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 explored the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host marsupial. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Today, I'm delighted to announce that we are joined by Sean Carroll, who is a professor of physics at Caltech and a popular speaker and author of many engaging and fascinating books such as From Eternity to Here and The Particle at the End of the Universe. And he's also the author of the blog Preposterous Universe Dotcom. Sean, pleasure to have you today.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So today we were going to focus particularly on a topic that, Sean, you led discussions about at a workshop last winter on the subject of naturalism, what we what we're talking about naked people on the beach.

Oh, no, that's nature isn't quite right. OK, so I hope you didn't prepare for that podcast because that's not the forecast right now.

All wrong. You know, there'll be a videocast.

I'm afraid that. So I would if I could take a stab at defining naturalism and shonen or Masimo, feel free to tweak this definition. I'd say naturalism is the philosophical position that there is no world other than the natural world around us whose behavior can be we can study and learn about through empirical investigation. And it's sort of governed by basic fundamental principles that appear to be universal and not subjective, like not particular to who's observing. How does that sound?

Sounds fine to me. And I think, you know, at our the meeting that I organized, the Massimo's, that we had more discussion than I thought we should have had about how to define naturalism, because people are saying, well, there's no good definition, blah, blah, blah. I think that it's easy to define naturalism. And Julia used in a perfectly good job. What is hard to define is supernaturalism is very hard to define as a coherent, sensible alternative to naturalism.

But you know what? That's not our job. So I think that taking the definition you gave is absolutely fine for me.

How can we back up just for a minute? And what was the meeting? Can you describe who organized it? Who was there?

Yes, back in October, I guess it was of last year, I helped organize a small workshop in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. So it was about 14 people, I guess, sitting around a table for two and a half days chatting about what naturalism means for us, how to make progress and understanding its implications and so forth. So if the world is all there is the natural world, the world we observe, then, you know, there's many age old human questions that need to be rethought.

Why? What is the meaning of life? Where did the universe come from? Do we have free will? What is the basis of morality, consciousness and so forth? So we had a bunch of people. You can find it online at my website. Again, preposterous universe dot com. There's a there's a Naturalism 2012 webpage because we videotaped every little bit of it. And Mossimo was there. We had philosophers, biologists, physicists, Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, lots of great people.

It was a very interesting conversation.

Yeah. So one of the things I think that we should make clear from the beginning, however, is that I think the is correct, that it's it's certainly easier to define naturalism. Supernatural is because supernatural is, at least in my way of thinking, is a very vague, fuzzy concept if it is a coherent concept at all.

But naturalism itself, however, is has varied definitions and in its broadest definition, which I think is the only one that all of the participants at the Stockbridge workshop actually agreed on.

We there were there were different people with different positions about what naturalism is. So the broad definition of naturalism is anything that is not supernatural. It's a worldview that doesn't invoke the supernatural within the plan.

To me, as long as supernaturalism isn't defined as anything that is not in which case we have a problem, in which case we have a problem.

Well, but but even before getting to that problem, the thing is, if you think about it, naturalism is not the same thing as physicalism and it's not the same thing as reductionism. That is, physicalism is the idea that everything that there is in the universe is made of its stuff. It's physical objects. Naturalism can be limited to that, but it may be broader. So, for instance, if you think that mathematical objects have an ontological reality of some sort, but in other words, if you're a mathematical Platonist, essentially a mathematical realist, you still claim you can still claim to be a naturalist, but obviously you're not a physicalist.

Because you think that there are non-physical things that exist in an interesting way of the term exists, clearly not in the same way because you can't, you know, numbers or things like that are not nothing that you can point the telescope to and observe them. But but you can be the point is, you can be a naturalist, which with a broader view than a physicalist on what is acceptable, as is existing.

Also, naturalist doesn't commit to in fact, this was not very clear at the meeting and trying can talk about it for a little bit naturalism and not commit you to reductionism. Reductionism is a very specific notion that, you know, which actually has a couple of different definitions in and of itself. But basically, it's a notion that complex phenomena reduce physically and causally to the most basic elements you can find so that everything is made of. If everything is made of quarks, let's say then then whatever describes the behavioral quirks describes the behavior of everything else.

That's a form of strong reductionism. You can be a naturalist and reject reductionism. So and so the word naturalism is, in fact fairly comprehensive, defined at that level. And I think it's important to distinguish it from these other two things, physicalism and reductionism.

