we we understand a lot. We have a ton of knowledge about this system, about the atomic world, about the quantum world. We just need to like reframe this a little bit so that things don't end up in contradictions so that things so that we don't have paradoxical conclusions so that we live in a world that makes sense. It's not that big of a leap and I don't think it will prove to have been a wasted century. Uh however, if it never course corrects, then we might actually be wasting time. This is a wonderful connection with the book and um and let me let me do one more reframing here and then we'll talk more about the specifics of the book. I I wonder if you guys have seen the same pattern. Um my interest in physics is very limited and I it only and in mathematics for that matter and it only started at all because of my interest in epistemology and logic and philosophy. And what happened is in logic and philosophy there was an annihilation of the concept of truth and even logical consistency good heavens underneath that and the downstream consequences of a culture let's say which has abandoned the notion of truth I think are very severe. I think I I think there's this weird connection between high level abstract philosophy and math like everyday culture, whether or not people believe there is such a thing as truth and whether or not it matters to use your mind to try to figure out the world. And so as I as I got sucked into a little bit of math and physics, it's driven almost entirely by noting that in our culture and in our intellectual culture, there is a an embrace of paradox and nonsense and contradiction and like a romanticization even of the idea that it doesn't make sense. Isn't that awesome? And I think there and I you could see it in other domains as well. So, so to to try to wrap our heads around the consequences of sloppy thinking in math and physics, I certainly would say there are weird like actual connections between even culture if your mathematicians and physicists are uh deeply fundamentally wrong about some things. Any thoughts on that? >> So many. >> Um, okay. So I think that what I trace it to is that there used to be two different realms in which you were able to form a meaningful picture of the world. On one hand, you had a spiritual religious realm that was inherently contradictory and inherently inconceivable. The metaphysics of a religious worldview where there is, you know, a creator figure that sits somewhere in judgment and is omnipotent and and omnipresent is it is it is not a rational logical sort of way of thinking about the world. >> Certainly not a physical one. >> Exactly. And yeah, so that's what I mean when I say rational like it's not um it is not a story of bodies in motion and cause and effect. It requires some kind of it requires you to step outside of normal consideration and to accept on faith that there is a system that you cannot see that yet drives everything around you. And this is a belief system that in one form or another seems to have been with us for all of time. You do not find a culture anywhere in the written or archaeological record where you do not have a supernatural realm in which meaningful things occur. that inform the way that your life works and are beyond the access of reason. Okay, so we have the entire stack of human history where that is a thing that operates and it is a really really loadbearing part of the way that people operate. And then in the last hundred years you basically have this Nietian death of God where yes people still go to church and yes they still believe but they're also living in a world where you know the intellectual and the rational and the elevated view it as perhaps a provincial affectation to believe in the man in the sky that offers truth and consequences and all of these like vaunted ideals. And what happens to a people that have evolved for literally their entire history with a spiritual foundation in the absence of that spiritual foundation. That spiritual foundation does not disappear in a few generations. It does not vanish. It simply becomes reframed. And I think that where it becomes reframed is it becomes reframed in the fact that we're like, okay, well, we know that there's some paradoxical inexplicable aspect to existence because that is our bedrock cognition and metaphysics for most of our evolution >> and our and our daily lives, right? I mean, being in love, being in pain, like these are intangible experiences that are very real. Like I want to be totally clear really quick. I want you to continue, but I want to be totally clear. Physics is great, but physics doesn't dictate most of my life. Right? I don't think about physics when I'm interacting with my family. I don't think about physics when I'm making music. I don't think about physics hardly ever. It's just that it is a way of approaching material reality. And the problem is it's tried to absorb all of this metaphysical duty. >> Exactly. like we don't have a place in the world for mystical experience anymore. And so where it goes is it goes into our sciences. And in some ways there's there's this dark edge to it because I feel like when you have people that accept this paradoxical, inherently inexplicable metaphysics that rules the day in these foundational disciplines and the smartest people in the world are telling them, "No, no, no, no. It's okay. There's things that you just can't understand. They work in ways that are beyond human reason. Then when you look out onto the world and you see these weird things like you were talking about this medical roll out, you're you see like weird things that are happening in government and strange geopolitical events and it's much easier to just be like, well, I don't understand it, but I'm sure that it's okay. >> I'm sure Iraq needed to be invaded. You know, whatever it is, it's like there's just things that crop up and you're like, well, there's hidden variables. I don't know. >> Reality is complex. Yeah. Uh so so let me let me try would you accept this uh attempt at rephrasing that um that the irrationalist worldview is evolutionary evolutionarily baked into humans and it found its expression recently in physics that the irrationalism in physics is a relig is the religious impulse expressed >> I would say supernaturalism as opposed to rationalism because I think irrationalism carries with it like an emotional char. It's an accusation inherently. >> It's also probably kind of wrong too just because a lot of these mythologies convey extraordinary wisdom about how to actually have a successful life. And so I don't think they're quite irrational. They're just not material stories of reality. >> I I I strongly agree we should separate the supernatural from the irrational. But I specifically So, so you're saying that I I just want to sus this out a little bit more that the supern there is space for the rational supernatural. >> There's space for mythopoetics in understanding your place in the universe. I think I I just don't see a material explanation for reality as being particularly useful for >> orienting you towards a good future >> other than getting out of the way of the bus obviously. But to use your example of the company that makes the pesticides that kills a bunch of people, there is a rational way in which you could arrive at the biological mechanisms by which it causes cancer. And over the course of many many years, you can come at the place of okay. So there's there's a mechanism that we have uncovered and we have done the studies and we we have you know caused untold numbers of mice to suffer so that we have proved that this pesticide is bad. But there's also probably some other level far before that where if you look into the internal documents of these companies, you you see reports that they know that they're doing something bad because they're kind of discussing it internally where they're like, "Well, how are we analyzing this data that we already have, the people at the plant that are producing it are getting really sick? There seems to be weird things happening when we dump all of this stuff in the rivers downstream." And so there is like an almost supernatural moral conjecture that you can say that okay so over a long enough time yes there will be a rational way that the consequences manifest and yet there is a much faster supernatural frame in which you could say this is bad and we shouldn't do it and the absence of a higher moral authority is what allows you to continue doing it because you're like well I'm going to be long gone I'm going to be gone I'm going to have the bag by the time that anybody figures it out. Who cares? And so it's like I think that they've worked together. >> It's not so institutionally encoded anymore. I mean, we still celebrate these things in mythopoetics, right? It's in movies. It's in song lyrics. It's in all of our forms of entertainment. Like we we see those bad guys in the movies do that thing and we all are like, you know, shame on them, right? It's just not institutionally encoded in the same way. And so the institution, the priest class of the modern world is the academic structure. And particularly the physicists happen to be at the king of that castle right now. >> And >> I love this. I think this is a very beautiful idea and I think it's completely wrong. I love it. I love it. In fact, in fact, I want to tell you it was it was such a delight. One of the many reasons it was delightful for reading this uh reading this book is in the