Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss and Massimo Pigliucci discuss The Limits Of Science @ Het Denkgelag
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0:10 - 0:15Welcome everyone to this very special edition of 'Het Denkgelag'.
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0:15 - 0:20Apologies for the delay. We won't keep you waiting for longer.
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0:20 - 0:24I'm very honoured to be your host and moderator tonight.
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0:24 - 0:32For those of you who don't know us: we started out last year with a couple of episodes,
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0:32 - 0:39very informal discussions actually, about science, philosophy, critical thinking, etc.
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0:39 - 0:47Maybe on a slightly smaller scale than today… But we decided to move up to the next level.
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0:47 - 0:55We are a little more ambitious. And we even decided to call this episode a 'Royale' edition.
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0:55 - 1:06If 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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1:06 - 1:15We thought that with this concentration of brainpower, we might as well tackle some of the big issues, you know.
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1:15 - 1:23This could equally have been called an episode about 'life, the universe, and everything'.
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1:23 - 1:25- Oh, I know the answer to that one!
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1:25 - 1:32- Right… Well, just try not to reveal the secret until we have calculated it...
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1:32 - 1:41So before we go down into that rabbit hole, let me very briefly introduce our guests.
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1:41 - 1:46Maybe they hardly need any introduction, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
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1:46 - 1:53On the far side, the gentleman there who seems to know the answer to 'life, the universe and everything' is
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1:53 - 2:02Prof. Dr. Massimo Pigliucci. He is the Head of the Philosophy Department at the City University of New York.
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2:02 - 2:10He is a biologist turned philosopher, and depending on your perspective, he has either seen the light,
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2:10 - 2:13or strayed into darkness.
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2:13 - 2:17He's a very prolific writer, as all three of our guests are.
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2:17 - 2:26He wrote numerous books on evolution and intelligent design, various sorts of pseudo-science, on skepticism,
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2:26 - 2:31the meaning of life, etc. His latest book…
- ...'cause I know the answer... -
2:31 - 2:39- …is called 'Answers for Aristotle', in which he explores how an alliance of science and philosophy,
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2:39 - 2:44not just science, but science and philosophy, can make our lives more meaningful.
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2:44 - 2:49In the middle is Prof. Daniel Dennett.
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2:49 - 2:54He is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University near Boston.
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2:54 - 3:03He is famous for being one of the 'Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse', together with his new atheist
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3:03 - 3:11colleagues: the biologist Richard Dawkins, the philosopher Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens.
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3:11 - 3:17He is arguably the most friendly, most amiable, of the four atheists, I think I can say so...
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3:19 - 3:21- The softest...
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3:26 - 3:30- Dare I say cuddly?
- He is very cuddly! -
3:30 - 3:35He also wrote numerous books on evolution, philosophy of mind, consciousness, free will.
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3:35 - 3:43He has an oeuvre that spans more than four decades. His most important work is maybe...
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3:43 - 3:46Well, what is your most important work, Prof. Dennett?
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3:46 - 3:50You were about to walk into a trap!
- ‘Consciousness Explained’, yeah... -
3:50 - 3:52- Sorry?
- Probably ‘Consciousness Explained’... -
3:52 - 3:58Right, Consciousness Explained. I think that's a very good choice. As you wrote it of course... Who am I ?
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3:58 - 3:59- If you say so...
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3:59 - 4:06Anyhow. His latest book provides an overview of his work and is titled 'Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for
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4:06 - 4:13Thinking.' It's translated into Dutch as 'De gereedschapskist van ons denken'.
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4:13 - 4:23Next to me is Prof. Lawrence Krauss. He is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
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4:23 - 4:28He is the director of 'The Origins Project' at Arizona State University.
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4:28 - 4:38He has also written numerous books, among them 'The Physics of Star Trek', 'Quintessence' and his latest book
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4:38 - 4:45'A Universe from Nothing. Why there is something rather than nothing.'
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4:45 - 4:54He is also one of the two stars in a film documentary called 'The Unbelievers', which follows professor
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4:54 - 5:00Krauss, and his atheist colleague Richard Dawkins, whom you may remember as one of the 'Four
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5:00 - 5:06Horsemen', around the world, spreading... Can I use the word 'gospel' here?
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5:06 - 5:11...the 'message' of science and reason. Apologies for that, not ‘gospel’.
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5:11 - 5:21Just to kick things off, I’m going to tell a little story from Greek mythology.
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5:21 - 5:32According to the Greeks, there was a message written above the pillars of Gibraltar. It was written by the hero Hercules.
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5:32 - 5:47It served as a warning to sailors and navigators not to venture beyond that point, which marked the edge of,
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5:47 - 5:49at least the known world at that point.
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5:49 - 5:55In Latin, the phrase is: “nec plus ultra” or “non plus ultra”.
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5:55 - 6:00It translates roughly as “No further beyond. This is the end of the world”.
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6:00 - 6:02- Those Greeks really knew their Latin….
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6:02 - 6:07Yeah right, I was looking for the Greek phrase, I don’t know. Blame it on Wikipedia.
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6:07 - 6:14I haven’t written these notes myself. I have an autocue.
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6:14 - 6:24Later on, the opposite of the phrase, ‘plus ultra’, again quite impressive for those Greeks, was adopted
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6:24 - 6:29centuries later as the national motto of Spain.
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6:29 - 6:37And it was actually, as you can tell, it was an invitation, in defiance of the ancient wisdom, to go further,
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6:37 - 6:41to explore new territories, which was of course after the discovery of the New World.
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6:41 - 6:43- To boldly go…
- To boldly go where no man has gone before. -
6:45 - 6:47Right, and you don’t have to be afraid of monsters and sea dragons.
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6:47 - 6:51You don’t have to be afraid to be swallowed up into the pits of hell.
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6:51 - 6:56Just go as far as you can and see where you end up.
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6:56 - 7:03Charles V by the way actually was born here in Ghent, and this brings us right back to the debate.
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7:03 - 7:10You 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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7:10 - 7:16Do you think that there is a 'nec plus ultra' in science? Do you think that science has limits?
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7:16 - 7:22Do you think it's dangerous for science to venture beyond the point where it is not allowed to go?
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7:22 - 7:25I don't know who is willing to go first...
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7:25 - 7:29- Let the scientist go first, right?
- I was gonna say you go first. -
7:29 - 7:32- All right, fine.
- We'll go this way. You guys were introduced first. -
7:32 - 7:39Sure. I hate the phrase 'limits of science' because it is so often misinterpreted.
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7:39 - 7:44As if there were really a sign post saying “Sorry, you're allowed to get here but not beyond.”
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7:44 - 7:49But it depends on what you mean by the phrase, right? Clearly there are limits to science because science is
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7:49 - 7:53a human activity, and human beings have limited epistemic capabilities.
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7:53 - 7:57We can understand certain things, and I'm sure there are certain things we're not going to be able to
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7:57 - 8:02understand. Even if we were smart enough, there are certainly things we don’t have or we're not going to
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8:02 - 8:08have enough information to figure out. So in that sense, certainly there are limits to science.
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8:08 - 8:15So 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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8:15 - 8:19woo-woo thinkers of any sort. It's not a sign post.
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8:19 - 8:25The 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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8:25 - 8:33tonight, is that I think that science is a particular type of epistemic activity, a particular way of getting to
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8:33 - 8:38know things. In particular, it's the best way we figured out, to know about how the world works.
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8:38 - 8:45But as such, as a human activity, it does have certain domains of applications, where it does very well.
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8:45 - 8:50And it has domains of applications where it does a little less well, and it has domains of applications where it
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8:50 - 8:52frankly doesn't really matter that much.
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8:52 - 8:54- Now it gets interesting…
- Right... -
8:54 - 8:57- So that is a limit of science?
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8:57 - 9:02- 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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9:02 - 9:07are 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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9:07 - 9:09a hammer because they are not nailed.
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9:09 - 9:11- Professor Krauss, do you agree?
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9:11 - 9:15- Well, in many ways I agree. In fact, it’s sort of unfortunate it's called a debate.
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9:15 - 9:20I 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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9:20 - 9:24- We'll see about that.
- We're just beginning! -
9:24 - 9:27….that we're all reasonable. We're all reasonable people on this stage, and how can any reasonable person
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9:27 - 9:30disagree with me and Dan?
- Never happened before! -
9:30 - 9:37But, certainly, there are limits to science. As an empiricist, which is what I am...
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9:37 - 9:43Empirically there are limits to what science can do. In fact, in my own field cosmology, there are clearly limits
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9:43 - 9:49because, we have one universe to observe.
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9:49 - 9:56And most of us live in that universe, the Republican party in my country doesn't, but therefore,
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9:56 - 10:01because of that, there may be many universes, and therefore there is obviously, in some real physical
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10:01 - 10:06sense, a limited domain over which we can explore. And that's the key point. It's not just tools.
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10:06 - 10:13Every academic discipline uses tools, and in some ways they are not that different.
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10:13 - 10:19But 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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10:19 - 10:25So, rational thought applied to empirical evidence. And therefore, if you can't measure it, even in principle...
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10:25 - 10:30I 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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10:30 - 10:32things a lot, a lot of things we can't measure right now.
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10:32 - 10:40But, if you can't ever measure it in principle, then science really has nothing to say about it.
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10:40 - 10:45I would argue that anything else you tend to say about it, is not worth much either.
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10:45 - 10:53But it's certainly a fact that science generally can't address it if you can't measure it in principle.
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10:53 - 10:58And that's of fundamental importance, I think, and we forget that.
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10:58 - 11:06So 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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11:06 - 11:11There are limits now, and there are many areas where science has very little to say right now.
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11:11 - 11:16But can I say that it will never have anything to say about it? Absolutely not, there is a huge difference
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11:16 - 11:21between what's unknowable and what's not known.
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11:21 - 11:26And so, the only way you can find out if science has anything to say about it, is try.
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11:26 - 11:32And if it has something useful to say, that makes predictions, which agree with experiments, then you
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11:32 - 11:35can make progress. But you could try it, and it might not work.
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11:35 - 11:41An example might be sociology, where they tried to use the language of physics to apply to societies,
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11:41 - 11:48and it was far too premature, too complex. And consciousness... as I was telling Dan, I did physics
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11:48 - 11:51because it's easy. If I wanted to do the hard stuff, I'd do consciousness.
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11:51 - 11:58- 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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11:58 - 12:01doesn't provide any comfort to people advocating other ways of knowing.
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12:01 - 12:04If science has limits, then maybe that’s a general limit...
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12:04 - 12:09- Let me say something that Massimo may jump on, just for the purpose of entertainment:
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12:09 - 12:12I don't think there are other ways of knowing.
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12:12 - 12:17If you talk about what knowing is: other ways of knowing are an illusion in my opinion.
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12:17 - 12:18- Right.
- That ultimately if you think about what you know, -
12:18 - 12:24it doesn't come by revelation. It ultimately comes from some empirical basis.
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12:24 - 12:29And of course you can reflect on it, and think about it, and learn things based on that reflection.
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12:29 - 12:34But 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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12:34 - 12:35- You're an empiricist.
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12:35 - 12:40- Professor Dennett, is it right that every knowledge is derived from empirical evidence?
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12:40 - 12:43That this is the sole source of knowledge, or...?
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12:43 - 12:48- Well, I would say no because I think there's a lot of mathematical knowledge.
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12:48 - 12:55And I don't think that mathematical knowledge is based on empirical facts. Formal systems...
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12:55 - 13:05Mathematical knowledge is inspired by empirical issues. After all, just think what 'geometry' means.
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13:05 - 13:11It means measuring the earth. But once you've got geometry, you have non-Euclidian geometries and
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13:11 - 13:13other sorts of geometries.
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13:13 - 13:17- But don't you think... I mean a proof is an empirical piece of work, I mean.
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13:17 - 13:22- No.
- It is... You can ask if it's consistent with what you know already. -
13:22 - 13:29There's an important empirical side which I think is often underestimated. And this came out like a ton of bricks
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13:29 - 13:36for me when I saw a wonderful documentary that was done on Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
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13:36 - 13:42And here were these number theorists trying to explain it to the general public, and to people like me,
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13:42 - 13:44who are no number theorists.
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13:44 - 13:55And 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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13:55 - 14:05Wiles wouldn't know whether he had proved Fermat's Last Theorem, until, and this is basically the sociological or
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14:05 - 14:15social fact, until his peers, his fellow experts in mathematics, reluctantly, and contra their own interest - they would
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14:15 - 14:23love 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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14:23 - 14:30That's the first time anybody has any confidence that the proof is actually sound.
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14:30 - 14:37That'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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14:37 - 14:41which is one example. Logic of course is another one, and they’re closely related for obvious reasons.
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14:41 - 14:47I think we need to be careful about how we use words like 'science', or empirical evidence and so forth.
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14:47 - 14:54Because, yes, if you expand empirical evidence to, say, including the cross-checking of proofs, then pretty much
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14:54 - 15:00everything that deals with language becomes empirical.
- Even theology would become empirical. -
15:00 - 15:05Yeah, exactly. But I think that that is in some sense cheating, because when people think of science,
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15:05 - 15:09and even when most scientists think of science, that's not what they're thinking about.