I think you just summarized our entire ISM's episode in ISM's were there.

Yes, that's right. So actually, a, I was curious because I don't think this one came up at the at the workshop. But what is your your position about physicalism versus naturalism? That is, for instance, what do you think about the ontological status of numbers or mathematical objects?

I mean, it's a good question. I think that I'm sorry, the ontological status I'm sorry to interrupt, but.

So you don't know what ontological status is. It doesn't do numbers exist, right?

Well, that's right. Ontologies, that branch of philosophy of metaphysics, really, that deals with with the nature of existence. So, yes, the ontological status of something means, you know, does it exist? And if so, in what sense? Right. I'm sorry to interrupt you. No, that's right.

Yes. I think there's two different very interesting things to say. One is more interesting than the other. So let me say the less interesting one first.

So I don't care whether numbers exist because they certainly don't exist in the same way the tables and chairs and stars and planets do. So, you know, the interesting thing to me is what are the properties of numbers? What are the properties of tables? They're not the same properties. And I would say the same thing about Schrodinger's equation in quantum mechanics, something that is very real in the sense that it's a pattern that that the real world seems to obey.

But it's not real in the same way that a quark or a methane molecule is. So if you want to think the numbers have an oncological status, that makes them real, even though they're not physical, being like knock yourself out. It's not what I'm interested in when I talk about talking about the natural world. But there is a very profound question to ask about physicalism versus naturalism when it gets to modern physics. And I think, you know, my my understanding of this is actually in the process of evolving myself, because we say, you know, materialism or physicalism, I'm not sure if those two things are any different, but we distinguish between thinking that the world is nothing but stuff right matter and energy and things like that, versus thinking that you need these extra categories like numbers or equations or something to describe the world or properties.

David Chalmers is a is a naturalist about consciousness, but he's not a physicalist. He thinks that you need some extra categories other than the stuff that makes up your brain to describe consciousness. And I think that this question of matter has changed really dramatically in the first half of the 20th century, and we haven't quite given that change its do. So I'm becoming more radical about this. And what I referred to obviously is quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

Quantum mechanics says that there are no electrons or atoms or molecules as things sitting there with a once and for all place and state. There are wave functions and in fact more profoundly there are not wave functions. There is a wave function for everything. There is one quantum state that describes the whole universe. That's the lesson of entanglement. There are not separate quantum states, four separate things in the universe. So the extent to which I'm a physicalist is a very strange one.

I think that matter and place is not the right way to think about the universe. I think that quantum wave functions. The quantum wave function of the universe is the right way to think about the universe. And I think that change changes what people mean by materialism or physicalism. Yeah, so.

So one of the people in. As you recall at the workshop was Don Ross, who is a philosopher of science and actually an economist, somebody who works on economics, actually a philosophy of economics.

And now he co-authored a book a few years ago called Everything Must Go with James Lederman, who has been actually a guest on our podcast. And the title of the book there is sort of hinting in what you were just talking about, everything must go, meaning that they explore what what does it mean to take seriously, to take on board sort of some of the implications of fundamental physics, including the idea that a bottom that doesn't seem to be stuff that seems to be relations or fields or whatever, whatever you want, you want to call it.

And that is, in fact, a profound change for a naturalist to take on board, because it really does provide you with a very different picture of the world from what a materialist or physicalist would would have been. Physicalism becomes an epiphenomenon of more fundamental aspect of nature rather than than the fundamental aspect itself. Do I get what you say right in that?

Well, I that is what I think my interpretation of what Don Ross and James Lederman are saying, and it is utterly not what I'm saying at all, because I think I'm a I'm a physicalist without being a materialist, if that makes sense. Oh, OK. I think that it's not relations that are at the fundamental stuff of the world. It's the quantum wavefunction of the universe is the fundamental stuff of the world. And that is that just is a simple replacement for what we used to think is the fundamental stuff of the world, which was particles and fluids moving through space.

So it's just as much stuff as it ever was, except that the kind of stuff that we realized the world is now made of takes this very dramatically different form.

But let me ask you two questions. OK, go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead.

Well, yeah, let me I can provoke you even more than that, because I think that the the reason why this is important is not only because it's right the way the modern physics describes the world, but if you take this view seriously, the entire discussion that people spend many, many hours and many, many volumes on about reductionism versus emergence becomes it doesn't solve that. It says that was a dumb discussion to have. It was a wrong discussion to have because the reduc, the way most people think of reductionism is in terms of a literal division into smaller pieces.

