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Welcome everyone to this very special edition of 'Het Denkgelag'.

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Apologies for the delay. We won't keep you waiting for longer.

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I'm very honoured to be your host and moderator tonight.

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For those of you who don't know us: we started out last year with a couple of episodes,

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very informal discussions actually, about science, philosophy, critical thinking, etc.

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Maybe on a slightly smaller scale than today… But we decided to move up to the next level.

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We are a little more ambitious. And we even decided to call this episode a 'Royale' edition.

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If you have a look at our distinguished panel here tonight, I think you will understand why we chose this slightly pompous title.

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We thought that with this concentration of brainpower, we might as well tackle some of the big issues, you know.

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This could equally have been called an episode about 'life, the universe, and everything'.


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- Oh, I know the answer to that one!

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- Right… Well, just try not to reveal the secret until we have calculated it...

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So before we go down into that rabbit hole, let me very briefly introduce our guests.

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Maybe they hardly need any introduction, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

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On the far side, the gentleman there who seems to know the answer to 'life, the universe and everything' is

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Prof. Dr. Massimo Pigliucci. He is the Head of the Philosophy Department at the City University of New York.

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He is a biologist turned philosopher, and depending on your perspective, he has either seen the light,

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or strayed into darkness.

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He's a very prolific writer, as all three of our guests are.

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He wrote numerous books on evolution and intelligent design, various sorts of pseudo-science, on skepticism,

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the meaning of life, etc. His latest book…
- ...'cause I know the answer...

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- …is called 'Answers for Aristotle', in which he explores how an alliance of science and philosophy,

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not just science, but science and philosophy, can make our lives more meaningful.

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In the middle is Prof. Daniel Dennett.

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He is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University near Boston.

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He is famous for being one of the 'Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse', together with his new atheist

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colleagues: the biologist Richard Dawkins, the philosopher Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens.

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He is arguably the most friendly, most amiable, of the four atheists, I think I can say so...

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- The softest...

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- Dare I say cuddly?
- He is very cuddly!

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He also wrote numerous books on evolution, philosophy of mind, consciousness, free will.

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He has an oeuvre that spans more than four decades. His most important work is maybe...

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Well, what is your most important work, Prof. Dennett?

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You were about to walk into a trap!
- ‘Consciousness Explained’, yeah...

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- Sorry?
- Probably ‘Consciousness Explained’...

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Right, Consciousness Explained. I think that's a very good choice. As you wrote it of course... Who am I ?

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- If you say so...


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Anyhow. His latest book provides an overview of his work and is titled 'Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for

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Thinking.' It's translated into Dutch as 'De gereedschapskist van ons denken'.

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Next to me is Prof. Lawrence Krauss. He is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist.

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He is the director of 'The Origins Project' at Arizona State University.

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He has also written numerous books, among them 'The Physics of Star Trek', 'Quintessence' and his latest book

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'A Universe from Nothing. Why there is something rather than nothing.'

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He is also one of the two stars in a film documentary called 'The Unbelievers', which follows professor

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Krauss, and his atheist colleague Richard Dawkins, whom you may remember as one of the 'Four

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Horsemen', around the world, spreading... Can I use the word 'gospel' here?

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...the 'message' of science and reason. Apologies for that, not ‘gospel’.


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Just to kick things off, I’m going to tell a little story from Greek mythology.

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According to the Greeks, there was a message written above the pillars of Gibraltar. It was written by the hero Hercules.

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It served as a warning to sailors and navigators not to venture beyond that point, which marked the edge of,

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at least the known world at that point.

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In Latin, the phrase is: “nec plus ultra” or “non plus ultra”.

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It translates roughly as “No further beyond. This is the end of the world”.

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- Those Greeks really knew their Latin….

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Yeah right, I was looking for the Greek phrase, I don’t know. Blame it on Wikipedia.

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I haven’t written these notes myself. I have an autocue.

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Later on, the opposite of the phrase, ‘plus ultra’, again quite impressive for those Greeks, was adopted

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centuries later as the national motto of Spain.

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And it was actually, as you can tell, it was an invitation, in defiance of the ancient wisdom, to go further,

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to explore new territories, which was of course after the discovery of the New World.


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- To boldly go…
- To boldly go where no man has gone before.

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Right, and you don’t have to be afraid of monsters and sea dragons.

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You don’t have to be afraid to be swallowed up into the pits of hell.

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Just go as far as you can and see where you end up.

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Charles V by the way actually was born here in Ghent, and this brings us right back to the debate.

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You probably know what I’m getting at, where this is going. So I’m going to put this open question to all of you.

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Do you think that there is a 'nec plus ultra' in science? Do you think that science has limits?

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Do you think it's dangerous for science to venture beyond the point where it is not allowed to go?

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I don't know who is willing to go first...


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- Let the scientist go first, right?
- I was gonna say you go first.

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- All right, fine.
- We'll go this way. You guys were introduced first.

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Sure. I hate the phrase 'limits of science' because it is so often misinterpreted.

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As if there were really a sign post saying “Sorry, you're allowed to get here but not beyond.”

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But it depends on what you mean by the phrase, right? Clearly there are limits to science because science is

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a human activity, and human beings have limited epistemic capabilities.

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We can understand certain things, and I'm sure there are certain things we're not going to be able to

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understand. Even if we were smart enough, there are certainly things we don’t have or we're not going to

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have enough information to figure out. So in that sense, certainly there are limits to science.

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So that's one sense in which it's true. But it's no comfort to, you know, theologians or mystics, or

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woo-woo thinkers of any sort. It's not a sign post.

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The other sense in which I think there may be a limit to science, and that may be a little more controversial

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tonight, is that I think that science is a particular type of epistemic activity, a particular way of getting to

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know things. In particular, it's the best way we figured out, to know about how the world works.

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But as such, as a human activity, it does have certain domains of applications, where it does very well.

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And it has domains of applications where it does a little less well, and it has domains of applications where it

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frankly doesn't really matter that much.


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- Now it gets interesting…
- Right...

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- So that is a limit of science?

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- In that sense. In the sense that it's... You know, science is a set of tools, and since not all problems

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are amenable to the same kind of tools, then there are certain things that you really don't want to do using

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a hammer because they are not nailed.


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- Professor Krauss, do you agree?

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- Well, in many ways I agree. In fact, it’s sort of unfortunate it's called a debate.

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I think people will be upset, because there won't be so much disagreement. I was saying to Dan in the car…


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- We'll see about that.
- We're just beginning!

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….that we're all reasonable. We're all reasonable people on this stage, and how can any reasonable person

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disagree with me and Dan?
- Never happened before!

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But, certainly, there are limits to science. As an empiricist, which is what I am...

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Empirically there are limits to what science can do. In fact, in my own field cosmology, there are clearly limits

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because, we have one universe to observe.

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And most of us live in that universe, the Republican party in my country doesn't, but therefore,

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because of that, there may be many universes, and therefore there is obviously, in some real physical

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sense, a limited domain over which we can explore. And that's the key point. It's not just tools.

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Every academic discipline uses tools, and in some ways they are not that different.

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But the key part of what makes science 'science', and what makes it work, is that it's based on empirical evidence.

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So, rational thought applied to empirical evidence. And therefore, if you can't measure it, even in principle...

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I mean there's a lot of things we can't measure that we can talk about. As a theoretical physicist, I think about

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things a lot, a lot of things we can't measure right now.

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But, if you can't ever measure it in principle, then science really has nothing to say about it.

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I would argue that anything else you tend to say about it, is not worth much either.

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But it's certainly a fact that science generally can't address it if you can't measure it in principle.

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And that's of fundamental importance, I think, and we forget that.

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So I think, the difference that I would say is that I don't know what the ultimate limits of science are.

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There are limits now, and there are many areas where science has very little to say right now.

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But can I say that it will never have anything to say about it? Absolutely not, there is a huge difference

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between what's unknowable and what's not known.

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And so, the only way you can find out if science has anything to say about it, is try.

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And if it has something useful to say, that makes predictions, which agree with experiments, then you

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can make progress. But you could try it, and it might not work.

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An example might be sociology, where they tried to use the language of physics to apply to societies,

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and it was far too premature, too complex. And consciousness... as I was telling Dan, I did physics

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because it's easy. If I wanted to do the hard stuff, I'd do consciousness.

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- Right. Am I right that... You say that even if there are limits to science, and we may never know, then that

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doesn't provide any comfort to people advocating other ways of knowing.

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If science has limits, then maybe that’s a general limit...

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- Let me say something that Massimo may jump on, just for the purpose of entertainment:

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I don't think there are other ways of knowing.

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If you talk about what knowing is: other ways of knowing are an illusion in my opinion.


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- Right.
- That ultimately if you think about what you know,

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it doesn't come by revelation. It ultimately comes from some empirical basis.

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And of course you can reflect on it, and think about it, and learn things based on that reflection.

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But it ultimately comes down to what you can measure. And therefore I don't think there are other ways of knowing.

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- You're an empiricist.

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- Professor Dennett, is it right that every knowledge is derived from empirical evidence?

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That this is the sole source of knowledge, or...?


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- Well, I would say no because I think there's a lot of mathematical knowledge.

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And I don't think that mathematical knowledge is based on empirical facts. Formal systems...

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Mathematical knowledge is inspired by empirical issues. After all, just think what 'geometry' means.

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It means measuring the earth. But once you've got geometry, you have non-Euclidian geometries and

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other sorts of geometries.

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- But don't you think... I mean a proof is an empirical piece of work, I mean.

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- No.
- It is... You can ask if it's consistent with what you know already.

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There's an important empirical side which I think is often underestimated. And this came out like a ton of bricks

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for me when I saw a wonderful documentary that was done on Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

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And here were these number theorists trying to explain it to the general public, and to people like me,

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who are no number theorists.

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And what hit me was: oh, first of all, not only would I not know whether Wiles had proved Fermat's Last Theorem.

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Wiles wouldn't know whether he had proved Fermat's Last Theorem, until, and this is basically the sociological or

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social fact, until his peers, his fellow experts in mathematics, reluctantly, and contra their own interest - they would

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love to win the glory - say: he's got it! And it's only when the consensus among mathematicians is: 'he did it'.

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That's the first time anybody has any confidence that the proof is actually sound.

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That's true, but I think that we should be careful here. I'm going to follow up on Dan's comment on mathematics,

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which is one example. Logic of course is another one, and they’re closely related for obvious reasons.

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I think we need to be careful about how we use words like 'science', or empirical evidence and so forth.

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Because, yes, if you expand empirical evidence to, say, including the cross-checking of proofs, then pretty much

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everything that deals with language becomes empirical.
- Even theology would become empirical. 


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Yeah, exactly. But I think that that is in some sense cheating, because when people think of science,

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and even when most scientists think of science, that's not what they're thinking about.

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What you're thinking about when you talk about science, we're talking about the way in which normally physics,

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biology, chemistry, geology, and so on works. Systematic observations, controlled experiments, that sort of stuff.

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Now if you limit science to that kind of view, then it seems to me clear that mathematics has very little to do, or logic has

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very little to do with it. It certainly has implications for science, it certainly gets its inspirations occasionally from science, but a lot of mathematics and logic work is entirely independent.

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- It's semantics! I think I agree with you that it's semantic difference. For me, science is obviously much more expansive.

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Because ultimately mathematics, I mean mathematics is a language. It isn't knowledge, by the way, it's a language.

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And it doesn’t, it's not the world, it's a model of the world. And it doesn't describe the world exactly.

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It's a model of the world, it's the best model we have, but there's no mathematics that exactly describes the world at

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all levels. So even that, even if people think that somehow mathematics is an ultimate description of reality, it isn't.

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There's no mathematical formula that describes the universe at all scales.

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But nevertheless, when Wiles or his colleagues are trying to determine if it's true, what they're ultimately doing, is seeing

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if it's consistent with things they know to be true, and ultimately those things come from a set of axioms which

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are in some sense empirical. My view is: science is really empiricism, and my view of empiricism is very broad.

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So we can disagree about whether my definition is your definition but I think when we deconstruct that, we'd

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probably agree.
- So it's partly a semantic issue.

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But maybe, before we go any further, I had the idea of checking with the audience, now that they have a sense

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of your initial position, and also some semantic clarification. I think it's time to ask the audience.

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If we phrase it like this: “Do you think that science is the sole source of knowing?” If there are philosophers in the room...

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- Abstain!
- … you have to ignore semantics for a while.

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In Dutch: “Wie denkt dat wetenschap de enige bron van kennis is?” Let's just raise hands and see.

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Don’t be shy, even if you don’t really know what the question is about.

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Nobody’s gonna check if you really thought it through.
- Where’s the house lights? That’s empiricism!

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So, and who thinks that beside science, there are other ways of knowing?

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(in Dutch): "Wie denkt dat er naast wetenschap nog andere kenvormen zijn?"

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I think that a majority of people, if I'm correct, is in favor of the view that science rules supreme.

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So, do we have some work to do, Prof. Pigliucci?
- That’s too bad. Let's get to work!

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- Just to get a little more specific, let's jump to one of our…
- I'm sorry. Dan was about to comment on the last thing

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that Lawrence said about the expansive definition of science.
- Right. Do you have a short comment to make?

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- Yeah. I think that your definition as empiricism raises some semantic problems...


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- Yeah, semantic problems…


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So, for instance, I think you know that there is no largest prime, I think you know that two plus two is four,

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I think you know that interior angles of a Euclidean triangle add up to two right angles.

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- Those are based on empirical... No, I do on the basis of empirical evidence...

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I know there's no largest prime because the proof of the largest primes relies on things I can see, work with and manipulate.

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- Then you see you ARE using the very point I was making about using basically social facts about what

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mathematicians agree on, and…
- It's not... I don't care who told me the facts.

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The numbers are there. It doesn't matter whether they were white males or...

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- No, if there was a coven of mathematicians in... Utah,
- There probably is...

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- Yeah, there probably is... And they claim to have proved the ABC conjecture. You'd probably think: 'Not likely'.

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- No, I tend to think 'not likely' whenever I read anything anyone says. My first response is: convince me.

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And I'm sure it's your first response, I hope…
- Well...

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- Speaking of things that are not likely. Let's talk about god...

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- Do we have to? Can't we talk about knowledge, or reality, or something?

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- Just to get it over with. As soon as we have dealt with god we can move on to less frivolous matters, more weighty

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subjects. Let's just…
- I'm sorry, you're asking three atheists. You understand that?

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- Well, last time we checked, as you say, none of you have any religious faith.

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- This was before dinner…
- I think...

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- I don't have faith in anything…


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- The question is: do you think that science, no matter how you define it, or maybe it depends, has disproven or refuted

00:20:19.410 --> 00:20:22.363
god's existence? Do you think that god is a scientific hypothesis? 


00:20:22.363 --> 00:20:24.724
- You can't disprove an improvable hypothesis...

00:20:24.724 --> 00:20:37.447
- But you can render it, so preposterously unlikely, that anybody who still takes it seriously has a serious problem.

00:20:37.447 --> 00:20:45.281
- That's really important, and science has definitely done that. But there are different levels, and you know, some

00:20:45.281 --> 00:20:50.802
people in the audience may be spiritual and say 'Oh I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual'. I never know what that means.

00:20:50.802 --> 00:20:57.682
But there are people who would say: 'I think there's some purpose to the universe.

00:20:57.682 --> 00:21:07.082
I don't believe in any world religion, but there's some purpose. That, I think, is an overstatement, to say that there is none.