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15:09 - 15:13What you're thinking about when you talk about science, we're talking about the way in which normally physics,
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15:13 - 15:19biology, chemistry, geology, and so on works. Systematic observations, controlled experiments, that sort of stuff.
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15:19 - 15:27Now 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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15:27 - 15:36very 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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15:36 - 15:43- 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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15:43 - 15:49Because ultimately mathematics, I mean mathematics is a language. It isn't knowledge, by the way, it's a language.
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15:49 - 15:53And 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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15:53 - 15:59It'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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15:59 - 16:07all levels. So even that, even if people think that somehow mathematics is an ultimate description of reality, it isn't.
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16:07 - 16:11There's no mathematical formula that describes the universe at all scales.
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16:11 - 16:18But 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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16:18 - 16:26if 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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16:26 - 16:35are in some sense empirical. My view is: science is really empiricism, and my view of empiricism is very broad.
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16:35 - 16:41So we can disagree about whether my definition is your definition but I think when we deconstruct that, we'd
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16:41 - 16:43probably agree.
- So it's partly a semantic issue. -
16:43 - 16:53But 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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16:53 - 17:00of your initial position, and also some semantic clarification. I think it's time to ask the audience.
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17:00 - 17:11If 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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17:11 - 17:15- Abstain!
- … you have to ignore semantics for a while. -
17:15 - 17:22In Dutch: “Wie denkt dat wetenschap de enige bron van kennis is?” Let's just raise hands and see.
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17:22 - 17:30Don’t be shy, even if you don’t really know what the question is about.
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17:30 - 17:39Nobody’s gonna check if you really thought it through.
- Where’s the house lights? That’s empiricism! -
17:39 - 17:44So, and who thinks that beside science, there are other ways of knowing?
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17:44 - 17:48(in Dutch): "Wie denkt dat er naast wetenschap nog andere kenvormen zijn?"
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17:48 - 17:58I think that a majority of people, if I'm correct, is in favor of the view that science rules supreme.
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17:58 - 18:04So, do we have some work to do, Prof. Pigliucci?
- That’s too bad. Let's get to work! -
18:04 - 18:13- 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 -
18:13 - 18:17that Lawrence said about the expansive definition of science.
- Right. Do you have a short comment to make? -
18:17 - 18:27- Yeah. I think that your definition as empiricism raises some semantic problems...
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18:27 - 18:29- Yeah, semantic problems…
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18:29 - 18:38So, 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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18:38 - 18:42I think you know that interior angles of a Euclidean triangle add up to two right angles.
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18:42 - 18:46- Those are based on empirical... No, I do on the basis of empirical evidence...
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18:46 - 18:53I 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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18:53 - 19:02- Then you see you ARE using the very point I was making about using basically social facts about what
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19:02 - 19:07mathematicians agree on, and…
- It's not... I don't care who told me the facts. -
19:07 - 19:10The numbers are there. It doesn't matter whether they were white males or...
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19:10 - 19:16- No, if there was a coven of mathematicians in... Utah,
- There probably is... -
19:16 - 19:28- Yeah, there probably is... And they claim to have proved the ABC conjecture. You'd probably think: 'Not likely'.
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19:28 - 19:37- No, I tend to think 'not likely' whenever I read anything anyone says. My first response is: convince me.
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19:37 - 19:40And I'm sure it's your first response, I hope…
- Well... -
19:40 - 19:43- Speaking of things that are not likely. Let's talk about god...
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19:43 - 19:47- Do we have to? Can't we talk about knowledge, or reality, or something?
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19:47 - 19:55- 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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19:55 - 20:00subjects. Let's just…
- I'm sorry, you're asking three atheists. You understand that? -
20:00 - 20:05- Well, last time we checked, as you say, none of you have any religious faith.
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20:05 - 20:08- This was before dinner…
- I think... -
20:08 - 20:10- I don't have faith in anything…
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20:10 - 20:19- The question is: do you think that science, no matter how you define it, or maybe it depends, has disproven or refuted
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20:19 - 20:22god's existence? Do you think that god is a scientific hypothesis?
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20:22 - 20:25- You can't disprove an improvable hypothesis...
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20:25 - 20:37- But you can render it, so preposterously unlikely, that anybody who still takes it seriously has a serious problem.
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20:37 - 20:45- That's really important, and science has definitely done that. But there are different levels, and you know, some
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20:45 - 20:51people in the audience may be spiritual and say 'Oh I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual'. I never know what that means.
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20:51 - 20:58But there are people who would say: 'I think there's some purpose to the universe.
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20:58 - 21:07I don't believe in any world religion, but there's some purpose. That, I think, is an overstatement, to say that there is none.
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21:07 - 21:12What we can say is that there is absolutely no evidence of purpose to the universe. But what we can say, and what
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21:12 - 21:19I think is really important, is that science is inconsistent with every religion in the world.
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21:19 - 21:23That every organized religion based on scripture and doctrine is inconsistent with science.
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21:23 - 21:31So they're all garbage and nonsense. That you can say with definitive authority. I don't like to use the word authority.
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21:31 - 21:33But the idea of purpose...
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21:33 - 21:40All I can say is: there is no evidence for it and every bit of evidence suggests that it isn't there, but you know...
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21:40 - 21:45- I'm gonna go even a little further, if possible...
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21:45 - 21:50Dan did a perfectly good job in demolishing the whole thing, but you can go even further.
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21:50 - 21:57I get nervous whenever I hear people talking about 'the god hypothesis'. Because I think that's conceding too much.
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21:57 - 22:04- It's a concept that Richard Dawkins uses…
- Well, it seems to me, in order to talk about a hypothesis, -
22:04 - 22:12you really have to have something fairly well articulated, coherent, that makes predictions that are actually falsifiable.
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22:12 - 22:19All that sort of stuff. And concepts of god, first of all, are heterogeneous. Let's not forget, it's not like all people on
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22:19 - 22:25earth believe in a particular kind of god. There is all sorts of stuff out there. But all these concepts are incoherent,
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22:25 - 22:29badly put together, if put together at all.
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22:29 - 22:37So, to say that science defeats the god hypothesis is actually even to give too much to the concept of god.
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22:37 - 22:44There is nothing to defeat there. It's an incoherent, badly articulated concept. Why do you use a sledgehammer to
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22:44 - 22:48demolish it?
- When you refuse to think, you call it god. -
22:48 - 22:54- 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.
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22:54 - 22:57It's part of the answer, right?
- Let me put it another way. -
22:57 - 23:05Can you think of any empirical, scientific, solid evidence that would convince you of the existence of some supernatural
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23:05 - 23:11creator we could call god? If he would just burst through the roof here, and point at the three of you and say:
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23:11 - 23:17“Stop spreading this nonsense”.
- Now THAT I would think is the beer or the whisky talking... -
23:17 - 23:21That wouldn't do it. No, there's plenty of things that would do it.
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23:21 - 23:26We go out at night and all of a sudden the stars are rearranged and say: “You suckers, you better believe”.
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23:26 - 23:31- In Aramaic, only in Aramaic, when I believe it…
- Yes. And everybody can see them, not just me. -
23:31 - 23:38Then I go back to the whisky hypothesis. But actually there's more interesting ways of doing it.
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23:38 - 23:47I just read recently a sci-fi novel. I tend to think of good science fiction as thought experiments, like
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23:47 - 23:51thought experiments in philosophy. And this one is called 'Calculating God'. And it's about an alien that comes down
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23:51 - 23:57to earth and asks to see a palaeontologist. And the guy looks like an arachnid, so he’s invertebrate.
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23:57 - 24:03The museum guard doesn’t get that it’s a natural alien. He thinks it’s a joke and plays along, and he says:
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24:03 - 24:09“Well, would you like a vertebrate or an invertebrate paleontologist?" And the alien is puzzled and it says:
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24:09 - 24:13“Well, I thought that the only paleontologists on earth were humans, so he must be a vertebrate”.
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24:13 - 24:19So he gets to talk to the palaeontologist. It turns out that the alien has very very solid and very good empirical evidence
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24:19 - 24:26across a bunch of different traces that there is in fact such a thing as an intelligent designer of the cosmos.
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24:26 - 24:33So the rest of the novel explores how these scientists react to that thing. That situation is unlikely, but it is possible.
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24:33 - 24:43- If there was nothing that could possibly convince you, maybe that’s worrisome, because if there’s nothing that can
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24:43 - 24:47convince you, it almost sounds like faith.
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24:47 - 24:52- The thing that as a philosopher would bother you about that, I think, would be…
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24:52 - 24:55- I'm curious.
- The fundamental problem with that picture is that -
24:55 - 25:00intelligent design implies there’s an intelligent designer.
-
25:00 - 25:05Then of course that implies the intelligent designer is more complex than the thing the intelligent designer
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25:05 - 25:10is designing. And then it becomes an infinite regression. Who designed the intelligent designer?
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25:10 - 25:13That’s the real logical problem.
- Although, to be honest I always found that question -
25:13 - 25:24a little bit disingenuous when it’s asked by atheists. Yes of course, that would be an obvious question, but so what?
-
25:24 - 25:29I mean, if we really had convincing evidence of intelligent design, then sure.
-
25:29 - 25:35- We could have convincing evidence…
- It wouldn’t be evidence for God. It would be evidence -
25:35 - 25:40for really smart people in another galaxy that designed our stuff.
-
25:40 - 25:46It could be Francis Crick’s panspermia, but an organized panspermia, where you decide, like that awful
-
25:46 - 25:52movie 'Prometheus', where you want to see the earth with…
- Or the big programmer in the sky. We're all part of a big -
25:52 - 25:58simulation and somebody else has started the game.
- Professor Dennett, do you think that you can only think of -
25:58 - 26:05evidence for a hyper intelligent alien race, and not so much for a god, a deity?
-
26:05 - 26:13Maybe you always have this thought in the back of your mind: ‘Wait a minute, there’s this thing about infinite regress”.
-
26:13 - 26:16- What do you mean by ‘god’? You mean someone who can suspend the laws of nature?
-
26:16 - 26:26- Somebody outside the universe, supernatural.
- The trouble is that if, by definition, god is not just an -
26:26 - 26:33intelligent designer, but supernatural, then I don’t think we can ever have really… well.
-
26:33 - 26:45No, I’m gonna back off and say: I can conjure up bizarre fantasies which, if that happened, would impress me tremendously.
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26:45 - 26:56Yeah, I'll make one up on the spot, okay? Somebody shows up, I don’t care what he looks like, and he says:
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26:56 - 27:10“If you drill down 2 miles deep into the mantle of such and such a place on earth, exactly this location, you will find
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27:10 - 27:15down there a golden plate – I’m gonna borrow from…
- Mormons… -
27:15 - 27:25- …from Joseph Smith. You’ll find a golden plate. And on it is written the genome of Craig Venter.
-
27:25 - 27:38First of all, we can not imagine a natural way that that gold plate could get down there, 2 miles under the earth, and sure
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27:38 - 27:43enough we do it and it comes up. Something like that would shiver my timbers…
-
27:43 - 27:49- Well, you hit on a key point, and I think it’s really important. This is the reason that knowledge is empirical.
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27:49 - 27:58You cannot imagine it. And we have to be very careful as scientists to say ‘we can not imagine something’.
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27:58 - 28:05Because then when we observe it, we have to try and understand if there is any imaginable way… before
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28:05 - 28:15we attribute it to the most exotic possibility. We have to see if there’s a far less exotic possibility that could explain it.
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28:15 - 28:21And we are obligated to do that. It’s true not just for something that crazy.
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28:21 - 28:29When we see a peak at the Large Hadron Collider, we are obligated to examine every more mundane possibility
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28:29 - 28:35before we say we discovered a new elementary particle. And that’s the fact that you want to disprove the very
-
28:35 - 28:40hypothesis that you're hoping for, is what makes science different than religion. One of the many things!
-
28:40 - 28:46- 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.
-
28:46 - 28:55So I’m a Star Trek fan.
- Great, I get extra money for that… -
28:55 - 29:02I read your book actually. One of the episodes of The Next Generation that is most pertinent to this discussion is called
-
29:02 - 29:08‘The Devil’s Due’. And it’s a situation where The Enterprise happened to be orbiting a planet where people are scared
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29:08 - 29:16out of their wits because the devil has come back to claim her due. It’s a female. Of course it’s a woman...
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29:16 - 29:23Of course, Captain Picard doesn’t buy for a second that this woman really is the devil although apparently she can do
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29:23 - 29:28miraculous things. She can conjure up earthquakes on a whim, she can appear and disappear from one side to
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29:28 - 29:33another of the planet. Of course, by the end of the episode it turns out sure enough she was just a trickster.
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29:33 - 29:39She’s using a series of highly technologically sophisticated tricks, but that’s what it is, right? And that is the problem:
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29:39 - 29:47that, even though it’s conceivable that there can be an intelligent designer that is in fact truly supernatural,
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29:47 - 29:55meaning that he or she can actually act outside or suspend the laws of nature. It’s much harder to imagine what set of
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29:55 - 29:59circumstances would truly convince us of that, because you’ll always have the suspicion that “you know what, I just
-
29:59 - 30:02don’t know enough about the stuff”. It could be that it’s The Enterprise out there doing it.
-
30:02 - 30:05- It’s very difficult to rule out alternative natural explanations…
-
30:05 - 30:12- Well, that takes us back to the subject, the limits of science. Because one of the biggest misunderstandings of science is
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30:12 - 30:17that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before. That’s not how science works.
