Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Carlucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, I wonder what we're going to talk about today.

Well, Massimo, we are here again live at the Northeast conference inside some skepticism. Give everyone a hug around. But yeah. And I'm very excited to welcome our special guest today, Jim Holt is a science writer and author. He's published several books, including A History of Jokes. And in 2012, a book called Why Does the World Exist on Existential Detective Story, which we're going to talk about today. Jim has also published many articles for publications like The New Yorker, New York Times, Harper's, New York Review of Books and so forth.

Jim, thanks for joining us. A pleasure to be here.

So I really enjoyed your book, as I mentioned, essentially a an investigation of why anything at all. I also really like your title, although I kind of wish you had titled it. Just why is this a nice, concise. That's really the question. It's not not so much about why is the universe the way that it is? Partly about that. It's not about how did the universe come into being, but really, why is there a universe at all.

Yeah. What sort of motivated by a British guy who was the, you know, I think the greatest philosopher of the 20th century and a victim. Justin had a very strong mystical and religious impulse, although he was not probably not a believer in the kitchen. Well, you know, once said in a lecture, the the it is not how the world is. That is the mystical, not how things are in the world. That is the mystical, but that there's a world at all.

And so he was always astonished at the miracle of existence that there should be a world rather than nothing at all. And this is something that, you know, has astonished and perplexed other philosophers of Heidegger, arguably the greatest continental philosopher of the of the 20th century greatest continent. Well, the greatest Nazi continental philosopher. Sure. Objecting to the Continental Congress always. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Analytical Philistines here. Yes. But for other people, the question, why is the world rather than nothing at all is, you know, it's just silly.

It's it's a child's naive question. I one of the first great thinkers I spoke to in my quest to get a handle on this question was a very great philosopher of science and a very, very militant, perhaps the most militant atheist I've ever encountered, whose name is Adolf Grünbaum. Is it the University of Pittsburgh? And he's just turning 90 years old. And he claimed that anybody who was obsessed with the question of existence, with the question, why is there something rather than nothing was was really in thrall to a to Christian metaphysics, the idea even as an atheist, right?

Yes. Yes. So it was only, you know, the question, why is the world rather than nothing at all is a modern question. It wasn't really framed in that form until the 17th century when Lightman's the German philosopher who wrote in French and Latin posted. And why is there something about that? Nothing. And if you look at the ancient Greeks, for example, among many other of earlier civilizations, they didn't have the concept of absolute nothingness.

They had a concept of sort of a pre-existing chaotic mess that was organized by Demiurge is or by some by some evolutionary process and and which gave rise to Kozmo. So it's chaos giving rise to Cosmos, not a world coming out of nothingness. And so the idea that that that the world could have come out of absolutely nothing is really a Christian idea. And the early church fathers believed in that. The God that they envisaged was infinite in every respect, all powerful.

And he could create a world out of nothing at all. He didn't need any sort of pre-existing material. OK, so this is the Christian you know, the Christian metaphysical equation. God plus, nothing equals the world. OK, now suppose you take God.

They were not very good at math. Yeah, right. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, I like equations that don't actually have dubbers. Right. So now suppose you you don't go for the God hypothesis. So you're an atheist. You say, you would say, well we have this equation. God plus nothing equals the world that we take God out of the equation and we have blank plus nothing equals equals the world. Now we've got to fill that blank with something else that could bring a world out of nothingness.

And so this is what this is what many physicists have been trying to do recently, notably Lawrence Krauss, who is, I think, a very a very good physicist. And everything he writes is worth reading. Yeah, I think he's fundamentally wrong headed some things more than other. Yeah, I've this particular matter. But he thinks that you can replace God with the laws of physics and get a perfectly satisfying equation that explains why there's a world rather than nothing at all and does so in purely scientific.

Herm's I've just been babbling for too long, so, well, let me let me ask you one thing. So actually, when I started reading your book for review in the Philosophers magazine, the first thing that came to my mind was this quote from somebody who was neither a philosopher, neuroscientist, but a lot of interesting things to say about this kind of stuff. Douglas Adams. So he said in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

The point being that I think Adams was actually focusing on what happened after the universe, which is a problem also, of course, for Christians. I mean, this brings up the whole point of the whole problem of evil. You know, why why the universe is, in fact, the way it is. The ancient Greeks did have an answer for that Plato's idea of the Miraj, these sort of minor God who had certain things to work with, and he did his best.

So what explain the fact that the world is not particularly good is just that, you know, that's what he had to work with. So that was that started focusing basically from what I've been after now.

On the other hand, the focus on your book, of course, is is to answer or to explore different to the range of possibilities of the assumption that is something actually was created. Now, I agree with you that Greenmount answer dismissal of the entire question is a little too easy. When I read that chapter, I said I just wish it were that easy to get rid of it, but but I don't buy it. On the other hand, in the book, you also go to the opposite extreme.

You talk about to the richest Wimborne, arguably one of the most well-known theologians currently active country arrive. And we're not not just a theologian, by the way, but a philosopher of science. Yes, very well versed.

He understands general relativity theory, understands Bayesian reasoning, the very personal intellectual right now, I, by the Swinburne answer just as much as I buy Grumbach, which is not at all. But would you like to sort of summarize what Swinburne says before we actually get into a conversation about it? What was his take on it? Sure. Richard Swinburne, who I agree with, Massimo is the most interesting philosopher of religion in the English speaking world today. He's been at Oxford his entire career and he has built over the decades and refined an inductive case and inductive scientific case for the existence of God.

You know, the old fashioned theologians would try to give you a deductive proof of God's existence. They would say God is defined as the being, a being that that exists and whose existence is inconceivable. Therefore, God must exist. That's, you know, a garbled version of the ontological proof. This is the cosmological proof that God is by definition, the first cause of all that exists and so forth. But Swinburne has developed a purely inductive scientific case for God.