Right. Right. When you say, well, we can describe a human being by their atoms and the relationship between their atoms or even just their neurons and their their their biology, you're literally taking a structure and dividing it into little pieces. Right. And I would say at least tentatively, the quantum mechanics tells us that that's not the way to do it. It's not a matter of literally smaller pieces. There is only one quantum wavefunction for the whole universe.

Well, it's a matter of is more and more finely grained descriptions of the world. There are coarse grain descriptions of people and emotions and motivations. There are more finely to gain descriptions than that in terms of genes and molecules and chemicals. And there's a much more finely grain description of that in terms of the one quantum wavefunction of the whole universe. And so I'm very much a reductionist in that sense. I think that there exists a complete, coherent, consistent, non limited way of talking about the world, which is just in terms of the wavefunction of the universe that are about Schrodinger's equation of quantum mechanics and is a very is something that would make a fundamental particle physicist very, very happy.

But if everything else are different stories, we can put on top of that.

But if I may first of all, I do have to ask you a couple of questions about this, but two qualifications first. First of all, you're right. That is a way of talking about reductionism that is very different from what most people think about reduction. So I would urge you to invent a new term because, OK, just just in terms of, you know, just for the purpose of reducing confusion, because as soon as you say, you know, I'm a very strong I'm a very much a reductionist, then I guarantee you most people are going to think in a way that it's not what you're talking about, which I actually find very interesting.

Do I have a say when other people use the word reduction myself?

Right. But now I think that's a very interesting way of looking at things. I also think actually that this may not be that very different from what laymen are talking about. There may be differences, but basically they would agree that, yes, that's the picture of the fundamental physics gives us. And they also talk, in fact, interestingly, just as you did, of the microscopic objects at different levels of complexity, just being different patterns that are manifestations of these of these.

Fundamental wavefunction, if you will, and what they do is they separate, let's say they make sense of the scope and methods of the special sciences. That is anything that is not fundamental physics in the sense that the special sciences are defined as those sciences to pay attention, or they're in the business of describing and explaining spatial, temporally located, you know, limited patterns. So a biological species is a spatial, temporarily located pattern. A planet is a spaceship, the provocative planet pattern and so on and so forth.

Everything actually is except, of course, the universe itself. And that's the business of fundamental physics. So you may actually not be that far. I mean, they may be using a different language, but you may not be as far. But I do have two questions for you, which are one of which you sort of already addressed, actually. But the fundamental question is, OK, so the fundamental thing here is these universal wavefunction function. But of course, the intuitive, immediate question comes up, which I'm sure you're going to tell me it's wrongly phrased.

But nonetheless, the intuitive question is, OK, and what is the wavefunction made of.

Yeah, that's wrongly phrased, right? That's right. The well, I mean, it's a natural question. I don't want to pooh pooh the question, but I do believe that whether or not the answer is the wavefunction, the question, what is acceptable then what is that made of? Needs to bottom out somewhere. There is something there is some most complete description of the universe. And so tentatively, that description might very well be a quantum wavefunction for the entire universe.

And it's not made of anything any more than that. In traditional particle physics. An electron is made of anything. It's the electron. That's what other things are made of.

Right. But you can see now why the title of the book that we're talking about, everything must go.

If you say, you know, the fundamental thing is not actually made of anything, that's beginning to look like there is nothing at the bottom or not nothing in the sense of a physical structure or is the physical structure at the bottom?

There's a Hilbert space where the wavefunction lives and it evolves in. And that's the universe. That's the most complete description. So there's no more going down and explaining and and dividing into smaller pieces after that.

Now, the next the next question would be there, OK, if you know, if that is the best picture we get from fundamental physics, that's good enough.

Now, how do we then go back up? Let's say that is, how do we go from the idea of a fundamental wavefunction in the entire universe to the appearance of these local patterns?

You know, why is it that you are over there in a few thousand miles away from what I am right now? And we do feel like very distinctive objects. We talk to each other as if we were different persons and so on and so on and so forth. How do we recover that from the basic idea of a fundamental universal function?