-
30:17 - 30:24What has satisfied the test of experiment, will always work. Newton’s laws have been supplanted by general relativity.
-
30:24 - 30:37But if you want to throw a baseball, a million years from now, that ball will be described by Newton’s laws, because
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30:37 - 30:43it survives the test of experiment. We’ll learn things that will change our fundamental understanding, the base of it,
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30:43 - 30:50but they’ll never contradict Newton’s laws. So it is true that at the limits of our knowledge, anything may be possible.
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30:50 - 30:56And we can’t presume, when we see something strange, to say it’s supernatural or natural.
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30:56 - 31:05But if it violates things that have been tested over and over again, the basis of science, then it would be much more
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31:05 - 31:14implausible that it’s new physics. If you let a ball go, and it fell up instead of down, that would be a much more…
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31:14 - 31:20So it’s not the edges, it’s not the exotic stuff. It’s the really basic stuff that you can be pretty confident about.
-
31:20 - 31:25- Let’s move on to a different topic. Yeah, finally...
-
31:25 - 31:36Another possible limit of science is the idea that science can teach us about the empirical facts, as all of you agree, but
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31:36 - 31:42not about what we ought to do. Not about how we should behave. Not about ethics.
-
31:42 - 31:51So, professor Krauss, let me start with you. Do you think that science, single-handedly, without the help of other
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31:51 - 31:55ways of knowing, can tell us how we should behave?
-
31:55 - 32:00- Yeah, I do. But I’m gonna use my expansive definition of science.
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32:00 - 32:08The point is: we cannot even ask the question how we should behave until we know what the consequences of
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32:08 - 32:14our actions are, very first. The only way to know the consequences of our actions is science, namely empirical
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32:14 - 32:16observations so you can see the consequences.
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32:16 - 32:20You know, if you hit someone with an axe on the head, are they gonna die?
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32:20 - 32:31So before you can make any judgement, you have to know the consequences of their actions. So that’s the first step.
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32:31 - 32:41Without science, you can’t possibly have an ethics or a morals. Morals is a word that I’m much less enthusiastic
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32:41 - 32:43about.
- So that would be the weaker claim. -
32:43 - 32:50- That’s the first level. But I would argue that after that…
- That’s already going too far, but anyway… -
32:50 - 32:59- Ok, ok. After that, what we do, we ultimately make rational decisions. I know that we are governed by emotional
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32:59 - 33:04responses, and all the rest. Although ultimately I think science will help us understand those emotional responses.
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33:04 - 33:16Neuroscience will, it doesn’t yet. So I think ultimately most of the people who make ethical decisions, make ethical
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33:16 - 33:22decisions based on a set of premises which are generally rational.
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33:22 - 33:30So I think rational thought applied to empirical evidence, is what I call science. Certainly, you don’t get your ethics from
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33:30 - 33:45a book of revelations. You get it either from some genetic predisposition, if there are evolutionary bases of certain
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33:45 - 33:49responses. But science will help us understand those. Or from some rational decision making.
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33:49 - 33:54Ultimately, the whole question of ethics comes down to scientific questions, yeah.
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33:54 - 33:59- Right. Professor Pigliucci…
- I think that answer confuses several different things which -
33:59 - 34:11need to be taken separately. We’re back to the “just semantics”. I hate it when people say “just the semantics”.
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34:11 - 34:18Semantics is very important. Semantics is about language and meaning. If we don’t agree on the meaning, then
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34:18 - 34:26we’re not having a discussion. Clearly you can come up with an expansive enough definition of science.
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34:26 - 34:32If you say ‘science has to do with anything that has even remotely input from the empirical world’, and I define input
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34:32 - 34:35from the empirical world, even the kind of things we were talking
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34:35 - 34:40about earlier in terms of mathematics and logic, then of course everything is science. You sort of win by definition.
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34:40 - 34:44But that seems like an empty pyrrhic victory. It’s like ‘now what are you saying then?’.
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34:44 - 34:50Most people don’t think that is what science is. In fact, most scientists don’t think that is what science is.
-
34:50 - 34:55- Well, I don’t know how you could say that…
- The problem with that sort of expansive definition is -
34:55 - 35:01that the two can play that game, right? I could say ‘Philosophy is about thinking, and since everything we do
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35:01 - 35:11implies thinking, that we’re always philosophizing.’ I wouldn’t go that far because that becomes an empty statement.
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35:11 - 35:17It’s like ‘so what?’. I’d like to hear Dan, and then I have a couple more things about the consequences to say…
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35:17 - 35:21- Yeah, let Prof. Dennett chime in. Are we doing philosophy now, or are we doing science?
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35:21 - 35:29- We’re ignoring an issue which I think actually gets to the heart of the question. And that is:
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35:29 - 35:39should we count all of the normative wisdom that we have acquired over the years as science?
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35:39 - 35:47Again, 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?
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35:47 - 35:53There is, just to take some relatively trivial examples…
- So those are normative… -
35:53 - 36:03- They are normative. Now, a lot of people would say: “Normative systems of thought are not science”.
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36:03 - 36:06I think you would say: “Oh yes, they are”.
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36:06 - 36:10- How can you know Bridge is better than Whist if you haven’t played either or know the rules?
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36:10 - 36:21You can’t just close your mind and have a revelation.
- No, of course not. But still, what I’m getting at, is that -
36:21 - 36:31the propositions include propositions which say: ‘This is better than that', or 'this is the right way of doing this.’
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36:31 - 36:38And those are normative. Normativity plays a role everywhere in science, but it does have a rather
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36:38 - 36:48marked role. And I think that, if you think of, say, ethical issues and political issues, as in the end fundamentally
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36:48 - 36:57normative, which is what philosophers have typically said… What counts as a good life? How ought we to live?
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36:57 - 37:09If you think of questions of that sort, as close cousins to: ‘Which is a better game, Canasta or Bridge?’.
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37:09 - 37:17How could you ever answer that question? It’s obviously going to be relative to what kind of players are playing
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37:17 - 37:22the game. Human beings are such… I’m going to take an example, ok?
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37:22 - 37:30Chess was ‘improved’ several times over the years. The castling rule was introduced, the 'moving of the pawn' to the
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37:30 - 37:38en passant rule. Those were considered improvements and I think almost everybody agrees.
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37:38 - 37:45That’s improvements by our lights. We’re impatient human beings. We just think the game is better
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37:45 - 37:54playing a little faster. That’s all it is. But these are normative judgements. They have an empirical basis.
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37:54 - 38:04You have to play the game. You never dream of making an evaluation without doing the empirical work.
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38:04 - 38:13But once you’ve made the evaluation, it has a different logical standing. It’s different from just saying:
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38:13 - 38:18“People of North America like this kind of chess….”
- Absolutely! But on the other hand it’s not… -
38:18 - 38:29not only subjective, but it’s time-variant. So absolutely, it depends on… The word ‘better’, whether this is ‘better’ than
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38:29 - 38:36that, depends on who you are, where you are, when you are. So it doesn’t have any independent reality. What’s ‘good’
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38:36 - 38:44doesn’t have an independent reality. And therefore, arguing about whether science determines that is just an irrelevant question.
-
38:44 - 38:52- That’s a red herring. To call it an independent reality, that’s a straw man.
-
38:52 - 39:05- The question I want to ask is: do you agree that the answers to those kind of questions may not be universal?
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39:05 - 39:12- Yeah.
- Ok. And to understand them you have to often understand -
39:12 - 39:16not only the individual background, but the cultural experiences etc.
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39:16 - 39:26- If we had a large group of people meeting together in a organized political debate, discussion, where they
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39:26 - 39:32were going to vote, and try to settle on some rules for how to lead your life.
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39:32 - 39:40That could be done rationally, that could be done well. And if it succeeded, we could all remark that this is one of the
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39:40 - 39:46great achievements of human intelligence. BUT the question is: would it be science? And I would think no.
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39:46 - 39:51It would be political action.
- But how do you know it succeeds? -
39:51 - 39:57That’s the question. To determine if it succeeds, is a scientific question. You know if it succeeds by studying what
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39:57 - 40:03happens based on those laws, and then asking people if they are happier, or… whatever your criteria are…
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40:04 - 40:06So if it succeeds is a scientific question.
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40:06 - 40:13- 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
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40:13 - 40:15actually empirical.
- Of course… -
40:15 - 40:19- Here’s another way to put the problem. First of all, when you started talking about consequences, it’s kind of
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40:19 - 40:24interesting because to a philosopher that immediately brings up: ‘Oh, so he has chosen a consequentialist frame of mind’.
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40:24 - 40:30- Yeah, I’ve heard this consequentialism and all that stuff…
- Well, yeah, “all that stuff” is philosophy. -
40:30 - 40:38Consequentialism is one way of looking at ethical problems. It’s by no means the universally agreed upon way.
-
40:38 - 40:40- No no, but it’s probably a component of every way, right?
-
40:40 - 40:42- No
- Hmmm, no. -
40:42 - 40:47- You may not make your ultimate decision on what is the appropriate action. You might not be a consequentialist,
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40:47 - 40:56but you probably have to at least address the issue of consequences when you are using other criteria to decide
-
40:56 - 40:58what's the…
- Of course, of course... -
40:58 - 41:07- In the game of chess, you could say that there are objective, normative rules, because you have a
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41:07 - 41:13pre-established goal. You want to force the other one to checkmate. It’s only when you agree on that goal, that
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41:13 - 41:18you can have an objective measure of success and you can see which moves are better than other ones.
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41:18 - 41:24But the more fundamental question is of course: if we change the goal, and in chess there are opposite goals
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41:24 - 41:31because we have a challenge, but in morality, don’t we have to find some way to agree on the goal first?
-
41:31 - 41:38- Well, yes, but the question is: is THAT a scientific question? Imagine…
-
41:38 - 41:44There was a great debate raging over how to play chess. Should you keep the ‘en passant’ rule, should you
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41:44 - 41:48keep ‘castling’ or not? And it turned out there were heated debates.
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41:48 - 41:57There 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,
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41:57 - 42:04hoping that it would work, is: have a conflict, get all the parties in who are interested and who cared, and
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42:04 - 42:11see if one side can convince the other that their way was better. If they can’t, that’s an empirical discovery.
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42:11 - 42:22It doesn’t work. But if they do, if everybody that cares, comes to see and agree, quite wholeheartedly:
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42:22 - 42:31“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
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42:31 - 42:37test it by, you know, you gotta count the votes and all the rest of that. But it also has a rather different standing.
-
42:37 - 42:46- Another way to put what I think Dan is getting at, is that nobody in his right mind, I think, no philosopher in his
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42:46 - 42:52right mind, is saying that empirical facts, or even some scientific facts – as should be clear by now, I take a more
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42:52 - 42:57restrictive definition of science or concept of science than Lawrence does - but even if we want to talk about
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42:57 - 43:05empirical facts, broadly speaking, nobody is denying, or at least should be denying, and certainly not in this group,
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43:05 - 43:12that empirical facts are relevant to ethical decisions. That’s not the question. The question is – another way to put
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43:12 - 43:16what Dan was saying a minute ago – is that the empirical facts, most of the times, if not all the times, in
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43:16 - 43:25ethical decision making, are going to underdetermine those decisions, those value judgments that we make.
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43:25 - 43:33So the way I think of ethics is of essentially ‘applied rationality’. You start with certain general ideas.
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43:33 - 43:39Are you adopting a utilitarian framework? Are you adopting a deontological framework, a virtue ethics
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43:39 - 43:45framework, or whatever it is? And then that essentially plays the equivalent role of, sort of, general axioms, if you will,
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43:45 - 43:52in mathematics or general assumptions in logic. And from there you incorporate knowledge, empirical knowledge,
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43:52 - 44:00about, among other things, what kind of beings humans are. Ethics, let’s not forget, is about human beings.
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44:00 - 44:07If we were not social animals, intelligent, conscious animals of a particular type, the whole point of ethics wouldn’t hold.
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44:07 - 44:10- There’s also the issue of, sorry, you wanna add something?
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44:10 - 44:18- Obviously, what you both said is reasonable in that sense, but it suggests in some sense that ethics has
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44:18 - 44:22some existence. Take: someone’s pretty. Does ‘pretty’ have an objective…
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44:22 - 44:30I would not say that science determines ‘pretty’. Science can determine why I may think, on the basis of my cultural
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44:30 - 44:36experience or my gender, what’s pretty. And it could determine why someone else would determine that
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44:36 - 44:45something very different is pretty. But it wouldn’t suggest that ‘pretty’ has any meaning beyond that.
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44:45 - 44:52And so, I guess what I worry about… It’s absolutely true that when humans make ethical decisions…
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44:52 - 45:02I don’t live my life every day, saying, well, what’s the rational… I act as a human because humans are not
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45:02 - 45:12fully rational. I’m governed by emotion, and all of that, but to assign some reality to something which is just a construct
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45:12 - 45:20that varies and depends upon circumstances is, I think, overdoing it, and I think ethics is that.
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45:20 - 45:23- I don’t think we were doing that, and I think most ethicists would agree with that.
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45:23 - 45:27- I think you’re conjuring up a ghost that isn’t really there.