And it begins with, you know, with evidence and the evidence that there is a world rather than nothing at all, that the world is is orderly. It obeys causal laws. It's much more likely, apriori, that the world should be a mess. But this world is is is desert because of laws. It seems to be fine tuned for the existence of creatures like us. If you look at all of the so-called cosmological, the so-called the constants in the in the standard model of physics, if you vary any of them, I'm sure everyone's heard this argument.

If you vary any of them by the slightest bit, the universe would be completely inhospitable to life, let alone conscious, intelligent observers like ourselves. So if you were to explain all of this, Swinburne argues, the simplest hypothesis is God. And you know the idea that that God I find he puts this case with, you know, great nuance and great intelligence. The sticking point for me is his claim that the God hypothesis is a simple one, and it's based on the idea that how do you define God?

Well, God is infinite in every respect, infinitely powerful and knowledgeable, eternal and so forth. And so it's the simplest thing other than zero. Zero is the simplest thing because it's it's it's you know, it's nothing. It's it's the it's the only non arbitrary number. The number 17, by contrast, is very arbitrary, but infinity is like zero. It's not arbitrary. And if you define a being is being infinite in every respect, that's a very simple way of characterizing God being.

So, you know, this is Swinburne's argument, which I think is a bad one for the simplicity of the God hypothesis. But I think it's a simple hypothesis. It also I don't buy that. But I thought, you know, this it's worth giving. It's worth allowing the God hypothesis to be given its best and most sophisticated presentation before dismissing it entirely.

So setting aside. What nature we can conclude God to have if there were a God, but just looking at the inductive case that he makes for our universe, having been intentionally created, that seems less obviously terrible to me than the God must be infinite because infinity is simpler than 17, for example. And and in fact, last year at Nexxus, in our live podcast recording, we talked about the simulation hypothesis and the sort of deductive and inductive case for why our universe might be might have been created, simulated on a computer in another universe.

So you and you come up. Sorry. So you call it the simulation hypothesis, right, in your book, although very briefly and as you said, we covered before, basically this is the idea that instead of a God, it was a computer programmer of some sort. You just put this thing together, you know, it's like it's a computer game for somebody else. Now, I called that God for geeks. And it seems it seems like the way it does, it doesn't have to be a computer simulation.

One of one of the physicians I spoke to, Andre Linda at at Stanford, who as many of you probably know, is the father of the theory of chaotic inflation, which is, you know, the most sophisticated theory that we have at present for to explain essentially what was going on before the Big Bang and and the the way the the background radiation left over from the Big Bang looks and that sort of thing. So Andre Linda said his theory is chaotic inflation.

And basically the idea is that the universe at a very early stage, ten to the minus thirty three seconds, underwent this very rapid expansion and with expansion stopped. That's when all the particles and energy came into existence that eventually evolved into the observable universe. But he pointed out that in the the inflationary scenario, you can make a universe with about, you know, one 100 trillionth of a gram of matter. So the resources you need to make even a vast universe like the observable universe are very, very modest.

He said it's quite possible that our universe was made by a physicist hacker in another universe, in a lab, and and he was putting this forth, this idea in theory about that. I'm sorry, isn't there an episode of The Big Bang Theory? I'm not sure I know far better than either one or The Matrix or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So I'm a half hour state now. I don't have any of the pop cultural background for this.

I don't even know why I'm here.

So if someone was creating a universe, could they actually set the constants, the physical constants of that? Yes.

Yeah, this is this was Audrey Land is very amusing idea. He said that that, OK, you can create a universe if you're a hacker at a more advanced civilization with the very finite, modest resources. But you couldn't really you know, if you were going to create a universe, you would especially the universe that evolved intelligent beings. You would want to communicate with them in some way. You would want to let them know that you had created them.

And, you know, so the physicist hacker might want to write in the firmament, please remember that I created you or something like that. But the problem with inflation is that the thing blows up so quickly that that we would be living in a very tiny corner of one letter of this message. It wouldn't be able to read it. So there would be no way for the creator, this physicist hacker, to to communicate with his creation except by he could alter the constants in the physical laws.

And this would mean that there could be a message hidden and things like the gravitational constant, the fine coupling constant, the ratio of the mass of the electron to the approach to this sort of thing, and that only physicists would be able to read it. So this is very. But he also said that this is what I thought was the most profound, humorous observation he made, was that the hypothesis that our universe was created by a physicist hacker would explain why it's basically so crummy.

I mean, if you look at that, it's not an elegantly constructed universe. I mean, why are there 60 plus different kinds of elementary particles? You know, why are there why are all these asymmetries in the why? If you look at the best theory we have of the universe, the standard model of physics, it's an ugly theory. It's a stick and bubble gum contraption. Actually, argument that I was about to bring up earlier is a different from the simulation hypothesis that we talked about last year.

Instead of the argument that if our universe was not intentionally created to be able to support life, then we had this weird, extremely unlikely coincidence to explain that it just so happened that the physical constants where we're in this very, very narrow band that would allow life to be created.

And and so, you know, we said we should think that it's just much more likely to see the universe that we see under the hypothesis that it was intentionally created then under the. That it was randomly created, but there are two problems with that, that argument, though, that I think we should explore. One is there's a lot of discussion here, if you think about it, sort of underlined that the argument from fine tuning, because that's what it comes down to.

One of the assumptions there is that the distribution of possible values of those constants is, in fact, flat and essentially infinite. That is that is equally probable that, let's say the charge of the electron or the mass of the proton or whatever it is to that particular value as opposed to any number of an infinite number of other values. And if you put it that way, of course, yes. Then the chances of having that particular value are one of infinity multiplied by the number of concerns and becomes incredibly incredible, in fact, that all of this just happened by coincidence.