Yeah, that's that is exactly the right question to ask. And my singular regret about our Stockbridge workshop was we didn't spend more time talking about questions like that, not because we talk about dumb things. There were too many good things to talk about and we ran out of time. But in fact, I'm also parenthetically in the middle of an email correspondence with Tim Modlin, who is a philosopher of science at NYU, one of the leading philosophers of physics out there who was pressing me on exactly the same point where we're emailing back and forth with hopes to someday publish what we're saying, because he doesn't think that you can get the macroscopic world of experience out of nothing more than the quantum wavefunction.

And I do think you can. And that's a great challenge. And I would say that it's a matter of what we call weak emergence. Right. And we need to talk about the word emergence, if we're talking about reductionism and naturalism and so forth. And there's this strong notion of emergence that, again, David Chalmers would push with consciousness where he says that when you get a certain number of things together in the right pattern, things happen that can't possibly be understood simply in terms of the underlying microscopic description.

So something totally new is happening because you're in this complex macroscopic state and consciousness is his example. So I don't believe in that. I think that's just unnecessary to understand the world. So what I'm saying is that there is a sort of much simpler story that you can tell about parts of the world when the quantum wave function is doing certain things. So when we're in a state that looks like and that's the critical phrase that looks like a baseball bat hitting a baseball, then you don't need to know anything about the way you function or quantum mechanics.

You just need to know good old Newtonian mechanics to figure out what's going to happen to the baseball next. And so I think that we need to build up a set of equations that relate the microscopic description, the fundamental description in terms of the. Function and say, I can find very, very, very accurate, approximate solutions to what's going to happen next without knowing all these details of the wavefunction, just knowing so much more simple ideas about good old classical mechanics.

So I wanted to return at some point to the sort of deep philosophical questions that you alluded to at the beginning of the episode, like what is the meaning of life and what's the purpose of the universe and morality and free will and get a sense of. Well, first, whether you think this debate about what stuff makes up the world actually has any bearing on the answers to those questions. But then second, which of those questions do you think really are the the biggest problems in a naturalistic universe?

Yeah, I think that this this whole set of issues we've just been discussing, there's a very centrally on exactly these questions because I think there's multiple ways you can go wrong when you are a human being, trying to ask questions about purpose and meaning and morality, confronting the fact that the universe seems to be this purposeless, equation driven natural reality. You know, one way to go wrong is to be all mysterious about it and to say we need to go outside the natural world.

We need to have God or something like that provide us with purpose, meaning morality. Otherwise they can't exist. I think that's a mistake. But the other way is to go too far to say that purpose, meaning morality, are nothing more than different ways of asking scientific questions. I don't I think that there is a distinction is a very good one. So I think that there's a middle ground where what we need to do is think carefully about how we talk about the world at its different levels when we talk about the world at this fundamental underlying level.

And the vocabulary is not good because we always have sort of vocabulary of, you know, on top of or smaller or things like that. But you know what I mean? The particle physics or fundamental physics vocabulary, there's no room in that story for freewill, for consciousness. You don't need it. There's also no room for chairs and baseball and and temperature and other things that we are clear that exist. But baseball exists even though it's nowhere in the wavefunction of the universe, because it's a crucial part of a higher level vocabulary that we use to describe this emergent phenomenon from the wavefunction when it comes to things like purpose and morality.

It's similar, but not exactly the same. It is these are terms that are part of a vocabulary we use to describe higher level phenomena. The difference is that the reason why we choose to call certain things moral, for example, and other things immoral is not simply a compactness of description. That is all we need for the sort of scientific rules. There's also some judgment that comes into play, some acknowledgement of there are certain that we're not blank slates as human beings, that there are things we want to be true and that we want to set up systems and logical ways of describing the world that help make those things come true.

I don't think the morality is out there in the world I think is given to us by science. It's something that we choose as human beings. It's not there in the equations, but we need to choose it in ways that are compatible with the equations, which, after all, tell us how we behave.

Well, that's a very interesting way of putting it. And I actually wouldn't disagree with pretty much anything you said in the last few minutes.

But I'd like to push you a little bit, if you don't mind, on one thing, because what you just said could be interpreted almost as just as well, either as a statement in defense of sort of strong emergence or in defense of weaker merchants. And, of course, much, much depends on what one means by emergence, which really people are not very clear about and all that sort of stuff. But but let me what I want to push a little bit is this.