introduction it you tell a history and you talk about similar to what you're describing our progress or that let's say the tension between the mystical and irrational versus the rational. And there are sort of two implicitly it's very little explicit but implicitly there are sort two forces that are the bad guys in the story. One is Plato the influence of the platonists and the other is the Catholic Church. And it's so funny because I just recently converted to Catholicism and I converted to Platonism uh several years ago. It was like the biggest revision in my world view was becoming a platonist. So I'm now the boogeyman. I am a Catholic Plonist. >> Wow. >> That's funny. >> So and I I I think actually the story as I can tell of history is one in which rationality gets its metaphysical footing within Christianity. And I think that I think the tension between rational the reason and faith is a modern one. I think it it ends up being that this is sort of an outcropping of Protestantism in the 16th century. When you have ancient church fathers that are talking about inherent mysteries, they're generally, from what I can tell, they're not talking about it as an they're not talking about it as a as irrationalism in principle. What they're trying to say is something along the lines of when one philosophically arrives at the necessity for God, God necessarily has properties which can't be fully expressed in uh reason dialogue. There's something always transcendent. No matter what your concept is, God necessarily as a logical matter transcends those concepts. And and there is a strain one that I grew up in. My background is in uh Protestantism growing up. And there is a strain that I find really bad in uh Protestant Christianity, which is the irrationalist strain, which says that you're just supposed to have faith. You're just supposed to believe things don't make sense. That's okay. You just trust God. You trust you just just have faith. And that I sort of thought at one point that that was religious thinking generally. And then I over the past few years have realized that the great ancient tradition of Catholicism and orthodoxy is one in which there is no disharmony between reason and faith. That rational that the reason that the world makes rational sense is because God is rational and and there's a way of understanding God which does not imply um an irrationalist mysticism or anything like that. And and when I look over the historical record, I do think that the Catholic Church get should get a lot of credit for the founding of our intellectual institutions. And and uh one I would love to see a demystifi on this which is uh church history. My mind has been blown in the past couple of years in how much propaganda I believed about church history. I embied the Protestant ethic to the extreme. do your own research all the way down to you as the individual are going to be they might say your own pope. I'm I am the moral authority. I have to make sense of everything. I'm going to be the one uh all of these ideas. I don't accept anybody's authority. Um and I'm I'm a I was my political background is a individualist anarchism. So it's like which is a which is sort of a strain an outcropping of Protestant thinking from the 16th century. And anyways, as I'm learning, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, so much of this is propaganda. There's so much anti-atholic propaganda out there. It is a scandal." I think you guys would find that incredibly fun in that it's weird that it's now heterodoxy like like the fence of the Catholic Church is this crazy uh heterodox position that there's not I feel like not too many intellectuals taking. >> I think we're working our way towards it, man. like we're we're in the Bronze Age still, but what comes next is actually quite fascinating with the transition of the Canaanite uh sphere and the development and loss of different deities and how it evolves into the Old Testament and how that evolves into the like there's this there's a thread that is important to understand if you want to understand the history of the world and the story starts in the bron probably before but uh down through the bronze age for sure and the collapse of those Goliath Empire things >> and there is a connection here between pl at least for me there's a connection between understanding platonism let's say with a lowercase P not specifically the ideas of Plato but for lack of a better term and what we can talk about I think we have to talk a lot about what that means there's there's a direct connection between grasping the platonism and grasping what's going on in religion I feel like there is translation key to understand religion almost clearly if one has the tools of understanding that are presented by a uh a platonism and and specifically at least the way I'm thinking about things like a pltonism with regards to patterns if abstra patterns and abstractions are baked into the world outside of our mind that's a very very big idea and it bakes the immaterial material into the world in addition to the material that it ends up being impossible to separate the material and the immaterial. Anyways, that's a that's uh let's not get sucked too much into that yet, but I just wanted to laugh and say uh I like being the Catholic Platonist after reading after reading your book. I I mean there absolutely are patterns. Our our contention is that there are patterns when we talk about physics that we should talk about what the patterns are of and they should always terminate in narrative arcs that involve physical actors. That's all. But okay, I mean in terms of the religious stuff like I don't see any disagreement with your perspective at all makes that sounds like stuff that I would agree to from tip to tail. Nasia grew up in a godless Soviet Union, so she's uh she she really struggles with the religious angles. But I mean, I absolutely love these old religious texts. I I love the stories in them. I I find them to encode deep truths and deep patterns about the universe, for sure. >> Okay. So, let's let's dive into big picture about the about what the vision of the material world as you see it. and then we'll go into some of that um axiomatic analysis. So your claim is that we're lacking a material picture of the world and you're trying you're do this incredibly ambitious and wonderful goal of saying let's let's actually be able to sink our teeth into what the material world is composed of. There is actually something out there that is operating according to certain understandable principles. What's the picture? Yeah, that's the game we're playing. Uh we take a look at well we have over the course of our lives taken a look at the physical reality that's presented to us which is deeply paradoxical often just completely shoulder shrugging at the final analysis. and we say, "Well, let's play a different game, one that provides hypothetical material solutions to these phenomena." And we're going to set up a few ground rules by which we play that game. Uh hopefully they're understandable enough that anybody could play the game with us. And let's tackle these problems. You know, let's start at each one of these things that doesn't make sense. For us, it started off with charge, right? So we both in our long you know winding road across many different hard science disciplines came up against this concept of charge all the time. You know there's charge flowing in a wire. The bacteria their electron transport chains are passing these electrons around these charges. Uh and we started asking people a long time ago like what does that actually mean though? Like you know I understand heat right turns out to be like this jiggle of molecules and atoms right? you can kind of visualize it makes sense. It has a material basis. What is this charge stuff? And we kept just getting passed down the line to somebody else. And at some point, it was one of those moments where we said, "Oh, oh, oh, no, nobody knows actually." And that was really exciting. So, that was perhaps the motivation for playing this game was, okay, well, what would a satisfactory explanation even look like? What what what are we after here? And that's how we built the three axioms, which are pretty simple, where we just say, "Hey, look, we're going to play a game where all of the explanations that we want, they are going to be material explanations, right?" And you might say, "Well, what what what the heck is that?" Um, I'm just going to maybe I should just read these cuz uh I don't want to I was going to >> Okay. Yeah, you can do it. Do it, please. >> Oh. Oh, I don't have you got >> Okay, I got it up here. >> So, the rules are are simple. There's three of them. Uh first one is all physical phenomena are the result of interactions between material bodies kind of like what I just said. So the second one is like well what the heck is a material body? Well we are going to define material bodies. There are that which have surfaces volumes and location. So they're ext they're structures with extension. And then the final rule by which we play this game is that the only thing that can happen in this sandbox universe is that these bodies fundamentally displace one another. You can't have two of them in the same place at once. So underpinning all physical phenomenon will be the exclusion of one body by another. And if you have composite structures, then the subunits will be displaced during deformation. And that's it. That's that's the that's the game