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45:27 - 45:29- Maybe
- But, let me get back… -
45:30 - 45:33- Wait, is there a ghost that is there?
- Let me get back to a question that was asked earlier, and -
45:33 - 45:40that was: ‘are there other ways of knowing?’. I would say: no, there aren’t other ways of knowing, but there's other
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45:40 - 45:45ways of doing things.
- Absolutely! I would agree with that. -
45:45 - 45:50- And some of them are really good, and some of them are really important. They are just not ways of knowing.
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45:50 - 45:52- We agree completely. Do you agree with that?
- Yes. -
45:52 - 45:58- Ok, well then. Can we go from here?
- We have 26 more topics to go. That’s ok? -
45:58 - 46:04- Sure. That’s well put.
- The question I wanted to ask earlier was... -
46:04 - 46:14You brought up the example of… you need science to know what the consequence is of…
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46:14 - 46:19- Anything.
- You know, hitting someone on the head with an axe. -
46:19 - 46:28There is sometimes this temptation to look at brain scanners for example, and to say: “See, this person is
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46:28 - 46:37suffering!”, so this is objectively wrong. I’m always wondering: do we really need sophisticated
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46:37 - 46:43scientific equipment to know that? We can tell…
- The answer is: no. -
46:43 - 46:45- The answer depends on the question you’re asking.
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46:45 - 46:51- Does it give us more confidence if we have a brain scanner? Because it seems like: now it has a scientific basis.
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46:51 - 46:57- Dan is probably the biggest expert in this group here. Only if you understand what the signals mean.
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46:57 - 47:03I think the big problem with neuroscience is that there are a lots of signals and some people think they have some
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47:03 - 47:05deep understanding of what they mean, but they probably don’t…
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47:05 - 47:10- No, but I think it’s worse than that. I think that what Maarten is getting at is different.
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47:10 - 47:14There are some instances where science, actual science, what I would consider even in my restricted definition
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47:14 - 47:20of science, actually is pertinent. Let’s say we are having a debate about abortion. And let’s say that because of a
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47:20 - 47:26number of pieces of reasoning, we started with certain assumptions blablablah, we arrive at a conclusion that:
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47:26 - 47:33ok, abortion is reasonable up until the moment in which the foetus begins to feel pain.
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47:33 - 47:36Let’s assume for the sake of argument. I know, let’s assume…
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47:36 - 47:43Well, if we get there, now at that point it really is the job of the developmental and neuro-biologists to tell us: what’s
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47:43 - 47:48your best estimate of when that happens, right? So that’s a clear example where neurobiology or developmental
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47:48 - 47:50biology really does…
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47:50 - 47:53- What you realize is that their best estimate is probably garbage, at least at this point.
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47:53 - 47:55- Maybe…
- Not garbage, it’s a better estimate than other people’s, -
47:55 - 48:00but it's uncertain.
- The point is: that is a clear case to me where science -
48:00 - 48:05either does already or could very very likely in the future do that sort of stuff.
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48:05 - 48:14What Maarten was getting at is, for instance: I can bring up my regular whipping boy, one of the other three horsemen.
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48:14 - 48:21- You mean I’m not? I’m sorry, go on…
- Never, never… We’re friends, especially for drinking. -
48:21 - 48:29No, Sam Harris, who you introduced as a philosopher, I would characterize mostly as a neuroscience based person.
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48:29 - 48:36I think that he would do it that way. When I read his book, ‘The Moral Landscape’ which promised a scientific way of
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48:36 - 48:45handling ethical questions. I got through the entire book and I didn’t learn anything at all, zero, new about ethics, right?
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48:45 - 48:49- The main thesis of the book, for people who don’t know him, is that you can have a scientific basis for moral
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48:49 - 48:50facts in the universe.
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48:50 - 48:59- And I think what Maarten was getting at: one of Sam’s examples is exactly that if you’re in the process of genital
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48:59 - 49:09mutilation of a young girl, and you do a neuro-scan. You’ll see that girl is going through a lot of pain. You think?
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49:09 - 49:15Do I really need that? Seriously? What does that add to the whole picture?
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49:15 - 49:22The screaming will do it for me, thank you very much. Screaming is empirical evidence, but you can hardly call it scientific.
-
49:23 - 49:30- Yeah, and to pay deference to my philosopher friends…
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49:30 - 49:39I’m not saying ethics is irrelevant, I’m just saying it’s contextual. There’s no doubt that people who think seriously
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49:39 - 49:53about the implications of actions, our ethicists or philosophers…
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49:53 - 50:00One doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. One can learn from the detailed, complex, logical, rational thinking that
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50:00 - 50:08philosophers do in determining what ethics may be reasonable or not. And I think that’s an essential part.
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50:08 - 50:12- Great, we agree again, we can move on to the next topic.
- This is getting too easy… -
50:12 - 50:15- How can something arise out of nothing?
- Oh boy… -
50:15 - 50:20- There is something, and before that, well… what was there?
-
50:20 - 50:26- I don’t understand why people are bothered by that at all. I mean I really don’t. It happens every day.
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50:26 - 50:35The lights that are shining, the photons that are hitting my eyes, they were emitted by electrons that are jumping
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50:35 - 50:44between 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.
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50:44 - 50:48- There was a lot of stuff around that maybe had provoked the photon.
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50:48 - 50:55- So the key question. I’m glad you asked ‘how’ because, you know, that’s the way I like to ask the question.
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50:55 - 51:00That’s all we can answer.
- He’s careful, he’s a philosopher. -
51:00 - 51:04- I mean… science shows all the time how things...
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51:04 - 51:14The 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.
-
51:14 - 51:18It’s required. Quantum mechanics requires it...
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51:18 - 51:26...in our universe, but it also could suggest that space and time themselves could result from no universe.
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51:26 - 51:31Now you can ask the deeper question :‘Was there anything else?’.
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51:31 - 51:39Those are questions you can ask. But the miracle, that people seem to think as a miracle, is how you get a
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51:39 - 51:46universe when there is no universe. And that is easy to imagine, without violating the known laws of physics.
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51:46 - 51:51Now you can ask: “Ok, there was no universe, was there anything else?”. That’s a different question.
-
51:51 - 52:00It’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:
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52:00 - 52:07how did our universe come from nothing? That is remarkably and in principle answerable.
-
52:07 - 52:14And moreover, the reason I wrote the book is: if you ask “What would be the characteristics of a universe that arose
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52:14 - 52:20from no universe by laws of physics without any supernatural shenanigans?", it would have precisely the
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52:20 - 52:24characteristics of the universe we see, and it didn’t have to be that way.
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52:24 - 52:26It could have been something else! We could falsify that presumption.
-
52:26 - 52:34- Let me try a parallel that… I think that Lawrence may like it. We’ll see.
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52:34 - 52:37- If it agrees with me, I’ll love it.
- Well, we’ll see. -
52:37 - 52:40- It’s an empirical question.
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52:40 - 52:47There are questions that philosophers have been asking for millennia, and every now and then, a scientist
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52:47 - 52:54comes along and says: “Well, instead of answering exactly that question, let me suggest a substitute question
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52:54 - 53:02which we can answer, and which, once we’ve answered it, we’ll sort of loose interest in the other question."
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53:02 - 53:11But let me choose an example where this was I think brilliant and comically failed to achieve its end.
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53:11 - 53:18That was Turing in his classic paper. He said: “Well, everybody wants to know if computers can think, if robots
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53:18 - 53:24can think. Let me ask an easier question. Let me ask one that we can answer.”
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53:24 - 53:26- This is Alan Turing, the computer scientist.
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53:26 - 53:31Alan Turing, right. And he proposed the famous Turing test. He said: “Now here’s a good empirical question”.
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53:31 - 53:40And I think everybody ought to be…. Look: if a computer can beat a human being in the Turing test...
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53:40 - 53:44- Can you briefly explain what the Turing test is, for the sake of…?
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53:44 - 53:51- Ok, I wonder if there’s people here that don’t know. Probably there are. You have a judge or two.
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53:51 - 53:58Let’s just say one judge, to keep it simple. And the judge is having a conversation with two different agents: A & B.
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53:58 - 54:03One of them is a human being, and one of them is a robot or a computer.
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54:03 - 54:14The identity is concealed, but the human judge’s job is to tell which is the human being, and which is the robot.
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54:14 - 54:24And if the robot – or the computer, it doesn’t have to have a body – if the computer program can fool the judge
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54:24 - 54:32more often than not over a half an hour test, we would all agree: that is one smart, one intelligent computer program.
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54:32 - 54:41Turing thought that this was a nice conversation stopper. It would end an interminable philosophical wrangle which
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54:41 - 54:45was not getting anywhere, and replace it with a question of some interest.
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54:45 - 54:50Not one that he thought we should set about trying to answer empirically. But he just wanted to point out…
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54:50 - 54:57‘How about replacing that old chestnut with this more easily answerable question?'
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54:57 - 55:01Now I take it that that’s the sort of thing that Lawrence was doing in his book.
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55:01 - 55:06He was saying: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a question about how you get something from nothing, or why is there
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55:06 - 55:14a universe rather than nothing. We can wring changes on that ancient philosophical conundrum, but how about this:
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55:14 - 55:20here is a question which is at least very closely related to that. And we can answer it!
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55:20 - 55:28And once we answer it, who cares about the other question?
-
55:28 - 55:31- I think it takes more than that. What science can do is sometimes they…
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55:31 - 55:36Sometimes the other question is simply not a good question. For example… no, no, this is very important!
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55:36 - 55:41Because science can tell us that the kind of ways we’re framing things are wrong.
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55:41 - 55:45Most of us would agree that the ‘why’ question is not a good question.
-
55:45 - 55:49- Of course, but what I want to add, just to drop the other shoe on this.
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55:49 - 56:00Turing, I thought it was a brilliant move, but it failed miserably. Because people don’t want to settle for that
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56:00 - 56:03question. They should want to, but they don’t want to.
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56:03 - 56:07- People want to know the ‘why’ question, because they really want there to be some reason.
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56:07 - 56:09- That's right.
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56:09 - 56:12- And there may be no reason and science has to recognize the fact that there may be no reason.
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56:12 - 56:17But better than saying the ‘why’ question is not a good question – which it isn’t, because it makes a presumption
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56:17 - 56:23of an answer that there must be a reason, and there may be none – but a better one is: it may say, for example, that
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56:23 - 56:29our whole notions are wrong, which is why science – especially physics, but I imagine it’s happening in other
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56:29 - 56:31fields – changes the playing field so much.
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56:31 - 56:37For example, it can say: the question of "What happened before, where did it come from?" is not a good question, or
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56:37 - 56:43may not be a good question. Because if space and time are related in general relativity - when space is created time is
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56:43 - 56:46created - and the question “before” may not even have a meaning.
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56:46 - 56:54“Before” may be something that arises when time arises. And time may not arise until after the big bang.
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56:54 - 57:00So that whole human intuitive concept goes out the window, and it’s not the right way to ask the question.
-
57:00 - 57:05- Hold on a second! So sometimes that is definitely the case.
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57:05 - 57:12You described exactly the process. Sometimes science shows that what we thought was a good question, turns
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57:12 - 57:15out to be either badly put, or in fact completely meaningless.
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57:15 - 57:24In other cases, I don’t actually think that the Turing example is going quite in that direction.
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57:24 - 57:29It’s a good example in terms that, yes, Turing failed abysmally to convince everybody else, certainly
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57:29 - 57:35in philosophy departments, that he figured out the answer to the question, or that he had a better question.
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57:35 - 57:40But I don’t think that the other question is in fact meaningless or uninteresting or whatever.
-
57:40 - 57:43- Which question?
- The one that Turing did not want to answer. -
57:43 - 57:48There are interesting issues…
- Well, then we’ve got a disagreement… -
57:48 - 57:54I know, we do. But there are interesting issues about the nature of intelligence, the relationship between intelligence
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57:54 - 57:57and consciousness, for instance, which are not at all the same thing.
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57:57 - 58:02You can imagine a being, either biological or artificial, that is very intelligent but not…
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58:02 - 58:08- But that’s a side issue. Let’s get back to nothing.
- No no. The reason I wanted to get there is because -
58:08 - 58:15sometimes I see my colleagues in the sciences, and remember I’m a scientist myself, so I’m talking to myself,
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58:15 - 58:18which happens often. And usually when I argue with myself.
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58:18 - 58:20- You have to be careful about that…
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58:20 - 58:26- I know, it’s a disease. But when I argue with myself, actually, I get it right. I convince the other self.
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58:26 - 58:34Anyway, one of the problems with the science/philosophy antagonism: I think it’s unfortunate that it’s seen by so many
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58:34 - 58:39people, some philosophers and some scientists as well, as an antagonism.
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58:39 - 58:42Because there are other ways to put what we just talked about.
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58:42 - 58:48For instance, there is a model of progress, of philosophy making progress, that goes something along these lines.
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58:48 - 58:53There are certain questions that philosophers are trying to clarify. Philosophy is mostly about clarifying things.
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58:53 - 58:58It’s about thinking about ‘What does that mean?’, ‘What do we mean by this?’, ‘Let’s talk about this stuff’.
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58:58 - 59:04Then at some point some of these questions become actually amenable to empirical answers. They go into the
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59:04 - 59:12scientific arena. We have several examples of entire disciplines, including science itself of course, originally from philosophy.