So all of these discussions about morality and free will and all that sort of stuff and how they relate to the fundamental wavefunction of the universe hinge on reductionism now and reductionism in the classical sense of what people mean as as in explaining the functioning of a complex system by by using the components of the system system, by understanding the components of those systems. Now, there are classically philosophy. People recognise two different meaning of the word reductionism. What is ontological there is that goes there that that word ontology, again, that is it's a claim about the nature of existence, the epistemic, that it's got to do with how we know about the universe.

Now, I think we all agree that at least now at the moment and possibly forever, epistemic reductionism is impossible.

That is, we're not going to come up with it's not practical, but it's probably beyond our computational abilities to come up with. Say, a quantum mechanical model of and name the most complex thing you want, human consciousness, economics, morality, literature, whatever.

In other words, even if everything is made of the same stuff where everything is boils down to the to the quantum way function of the universe, it turns out that in practical terms, as you just pointed out a minute ago, if you want to understand how to move a car around or a projectile around, you better use Newtonian mechanics, not quantum mechanics, because it's simply practical.

Practical, right. So epistemic reductionism in that sense, it's impossible. I think we most people essentially agree with that.

The question is, what about ontological reductionism? And the logical reductionism could be interpreted as the claim that if we had infinite computational capability, we could, in fact, deploy epistemic reductionism. That is, we could, in fact, build a quantum mechanical model of consciousness, morality, economics and etc., etc..

Does that is that, in your opinion, a fair representation of what ontological reductionism might be?

Yeah, again, I'm not the expert in the vocabulary, but I think that is a statement that I would actually think is true. So let me let me vote for it. In that sense, I think that it is correct to say that there is a way of talking about the world, I suspect, with the property that if we knew absolutely everything there was to know about the world at one moment in time and had infinite computational power and perfect knowledge of the laws of physics, we could predict what would happen at all other times with perfect fidelity.

Right. So but the thing is. So that's and that's what I want to push a little bit, if you don't mind.

So given that and given the following, given that we agree that epistemic reduction is in fact impossible, OK, that is we're not going to be able to do that.

And given that ontological reductionism can only be understood as essentially a promissory note based on on epistemic power, you just the way you just put it is ontology. Reductionism is the idea that if we had that that kind of computational power in perfect knowledge, we could do X?

Well, since we don't, um, some people might hint, perhaps provocatively and the idea that therefore the logical reduction is just an assumption that is at best a non validated and at worst contrary to empirical evidence.

Yeah, I think I think that's not a very fruitful way of thinking because it's no more a promissory note than any other scientific statement ever is in science. We live in a world where every statement we make is fallible, is contingent, is known with less than perfect confidence. And yet we do think that the moon is not made of green cheese. And we don't worry about the fact that, well, maybe we've just gotten everything wrong. In the mood, after all, is made of green cheese.

We go on with our lives thinking that the moon is not made of green cheese. I'm advocating going on with our lives thinking that there is a way of describing the world in which we could get it right if you were a little plus's demon. And I think that our reasons for having that belief are the same as any other reason for any other scientific claim. That's the model that seems to be the most powerful way to fit the data. So I'm not I would not give that any different kind of status than I would my belief in quantum mechanics or general relativity or anything else.

Sean, you talked already about morality and how naturalism relates to morality. But I'd be curious to hear, given your impressions from the workshop, how much controversy there really is among philosophers about well, I guess first, whether they have a naturalistic worldview, sort of hard for me to imagine modern philosophers not having one, but maybe that's just my bias. But then but then second, how much controversy there is about whether naturalism poses a problem for other philosophical issues like meaning or free will?

Well, you know, we don't need to guess if our question is the question of what do most philosophers believe? I keep mentioning David Chalmers because he's a smart philosopher and a Facebook friend of mine. But he did a survey with David Bourgie and they came out with the answers. And I just blogged about it literally yesterday. So 60 percent of working philosophers in the Anglo analytic tradition believe in a compatible view of free will. That is to say, if you talk about atoms and molecules, there's no free will.

But if you talk about people, it's a perfectly sensible concept. 14 percent or libertarian, 12 percent don't believe in free will at all, cetera.

Libertarian, none in the political sense and none of the political sense seems like a weird non sequitur. Yes, there's the libertarian free will means that there is really you can make choices that are not constrained by the laws of physics and more. Surprising to me, naturalism was one of the questions, and it was only about where is it now? 50 percent of these philosophers are naturalists. Twenty six percent are non naturalists. And Aristotle be damned. Twenty four percent are other.