we're playing here. And the the goal is to use that to produce hypotheses about what the math could mean. >> Not even necessarily to say this is the way it is for sure or anything like that. It's to say, hey, here's here's a hypothesis that conforms to these basic tenets that most people could probably get behind. Certainly, anybody working in material science would already be using these. Uh so what if we play that game? Maybe you can come up with maybe if lots of people are playing that game, they'll come up with lots of interesting hypotheses. And >> the goal ultimately is to be able to explain these very mysterious phenomena that are that surround us all the time. Charge, light, electricity, magnetism, and gravity because there's this famous video with fine with uh Fineman where the interviewer asks him, you know, how does how does a magnet work? >> Yes, I love that one. >> And you know, the interviewer asks him and Fineman's like, well, what do you mean? And there's this moment where the interviewer is like, "What do you what do you what do you what do you mean? What do I mean?" Like there's a thing that happens like when you push the magnets together and when you when when you know the two south poles face each other there's there's there's there's a something that keeps them from sticking together and then if you turn them turn one around they do stick together. Like what is that? And Fineman gives this really meandering long non-answer where at the end of the day he's just like I can't explain it to you because there's not an explanation that is in the language that you would understand. And so what he means is that he can give you a mathematical description for what's happening but not a physical material explanation. And so our task was to use the axioms that Shiloh just read to see if we could find a consistent explanation for all of these phenomena that didn't require us to basically start from scratch every time that we approached one because they're all intricately linked to one another. And so the game was to say, okay, so if these are axioms, is there some kind of structure that we can assign to atoms that allows them to actually do all of these things >> that helps us have physical models for how they happen and solves these mysteries that, you know, like Newton worked out gravitation. He worked out in Fals MA, all of this stuff. He didn't know what mass was. To this day, nobody really knows what mass was. And so we were like, okay, let's see if we can solve these things using these three axioms. And after 10 years, I think that we have a good first pass at it. >> That is uh it's so beautiful. It like I feel a little bit emotional hearing it because every part of me wants to say that's exactly what we need. Of course, where have you guys been? like how how is it that we're in 2026 now and nobody's trying to do that of isn't is that's the holy grail. You guys are like there's a bunch of incredible phenomena that don't really have great explanation. Maybe we can put them all in one picture that's internally coherent that makes sense and we could sort of develop intuitions about >> I mean I love it >> dude there was there was times when we would start applying this model >> especially at the end stage where we were applying it to new things we hadn't looked at and it fit so incredibly well that I started to get super confused why nobody had published this yet. Uh-huh. >> Like I I couldn't believe it a few times. I would I just couldn't believe I I expected this book to come out before ours came out, to be honest. I totally expected that. There's precedent for that in the past. >> I I just uh I'm still a little shocked by it, too. >> I I that makes complete sense. And what's uh another >> serendipitous coincidence? So, I I I I have my own toy model in my head. Okay. I don't have a fraction of the knowledge that you guys have in physics, but I because of the frustrations that I've encountered in dealing with um the stupendous claims coming from physicists. I'm like, okay, is there a way to make sense of this without nonsense and contradiction? And I actually wrote an article at the beginning of last year and it has in different language this displacement axiom that you're talking about that I'm trying to do something which what I had what I've inferred in reading and talking with other physicists is that thinking about this think about physics this way is like childish but I am yeah I have a childish mind so I guess that's yeah I I accept I accept that and trying to boil down physical phenomenon down to uh uh this principle that two things can't be in the same place at the same time and how far can we get now in my in my model which is going to be very different than your model and this is going to I can't wait to have this conversation I'm thinking it as as being like cellular auto automata that that uh what is what are the fundamental bits of nature well they're states in a grid or they're voxels like we're we're in a Minecraft world and the and the bits are blocks in the Minecraft world. And in playing with that idea from the childish perspective, I I've also found there are some there are some ways of making sense of phenomena that sort of pop out from thinking of the world this way and they and they actually give explanatory and predictive power. And I want to want to run one of them by you and then we'll we'll keep going into your model because yours is going to be better than mine. But is isn't this fun? Okay. So So I I there's this phenomena of quantum tunneling. People say that it, you know, it seems like you have these uh uh there's a jumping of one, you know, electron or something over a barrier that we wouldn't expect it otherwise would be able to jump and it sort of like teleports and this is confusing and magical or mysterious. And I'm thinking, okay, okay, okay. I sort of don't know if this is true, but if one thinks about space as being discretized as it is in the Minecraft world, you actually get weird uh uh phenomena that look like quantum tunneling. So if you have So I used to work in in motion graphics a little bit and if you have a line that's pixelated and you're rotating the line, you end up with broken the line breaks. It's not a smooth line. And so you can end up with if you have two rotating lines and they're intersecting, you actually don't have them intersecting at one point. You might have them not intersecting at all, not having a shared point or they might have multiple shared points depending on the on on how the line is uh uh composed, what the resolutions of the lines are. So if if you think of spaces being discretized, it gives me an immediate intuition that I wonder if this is what's going on with quantum tunneling is if you have broken edges, jagged edges. And what that means is in some circumstances when two things are are meeting or intersecting in space, they they pass over a wall without without interacting. Okay, that might just be the most completely ridiculous thing that's ever been uh articulated. I just does that does that does that make sense that picture? Well, I think that that's very much how our mind works and that's how we go about composing models of reality for sure. I think there are different layers of pixelation and even when you examine a physical system there's different abstraction layers that you can look at it from. I think this is a great term handed down from computer architects is this idea of abstraction layers. And I think that you can uh you can observe one phenomena, one abstraction layer and then go down and find something very different below it or above it. And so as you zoom in on these pieces, you may actually find that some of your contradictions are resolved uh as a result of it. To actually address the electron tunneling though, I think we have to be really careful what we mean by electron. >> Um where's where do we get this idea from? Why do we think that there's electrons? Why do we think they're tunneling? Uh because I would probably arrive at a very different conclusion once I understood what we meant by electron. >> Yeah. what do we mean by electron? But even in terms of the explanation that you just gave as it is like I think that there is there's a bunch of terms that need to be defined right so like space what is like a unit of space like Shila said what is the electron what does it mean for it to tunnel but in at a at a relatively high level it sounds like what you're saying is that the subunits of the system periodically have confirmation because it's it's it's a wildly dynamic system, right? Like we think of a protein as being one of the things that sometimes these electrons can tunnel through. Like I studied the electron transport chain in bacteria and there's a crazy thing where the reaction center that holds the metal atom that actually is doing the transferring of the of the charge as they say is buried deep inside the heart of this globular structure that's sitting inside of a membrane. And the electron in the story that is told arrives basically from the outside and kind of gets docked onto the outside of it. and somehow it makes it into the center and then gets passed along through all of these proteins. And so like quantum tunneling is basically the explanation given for what's happening inside of all of your cells to produce ATP inside the mitochondria. >> And so we tend to think of these proteins as these stable glob globs of stuff, but down at the atomic world, there's going