00:21:07.082 --> 00:21:12.404
What we can say is that there is absolutely no evidence of purpose to the universe. But what we can say, and what

00:21:12.404 --> 00:21:18.780
I think is really important, is that science is inconsistent with every religion in the world.

00:21:18.780 --> 00:21:23.447
That every organized religion based on scripture and doctrine is inconsistent with science.

00:21:23.447 --> 00:21:31.300
So they're all garbage and nonsense. That you can say with definitive authority. I don't like to use the word authority.

00:21:31.300 --> 00:21:32.883
But the idea of purpose...

00:21:32.883 --> 00:21:40.114
All I can say is: there is no evidence for it and every bit of evidence suggests that it isn't there, but you know...

00:21:40.114 --> 00:21:45.281
- I'm gonna go even a little further, if possible...

00:21:45.281 --> 00:21:50.324
Dan did a perfectly good job in demolishing the whole thing, but you can go even further.

00:21:50.324 --> 00:21:56.530
I get nervous whenever I hear people talking about 'the god hypothesis'. Because I think that's conceding too much.

00:21:56.530 --> 00:22:04.244
- It's a concept that Richard Dawkins uses…
- Well, it seems to me, in order to talk about a hypothesis,

00:22:04.244 --> 00:22:11.844
you really have to have something fairly well articulated, coherent, that makes predictions that are actually falsifiable.

00:22:11.844 --> 00:22:18.947
All that sort of stuff. And concepts of god, first of all, are heterogeneous. Let's not forget, it's not like all people on

00:22:18.947 --> 00:22:24.805
earth believe in a particular kind of god. There is all sorts of stuff out there. But all these concepts are incoherent,

00:22:24.805 --> 00:22:28.805
badly put together, if put together at all.

00:22:28.805 --> 00:22:37.365
So, to say that science defeats the god hypothesis is actually even to give too much to the concept of god.

00:22:37.365 --> 00:22:44.402
There is nothing to defeat there. It's an incoherent, badly articulated concept. Why do you use a sledgehammer to

00:22:44.402 --> 00:22:48.282
demolish it?
- When you refuse to think, you call it god.

00:22:48.282 --> 00:22:54.485
- But that does bring me back, if you don't mind, to the issue of semantics, because of course, it depends on what you mean by god.

00:22:54.485 --> 00:22:57.116
It's part of the answer, right?
- Let me put it another way.

00:22:57.116 --> 00:23:05.484
Can you think of any empirical, scientific, solid evidence that would convince you of the existence of some supernatural

00:23:05.484 --> 00:23:11.199
creator we could call god? If he would just burst through the roof here, and point at the three of you and say:

00:23:11.199 --> 00:23:17.281
“Stop spreading this nonsense”. 
- Now THAT I would think is the beer or the whisky talking...

00:23:17.281 --> 00:23:21.323
That wouldn't do it. No, there's plenty of things that would do it.

00:23:21.323 --> 00:23:26.197
We go out at night and all of a sudden the stars are rearranged and say: “You suckers, you better believe”.

00:23:26.197 --> 00:23:30.684
- In Aramaic, only in Aramaic, when I believe it…
- Yes. And everybody can see them, not just me.

00:23:30.684 --> 00:23:37.725
Then I go back to the whisky hypothesis. But actually there's more interesting ways of doing it.

00:23:37.725 --> 00:23:46.563
I just read recently a sci-fi novel. I tend to think of good science fiction as thought experiments, like

00:23:46.563 --> 00:23:51.447
thought experiments in philosophy. And this one is called 'Calculating God'. And it's about an alien that comes down

00:23:51.447 --> 00:23:57.447
to earth and asks to see a palaeontologist. And the guy looks like an arachnid, so he’s invertebrate.

00:23:57.447 --> 00:24:03.324
The museum guard doesn’t get that it’s a natural alien. He thinks it’s a joke and plays along, and he says:

00:24:03.324 --> 00:24:08.523
“Well, would you like a vertebrate or an invertebrate paleontologist?" And the alien is puzzled and it says:

00:24:08.523 --> 00:24:12.884
“Well, I thought that the only paleontologists on earth were humans, so he must be a vertebrate”.

00:24:12.884 --> 00:24:19.483
So he gets to talk to the palaeontologist. It turns out that the alien has very very solid and very good empirical evidence

00:24:19.483 --> 00:24:25.724
across a bunch of different traces that there is in fact such a thing as an intelligent designer of the cosmos.

00:24:25.724 --> 00:24:33.323
So the rest of the novel explores how these scientists react to that thing. That situation is unlikely, but it is possible.

00:24:33.323 --> 00:24:43.405
- If there was nothing that could possibly convince you, maybe that’s worrisome, because if there’s nothing that can

00:24:43.405 --> 00:24:46.531
convince you, it almost sounds like faith.


00:24:46.531 --> 00:24:52.198
- The thing that as a philosopher would bother you about that, I think, would be…

00:24:52.198 --> 00:24:55.447
- I'm curious.
- The fundamental problem with that picture is that

00:24:55.447 --> 00:24:59.698
intelligent design implies there’s an intelligent designer.

00:24:59.698 --> 00:25:04.643
Then of course that implies the intelligent designer is more complex than the thing the intelligent designer

00:25:04.643 --> 00:25:09.615
is designing. And then it becomes an infinite regression. Who designed the intelligent designer? 


00:25:09.615 --> 00:25:13.447
That’s the real logical problem.
- Although, to be honest I always found that question


00:25:13.447 --> 00:25:24.404
a little bit disingenuous when it’s asked by atheists. Yes of course, that would be an obvious question, but so what?

00:25:24.404 --> 00:25:29.483
I mean, if we really had convincing evidence of intelligent design, then sure.

00:25:29.483 --> 00:25:35.365
- We could have convincing evidence…
- It wouldn’t be evidence for God. It would be evidence

00:25:35.365 --> 00:25:40.447
for really smart people in another galaxy that designed our stuff.

00:25:40.447 --> 00:25:46.282
It could be Francis Crick’s panspermia, but an organized panspermia, where you decide, like that awful

00:25:46.282 --> 00:25:52.484
movie 'Prometheus', where you want to see the earth with…
- Or the big programmer in the sky. We're all part of a big

00:25:52.484 --> 00:25:58.300
simulation and somebody else has started the game.
- Professor Dennett, do you think that you can only think of

00:25:58.300 --> 00:26:05.197
evidence for a hyper intelligent alien race, and not so much for a god, a deity?

00:26:05.197 --> 00:26:12.948
Maybe you always have this thought in the back of your mind: ‘Wait a minute, there’s this thing about infinite regress”.

00:26:12.948 --> 00:26:16.325
- What do you mean by ‘god’? You mean someone who can suspend the laws of nature?

00:26:16.325 --> 00:26:26.281
- Somebody outside the universe, supernatural.
- The trouble is that if, by definition, god is not just an

00:26:26.281 --> 00:26:33.032
intelligent designer, but supernatural, then I don’t think we can ever have really… well.

00:26:33.032 --> 00:26:45.403
No, I’m gonna back off and say: I can conjure up bizarre fantasies which, if that happened, would impress me tremendously.

00:26:45.403 --> 00:26:56.198
Yeah, I'll make one up on the spot, okay? Somebody shows up, I don’t care what he looks like, and he says:

00:26:56.198 --> 00:27:09.682
“If you drill down 2 miles deep into the mantle of such and such a place on earth, exactly this location, you will find

00:27:09.682 --> 00:27:14.923
down there a golden plate – I’m gonna borrow from…
- Mormons…

00:27:14.923 --> 00:27:25.199
- …from Joseph Smith. You’ll find a golden plate. And on it is written the genome of Craig Venter.

00:27:25.199 --> 00:27:37.923
First of all, we can not imagine a natural way that that gold plate could get down there, 2 miles under the earth, and sure

00:27:37.923 --> 00:27:42.614
enough we do it and it comes up. Something like that would shiver my timbers…

00:27:42.614 --> 00:27:49.140
- Well, you hit on a key point, and I think it’s really important. This is the reason that knowledge is empirical.

00:27:49.140 --> 00:27:58.391
You cannot imagine it. And we have to be very careful as scientists to say ‘we can not imagine something’.

00:27:58.391 --> 00:28:05.444
Because then when we observe it, we have to try and understand if there is any imaginable way… before

00:28:05.444 --> 00:28:14.842
we attribute it to the most exotic possibility. We have to see if there’s a far less exotic possibility that could explain it.

00:28:14.842 --> 00:28:20.890
And we are obligated to do that. It’s true not just for something that crazy.

00:28:20.890 --> 00:28:28.844
When we see a peak at the Large Hadron Collider, we are obligated to examine every more mundane possibility

00:28:28.844 --> 00:28:34.640
before we say we discovered a new elementary particle. And that’s the fact that you want to disprove the very

00:28:34.640 --> 00:28:39.973
hypothesis that you're hoping for, is what makes science different than religion. One of the many things!

00:28:39.973 --> 00:28:45.963
- I don’t want to agree too much, but I’m going to bring in another sci-fi scenario in favour of what Lawrence just said.

00:28:45.963 --> 00:28:54.557
So I’m a Star Trek fan. 
- Great, I get extra money for that…

00:28:54.557 --> 00:29:02.283
I read your book actually. One of the episodes of The Next Generation that is most pertinent to this discussion is called

00:29:02.283 --> 00:29:07.890
‘The Devil’s Due’. And it’s a situation where The Enterprise happened to be orbiting a planet where people are scared

00:29:07.890 --> 00:29:15.523
out of their wits because the devil has come back to claim her due. It’s a female. Of course it’s a woman...

00:29:15.523 --> 00:29:22.640
Of course, Captain Picard doesn’t buy for a second that this woman really is the devil although apparently she can do

00:29:22.640 --> 00:29:28.306
miraculous things. She can conjure up earthquakes on a whim, she can appear and disappear from one side to

00:29:28.306 --> 00:29:33.222
another of the planet. Of course, by the end of the episode it turns out sure enough she was just a trickster.

00:29:33.222 --> 00:29:38.924
She’s using a series of highly technologically sophisticated tricks, but that’s what it is, right? And that is the problem:

00:29:38.924 --> 00:29:47.390
that, even though it’s conceivable that there can be an intelligent designer that is in fact truly supernatural,

00:29:47.390 --> 00:29:55.244
meaning that he or she can actually act outside or suspend the laws of nature. It’s much harder to imagine what set of

00:29:55.244 --> 00:29:59.223
circumstances would truly convince us of that, because you’ll always have the suspicion that “you know what, I just

00:29:59.223 --> 00:30:02.444
don’t know enough about the stuff”. It could be that it’s The Enterprise out there doing it.


00:30:02.444 --> 00:30:05.244
- It’s very difficult to rule out alternative natural explanations…

00:30:05.244 --> 00:30:11.604
- Well, that takes us back to the subject, the limits of science. Because one of the biggest misunderstandings of science is

00:30:11.604 --> 00:30:17.004
that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before. That’s not how science works.

00:30:17.004 --> 00:30:24.123
What has satisfied the test of experiment, will always work. Newton’s laws have been supplanted by general relativity.

00:30:24.123 --> 00:30:37.307
But if you want to throw a baseball, a million years from now, that ball will be described by Newton’s laws, because

00:30:37.307 --> 00:30:42.973
it survives the test of experiment. We’ll learn things that will change our fundamental understanding, the base of it,

00:30:42.973 --> 00:30:50.163
but they’ll never contradict Newton’s laws. So it is true that at the limits of our knowledge, anything may be possible.

00:30:50.163 --> 00:30:55.973
And we can’t presume, when we see something strange, to say it’s supernatural or natural.

00:30:55.973 --> 00:31:05.244
But if it violates things that have been tested over and over again, the basis of science, then it would be much more

00:31:05.244 --> 00:31:13.558
implausible that it’s new physics. If you let a ball go, and it fell up instead of down, that would be a much more…

00:31:13.558 --> 00:31:19.889
So it’s not the edges, it’s not the exotic stuff. It’s the really basic stuff that you can be pretty confident about.

00:31:19.889 --> 00:31:25.307
- Let’s move on to a different topic. Yeah, finally...

00:31:25.307 --> 00:31:36.244
Another possible limit of science is the idea that science can teach us about the empirical facts, as all of you agree, but

00:31:36.244 --> 00:31:42.282
not about what we ought to do. Not about how we should behave. Not about ethics.

00:31:42.282 --> 00:31:50.843
So, professor Krauss, let me start with you. Do you think that science, single-handedly, without the help of other

00:31:50.843 --> 00:31:54.685
ways of knowing, can tell us how we should behave?


00:31:54.685 --> 00:31:59.685
- Yeah, I do. But I’m gonna use my expansive definition of science.

00:31:59.685 --> 00:32:07.640
The point is: we cannot even ask the question how we should behave until we know what the consequences of

00:32:07.640 --> 00:32:13.604
our actions are, very first. The only way to know the consequences of our actions is science, namely empirical

00:32:13.604 --> 00:32:15.972
observations so you can see the consequences.

00:32:15.972 --> 00:32:19.524
You know, if you hit someone with an axe on the head, are they gonna die?

00:32:19.524 --> 00:32:30.640
So before you can make any judgement, you have to know the consequences of their actions. So that’s the first step.

00:32:30.640 --> 00:32:40.807
Without science, you can’t possibly have an ethics or a morals. Morals is a word that I’m much less enthusiastic

00:32:40.807 --> 00:32:43.283
about.
- So that would be the weaker claim.

00:32:43.283 --> 00:32:49.684
- That’s the first level. But I would argue that after that…
- That’s already going too far, but anyway…

00:32:49.684 --> 00:32:59.363
- Ok, ok. After that, what we do, we ultimately make rational decisions. I know that we are governed by emotional

00:32:59.363 --> 00:33:04.282
responses, and all the rest. Although ultimately I think science will help us understand those emotional responses.

00:33:04.282 --> 00:33:15.764
Neuroscience will, it doesn’t yet. So I think ultimately most of the people who make ethical decisions, make ethical

00:33:15.764 --> 00:33:21.924
decisions based on a set of premises which are generally rational.

00:33:21.924 --> 00:33:30.444
So I think rational thought applied to empirical evidence, is what I call science. Certainly, you don’t get your ethics from

00:33:30.444 --> 00:33:44.843
a book of revelations. You get it either from some genetic predisposition, if there are evolutionary bases of certain

00:33:44.843 --> 00:33:49.140
responses. But science will help us understand those. Or from some rational decision making.

00:33:49.140 --> 00:33:54.057
Ultimately, the whole question of ethics comes down to scientific questions, yeah.

00:33:54.057 --> 00:33:59.003
- Right. Professor Pigliucci…
- I think that answer confuses several different things which

00:33:59.003 --> 00:34:11.363
need to be taken separately. We’re back to the “just semantics”. I hate it when people say “just the semantics”.

00:34:11.363 --> 00:34:17.557
Semantics is very important. Semantics is about language and meaning. If we don’t agree on the meaning, then

00:34:17.557 --> 00:34:25.640
we’re not having a discussion. Clearly you can come up with an expansive enough definition of science.

00:34:25.640 --> 00:34:32.473
If you say ‘science has to do with anything that has even remotely input from the empirical world’, and I define input

00:34:32.473 --> 00:34:35.283
from the empirical world, even the kind of things we were talking

00:34:35.283 --> 00:34:39.807
about earlier in terms of mathematics and logic, then of course everything is science. You sort of win by definition.

00:34:39.807 --> 00:34:43.604
But that seems like an empty pyrrhic victory. It’s like ‘now what are you saying then?’.