But we really don't know anything at all about the distribution of these the values for these constants. It could be, for all we know, that there is only one way in which the universe could have come out, or maybe there is a distribution, but it's a narrow distribution. Maybe the parameters that, you know, the values that came out are actually the most probable, or at least they're not very probable. We really have no clue about what the distribution is.

And so we're simply making the assumption that it's an infinite flat distribution if that falls. And there is, I don't think, any empirical evidence for that particular assumption that that idea goes out the window. The other typical criticism, which I think you do get into in the book, is, of course, that a version of the of the many, many universes hypothesis, the idea that you know that well, this may be, in fact, one of an infinite number of universes.

And, yes, all sorts of parameter combinations appear in in the entire multiverse. But obviously, we would find ourselves only in the ones that actually happen to bring about life. There is an infinite other number out there where nobody's asking the question, not Douglas Adams was never born and so on and so forth. So so those two, it seemed to me, strike me as very, very good answers. One isn't an answer from ignorance essentially would say, what would it mean?

You're making assumptions here about the distribution that you don't you cannot support. And the other one is actually a reasonable answer coming out of theoretical physics now. True, there's no empirical evidence of multiverses that that is the case. But but physically, it is in fact a very good possibility where there is actually a little bit of empirical evidence for the multiverse model, because the the theory of chaotic inflation that explains conditions in this universe so accurately, that explains all of the observations by the Kobe satellite of the of the texture of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

That theory implies that there should be other universes. I mean, by the way, to speak of a multiverse, you might just say, well, why do we call the multiverse the universe? I mean, its universe is all there is. But the reason it's appropriate to use to speak of many universes in this context is because if you think of, you know, our universe is sort of a you know, it's a bubble universe in this ensemble of bubble universes.

And you can't get from one of the universes in the multiverse to to another because the space between them is expanding faster than the speed of light. So there's no possibility of getting from one to the other. There's no possibility of causal contact between two of one of them influencing the other or sending a signal or anything like that. So in a sense, they are an observable. But if they're implied by a theory that explains the observable world very nicely, that's some reason to take it seriously.

And I agree with you that the multiverse model I mean, this is this has been this is hardly original with us. The multiverse model really solves the fine tuning problem because the you know, these constants of physics that we think of as universal, they're just like local weather. So we happen to be living in a corner of the universe, the multiverse, where the local weather is nice. And so, of course, you know, we could only live in this part of the multiverse.

So what else are we going to observe? Right. So, yeah, none of that. I mean, I yeah. I mean, I'm not I don't think that there are any we perhaps we should get away from the the notion that of of God is an explanation for the universe. I mean, I think we're still feeling the gravitational pull. Yeah. Well, but I do want to go. Right. Why was even if our universe was created or as part of a multiverse, why was why did a creator exist or be there to help us to God about this is one that we many of us don't believe in God.

The other is that that even if God did exist, that too would require an explanation. The and even Richard Swanberg, the great theologian, I said, OK, if God is the God hypothesis really is the simplest one by the canon, some sort of scientific explanation. What explains the existence of God? And he said God is just a brute fact. He didn't believe in the in the ontological argument that God exists as a matter of logical necessity, that there's no further explanation for God's existence, and you just have to accept that as a brute fact.

So, you know, explanation always has to come to an end. And for me. The neatest place for it to come to an end is with God, you know, it occurred to me that that if God exists, which I don't believe, that, you know, God must be puzzled by his own existence. You well, you know, eternal. I've always been here that God was powerful where I come from. Why not? I'm nothing.

And so maybe it out of boredom with contemplating the puzzle of his own existence. He created the world. You know, that's I'm going to I'm going to indulge your patience for a moment and refer to Douglas Adams again. There is a wonderful bit in the chuggers guide to the Galaxy where God is presented with some kind of reasoning similar to the one you put forth. And the outcome of that is that disappears in a puff of logic.

Douglas Adams always got there before. I always has the better to go before we go ahead. Sorry, one more thing. I really want to nail a couple more things about Swinburne, because I think sometimes theologically inclined philosophers are going to get away with a little too much. And in this particular case, there's two things. I mean, other than the objections you raised, which I think are very reasonable, traditional things that are problematic. Anytime that I read something like Swinburne or Plantinga, for instance, was another example of a well-known theologian who argues along similar lines.

And those are, number one, the issue of complexity on this one unfortunate complexity of God about this one unfortunate I think even atheist like Richard Dawkins are guilty of that is I am not sure. I haven't seen any argument, any developed argument that convinced me that the concept of complexity can be kahir or simplicity can be coherently applied to a God, or at least the kind of God we're talking about. So when Richard Dawkins says, well, God is not in a good explanation because it's very complicated or when swimming says the opposite, it's a very simple explanation.

I have no idea what they're talking about because how do you measure the complexity of God? You know, what kind of sort of metric I'd never seen? They both assume that. Well, it's obvious that it's obvious that it's very simple. It's obvious. It's very complex. To me, that is not obvious at all. And to the point that I suspect there is actually no way to cash out that that concept. So that's the first thing.

The other thing is and this one really bothers bothers me often when it comes to so-called supernatural explanations in general, that these people seem to have a very bizarre idea of what counts as an explanation. So to me, God did it. It's not an explanation. It's just a reformulating the mystery in a way that makes sure that satisfies you better. From a psychological perspective, you have not given me any explanation at all, OK? You have not given me any idea mechanisms, any ideas of motivations.

You are talking about a conscious individual, conscious being. Those will count as explanations. But but but you say well and therefore God did it like no. That sounds superficially like an explanation. It just doesn't qualify. No epistemology would buy that as an explanation. Yeah. It's interesting that Swinburne not only. Develops this case for God being the simplest explanation of existence, but he he he he develops it in great detail right down to the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.

Yeah. And actually, I was sitting in a study in Oxford and in a fully skeptical cast of mind. And I have to say he was sitting in front of a crucifix and he had a very he reminded me a bit of a Byzantine divine. He actually is a a congregant of the Eastern Orthodox Church. And there was a crucifix behind him. And as he unfolded this sort of very luminous and very coherent, I think, very false story, I could see a kind of nimbus forming around him as though he were saying, you know, so it's very seductive.