to be motion. There's going to be things that are moving around all the time. And so the story that you're telling about this kind of like rotation of the units in such a way where they momentarily come into a configuration where all of the sudden this unit of charge can be passed into a space where it couldn't pass before I think is exactly the right track. Though we would describe it in radically different language the the intuition of there being a momentary alignment that suddenly lowers the energy barrier in a way that we cannot detect because we don't have that kind of fine grain resolution I think is spot on though. >> Okay. And what about the generalization that comes >> from this that could could we say um it could be that unusual phenomena have clear explanations when one understands the the relevant geometry deeply enough. I would say that's spot on. I mean, the arrangement of the world needs to be understood if you're going to be studying it. You have to know what it is that you're looking at. You have to you have to have some kind of visual model for the system in order to be able to conceptualize it. Because the crazy thing is is that our mathematics always lag behind our ability to conceptualize of something. like you can imagine a a vortex and that vortex moving through the water. If you've ever if you've ever been on a creek or a river or some where with a current, sometimes you can see these vortices form and they kind of move around. And so you can hold the picture of that in your head. You can imagine it. You can realistically figure out what it's going to do. But the mathematics for that are unbelievably complex. They are almost uncomputable. And so if you're depending exclusively on a mathematical model to think about eddies in a river, you're going to be in trouble because the math for that's really hard. But if you're able to think about, okay, well, so I can watch these eddies interact. I can see how they pull towards each other or they they push away from each other and the way the the dynamics of the water works. There's something in your mind that processes at a level that is not mathematical that gets you closer to understanding than the math alone would. >> Oh, that's fascinating. So, so c can you tell me how you guys are thinking about the relationship then between math and geometry because the general thought is geometry is like a subset of ma. I mean this is like an ancient idea about the relationship between numbers and and space and what what is more primary. So do do you have a a thought on that? Like is is are these two totally separate um spaces, the mathematical space and the quantitative space and the extended space, the geometric space? >> Well, how do those? >> Okay, so geometry is a map. It is a quantitative map, but it is a map of a particular structure, right? That's the idea. The world was obviously the first landscape that was mapped geometrically, right? So you would have something in the world, you would see something that approximated uh an ideal form of there you go, idealism, right? You have spheres and you have uh right angles and you have all these interesting things and you find a way to to work with them quantitatively and that that mathematics is geometry. But it is still a map of it is still a map approximating a material world initially. Now we you know we today it's gotten quite abstract. You have uh non- uklitian geometries and the word has been applied to things other than mapping the standard topology of the material world but it is the closest mathematics to describing a actual structural picture of a landscape that that one could perhaps use. Still at the end of the day it's a map though. That's the one thing that we always have to keep coming back to. Mathematics is very very descriptive. It can give you a really really accurate picture of the relationships that you're mapping. But it is not the territory. There is the territory and you can't confuse one for the other. The description can't be confused for an explanation. >> Okay. This is something I wanted to ask you later, but we have to talk about it now. Map territory distinction absolutely critical such an important I'm going to call it a heruristic for critical thinking is it absolute does the map territory distinction break down ever and and that here's the the prompting question is in in your view are there maps in the territory is the territory at least composed of some maps. >> I mean, I wouldn't I my initial response is no because I mean, okay, well, what is a map? Like, a map is a thing that we make. We go and we need some kind of informationally compressed way of being able to handle the thing that's out there in the world. like I uh worked as a backpacking guide and the map is really useful because it tells you about the landscape that's in front of you, what's around the next bend. Somebody has gone through and they have with their, you know, surveyor tools identified all of these landscape gradients. It's an extraordinary feat, but it's not like I'm going to go out into the world and look at the landscape and suddenly find that part of the landscape is made out of a map. And I'm not sure why we should expect that down below the level of what we can easily see with our eyes either. >> Some imagine uh some crazy person would have say well well um like when you're talking about a map then what are you talking about? Like isn't isn't a map something? Don't maps exist? >> Yeah. I mean they're symbolic representations of some chosen elements of reality. That that's all that's all you have. It's uh you know you put cities on there because the cities are important but there's a lot of stuff between the cities that's not mapped but it's irrelevant to the task that you're undertaking when you instrumentalize that information. >> And it's also a thing that we've created like there there there is no map until a mind goes and maps it. And you know, I think that the the bee has a map of the world in its mind that knows how it can go and find the the grove of flowers and it can come back and it can communicate that to the hive. And now the hive has this map in the world, but and they might be able to go and let's say that they have an intercies civilization and so different kinds of insects can communicate different kinds of maps to each other. So they might be able to go out into the world and find that another type of creature has a different type of map that is useful to them, >> but I think that maps ultimately are the production of minds. >> Okay, so forgive me for going down this rabbit hole, but this is so fun. Um, okay. It seems to me that the map territory distinction is a claim about the territory. And I don't know how to resolve this tension without saying that well our maps must actually uh not be totally separated at all times from the territory because I note that there are maps. So some part of the territory seems I have to place the map somewhere in my ontology. Sh. >> And I had a really really funny experience. We were hiking once outside of Portland and I had this uh tourist map. >> Very very high quality, very professional looking, gritted. >> Yeah. Like it was it was >> scale bars >> with some topography on it. And so we're sitting on this ridge and we're we're a ways away from Mount Hood. And we have on this topographic map a picture of Mount Hood. So, we have all of the contours of it, and we're trying to figure out from looking at the map what part of the mountain it is that we're looking at. And we come up with completely different points on the mountain that we're looking at. And it's really funny because we're actually sitting on the side of this cliff and we have a rifle with us. And so what we're doing is we're looking through the scope of the rifle at the mountain and just arguing full voice because we think we're alone in the woods. And so we're just never alone in the woods. >> We're completely certain that each one of us is right. You know, we're pointing at the map. We're arguing. We're looking through this rifle barrel. And all of a sudden, these two hikers pass by behind us. And I realize too late that they have seen they they they get very quiet. And I realize that they have seen us sitting on this cliff with the rifle yelling about, you know, what it is that we're looking at. And we later discovered that the reason that we had this complete divergence is because I had realized that the map was not properly scaled. And so the way that it applied to the landscape needed to needed an extra transformation in my mind in order for me to accurately place it to the landscape. >> To be clear, the X and Y axis were not scaled the same, >> which was just so bizarre. All this is to say that not all maps are created equal, right? So there are better and worse maps of reality and there are some which are more appropriate to riding the subway in New York and some which are more appropriate to flying a helicopter in New York. Right? So your your instrumentalization cannot be untangled from the map and and these maps that we're dealing with in quantum mechanics have been unbelievably effective at the sort of territory they're trying to navigate. Right? they're they're able to make very very tight predictive success following these maps and setting up their experiments. So no issue with the mapping itself at the end of the day for most of this stuff. I I the the motivation for the question comes from it really connects to how one thinks about how the