00:34:43.604 --> 00:34:49.684
Most people don’t think that is what science is. In fact, most scientists don’t think that is what science is.

00:34:49.684 --> 00:34:55.420
- Well, I don’t know how you could say that…
- The problem with that sort of expansive definition is

00:34:55.420 --> 00:35:01.243
that the two can play that game, right? I could say ‘Philosophy is about thinking, and since everything we do

00:35:01.243 --> 00:35:10.556
implies thinking, that we’re always philosophizing.’ I wouldn’t go that far because that becomes an empty statement.

00:35:10.556 --> 00:35:17.308
It’s like ‘so what?’. I’d like to hear Dan, and then I have a couple more things about the consequences to say…

00:35:17.308 --> 00:35:21.140
- Yeah, let Prof. Dennett chime in. Are we doing philosophy now, or are we doing science?

00:35:21.140 --> 00:35:29.443
- We’re ignoring an issue which I think actually gets to the heart of the question. And that is:

00:35:29.443 --> 00:35:38.557
should we count all of the normative wisdom that we have acquired over the years as science?

00:35:38.557 --> 00:35:46.890
Again, it’s a semantic issue, but there’s a lot of it. How to play good chess? Whether Bridge is a better game than Whist?

00:35:46.890 --> 00:35:53.473
There is, just to take some relatively trivial examples…
- So those are normative…

00:35:53.473 --> 00:36:02.640
- They are normative. Now, a lot of people would say: “Normative systems of thought are not science”.

00:36:02.640 --> 00:36:06.444
I think you would say: “Oh yes, they are”.

00:36:06.444 --> 00:36:09.972
- How can you know Bridge is better than Whist if you haven’t played either or know the rules?

00:36:09.972 --> 00:36:20.889
You can’t just close your mind and have a revelation.
- No, of course not. But still, what I’m getting at, is that

00:36:20.889 --> 00:36:30.890
the propositions include propositions which say: ‘This is better than that', or 'this is the right way of doing this.’

00:36:30.890 --> 00:36:38.363
And those are normative. Normativity plays a role everywhere in science, but it does have a rather

00:36:38.363 --> 00:36:48.283
marked role. And I think that, if you think of, say, ethical issues and political issues, as in the end fundamentally

00:36:48.283 --> 00:36:57.243
normative, which is what philosophers have typically said… What counts as a good life? How ought we to live?

00:36:57.243 --> 00:37:08.806
If you think of questions of that sort, as close cousins to: ‘Which is a better game, Canasta or Bridge?’.

00:37:08.806 --> 00:37:17.161
How could you ever answer that question? It’s obviously going to be relative to what kind of players are playing

00:37:17.161 --> 00:37:22.203
the game. Human beings are such… I’m going to take an example, ok?

00:37:22.203 --> 00:37:29.828
Chess was ‘improved’ several times over the years. The castling rule was introduced, the 'moving of the pawn' to the

00:37:29.828 --> 00:37:37.910
<i>en passant</i> rule. Those were considered improvements and I think almost everybody agrees.

00:37:37.910 --> 00:37:44.911
That’s improvements by our lights. We’re impatient human beings. We just think the game is better

00:37:44.911 --> 00:37:54.044
playing a little faster. That’s all it is. But these are normative judgements. They have an empirical basis.

00:37:54.044 --> 00:38:03.993
You have to play the game. You never dream of making an evaluation without doing the empirical work.

00:38:03.993 --> 00:38:12.994
But once you’ve made the evaluation, it has a different logical standing. It’s different from just saying:

00:38:12.994 --> 00:38:17.577
“People of North America like this kind of chess….”
- Absolutely! But on the other hand it’s not…

00:38:17.577 --> 00:38:28.578
not only subjective, but it’s time-variant. So absolutely, it depends on… The word ‘better’, whether this is ‘better’ than

00:38:28.578 --> 00:38:36.044
that, depends on who you are, where you are, when you are. So it doesn’t have any independent reality. What’s ‘good’

00:38:36.044 --> 00:38:43.577
doesn’t have an independent reality. And therefore, arguing about whether science determines that is just an irrelevant question. 


00:38:43.577 --> 00:38:52.326
- That’s a red herring. To call it an independent reality, that’s a straw man.

00:38:52.326 --> 00:39:05.124
- The question I want to ask is: do you agree that the answers to those kind of questions may not be universal?

00:39:05.124 --> 00:39:11.576
- Yeah.
- Ok. And to understand them you have to often understand

00:39:11.576 --> 00:39:16.245
not only the individual background, but the cultural experiences etc.

00:39:16.245 --> 00:39:25.965
- If we had a large group of people meeting together in a organized political debate, discussion, where they

00:39:25.965 --> 00:39:31.909
were going to vote, and try to settle on some rules for how to lead your life.

00:39:31.909 --> 00:39:39.826
That could be done rationally, that could be done well. And if it succeeded, we could all remark that this is one of the

00:39:39.826 --> 00:39:45.912
great achievements of human intelligence. BUT the question is: would it be science? And I would think no.

00:39:45.912 --> 00:39:50.910
It would be political action. 
- But how do you know it succeeds?

00:39:50.910 --> 00:39:56.911
That’s the question. To determine if it succeeds, is a scientific question. You know if it succeeds by studying what

00:39:56.911 --> 00:40:03.179
happens based on those laws, and then asking people if they are happier, or… whatever your criteria are…

00:40:03.625 --> 00:40:06.409
So if it succeeds is a scientific question.


00:40:06.409 --> 00:40:12.947
- But there is a lot there swept into the “whatever those criteria are”. There’s a lot of stuff going on there that is not

00:40:12.947 --> 00:40:14.613
actually empirical. 
- Of course…

00:40:14.613 --> 00:40:19.334
- Here’s another way to put the problem. First of all, when you started talking about consequences, it’s kind of

00:40:19.334 --> 00:40:24.135
interesting because to a philosopher that immediately brings up: ‘Oh, so he has chosen a consequentialist frame of mind’.

00:40:24.135 --> 00:40:29.532
- Yeah, I’ve heard this consequentialism and all that stuff… 
- Well, yeah, “all that stuff” is philosophy.

00:40:29.532 --> 00:40:37.613
Consequentialism is one way of looking at ethical problems. It’s by no means the universally agreed upon way.

00:40:37.613 --> 00:40:40.334
- No no, but it’s probably a component of every way, right?

00:40:40.334 --> 00:40:42.300
- No
- Hmmm, no.

00:40:42.300 --> 00:40:47.254
- You may not make your ultimate decision on what is the appropriate action. You might not be a consequential<i>ist</i>,

00:40:47.254 --> 00:40:56.175
but you probably have to at least address the issue of consequences when you are using other criteria to decide

00:40:56.175 --> 00:40:58.363
what's the…
- Of course, of course...

00:40:58.363 --> 00:41:06.815
- In the game of chess, you could say that there are objective, normative rules, because you have a

00:41:06.815 --> 00:41:13.495
pre-established goal. You want to force the other one to checkmate. It’s only when you agree on that goal, that

00:41:13.495 --> 00:41:17.655
you can have an objective measure of success and you can see which moves are better than other ones.

00:41:17.655 --> 00:41:24.175
But the more fundamental question is of course: if we change the goal, and in chess there are opposite goals

00:41:24.175 --> 00:41:30.697
because we have a challenge, but in morality, don’t we have to find some way to agree on the goal first?

00:41:30.697 --> 00:41:38.094
- Well, yes, but the question is: is THAT a scientific question? Imagine…

00:41:38.094 --> 00:41:44.495
There was a great debate raging over how to play chess. Should you keep the ‘en passant’ rule, should you

00:41:44.495 --> 00:41:48.495
keep ‘castling’ or not? And it turned out there were heated debates.

00:41:48.495 --> 00:41:56.816
There were people who liked the old way, people who like the new way. And what are we going to do? Well, what we could do,

00:41:56.816 --> 00:42:04.495
hoping that it would work, is: have a conflict, get all the parties in who are interested and who cared, and

00:42:04.495 --> 00:42:10.894
see if one side can convince the other that their way was better. If they can’t, that’s an empirical discovery.

00:42:10.894 --> 00:42:22.334
It doesn’t work. But if they do, if everybody that cares, comes to see and agree, quite wholeheartedly:

00:42:22.334 --> 00:42:30.653
“Look, this is the right way to play chess”. A: that’s not just an empirical fact. It is an empirical fact, and you‘ve got to

00:42:30.653 --> 00:42:36.690
test it by, you know, you gotta count the votes and all the rest of that. But it also has a rather different standing.

00:42:36.690 --> 00:42:45.939
- Another way to put what I think Dan is getting at, is that nobody in his right mind, I think, no philosopher in his

00:42:45.939 --> 00:42:51.691
right mind, is saying that empirical facts, or even some scientific facts – as should be clear by now, I take a more

00:42:51.691 --> 00:42:57.133
restrictive definition of science or concept of science than Lawrence does - but even if we want to talk about

00:42:57.133 --> 00:43:04.934
empirical facts, broadly speaking, nobody is denying, or at least should be denying, and certainly not in this group,

00:43:04.934 --> 00:43:12.175
that empirical facts are relevant to ethical decisions. That’s not the question. The question is – another way to put

00:43:12.175 --> 00:43:16.108
what Dan was saying a minute ago – is that the empirical facts, most of the times, if not all the times, in

00:43:16.108 --> 00:43:25.135
ethical decision making, are going to underdetermine those decisions, those value judgments that we make.

00:43:25.135 --> 00:43:32.523
So the way I think of ethics is of essentially ‘applied rationality’. You start with certain general ideas.

00:43:32.523 --> 00:43:38.524
Are you adopting a utilitarian framework? Are you adopting a deontological framework, a virtue ethics

00:43:38.524 --> 00:43:45.053
framework, or whatever it is? And then that essentially plays the equivalent role of, sort of, general axioms, if you will,

00:43:45.053 --> 00:43:52.090
in mathematics or general assumptions in logic. And from there you incorporate knowledge, empirical knowledge,

00:43:52.229 --> 00:43:59.646
about, among other things, what kind of beings humans are. Ethics, let’s not forget, is about human beings.

00:43:59.646 --> 00:44:07.333
If we were not social animals, intelligent, conscious animals of a particular type, the whole point of ethics wouldn’t hold.

00:44:07.333 --> 00:44:09.646
- There’s also the issue of, sorry, you wanna add something?

00:44:09.646 --> 00:44:18.454
- Obviously, what you both said is reasonable in that sense, but it suggests in some sense that ethics has

00:44:18.454 --> 00:44:21.646
some existence. Take: someone’s pretty. Does ‘pretty’ have an objective…

00:44:21.646 --> 00:44:30.092
I would not say that science determines ‘pretty’. Science can determine why I may think, on the basis of my cultural

00:44:30.092 --> 00:44:36.397
experience or my gender, what’s pretty. And it could determine why someone else would determine that

00:44:36.397 --> 00:44:44.532
something very different is pretty. But it wouldn’t suggest that ‘pretty’ has any meaning beyond that.

00:44:44.532 --> 00:44:51.979
And so, I guess what I worry about… It’s absolutely true that when humans make ethical decisions…

00:44:51.979 --> 00:45:01.813
I don’t live my life every day, saying, well, what’s the rational… I act as a human because humans are not

00:45:01.813 --> 00:45:11.852
fully rational. I’m governed by emotion, and all of that, but to assign some reality to something which is just a construct

00:45:11.852 --> 00:45:19.932
that varies and depends upon circumstances is, I think, overdoing it, and I think ethics is that.

00:45:19.932 --> 00:45:23.481
- I don’t think we were doing that, and I think most ethicists would agree with that.

00:45:23.481 --> 00:45:26.773
- I think you’re conjuring up a ghost that isn’t really there.

00:45:26.773 --> 00:45:29.229
- Maybe
- But, let me get back…

00:45:29.618 --> 00:45:33.487
- Wait, is there a ghost that is there?
- Let me get back to a question that was asked earlier, and

00:45:33.487 --> 00:45:40.405
that was: ‘are there other ways of knowing?’. I would say: no, there aren’t other ways of knowing, but there's other

00:45:40.405 --> 00:45:45.405
ways of doing things.
- Absolutely! I would agree with that.

00:45:45.405 --> 00:45:49.700
- And some of them are really good, and some of them are really important. They are just not ways of knowing.

00:45:49.700 --> 00:45:51.652
- We agree completely. Do you agree with that?
- Yes.


00:45:51.652 --> 00:45:58.406
- Ok, well then. Can we go from here?
- We have 26 more topics to go. That’s ok?

00:45:58.406 --> 00:46:03.950
- Sure. That’s well put.
- The question I wanted to ask earlier was...

00:46:03.950 --> 00:46:13.535
You brought up the example of… you need science to know what the consequence is of…

00:46:13.535 --> 00:46:18.566
- Anything.
- You know, hitting someone on the head with an axe.

00:46:18.566 --> 00:46:27.806
There is sometimes this temptation to look at brain scanners for example, and to say: “See, this person is

00:46:27.806 --> 00:46:36.647
suffering!”, so this is objectively wrong. I’m always wondering: do we really need sophisticated

00:46:36.647 --> 00:46:42.647
scientific equipment to know that? We can tell… 
- The answer is: no.

00:46:42.647 --> 00:46:45.118
- The answer depends on the question you’re asking.

00:46:45.118 --> 00:46:51.243
- Does it give us more confidence if we have a brain scanner? Because it seems like: now it has a scientific basis.

00:46:51.243 --> 00:46:57.451
- Dan is probably the biggest expert in this group here. Only if you understand what the signals mean.

00:46:57.451 --> 00:47:02.646
I think the big problem with neuroscience is that there are a lots of signals and some people think they have some

00:47:02.646 --> 00:47:04.951
deep understanding of what they mean, but they probably don’t…

00:47:04.951 --> 00:47:10.406
- No, but I think it’s worse than that. I think that what Maarten is getting at is different.

00:47:10.406 --> 00:47:14.202
There are some instances where science, actual science, what I would consider even in my restricted definition

00:47:14.202 --> 00:47:20.284
of science, actually is pertinent. Let’s say we are having a debate about abortion. And let’s say that because of a

00:47:20.284 --> 00:47:26.452
number of pieces of reasoning, we started with certain assumptions blablablah, we arrive at a conclusion that:

00:47:26.452 --> 00:47:33.034
ok, abortion is reasonable up until the moment in which the foetus begins to feel pain.

00:47:33.034 --> 00:47:36.201
Let’s assume for the sake of argument. I know, let’s assume…

00:47:36.201 --> 00:47:43.119
Well, if we get there, now at that point it really is the job of the developmental and neuro-biologists to tell us: what’s

00:47:43.119 --> 00:47:48.203
your best estimate of when that happens, right? So that’s a clear example where neurobiology or developmental

00:47:48.203 --> 00:47:49.701
biology really does…

00:47:49.701 --> 00:47:52.952
- What you realize is that their best estimate is probably garbage, at least at this point.

00:47:52.952 --> 00:47:55.284
- Maybe…
- Not garbage, it’s a better estimate than other people’s,

00:47:55.284 --> 00:48:00.367
but it's uncertain.
- The point is: that is a clear case to me where science

00:48:00.367 --> 00:48:05.326
either does already or could very very likely in the future do that sort of stuff.

00:48:05.326 --> 00:48:14.368
What Maarten was getting at is, for instance: I can bring up my regular whipping boy, one of the other three horsemen.

00:48:14.368 --> 00:48:21.452
- You mean I’m not? I’m sorry, go on…
- Never, never… We’re friends, especially for drinking.