So either naturalist nor naturalist, what would be the most sort of common non fringe position of a philosopher who's not a naturalist?

Know, I strongly suspect that it's consciousness, that it's getting in the way questions of free will and ethics or something like that. I mean, something you know, it's just to me and I and this is just my physics bias he's showing. It's it's there blinking in the face of a hard decision. It's a failure of will, I would say, to face up to the fact that naturalism is clearly the best description of the world that we have today.

Well, at least it's consciousness and not ghosts. Exactly.

I think you're right that that is where the problem comes from, that especially the undecided come from. But to be fair, there was a survey I haven't read actually the article I have to get by by chance. This is downloaded on my iPad, but I haven't had a chance to do it. And so, actually, I'm going to ask you a simple methodological question about the survey. Was this done by, you know, random actual random sampling of a population or was it a self reported, you know, people to go to the to the to Chalmers website because he has done the latter before.

And those are obviously are not necessarily believe a word.

You wouldn't leave any of those results? No, this is actually a not random it's a comprehensive survey of a fixed population. OK, they got the ninety nine leading philosophy departments specializing in sort of English speaking or analytic philosophy, and they asked every faculty member in those department right now, that's good.

So in that sense, this is parallel or comparable to a survey of scientists that came out now a number of years ago, was published in two papers in in Science magazine. And believe it or not, about 50 percent of scientists are not naturalists because they admitted to belief in God that that person was God. And so and interestingly, that survey showed that that varies by by discipline. Businesses tend to be the ones that are least non naturalists. So the most naturalist, I think it went up to sixty five percent and as well as evolutionary biologists.

And on the other hand, chemists and engineers tend to be the most known naturalist with a peak at 55 percent to think something like that. Now, interestingly, and this is where I think it would be nice to have a comparison with with The Philosopher's Data, the second article in science about beliefs, belief in the supernatural among among scientists, actually focus then on on a smaller subset, which is only scientists or members of the National Academy. The idea being, you know, OK, now let's ask to what is the sort of self selected elite of scientists in those in that case, rejection of naturalism, essentially as measured by belief in a personal God, went down dramatically.

It was less than 10 percent. Right.

And likewise with the philosophers, only about 15 percent of them were atheists. There was most of them were atheists. But there's also they cross tabulated with specialty and gender and location and things like that. And unsurprisingly, if you work in philosophy of religion, you are likely to be a believer in God. So they didn't do the numbers. But if you actually took out people who specialized in philosophy of religion, the percentage of atheist philosophers would be very, very high.

Right, right. Are there any out of the set of meaning, purpose, morality, freewill, etc., questions that you still feel unsettled by, that you have a hard time fitting into a naturalistic view of the universe? Well, that's a good question.

I mean, I think that these questions are all hard. I wouldn't say I feel unsettled by any of them, but I certainly don't feel that they are settled either. You know, I think I'm very open to have my mind changed about how moral what it means to be moral. What is the best way to find meaning in your life? I'm very I'm not at all pessimistic that these are questions that can be answered. I mean, they are answered.

I have answered them for myself. I'm just I'm just not at all confident that we've given the best possible answers. I'm very eager to find even better answers than the ones we have.

Let me ask you a somewhat provocative question, if you will.

Now, you have shown with both by organizing the workshop and by what you write in in your blog, as well as, frankly, by simply being a guest on this podcast that you enjoy and value it relationships and and crosstalk with philosophers, some of your colleagues in science who in physics in particular, who shall go unnamed, don't you?

What do you think that. How could you say, yeah, well, how do you what do you think that comes from?

You know, I don't want to psychoanalyze I don't want to say individual people don't respect other disciplines or philosophy in general. You know, philosophers are very sorry. Fit physicists. Scientists are very hard nosed about their subject. You know, the way and I sort of what you had a conversation with David Albert about this was another leading philosopher of science because he was trained as a physicist. And he basically thinks that, well, he's in a philosophy department because those are the people who will pay him.

But he doesn't see any boundary in between what he does for a living and what physicists do for a living. He you know, he has a certain set of techniques that are identified as philosophical, but he thinks of himself as just as much a theoretical physicist as anybody.

And he didn't like it when some of the you know, some people standing up for philosophy tried to say that, you know, philosophy is not supposed to be of interest to physicists. And I think that, you know, both the philosophers and the physicists can be a little bit blinkered about this question. The physicists want to know, you know, what good is philosophy to me? And the philosophers are saying, well, philosophy is very, very important to physics for this reason, for this reason and this reason.