mind relates to reality and also about how one thinks we are connected to truth. Here here's my position and I I wonder if you disagree with this. I'm going to say that the map territory distinction is a wonderful heristic that breaks down in abstract edge cases because we note that there are maps that exist in the world is the and I don't mean physical maps I mean abstract maps. So I could say well the mind must have some access to the world. I can't be wrong that there are maps just like I can't be wrong that there are experiences taking place. My mind must have some access to the truth of what exists in the world. >> Do you agree or disagree? >> Okay. So that's really interesting because if we if we use the map for that like there's a really different experience from looking sitting in your room and planning a backpacking trip and looking at a topographic map and looking at all of you know the the terrain and where you're going to get water and everything else and how far the distances are between these stops and the process of actually being there and experiencing that terrain and because there's so much that the map doesn't contain. It doesn't contain how many bugs are there. It doesn't contain how hot it is. It doesn't contain how heavy your pack is, how much water you've had, have you had enough to eat? And so the experience of being in the world, the truth of what that terrain feels like and how you encounter it, like how overgrown is the path. Has there been a lot of deadfall that nobody's cleared yet? Like there's so much information that is not in that map that you can only glean by going out there and discovering that oh crap I did not prepare for what the actual terrain looked like because it was presented in this really really ideal way on this map. And so there is a piece of understanding the world that can only be gleaned from experience. But then when you're talking about the subatomic world or even the atomic world, you hit against a really really interesting block because you cannot really experience that world. You cannot experience a single photon. You cannot experience the action of a single electron. And so I think that when you're talking about this thing of like there being maps in the world, what you might be pointing to is the fact that at some point you could probably abstract like a measurement device as being a kind of map that allows you to encounter something that's down there without actually having true experience of it. Yeah, I was going to add that all we one of the things that was shocking to us on this voyage was that all you can ever really know is when an atom changes like that's it. And so that's your pixel essentially is when the atom changes something's just changed about it in a monumental way. Like it's not the atom it was a moment ago. It's in a completely different energy state. It has new light associated with it. It has new structural properties associated with it. It's just there are these changes and all of our instruments come down to how those changes are evidenced by the measuring device. >> That's the pixel. >> So, so it sounds like the the way you both of you are thinking about things also very similar to the way I'm thinking about things. You're thinking of of it sort of in terms of information and compression. So you're you're you're saying you go into the world and there's all this in there's all this let's say information in the world that wasn't in the map and sort of by it sounds like what you're saying is by necessity the map is discarding information about the territory intrinsically. Is that fair? >> I think that's almost definitionally true for a map. It would be a pretty useless map if it was just a miniature universe. Are there are there any perfect maps like can or maybe I should say is there any part of the territory that is sufficiently simple such that it can be truly mapped that that one one can possess knowledge about the way things actually are fully. >> Yeah. >> Totally >> interesting. I was going to say no. >> Oh. Oh. I mean they're they're idealized, right? They're they might Yeah. The question is whether they hold up in all cases or something like but I would say there's a lot of relationships that are mapped in the quantitative realm for physics that are simple. You could write the equation with three letters and an equal sign. And >> do you think that they correspond to aspects of reality? So it's not just sort of a m like a tic-tac-toe game we're playing. >> Yeah. Yeah, I absolutely do. I mean some of them are some of them stand the test of trial after trial after trial. I mean gravity is a really good one. uh it it might uh there might be more to the picture when we start getting far away from the earth and we start trying to understand why the galaxy moves the way it does. Uh I wouldn't jump so far as to impug gravity, but for for every every instance that we understand, it's it's a pretty simple relationship. Um and there's a number of these in fundamental physics which are really solid maps and they'll get you where you're going all the time. So maybe what what you're trying to say is that as long as the map is sufficiently narrow in scope like if you have an equation F equals MA that in some ways you can treat as a map and it is a functional one because it seems to hold across a wide variety of experiences. But there are very few physics problems except for the the highly simplified ones that you do in physics 101 that you can really solve with F equals MA, >> right? >> Yeah. >> Oh, sorry to interrupt. What if we what if it's a more general question, not just about physics? I think it it's probably going to end up being correct that you can't really to claim knowledge of the territory directly in physics. Even if even if you have a map that's working well, maybe it's only working under circumstances that we experience that might change in 10,000 years or something. But are there are there maps outside of physics, let's say in philosophy or in logic or or maybe even in geometry, like some facts about how structures are in geometry? You feel like this is true. This is sort of a and and here's here's the here's one possible answer as a platonist. >> I was gonna say this feels like a very platonic question. >> Yeah. There are uh there are abstract structures that are mind independent that are that are simple in some sense in which they can be known and fully understood. I'm thinking in terms of like discrete geometry you can sort of understand if if we go with a pixelated a simple pixelated geometry. there are real relations baked into that that can be grasped and understood fully and maybe they don't necessarily apply always to physics or the physics is way more complex and so there's a bunch of like other variables but there's still that abstract structure out there that can be uh fully understood. I mean, I think that what you're pointing to is that there are like like logic feels like a map that can be very very true and geometry also feels like a map that can be very very true. Like there's a formula for a triangle and you can use that formula to evaluate if the thing that you're looking at is a triangle or if it's something else. And so I would say that yes, but again it's like what a map normally does is it allows you to grasp a large amount of information at once. And so if if you have a map and that map only applies to the realm of triangles or you have a map and it only applies to the realm of normal distributions and there's not a real way that you can say, okay, so now I have a way of applying the normal distribution map onto the map of the triangles and there's this there's this smooth gradation between them that allows me to link these two together. Like that's what I mean about the fact that yes, you can have a map, but I feel like the map that's accurate has to be really simple. >> Yes. And it almost stops being a map at that point because a map by its very nature is your ability to connect multiple different layers of information together. Like a topographic map is elevation and distance at the very least plus like whatever water features and everything else. And so it's like it's a piece of information that has lots of different units that are interconnected. And so to talk about maps that do all many many different combinations that completely recapitulate reality, I'm like, well, you lose you you can't in you you can't put every single piece of information onto a map. It just it doesn't hold it. I love that idea and I think I think that's right and thank you for saying that because I've gotten into trouble in some other discussions pushing this map territory distinction and I think part of the problem so I I viewing the map territory relationship as a heristic I think is correct um but I think what I'm what I'm trying to say that you've just uh articulated better is that ultimately there is an a priority abstract framework that is simple in some sense into which we put a bunch of empirical data. So there's a map like there's an ab the most abstract and simple of the maps is is logic like everything is the way that it is. >> A equals a >> a equals a that literally applies to everything. Is it a map? Well, it's not really like what is it compressing? What's the information that's being lost? sort of everything. And it's just it's just like a structural feature that's there that that that gives rise to the empirical data that we learn about the world through that it's not a map through that framework maybe is a better better way of thinking about it. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if you and if you can combine a bunch of those frameworks together in order to be able to outline some complex feature >> and intraconsistently, >> then I think that you've reached to the level of map. >> I I feel like what you're pointing to is that there there are truths out there and they can be identified. And why this material physics project is such an interesting test case of that is because there is a physical reality you have to contend with. Right? I keep bringing up this example of stepping in front of a bus. Like it is true that if you step in front of a bus, you're going to be messed up. And so I really like physics as a test case of this because physical reality is objectively apparent. And most physicists outside of quantum mechanics and fundamental physics and deep astrophysics, in other words, most people working at the scales where these observations can be made easily. They wouldn't contend with that. They would say, of course, this material has an objective property. We can understand it, you know, we can manipulate it. Uh it's only when you get into the world of the invisible that this even becomes an issue. >> Yeah. And and uh I agree. And this is, you know, I'm sympathetic with a lot of, for example, Bernardo Castro's arguments on the flaws of physicalism. Um, but I think there is a, you know, I think people push it too far. And the physical world, material, the existence of the material world is like a really, really good idea. I don't think it's logically necessary, but boy, does it explain a lot. Maybe the last conclusion on the list of possibilities is like there's no physical world. Let's let's make sure we exhaust all other possibilities before we get there. I do want to ask one question before we we uh talk about the the picture. >> Can I say I'm sorry. Can I say one thing to that really quick? >> Um I don't think that having a physical world is incompatible with having uh higher order pattern systems that are equally fundamental and true. You know, I I see there being this I hate the word fundamental so much, but I see people being like consciousness is fundamental. No, physics is is fundamental, material is fundamental. I I don't think there's an incompatibility. And I'm just trying to call back to what you were saying about God earlier as well. I I don't think there's any incompatibility uh between these different analyses. They're just different abstraction layers by which you want to approach reality. That's one thing we'll we really need to go into the weeds on because in my in my reading of the book it I did find the the the first part and the last part to be intention and it seems like on the one hand there is a so there's an insistence to ground abstractions in the material it sounds like >> for physics >> ultimately they for physics and at the And there is a section where you're you say if you want evidence of um something really special going on that that maybe physics doesn't explain is like walk stand up and walk to the end of the room and come back. That seems like it's you're violating a bunch of weird laws. Like is is mind impressing upon the world in some way that isn't captured by physics? But it was hard for me to rec Yeah, go ahead. It's hard for me to reconcile these two. >> I just don't think that physics captures biology. And I think that this question about getting up and walking across the room is the thing that separates the inanimate from the animate. And right now when you go, this is one of the craziest things, which is that, you know, if you ask a chemist what an atom is, they can pretty much tell you. Like they can tell you, they can give you a decent definition where they're like, "Okay, so atoms are the building blocks of matter and they combine into molecules and they do these things and they don't have this long list of characteristics that they use to be able to say, okay, well, this is this is matter and this is not matter." It's just kind of self-evident. But if you go into biology and you ask the question of okay, like, well, what is life? You get a listical. you're like, "Okay, well, it metabolizes, it reproduces, it has homeostasis, it evolves, it like there's these it's made of cells." And that seems to be not a very good definition for life. But it is a very effective definition of what you're trying to do is you're trying to construct an experiment to be able to identify if there is life on a distant planet >> or if you're trying to we had a friend who um is a fighter pilot and he says if you're trying to missionize it if you have some sort of achievable goals that are in a list of of of things that you have to hit in order to make it. But if you ask the question of like what really from our own intuitive experience differentiates life from non-life, it's will, it's desire, it's wanting to go somewhere that you are not. It is to fight against gravity. It is to fight against the path of least resistance. >> Inanimate matter always takes the path of least resistance. >> Okay. So on on that is the claim then that there are any cases of downward causality. Oh, so is it the case that you can have some biological form or structure which is actually moving the atoms in a way they would otherwise not move? >> Abs. Absolutely. I mean I'm doing it right now like I'm moving this microphone around. I mean, if you were just studying the atoms in this microphone without recognizing that they were connected to a living system, I mean, you could spend many careers trying to make sense of their emotions based on pure material principles because there's there's not it's not the right map to approach it. I want to be like really clear here, by the way. We're just kicking maps a bunch. What we're proposing in this book is a map as well. It's just a material map, right? It's not a quantitative map. It's a material map, right? So this this is the wrong map. If you want to ask why I just why all the atoms that constitute my body just went into the other room to the bathroom and came back here in the break. Uh if you approached it from a material physics perspective, you would be busy trying to make sense of that for eons. Whereas if you approached it from a psychological perspective, it's like, oh, Shiloh had to pee. Boom. Done. >> Uh okay. But the so there's one one answer would be that there is downward causality because if there weren't we would be overwhelmed with information. So that's like a practical consideration. The reason we use explanations that incorporate downward causality is because it's we're humans that have to simplify things. But there's another which which I'm asking which is is there actually downward causality? Like I if you had the the giga computer that was trying to understand you going to the bathroom at the fundamental material level. Would would they be able to do so? Or is there some other level of causality taking place where you a higher form is actually causing something in principle different? or something to move in a way that it otherwise wouldn't. >> Well, look, if you zoom in onto one of my atoms, I think you can absolutely understand why it materially moved, right? It's knitted together with the atom next to it and it's being displaced. And then you might be like, okay, well, these, you know, you could just do that all the way down the line. There's nothing incompatible about the physics of what just happened when I went to the bathroom with the biological motivation for what really drove that. It's just you're asking for a different abstraction layer to understand the phenomenon. >> Steve, are you asking if physics can handle the soul? >> Depends on what you meant by the soul. So, um, it's that's actually an excellent word to use because this is like the way that the church has been talking about what the soul is is it's actually a form that has causal power. So, there is an arrangement of matter in the form of a body which allows that matter to do things that it otherwise couldn't without that arrangement. And the arrangement is not merely a way of speaking. It's an actual abstract structure. And so so there the claim would be the traditional claim would be one that I I think I agree with is that well being a platonist this helps the the immaterial structure and form is doing something that that uh that when we're just that uh it would be that the computer trying to understand the motion of your body with just local physics isn't actually going to give you correct predictions. There's actually something else going on here. >> Absolutely. >> Which sounds like Oh, you think so? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, >> I don't think it gives you the wrong predictions. I mean, that atom, it's knitted to the atom next to it. So, it it should be predicted to move when that one moves and that one moves and that one. And you could you could track like a whole material story. I mean, this is what neuroscience tries to do. >> Yeah. Okay. And so, I think that it works for something that's as simple as like a biological urge where you're like, I have to use the bathroom. And so you probably could parameterize that enough to make a supercomput be like okay when the bladder is full to this point there's a process that happens but I think that if you zoom out from that like very simple experience then you get into one of my favorite tangents which is evolution which is okay so we are surrounded by a world of different kinds of species that have all found different kinds of ways to solve the problem of how it is to stay alive and get the things that they need. And the evolutionary story is that this is just a matter of competition and this is a matter of niches and this is a matter of survival of the fittest and all of these like kind of very dull physical at the end of the day kind of materialist explanations but >> displacements. >> Yeah, displacements. Right. So you have two birds, they want the same food stuffs. One bird evolves a beak that lets it eat something else and now you have two kinds of finches. Okay, great. But I think that there's something else too, which is that there is a drive towards something that is not necessarily biologically programmed in you for these basic listical things. That is what defines the huge variety of forms and that is like will and preference. I think that different species have different aesthetic senses for what is beautiful and good. And I think that they evolve along those lines because they make a million minute decisions according to what they think is good. That is not informed simply by the butdding up of molecules. And I know it's super far out, but I really do believe that there's a re like wasps and bees are ostensibly like very similar looking creatures, but they have wildly different spirits. And those spirits come from a countless number of decisions along the way about how to organize themselves and how to solve the problem of being alive and what to move towards. And you actually see this, I think, inside of people too, where you see people that are like wasplike. You see people that are sheeplike, you see people that are predatory, you see people that are not. And you can see a human speciation event. >> These are your forms. >> These are >> they are. Yeah. I I think we should You call yourself a platonist. I think we can staunchly say we're dualists. Make >> Okay. I I used to be and then Oh. Oh my gosh. This is going to be the most fun conversation ever. Okay. So, I love this too because both of you are desps. The way that I'm interpreting things, you've both expressed in different ways a fully materialistic picture of what's going on and a fully religious one. But but you're but it's alternating between the two on which parts you're like affirming or disagreeing which is which is the >> and the two shall never touch. No. >> Yeah. perfect candidate for marriage here. >> Okay. Wow. >> It's not that they're incompatible, though. I think that's what's critical. It's just which lens is going to be most instrumental in examining the phenomenon. >> I think they end up being incompatible. So, so I think the claim So, so okay, so using the Wasp B analogy that they have different spirits, um, let's put that phenomena into the supercomputer and just imagine that it it un it has the base resolution for reality. It's running the computation and it uh in your model do you get full predictive power of what the wasp is going to do if you un if you understood all of the base states. >> You might get predictive power about what the wasp will do but you will not get predictive power about where the wasp will be a million years from now. like because I think that there's so so the way that I see it is this is that when you try to um formalize the individual actions of one being, you might be able to feed all of the data about that person that you have up until that moment and then make some kind of rational prediction that is quite accurate about the next choice that they are going to make. But okay, then what happens if they have a a radically transformative spiritual experience and they realize that, you know, they've been working on maximizing shareholder value for their entire life. >> I thought you were talking about the wasp. I was like, I I was thinking the spiritual experience is like, I actually don't like these flowers. I'm going to go have the, you know, create honey from the from the rose. But I mean, I think that you can it it sounds much more absurd to talk about it in that sense, but I do think that there is the possibility that within the wasp realm, there could be wasps that don't like living in the wasp hive, they don't like being wasps. Like why is it so impossible for us to conceive of the fact that there is some kind of like rudimentary moral framework in the African killer wasp where one wasp can arise and be like you know what I don't really like beheading bee colonies. I think I'm going to try something else. And then maybe it becomes like a carry-on wasp and it only eat it still eats meat but it only feeds on dead things. like you have to have some kind of of you can say that the reason for that is just pure competition. But I think that that removes from the description of life something that defies a material explanation, which is that we do have spirits with preference. And those preferences are shaped by the world. And yet they are not necessarily predictive after radical transformations of our internal state that then send us along a new trajectory. And that new trajectory over the course of a single life does not end in any kind of like massive body plan change. But if you sew the seeds that somebody else can follow you, right? Like if you if you walk into the I always use woods metaphors because I feel like it's just so informative. Like okay, you walk into the woods and you want to go somewhere, the way that you're going to go is you're going to follow a path that you find, whether it's a deer path or you follow a river valley or you follow a ridge line. Like it's very very very uncomfortable to walk through trackless woods. >> But sometimes somebody does somebody makes a new path. Somebody sees something that they want to go explore and they want to figure out and they make the new path and then the next time the person somebody follows them there is a path that's laid out. And so I think that that's the like the gradual incremental creep that cannot necessarily be predicted by a supercomput because there's just some like weird moment of inspiration that's like well what if we try something different >> and this is different compared to a rock >> very >> okay and and is it because of the material composition of the rock or is it because of a a sort of vital separate thing? I mean that's a really good question. So >> there are massive material differences between biomaterials and inanimate materials. So I think you could approach that from either end depending on what kind of question you wanted to tackle specifically. >> There's a really interesting thing though in terms of rocks which is similar a little bit to life which is that you know we've we've tried to make artificial life in laboratories and it doesn't really work. Like there was a Craig Ventner was one of the big proponents of trying to create these like minimalist cells. And so he had the belief that what you could do is you could scan the genome of a species. You could identify the minimum set of really necessary genes and then you could just stitch them together into uh the bacteria use these like circular strands of DNA that are like plasmids and then you could basically like create life. But the the project kind of faltered because they realized that you you can't like just stitch stuff together denovo and like put it into a test tube and like let it go. The best that they could get is that they took a bacterium with already a very small genome and then just started deleting genes and so figured out that there's some like minimal organism. And so >> the the the greatest minds that tried to create artificial life at the end of the day were like it really does seem like we can only create life from other life. So magnetic fields also work in the same way where you cannot denovo create a magnetic field. You have to pattern a new magnet off of an old magnet. And so there >> you're talking about uh solid magnets essentially. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Yeah. So you can obviously make a coil do a magnet magnetic action. But yeah, if you want to make a magnet on the wall or you want to make a planet that has a magnetic field, you have to pattern it from somebody else. So if we're talking about the bee and the rock, one could say that the difference between the bee and the rock is fundamentally due to atomic material arrangements between the two. And ultimately if we had a way to transmute the the stone into a more sophisticated structure then it would be biioaterial. And then if we had a way to transmute or or or rearrange that made of biioaterial into the B form then you would get a bee acting like a bee. And now another approach would be to say well there is something that let's say the difference between the bee and the rock is fundamentally not material. >> It's in principle. Well, historical is uh an interesting idea here. >> Can you say a little bit more about that? >> Well, like look, >> I'm sorry. Historical separate from the material. So, like isn't the Couldn't we say that the reason the biomaterial is the way that it is is because of its history? >> Well, life is beings, right? I mean, that that's the perfect word for it. >> Beings. >> Being, right? Yeah. So, so you're going to have different atoms tomorrow in part than you do today. your materials are going to change actually and if you go several years out almost all the materials will be different but you'll still be here. So we're more of a