00:48:21.452 --> 00:48:28.807
No, Sam Harris, who you introduced as a philosopher, I would characterize mostly as a neuroscience based person.

00:48:28.807 --> 00:48:36.165
I think that he would do it that way. When I read his book, ‘The Moral Landscape’ which promised a scientific way of

00:48:36.165 --> 00:48:44.525
handling ethical questions. I got through the entire book and I didn’t learn anything at all, zero, new about ethics, right?

00:48:44.525 --> 00:48:48.565
- The main thesis of the book, for people who don’t know him, is that you can have a scientific basis for moral

00:48:48.565 --> 00:48:50.323
facts in the universe.



00:48:50.323 --> 00:48:58.646
- And I think what Maarten was getting at: one of Sam’s examples is exactly that if you’re in the process of genital

00:48:58.646 --> 00:49:08.925
mutilation of a young girl, and you do a neuro-scan. You’ll see that girl is going through a lot of pain. You think?

00:49:08.925 --> 00:49:15.118
Do I really need that? Seriously? What does that add to the whole picture?

00:49:15.118 --> 00:49:22.306
The screaming will do it for me, thank you very much. Screaming is empirical evidence, but you can hardly call it scientific.

00:49:22.537 --> 00:49:29.642
- Yeah, and to pay deference to my philosopher friends…

00:49:29.803 --> 00:49:39.476
I’m not saying ethics is irrelevant, I’m just saying it’s contextual. There’s no doubt that people who think seriously

00:49:39.476 --> 00:49:53.011
about the implications of actions, our ethicists or philosophers…

00:49:53.011 --> 00:49:59.779
One doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. One can learn from the detailed, complex, logical, rational thinking that

00:49:59.779 --> 00:50:08.163
philosophers do in determining what ethics may be reasonable or not. And I think that’s an essential part.

00:50:08.215 --> 00:50:11.881
- Great, we agree again, we can move on to the next topic. 
- This is getting too easy…

00:50:11.881 --> 00:50:15.112
- How can something arise out of nothing?
- Oh boy…

00:50:15.112 --> 00:50:20.162
- There is something, and before that, well… what was there?

00:50:20.162 --> 00:50:25.604
- I don’t understand why people are bothered by that at all. I mean I really don’t. It happens every day.

00:50:25.619 --> 00:50:34.640
The lights that are shining, the photons that are hitting my eyes, they were emitted by electrons that are jumping

00:50:34.640 --> 00:50:44.320
between states in the atom. Where was the photon before the electron emitted it? It didn’t exist! But it’s enough for me to see.

00:50:44.320 --> 00:50:48.480
- There was a lot of stuff around that maybe had provoked the photon.

00:50:48.480 --> 00:50:54.741
- So the key question. I’m glad you asked ‘how’ because, you know, that’s the way I like to ask the question.

00:50:54.741 --> 00:51:00.034
That’s all we can answer.
- He’s careful, he’s a philosopher.

00:51:00.034 --> 00:51:04.333
- I mean… science shows all the time how things...

00:51:04.384 --> 00:51:14.223
The reason I wrote the book is: it seems like a miracle that to get stuff, you get stuff from no stuff. And in fact, it’s easy.

00:51:14.254 --> 00:51:18.372
It’s required. Quantum mechanics requires it...

00:51:18.372 --> 00:51:26.289
...in our universe, but it also could suggest that space and time themselves could result from no universe.

00:51:26.289 --> 00:51:30.573
Now you can ask the deeper question :‘Was there anything else?’.

00:51:30.573 --> 00:51:38.934
Those are questions you can ask. But the miracle, that people seem to think as a miracle, is how you get a

00:51:38.934 --> 00:51:46.172
universe when there is no universe. And that is easy to imagine, without violating the known laws of physics.

00:51:46.172 --> 00:51:51.412
Now you can ask: “Ok, there was no universe, was there anything else?”. That’s a different question.

00:51:51.412 --> 00:51:59.955
It’s like saying: “I don’t care where the photon came from, I want to know where the atom was.”. But the simple question is:

00:51:59.955 --> 00:52:07.173
how did our universe come from nothing? That is remarkably and in principle answerable.

00:52:07.173 --> 00:52:13.955
And moreover, the reason I wrote the book is: if you ask “What would be the characteristics of a universe that arose

00:52:13.955 --> 00:52:20.123
from no universe by laws of physics without any supernatural shenanigans?", it would have precisely the

00:52:20.123 --> 00:52:23.788
characteristics of the universe we see, and it didn’t have to be that way.

00:52:23.788 --> 00:52:26.205
It could have been something else! We could falsify that presumption.

00:52:26.205 --> 00:52:34.488
- Let me try a parallel that… I think that Lawrence may like it. We’ll see.

00:52:34.488 --> 00:52:36.978
- If it agrees with me, I’ll love it.
- Well, we’ll see.

00:52:36.978 --> 00:52:39.601
- It’s an empirical question.

00:52:39.601 --> 00:52:47.129
There are questions that philosophers have been asking for millennia, and every now and then, a scientist

00:52:47.129 --> 00:52:54.017
comes along and says: “Well, instead of answering exactly that question, let me suggest a substitute question

00:52:54.017 --> 00:53:01.767
which we can answer, and which, once we’ve answered it, we’ll sort of loose interest in the other question."

00:53:01.767 --> 00:53:11.434
But let me choose an example where this was I think brilliant and comically failed to achieve its end.

00:53:11.434 --> 00:53:17.888
That was Turing in his classic paper. He said: “Well, everybody wants to know if computers can think, if robots

00:53:17.888 --> 00:53:23.888
can think. Let me ask an easier question. Let me ask one that we can answer.”

00:53:23.888 --> 00:53:25.851
- This is Alan Turing, the computer scientist.


00:53:25.851 --> 00:53:31.351
Alan Turing, right. And he proposed the famous Turing test. He said: “Now here’s a good empirical question”.

00:53:31.351 --> 00:53:40.049
And I think everybody ought to be…. Look: if a computer can beat a human being in the Turing test...


00:53:40.049 --> 00:53:43.933
- Can you briefly explain what the Turing test is, for the sake of…?

00:53:43.933 --> 00:53:50.970
- Ok, I wonder if there’s people here that don’t know. Probably there are. You have a judge or two.

00:53:50.970 --> 00:53:58.352
Let’s just say one judge, to keep it simple. And the judge is having a conversation with two different agents: A & B.

00:53:58.352 --> 00:54:02.568
One of them is a human being, and one of them is a robot or a computer.

00:54:02.568 --> 00:54:14.100
The identity is concealed, but the human judge’s job is to tell which is the human being, and which is the robot.

00:54:14.100 --> 00:54:23.850
And if the robot – or the computer, it doesn’t have to have a body – if the computer program can fool the judge

00:54:23.850 --> 00:54:32.267
more often than not over a half an hour test, we would all agree: that is one smart, one intelligent computer program.

00:54:32.267 --> 00:54:41.102
Turing thought that this was a nice conversation stopper. It would end an interminable philosophical wrangle which

00:54:41.102 --> 00:54:45.129
was not getting anywhere, and replace it with a question of some interest.

00:54:45.129 --> 00:54:50.409
Not one that he thought we should set about trying to answer empirically. But he just wanted to point out…

00:54:50.409 --> 00:54:57.208
‘How about replacing that old chestnut with this more easily answerable question?'

00:54:57.208 --> 00:55:01.267
Now I take it that that’s the sort of thing that Lawrence was doing in his book.

00:55:01.267 --> 00:55:05.517
He was saying: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a question about how you get something from nothing, or why is there

00:55:05.517 --> 00:55:14.435
a universe rather than nothing. We can wring changes on that ancient philosophical conundrum, but how about this:

00:55:14.435 --> 00:55:19.809
here is a question which is at least very closely related to that. And we can answer it!

00:55:19.809 --> 00:55:27.684
And once we answer it, who cares about the other question?

00:55:27.684 --> 00:55:30.601
- I think it takes more than that. What science can do is sometimes they…

00:55:30.601 --> 00:55:36.433
Sometimes the other question is simply not a good question. For example… no, no, this is very important!

00:55:36.433 --> 00:55:40.934
Because science can tell us that the kind of ways we’re framing things are wrong.

00:55:40.934 --> 00:55:44.517
Most of us would agree that the ‘why’ question is not a good question.

00:55:44.517 --> 00:55:49.129
- Of course, but what I want to add, just to drop the other shoe on this.

00:55:49.129 --> 00:55:59.649
Turing, I thought it was a brilliant move, but it failed miserably. Because people don’t want to settle for that

00:55:59.649 --> 00:56:03.047
question. They should want to, but they don’t want to.

00:56:03.047 --> 00:56:07.434
- People want to know the ‘why’ question, because they really want there to be some reason.

00:56:07.434 --> 00:56:08.766
- That's right.

00:56:08.766 --> 00:56:12.101
- And there may be no reason and science has to recognize the fact that there may be no reason.

00:56:12.101 --> 00:56:17.129
But better than saying the ‘why’ question is not a good question – which it isn’t, because it makes a presumption

00:56:17.129 --> 00:56:22.934
of an answer that there must be a reason, and there may be none – but a better one is: it may say, for example, that

00:56:22.934 --> 00:56:28.517
our whole notions are wrong, which is why science – especially physics, but I imagine it’s happening in other

00:56:28.517 --> 00:56:30.768
fields – changes the playing field so much.

00:56:30.768 --> 00:56:36.888
For example, it can say: the question of "What happened before, where did it come from?" is not a good question, or

00:56:36.888 --> 00:56:42.517
may not be a good question. Because if space and time are related in general relativity - when space is created time is

00:56:42.517 --> 00:56:46.289
created - and the question “before” may not even have a meaning.

00:56:46.289 --> 00:56:53.700
“Before” may be something that arises when time arises. And time may not arise until after the big bang.

00:56:53.700 --> 00:57:00.048
So that whole human intuitive concept goes out the window, and it’s not the right way to ask the question.

00:57:00.048 --> 00:57:04.517
- Hold on a second! So sometimes that is definitely the case.

00:57:04.517 --> 00:57:12.184
You described exactly the process. Sometimes science shows that what we thought was a good question, turns

00:57:12.184 --> 00:57:15.434
out to be either badly put, or in fact completely meaningless.

00:57:15.434 --> 00:57:23.516
In other cases, I don’t actually think that the Turing example is going quite in that direction.

00:57:23.516 --> 00:57:29.489
It’s a good example in terms that, yes, Turing failed abysmally to convince everybody else, certainly

00:57:29.489 --> 00:57:35.184
in philosophy departments, that he figured out the answer to the question, or that he had a better question.

00:57:35.184 --> 00:57:40.351
But I don’t think that the other question is in fact meaningless or uninteresting or whatever.

00:57:40.351 --> 00:57:43.351
- Which question?
- The one that Turing did not want to answer.

00:57:43.351 --> 00:57:48.209
There are interesting issues…
- Well, then we’ve got a disagreement…

00:57:48.209 --> 00:57:53.601
I know, we do. But there are interesting issues about the nature of intelligence, the relationship between intelligence

00:57:53.601 --> 00:57:56.684
and consciousness, for instance, which are not at all the same thing.

00:57:56.684 --> 00:58:02.289
You can imagine a being, either biological or artificial, that is very intelligent but not…


00:58:02.289 --> 00:58:07.808
- But that’s a side issue. Let’s get back to nothing.
- No no. The reason I wanted to get there is because

00:58:07.808 --> 00:58:14.684
sometimes I see my colleagues in the sciences, and remember I’m a scientist myself, so I’m talking to myself,

00:58:14.684 --> 00:58:18.351
which happens often. And usually when I argue with myself.

00:58:18.351 --> 00:58:19.568
- You have to be careful about that…

00:58:19.568 --> 00:58:25.767
- I know, it’s a disease. But when I argue with myself, actually, I get it right. I convince the other self.

00:58:25.767 --> 00:58:34.368
Anyway, one of the problems with the science/philosophy antagonism: I think it’s unfortunate that it’s seen by so many

00:58:34.368 --> 00:58:39.208
people, some philosophers and some scientists as well, as an antagonism.

00:58:39.208 --> 00:58:42.168
Because there are other ways to put what we just talked about.

00:58:42.168 --> 00:58:48.288
For instance, there is a model of progress, of philosophy making progress, that goes something along these lines.

00:58:48.288 --> 00:58:53.408
There are certain questions that philosophers are trying to clarify. Philosophy is mostly about clarifying things.

00:58:53.408 --> 00:58:58.208
It’s about thinking about ‘What does that mean?’, ‘What do we mean by this?’, ‘Let’s talk about this stuff’.

00:58:58.208 --> 00:59:04.267
Then at some point some of these questions become actually amenable to empirical answers. They go into the

00:59:04.267 --> 00:59:11.516
scientific arena. We have several examples of entire disciplines, including science itself of course, originally from philosophy.

00:59:11.516 --> 00:59:18.351
Now what happens at that point is interesting. We can mention several cases. Science itself came out of

00:59:18.351 --> 00:59:23.767
what used to be ‘natural philosophy’. People like Descartes and even Newton actually, thought of themselves as philosophers.

00:59:23.767 --> 00:59:25.648
And then it becomes science.


00:59:25.648 --> 00:59:28.210
- But they also thought of themselves as theologians too, so…

00:59:28.210 --> 00:59:33.168
- Yeah, I agree. But what used to be called natural philosophy became science.

00:59:33.168 --> 00:59:40.888
What used to a branch of philosophy became eventually psychology, independently. And to some extent what is now

00:59:40.888 --> 00:59:46.184
philosophy of mind is turning into a combination of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and

00:59:46.184 --> 00:59:51.850
so on and so forth. Now, what happens at that point to philosophers? Are philosophers therefore out of business?

00:59:51.850 --> 01:00:03.267
No, what happens is that philosophers switch their interests to observing that newly spawned discipline from the outside.

01:00:03.267 --> 01:00:08.850
So now you have philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology and so on.

01:00:08.850 --> 01:00:13.809
What happens is that… This is progress, I think.

01:00:13.809 --> 01:00:19.267
Because it’s philosophers coming up with certain questions, a question becomes amenable to empirical answers.

01:00:19.267 --> 01:00:24.128
The scientists take them over. Now there’s something else that is the problem, which is:

01:00:24.128 --> 01:00:27.351
ok, how is it exactly the scientists are doing? What are they doing?

01:00:27.351 --> 01:00:32.488
- The value of philosophy is actually the next topic. I just want to resolve this issue of nothingness.

01:00:32.488 --> 01:00:39.648
Because I have a quote from your book which I found interesting and provocative. It’s from an article maybe.

01:00:39.648 --> 01:00:48.208
I assume that you agree with professor Dennett that sometimes scientists can subtly change the issue and

01:00:48.208 --> 01:00:54.129
answer a more interesting question, and then find out that the old question was maybe not worth asking.

01:00:54.129 --> 01:01:03.729
We have this issue of ‘nothing’ and the standard philosophical definition of what nothing is. 


01:01:03.729 --> 01:01:06.101
- I don’t know. Nobody has given me a standard definition of ‘nothing’.

01:01:06.101 --> 01:01:08.290
- Let’s say that it is the absence of something. 
- Well, that’s easy!

01:01:13.048 --> 01:01:18.267
Right. You have written that, before the advancements of science, there have been “abstract and useless debates

01:01:18.267 --> 01:01:26.101
about the nature of nothingness”, and you say that “to insist on this philosophical notion of ‘nothing’ is backward and

01:01:26.101 --> 01:01:29.248
annoying.” So we have a specific issue here.