And I think it also, you know, I also felt that this is a man of genuine intellectual integrity. And so I felt that not the slightest inclination to make fun of him in my book. Yes, but I agree with you. The notion of simplicity is a very dodgy one. The idea that simple things are more probable than more than complex things is is a I don't know why we should think that to be true. If you know the early theories of chemistry which had, you know, you know, when one or two elements, you know, are very simple, but everything is made of fire or something.

Yeah, we have one hundred and ten elements and counting. And it's it's it's not simple at all. I was actually glad in your book that you didn't treat the religious explanations or you didn't give them that much space just because there are so many really difficult to evaluate hypotheses like much more difficult to evaluate than the God hypothesis that I actually am genuinely unsure about, unlike the God hypothesis. And the sort of most fundamental one for me was, you know, I when I look at the question, why does why is there anything at all?

I also like you have this intuition that there is a mystery there that needs explaining. But then I have the second intuition that my first intuition might just be confused, that maybe there actually doesn't there isn't something that needs to be explained. And the reason that I have that intuition is that when I try to imagine what kind of explanation could ever possibly feel like it settled things, I can't picture anything at all. And I, like you were saying earlier, you know, you have an explanation.

Explanations always sort of explain brute facts in terms of other brute facts that we already understand. And so I'm always going to keep wanting to say, well, yeah, but why is that a fact? And it just doesn't I can't imagine there ever being any end to that process, which makes me wonder if maybe the right answer to this question isn't just a sort of deflationary like, well, why do I think that this needs an explanation as opposed to what is the explanation?

I think there is an end to it. Eventually you run out of logical options and you're stuck with a if you ascend the explanatory hierarchy to a certain point, you end up with a single explanation or actually with two explanations that imply the same thing. But that's to get ahead of ourselves. What I think you're right, the question that we're at, if we're asking the question why is the world rather than nothing at all, the question that, you know, bewitched that can shine and and in many of us and may well be, as some people believe, that the the root of the or the source of the religious impulse, the proper question to ask is why does reality take the most general form that it does now?

I was one of the the great thinkers I talked to was Steven Weinberg, who I think is, you know, one of the greatest living physicists. He's regarded as the father of the standard model of physics. And he won the Nobel Prize for his work and unifying the the weak force with the electromagnetic force in the 1960s at a very deep thinker, very antiracism in brilliant essays against religion in the New York Review of Books, and actually came up with the wonderful epigram for how does it go if a for a wicked person, wicked people do wicked things, but for a good person to do wicked things, that takes religion.

Right. Which I think is sort of about anyway. And, you know, I said, you know, he I was discussing the attempt of Lawrence Krauss and other physicists to give a purely scientific explanation for the existence of a world rather than nothing at all. And he, like, you know, many of the other physicists I spoke to thinks that's no good, that that even when we have a final theory of physics, you know, the so-called theory of everything, that's always, you know, just over the horizon, we can never string theory is supposed to get us there.

But, you know, that's, you know, been promising us the final theory for about the last three decades. So I'm beginning to get a little pessimistic. And so as Weinberg But any case, even when we have the final theory and it might explain the big bang, what was going on before the Big Bang, it might explain that, you know, we're living in this eternal, chaotically inflating multiverse. But it won't explain. There will still be the question why this set of laws rather than some completely different set of laws or no laws at all, it will always leave a residual mystery.

And so even Weinberg, who is who is has been famously and fiercely critical of philosophy in a lot of his public writings, was eventually driven in the philosophical direction and was, you know, talking with me about principles like the principle of plentitude, which says that all imaginable possibilities actually exist somewhere. And so so if you ask the question, why is there something rather than nothing? Well, there's both. There's something and that because there's a whole world out there and there's this world and there's the best of all possible worlds, etc.

It's all real. If that were true, would that actually feel like a satisfying. All right, now we've solved it. That's why there is something. Well, you know, because then you would ask, why is the principal planning to tour? Yeah. Yeah. About Feinburg, about that. So let's go back here to the physicist for a second. So it's interesting. I actually talked to Vineberg recently during a three day long workshop on naturalism that the video is available for people to have can actually stomach three days of philosophers and physicists talking to each other.

But anyway, there was an interesting experience. And yes, I confirm that that is pretty much exactly at this point, which was surprising because, as you said, he did great things years ago, very critical philosophy. I suspect that physicists, when they actually become wise, they actually become more open to philosophy. Which brings me to Krauss. You mentioned twice already. Now, as he's not mentioned in your book, I suspect partly because the Krauss book actually came out later or it was in production pretty much when your book was out, something like that.

But as you probably know, there has been this huge controversy over the last several months. It doesn't seem to go away, actually, just recently between Krauss and David Albert at Columbia, who is just as a little bit of background, Albert is a philosopher of physics. He's also Yelitza actually has a theoretical physics. And the book that Krauss wrote last year that came out last year, which was about how physics explain everything. The title is the title of Krauss's book is A Universe from Nothing.

And the subtitle is Why There is Something rather than Nothing. Right. So it's a pretty definitive promise that he makes in that book, in the title at least. And it was very well reviewed up until Albert published his review in The New York Times, which let's say it's not exactly complimentary now, highly entertaining.

Well, well worth looking at. And the last paragraph is one of the the most poisonous concluding paragraphs in the history book review and very effective. Well, we'll post maybe actually, for once in my life, I felt pity for Lawrence Krauss. He's a hard man for now. This has led to endless apparently discussions directly or indirectly between Albert and Krauss, but more broadly between Krauss and a bunch of other people. Crowson sort of hashed out a philosophy in general.