happening we're more of an occurrence than a static material body that that's a very important uh distinction. The the rock ostensibly could sit there the whole time in my backyard and you know it might get weathered a little bit but it's not being replaced. It's not becoming a new rock. It's not becoming. We could easily be called human becomings as well. It would be equally appropriate. >> I love that so much. Okay. So, like let's think about your example. You're like, okay, so if we could take the rock and we could transform it into the same materials that are the bee and then would it become a bee? And I'm like, okay, well, number one, it wouldn't be a rock anymore. It would be a bee, right? because and so it's kind of it's one of those like spherical cow thought experiments because you would literally have to like switch out almost every single atom in that rock and replace it with B atoms and then figure out how to put them into the exact right configuration and then you would have to have some kind of template for the genome that you would use which would presumably be like a B genome and so you'd like nucleotide by nucleotide like painstakingly you just it would not be be material. So it's like you can't take the rock and keep the rock as it is and transform it into a beast. So like that that's the first problem. >> The second problem is that there is a path by which the inanimate becomes animate and as far as I can tell it is a deeply biological path. So there's um rocks just hang out and do the rock thing. But there are living beings like specific kind of uh lithotropes bacteria that feed on rocks. So they grow on the surfaces of rocks and they're able to like slowly digest the minerals inside of them and incorporate them into biological material. Those biological materials get eaten like up the food chain and eventually it probably ends up in a bee somewhere. Okay. So there is like a path but like it's it's a very indirect path. >> And so if your question is like how do you make a bee from scratch? Well, it sounds like what you have to do is you have to put into the center of that bee, all of the information that it has about what it means to be a bee that it has not learned over the course of its life. It has learned through being part of an unbroken chain of being all the way back to the first life. And so, it comes with all of this like bee baggage and all of the baggage of all of its ancestors that like forms it as the bee. And so I don't think that there's a there's a lateral transition that you can make from rock to be. There's maybe like a very slow gradual like rise >> unless you are a beeing cuz uh I took in a bunch of rocks this morning, right? And they're going into me and they're making me and so I'm trying. >> Did you eat rocks again? >> Yeah. You know, salts in my coffee and stuff. But >> I I love that. That's that I think that's such a a an excellent picture and it it also teaches a lesson that when using thought experiments don't use bees as the as the main entity because the puns just you know the bee eating and then you were talking about the bee genome and I'm like no that's a bome endless. Okay. So, this this is we're hovering around something that's very very central here and and uh I think it's going to be is super relevant to this which is what material arrangement is. This is going to take us into the question of of platonism in forms because I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna make a a claim here and we'll see if you guys disagree that a a wasp is not actually fully describable in terms of its immediate material arrange uh material uh states. It's not a it's not a word to describe atoms. It's actually the arrangement of the atoms which is the thing that constitutes the wasp. >> Yeah. If you pulverize the wasp and spin it in a test tube, you're not going to get a wasp out of it at the end of the day. >> Right. So it's so it's so it's so there is a difference between atoms and their arrangement. >> Yeah. That's it's everything in terms of under understanding the physical universe for sure. Their arrangement and also the actions of the atoms. Yeah. >> What in your ontology is arrangement? >> Um you I I think we're talking about location right now. We're talking about the relocation of subunits. The atoms are the subunits in this material presentation, but we're talking about their locations. Yeah. >> But not their locations isolated from one another. You're talking about a an abstract thing, right? >> Well, I would say location has no meaning if it's not relational. So, you're you're always talking about the distances measured to some other I mean, ultimately, if you want to get big about it, you're talking about with respect to every other physical body in existence at some point, but you can just talk about your local test tube or whatever. >> And and do those arrangements have a real type of existence outside of our conceiving of them? Yes. Like the world exists whether or not you are there to look at it. >> Yeah. If your eyes aren't open, you still get mowed down by the bus. >> So arrangement is something that is mind independent in the world. That's not something we came up with >> materially. Yeah. >> Okay. What? But but but when you say materially, the arrangement itself is something over and above the material, right? It's the relation of the material. But we're refer the subject matter in these sentences is the material right. So m material locations that has a specific connotation to it >> like you the the concept of arrangement is one that we have come up with like the the Babylonians would have used a different word to describe the thing that we're talking about when we say arrangement. The the bee has an innate understanding of locations and arrangements of macroscopic objects. And again, it has some kind of other way of conceptualizing that. >> It has like a lot of higher level abstractions to it. I mean, like you could say your marriage is an arrangement. Like I'm going to I have an arrangement with this guy to do this thing or whatever it is. So you can apply this at different abstraction levels. But if we're talking about physics, then it sounds like we're talking about the locations with respect to one another of the subunits >> and those locations are mind independent. Our conceptualization of them and the model that we have for them and the map that we create of their arrangements totally lives in the mind that is the thing that we have constructed. But what we are trying to do is we are trying to say that okay there is an arrangement of atoms and of the subunits that make up the atoms that results in the physical phenomena that we observe that results in light, charge, electricity, magnetism and gravity. And we do not have direct access to those because we cannot see gravity. We cannot see magnetism and yet our job is to figure out what is the arrangement of these of of atoms and what is the behavior of the atoms that produces the things that we see that would be going on even in our absence. >> Yes, that is that is a I would say that is perhaps a definition of a realist view of the world. However, I want to say that's also a platonic view of the world. So is it the case that the arrangement has causal effect on the fundamental underlying atoms like so for example different arrangements result in different behavior >> I would say so yeah >> does wouldn't doesn't this sound an awful lot like an immaterial force that is affecting how atoms move because the arrangement is something itself which appears to be abstract and yet you're saying it also it's abstract mind independent and has is causally efficacious. >> I see what you're driving at. Okay. So basically if I understand you correctly and you're saying that okay so you have the atoms and you have so let's say that the atom for the sake of this conversation is our fundamental subunit and we're saying that the action of these atoms is what produces all of these phenomena and what you're saying is you're saying okay well there's a weird thing that when the atoms come together and they are in some specific arrangement their properties change like in the optics chapter we talk about the kind of light that is produced by objects and the phenomena of you know transparency or opacity and all of these are phenomena that emerge from the arrangement of the atoms. If you have an isolated atom by itself in a vacuum it produces one kind of light. When you put it into a hexagonal carbon lattice it produces a radically different kind of light. And you're like well that's crazy. that seems like that's some kind of platonic thing where like the form is informing the action of the thing down below and how do you square that and I'm like okay >> I it is as one of our friends pointed out the fact that I use the word numinous a lot in the text or we use the word numinous a lot in the text and I think that this is one of those numinous things where there's there's some sort of weird different property that an ensemble has from the individual but I I don't think that it is divorcable from the way that the ensemble atoms are all pulling and pushing on each other. The dynamics of how the atoms communicate changes when you put them into an arrangement, when you put them into a block of carbon, >> but it's not like the Oh god, I was going to say it's not like the block of carbon >> informs the thing that comes out, but ultimately it it it does. It does. Like, you can't get away from that.