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59:12 - 59:18Now what happens at that point is interesting. We can mention several cases. Science itself came out of
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59:18 - 59:24what used to be ‘natural philosophy’. People like Descartes and even Newton actually, thought of themselves as philosophers.
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59:24 - 59:26And then it becomes science.
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59:26 - 59:28- But they also thought of themselves as theologians too, so…
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59:28 - 59:33- Yeah, I agree. But what used to be called natural philosophy became science.
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59:33 - 59:41What used to a branch of philosophy became eventually psychology, independently. And to some extent what is now
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59:41 - 59:46philosophy of mind is turning into a combination of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and
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59:46 - 59:52so on and so forth. Now, what happens at that point to philosophers? Are philosophers therefore out of business?
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59:52 - 60:03No, what happens is that philosophers switch their interests to observing that newly spawned discipline from the outside.
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60:03 - 60:09So now you have philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology and so on.
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60:09 - 60:14What happens is that… This is progress, I think.
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60:14 - 60:19Because it’s philosophers coming up with certain questions, a question becomes amenable to empirical answers.
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60:19 - 60:24The scientists take them over. Now there’s something else that is the problem, which is:
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60:24 - 60:27ok, how is it exactly the scientists are doing? What are they doing?
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60:27 - 60:32- The value of philosophy is actually the next topic. I just want to resolve this issue of nothingness.
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60:32 - 60:40Because I have a quote from your book which I found interesting and provocative. It’s from an article maybe.
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60:40 - 60:48I assume that you agree with professor Dennett that sometimes scientists can subtly change the issue and
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60:48 - 60:54answer a more interesting question, and then find out that the old question was maybe not worth asking.
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60:54 - 61:04We have this issue of ‘nothing’ and the standard philosophical definition of what nothing is.
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61:04 - 61:06- I don’t know. Nobody has given me a standard definition of ‘nothing’.
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61:06 - 61:08- Let’s say that it is the absence of something.
- Well, that’s easy! -
61:13 - 61:18Right. You have written that, before the advancements of science, there have been “abstract and useless debates
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61:18 - 61:26about the nature of nothingness”, and you say that “to insist on this philosophical notion of ‘nothing’ is backward and
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61:26 - 61:29annoying.” So we have a specific issue here.
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61:29 - 61:36There’s this quantum mechanical notion of nothingness, which is not really nothing because it’s teeming with
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61:36 - 61:41energy and particles. And then we have those philosophers and also theologians insisting on:
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61:41 - 61:43“Yes, but it’s still something. You haven’t explained…”
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61:43 - 61:49Well, my point was just simple, and I suspect again, well we'll see, I suspect there will be more agreement,
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61:49 - 61:56I mean obviously one provokes, but the point is that you can't define 'nothing' without knowing what 'something' is.
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61:56 - 62:05So as we are, as our scientific understanding evolves, the absence of something evolves, our understanding of that.
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62:05 - 62:11So to require something without knowing very carefully what you mean by it - and what I mean by what you mean by it
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62:11 - 62:18is what science has discovered about that - to do that in the absence of that, is a useless debate.
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62:18 - 62:25And I think, it more or less agrees with what Massimo said, that in some sense philosophers try to understand the
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62:25 - 62:36meaning of things by thinking about what the results of science does. And so to have a discussion and debate
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62:36 - 62:41on what the absence of something is without talking about quantum mechanics or without talking about the vacuum or
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62:41 - 62:51without talking about space and time and what they mean and all of that, is maybe enjoyable but it is not particularly informative.
-
62:51 - 63:00- There's many cases that I think bear that out. A traditional metaphysical issue is the nature of causation.
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63:00 - 63:09Well, there is one way of studying causation, and that is: look at the best science and see how science uses the idea
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63:09 - 63:18and look at work by scientists, conceptual work on causation, people like Judea Pearl. Then you really get
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63:18 - 63:27a topic. Otherwise what you’re talking about is the folk notion of causation and then you’re doing anthropology, which,
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63:27 - 63:37I 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
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63:37 - 63:42what some human populations think is an interesting way of defining causation.
-
63:42 - 63:50- And I think al lot of philosophy in that sense, not all philosophers but for example, holding to an Aristotelian
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63:50 - 63:56notion and requiring and not all…
- Oh, come on. Nobody holds Aristotelian notions anymore. -
63:56 - 64:01If you did hold to an Aristotelian notion of something and saying that is the thing that I want to describe, you are
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64:01 - 64:08having an interesting conversation about a concept but that concept may not be related to reality.
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64:08 - 64:13- But Lawrence, let me ask you a question. First of all, I actually disagree even in this particular case with Dan,
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64:13 - 64:18I have to say, about causality. Yes, you're right that certainly the early discussions about causality, beginning with Hume,
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64:18 - 64:24which still is the starting point in philosophy for any discussion on causality. They definitely do refer to what you
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64:24 - 64:31called the folk concept of causality. But I think that, you know, I've actually read recently some of that
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64:31 - 64:36technical literature in philosophy of causality because I'm preparing to teach a seminar about this,
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64:36 - 64:42that includes that sort of stuff. And actually the philosophers who are now working on that stuff, very much do what I just
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64:42 - 64:46described a minute ago which is: they do take on board the best notions of science...
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64:46 - 64:52- They have to!
- Well, of course. Well, they don't have to. You are making a moral statement. -
64:52 - 65:02Well, they are, so the point is that they are. But I do get nervous when I hear scientists - some scientists because
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65:02 - 65:11I don't want to make the generalization too broad. When I hear sometimes, well, that "most of philosophy does x or z or y",
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65:11 - 65:17I bet that most of those scientists have never actually read a technical paper in philosophy. So, that's my
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65:17 - 65:23empirical question: how can you make a generalization about what most philosophy does, if you don't have it?
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65:23 - 65:27- You hit the key point of what I was gonna get to, which may sound judgmental but it's not.
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65:27 - 65:31- Really?
- Yes and that is: your picture I would agree with, about how -
65:31 - 65:38how philosophy proceeds, and it then is a simple empirical fact - I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing but
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65:38 - 65:48it is a fact - that the reason that most scientists don’t read philosophy is it doesn’t have any impact on what they do.
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65:48 - 65:55And 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
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65:55 - 66:02would have to read philosophy of science is just not true. Scientists go about doing what they are doing, being
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66:02 - 66:11ignorant about detailed questions that are not uninteresting from an intellectual perspective, but they’re irrelevant to the science.
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66:11 - 66:16So it is a true statement that once philosophy generally gets to the point where the science is producing knowledge,
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66:16 - 66:21and the philosophers are discussing the meaning of that knowledge, it's interesting.
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66:21 - 66:26And you can read about it if you are interested from an intellectual perspective, but it has no impact upon the science.
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66:26 - 66:34- Let me give a different case though because I think there is a better job for philosophers and...
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66:34 - 66:43- They are always looking for employment so…
- They’re not gonna be put out of work. -
66:43 - 66:52- You can’t do science without doing philosophy. You can do it, seat-in-the-pants, informally, or you can do it reflectively.
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66:52 - 67:01And some people are either brilliant or lucky and they never consult any philosophers and they don’t make any howlers
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67:01 - 67:11philosophically, and so they’re pretty in good shape. And anybody like that, I think, is in a certain sense entitled to
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67:11 - 67:19say: ‘I'm just going to ignore philosophy, I don’t seem to need this’. But the fact is that in the areas which are
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67:19 - 67:26particularly controversial -- everything to do with the mind, all of neuroscience, in particular in the life sciences.
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67:26 - 67:31Maybe not physics, maybe…
- I think not physics but I think I agree with where you're going. -
67:31 - 67:41- But the fact is the scientists, really smart people, and they know their fields and very often they are asking questions
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67:41 - 67:44that are just preposterous.
- Exactly, that is what philosophers... -
67:44 - 67:49- ...and what philosophers are really good at..
- …is framing the questions. -
67:49 - 67:52- …is coming up with better questions.
- And I think in the field of the mind, anywhere where -
67:52 - 68:00science is at the edge, it doesn’t really know yet how to define things, that’s where philosophy generally has had
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68:00 - 68:03an impact. But after that point it doesn’t and that’s just...
-
68:03 - 68:11- I have a nice quote from professor Dennett’s book that is relevant to this discussion. Well, you already paraphrased
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68:11 - 68:17the other quote that I had about "there is no such thing as a philosophy-free science, there is only science whose
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68:17 - 68:23philosophical baggage is taking on board without examination", but the other quote that I wanted to bring up is
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68:23 - 68:33from your latest book. I am paraphrasing a little bit. You say that you derive some sort of guilty pleasure from watching
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68:33 - 68:40eminent scientists who have expressed what you call withering contempt for philosophy, and to watch those
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68:40 - 68:47scientists stumble embarrassingly in their own philosophical efforts. Can you give us any names, professor Dennett?
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68:47 - 68:51Who are these scientists?
- Oh, sure! -
68:51 - 68:55- Off the record!
- Yeah, off the record. Nobody's gonna know. -
68:55 - 69:07- No one here will talk about it.
- There are eminent people working on consciousness, -
69:07 - 69:21working on neuroscience, who frame the issues in just bizarrely unsuccessful ways and they include some really heavy hitters.
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69:21 - 69:28And I name them in the book so I can name them here. I mean Francis Crick had some really simpleminded
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69:28 - 69:34ideas about consciousness.
- He was the guy who discovered the double helix. -
69:34 - 69:46- You know, you can hardly pick a more eminent or ingenious, or more conceptually adroit scientist than Crick,
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69:46 - 69:50and yet Crick had a real tin ear for some of these issues when he turned to neuroscience.
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69:50 - 70:00And he sought out the help of Christof Koch, who is a wonderful neuroscientist, but he has not outlived his
-
70:00 - 70:11catholic upbringing. And he is still sort of hankering for a soul. I can point to the places in his work where you see,
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70:11 - 70:16‘look what he is missing here, look what he is missing here’ because he is still trying to save a haven for the soul.
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70:16 - 70:23I can multiply that by twenty.
- So he doesn’t think that he needs to read philosophy.. -
70:23 - 70:29He just brashly enters into philosophical territory and thinks that he can just solve...
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70:29 - 70:42But notice that Francis Crick, Francis got better. He learned his lesson and he took on some philosophers, mainly
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70:42 - 70:47Patty Churchland and Paul Churchland but also to some degree me and he began to take us seriously
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70:47 - 70:50because he realized these were hard questions.
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70:50 - 71:01What really gives me guilty pleasure is seeing the books, there’s been dozens of books about
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71:01 - 71:10consciousness by eminent neuroscientists. Most of them are pretty dreadful and they sink like a stone and that
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71:10 - 71:21is what they deserve. But very often their authors even come that close to acknowledging, if you look at the book
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71:21 - 71:30carefully, that ‘oh oh' they suddenly realize they are in philosophical hot water and they need help from a
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71:30 - 71:36philosopher. And a few of them ask for help and I really appreciate it.
-
71:36 - 71:44- It hasn’t happened in seventy years of physics, but I absolutely agree in an area which is forming, where the
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71:44 - 71:48questions need to be formed. Like philosophy of quantum mechanics, forgive me, but philosophy of quantum
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71:48 - 71:55mechanics is a lot of philosophers who know something about quantum mechanics, but the progress in
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71:55 - 72:03understanding quantum mechanics has not come… I mean there are incredibly interesting philosophical questions
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72:03 - 72:06about quantum mechanics, but the progress doesn’t come from there.
-
72:06 - 72:09- What about Shimoni?
- But Shimoni is a physicist. -
72:09 - 72:15- He is in the philosophy department.
- Yes, you can google it. -
72:15 - 72:21- I think it's my turn to say something presumptuous as Lawrence put it earlier.
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72:21 - 72:27This is it, I want to go back to what Lawrence said about philosophy of science and the role between philosophy of science
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72:27 - 72:32and the relationship between philosophy and science and science, because I'm both a scientist and a philosopher of science.
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72:32 - 72:39I’m going to put forth – and this is the presumptuous part – that what you said a few minutes ago was both conceptually
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72:39 - 72:45incorrect and empirically wrong. This is what I mean by that.
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72:45 - 72:50So if you actually take a look at the philosophy of science literature, by the way there is no such thing as
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72:50 - 72:53the philosophy of science literature. There is a philosophy of quantum mechanics, there is a philosophy of other parts
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72:53 - 72:57of physics, there is a philosophy of biology and so on and so forth. So it is a bunch of different things.
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72:57 - 73:07So what you find are two things, or at least two things, to simplify. First of all, most of philosophy of science is not
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73:07 - 73:13at all about helping scientists answer questions. So it is no surprise that it doesn’t.
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73:13 - 73:20So when people like your colleague Stephen Hawking - to name names - starts out a book and says that philosophy is
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73:20 - 73:25dead because it hasn’t contributed anything to science, he literally does not know what he is talking about.
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73:25 - 73:31That is not the point of philosophy of science, most of the time.
- Yeah, but philosophers get offended when some -
73:31 - 73:39scientist says, or some philosophers do. It’s just a fact. It’s got other goals and aims and techniques
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73:39 - 73:42and there is nothing wrong with that.
- Right, but when there’s nothing wrong with something, -
73:42 - 73:46you don’t say ‘it’s a dead field’, you just say it is a different stuff.