And my attitude is philosophy can be very helpful to people doing physics. I approve of that because it's very helpful to me. I do physics, but that's not the point. Philosophy, good philosophy of sciences is interesting because it's interesting, not because it's useful to physicists. If the philosophers buy in to the you know, the way of stating the question, which says how useful is it to physicists, then they're going to lose because the overwhelming majority of physics or any science goes on perfectly well without any knowledge of philosophy whatsoever.

Sure, working scientists are terribly bad at philosophy of science.

Yeah, and that was actually what was going to say that that was also my experience. As you know, I have a background in evolutionary biology before I moved to philosophy of science. And even though I have always had an interest in philosophy of science, it certainly I cannot recall a single case in which, you know, reading a paper in philosophy all of a sudden sort of redirected my sort of empirical investigation or answer the question, an empirical question that I was interested in.

But then again, I wouldn't expect philosophy to do that. What philosophy was doing for me was from time to time would allow me to sort of step back and take a look at the broader picture of the broader vista of what I was doing, make more sense of it, and then rethink about my general research program. But it certainly wasn't in the business providing me with specific answers that that's why I was doing the science to begin with.

Yeah, I was sort of on the side of what I was going to, actually. But I like to your point that physicists were sort of asking the wrong question about how useful philosophy was to them doing physics. And the mistaken question that I've noticed from non philosophers is, has philosophy taught us anything about the universe, like empirically taught us anything about the universe, which is the wrong question. I think really like say if you're a mathematician, not a physicist, and you want to know, well, does philosophy of math help me do math?

Does it actually help me learn new things, mathematical principles that I didn't know? Well, no. But still, it helps us understand what it is we're doing when we're doing math and asking questions like are we discovering mathematical principles or are we inventing them? You know, that's like a really important financial question to understand what it is we're doing, even if it doesn't make any difference to actually solving the proofs. Right.

You can do a lot of mathematics regardless of what the answer to that question is, just adjusting the way you can do a lot of physics or biology, regardless of what philosopher philosophy of biology or physics actually says.

But as I said, let me give you a little bit for I think the point that David Albert was trying to make, which is that that what you're saying is very true for lots of philosophy of science, but there is some philosophy of science that really is just science. It's just sort of done in a certain way. And, you know, the way that I like to say it is that philosophers are much better than scientists at discovering when certain scientific accepted beliefs are wrong, they're Muttiah.

They probe much more carefully into the logical consistency and underlying assumptions behind our accepted beliefs. And they're nowhere near as good as scientists are proposing. Right answers? No, I think that's very fair.

And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to to give the impression that I thought that the two fields are completely separate. On the contrary, you're right. There is a, for instance, certain areas of philosophy or biology or philosophy of physics where if you read the particular paper, it's hard to tell whether it was written by a physicist, biologist or philosopher without actually looking up the affiliation of the. Of the of the other, and that is as it should be, because you're right, there are certain areas of conceptional essentially conceptual inquiry that are pertinent both to the philosopher who looks at science from the outside and that the scientist who looks at it from the inside.

Yeah, absolutely.

And in particular, there's two areas that are my favorite areas to think about the fundamental status of quantum mechanics and the origin of the arrow of time, the asymmetry between past and future, where the philosophers working in the field understand the whole landscape a lot better than most physicists do. So it's been very helpful to me.

I also just wanted to say that, Masimo, you probably remember that I was took more of a hard line against philosophy when we first started doing this podcast over two and a half years.

Now I know. And I was thinking just that a minute ago right there.

So genius actually changed their mind a little bit.

What I wanted to point out, I mean, sort of in a sense, but there is a lot of bad philosophy out there, of course, and there's a lot of philosophers debating questions that are sort of like boiled down to just they're using different words. Yeah. Things like using different definitions for the same word or something like that. And so I think I had like, uh, I had encountered a lot of the bad philosophy and less of the good, more sophisticated, subtle philosophy.

So based on what I had seen, I had formed the impression that philosophy was basically useless. And I don't have that impression anymore. But I still it's quite possible, I think, to encounter some philosophy and have it pretty much be bad philosophy and come away with the impression that philosophers are not contributing right now.