As a result of that review, Daniel Dennett told them essentially to apologize in Scientific American and apologized by insulting even more. So it was just kept going that way. Now, all of this is, you know, this is all in good fun. But this was leading to a serious question, which is why do you think is from your perspective, having talked to a lot of philosophers and scientists, what is what is your view about the relationship between not only science and philosophy in general, but sort of physics and metaphysics in particular?

Because that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about the interface between physics and metaphysics. So what is your thought about that?

Oh, and you have 30 seconds. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. I mean, the first observation that occurs to me is that the metaphysical picture of the world that science gives us is not at all satisfying. Many of you are probably familiar with with quantum theory, either with the mathematics of it or you've read popularisation of it. And you know that that that that it's been impossible for physicists or philosophers or anyone who's thought about the matter to give a realistic interpretation of quantum theory, as Richard Feynman memorably put it.

How did he put it? If you think you understand quantum physics, you're crazy. I mean, it's a wonderful you know, the attitude now in the physics world is shut up and calculate. Don't worry about what it means because it's impossible to make sense of it seems to have paradox built into it, but it's just marvelous, marvelous, calculating device. It's you know, if your criterion of scientific success is empirical adequacy, then quantum field theory is as a success.

It gives you empirical adequacy down to the 11th decimal point. But you know, what is the picture of the universe it gives us? Well, there are no I mean. We seem to be sitting on a stage and here's a table and microphones and you're out there in the audience and sitting in chairs and so forth, all of this is sort of an illusion, really. All we have is this system called you, which stands for the universe.

And its state is described by point, an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. And when I look on the table and I observe a bottle of Poland Spring water, what I'm actually observing is that this the the state of the system, you was actually in some subspace of Hilbert space. So, you know, all of the Lavon's felt that we all live in is is basically just is an illusion. It's not fundamentally real. And so that's one thing. I mean, the physical world is is way, you know, different than we imagined it.

And nor is it possible to integrate very important parts of the Lavon's felt to us our consciousness value the the objective badness of pleasure and the objective of I'm sorry, I like the badness of pain and the goodness or desirability of pleasure, etc.. So the naturalistic world view is it's very good at helping us predict patterns of regularity and our experience. It's very bad so far at giving us any idea of how subjectivity, consciousness and value fit into that picture.

And this is something, by the way, the great NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel has just written a book many of you no doubt heard of called Cosmos. And he complains that, you know, unfortunately, modern cosmos has been in the press, has been depicted as an attack on the Darwinian worldview. And to some extent it is. But I I think that's an unfortunate aspect of the book. I think the interesting claim that ego makes is that the naturalistic worldview does have a real difficulty integrating subjectivity and value.

And so it's adequate for what it does, but it's not adequate, you know, to you know, to our entire existence. Now that that's awfully an awfully vaporous answer. Well, no, no, I think it is. Well, they're awfully Baber's. I understood it. But you know what? Yes. One of the things actually that that is important that just came particularly from your comment about Nichelle Nichols book, is, as you say, in some sense, unfortunate.

But it but it's unfortunate that he has been he's going to be dismissed for the wrong reasons. And I think the point that Nicole does make very well, as you just summarized, is that the reduction is particularly the physical physics based, fundamentally physics, fundamental physics based view of the world that we have, which, by the way, it's only one particular way of cashing out the idea of naturalism and naturalism. It is a much broader philosophy that actually is compatible with a lot of other stuff out there.

And maybe we can talk about some of that in a minute. But that particular worldview, as successful as it has been in fundamental physics, actually does have a lot of trouble dealing with a lot of other things, and not just the high level phenomena you're talking about, like consciousness, freewill, morality, all that sort of stuff, aesthetics, for instance, all that. But in fact, I'm at the naturalism workshop. We have we VINEBERG this thing came out that even non fundamental physicists over the last some of them, at least over the last several years, have been having increasing trouble with this idea that it all comes down to fundamental if it all comes down to quarks or strings and all that sort of stuff.

So one of them, one of these people I don't remember his name said, but what we'll post the link to the on the website for the podcast. One of these is a solid state physicist. And he pointed out that actually over the last two or three decades, the more fundamental physicists, physicists were successful at doing what they were doing, that less relevant they wear to the rest of physics, let alone to biology, ecology, psychology and so on and so forth.

And that is because what the way you describe, for instance, the table in the water and all that sort of stuff, I think of that as a description of the world, which is very different from saying that is the way the world really is. It's one description of the world and at one level of understanding of what the world, how the world is put together. That is a perfectly good description and it's much more informative than other kinds of descriptions.

But at the level of having this conversation and if I wanted to understand, let's say, your motivations for coming in today at the Nexus conference, being on the podcast and so on, so forth, that description tells me absolutely nothing useful about about this. And I'm an empiricist. I think that science has to do with useful stuff.

If an entire if an allegedly fundamental theory in science is incapable to tell me anything at all useful on the majority of the aspects of what is interesting to. Science today, then I think there's a problem that doesn't mean that the theory is wrong, it just means that it's not complete. It's not it's not the only way of looking at all the most informative way of looking at the problem. So are you talking about, say, the the you know, the physicists are looking for a unified theory of physics that gives them that that that places all four of the fundamental forces of nature in the same mathematical framework.

This quest is completely irrelevant to psychology or any to any of the high level such that. So it was that was that one of the points you were making? That is one of the points. And one of the things that I noticed in your book, again, was not mentioned. But I suspect that that is also because the book that I'm about to mention came out at the same time. And so that apparently this topic is very it's very hot because lots of people are publishing books on these and these kinds of things.

But it's the work by two philosophers of science, James Lederman and Don Ross. And they published the book a year and a half ago or so called Everything Must Go. And it's really a book about the how metaphysics makes sense of the differences between fundamental physics and the so-called special sciences, biology, ecology, psychology and so on and so forth. And without getting into details with about the book, by the way, we we did have James in on on the nationally speaking podcast so people can check it out.