-
73:46 - 73:49- Well, theology, you could say is a dead field..
- Yes, you can say that. Right! -
73:49 - 73:59Well, so that was the conceptual part that I objected to. We need to realize that philosophy is largely in a different kind of business.
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73:59 - 74:04And so, yes, it doesn’t contribute to science, just like science does not contribute to, you know, English literature.
-
74:04 - 74:07Or literary criticism, whatever you want to put it.
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74:07 - 74:13But so what, no one is blaming the physicists for not coming up with something new about Jane Austen .
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74:13 - 74:19The other part is the empirical part. When you say, you know, they don’t talk to each other,
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74:19 - 74:26they have nothing to say to each other. I am not as familiar as Dan probably is with areas of philosophy of quantum
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74:26 - 74:29mechanics for instance. But I’m certainly very familiar with philosophy of biology.
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74:29 - 74:36And there are plenty of scientists that actually do work with philosophers to clarify conceptual issues that come
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74:36 - 74:43out of live problems in evolutionary biology. So there are subfields of philosophy of science where
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74:43 - 74:48knowledge and even interaction with philosophy does in fact help science.
-
74:48 - 74:53- Absolutely! In those areas where science is trying to form the questions. And an intelligent discussion with people who
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74:53 - 75:02thought 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.
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75:02 - 75:11And that’s the area of physics. Absolutely, where science is at the edge of thinking about questions, then there is a very
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75:11 - 75:16fruitful relationship. I think consciousness is probably the prototypical example.
-
75:16 - 75:21- One of the best examples, yes!
- ...of where we’re just flailing about, I think, still... -
75:21 - 75:32- But let me get straight about one thing you are saying, Lawrence. You are saying that cosmology is an area of
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75:32 - 75:37physics where…
- ...nothing useful is gonna come from philosophy, yes! -
75:37 - 75:47- Does it bother you that there are many physicists who think cosmology is just bad philosophy?
-
75:47 - 75:52- Which is the ultimate insult of course!
- Because there are! -
75:52 - 75:56- It used to be. No, the great thing about cosmology is that it is now a science. Thirty, forty years ago it wasn’t.
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75:56 - 76:03That's why I also wrote this book, because there’s been a revolution in our empirical understanding about the universe.
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76:03 - 76:08So we can address questions that we could talk about before but it was just talk.
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76:08 - 76:15We can now actually ask questions that we might be able to get empirical answers about and that is remarkable.
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76:15 - 76:22But the fact that some scientists say something, I mean, some scientists are Republicans, it doesn’t say anything
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76:22 - 76:26bad about science.
- Or good about republicans. -
76:26 - 76:32- So what you’re saying is that a lot of physicists haven’t caught up with the progress in cosmology.
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76:32 - 76:38- But the key question is: you can talk generalities, but the questions in cosmology, the fundamental questions are
-
76:38 - 76:42ones that basically have a huge amount of intellectual baggage that is scientific.
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76:42 - 76:47That the questions are gonna only be resolved by understanding aspects of quantum gravity and
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76:47 - 76:55measurements from the early universe. And so you can talk all about them all you want but the progress is gonna be
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76:55 - 77:02made in very technical areas of science, be it either theoretical physics or experimental science.
-
77:02 - 77:12And there are conceptual questions that, I mean, the basic conceptual questions, the ones people… they are bland
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77:12 - 77:20and general and we’ve had them for millennia and they are not new, they’re not gonna add anything to that, the really
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77:20 - 77:27detailed questions that unfortunately may require a new language. I mean...
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77:27 - 77:40- Now let me just name four physicists: Laughlin, Penrose, Smolin and you.
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77:40 - 77:46- I am not sure I want to be in that list, but okay.
- Too late! -
77:46 - 77:53- You’re at the end so…
- Two of them are philosophers. Anyway, go on. -
77:53 - 78:09- Would you not agree that the reason you don’t like that company is because those are eminent physicists
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78:09 - 78:18who are making, dare I say, philosophical claims that you don’t trust. That you don’t accept.
-
78:18 - 78:24- I would say that they’re making scientific claims that are beyond the domain of what science is now doing.
-
78:24 - 78:29- That in itself, I think, is a philosophical claim.
- Of course, fine, if you want to call it that. -
78:29 - 78:37No, it is just dishonest… you can frame, you can dress it up in all that language, but the question is:
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78:37 - 78:46are you saying something that you are justified in saying on the basis of what we know about the world or not.
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78:46 - 78:52And if you’re not, you are not being intellectually honest. And that is something I disagree with, whether
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78:52 - 78:56you call it philosophy or physics.
- Those four people. -
78:56 - 79:01- No, I don't think I apply it to all of them.
- I picked the names not quite out of the hat. -
79:01 - 79:11The fact is, all four of you are very strongly opinionated, you are all brilliant and you don’t agree and…
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79:11 - 79:18- No, we don't agree. The question is, what don’t we agree about. We don’t agree about questions that are
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79:18 - 79:24not central to cosmology. We all agree about what the data tells us about..
-
79:24 - 79:31- I think those people would disagree about the centrality of those questions, but I also would like to caution: whenever
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79:31 - 79:38we have these discussions, I think that we really should resist, unless we are talking about republicans or theologians,
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79:38 - 79:44the word ‘intellectually dishonest’, because that really imputes motives to people. I think there is better reason
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79:44 - 79:48to disagree with.
- You’re right, and I didn’t impute that motive to all of those people, maybe some subset so.. -
79:48 - 79:51- And you’re not gonna to tell us who..
- No, absolutely not! -
79:51 - 79:54- In fact, actually I should take that back also as far as republicans and theologians are concerned.
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79:54 - 79:58- Professor Krauss, would you agree that there's philosophy in your book? Because I have a quote here and I think..
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79:58 - 80:02- No look, Massimo could say any time you think you are doing philosophy.
-
80:02 - 80:09Of course philosophy is asking questions about the world like science is and so science was natural philosophy.
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80:09 - 80:14But the key… those are, as you just said, if you expand the definition enough… it loses meaning.
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80:14 - 80:22The question is, am I talking… I tried to talk specifically about the way we do science, what science has told us,
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80:22 - 80:29what science hasn’t told us, what’s plausible, what’s implausible, what’s known, what’s likely, what’s unlikely…
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80:29 - 80:34Those are scientific terms and of course they all impact on philosophical questions.
-
80:34 - 80:38Look at the title of my book, you could say it’s a philosophical question.
-
80:38 - 80:40- Can I give the example?
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80:40 - 80:53- Don’t you think that we ought to inaugurate, initiate Lawrence into the band of philosophers who work in other departments?
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80:53 - 80:57- Absolutely!
- No, no I have a doctorate in philosophy in fact. -
80:57 - 81:01- Like anybody who has a PhD. That’s right.
- My PhD is a ‘doctor of philosophy’ so I am philosopher.. -
81:01 - 81:07- There is a nice thought experiment in your book. It sounds almost philosophical.
-
81:07 - 81:11- Thought experiments are physics by the way.
- You probably know what I'm talking about, what I'm getting at. -
81:11 - 81:15- Well, he wrote it.
- But Einstein’s thought experiments were physics, I should point out. -
81:15 - 81:23- So you describe in your book a time in the distant future when all the evidence that we currently have
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81:23 - 81:32for the big bang, our basic picture of the cosmos, will disappear beyond what is called the observational horizon.
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81:32 - 81:39Very quickly, so all the traces that we now have of the origin of the universe will be erased.
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81:39 - 81:46And so future scientists, maybe in a different galaxy, even when they are using the best available methods, will end up
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81:46 - 81:51with a completely false picture of the universe. Just because they don’t have the evidence.
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81:51 - 81:58This is a fascinating idea of course. It strikes me as quite philosophical. And it’s also a sobering thought because
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81:58 - 82:06it raises the question, is it possible that we find ourselves in a similar predicament, in a similar situation?
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82:06 - 82:12Could it be that some part of reality will be forever hidden for us just as it is for those future scientists?
-
82:12 - 82:18- I raised it for that reason. I raised it to provoke that question and to provoke some humility in the sense that
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82:18 - 82:27to realize that we have a picture that holds together, but… all of science is based on a limited amount of data and
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82:27 - 82:31there’s things that we haven’t measured and there maybe some things we’ll never be able to measure.
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82:31 - 82:40And therefore there could be some questions which are ultimately, may ultimately - and I say ‘may’ because it’s not
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82:40 - 82:44obvious - may ultimately be unanswerable. But it’s a leap...
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82:44 - 82:47What worries me, and I don’t want to give the people the wrong impression.
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82:47 - 82:52The reason people in the far future will get the wrong answer is that they don’t have access to information.
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82:52 - 82:56So I am not saying that the big bang is gonna ever be wrong. It’s not.
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82:56 - 83:01The big bang happened just like evolution happened. Because we have access to that data.
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83:01 - 83:07Now, we don’t have access to the data right now to what happened with t (time) equal zero and our picture of that
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83:07 - 83:12could change dramatically. We don’t have access to information about whether our universe is unique and
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83:12 - 83:15what’s beyond the visible horizon. So that could change dramatically.
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83:15 - 83:20It is just the fact that we don’t know everything, doesn’t mean we know nothing.
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83:20 - 83:24And that’s a presumption that a lot of people make. They say ‘oh well, because science doesn’t know this,
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83:24 - 83:27I can’t trust any of the basic science’ and that’s a real problem.
-
83:27 - 83:30- And that's baloney.
- Yeah, we all agree on that, but it’s a common -
83:30 - 83:33misunderstanding that people have about science.
- Professor Dennett, would you say, as an expert on -
83:33 - 83:41evolutionary theory and cognition, that our brains, or the brains of future scientists for that matter in different
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83:41 - 83:48galaxies, are evolved, or will have been evolved, to grasp the fundamental structure of the universe?
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83:48 - 83:54Maybe our minds are just not equipped for that.
- Well, I’m glad you asked that question because it gets very -
83:54 - 84:04close to what I consider the bad pseudo-biological argument for the limits of science.
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84:04 - 84:15And that’s the ‘our brains are just finite brains and just as the fish cannot understand democracy and the dog cannot
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84:15 - 84:19understand quantum mechanics so there must be all these realms that we cannot understand.
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84:19 - 84:23Because after all we are just mammals with mammalian brains blablabla’.
-
84:23 - 84:29- Nice summary!
- The reason that that’s a pseudo… notice by the way -
84:29 - 84:37that it has some rather eminent exponents. Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Colin McGinn, in order of eminence.
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84:37 - 84:41- Increasing or decreasing? Nevermind.
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84:41 - 84:46- You can figure that out. So what’s wrong with that argument?
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84:46 - 84:50What’s wrong with that argument - in fact it’s sort of comical when you think of Chomsky and Fodor -
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84:50 - 84:58is that the dog, the fish, the monkey, they can’t even understand the questions. We got language,
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84:58 - 84:59we can understand the questions.
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84:59 - 85:06What makes you think that there are questions that we can understand yet the answers to which are not available at
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85:06 - 85:19any cost, at any price? Particularly what I think is important is that Chomsky rightly for decades has been heralding
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85:19 - 85:26and praising the near infinity of the human mind. Why? Because of the generativity of language.
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85:26 - 85:37Now if there are questions that are simply beyond our ken, that is: the questions we can understand, but the answers
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85:37 - 85:46will stump us forever. Like a question as simple as: what is consciousness? Do we have free will? I think I understand those questions.
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85:46 - 85:52The idea that we could not understand the answers, the true answers to those questions,
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85:52 - 86:02has got to mean something quite bizarre. It’s gonna have to mean that there is no finite set of books in natural language
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86:02 - 86:12which will gradually bring the reader of those books to an appreciation of the answers. Now that might be true.
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86:12 - 86:16But nothing in biology tells us that that should be true.
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86:16 - 86:20- Yes, it’s making a presumption about something you don’t know. Saying we’ll never understand something
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86:20 - 86:22assumes you know all the things we can understand and…
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86:22 - 86:30- 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.
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86:30 - 86:46- 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.
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86:46 - 86:54Look, I am sure without the benefit of thousands of scientists and philosophers who’ve worked over the eons
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86:54 - 86:58I’d be unable to understand all sorts of really simple things.
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86:58 - 87:06The fact is that I can benefit from all their hard-won understanding, it means that I can understand things.
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87:06 - 87:16I like to point out that my grandchildren can easily understand concepts that my parents’ generation
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87:16 - 87:26were baffled by. And now of course, there may be limits, but it’s not as if we’re facing a stone wall somewhere.
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87:26 - 87:33The idea that there is somewhere, where there’s this stone wall and we’re just gonna hit blank incomprehension
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87:33 - 87:44when we get there… It’s not biological. It’s mystical. It’s the idea that there is no trajectory through ‘book land’
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87:44 - 87:52and ‘science land’ that gets you there. But that has nothing to do with the limitations of neurons.
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87:52 - 87:57- It also goes against the history of science. There haven’t been any brick walls yet.
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87:57 - 88:02That doesn’t mean we won’t come up yet, but there is no evidence for that so far, so why should you make the
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88:02 - 88:04presumption that there will be?
- Are you equally confident, professor Pigliucci? -
88:04 - 88:09- No, I’m not. I mean, I tend to agree with most, with the gist of what Dan said.