You're absolutely right. And actually some philosophers themselves are very cognizant of this thing. When you say bad philosophy, let's let's clarify that for a second.

It's not most professional philosophers are good philosophers, but they don't necessarily do interesting philosophy. No, let him and then have this wonderful phrase when they refer to some of their colleagues who who indulge in certain kinds of metaphysics and they call them Neo Scholastic's. Now, the Scholastic's, of course, the mediaeval philosophers who who have these bad reputation because they were wasting their time trying to figure out how many angels will dance and the pain, etc., etc..

Well, the Scholastic's were actually very, very good and very careful logicians. It's just that they were spending their time talking about stuff and study from assumptions that were particularly not not fruitful and not not useful, but they were very careful logicians.

So the same goes for for a lot of modern philosophers who actually are good at what they're doing is just what they're doing is not particularly interesting.

Now, that said, again, I'm drawing on my experience as a scientist. This is a less well known fact. But quite frankly, a lot of science itself is not particularly useful. A lot of scientists spend their entire career focused in a very tiny little component of, you know, understanding. I don't know. My favorite example tends to be the sexual habit of an obscure moth in the middle of Panama or something like that, which really has very little relationship with anything else.

They do it just because they like it. It doesn't produce any any interesting, durable. Nunavut's famous paper back in 1964 by a guy named Platt, who was a chemist, a physicist, actually, it's called Strong Inference and is a really interesting paper. It's a classic paper in how to do scientific inference.

But it starts out by saying that, well, we're also proud of contributing individual bricks to to the edifice of knowledge. What we do not acknowledge very, very readily is that most of those bricks lay unused in the backyard.

And that's pretty much every discipline I think it is.

But I'll show my parochialism here again. I think that it's easier to tell the difference between the useful stuff and the useless stuff in science than it is in philosophy, because science is easier than so. They may be right. You know, we have the data and it's a much harsher, quicker, more cut and dried criterion of usefulness. So philosophers have a tougher time and therefore they need to be a little more forgiving because, you know, it's hard to tell what a hundred years from that will turn out to be useful.

No, I agree.

And the difference I think I think you're absolutely right on this one. And the difference there is well, you put it in terms of science is easier. But I would put it in terms of science, of course, deals with empirical possibilities. And philosophy tends to although it's empirically informed, that tends to deal with logical possibilities and logical possibilities are much broader.

So there's many, many more ways you can go wrong with logical possibilities that with empirical ones, because the empirical facts will eliminate a bunch of other stuff that it although it's logically possible, it's not actually empirically true.

And so the scientists are just not going to bother with it because we're just about out of time. So unless anyone has that, any burning last thoughts are going once, twice. All right. We're going to move on now to the rationally speaking PEX. Welcome back, everybody. Every episode we pick a suggestion for our listeners then has tickled our rational fancy. This time we ask our guests from Carroll for his suggestions.

Some, well, unusual pick here, because obviously, you know, the first temptation is to pick all my own stuff, my books and my website. And then my second temptation is to pick all of my wife stuff. Jennifer Willette writes wonderful things and blogs and so forth. But all right. So I resisted those temptations. But their implicit we started talking about emergence and reductionism and how higher level questions like purpose and meaning morality fit in. And I like to use the word story to return to refer to the different ways in which we talk about the universe.

And that's what sort of to me enables all these higher level concepts. So I'm going to recommend a new book by Jonathan Gottschall. Goateed as c h a l. L called The Storytelling Animal How Stories Make US Human. And he's, I think, an English professor. But he wrote It's a popular science book. He talks about neuroscience, evolution, evolutionary biology, and how storytelling is part of the tendency of human beings to recognize patterns that was evolved into us and is the fundamental paradigm by which we make sense of the everyday world.

And seeing the science of that, I think is crucial. And I'm looking forward to the day when we fit in this storytelling aspect of things to comprehensive view of the universe that goes from wavefunction to the meaning of life. And fascinating. And, Sean, you may have resisted the temptation to self promote, but in your stead I will say that your books are excellent. And your wife, Jennifer, is also a fantastic and fascinating writer. And we will link to your page on the rationally speaking podcast site of it.

People so glad you took the hint. That was very nice of you. All right. Well, Sean, thanks so much for joining you. It's been a pleasure to have you in the conversation. Thank you, Sean.

It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, guys.

This concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense. 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 Carlin and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission.

Thank you for listening.