But the basic idea there is, in fact, that the so-called fundamental theory of everything is actually a theory of the fundamentals, but it is not a theory of a lot of stuff that is above the fundamentals. And when you go about the fundamentals, you actually need special theories. You're never going to be reducing or eliminating biology, psychology and so on and so forth. And all of a sudden a unified description in terms of quantum mechanics of everything, because it's just not useful.

Quantum mechanics is simply not useful. There's no way to develop that theory and make sense of psychological factors and so on. I've been wanting to ask you about the fundamental you left us on a cliffhanger earlier when I was saying it seemed to me like there couldn't be an explanation that would be satisfying and, you know, actually reached the end of the chain of wires. And you said you thought there could be. Yeah, yeah. I it's a good memory.

Yeah. There was an Oxford philosopher named Derek Parfit who was actually profiled in The New Yorker about two years ago by Larissa MacFarquhar, a very fine writer, very interesting profile. And actually, if any of you are curious about what's going on and in the Anglophone analytical philosophy, this profile is a very good introduction. And the name of the subject is Derek Parfit. He's a pure fact. He's a fellow, long time fellow of all souls. And he was the one who got me to think about the mystery of existence in a completely different way, instead of thinking how did something how did the world come out of nothingness?

That's the wrong way of thinking about it the right way. He claimed it was to imagine all the different ways reality might have turned out. So one way is nothingness. The whole world. That's the simplest way. Another way would be the way that the principle of plenitude that we were just discussing would have it that all possible realities actually exist. That would be the richest possible reality, the fullest and the least arbitrary since it excluded nothing. And so in between the null state, the world of nothingness and the platitudinous world, the fullest possible world, you have all kinds of intermediate possibilities.

One of them would be the best of all possible worlds were only good things existed. Another would be the most the the most, I suppose, the most mathematically elegant world where the laws of physics were the most beautiful, that sort of thing. And then there'd be just a lot of crappy, mediocre worlds, which is basically I think this universe is one of those crappy, mediocre ones. I mean, I call it it's a cosmic junk shot.

It's a it's an infinite, incomplete, mediocre mess with, you know, with areas of of orderliness and beauty and goodness and then areas of ugliness and evil. I mean, it contains beautiful phenomena that it contains child cancer, etc. And this if you if you follow the explanatory scheme that that Derek Parfit has laid out and you you explain it's way too complicated to talk about in this context, but basically. Well, I'll give you a hint as to the solution, the the principle of simplicity, which is the bedrock principle of science.

You always go for the simplest explanation and the principle of fullness or plentitude, which goes back to Plato, sort of conspire in a very funny way to produce or to explain a world that is neither simple. Awful but infinite, messy, falling infinitely far from the, you know, completeness, but infinitely removed from nothingness, the world that we we inhabit, not just the physical world, but, you know, our subjective world is like that. I mean, the way I think are the subjective world, the world of, you know, of pleasure and pain and good and evil, whether those are fundamentally or, you know, ultimately subjective or not, I don't know.

But that's something that we need an explanation of, too. And I think the fact that the world is it at this is a weird mixture of of goodness and suffering. And it's you know, different people have different attitudes toward I mean, Woody Allen gave an interview actually to a Jesuit priest about two years ago, and he talked about his vision of the world. And really, you know, it's a world of brutal meaninglessness and overwhelming bleakness. And we all go to our graves in a horrible, meaningless way.

And that's right there. Little they're little pools of charm and, you know, and and love. But that it's basically it's just, you know, Schopenhauer is vision of the universe or the Buddhist vision. I mean, it's better not to exist at all. And we should all try to extinguish all our desires and lapse into this wonderful state of Nevada, which is, you know, being just having just enough life to enjoy being dead, something the closest we can get to nothing.

So anyway, so I'm just babbling on here. But I do think that, you know, in my book, extending the the the way of thinking about ultimate explanation along Derek Parfit lines, you eventually run out of logical options as you try to explain the world and then explain why that explanation is right and then explain why that meta explanation is right. Eventually, you run out of options and you get something like a logically unique explanation at the highest level.

And it doesn't tell you a lot, but it does tell you something. It tells you that that reality is in most senses infinite. Now, that seems to be a very fuzzy claim. But if you look you could look back to the year 1900. It was thought that reality was very far from the physical. Reality was thought to consist just of the Milky Way, just as this one galaxy sitting in otherwise empty space with these little fuzzy areas.

They were called nebulae, which looked like clouds. But then, you know, lo and behold, with telescopes have greater resolution. It was discovered that these little fuzzy things were actually other galaxies or many of them were. And so now we you know, we know that there are about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. This is just one little part of a multiverse and there might be many multiverses. And so reality is really, you know, it is turning out to be infinite in almost every respect.

It's probably did not have a beginning. It's likely that it's eternal. But clearly it falls short of everything, you know, of realizing every possibility or so we think. So, yeah, this this this very fuzzy sounding conclusion that reality is an infinite, incomplete video. Comus does make actual empirical predictions. So before we move on to the last part of the podcast and we're going to take over a minute, I wanted to make a point about what you just said from from Parfit.

So in some sense, answering my own question earlier on about the relationship between physics and metaphysics. And that is, if you think about it, whether whether you people are going to buy Prophet's answer or not, I think it's it's not the point that I'm trying to make. It doesn't and doesn't hinge on that. The point is the perfect answer is entirely logical. It's entirely based on logical analysis. It's not informed by empirical evidence. So it's pure metaphysics, essentially.

And now, as you pointed out, or even if you do find an answer, um, what happens is that it's a very generic answer. It's a very general answer about a very general question. Then it doesn't actually tell you any of the specific content of the particular universe in which we live. For that, you need physics. You can't get there by just logical analysis because the logical analysis is about, you know, these these very broad space of possibilities.