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88:09 - 88:16Certainly the evolutionary argument for human limitations is false on the face of it.
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88:16 - 88:24We didn’t evolve to solve Fermat’s last theorem and we did. And there’s no way you can argue that natural selection
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88:24 - 88:29somehow favored that kind of abstract level of mathematical understanding, what the hell.
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88:29 - 88:32Mathematicians… do mathematicians have a lot of children? Well, I don’t know, but certainly not in the Pleistocene.
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88:32 - 88:34- Most of them can meet women.
- Yes, exactly. -
88:34 - 88:39- But they can multiply, right? They multiply all the time.
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88:39 - 88:50- So I agree with Dan that the evolutionary argument for sort of the intrinsic limitations of the human brain is baloney.
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88:50 - 88:56I also don’t think that the position, the so-called mysterian position, you mentioned Colin McGinn, the mysterian
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88:56 - 89:01position about certain issues, like consciousness, you know, ‘Oh, I think there are reasons to think that we’ll never get there’.
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89:01 - 89:07It’s utterly useless. It doesn’t tell me anything actionable. It says ‘Oh, maybe there is a limit’.
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89:07 - 89:13Okay, 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.
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89:13 - 89:20- Then I will go play tennis, but in the meantime...
- Exactly, or chess. But for all of that, in that sense I do agree. -
89:20 - 89:26Now I do think however there are some interesting issues actually that science, certain areas of science,
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89:26 - 89:30are actually facing right now in terms of a certain human ability to understand things.
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89:30 - 89:35For instance, there has been a debate in the last few years about massive datasets, coming from
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89:35 - 89:40molecular biology and now eventually from neuroscience. Neuroscience is not quite there yet.
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89:40 - 89:47Molecular biology started out, for instance, a few years ago, not so many years ago, with the human genome project,
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89:47 - 89:56sort 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
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89:56 - 89:59and then you'll figure out how to make a human being.’ Well, clearly that didn’t happen.
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89:59 - 90:04But not only that didn’t happen, things got much worse. We’ve gotten into genomics, as an entire discipline…
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90:04 - 90:08And for a while it was kind of comical in biology; that every few days there was a new ‘-omics’ coming out:
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90:08 - 90:15genomics, metabolomics, proteinomics, blabla. And finally phenomics, the entire phenotype.
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90:15 - 90:18It’s like, what the hell are these people talking about?
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90:18 - 90:21Just because they rebrand something they think they’re inventing something new. Anyway,
-
90:21 - 90:27the point is that we may have hit at least a temporary wall in some of those areas already. Because it was
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90:27 - 90:33really interesting to me to see, as a member of the department of biology. We had at some point in Stony Brook university,
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90:33 - 90:42a whole series of seminars about genomics. And these people were coming in telling us all these very fascinating
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90:42 - 90:49things about gene-gene interactions and networks and all that sort of stuff. And then I realized that the data analysis
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90:49 - 90:54that they were doing, the statistical techniques to analyzing that sort of stuff, were things along the lines
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90:54 - 90:59of principal components analysis. I don’t know how many people here know what principal components analysis is.
-
90:59 - 91:02- I'm sure all of us.
- All of you, right? But it’s a complex, interesting, -
91:02 - 91:06multivariate statistical analysis to deal with complex data sets.
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91:06 - 91:11In other parts of biology, is what you do when you have no idea what you’re doing.
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91:11 - 91:16Cos it’s an exploratory analysis that sort of tells you: 'well, there is a cluster there over here,
-
91:16 - 91:19there is another cluster there over there. I don’t know what the hell that means, but it’s there’.
-
91:19 - 91:24- It's exploring new territory, like ‘non plus ultra’.
- Right, so what I am saying is, the bottom line is -
91:24 - 91:29that there may be areas where we are already hitting walls - they may be temporary walls.
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91:29 - 91:33- But there are only walls because... In a sense you are validating what Dan said earlier.
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91:33 - 91:38What you are really saying is that there's some areas where you find you’re asking the wrong questions.
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91:38 - 91:44And you find you’re asking the wrong questions by doing it and you find it doesn't lead anywhere, so you move somewhere else.
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91:44 - 91:47- I am not sure. That actually is a good example where there could be a difference.
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91:47 - 91:52And I know a little bit about that, more certainly than I know about quantum mechanics, so let me
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91:52 - 91:55elaborate for a second.
- Okay. -
91:55 - 92:00- So the idea there is that the question is good, the question that we wanna know there, the fundamental question is
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92:00 - 92:05how is it that gene-gene interactions and then interaction of genes with the environment during development create
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92:05 - 92:12phenotypes, that is, the way organisms look, behave, and so on and so forth. That is a perfect valid question and
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92:12 - 92:16we’ve been making progress in certain areas, you know, with that question.
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92:16 - 92:22But we seem to be hitting a moment now, which as I said, could be temporary, but a moment where the data is
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92:22 - 92:29becoming so complex and so variable that we do not seem to have a way through the maze.
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92:29 - 92:32We just see a bunch of complexity there. There's all sorts of interesting patterns.
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92:32 - 92:36But we're not able to extract the meaning.
- But that's so great in physics! -
92:36 - 92:42- It's already getting late. I do wanna put up some questions that were asked by the audience.
-
92:42 - 92:53- I'll let you go first and then I go.
- Here's a downer of a hypothesis which comes out of -
92:53 - 93:04the new data mining that people are doing. And that is: what if it turns out that we find that we can use data mining
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93:04 - 93:13algorithms to get answers to all sorts of questions which we are very sure that they’re the right answers,
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93:13 - 93:19but we can't understand how the process works at all.
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93:19 - 93:28But we can go ahead and do science sort of flying blind, relying on our algorithms to give us the right answers.
-
93:28 - 93:35And the funny thing is: but why... how does that work? Well..
- And that's where we are. -
93:35 - 93:41- That's I think a very real possibility and at that point we will have…
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93:41 - 93:49Scientific predictions will go right on and scientific fact finding will go right on but scientific understanding will
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93:49 - 93:56sort of… it's not that it will hit a wall so much as people will stop trying.
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93:56 - 94:02- Well no. I think you guys are just experiencing the growth pains that physics has had. Point is: it has happened
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94:02 - 94:04a lot of times.
- Isn't that always the case... -
94:04 - 94:09- No, no. I know it sounds patronizing. What will really happens is: it will stagnate for a while, but someone will come.
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94:09 - 94:15If the experience of science is… You'll have like what we call phenomenological models.
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94:15 - 94:21An exactly similar thing happened in the 1960s. Accelerators were built, all these particles were discovered,
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94:21 - 94:25and people just said ‘the more energy you have the more particles you have’. And they came up with these
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94:25 - 94:29weird zen-like things called bootstrap models: every particle is made up of every other particle… You'll never...
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94:29 - 94:37It’s too complicated to ever really have a fundamental idea about. And we’ll just try and look for patterns, see things.
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94:37 - 94:43And for a long time that’s what was done. But eventually someone had a good idea and it moved forward.
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94:43 - 94:48And it could be that it forever is that way… I don’t think that it necessarily has to be. It may be that
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94:48 - 94:56a different way of thinking is required and some young person here may come up with that way of thinking.
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94:56 - 95:00And certainly that what’s happened in physics.
- Agree, my intention was definitely not to show that 'haha', -
95:00 - 95:08we got it, we hit a wall. But I am a little less optimistic, I suppose, than you are because the kinds of problems that
-
95:08 - 95:16we're talking about that physics faced in the 1960s is literally billions of orders of magnitude less than what we are
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95:16 - 95:20talking here .... So yeah, it may be, or may be not. I don't know. We’ll find out.
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95:20 - 95:23- I agree, you’re absolutely right. That's why I’m into physics cause it's easy.
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95:23 - 95:30These 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
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95:30 - 95:36of course. They seem so daunting now that they don't seem solvable.
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95:36 - 95:41But I wouldn't be surprised if in a few hundred years they’re be solvable.
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95:41 - 95:46- Maybe not tonight. So, which reminds me, it's getting late, so I want to...
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95:46 - 95:49- But people are having fun, right?
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95:54 - 95:56So what if we are all jetlagged here?
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95:56 - 96:03- So one of those fun-having people out there in the audience has submitted this question through text message:
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96:03 - 96:11- That's fancy.
- "If politics were based more on proper science, -
96:11 - 96:19how would it improve our society?"
- Yeah, well, I've written a lot about that. -
96:19 - 96:27I mean public policy should be based on empirical evidence. And it's that simple.
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96:27 - 96:35If you gonna try to make a policy you should generally have some empirical basis for why that policy is reasonable.
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96:35 - 96:41And if you don't you should employ the policy and then second see if it is, and that's a really simple thing.
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96:41 - 96:49And if it were done more generally and used by most political parties, I think the world would be a better place.
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96:49 - 96:53- But there is a downside to take very seriously and that's this:
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96:53 - 97:00what if the science in question is basically the science of spin doctoring?
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97:00 - 97:13And political parties who were already using technology in novel and interesting ways... And what if they really discover
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97:13 - 97:21that they can craft messages which have almost no content, but that will win votes…
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97:21 - 97:25- As they have…
- …done. Yes; chuck. -
97:25 - 97:33- …and the whole premise of democracy as an informed electorate is sort of out the window.
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97:33 - 97:43Because instead of informing the populace, the populace is being manipulated by images that are scientifically honed.
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97:43 - 97:47This worries me a lot.
- Well, I agree with you, and I wanna make something clear -
97:47 - 97:50that may not be obvious. I am not saying that scientists have the answer to political questions.
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97:50 - 97:56I’m saying that science should be the basis. So what we need to do, is not what the politicians want.
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97:56 - 98:03It is the obligation of some scientists to inform the public of what we know and what we don't know,
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98:03 - 98:08how we learn, and how we ask questions. So that they can make informed decisions about what they are hearing
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98:08 - 98:15from the politicians. But even having said that I'm not saying that scientific result should be the basis of public policy.
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98:15 - 98:20For example, there are political questions. So you may... what you need to know is that global warming is happening,
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98:20 - 98:23and you need to know that humans are impacting on climate.
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98:23 - 98:31But you could easily say, ‘ok, I accept that scientific fact, but as a political decision, I need to burn coal'.
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98:31 - 98:39And that's a political decision. But to make the correct decision, you have to know and the public needs to know
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98:39 - 98:44what the implications are. But that doesn't mean that the scientific answer, which is ‘burning coal is bad for
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98:44 - 98:47the environment’, is always going to be the correct political answer.
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98:47 - 98:53That's not the case. People have the right to make the vote based on informed decision that "you know what,
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98:53 - 98:57I don't give a damn, I want to burn coal." Because that's just the way democracies work.
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98:57 - 99:04So we need to inform people so that they don't buy the crap from politicians, that they learn the scientific process
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99:04 - 99:10of how to be skeptical, how to ask questions.
- And in fact, that's a point I want to underline, -
99:10 - 99:23All the methods, all the propaganda methods are counteractable, actually quite straightforwardly,
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99:23 - 99:35by simply informing people about those very methods and getting them tuned in to the fact that an attempt is being made
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99:35 - 99:38to manipulate them.
- Everybody sign up for a critical thinking course. -
99:38 - 99:45- Well, that’s what science should be. Or philosophy! Any good academic field should be based on...
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99:45 - 99:52- True! That is correct. Now, I wanted to give a slightly different answer to the question that was posed, which is,
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99:52 - 99:57again it's a question of nuance. I thought it was interesting that Lawrence's immediate answer was
-
99:57 - 100:04'policy ought to be informed by...' Your first actions were not politics but policy. There's a difference between
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100:04 - 100:09politics and policy. Absolutely policy ought to be informed by the best empirical evidence that we have because
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100:09 - 100:16otherwise you literally are blundering into nonsense, into bad notions. So yes if there is such a thing as
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100:16 - 100:24climate change, antropogenic climate change, and there is, that has to be part of any policy decision.
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100:24 - 100:31Now the other part, however, this is sort of analogous to the discussion we were having early on about the
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100:31 - 100:36empirical imput into ethical decision making, into ethics.
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100:36 - 100:41There definitely has to be empirical input into political decision, but part of political decision making also
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100:41 - 100:47is concerned with people's ways of looking at the world, their values, their judgments about
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100:47 - 100:55what is important and what is less important. So for instance, you could say, if in fact you want to solve the problem of
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100:55 - 101:01of poverty - let's say in the US - then you need to enact certain redistribution of wealth measures and so on.
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101:01 - 101:08And that is a fact, but it flies politically, only if we actually convince people that that ought to be a priority.
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101:08 - 101:15If people say, well no, personal liberty or freedom of acting as an independent agent is more important than…
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101:15 - 101:21in other words, that value is higher to me than the other one, then there is nothing you can do factually
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101:21 - 101:24to convince those people. You have to argue about: 'well, what do you mean by that?',
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101:24 - 101:26'have you thought about the implications from an ethical perspective'?
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101:26 - 101:31What that means is that, in order to allow for some people to be obscenely rich,
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101:31 - 101:36you are actually condemning a bunch more people to poverty. That sort of argument is clearly
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101:36 - 101:43informed by the facts but it doesn't stop at the facts. Again the facts in some sense underdetermine the answer.