01:01:29.248 --> 01:01:35.569
There’s this quantum mechanical notion of nothingness, which is not really nothing because it’s teeming with

01:01:35.569 --> 01:01:40.730
energy and particles. And then we have those philosophers and also theologians insisting on:

01:01:40.730 --> 01:01:43.129
“Yes, but it’s still something. You haven’t explained…”

01:01:43.129 --> 01:01:48.969
Well, my point was just simple, and I suspect again, well we'll see, I suspect there will be more agreement,

01:01:48.969 --> 01:01:55.516
I mean obviously one provokes, but the point is that you can't define 'nothing' without knowing what 'something' is.

01:01:55.516 --> 01:02:05.184
So as we are, as our scientific understanding evolves, the absence of something evolves, our understanding of that.

01:02:05.184 --> 01:02:11.129
So to require something without knowing very carefully what you mean by it - and what I mean by what you mean by it

01:02:11.129 --> 01:02:18.203
is what science has discovered about that - to do that in the absence of that, is a useless debate.

01:02:18.203 --> 01:02:25.168
And I think, it more or less agrees with what Massimo said, that in some sense philosophers try to understand the

01:02:25.168 --> 01:02:35.608
meaning of things by thinking about what the results of science does. And so to have a discussion and debate

01:02:35.608 --> 01:02:40.948
on what the absence of something is without talking about quantum mechanics or without talking about the vacuum or

01:02:40.948 --> 01:02:50.948
without talking about space and time and what they mean and all of that, is maybe enjoyable but it is not particularly informative.

01:02:50.948 --> 01:02:59.808
- There's many cases that I think bear that out. A traditional metaphysical issue is the nature of causation.

01:02:59.808 --> 01:03:08.781
Well, there is one way of studying causation, and that is: look at the best science and see how science uses the idea

01:03:08.781 --> 01:03:18.448
and look at work by scientists, conceptual work on causation, people like Judea Pearl. Then you really get

01:03:18.448 --> 01:03:26.728
a topic. Otherwise what you’re talking about is the folk notion of causation and then you’re doing anthropology, which,

01:03:26.728 --> 01:03:37.418
I mean, not that that's bootless, but it's naive if you think that it's getting at the truth, as opposed to simply getting at

01:03:37.418 --> 01:03:42.333
what some human populations think is an interesting way of defining causation.

01:03:42.333 --> 01:03:49.529
- And I think al lot of philosophy in that sense, not all philosophers but for example, holding to an Aristotelian

01:03:49.529 --> 01:03:55.501
notion and requiring and not all…
- Oh, come on. Nobody holds Aristotelian notions anymore.

01:03:55.501 --> 01:04:01.333
If you did hold to an Aristotelian notion of something and saying that is the thing that I want to describe, you are

01:04:01.333 --> 01:04:07.917
having an interesting conversation about a concept but that concept may not be related to reality.

01:04:07.917 --> 01:04:13.100
- But Lawrence, let me ask you a question. First of all, I actually disagree even in this particular case with Dan,

01:04:13.100 --> 01:04:18.248
I have to say, about causality. Yes, you're right that certainly the early discussions about causality, beginning with Hume,

01:04:18.248 --> 01:04:24.049
which still is the starting point in philosophy for any discussion on causality. They definitely do refer to what you

01:04:24.049 --> 01:04:30.917
called the folk concept of causality. But I think that, you know, I've actually read recently some of that

01:04:30.917 --> 01:04:36.447
technical literature in philosophy of causality because I'm preparing to teach a seminar about this,

01:04:36.447 --> 01:04:41.917
that includes that sort of stuff. And actually the philosophers who are now working on that stuff, very much do what I just

01:04:41.917 --> 01:04:46.000
described a minute ago which is: they do take on board the best notions of science...

01:04:46.000 --> 01:04:51.808
- They have to!
- Well, of course. Well, they don't have to. You are making a moral statement.

01:04:51.808 --> 01:05:01.917
Well, they are, so the point is that they are. But I do get nervous when I hear scientists - some scientists because

01:05:01.917 --> 01:05:10.751
I don't want to make the generalization too broad. When I hear sometimes, well, that "most of philosophy does x or z or y",

01:05:10.751 --> 01:05:16.583
I bet that most of those scientists have never actually read a technical paper in philosophy. So, that's my

01:05:16.583 --> 01:05:22.917
empirical question: how can you make a generalization about what most philosophy does, if you don't have it?

01:05:22.917 --> 01:05:26.769
- You hit the key point of what I was gonna get to, which may sound judgmental but it's not.

01:05:26.769 --> 01:05:31.210
- Really?
- Yes and that is: your picture I would agree with, about how

01:05:31.210 --> 01:05:38.084
how philosophy proceeds, and it then is a simple empirical fact - I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing but

01:05:38.084 --> 01:05:47.500
it is a fact - that the reason that most scientists don’t read philosophy is it doesn’t have any impact on what they do.

01:05:47.500 --> 01:05:54.830
And that’s fine. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. I don’t want you to suggest it’s bad. But the presumption that scientists

01:05:54.830 --> 01:06:01.809
would have to read philosophy of science is just not true. Scientists go about doing what they are doing, being

01:06:01.809 --> 01:06:10.833
ignorant about detailed questions that are not uninteresting from an intellectual perspective, but they’re irrelevant to the science.

01:06:10.833 --> 01:06:15.984
So it is a true statement that once philosophy generally gets to the point where the science is producing knowledge,

01:06:15.984 --> 01:06:21.135
and the philosophers are discussing the meaning of that knowledge, it's interesting.

01:06:21.135 --> 01:06:26.288
And you can read about it if you are interested from an intellectual perspective, but it has no impact upon the science.

01:06:26.288 --> 01:06:34.370
- Let me give a different case though because I think there is a better job for philosophers and...

01:06:34.370 --> 01:06:42.648
- They are always looking for employment so…
- They’re not gonna be put out of work.

01:06:42.648 --> 01:06:52.208
- You can’t do science without doing philosophy. You can do it, seat-in-the-pants, informally, or you can do it reflectively.

01:06:52.208 --> 01:07:01.128
And some people are either brilliant or lucky and they never consult any philosophers and they don’t make any howlers

01:07:01.128 --> 01:07:10.830
philosophically, and so they’re pretty in good shape. And anybody like that, I think, is in a certain sense entitled to

01:07:10.830 --> 01:07:18.833
say: ‘I'm just going to ignore philosophy, I don’t seem to need this’. But the fact is that in the areas which are

01:07:18.833 --> 01:07:25.890
particularly controversial -- everything to do with the mind, all of neuroscience, in particular in the life sciences.

01:07:25.890 --> 01:07:30.529
Maybe not physics, maybe…
- I think not physics but I think I agree with where you're going.

01:07:30.529 --> 01:07:41.250
- But the fact is the scientists, really smart people, and they know their fields and very often they are asking questions

01:07:41.250 --> 01:07:43.830
that are just preposterous. 
- Exactly, that is what philosophers...

01:07:43.830 --> 01:07:48.830
- ...and what philosophers are really good at..
- …is framing the questions.

01:07:48.830 --> 01:07:51.728
- …is coming up with better questions.
- And I think in the field of the mind, anywhere where

01:07:51.728 --> 01:07:59.667
science is at the edge, it doesn’t really know yet how to define things, that’s where philosophy generally has had

01:07:59.667 --> 01:08:02.833
an impact. But after that point it doesn’t and that’s just...

01:08:02.833 --> 01:08:11.332
- I have a nice quote from professor Dennett’s book that is relevant to this discussion. Well, you already paraphrased

01:08:11.332 --> 01:08:17.369
the other quote that I had about "there is no such thing as a philosophy-free science, there is only science whose

01:08:17.369 --> 01:08:22.918
philosophical baggage is taking on board without examination", but the other quote that I wanted to bring up is

01:08:22.918 --> 01:08:33.083
from your latest book. I am paraphrasing a little bit. You say that you derive some sort of guilty pleasure from watching

01:08:33.083 --> 01:08:40.209
eminent scientists who have expressed what you call withering contempt for philosophy, and to watch those

01:08:40.209 --> 01:08:47.083
scientists stumble embarrassingly in their own philosophical efforts. Can you give us any names, professor Dennett?

01:08:47.083 --> 01:08:50.689
Who are these scientists? 
- Oh, sure!

01:08:50.689 --> 01:08:55.128
- Off the record!
- Yeah, off the record. Nobody's gonna know.

01:08:55.128 --> 01:09:06.809
- No one here will talk about it.
- There are eminent people working on consciousness,

01:09:06.809 --> 01:09:20.834
working on neuroscience, who frame the issues in just bizarrely unsuccessful ways and they include some really heavy hitters.

01:09:20.834 --> 01:09:28.334
And I name them in the book so I can name them here. I mean Francis Crick had some really simpleminded

01:09:28.334 --> 01:09:33.820
ideas about consciousness.
- He was the guy who discovered the double helix.

01:09:33.820 --> 01:09:45.751
- You know, you can hardly pick a more eminent or ingenious, or more conceptually adroit scientist than Crick,

01:09:45.751 --> 01:09:50.289
and yet Crick had a real tin ear for some of these issues when he turned to neuroscience.

01:09:50.289 --> 01:10:00.447
And he sought out the help of Christof Koch, who is a wonderful neuroscientist, but he has not outlived his

01:10:00.447 --> 01:10:10.529
catholic upbringing. And he is still sort of hankering for a soul. I can point to the places in his work where you see,

01:10:10.529 --> 01:10:15.888
‘look what he is missing here, look what he is missing here’ because he is still trying to save a haven for the soul.

01:10:15.888 --> 01:10:22.833
I can multiply that by twenty.
- So he doesn’t think that he needs to read philosophy..

01:10:22.833 --> 01:10:28.833
He just brashly enters into philosophical territory and thinks that he can just solve...

01:10:28.833 --> 01:10:41.690
But notice that Francis Crick, Francis got better. He learned his lesson and he took on some philosophers, mainly

01:10:41.690 --> 01:10:47.001
Patty Churchland and Paul Churchland but also to some degree me and he began to take us seriously

01:10:47.001 --> 01:10:49.750
because he realized these were hard questions.

01:10:49.750 --> 01:11:00.667
What really gives me guilty pleasure is seeing the books, there’s been dozens of books about

01:11:00.667 --> 01:11:09.970
consciousness by eminent neuroscientists. Most of them are pretty dreadful and they sink like a stone and that

01:11:09.970 --> 01:11:21.332
is what they deserve. But very often their authors even come that close to acknowledging, if you look at the book

01:11:21.332 --> 01:11:30.332
carefully, that ‘oh oh' they suddenly realize they are in philosophical hot water and they need help from a

01:11:30.332 --> 01:11:36.333
philosopher. And a few of them ask for help and I really appreciate it.

01:11:36.333 --> 01:11:43.609
- It hasn’t happened in seventy years of physics, but I absolutely agree in an area which is forming, where the

01:11:43.609 --> 01:11:47.500
questions need to be formed. Like philosophy of quantum mechanics, forgive me, but philosophy of quantum

01:11:47.500 --> 01:11:55.000
mechanics is a lot of philosophers who know something about quantum mechanics, but the progress in

01:11:55.000 --> 01:12:02.607
understanding quantum mechanics has not come… I mean there are incredibly interesting philosophical questions

01:12:02.607 --> 01:12:05.690
about quantum mechanics, but the progress doesn’t come from there.

01:12:05.690 --> 01:12:09.167
- What about Shimoni?
- But Shimoni is a physicist.

01:12:09.167 --> 01:12:14.584
- He is in the philosophy department.
- Yes, you can google it.

01:12:14.584 --> 01:12:20.667
- I think it's my turn to say something presumptuous as Lawrence put it earlier.

01:12:20.667 --> 01:12:27.448
This is it, I want to go back to what Lawrence said about philosophy of science and the role between philosophy of science

01:12:27.448 --> 01:12:32.000
and the relationship between philosophy and science and science, because I'm both a scientist and a philosopher of science.

01:12:32.000 --> 01:12:38.650
I’m going to put forth – and this is the presumptuous part – that what you said a few minutes ago was both conceptually

01:12:38.650 --> 01:12:44.750
incorrect and empirically wrong. This is what I mean by that.

01:12:44.750 --> 01:12:49.528
So if you actually take a look at the philosophy of science literature, by the way there is no such thing as

01:12:49.528 --> 01:12:53.368
<i>the</i> philosophy of science literature. There is a philosophy of quantum mechanics, there is a philosophy of other parts

01:12:53.368 --> 01:12:57.248
of physics, there is a philosophy of biology and so on and so forth. So it is a bunch of different things.

01:12:57.248 --> 01:13:07.208
So what you find are two things, or at least two things, to simplify. First of all, most of philosophy of science is not

01:13:07.208 --> 01:13:13.449
at all about helping scientists answer questions. So it is no surprise that it doesn’t.

01:13:13.449 --> 01:13:19.916
So when people like your colleague Stephen Hawking - to name names - starts out a book and says that philosophy is

01:13:19.928 --> 01:13:24.565
dead because it hasn’t contributed anything to science, he literally does not know what he is talking about.

01:13:24.565 --> 01:13:30.697
That is not the point of philosophy of science, most of the time.
- Yeah, but philosophers get offended when some

01:13:30.697 --> 01:13:39.115
scientist says, or some philosophers do. It’s just a fact. It’s got other goals and aims and techniques

01:13:39.115 --> 01:13:42.247
and there is nothing wrong with that. 
- Right, but when there’s nothing wrong with something,

01:13:42.247 --> 01:13:45.910
you don’t say ‘it’s a dead field’, you just say it is a different stuff.

01:13:45.910 --> 01:13:48.688
- Well, theology, you could say is a dead field..
- Yes, you can say that. Right!

01:13:48.688 --> 01:13:58.976
Well, so that was the conceptual part that I objected to. We need to realize that philosophy is largely in a different kind of business.

01:13:58.976 --> 01:14:04.094
And so, yes, it doesn’t contribute to science, just like science does not contribute to, you know, English literature.

01:14:04.094 --> 01:14:06.926
Or literary criticism, whatever you want to put it.

01:14:06.926 --> 01:14:12.900
But so what, no one is blaming the physicists for not coming up with something new about Jane Austen .

01:14:12.900 --> 01:14:18.842
The other part is the empirical part. When you say, you know, they don’t talk to each other,

01:14:18.842 --> 01:14:26.009
they have nothing to say to each other. I am not as familiar as Dan probably is with areas of philosophy of quantum

01:14:26.009 --> 01:14:29.176
mechanics for instance. But I’m certainly very familiar with philosophy of biology.

01:14:29.176 --> 01:14:35.676
And there are plenty of scientists that actually do work with philosophers to clarify conceptual issues that come

01:14:35.676 --> 01:14:42.509
out of live problems in evolutionary biology. So there are subfields of philosophy of science where

01:14:42.509 --> 01:14:47.816
knowledge and even interaction with philosophy does in fact help science.

01:14:47.816 --> 01:14:53.093
- Absolutely! In those areas where science is trying to form the questions. And an intelligent discussion with people who

01:14:53.093 --> 01:15:02.136
thought about those questions can never be a bad thing. And so I'm talking from a point view of the area of science that I work on.

01:15:02.136 --> 01:15:11.178
And that’s the area of physics. Absolutely, where science is at the edge of thinking about questions, then there is a very

01:15:11.178 --> 01:15:15.927
fruitful relationship. I think consciousness is probably the prototypical example.