But of course, we live in a particular instantiation of that space of possibilities. The physical universe better be logically possible, because if it's if you were logically possible, then we would have a problem. But just because it's logically possible, it's certainly not the only logical possibility. It's one of many logical possibilities, almost infinite. And so to me that actually it's an interesting, you know, going back and forth in different chapters in your book, where you talk from on the one hand, sort of one extreme of the spectrum, if you will, to people like Parfit who approach the thing entirely on metaphysical grounds and on logic in terms of logical possibilities.

And then to physicists who on the other hand, as much as they may be interested in the metaphysics they actually like to do, either they're shut up and calculating or telling you how things actually are. That, to me, is what emerges in the long run is I think the best view of the relationship between physics and metaphysics is that it is the interplay. Between logical possibilities on the one hand and physical possibilities and the other, the philosophers tend to be more interested in the logical possibilities.

Of course, the scientists tend to be interested in empirical possibilities, but we sort of need both when I get to the big picture.

There are other possible ways of explaining. You know, once you have the final theory of physics, is there any explanation of why the laws take that form? Well, you know, one hope was there might be a single logically only one logically consistent final theory. And that's ridiculous because the theory of nothingness is largely consistent. And there are many Newtonian physics is largely consistent. There are many logically consistent theories. But one possibility, this was brought up by the great and now dead physicist John Archibald Wheeler is that the laws of physics, the final theory, will be the only logically consistent theory that is that will permit the emergence of conscious observers such as ourselves.

And so Wheeler called this notion that participatory universe. And so you would ask the question, why should conscious observers be an ontologically necessary ingredient in a cosmos? And the answer is basically in quantum theory, you have the universe has lots of possible histories and they all sort of co-exist in what's called a superposition. And until an observation is made, none of these histories is real. And so if you look at all the histories of the universe from the beginning, some of them, some of these histories give rise to conscious observers and others give rise to a zombie, lifeless, observable universe.

But in the in the histories that give rise to observers, the observers at the end of the history look back and make an observation and collapse the wavefunction and make that history real as opposed to merely possible and sort of. So it's a very interesting idea that the universe creates us and we, in a sense, create the universe by collapsing the wavefunction. And this is a crazy sounding lotus leaf eating idea. But it came from that the teacher of Richard Feynman, the man who who coined the term black hole and quantum foam and said very, very great physicists.

And this this is the sort of crazy conjectures that that contemplating rally will lead you to. I mean, Bertrand Russell, I think, famously said that that common sense of self underbody, because common sense leads to science and then science completely undermines common sense. So I think this is a case of that. I mean, it's it sounds like something that an idea someone had an acid trip, the participatory universe now set up. OK, we can get to the question and answers.

And, of course, let's try to have questions instead of speeches, if possible. Shouldn't the historical analogue to Derek Parfit satisfy? That is the great philosopher King Lear's fool in asking Lear why the seven stars are up more than seven and and providing the answer because they know your book could have been so short.

Why you wrote a whole book. I was convinced when you brought up Lear that you would have the line you would allude to was nothing comes of nothing. But yeah, I actually do remember the one about. Yeah. That's you know, Hegel thought he had a philosophical and apriori proof that there were exactly seven planets and this was just before Uranus was discovered, which made eight. So, so much that, you know. Yes, I don't understand what the word exists means in the context of the principle of plenty of illness.

I mean, how can you have a universe where nothing exists if you do have a universe where everything where all these other things exist? You're exactly right. You're absolutely right. And I actually this is something Nosik Robert Nozick, who wrote Anarchist Utopia, Utopia, he was a philosopher at Harvard who died about 10 years ago. He was a champion of the principle of plentitude as a conceptual possibility. He said, yeah, you would have something and nothing.

I thought this. And then Richard, I'm sorry, Steven Weinberg, the physicist, agreed with this. And I thought, this is crazy. If you have something, you don't have nothing, they can't coexist. And I and I went to the first thing I asked Derek Parfit, but I went to All Souls in the sort of, you know, marvelous, you know, ethereal, cloistered atmosphere. I said, you you do agree that nothing and something can't coexist.

Of course. So, you know, this also shows you I mean, that that that great thinkers, when they begin to think about the deepest of all questions, they just end up contradicting one another. I mean, you know, one has an intuition that something and nothing can coexist. And you and I and Derek Parfit have the, you know, equally strong intuition that if there's something, there's not nothing. So that's just why it's good.

You know, these questions are best pursued in college dorms at two a.m. with a ball, I think.

Do we have other questions? Yes, them. Is there anything at all about, like, the energy needed to, like, maintain a universe like if you have like one universe, there's like a certain amount of energy in it? If you've got the all of the universe as an infinite number, there's an infinite amount of energy. Is there would there be any theoretical way to, like, say, well, there can only be so much energy so you couldn't have an infinite number of multiverses or something?

That's a there was a New York physicist named Ed Trion who who had an idea to physics Clokey at Columbia in the 1960s. He was thinking about how much energy there was in the universe. And it occurred to him that all of the the radiation and the energy that's locked up in matter by the equation equals EMC squared was exactly counterbalanced by all of the negative gravitational energy. So the net energy of the universe is zero. It's sort of like it's like Donald Trump.

You have these big assets and big debts. You go, you know what, your net worth zero. So it's so then, you know, well, the universe might be a free lunch. I mean, there could be a little quantum fluctuation since the net energy of the universe is zero. There's a trade off between how long somebody can last and the exactness of its energy. It's another version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. So it's possible that a net energy universe could quantum fluctuate into existence and could last for a very long time, all in harmony with the laws of physics.

So this is another crazy sounding idea that all of this world around us is zero net energy. And, you know, basically energy is the fundamental thing that exists according to physics. I mean, all of all of the physical world is just energy, rearranging itself in various ways. And as Richard Feynman said in his lectures, we have we can't tell you what energy is. We can just tell you about, you know, the events where it rearranges itself from one form into another.