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101:43 - 101:48The answer has to imply value judgments, and therefore I would say ethics.
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101:48 - 101:56- I agree with you. In some sense, the job of the politicians, if there is one, is to then say:
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101:56 - 102:01here are my value judgments, do you agree with them? Elect me if you do.
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102:01 - 102:05But not: here's the facts. Here's my facts. I've invented them.
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102:05 - 102:09- You can argue values, you cannot argue facts.
- You say honestly, you say look: -
102:09 - 102:13'I don't want to solve the problem of poverty.' I wanna ensure some people can be obscenely wealthy, whatever.
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102:13 - 102:21Just put it out there and there’ll be people who agree. If democracy has any value, if you believe in it,
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102:21 - 102:25then you say well, if more people like that value, then that's the way we're gonna live with it.
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102:25 - 102:30- We are all entitled to our own opinions, but not entitled to our own facts.
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102:30 - 102:32- Of course.
- Actually I think we're not. -
102:32 - 102:35- We're not even entitled to our own opinions?
- No! -
102:35 - 102:38- I agree.
- Not all opinions are created equal. -
102:38 - 102:44There was a lovely paper by a philosopher whose name escapes me, a young philosopher from Australia, who
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102:44 - 102:51challenged that idea that we are entitled to our opinions. And I thought: he's right, we all pay lip service to that, and
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102:51 - 103:02in fact: in what sense, if your opinions are ill-informed and incoherent, in what sense are you entitled to it?
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103:02 - 103:08- Well, I think in the movie we produced, Ricky Gervais says everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I am
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103:08 - 103:14entitled to find their opinion ridiculous. The point is: they can express it, but we should be able to ridicule it,
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103:14 - 103:18and that's why we should be allowed to ridicule religion like we do sex or politics.
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103:18 - 103:26- What's ridiculous about sex?
- All of you are entitled to your opinion about the following -
103:26 - 103:30question, which goes as follows. Let me see.
- But only because we are informed. -
103:30 - 103:38- Only cause we're here.
- "Economics makes claims about what is beneficial, -
103:38 - 103:48what is good for humanity. Is that a form of science, or will that eventually lead to a form of religion?" It is basically
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103:48 - 103:53a question about the status of economics.
- We're not economists, but I am very sceptical that -
103:53 - 104:00economics… Economics is an attempt to make decisions about very complex systems, and obviously they're so
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104:00 - 104:09complex that those conclusions are not necessarely reproducable, if you look at the history of economics.
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104:09 - 104:20I think that economics is fascinating because if you think of it broadly – and again we're back to a sort of semantic issue –
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104:20 - 104:29there’s lots of issues which actually are well addressed using the tools of economists that have nothing to do
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104:29 - 104:39with money or standard economic topics at all. They have to do with organization and influence, and all sorts of other
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104:39 - 104:44things. I think that, in fact, let's have more of that.
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104:44 - 104:55But what is also true is that economists, being under the gun to provide hard data and predictions that can be quantified,
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104:55 - 105:08have this lamentable practice of operationalising everything in terms of money, and then as I think even
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105:08 - 105:17very unreflective people recognize: is something really missing when economists reduce everything
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105:17 - 105:28to monetary values? It’s not that there is some magic ingredient missing, it's just that putting monetary values on
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105:28 - 105:36everything (everything has a price) is just a very blunt tool.
- But so is putting an equation on everything when -
105:36 - 105:42the equations are unjustified. The Noble prize in economics, the Nobel memorial prize (it’s not a Noble prize) this year...
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105:42 - 105:49I was so amused because two people who won the prize have two completely different ideas about what the results
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105:49 - 105:53of the same phenomena are, which to me represents economics.
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105:53 - 106:05- Again, I like to make some distinctions again. So, first of all, there's fundamental differences between macro-
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106:05 - 106:12and micro-economics ... certain areas of economic theory actually work pretty well. They produce reliable predictions
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106:12 - 106:15in terms of empirical verification and so on, and other parts don't.
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106:15 - 106:24Also within, there’s different approaches to doing economics, right? There's sort of a classical economist who
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106:24 - 106:29might start with the assumption of a perfect rational agent who has perfect access to information, that sort of stuff,
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106:29 - 106:36and do mathematical models that are pefectly fine as far as models go. They don't match up with reality very well
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106:36 - 106:41because, guess what, we don't have perfect information and we are not perfect rational agents.
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106:41 - 106:45There is another way of doing that sort of economics which is behavioral economics
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106:45 - 106:52and that imports psychology and sociology into it. And it's much more interesting and probably
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106:52 - 106:55more likely to get things right.
- That's why Daniel Kahneman is so fascinating. -
106:55 - 106:59- Correct. Now, the other thing about economics, again we go back to ethics.
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106:59 - 107:05Economists seem to have this idea that what they do is ethically neutral, and it's not.
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107:05 - 107:12Because a lot of stuff – the very fact that Dan pointed out that everything is measured in one particular currency,
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107:12 - 107:18that is just one example. But a lot of assumptions that go into certain economical models actually sneak in
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107:18 - 107:25a lot of... Dan will say philosophical baggage, I would say ethical baggage in particular. And it is simply not
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107:25 - 107:35the case that economics is ethically neutral. There are these assumptions, they ought to be put out into the open, and say
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107:35 - 107:40‘wait, look!’ If you approach economic problems from this perspective - let’s say a libertarian perspective as opposed
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107:40 - 107:47to a progressive perspective, whatever it is - this is what you're sneaking in, you’re bringing in to the reasoning.
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107:47 - 107:53The reasoning may be valid, it may be good reasoning; but you now have to expose these assumptions and then you'll
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107:53 - 107:59have to let people say: ‘well actually, I don't think these assumptions are the ones I wanna have when I'm thinking
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107:59 - 108:02of running an economy’. And so you may be formally correct in terms of your models
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108:02 - 108:05but the assumptions you start with embed some kind of ethics that I don't like.
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108:05 - 108:13- To follow up about the last part of your question. It really is unfair to economics, to say it ends up being a religion.
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108:13 - 108:24You can see if it's wrong. And that's the big difference.
- Maybe a final question, probably directed to Prof. Dennett: -
108:24 - 108:31"Is conscioussness is a scientific fact? Does it exist? Can we measure it?" Because there has been a rumor
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108:31 - 108:41(I'm adding this now) that you deny the existence of conscioussness. That you are a so called eliminativist.
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108:41 - 108:44Is this rumor true?
- And you got two minutes to answer! -
108:47 - 108:55- The trouble with the word or the concept of consciousness is that not only is there no agreed upon definition,
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108:55 - 109:05people don't WANT to agree on a definition, because a lot of people want consciousness to turn out to be
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109:05 - 109:13whatever it is that is just so supercalifragilisticexpealidocious that it defies science.
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109:13 - 109:19And anybody who puts forward a theory of consciousness which says: 'oh and by the way
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109:19 - 109:31it's a biological phenomenon. It's very wonderful but then so is reproduction, so is self-repair, so is blood clotting,
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109:31 - 109:41so is metabolism.' For a lot of people, if you take that view on consciousness, I often put it:
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109:41 - 109:48it turns out that consciousness is not one big trick, it’s a bag of trick. It's not something that sunders the universe
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109:48 - 109:56universe into the things that have it and the thing that don't. The question: ‘gee I wonder if star fish are conscious
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109:56 - 110:05or maybe mice, or maybe how about ants or cockroaches?' And they think there’s this magic dividing line somewhere
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110:05 - 110:12between the oak tree and the human being where bingo the consciousness starts.
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110:12 - 110:21I think that very idea, which is deeply engrained in the thinking of many people, who think that consciousness
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110:21 - 110:27divides the universe into two. Either you got it or you don't.
- The idea suddenly the light goes on. -
110:27 - 110:35- That idea is an artifact of bad imagining right there and we have to get rid of that idea, we have to get
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110:35 - 110:42people to recognize: as long as you insist on that as a sort of a defining characteristic of consciousness,
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110:42 - 110:47then you get your wish: we’ll never have a theory of consciousness.
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110:47 - 110:54But abandon that idea and start looking at what different kinds of consciousness or
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110:54 - 111:01so-called consciousness or hemi-semi-demi consciousness, as soon as you start getting out of that essentialist mode
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111:01 - 111:09and looking for the dividing line, then consciousness is a very real family of phenomena, not a single phenomenon,
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111:09 - 111:15a family of phenomena.
- Right, do you have any short final statements about -
111:15 - 111:21consciousness or maybe in general?
- Yeah, I think I am agreeing, if I hear correctly Dan, -
111:21 - 111:27with what he said but I might be about to just step into a really bad situation.
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111:27 - 111:31- It’s about to end, so you have to beware…
- So I look at it as biologist... -
111:31 - 111:37- Ok, I'm ready…
- ...not as a philosopher of mind, because I am not a -
111:37 - 111:44philosopher of mind. So I agree completely that there is this fallacy of: 'there is a dividing line'. This essentialist idea,
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111:44 - 111:50that is bizarre to me. If consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and I think we agreed it is a biological phenomenon,
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111:50 - 111:57unless we are talking about something completely different, then it ought to come gradually, or that doesn't mean
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111:57 - 112:03exactly gradually – there may be jumps here and there – but it must be in degrees and therefore it makes no sense
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112:03 - 112:07to say: well, here's the dividing line, these things have it and these things don’t have it.
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112:07 - 112:13Of course there is another dividing line. There is an entire universe that is inanimate as far as we can tell.
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112:13 - 112:17And that one I'm gonna bet pretty strongly that doesn't have consciousness. Rocks don't have consciousness.
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112:17 - 112:23But if we’re talking about the biological world, clearly it is a question of degrees and not a question of yes or no.
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112:23 - 112:29That said I really never understood – I agree again with Dan before stepping into the problem here,
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112:29 - 112:35the self inflicted problem – I also agree with Dan, yes there’s plenty of people who seem to equivocate
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112:35 - 112:41almost on purpose on the term, to make it more fuzzy, more mysterian, more whatever it is.
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112:41 - 112:45But honestly everytime that I read a paper about, you know, definitions of consciousness,
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112:45 - 112:48I don't get why the thing is so damn complicated.
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112:48 - 112:53I don't mean the answer to how it works, that is complicated. But the thing itself.
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112:53 - 112:59To me consciousness is the ability, that is shared pretty much as far as we know by at least all animals,
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112:59 - 113:10of experiencing, having phenomenal experiences, things like heat, cold, color, that sort of stuff. This is the ability…
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113:10 - 113:14- That's something that robots do if they have heat sensors.
- Well, fine of course, well maybe. -
113:14 - 113:19- It depends on what you mean by ‘experiencing’ of course. You mean a dial goes up?
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113:19 - 113:26Of 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
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113:26 - 113:32right now, now that’s consciousness. Now in the case of human beings, and possibly of other organisms,
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113:32 - 113:39you have a significantly more interesting, additional level, which is the ability to reflect on those experiences,
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113:39 - 113:45of having this consciousness that you really are having those kinds of experiences.
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113:45 - 113:51Now, there is nothing mysterious about it, it seems to me that that goes down to biology.
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113:51 - 113:56We don't have the answer, but it’s gonna be some combination of, well, certain materials interact in certain
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113:56 - 114:03ways, and they create that sort of capacity, just like materials interacting in certain ways create all sorts
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114:03 - 114:07of biological phenomena.
- The one trouble with that definition, simple as it is, -
114:07 - 114:13is that it flies in the face of many people's intuitions. Maybe just you’re happy with this,
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114:13 - 114:17because it turns out that on that definition Athlete’s Foot is conscious.
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114:17 - 114:23- It’s like the definition of life. It's very hard. Many people could say that life is something that organises,
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114:23 - 114:32takes energy, but then fire is life. So as a physicist, the good thing is, it is far too complicated an issue for me
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114:32 - 114:36and I plan to continue drink this tonight until I lose conscioussness.
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114:36 - 114:45- Prof. Dennett once wrote, I think, that nothing that is complicated enough to be interesting could have an essence.
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114:45 - 114:52Or something along those lines. Maybe that's a good way to bring things to a close. An open ending...
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114:52 - 114:55- That's the essential message of this debate.
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114:55 - 114:59- So I want to thank all of you, you have been a great audience, it has been terribly exciting.
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114:59 - 115:04Unfortunately we have to stop at some point, we could go on and on forever of course.
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115:04 - 115:10I wanna thank all of our volunteers of Het Denkgelag for their tremendous support and help in making this possible.
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115:10 - 115:15I want to thank Ghent University for hosting this event,
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115:15 - 115:19all the people that have been handling the technical equipment,
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115:19 - 115:27and of course the three of you Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss.
- Title:
- Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss and Massimo Pigliucci discuss The Limits Of Science @ Het Denkgelag
- Description:
-
00:00 Introduction
07:07 Limits of Science
19:40 God & the Supernatural
31:20 Science & Morality
50:11 Something out of Nothing
1:03:42 The Value of Philosophy
1:20:59 Cognitive Limits
1:35:43 Questions:
- 1:35:56 Science & Politics
- 1:43:33 The Status of Economics
- 1:48:17 Does Consciousness Exist?1:55:00 Credits
English and Dutch subtitles coming soon!
Website: http://www.hetdenkgelag.be
- Video Language:
- English
- Duration:
- 01:56:20