01:15:15.927 --> 01:15:20.900
- One of the best examples, yes!
- ...of where we’re just flailing about, I think, still...

01:15:20.900 --> 01:15:31.647
- But let me get straight about one thing you are saying, Lawrence. You are saying that cosmology is an area of

01:15:31.647 --> 01:15:36.936
physics where…
- ...nothing useful is gonna come from philosophy, yes!

01:15:36.936 --> 01:15:46.980
- Does it bother you that there are many physicists who think cosmology is just bad philosophy?

01:15:46.980 --> 01:15:51.981
- Which is the ultimate insult of course! 
- Because there are!

01:15:51.981 --> 01:15:56.397
- It used to be. No, the great thing about cosmology is that it is now a science. Thirty, forty years ago it wasn’t.

01:15:56.397 --> 01:16:02.896
That's why I also wrote this book, because there’s been a revolution in our empirical understanding about the universe.

01:16:02.896 --> 01:16:07.731
So we can address questions that we could talk about before but it was just talk.

01:16:07.731 --> 01:16:14.776
We can now actually ask questions that we might be able to get empirical answers about and that is remarkable.

01:16:14.776 --> 01:16:22.335
But the fact that some scientists say something, I mean, some scientists are Republicans, it doesn’t say anything

01:16:22.335 --> 01:16:25.698
bad about science. 
- Or good about republicans.

01:16:25.698 --> 01:16:32.147
- So what you’re saying is that a lot of physicists haven’t caught up with the progress in cosmology.

01:16:32.147 --> 01:16:38.096
- But the key question is: you can talk generalities, but the questions in cosmology, the fundamental questions are

01:16:38.096 --> 01:16:42.481
ones that basically have a huge amount of intellectual baggage that is scientific.

01:16:42.481 --> 01:16:46.815
That the questions are gonna only be resolved by understanding aspects of quantum gravity and

01:16:46.815 --> 01:16:54.731
measurements from the early universe. And so you can talk all about them all you want but the progress is gonna be

01:16:54.731 --> 01:17:02.055
made in very technical areas of science, be it either theoretical physics or experimental science.

01:17:02.055 --> 01:17:12.415
And there are conceptual questions that, I mean, the basic conceptual questions, the ones people… they are bland

01:17:12.415 --> 01:17:19.980
and general and we’ve had them for millennia and they are not new, they’re not gonna add anything to that, the really

01:17:19.980 --> 01:17:26.699
detailed questions that unfortunately may require a new language. I mean...

01:17:26.699 --> 01:17:40.417
- Now let me just name four physicists: Laughlin, Penrose, Smolin and you.

01:17:40.417 --> 01:17:45.647
- I am not sure I want to be in that list, but okay.
- Too late!

01:17:45.647 --> 01:17:53.231
- You’re at the end so…
- Two of them are philosophers. Anyway, go on.

01:17:53.231 --> 01:18:08.936
- Would you not agree that the reason you don’t like that company is because those are eminent physicists

01:18:08.936 --> 01:18:18.455
who are making, dare I say, philosophical claims that you don’t trust. That you don’t accept.

01:18:18.455 --> 01:18:23.730
- I would say that they’re making scientific claims that are beyond the domain of what science is now doing.

01:18:23.730 --> 01:18:29.146
- That in itself, I think, is a philosophical claim.
- Of course, fine, if you want to call it that.

01:18:29.146 --> 01:18:36.647
No, it is just dishonest… you can frame, you can dress it up in all that language, but the question is:

01:18:36.647 --> 01:18:45.564
are you saying something that you are justified in saying on the basis of what we know about the world or not.

01:18:45.564 --> 01:18:52.297
And if you’re not, you are not being intellectually honest. And that is something I disagree with, whether

01:18:52.297 --> 01:18:55.855
you call it philosophy or physics. 
- Those four people.

01:18:55.855 --> 01:19:00.777
- No, I don't think I apply it to all of them.
- I picked the names not quite out of the hat.

01:19:00.777 --> 01:19:11.255
The fact is, all four of you are very strongly opinionated, you are all brilliant and you don’t agree and…

01:19:11.255 --> 01:19:18.377
- No, we don't agree. The question is, what don’t we agree about. We don’t agree about questions that are

01:19:18.377 --> 01:19:24.297
not central to cosmology. We all agree about what the data tells us about..

01:19:24.297 --> 01:19:31.417
- I think those people would disagree about the centrality of those questions, but I also would like to caution: whenever

01:19:31.417 --> 01:19:37.647
we have these discussions, I think that we really should resist, unless we are talking about republicans or theologians,

01:19:37.647 --> 01:19:43.775
the word ‘intellectually dishonest’, because that really imputes motives to people. I think there is better reason

01:19:43.775 --> 01:19:48.137
to disagree with.
- You’re right, and I didn’t impute that motive to all of those people, maybe some subset so..

01:19:48.137 --> 01:19:50.937
- And you’re not gonna to tell us who..
- No, absolutely not!

01:19:50.937 --> 01:19:53.857
- In fact, actually I should take that back also as far as republicans and theologians are concerned.

01:19:53.857 --> 01:19:58.065
- Professor Krauss, would you agree that there's philosophy in your book? Because I have a quote here and I think..

01:19:58.065 --> 01:20:02.297
- No look, Massimo could say any time you think you are doing philosophy.

01:20:02.297 --> 01:20:09.258
Of course philosophy is asking questions about the world like science is and so science was natural philosophy.

01:20:09.258 --> 01:20:14.455
But the key… those are, as you just said, if you expand the definition enough… it loses meaning.

01:20:14.455 --> 01:20:22.337
The question is, am I talking… I tried to talk specifically about the way we do science, what science has told us,

01:20:22.337 --> 01:20:28.815
what science hasn’t told us, what’s plausible, what’s implausible, what’s known, what’s likely, what’s unlikely…

01:20:28.815 --> 01:20:34.314
Those are scientific terms and of course they all impact on philosophical questions.

01:20:34.314 --> 01:20:37.565
Look at the title of my book, you could say it’s a philosophical question.

01:20:37.565 --> 01:20:39.815
- Can I give the example?

01:20:39.815 --> 01:20:52.731
- Don’t you think that we ought to inaugurate, initiate Lawrence into the band of philosophers who work in other departments?

01:20:52.731 --> 01:20:56.537
- Absolutely!
- No, no I have a doctorate in philosophy in fact.

01:20:56.537 --> 01:21:00.616
- Like anybody who has a PhD. That’s right.
- My PhD is a ‘doctor of philosophy’ so I am philosopher..

01:21:00.616 --> 01:21:06.647
- There is a nice thought experiment in your book. It sounds almost philosophical.

01:21:06.647 --> 01:21:10.776
- Thought experiments are physics by the way.
- You probably know what I'm talking about, what I'm getting at.

01:21:10.776 --> 01:21:14.937
- Well, he wrote it.
- But Einstein’s thought experiments were physics, I should point out.

01:21:14.937 --> 01:21:23.096
- So you describe in your book a time in the distant future when all the evidence that we currently have

01:21:23.096 --> 01:21:32.415
for the big bang, our basic picture of the cosmos, will disappear beyond what is called the observational horizon.

01:21:32.415 --> 01:21:39.097
Very quickly, so all the traces that we now have of the origin of the universe will be erased.

01:21:39.097 --> 01:21:46.096
And so future scientists, maybe in a different galaxy, even when they are using the best available methods, will end up

01:21:46.096 --> 01:21:50.815
with a completely false picture of the universe. Just because they don’t have the evidence.

01:21:50.815 --> 01:21:58.498
This is a fascinating idea of course. It strikes me as quite philosophical. And it’s also a sobering thought because

01:21:58.498 --> 01:22:06.132
it raises the question, is it possible that we find ourselves in a similar predicament, in a similar situation?

01:22:06.132 --> 01:22:12.464
Could it be that some part of reality will be forever hidden for us just as it is for those future scientists?

01:22:12.464 --> 01:22:17.547
- I raised it for that reason. I raised it to provoke that question and to provoke some humility in the sense that

01:22:17.547 --> 01:22:26.714
to realize that we have a picture that holds together, but… all of science is based on a limited amount of data and

01:22:26.714 --> 01:22:31.337
there’s things that we haven’t measured and there maybe some things we’ll never be able to measure.

01:22:31.337 --> 01:22:39.576
And therefore there could be some questions which are ultimately, may ultimately - and I say ‘may’ because it’s not

01:22:39.576 --> 01:22:43.714
obvious - may ultimately be unanswerable. But it’s a leap...

01:22:43.714 --> 01:22:46.575
What worries me, and I don’t want to give the people the wrong impression.

01:22:46.575 --> 01:22:51.855
The reason people in the far future will get the wrong answer is that they don’t have access to information.

01:22:51.855 --> 01:22:56.257
So I am not saying that the big bang is gonna ever be wrong. It’s not.

01:22:56.257 --> 01:23:00.964
The big bang happened just like evolution happened. Because we have access to that data.

01:23:00.964 --> 01:23:06.736
Now, we don’t have access to the data right now to what happened with t (time) equal zero and our picture of that

01:23:06.736 --> 01:23:11.575
could change dramatically. We don’t have access to information about whether our universe is unique and

01:23:11.575 --> 01:23:15.337
what’s beyond the visible horizon. So that could change dramatically.

01:23:15.337 --> 01:23:19.776
It is just the fact that we don’t know everything, doesn’t mean we know nothing.

01:23:19.776 --> 01:23:24.018
And that’s a presumption that a lot of people make. They say ‘oh well, because science doesn’t know this,

01:23:24.018 --> 01:23:27.214
I can’t trust any of the basic science’ and that’s a real problem.

01:23:27.214 --> 01:23:29.696
- And that's baloney.
- Yeah, we all agree on that, but it’s a common

01:23:29.696 --> 01:23:33.256
misunderstanding that people have about science. 
- Professor Dennett, would you say, as an expert on

01:23:33.256 --> 01:23:40.857
evolutionary theory and cognition, that our brains, or the brains of future scientists for that matter in different

01:23:40.857 --> 01:23:48.481
galaxies, are evolved, or will have been evolved, to grasp the fundamental structure of the universe?

01:23:48.481 --> 01:23:53.857
Maybe our minds are just not equipped for that. 
- Well, I’m glad you asked that question because it gets very

01:23:53.857 --> 01:24:03.936
close to what I consider the bad pseudo-biological argument for the limits of science.

01:24:03.936 --> 01:24:14.647
And that’s the ‘our brains are just finite brains and just as the fish cannot understand democracy and the dog cannot

01:24:14.647 --> 01:24:19.337
understand quantum mechanics so there must be all these realms that we cannot understand.

01:24:19.337 --> 01:24:23.136
Because after all we are just mammals with mammalian brains blablabla’.

01:24:23.136 --> 01:24:29.415
- Nice summary!
- The reason that that’s a pseudo… notice by the way

01:24:29.415 --> 01:24:36.730
that it has some rather eminent exponents. Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Colin McGinn, in order of eminence.

01:24:36.730 --> 01:24:41.397
- Increasing or decreasing? Nevermind.

01:24:41.397 --> 01:24:45.940
- You can figure that out. So what’s wrong with that argument?

01:24:45.940 --> 01:24:49.562
What’s wrong with that argument - in fact it’s sort of comical when you think of Chomsky and Fodor -

01:24:49.562 --> 01:24:57.647
is that the dog, the fish, the monkey, they can’t even understand the questions. We got language,

01:24:57.647 --> 01:24:59.230
we can understand the questions.

01:24:59.230 --> 01:25:06.177
What makes you think that there are questions that we can understand yet the answers to which are not available at

01:25:06.177 --> 01:25:19.231
any cost, at any price? Particularly what I think is important is that Chomsky rightly for decades has been heralding

01:25:19.231 --> 01:25:26.397
and praising the near infinity of the human mind. Why? Because of the generativity of language.

01:25:26.397 --> 01:25:36.730
Now if there are questions that are simply beyond our ken, that is: the questions we can understand, but the answers

01:25:36.730 --> 01:25:46.415
will stump us forever. Like a question as simple as: what is consciousness? Do we have free will? I think I understand those questions.

01:25:46.415 --> 01:25:51.730
The idea that we could not understand the answers, the true answers to those questions,

01:25:51.730 --> 01:26:02.232
has got to mean something quite bizarre. It’s gonna have to mean that there is no finite set of books in natural language

01:26:02.232 --> 01:26:12.176
which will gradually bring the reader of those books to an appreciation of the answers. Now that might be true.

01:26:12.176 --> 01:26:15.856
But nothing in biology tells us that that should be true.

01:26:15.856 --> 01:26:19.695
- Yes, it’s making a presumption about something you don’t know. Saying we’ll never understand something

01:26:19.695 --> 01:26:22.134
assumes you know all the things we can understand and…

01:26:22.134 --> 01:26:30.314
- Maybe it’s just a sign of humility. You say, well, maybe there’s a limit to the things that we are able to grasp.

01:26:30.314 --> 01:26:46.257
- Wait a minute. You have to appreciate, I think, that it’s not one brain at a time. It’s teams of brains in all of science.

01:26:46.257 --> 01:26:54.177
Look, I am sure without the benefit of thousands of scientists and philosophers who’ve worked over the eons

01:26:54.177 --> 01:26:58.417
I’d be unable to understand all sorts of really simple things.

01:26:58.417 --> 01:27:06.397
The fact is that I can benefit from all their hard-won understanding, it means that I can understand things.

01:27:06.397 --> 01:27:15.979
I like to point out that my grandchildren can easily understand concepts that my parents’ generation

01:27:15.979 --> 01:27:25.980
were baffled by. And now of course, there may be limits, but it’s not as if we’re facing a stone wall somewhere.

01:27:25.980 --> 01:27:32.730
The idea that there is somewhere, where there’s this stone wall and we’re just gonna hit blank incomprehension

01:27:32.730 --> 01:27:43.564
when we get there… It’s not biological. It’s mystical. It’s the idea that there is no trajectory through ‘book land’

01:27:43.564 --> 01:27:51.698
and ‘science land’ that gets you there. But that has nothing to do with the limitations of neurons.

01:27:51.698 --> 01:27:56.647
- It also goes against the history of science. There haven’t been any brick walls yet.

01:27:56.647 --> 01:28:01.616
That doesn’t mean we won’t come up yet, but there is no evidence for that so far, so why should you make the

01:28:01.616 --> 01:28:04.377
presumption that there will be? 
- Are you equally confident, professor Pigliucci?

01:28:04.377 --> 01:28:08.698
- No, I’m not. I mean, I tend to agree with most, with the gist of what Dan said.

01:28:08.698 --> 01:28:16.415
Certainly the evolutionary argument for human limitations is false on the face of it.

01:28:16.415 --> 01:28:23.564
We didn’t evolve to solve Fermat’s last theorem and we did. And there’s no way you can argue that natural selection

01:28:23.564 --> 01:28:28.564
somehow favored that kind of abstract level of mathematical understanding, what the hell.

01:28:28.564 --> 01:28:32.337
Mathematicians… do mathematicians have a lot of children? Well, I don’t know, but certainly not in the Pleistocene.

01:28:32.337 --> 01:28:34.257
- Most of them can meet women.
- Yes, exactly.

01:28:34.257 --> 01:28:39.216
- But they can multiply, right? They multiply all the time.

01:28:39.216 --> 01:28:49.857
- So I agree with Dan that the evolutionary argument for sort of the intrinsic limitations of the human brain is baloney.