So once again, science can't give us any satisfying notion of what reality is at the deepest level. So that's for philosophers.

You mentioned free lunch and then, of course, that brought it to my mind. Yet another quote from Douglas Adams, who said that time is an illusion.

Lunchtime, doubly so if some part of the book through other podcasts. One more. I want to touch on the subject of a famous known feud between physicists and philosophers and especially between physicists, that is such an opinion that the Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics and in contemporary physics. Philosophers can say nothing about the nature of reality because they know nothing about mathematics. Well, we heard about a third. Yeah, I heard you began by Galileo, I believe, who said that the The Book of Nature is written in the world in the language of mathematics.

And then you said and then you said that that philosophers can't give us a satisfying account of what mathematical entities are, what sense they exist. I think I actually heard that philosophers don't deal with mathematics, therefore they have nothing to say about it, which is a little unfair. There's an entire branch of philosophy called philosophy in mathematics, and there's plenty of philosophers, quite a bit about mathematics. But that does bring up the one of the things that did not we didn't talk about in the main segment, which is this whole idea of mathematical platonism and the foundation of the ideas being just in the relations between things and mathematics and rather than the bit thing.

Yeah, that's right. So you want to talk about briefly about that. Yeah. I mean, the idea that, as I was just saying, that that science is essentially deals with structure and not stuff. If you look at the the world on the finest levels, it's sort of, you know, good solid things sort of disappear and are replaced by, you know, mathematical fields that don't have any, you know, good old fashioned solidity.

And so and you can only say what an electron is. We can't say anything about the intrinsic nature of electrons. We can just say that it has a charge that means it's has a propensity to affect other electrons in certain ways and to be affected by other electrons in certain ways. So basically, this picture of reality that science gives us is, as is that of a pure informational flux. And it's completely silent on the question, you know, in what kind of stuff is this informational flux realized?

And so the radical thought has occurred to some thinkers that there is no stop. It's just it's structure all the way down. It's pure information. It's pure mathematics, because mathematics is the science of structure. Mathematicians, if two structures are, you know, if two structures are have the same isomorphic as mathematicians say they don't care what color the structures are painted, that's irrelevant. So so then the you know, you have the notion that maybe if mathematical entities exist platonically, if they exist eternally and they're actually good physicists who believe this, like Sir Roger Penrose, one of the great living physicists, he's a mathematical plainness and he believes that mathematics is more real than the physical world and that that the mathematical entities are so rich, they sort of sort of boil over into a physical world.

I mean, it's almost mystical the way he puts it, but he really does believe this. And then there are other people who believe that the world is like a computer simulation, but there's no actual hardware. It's all software. Yes. These are some of the radical ideas that, you know, they they strike. I think all of us is being shamefully conjectural. And yet they are responses to a question that science has no real answer to.

I'm a philosopher and I have no problem with shameful, shameful conjectures as long as they're interesting now. But the interesting the connection is actually the one you implicitly made just a second ago, which is structural realism, which is what these idea it's called, is the idea that there is only structures actually has some interesting support from both science and philosophy of science. And if structural realism is a reasonable view of how things go and therefore it turns out that mathematical structures are the foundations of reality as we understand it or experience it, then from there to say, oh, and the reason for that is because, in fact, this is a simulated universe.

It's not that at that point, once you got that far, that last step isn't really that inconceivable. It's it's actually a fairly logical step. Now what? I believe it. I know it's a different it's a different matter, but the idea is that the conjecture is actually interesting and it's difficult to find fault, logical fault with the whole idea of of the fact that the whole idea that that the foundations of reality are more about structure than about things.

Yeah. And then there are other people who have the the intuition that you can't have structure without stuff. Right. Structure that it's like the smile of the Cheshire cat when the cat has disappeared. And so, you know, basically at this point we're sort of scratching an itch. I mean, we're we're not dealing with with notions that that. Can go up against the tribunal with experience that can be empirically tested, are we are we actually dealing with with a with an objective reality where we can get things right or wrong?

Or are we just trying to scratch the itch of our of our curiosity and eliminate our sense of mystery? Well, I would gather that's a rhetorical question. Yeah, I'm not I'm not really sure. I mean, maybe a rhetorical question, but I think that actually this goes back to what we were saying a few minutes ago. That is now once you get to those kinds of conjectures, you moved significantly away from empirical evidence because the empirical evidence is compatible with all of these ideas.

It just doesn't determine it. It doesn't you know, it doesn't tell you what this one is, right. That one is wrong. And so we're we're moving from empirical empirical realm to the realm of logical possibilities. And so I think we're still on interesting grounds, whether those are grounds that actually tell us how reality actually is as opposed to how reality could be. Right. But it's true that if you're just using the principle of Occam's razor, Michael Faraday, who who really invented the notion of a field in the 19th century, he you know, he believed that there's no reason to think there's anything to fiscal reality other than fields.

Fields are essentially distributions of mathematical quantities. They're you know, they're highly abstract things. They're not like the physical reality we're used to in the Lavon's belt. And so, you know, why posit anything if the fields are all that's necessary to explain the pattern of our experience, why posit any stuff in addition to that? Just because you have this intuition that you can't have structure without without stuff to be structured. So, you know, once again, this is a sort of Occam's razor is a sort of methodological principle.

It can't be empirically tested. But we can say that in general, it's a you know, it's worked well in the history of science. So it's you know, it's valid in a sort of, you know, not an empirical way, but it's a scientific value, I suppose. Now in the realm of values, again, which silent science is also Silpada next podcast, Occam's Razor.

This podcast ended ten minutes ago, unfortunately. OK, well, I mean, not literally, but but now we're just having this now. Why does the world exist? An existential detective story. I highly recommend it. It's got an unusually good mix of sophistication and clarity is hard with a subject like this. It's been such a pleasure having you on the show and as a guest at Nexxus. Thank you so much. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.