01:28:49.857 --> 01:28:56.297
I also don’t think that the position, the so-called mysterian position, you mentioned Colin McGinn, the mysterian

01:28:56.297 --> 01:29:01.457
position about certain issues, like consciousness, you know, ‘Oh, I think there are reasons to think that we’ll never get there’.

01:29:01.457 --> 01:29:07.417
It’s utterly useless. It doesn’t tell me anything actionable. It says ‘Oh, maybe there is a limit’.

01:29:07.417 --> 01:29:12.730
Okay, well, if I get to the limit I will recognize it presumably, I’ll know. I will hit the wall and then I will figure it out.

01:29:12.730 --> 01:29:19.976
- Then I will go play tennis, but in the meantime...
- Exactly, or chess. But for all of that, in that sense I do agree.

01:29:19.976 --> 01:29:26.231
Now I do think however there are some interesting issues actually that science, certain areas of science,

01:29:26.231 --> 01:29:29.696
are actually facing right now in terms of a certain human ability to understand things.

01:29:29.696 --> 01:29:35.457
For instance, there has been a debate in the last few years about massive datasets, coming from

01:29:35.457 --> 01:29:39.562
molecular biology and now eventually from neuroscience. Neuroscience is not quite there yet.

01:29:39.562 --> 01:29:46.777
Molecular biology started out, for instance, a few years ago, not so many years ago, with the human genome project,

01:29:46.777 --> 01:29:55.616
sort of proposing things like ‘Oh well, we’re going to have the human genome on a cd and then you look at the cd and

01:29:55.616 --> 01:29:59.136
and then you'll figure out how to make a human being.’ Well, clearly that didn’t happen.

01:29:59.136 --> 01:30:04.134
But not only that didn’t happen, things got much worse. We’ve gotten into genomics, as an entire discipline…

01:30:04.134 --> 01:30:08.481
And for a while it was kind of comical in biology; that every few days there was a new ‘-omics’ coming out:

01:30:08.481 --> 01:30:15.337
genomics, metabolomics, proteinomics, blabla. And finally phenomics, the entire phenotype.

01:30:15.337 --> 01:30:17.731
It’s like, what the hell are these people talking about?

01:30:17.731 --> 01:30:21.015
Just because they rebrand something they think they’re inventing something new. Anyway,

01:30:21.015 --> 01:30:27.417
the point is that we may have hit at least a temporary wall in some of those areas already. Because it was

01:30:27.417 --> 01:30:33.296
really interesting to me to see, as a member of the department of biology. We had at some point in Stony Brook university,

01:30:33.296 --> 01:30:41.896
a whole series of seminars about genomics. And these people were coming in telling us all these very fascinating

01:30:41.896 --> 01:30:48.896
things about gene-gene interactions and networks and all that sort of stuff. And then I realized that the data analysis

01:30:48.896 --> 01:30:54.215
that they were doing, the statistical techniques to analyzing that sort of stuff, were things along the lines

01:30:54.261 --> 01:30:59.038
of principal components analysis. I don’t know how many people here know what principal components analysis is.

01:30:59.038 --> 01:31:02.407
- I'm sure all of us.
- All of you, right? But it’s a complex, interesting,

01:31:02.407 --> 01:31:05.740
multivariate statistical analysis to deal with complex data sets.

01:31:05.740 --> 01:31:10.599
In other parts of biology, is what you do when you have no idea what you’re doing.

01:31:10.599 --> 01:31:15.823
Cos it’s an exploratory analysis that sort of tells you: 'well, there is a cluster there over here,

01:31:15.823 --> 01:31:19.120
there is another cluster there over there. I don’t know what the hell that means, but it’s there’.

01:31:19.120 --> 01:31:23.518
- It's exploring new territory, like ‘non plus ultra’. 
- Right, so what I am saying is, the bottom line is

01:31:23.518 --> 01:31:28.679
that there may be areas where we are already hitting walls - they may be temporary walls.

01:31:28.679 --> 01:31:33.489
- But there are only walls because... In a sense you are validating what Dan said earlier.

01:31:33.489 --> 01:31:37.657
What you are really saying is that there's some areas where you find you’re asking the wrong questions.

01:31:37.657 --> 01:31:44.120
And you find you’re asking the wrong questions by doing it and you find it doesn't lead anywhere, so you move somewhere else.

01:31:44.120 --> 01:31:47.318
- I am not sure. That actually is a good example where there could be a difference.

01:31:47.318 --> 01:31:52.322
And I know a little bit about that, more certainly than I know about quantum mechanics, so let me

01:31:52.322 --> 01:31:54.989
elaborate for a second.
- Okay.

01:31:54.989 --> 01:31:59.600
- So the idea there is that the question is good, the question that we wanna know there, the fundamental question is

01:31:59.600 --> 01:32:05.119
how is it that gene-gene interactions and then interaction of genes with the environment during development create

01:32:05.119 --> 01:32:11.822
phenotypes, that is, the way organisms look, behave, and so on and so forth. That is a perfect valid question and

01:32:11.822 --> 01:32:15.717
we’ve been making progress in certain areas, you know, with that question.

01:32:15.717 --> 01:32:21.990
But we seem to be hitting a moment now, which as I said, could be temporary, but a moment where the data is

01:32:21.990 --> 01:32:28.679
becoming so complex and so variable that we do not seem to have a way through the maze.

01:32:28.679 --> 01:32:31.758
We just see a bunch of complexity there. There's all sorts of interesting patterns.

01:32:31.758 --> 01:32:36.462
But we're not able to extract the meaning.
- But that's so great in physics!

01:32:36.492 --> 01:32:41.714
- It's already getting late. I do wanna put up some questions that were asked by the audience.

01:32:41.714 --> 01:32:52.573
- I'll let you go first and then I go.
- Here's a downer of a hypothesis which comes out of

01:32:52.573 --> 01:33:03.964
the new data mining that people are doing. And that is: what if it turns out that we find that we can use data mining

01:33:03.964 --> 01:33:12.571
algorithms to get answers to all sorts of questions which we are very sure that they’re the right answers,

01:33:12.571 --> 01:33:18.883
but we can't understand how the process works at all.

01:33:18.883 --> 01:33:27.714
But we can go ahead and do science sort of flying blind, relying on our algorithms to give us the right answers.

01:33:27.714 --> 01:33:35.489
And the funny thing is: but why... how does that work? Well..
- And that's where we are.

01:33:35.489 --> 01:33:40.964
- That's I think a very real possibility and at that point we will have…

01:33:40.964 --> 01:33:49.249
Scientific predictions will go right on and scientific fact finding will go right on but scientific understanding will

01:33:49.249 --> 01:33:55.964
sort of… it's not that it will hit a wall so much as people will stop trying.

01:33:55.964 --> 01:34:01.714
- Well no. I think you guys are just experiencing the growth pains that physics has had. Point is: it has happened

01:34:01.714 --> 01:34:03.547
a lot of times.
- Isn't that always the case...

01:34:03.547 --> 01:34:09.047
- No, no. I know it sounds patronizing. What will really happens is: it will stagnate for a while, but someone will come.

01:34:09.047 --> 01:34:14.714
If the experience of science is… You'll have like what we call phenomenological models.

01:34:14.714 --> 01:34:20.714
An exactly similar thing happened in the 1960s. Accelerators were built, all these particles were discovered,

01:34:20.714 --> 01:34:25.409
and people just said ‘the more energy you have the more particles you have’. And they came up with these

01:34:25.409 --> 01:34:29.249
weird zen-like things called bootstrap models: every particle is made up of every other particle… You'll never...

01:34:29.249 --> 01:34:37.011
It’s too complicated to ever really have a fundamental idea about. And we’ll just try and look for patterns, see things.

01:34:37.011 --> 01:34:42.770
And for a long time that’s what was done. But eventually someone had a good idea and it moved forward.

01:34:42.770 --> 01:34:48.370
And it could be that it forever is that way… I don’t think that it necessarily has to be. It may be that

01:34:48.370 --> 01:34:56.249
a different way of thinking is required and some young person here may come up with that way of thinking.

01:34:56.249 --> 01:35:00.298
And certainly that what’s happened in physics. 
- Agree, my intention was definitely not to show that 'haha',

01:35:00.298 --> 01:35:08.382
we got it, we hit a wall. But I am a little less optimistic, I suppose, than you are because the kinds of problems that

01:35:08.382 --> 01:35:16.213
we're talking about that physics faced in the 1960s is literally billions of orders of magnitude less than what we are

01:35:16.213 --> 01:35:20.213
talking here .... So yeah, it may be, or may be not. I don't know. We’ll find out.

01:35:20.213 --> 01:35:22.964
- I agree, you’re absolutely right. That's why I’m into physics cause it's easy.

01:35:22.964 --> 01:35:30.490
These questions are much harder, and it’s taking a lot longer to do it. But I think it's unlikely, and I could be wrong

01:35:30.490 --> 01:35:36.410
of course. They seem so daunting now that they don't seem solvable.

01:35:36.410 --> 01:35:41.132
But I wouldn't be surprised if in a few hundred years they’re be solvable.

01:35:41.132 --> 01:35:46.013
- Maybe not tonight. So, which reminds me, it's getting late, so I want to...

01:35:46.074 --> 01:35:49.404
- But people are having fun, right?

01:35:54.252 --> 01:35:55.854
So what if we are all jetlagged here?

01:35:55.854 --> 01:36:03.451
- So one of those fun-having people out there in the audience has submitted this question through text message:

01:36:03.451 --> 01:36:10.817
- That's fancy.
- "If politics were based more on proper science,

01:36:10.817 --> 01:36:18.972
how would it improve our society?"
- Yeah, well, I've written a lot about that.

01:36:18.972 --> 01:36:26.533
I mean public policy should be based on empirical evidence. And it's that simple.

01:36:26.533 --> 01:36:35.373
If you gonna try to make a policy you should generally have some empirical basis for why that policy is reasonable.

01:36:35.373 --> 01:36:41.013
And if you don't you should employ the policy and then second see if it is, and that's a really simple thing.

01:36:41.013 --> 01:36:48.613
And if it were done more generally and used by most political parties, I think the world would be a better place.

01:36:48.613 --> 01:36:53.093
- But there is a downside to take very seriously and that's this:

01:36:53.093 --> 01:36:59.972
what if the science in question is basically the science of spin doctoring?

01:36:59.972 --> 01:37:13.452
And political parties who were already using technology in novel and interesting ways... And what if they really discover

01:37:13.452 --> 01:37:20.892
that they can craft messages which have almost no content, but that will win votes…

01:37:20.892 --> 01:37:25.174
- As they have…
- …done. Yes; chuck.

01:37:25.174 --> 01:37:32.650
- …and the whole premise of democracy as an informed electorate is sort of out the window.

01:37:32.650 --> 01:37:42.651
Because instead of informing the populace, the populace is being manipulated by images that are scientifically honed.

01:37:42.651 --> 01:37:46.734
This worries me a lot.
- Well, I agree with you, and I wanna make something clear

01:37:46.734 --> 01:37:50.318
that may not be obvious. I am not saying that scientists have the answer to political questions.

01:37:50.318 --> 01:37:55.612
I’m saying that science should be the basis. So what we need to do, is not what the politicians want.

01:37:55.612 --> 01:38:03.212
It is the obligation of some scientists to inform the public of what we know and what we don't know,

01:38:03.212 --> 01:38:08.374
how we learn, and how we ask questions. So that they can make informed decisions about what they are hearing

01:38:08.374 --> 01:38:15.014
from the politicians. But even having said that I'm not saying that scientific result should be the basis of public policy.

01:38:15.014 --> 01:38:20.484
For example, there are political questions. So you may... what you need to know is that global warming is happening,

01:38:20.484 --> 01:38:23.317
and you need to know that humans are impacting on climate.

01:38:23.317 --> 01:38:30.892
But you could easily say, ‘ok, I accept that scientific fact, but as a political decision, I need to burn coal'.

01:38:30.892 --> 01:38:39.452
And that's a political decision. But to make the correct decision, you have to know and the public needs to know

01:38:39.452 --> 01:38:44.013
what the implications are. But that doesn't mean that the scientific answer, which is ‘burning coal is bad for

01:38:44.013 --> 01:38:46.983
the environment’, is always going to be the correct political answer.

01:38:46.983 --> 01:38:53.093
That's not the case. People have the right to make the vote based on informed decision that "you know what,

01:38:53.093 --> 01:38:57.317
I don't give a damn, I want to burn coal." Because that's just the way democracies work.

01:38:57.317 --> 01:39:04.173
So we need to inform people so that they don't buy the crap from politicians, that they learn the scientific process

01:39:04.173 --> 01:39:10.401
of how to be skeptical, how to ask questions.
- And in fact, that's a point I want to underline,

01:39:10.401 --> 01:39:22.568
All the methods, all the propaganda methods are counteractable, actually quite straightforwardly,

01:39:22.568 --> 01:39:34.651
by simply informing people about those very methods and getting them tuned in to the fact that an attempt is being made

01:39:34.651 --> 01:39:38.453
to manipulate them.
- Everybody sign up for a critical thinking course.

01:39:38.453 --> 01:39:44.934
- Well, that’s what science should be. Or philosophy! Any good academic field should be based on...

01:39:44.934 --> 01:39:52.120
- True! That is correct. Now, I wanted to give a slightly different answer to the question that was posed, which is,

01:39:52.120 --> 01:39:57.234
again it's a question of nuance. I thought it was interesting that Lawrence's immediate answer was

01:39:57.234 --> 01:40:04.173
'policy ought to be informed by...' Your first actions were not politics but policy. There's a difference between

01:40:04.173 --> 01:40:09.318
politics and policy. Absolutely policy ought to be informed by the best empirical evidence that we have because

01:40:09.318 --> 01:40:16.484
otherwise you literally are blundering into nonsense, into bad notions. So yes if there is such a thing as

01:40:16.484 --> 01:40:23.852
climate change, antropogenic climate change, and there is, that has to be part of any policy decision.

01:40:23.852 --> 01:40:30.971
Now the other part, however, this is sort of analogous to the discussion we were having early on about the

01:40:30.971 --> 01:40:35.927
empirical imput into ethical decision making, into ethics.

01:40:35.958 --> 01:40:41.275
There definitely has to be empirical input into political decision, but part of political decision making also

01:40:41.275 --> 01:40:47.128
is concerned with people's ways of looking at the world, their values, their judgments about

01:40:47.128 --> 01:40:54.567
what is important and what is less important. So for instance, you could say, if in fact you want to solve the problem of

01:40:54.567 --> 01:41:01.047
of poverty - let's say in the US - then you need to enact certain redistribution of wealth measures and so on.

01:41:01.047 --> 01:41:08.441
And that is a fact, but it flies politically, only if we actually convince people that that ought to be a priority.

01:41:08.441 --> 01:41:15.248
If people say, well no, personal liberty or freedom of acting as an independent agent is more important than…

01:41:15.248 --> 01:41:20.847
in other words, that value is higher to me than the other one, then there is nothing you can do factually

01:41:20.847 --> 01:41:23.942
to convince those people. You have to argue about: 'well, what do you mean by that?',

01:41:23.942 --> 01:41:26.441
'have you thought about the implications from an ethical perspective'?

01:41:26.441 --> 01:41:30.968
What that means is that, in order to allow for some people to be obscenely rich,

01:41:30.968 --> 01:41:36.359
you are actually condemning a bunch more people to poverty. That sort of argument is clearly

01:41:36.359 --> 01:41:42.729
informed by the facts but it doesn't stop at the facts. Again the facts in some sense underdetermine the answer.

01:41:42.729 --> 01:41:47.807
The answer has to imply value judgments, and therefore I would say ethics.

01:41:47.807 --> 01:41:55.914
- I agree with you. In some sense, the job of the politicians, if there is one, is to then say:

01:41:55.991 --> 01:42:01.129
here are my value judgments, do you agree with them? Elect me if you do.

01:42:01.129 --> 01:42:05.049
But not: here's the facts. Here's my facts. I've invented them.

01:42:05.049 --> 01:42:09.090
- You can argue values, you cannot argue facts. 
- You say honestly, you say look:

01:42:09.090 --> 01:42:13.400
'I don't want to solve the problem of poverty.' I wanna ensure some people can be obscenely wealthy, whatever.

01:42:13.400 --> 01:42:21.482
Just put it out there and there’ll be people who agree. If democracy has any value, if you believe in it,

01:42:21.482 --> 01:42:24.732
then you say well, if more people like that value, then that's the way we're gonna live with it.

01:42:24.732 --> 01:42:29.609
- We are all entitled to our own opinions, but not entitled to our own facts.

01:42:29.609 --> 01:42:32.482
- Of course.
- Actually I think we're not.

01:42:32.482 --> 01:42:35.315
- We're not even entitled to our own opinions?
- No!

01:42:35.315 --> 01:42:38.169
- I agree.
- Not all opinions are created equal.

01:42:38.169 --> 01:42:44.232
There was a lovely paper by a philosopher whose name escapes me, a young philosopher from Australia, who

01:42:44.232 --> 01:42:51.128
challenged that idea that we are entitled to our opinions. And I thought: he's right, we all pay lip service to that, and

01:42:51.128 --> 01:43:02.066
in fact: in what sense, if your opinions are ill-informed and incoherent, in what sense are you entitled to it?

01:43:02.066 --> 01:43:08.128
- Well, I think in the movie we produced, Ricky Gervais says everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I am

01:43:08.128 --> 01:43:14.048
entitled to find their opinion ridiculous. The point is: they can express it, but we should be able to ridicule it,

01:43:14.048 --> 01:43:18.369
and that's why we should be allowed to ridicule religion like we do sex or politics.

01:43:18.369 --> 01:43:25.531
- What's ridiculous about sex?
- All of you are entitled to your opinion about the following

01:43:25.531 --> 01:43:30.482
question, which goes as follows. Let me see.
- But only because we are informed.

01:43:30.482 --> 01:43:37.982
- Only cause we're here.
- "Economics makes claims about what is beneficial,

01:43:37.982 --> 01:43:47.814
what is good for humanity. Is that a form of science, or will that eventually lead to a form of religion?" It is basically

01:43:47.814 --> 01:43:52.613
a question about the status of economics. 
- We're not economists, but I am very sceptical that

01:43:52.613 --> 01:43:59.849
economics… Economics is an attempt to make decisions about very complex systems, and obviously they're so

01:43:59.849 --> 01:44:09.210
complex that those conclusions are not necessarely reproducable, if you look at the history of economics.

01:44:09.210 --> 01:44:19.610
I think that economics is fascinating because if you think of it broadly – and again we're back to a sort of semantic issue –

01:44:19.610 --> 01:44:29.483
there’s lots of issues which actually are well addressed using the tools of economists that have nothing to do

01:44:29.483 --> 01:44:39.171
with money or standard economic topics at all. They have to do with organization and influence, and all sorts of other

01:44:39.171 --> 01:44:44.232
things. I think that, in fact, let's have more of that.

01:44:44.232 --> 01:44:54.969
But what is also true is that economists, being under the gun to provide hard data and predictions that can be quantified,

01:44:54.969 --> 01:45:07.731
have this lamentable practice of operationalising everything in terms of money, and then as I think even

01:45:07.731 --> 01:45:16.929
very unreflective people recognize: is something really missing when economists reduce everything

01:45:16.929 --> 01:45:28.451
to monetary values? It’s not that there is some magic ingredient missing, it's just that putting monetary values on

01:45:28.451 --> 01:45:35.529
everything (everything has a price) is just a very blunt tool. 
- But so is putting an equation on everything when

01:45:35.529 --> 01:45:42.482
the equations are unjustified. The Noble prize in economics, the Nobel memorial prize (it’s not a Noble prize) this year...

01:45:42.482 --> 01:45:49.483
I was so amused because two people who won the prize have two completely different ideas about what the results

01:45:49.483 --> 01:45:52.983
of the same phenomena are, which to me represents economics.

01:45:52.983 --> 01:46:05.090
- Again, I like to make some distinctions again. So, first of all, there's fundamental differences between macro-

01:46:05.090 --> 01:46:11.690
and micro-economics ... certain areas of economic theory actually work pretty well. They produce reliable predictions

01:46:11.690 --> 01:46:15.482
in terms of empirical verification and so on, and other parts don't.

01:46:15.482 --> 01:46:23.648
Also within, there’s different approaches to doing economics, right? There's sort of a classical economist who

01:46:23.648 --> 01:46:29.315
might start with the assumption of a perfect rational agent who has perfect access to information, that sort of stuff,

01:46:29.315 --> 01:46:36.316
and do mathematical models that are pefectly fine as far as models go. They don't match up with reality very well

01:46:36.316 --> 01:46:41.170
because, guess what, we don't have perfect information and we are not perfect rational agents.

01:46:41.170 --> 01:46:45.090
There is another way of doing that sort of economics which is behavioral economics

01:46:45.090 --> 01:46:51.770
and that imports psychology and sociology into it. And it's much more interesting and probably

01:46:51.770 --> 01:46:54.611
more likely to get things right.
- That's why Daniel Kahneman is so fascinating.

01:46:54.611 --> 01:46:59.171
- Correct. Now, the other thing about economics, again we go back to ethics.

01:46:59.171 --> 01:47:05.232
Economists seem to have this idea that what they do is ethically neutral, and it's not.

01:47:05.232 --> 01:47:12.398
Because a lot of stuff – the very fact that Dan pointed out that everything is measured in one particular currency,

01:47:12.398 --> 01:47:18.049
that is just one example. But a lot of assumptions that go into certain economical models actually sneak in

01:47:18.049 --> 01:47:25.049
a lot of... Dan will say philosophical baggage, I would say ethical baggage in particular. And it is simply not

01:47:25.049 --> 01:47:34.649
the case that economics is ethically neutral. There are these assumptions, they ought to be put out into the open, and say

01:47:34.649 --> 01:47:40.049
‘wait, look!’ If you approach economic problems from this perspective - let’s say a libertarian perspective as opposed

01:47:40.049 --> 01:47:46.814
to a progressive perspective, whatever it is - this is what you're sneaking in, you’re bringing in to the reasoning.

01:47:46.814 --> 01:47:53.168
The reasoning may be valid, it may be good reasoning; but you now have to expose these assumptions and then you'll

01:47:53.168 --> 01:47:58.816
have to let people say: ‘well actually, I don't think these assumptions are the ones I wanna have when I'm thinking

01:47:58.816 --> 01:48:02.232
of running an economy’. And so you may be formally correct in terms of your models

01:48:02.232 --> 01:48:05.314
but the assumptions you start with embed some kind of ethics that I don't like.

01:48:05.314 --> 01:48:13.009
- To follow up about the last part of your question. It really is unfair to economics, to say it ends up being a religion.

01:48:13.009 --> 01:48:24.315
You can see if it's wrong. And that's the big difference. 
- Maybe a final question, probably directed to Prof. Dennett:

01:48:24.315 --> 01:48:31.481
"Is conscioussness is a scientific fact? Does it exist? Can we measure it?" Because there has been a rumor

01:48:31.481 --> 01:48:40.723
(I'm adding this now) that you deny the existence of conscioussness. That you are a so called eliminativist.

01:48:40.752 --> 01:48:44.370
Is this rumor true? 
- And you got two minutes to answer!

01:48:47.231 --> 01:48:54.987
- The trouble with the word or the concept of consciousness is that not only is there no agreed upon definition,

01:48:54.987 --> 01:49:05.486
people don't WANT to agree on a definition, because a lot of people want consciousness to turn out to be

01:49:05.486 --> 01:49:12.987
whatever it is that is just so supercalifragilisticexpealidocious that it defies science.

01:49:12.987 --> 01:49:19.043
And anybody who puts forward a theory of consciousness which says: 'oh and by the way

01:49:19.043 --> 01:49:30.803
it's a biological phenomenon. It's very wonderful but then so is reproduction, so is self-repair, so is blood clotting,

01:49:30.803 --> 01:49:40.845
so is metabolism.' For a lot of people, if you take that view on consciousness, I often put it:

01:49:40.845 --> 01:49:47.903
it turns out that consciousness is not one big trick, it’s a bag of trick. It's not something that sunders the universe

01:49:47.903 --> 01:49:55.964
universe into the things that have it and the thing that don't. The question: ‘gee I wonder if star fish are conscious

01:49:55.964 --> 01:50:05.284
or maybe mice, or maybe how about ants or cockroaches?' And they think there’s this magic dividing line somewhere

01:50:05.284 --> 01:50:11.821
between the oak tree and the human being where <i>bingo</i> the consciousness starts.

01:50:11.821 --> 01:50:20.571
I think that very idea, which is deeply engrained in the thinking of many people, who think that consciousness

01:50:20.571 --> 01:50:26.842
divides the universe into two. Either you got it or you don't.
- The idea suddenly the light goes on.

01:50:26.842 --> 01:50:34.986
- That idea is an artifact of bad imagining right there and we have to get rid of that idea, we have to get

01:50:34.986 --> 01:50:41.987
people to recognize: as long as you insist on that as a sort of a defining characteristic of consciousness,

01:50:41.987 --> 01:50:46.524
then you get your wish: we’ll never have a theory of consciousness.

01:50:46.524 --> 01:50:53.924
But abandon that idea and start looking at what different kinds of consciousness or

01:50:53.924 --> 01:51:01.070
so-called consciousness or hemi-semi-demi consciousness, as soon as you start getting out of that essentialist mode

01:51:01.070 --> 01:51:09.444
and looking for the dividing line, then consciousness is a very real family of phenomena, not a single phenomenon,

01:51:09.444 --> 01:51:14.923
a family of phenomena.
- Right, do you have any short final statements about

01:51:14.923 --> 01:51:20.802
consciousness or maybe in general?
- Yeah, I think I am agreeing, if I hear correctly Dan,

01:51:20.802 --> 01:51:27.154
with what he said but I might be about to just step into a really bad situation.

01:51:27.154 --> 01:51:31.283
- It’s about to end, so you have to beware…
- So I look at it as biologist...

01:51:31.283 --> 01:51:37.043
- Ok, I'm ready…
- ...not as a philosopher of mind, because I am not a

01:51:37.073 --> 01:51:43.687
philosopher of mind. So I agree completely that there is this fallacy of: 'there is a dividing line'. This essentialist idea,

01:51:43.702 --> 01:51:50.368
that is bizarre to me. If consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and I think we agreed it is a biological phenomenon,

01:51:50.368 --> 01:51:56.727
unless we are talking about something completely different, then it ought to come gradually, or that doesn't mean

01:51:56.727 --> 01:52:03.479
exactly gradually – there may be jumps here and there – but it must be in degrees and therefore it makes no sense

01:52:03.479 --> 01:52:07.229
to say: well, here's the dividing line, these things have it and these things don’t have it.

01:52:07.229 --> 01:52:12.979
Of course there is another dividing line. There is an entire universe that is inanimate as far as we can tell.

01:52:12.979 --> 01:52:17.248
And that one I'm gonna bet pretty strongly that doesn't have consciousness. Rocks don't have consciousness.

01:52:17.248 --> 01:52:22.889
But if we’re talking about the biological world, clearly it is a question of degrees and not a question of yes or no.

01:52:22.889 --> 01:52:29.229
That said I really never understood – I agree again with Dan before stepping into the problem here,

01:52:29.229 --> 01:52:35.208
the self inflicted problem – I also agree with Dan, yes there’s plenty of people who seem to equivocate

01:52:35.208 --> 01:52:40.728
almost on purpose on the term, to make it more fuzzy, more mysterian, more whatever it is.

01:52:40.728 --> 01:52:45.288
But honestly everytime that I read a paper about, you know, definitions of consciousness,

01:52:45.288 --> 01:52:48.479
I don't get why the thing is so damn complicated.

01:52:48.479 --> 01:52:53.311
I don't mean the answer to how it works, that is complicated. But the thing itself.

01:52:53.311 --> 01:52:59.449
To me consciousness is the ability, that is shared pretty much as far as we know by at least all animals,

01:52:59.449 --> 01:53:10.047
of experiencing, having phenomenal experiences, things like heat, cold, color, that sort of stuff. This is the ability…

01:53:10.047 --> 01:53:14.396
- That's something that robots do if they have heat sensors.
- Well, fine of course, well maybe.

01:53:14.396 --> 01:53:19.397
- It depends on what you mean by ‘experiencing’ of course. You mean a dial goes up?

01:53:19.397 --> 01:53:26.312
Of course it does. But what I’m saying is, if you look at your own ability of doing the kinds of thing we’re doing

01:53:26.312 --> 01:53:32.249
right now, now that’s consciousness. Now in the case of human beings, and possibly of other organisms,

01:53:32.249 --> 01:53:39.147
you have a significantly more interesting, additional level, which is the ability to reflect on those experiences,

01:53:39.147 --> 01:53:45.449
of having this consciousness that you really are having those kinds of experiences.

01:53:45.449 --> 01:53:50.563
Now, there is nothing mysterious about it, it seems to me that that goes down to biology.

01:53:50.563 --> 01:53:55.968
We don't have the answer, but it’s gonna be some combination of, well, certain materials interact in certain

01:53:55.968 --> 01:54:02.689
ways, and they create that sort of capacity, just like materials interacting in certain ways create all sorts

01:54:02.689 --> 01:54:07.449
of biological phenomena. 
- The one trouble with that definition, simple as it is,

01:54:07.449 --> 01:54:13.396
is that it flies in the face of many people's intuitions. Maybe just you’re happy with this,

01:54:13.396 --> 01:54:17.088
because it turns out that on that definition Athlete’s Foot is conscious.

01:54:17.088 --> 01:54:22.562
- It’s like the definition of life. It's very hard. Many people could say that life is something that organises,

01:54:22.562 --> 01:54:32.129
takes energy, but then fire is life. So as a physicist, the good thing is, it is far too complicated an issue for me

01:54:32.129 --> 01:54:35.646
and I plan to continue drink this tonight until I lose conscioussness.

01:54:35.646 --> 01:54:45.062
- Prof. Dennett once wrote, I think, that nothing that is complicated enough to be interesting could have an essence.

01:54:45.062 --> 01:54:51.895
Or something along those lines. Maybe that's a good way to bring things to a close. An open ending...

01:54:51.895 --> 01:54:54.646
- That's the essential message of this debate.

01:54:54.646 --> 01:54:59.313
- So I want to thank all of you, you have been a great audience, it has been terribly exciting.

01:54:59.313 --> 01:55:03.688
Unfortunately we have to stop at some point, we could go on and on forever of course.

01:55:03.688 --> 01:55:10.288
I wanna thank all of our volunteers of Het Denkgelag for their tremendous support and help in making this possible.

01:55:10.288 --> 01:55:14.928
I want to thank Ghent University for hosting this event,

01:55:14.928 --> 01:55:18.811
all the people that have been handling the technical equipment,

01:55:18.811 --> 01:55:27.479
and of course the three of you Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss.