< Return to Video

Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss and Massimo Pigliucci discuss The Limits Of Science @ Het Denkgelag

  • 0:10 - 0:15
    Welcome everyone to this very special edition of 'Het Denkgelag'.
  • 0:15 - 0:20
    Apologies for the delay. We won't keep you waiting for longer.
  • 0:20 - 0:24
    I'm very honoured to be your host and moderator tonight.
  • 0:24 - 0:32
    For those of you who don't know us: we started out last year with a couple of episodes,
  • 0:32 - 0:39
    very informal discussions actually, about science, philosophy, critical thinking, etc.
  • 0:39 - 0:47
    Maybe on a slightly smaller scale than today… But we decided to move up to the next level.
  • 0:47 - 0:55
    We are a little more ambitious. And we even decided to call this episode a 'Royale' edition.
  • 0:55 - 1:06
    If you have a look at our distinguished panel here tonight, I think you will understand why we chose this slightly pompous title.
  • 1:06 - 1:15
    We thought that with this concentration of brainpower, we might as well tackle some of the big issues, you know.
  • 1:15 - 1:23
    This could equally have been called an episode about 'life, the universe, and everything'.
  • 1:23 - 1:25
    - Oh, I know the answer to that one!
  • 1:25 - 1:32
    - Right… Well, just try not to reveal the secret until we have calculated it...
  • 1:32 - 1:41
    So before we go down into that rabbit hole, let me very briefly introduce our guests.
  • 1:41 - 1:46
    Maybe they hardly need any introduction, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
  • 1:46 - 1:53
    On the far side, the gentleman there who seems to know the answer to 'life, the universe and everything' is
  • 1:53 - 2:02
    Prof. Dr. Massimo Pigliucci. He is the Head of the Philosophy Department at the City University of New York.
  • 2:02 - 2:10
    He is a biologist turned philosopher, and depending on your perspective, he has either seen the light,
  • 2:10 - 2:13
    or strayed into darkness.
  • 2:13 - 2:17
    He's a very prolific writer, as all three of our guests are.
  • 2:17 - 2:26
    He wrote numerous books on evolution and intelligent design, various sorts of pseudo-science, on skepticism,
  • 2:26 - 2:31
    the 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,
  • 2:39 - 2:44
    not just science, but science and philosophy, can make our lives more meaningful.
  • 2:44 - 2:49
    In the middle is Prof. Daniel Dennett.
  • 2:49 - 2:54
    He is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University near Boston.
  • 2:54 - 3:03
    He is famous for being one of the 'Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse', together with his new atheist
  • 3:03 - 3:11
    colleagues: the biologist Richard Dawkins, the philosopher Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens.
  • 3:11 - 3:17
    He is arguably the most friendly, most amiable, of the four atheists, I think I can say so...
  • 3:19 - 3:21
    - The softest...
  • 3:26 - 3:30
    - Dare I say cuddly?
    - He is very cuddly!
  • 3:30 - 3:35
    He also wrote numerous books on evolution, philosophy of mind, consciousness, free will.
  • 3:35 - 3:43
    He has an oeuvre that spans more than four decades. His most important work is maybe...
  • 3:43 - 3:46
    Well, what is your most important work, Prof. Dennett?
  • 3:46 - 3:50
    You were about to walk into a trap!
    - ‘Consciousness Explained’, yeah...
  • 3:50 - 3:52
    - Sorry?
    - Probably ‘Consciousness Explained’...
  • 3:52 - 3:58
    Right, Consciousness Explained. I think that's a very good choice. As you wrote it of course... Who am I ?
  • 3:58 - 3:59
    - If you say so...
  • 3:59 - 4:06
    Anyhow. His latest book provides an overview of his work and is titled 'Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for
  • 4:06 - 4:13
    Thinking.' It's translated into Dutch as 'De gereedschapskist van ons denken'.
  • 4:13 - 4:23
    Next to me is Prof. Lawrence Krauss. He is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
  • 4:23 - 4:28
    He is the director of 'The Origins Project' at Arizona State University.
  • 4:28 - 4:38
    He has also written numerous books, among them 'The Physics of Star Trek', 'Quintessence' and his latest book
  • 4:38 - 4:45
    'A Universe from Nothing. Why there is something rather than nothing.'
  • 4:45 - 4:54
    He is also one of the two stars in a film documentary called 'The Unbelievers', which follows professor
  • 4:54 - 5:00
    Krauss, and his atheist colleague Richard Dawkins, whom you may remember as one of the 'Four
  • 5:00 - 5:06
    Horsemen', around the world, spreading... Can I use the word 'gospel' here?
  • 5:06 - 5:11
    ...the 'message' of science and reason. Apologies for that, not ‘gospel’.
  • 5:11 - 5:21
    Just to kick things off, I’m going to tell a little story from Greek mythology.
  • 5:21 - 5:32
    According to the Greeks, there was a message written above the pillars of Gibraltar. It was written by the hero Hercules.
  • 5:32 - 5:47
    It served as a warning to sailors and navigators not to venture beyond that point, which marked the edge of,
  • 5:47 - 5:49
    at least the known world at that point.
  • 5:49 - 5:55
    In Latin, the phrase is: “nec plus ultra” or “non plus ultra”.
  • 5:55 - 6:00
    It translates roughly as “No further beyond. This is the end of the world”.
  • 6:00 - 6:02
    - Those Greeks really knew their Latin….
  • 6:02 - 6:07
    Yeah right, I was looking for the Greek phrase, I don’t know. Blame it on Wikipedia.
  • 6:07 - 6:14
    I haven’t written these notes myself. I have an autocue.
  • 6:14 - 6:24
    Later on, the opposite of the phrase, ‘plus ultra’, again quite impressive for those Greeks, was adopted
  • 6:24 - 6:29
    centuries later as the national motto of Spain.
  • 6:29 - 6:37
    And it was actually, as you can tell, it was an invitation, in defiance of the ancient wisdom, to go further,
  • 6:37 - 6:41
    to explore new territories, which was of course after the discovery of the New World.
  • 6:41 - 6:43
    - To boldly go…
    - To boldly go where no man has gone before.
  • 6:45 - 6:47
    Right, and you don’t have to be afraid of monsters and sea dragons.
  • 6:47 - 6:51
    You don’t have to be afraid to be swallowed up into the pits of hell.
  • 6:51 - 6:56
    Just go as far as you can and see where you end up.
  • 6:56 - 7:03
    Charles V by the way actually was born here in Ghent, and this brings us right back to the debate.
  • 7:03 - 7:10
    You probably know what I’m getting at, where this is going. So I’m going to put this open question to all of you.
  • 7:10 - 7:16
    Do you think that there is a 'nec plus ultra' in science? Do you think that science has limits?
  • 7:16 - 7:22
    Do you think it's dangerous for science to venture beyond the point where it is not allowed to go?
  • 7:22 - 7:25
    I don't know who is willing to go first...
  • 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 - 7:39
    Sure. I hate the phrase 'limits of science' because it is so often misinterpreted.
  • 7:39 - 7:44
    As if there were really a sign post saying “Sorry, you're allowed to get here but not beyond.”
  • 7:44 - 7:49
    But it depends on what you mean by the phrase, right? Clearly there are limits to science because science is
  • 7:49 - 7:53
    a human activity, and human beings have limited epistemic capabilities.
  • 7:53 - 7:57
    We can understand certain things, and I'm sure there are certain things we're not going to be able to
  • 7:57 - 8:02
    understand. Even if we were smart enough, there are certainly things we don’t have or we're not going to
  • 8:02 - 8:08
    have enough information to figure out. So in that sense, certainly there are limits to science.
  • 8:08 - 8:15
    So that's one sense in which it's true. But it's no comfort to, you know, theologians or mystics, or
  • 8:15 - 8:19
    woo-woo thinkers of any sort. It's not a sign post.
  • 8:19 - 8:25
    The other sense in which I think there may be a limit to science, and that may be a little more controversial
  • 8:25 - 8:33
    tonight, is that I think that science is a particular type of epistemic activity, a particular way of getting to
  • 8:33 - 8:38
    know things. In particular, it's the best way we figured out, to know about how the world works.
  • 8:38 - 8:45
    But as such, as a human activity, it does have certain domains of applications, where it does very well.
  • 8:45 - 8:50
    And it has domains of applications where it does a little less well, and it has domains of applications where it
  • 8:50 - 8:52
    frankly doesn't really matter that much.
  • 8:52 - 8:54
    - Now it gets interesting…
    - Right...
  • 8:54 - 8:57
    - So that is a limit of science?
  • 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
  • 9:02 - 9:07
    are amenable to the same kind of tools, then there are certain things that you really don't want to do using
  • 9:07 - 9:09
    a hammer because they are not nailed.
  • 9:09 - 9:11
    - Professor Krauss, do you agree?
  • 9:11 - 9:15
    - Well, in many ways I agree. In fact, it’s sort of unfortunate it's called a debate.
  • 9:15 - 9:20
    I think people will be upset, because there won't be so much disagreement. I was saying to Dan in the car…
  • 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
  • 9:27 - 9:30
    disagree with me and Dan?
    - Never happened before!
  • 9:30 - 9:37
    But, certainly, there are limits to science. As an empiricist, which is what I am...
  • 9:37 - 9:43
    Empirically there are limits to what science can do. In fact, in my own field cosmology, there are clearly limits
  • 9:43 - 9:49
    because, we have one universe to observe.
  • 9:49 - 9:56
    And most of us live in that universe, the Republican party in my country doesn't, but therefore,
  • 9:56 - 10:01
    because of that, there may be many universes, and therefore there is obviously, in some real physical
  • 10:01 - 10:06
    sense, a limited domain over which we can explore. And that's the key point. It's not just tools.
  • 10:06 - 10:13
    Every academic discipline uses tools, and in some ways they are not that different.
  • 10:13 - 10:19
    But the key part of what makes science 'science', and what makes it work, is that it's based on empirical evidence.
  • 10:19 - 10:25
    So, rational thought applied to empirical evidence. And therefore, if you can't measure it, even in principle...
  • 10:25 - 10:30
    I mean there's a lot of things we can't measure that we can talk about. As a theoretical physicist, I think about
  • 10:30 - 10:32
    things a lot, a lot of things we can't measure right now.
  • 10:32 - 10:40
    But, if you can't ever measure it in principle, then science really has nothing to say about it.
  • 10:40 - 10:45
    I would argue that anything else you tend to say about it, is not worth much either.
  • 10:45 - 10:53
    But it's certainly a fact that science generally can't address it if you can't measure it in principle.
  • 10:53 - 10:58
    And that's of fundamental importance, I think, and we forget that.
  • 10:58 - 11:06
    So I think, the difference that I would say is that I don't know what the ultimate limits of science are.
  • 11:06 - 11:11
    There are limits now, and there are many areas where science has very little to say right now.
  • 11:11 - 11:16
    But can I say that it will never have anything to say about it? Absolutely not, there is a huge difference
  • 11:16 - 11:21
    between what's unknowable and what's not known.
  • 11:21 - 11:26
    And so, the only way you can find out if science has anything to say about it, is try.
  • 11:26 - 11:32
    And if it has something useful to say, that makes predictions, which agree with experiments, then you
  • 11:32 - 11:35
    can make progress. But you could try it, and it might not work.
  • 11:35 - 11:41
    An example might be sociology, where they tried to use the language of physics to apply to societies,
  • 11:41 - 11:48
    and it was far too premature, too complex. And consciousness... as I was telling Dan, I did physics
  • 11:48 - 11:51
    because it's easy. If I wanted to do the hard stuff, I'd do consciousness.
  • 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
  • 11:58 - 12:01
    doesn't provide any comfort to people advocating other ways of knowing.
  • 12:01 - 12:04
    If science has limits, then maybe that’s a general limit...
  • 12:04 - 12:09
    - Let me say something that Massimo may jump on, just for the purpose of entertainment:
  • 12:09 - 12:12
    I don't think there are other ways of knowing.
  • 12:12 - 12:17
    If you talk about what knowing is: other ways of knowing are an illusion in my opinion.
  • 12:17 - 12:18
    - Right.
    - That ultimately if you think about what you know,
  • 12:18 - 12:24
    it doesn't come by revelation. It ultimately comes from some empirical basis.
  • 12:24 - 12:29
    And of course you can reflect on it, and think about it, and learn things based on that reflection.
  • 12:29 - 12:34
    But it ultimately comes down to what you can measure. And therefore I don't think there are other ways of knowing.
  • 12:34 - 12:35
    - You're an empiricist.
  • 12:35 - 12:40
    - Professor Dennett, is it right that every knowledge is derived from empirical evidence?
  • 12:40 - 12:43
    That this is the sole source of knowledge, or...?
  • 12:43 - 12:48
    - Well, I would say no because I think there's a lot of mathematical knowledge.
  • 12:48 - 12:55
    And I don't think that mathematical knowledge is based on empirical facts. Formal systems...
  • 12:55 - 13:05
    Mathematical knowledge is inspired by empirical issues. After all, just think what 'geometry' means.
  • 13:05 - 13:11
    It means measuring the earth. But once you've got geometry, you have non-Euclidian geometries and
  • 13:11 - 13:13
    other sorts of geometries.
  • 13:13 - 13:17
    - But don't you think... I mean a proof is an empirical piece of work, I mean.
  • 13:17 - 13:22
    - No.
    - It is... You can ask if it's consistent with what you know already.
  • 13:22 - 13:29
    There's an important empirical side which I think is often underestimated. And this came out like a ton of bricks
  • 13:29 - 13:36
    for me when I saw a wonderful documentary that was done on Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
  • 13:36 - 13:42
    And here were these number theorists trying to explain it to the general public, and to people like me,
  • 13:42 - 13:44
    who are no number theorists.
  • 13:44 - 13:55
    And what hit me was: oh, first of all, not only would I not know whether Wiles had proved Fermat's Last Theorem.
  • 13:55 - 14:05
    Wiles wouldn't know whether he had proved Fermat's Last Theorem, until, and this is basically the sociological or
  • 14:05 - 14:15
    social fact, until his peers, his fellow experts in mathematics, reluctantly, and contra their own interest - they would
  • 14:15 - 14:23
    love to win the glory - say: he's got it! And it's only when the consensus among mathematicians is: 'he did it'.
  • 14:23 - 14:30
    That's the first time anybody has any confidence that the proof is actually sound.
  • 14:30 - 14:37
    That's true, but I think that we should be careful here. I'm going to follow up on Dan's comment on mathematics,
  • 14:37 - 14:41
    which is one example. Logic of course is another one, and they’re closely related for obvious reasons.
  • 14:41 - 14:47
    I think we need to be careful about how we use words like 'science', or empirical evidence and so forth.
  • 14:47 - 14:54
    Because, yes, if you expand empirical evidence to, say, including the cross-checking of proofs, then pretty much
  • 14:54 - 15:00
    everything that deals with language becomes empirical.
    - Even theology would become empirical.
  • 15:00 - 15:05
    Yeah, exactly. But I think that that is in some sense cheating, because when people think of science,
  • 15:05 - 15:09
    and even when most scientists think of science, that's not what they're thinking about.
  • 15:09 - 15:13
    What you're thinking about when you talk about science, we're talking about the way in which normally physics,
  • 15:13 - 15:19
    biology, chemistry, geology, and so on works. Systematic observations, controlled experiments, that sort of stuff.
  • 15:19 - 15:27
    Now if you limit science to that kind of view, then it seems to me clear that mathematics has very little to do, or logic has
  • 15:27 - 15:36
    very little to do with it. It certainly has implications for science, it certainly gets its inspirations occasionally from science, but a lot of mathematics and logic work is entirely independent.
  • 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.
  • 15:43 - 15:49
    Because ultimately mathematics, I mean mathematics is a language. It isn't knowledge, by the way, it's a language.
  • 15:49 - 15:53
    And it doesn’t, it's not the world, it's a model of the world. And it doesn't describe the world exactly.
  • 15:53 - 15:59
    It's a model of the world, it's the best model we have, but there's no mathematics that exactly describes the world at
  • 15:59 - 16:07
    all levels. So even that, even if people think that somehow mathematics is an ultimate description of reality, it isn't.
  • 16:07 - 16:11
    There's no mathematical formula that describes the universe at all scales.
  • 16:11 - 16:18
    But nevertheless, when Wiles or his colleagues are trying to determine if it's true, what they're ultimately doing, is seeing
  • 16:18 - 16:26
    if it's consistent with things they know to be true, and ultimately those things come from a set of axioms which
  • 16:26 - 16:35
    are in some sense empirical. My view is: science is really empiricism, and my view of empiricism is very broad.
  • 16:35 - 16:41
    So we can disagree about whether my definition is your definition but I think when we deconstruct that, we'd
  • 16:41 - 16:43
    probably agree.
    - So it's partly a semantic issue.
  • 16:43 - 16:53
    But maybe, before we go any further, I had the idea of checking with the audience, now that they have a sense
  • 16:53 - 17:00
    of your initial position, and also some semantic clarification. I think it's time to ask the audience.
  • 17:00 - 17:11
    If we phrase it like this: “Do you think that science is the sole source of knowing?” If there are philosophers in the room...
  • 17:11 - 17:15
    - Abstain!
    - … you have to ignore semantics for a while.
  • 17:15 - 17:22
    In Dutch: “Wie denkt dat wetenschap de enige bron van kennis is?” Let's just raise hands and see.
  • 17:22 - 17:30
    Don’t be shy, even if you don’t really know what the question is about.
  • 17:30 - 17:39
    Nobody’s gonna check if you really thought it through.
    - Where’s the house lights? That’s empiricism!
  • 17:39 - 17:44
    So, and who thinks that beside science, there are other ways of knowing?
  • 17:44 - 17:48
    (in Dutch): "Wie denkt dat er naast wetenschap nog andere kenvormen zijn?"
  • 17:48 - 17:58
    I think that a majority of people, if I'm correct, is in favor of the view that science rules supreme.
  • 17:58 - 18:04
    So, 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 - 18:17
    that 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...
  • 18:27 - 18:29
    - Yeah, semantic problems…
  • 18:29 - 18:38
    So, for instance, I think you know that there is no largest prime, I think you know that two plus two is four,
  • 18:38 - 18:42
    I think you know that interior angles of a Euclidean triangle add up to two right angles.
  • 18:42 - 18:46
    - Those are based on empirical... No, I do on the basis of empirical evidence...
  • 18:46 - 18:53
    I know there's no largest prime because the proof of the largest primes relies on things I can see, work with and manipulate.
  • 18:53 - 19:02
    - Then you see you ARE using the very point I was making about using basically social facts about what
  • 19:02 - 19:07
    mathematicians agree on, and…
    - It's not... I don't care who told me the facts.
  • 19:07 - 19:10
    The numbers are there. It doesn't matter whether they were white males or...
  • 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'.
  • 19:28 - 19:37
    - No, I tend to think 'not likely' whenever I read anything anyone says. My first response is: convince me.
  • 19:37 - 19:40
    And 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...
  • 19:43 - 19:47
    - Do we have to? Can't we talk about knowledge, or reality, or something?
  • 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
  • 19:55 - 20:00
    subjects. 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.
  • 20:05 - 20:08
    - This was before dinner…
    - I think...
  • 20:08 - 20:10
    - I don't have faith in anything…
  • 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
  • 20:19 - 20:22
    god's existence? Do you think that god is a scientific hypothesis?
  • 20:22 - 20:25
    - You can't disprove an improvable hypothesis...
  • 20:25 - 20:37
    - But you can render it, so preposterously unlikely, that anybody who still takes it seriously has a serious problem.
  • 20:37 - 20:45
    - That's really important, and science has definitely done that. But there are different levels, and you know, some
  • 20:45 - 20:51
    people in the audience may be spiritual and say 'Oh I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual'. I never know what that means.
  • 20:51 - 20:58
    But there are people who would say: 'I think there's some purpose to the universe.
  • 20:58 - 21:07
    I don't believe in any world religion, but there's some purpose. That, I think, is an overstatement, to say that there is none.
  • 21:07 - 21:12
    What we can say is that there is absolutely no evidence of purpose to the universe. But what we can say, and what
  • 21:12 - 21:19
    I think is really important, is that science is inconsistent with every religion in the world.
  • 21:19 - 21:23
    That every organized religion based on scripture and doctrine is inconsistent with science.
  • 21:23 - 21:31
    So they're all garbage and nonsense. That you can say with definitive authority. I don't like to use the word authority.
  • 21:31 - 21:33
    But the idea of purpose...
  • 21:33 - 21:40
    All I can say is: there is no evidence for it and every bit of evidence suggests that it isn't there, but you know...
  • 21:40 - 21:45
    - I'm gonna go even a little further, if possible...
  • 21:45 - 21:50
    Dan did a perfectly good job in demolishing the whole thing, but you can go even further.
  • 21:50 - 21:57
    I get nervous whenever I hear people talking about 'the god hypothesis'. Because I think that's conceding too much.
  • 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 - 22:12
    you really have to have something fairly well articulated, coherent, that makes predictions that are actually falsifiable.
  • 22:12 - 22:19
    All that sort of stuff. And concepts of god, first of all, are heterogeneous. Let's not forget, it's not like all people on
  • 22:19 - 22:25
    earth believe in a particular kind of god. There is all sorts of stuff out there. But all these concepts are incoherent,
  • 22:25 - 22:29
    badly put together, if put together at all.
  • 22:29 - 22:37
    So, to say that science defeats the god hypothesis is actually even to give too much to the concept of god.
  • 22:37 - 22:44
    There is nothing to defeat there. It's an incoherent, badly articulated concept. Why do you use a sledgehammer to
  • 22:44 - 22:48
    demolish 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.
  • 22:54 - 22:57
    It's part of the answer, right?
    - Let me put it another way.
  • 22:57 - 23:05
    Can you think of any empirical, scientific, solid evidence that would convince you of the existence of some supernatural
  • 23:05 - 23:11
    creator we could call god? If he would just burst through the roof here, and point at the three of you and say:
  • 23:11 - 23:17
    “Stop spreading this nonsense”.
    - Now THAT I would think is the beer or the whisky talking...
  • 23:17 - 23:21
    That wouldn't do it. No, there's plenty of things that would do it.
  • 23:21 - 23:26
    We go out at night and all of a sudden the stars are rearranged and say: “You suckers, you better believe”.
  • 23:26 - 23:31
    - In Aramaic, only in Aramaic, when I believe it…
    - Yes. And everybody can see them, not just me.
  • 23:31 - 23:38
    Then I go back to the whisky hypothesis. But actually there's more interesting ways of doing it.
  • 23:38 - 23:47
    I just read recently a sci-fi novel. I tend to think of good science fiction as thought experiments, like
  • 23:47 - 23:51
    thought experiments in philosophy. And this one is called 'Calculating God'. And it's about an alien that comes down
  • 23:51 - 23:57
    to earth and asks to see a palaeontologist. And the guy looks like an arachnid, so he’s invertebrate.
  • 23:57 - 24:03
    The museum guard doesn’t get that it’s a natural alien. He thinks it’s a joke and plays along, and he says:
  • 24:03 - 24:09
    “Well, would you like a vertebrate or an invertebrate paleontologist?" And the alien is puzzled and it says:
  • 24:09 - 24:13
    “Well, I thought that the only paleontologists on earth were humans, so he must be a vertebrate”.
  • 24:13 - 24:19
    So he gets to talk to the palaeontologist. It turns out that the alien has very very solid and very good empirical evidence
  • 24:19 - 24:26
    across a bunch of different traces that there is in fact such a thing as an intelligent designer of the cosmos.
  • 24:26 - 24:33
    So the rest of the novel explores how these scientists react to that thing. That situation is unlikely, but it is possible.
  • 24:33 - 24:43
    - If there was nothing that could possibly convince you, maybe that’s worrisome, because if there’s nothing that can
  • 24:43 - 24:47
    convince you, it almost sounds like faith.
  • 24:47 - 24:52
    - The thing that as a philosopher would bother you about that, I think, would be…
  • 24:52 - 24:55
    - I'm curious.
    - The fundamental problem with that picture is that
  • 24:55 - 25:00
    intelligent design implies there’s an intelligent designer.
  • 25:00 - 25:05
    Then of course that implies the intelligent designer is more complex than the thing the intelligent designer
  • 25:05 - 25:10
    is designing. And then it becomes an infinite regression. Who designed the intelligent designer?
  • 25:10 - 25:13
    That’s the real logical problem.
    - Although, to be honest I always found that question
  • 25:13 - 25:24
    a little bit disingenuous when it’s asked by atheists. Yes of course, that would be an obvious question, but so what?
  • 25:24 - 25:29
    I 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 - 25:40
    for really smart people in another galaxy that designed our stuff.
  • 25:40 - 25:46
    It could be Francis Crick’s panspermia, but an organized panspermia, where you decide, like that awful
  • 25:46 - 25:52
    movie '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 - 25:58
    simulation and somebody else has started the game.
    - Professor Dennett, do you think that you can only think of
  • 25:58 - 26:05
    evidence for a hyper intelligent alien race, and not so much for a god, a deity?
  • 26:05 - 26:13
    Maybe 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 - 26:33
    intelligent designer, but supernatural, then I don’t think we can ever have really… well.
  • 26:33 - 26:45
    No, I’m gonna back off and say: I can conjure up bizarre fantasies which, if that happened, would impress me tremendously.
  • 26:45 - 26:56
    Yeah, I'll make one up on the spot, okay? Somebody shows up, I don’t care what he looks like, and he says:
  • 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
  • 27:10 - 27:15
    down 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 - 27:38
    First of all, we can not imagine a natural way that that gold plate could get down there, 2 miles under the earth, and sure
  • 27:38 - 27:43
    enough 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.
  • 27:49 - 27:58
    You cannot imagine it. And we have to be very careful as scientists to say ‘we can not imagine something’.
  • 27:58 - 28:05
    Because then when we observe it, we have to try and understand if there is any imaginable way… before
  • 28:05 - 28:15
    we attribute it to the most exotic possibility. We have to see if there’s a far less exotic possibility that could explain it.
  • 28:15 - 28:21
    And we are obligated to do that. It’s true not just for something that crazy.
  • 28:21 - 28:29
    When we see a peak at the Large Hadron Collider, we are obligated to examine every more mundane possibility
  • 28:29 - 28:35
    before we say we discovered a new elementary particle. And that’s the fact that you want to disprove the very
  • 28:35 - 28:40
    hypothesis 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 - 28:55
    So I’m a Star Trek fan.
    - Great, I get extra money for that…
  • 28:55 - 29:02
    I 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
  • 29:08 - 29:16
    out of their wits because the devil has come back to claim her due. It’s a female. Of course it’s a woman...
  • 29:16 - 29:23
    Of course, Captain Picard doesn’t buy for a second that this woman really is the devil although apparently she can do
  • 29:23 - 29:28
    miraculous things. She can conjure up earthquakes on a whim, she can appear and disappear from one side to
  • 29:28 - 29:33
    another of the planet. Of course, by the end of the episode it turns out sure enough she was just a trickster.
  • 29:33 - 29:39
    She’s using a series of highly technologically sophisticated tricks, but that’s what it is, right? And that is the problem:
  • 29:39 - 29:47
    that, even though it’s conceivable that there can be an intelligent designer that is in fact truly supernatural,
  • 29:47 - 29:55
    meaning that he or she can actually act outside or suspend the laws of nature. It’s much harder to imagine what set of
  • 29:55 - 29:59
    circumstances would truly convince us of that, because you’ll always have the suspicion that “you know what, I just
  • 29:59 - 30:02
    don’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
  • 30:12 - 30:17
    that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before. That’s not how science works.
  • 30:17 - 30:24
    What has satisfied the test of experiment, will always work. Newton’s laws have been supplanted by general relativity.
  • 30:24 - 30:37
    But if you want to throw a baseball, a million years from now, that ball will be described by Newton’s laws, because
  • 30:37 - 30:43
    it survives the test of experiment. We’ll learn things that will change our fundamental understanding, the base of it,
  • 30:43 - 30:50
    but they’ll never contradict Newton’s laws. So it is true that at the limits of our knowledge, anything may be possible.
  • 30:50 - 30:56
    And we can’t presume, when we see something strange, to say it’s supernatural or natural.
  • 30:56 - 31:05
    But if it violates things that have been tested over and over again, the basis of science, then it would be much more
  • 31:05 - 31:14
    implausible that it’s new physics. If you let a ball go, and it fell up instead of down, that would be a much more…
  • 31:14 - 31:20
    So it’s not the edges, it’s not the exotic stuff. It’s the really basic stuff that you can be pretty confident about.
  • 31:20 - 31:25
    - Let’s move on to a different topic. Yeah, finally...
  • 31:25 - 31:36
    Another possible limit of science is the idea that science can teach us about the empirical facts, as all of you agree, but
  • 31:36 - 31:42
    not about what we ought to do. Not about how we should behave. Not about ethics.
  • 31:42 - 31:51
    So, professor Krauss, let me start with you. Do you think that science, single-handedly, without the help of other
  • 31:51 - 31:55
    ways 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.
  • 32:00 - 32:08
    The point is: we cannot even ask the question how we should behave until we know what the consequences of
  • 32:08 - 32:14
    our actions are, very first. The only way to know the consequences of our actions is science, namely empirical
  • 32:14 - 32:16
    observations so you can see the consequences.
  • 32:16 - 32:20
    You know, if you hit someone with an axe on the head, are they gonna die?
  • 32:20 - 32:31
    So before you can make any judgement, you have to know the consequences of their actions. So that’s the first step.
  • 32:31 - 32:41
    Without science, you can’t possibly have an ethics or a morals. Morals is a word that I’m much less enthusiastic
  • 32:41 - 32:43
    about.
    - 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
  • 32:59 - 33:04
    responses, and all the rest. Although ultimately I think science will help us understand those emotional responses.
  • 33:04 - 33:16
    Neuroscience will, it doesn’t yet. So I think ultimately most of the people who make ethical decisions, make ethical
  • 33:16 - 33:22
    decisions based on a set of premises which are generally rational.
  • 33:22 - 33:30
    So I think rational thought applied to empirical evidence, is what I call science. Certainly, you don’t get your ethics from
  • 33:30 - 33:45
    a book of revelations. You get it either from some genetic predisposition, if there are evolutionary bases of certain
  • 33:45 - 33:49
    responses. But science will help us understand those. Or from some rational decision making.
  • 33:49 - 33:54
    Ultimately, the whole question of ethics comes down to scientific questions, yeah.
  • 33:54 - 33:59
    - Right. Professor Pigliucci…
    - I think that answer confuses several different things which
  • 33:59 - 34:11
    need to be taken separately. We’re back to the “just semantics”. I hate it when people say “just the semantics”.
  • 34:11 - 34:18
    Semantics is very important. Semantics is about language and meaning. If we don’t agree on the meaning, then
  • 34:18 - 34:26
    we’re not having a discussion. Clearly you can come up with an expansive enough definition of science.
  • 34:26 - 34:32
    If you say ‘science has to do with anything that has even remotely input from the empirical world’, and I define input
  • 34:32 - 34:35
    from the empirical world, even the kind of things we were talking
  • 34:35 - 34:40
    about earlier in terms of mathematics and logic, then of course everything is science. You sort of win by definition.
  • 34:40 - 34:44
    But that seems like an empty pyrrhic victory. It’s like ‘now what are you saying then?’.
  • 34:44 - 34:50
    Most 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 - 35:01
    that the two can play that game, right? I could say ‘Philosophy is about thinking, and since everything we do
  • 35:01 - 35:11
    implies thinking, that we’re always philosophizing.’ I wouldn’t go that far because that becomes an empty statement.
  • 35:11 - 35:17
    It’s like ‘so what?’. I’d like to hear Dan, and then I have a couple more things about the consequences to say…
  • 35:17 - 35:21
    - Yeah, let Prof. Dennett chime in. Are we doing philosophy now, or are we doing science?
  • 35:21 - 35:29
    - We’re ignoring an issue which I think actually gets to the heart of the question. And that is:
  • 35:29 - 35:39
    should we count all of the normative wisdom that we have acquired over the years as science?
  • 35:39 - 35:47
    Again, it’s a semantic issue, but there’s a lot of it. How to play good chess? Whether Bridge is a better game than Whist?
  • 35:47 - 35:53
    There 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”.
  • 36:03 - 36:06
    I think you would say: “Oh yes, they are”.
  • 36:06 - 36:10
    - How can you know Bridge is better than Whist if you haven’t played either or know the rules?
  • 36:10 - 36:21
    You 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 - 36:31
    the propositions include propositions which say: ‘This is better than that', or 'this is the right way of doing this.’
  • 36:31 - 36:38
    And those are normative. Normativity plays a role everywhere in science, but it does have a rather
  • 36:38 - 36:48
    marked role. And I think that, if you think of, say, ethical issues and political issues, as in the end fundamentally
  • 36:48 - 36:57
    normative, which is what philosophers have typically said… What counts as a good life? How ought we to live?
  • 36:57 - 37:09
    If you think of questions of that sort, as close cousins to: ‘Which is a better game, Canasta or Bridge?’.
  • 37:09 - 37:17
    How could you ever answer that question? It’s obviously going to be relative to what kind of players are playing
  • 37:17 - 37:22
    the game. Human beings are such… I’m going to take an example, ok?
  • 37:22 - 37:30
    Chess was ‘improved’ several times over the years. The castling rule was introduced, the 'moving of the pawn' to the
  • 37:30 - 37:38
    en passant rule. Those were considered improvements and I think almost everybody agrees.
  • 37:38 - 37:45
    That’s improvements by our lights. We’re impatient human beings. We just think the game is better
  • 37:45 - 37:54
    playing a little faster. That’s all it is. But these are normative judgements. They have an empirical basis.
  • 37:54 - 38:04
    You have to play the game. You never dream of making an evaluation without doing the empirical work.
  • 38:04 - 38:13
    But once you’ve made the evaluation, it has a different logical standing. It’s different from just saying:
  • 38:13 - 38:18
    “People of North America like this kind of chess….”
    - Absolutely! But on the other hand it’s not…
  • 38:18 - 38:29
    not only subjective, but it’s time-variant. So absolutely, it depends on… The word ‘better’, whether this is ‘better’ than
  • 38:29 - 38:36
    that, depends on who you are, where you are, when you are. So it doesn’t have any independent reality. What’s ‘good’
  • 38:36 - 38:44
    doesn’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?
  • 39:05 - 39:12
    - Yeah.
    - Ok. And to understand them you have to often understand
  • 39:12 - 39:16
    not only the individual background, but the cultural experiences etc.
  • 39:16 - 39:26
    - If we had a large group of people meeting together in a organized political debate, discussion, where they
  • 39:26 - 39:32
    were going to vote, and try to settle on some rules for how to lead your life.
  • 39:32 - 39:40
    That could be done rationally, that could be done well. And if it succeeded, we could all remark that this is one of the
  • 39:40 - 39:46
    great achievements of human intelligence. BUT the question is: would it be science? And I would think no.
  • 39:46 - 39:51
    It would be political action.
    - But how do you know it succeeds?
  • 39:51 - 39:57
    That’s the question. To determine if it succeeds, is a scientific question. You know if it succeeds by studying what
  • 39:57 - 40:03
    happens based on those laws, and then asking people if they are happier, or… whatever your criteria are…
  • 40:04 - 40:06
    So if it succeeds is a scientific question.
  • 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
  • 40:13 - 40:15
    actually 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
  • 40:19 - 40:24
    interesting because to a philosopher that immediately brings up: ‘Oh, so he has chosen a consequentialist frame of mind’.
  • 40:24 - 40:30
    - Yeah, I’ve heard this consequentialism and all that stuff…
    - Well, yeah, “all that stuff” is philosophy.
  • 40:30 - 40:38
    Consequentialism 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,
  • 40:47 - 40:56
    but you probably have to at least address the issue of consequences when you are using other criteria to decide
  • 40:56 - 40:58
    what'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
  • 41:07 - 41:13
    pre-established goal. You want to force the other one to checkmate. It’s only when you agree on that goal, that
  • 41:13 - 41:18
    you can have an objective measure of success and you can see which moves are better than other ones.
  • 41:18 - 41:24
    But the more fundamental question is of course: if we change the goal, and in chess there are opposite goals
  • 41:24 - 41:31
    because 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 - 41:44
    There was a great debate raging over how to play chess. Should you keep the ‘en passant’ rule, should you
  • 41:44 - 41:48
    keep ‘castling’ or not? And it turned out there were heated debates.
  • 41:48 - 41:57
    There were people who liked the old way, people who like the new way. And what are we going to do? Well, what we could do,
  • 41:57 - 42:04
    hoping that it would work, is: have a conflict, get all the parties in who are interested and who cared, and
  • 42:04 - 42:11
    see if one side can convince the other that their way was better. If they can’t, that’s an empirical discovery.
  • 42:11 - 42:22
    It doesn’t work. But if they do, if everybody that cares, comes to see and agree, quite wholeheartedly:
  • 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
  • 42:31 - 42:37
    test 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
  • 42:46 - 42:52
    right mind, is saying that empirical facts, or even some scientific facts – as should be clear by now, I take a more
  • 42:52 - 42:57
    restrictive definition of science or concept of science than Lawrence does - but even if we want to talk about
  • 42:57 - 43:05
    empirical facts, broadly speaking, nobody is denying, or at least should be denying, and certainly not in this group,
  • 43:05 - 43:12
    that empirical facts are relevant to ethical decisions. That’s not the question. The question is – another way to put
  • 43:12 - 43:16
    what Dan was saying a minute ago – is that the empirical facts, most of the times, if not all the times, in
  • 43:16 - 43:25
    ethical decision making, are going to underdetermine those decisions, those value judgments that we make.
  • 43:25 - 43:33
    So the way I think of ethics is of essentially ‘applied rationality’. You start with certain general ideas.
  • 43:33 - 43:39
    Are you adopting a utilitarian framework? Are you adopting a deontological framework, a virtue ethics
  • 43:39 - 43:45
    framework, or whatever it is? And then that essentially plays the equivalent role of, sort of, general axioms, if you will,
  • 43:45 - 43:52
    in mathematics or general assumptions in logic. And from there you incorporate knowledge, empirical knowledge,
  • 43:52 - 44:00
    about, among other things, what kind of beings humans are. Ethics, let’s not forget, is about human beings.
  • 44:00 - 44:07
    If we were not social animals, intelligent, conscious animals of a particular type, the whole point of ethics wouldn’t hold.
  • 44:07 - 44:10
    - There’s also the issue of, sorry, you wanna add something?
  • 44:10 - 44:18
    - Obviously, what you both said is reasonable in that sense, but it suggests in some sense that ethics has
  • 44:18 - 44:22
    some existence. Take: someone’s pretty. Does ‘pretty’ have an objective…
  • 44:22 - 44:30
    I would not say that science determines ‘pretty’. Science can determine why I may think, on the basis of my cultural
  • 44:30 - 44:36
    experience or my gender, what’s pretty. And it could determine why someone else would determine that
  • 44:36 - 44:45
    something very different is pretty. But it wouldn’t suggest that ‘pretty’ has any meaning beyond that.
  • 44:45 - 44:52
    And so, I guess what I worry about… It’s absolutely true that when humans make ethical decisions…
  • 44:52 - 45:02
    I don’t live my life every day, saying, well, what’s the rational… I act as a human because humans are not
  • 45:02 - 45:12
    fully rational. I’m governed by emotion, and all of that, but to assign some reality to something which is just a construct
  • 45:12 - 45:20
    that varies and depends upon circumstances is, I think, overdoing it, and I think ethics is that.
  • 45:20 - 45:23
    - I don’t think we were doing that, and I think most ethicists would agree with that.
  • 45:23 - 45:27
    - I think you’re conjuring up a ghost that isn’t really there.
  • 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 - 45:40
    that was: ‘are there other ways of knowing?’. I would say: no, there aren’t other ways of knowing, but there's other
  • 45:40 - 45:45
    ways 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.
  • 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 - 46:14
    You brought up the example of… you need science to know what the consequence is of…
  • 46:14 - 46:19
    - Anything.
    - You know, hitting someone on the head with an axe.
  • 46:19 - 46:28
    There is sometimes this temptation to look at brain scanners for example, and to say: “See, this person is
  • 46:28 - 46:37
    suffering!”, so this is objectively wrong. I’m always wondering: do we really need sophisticated
  • 46:37 - 46:43
    scientific equipment to know that? We can tell…
    - The answer is: no.
  • 46:43 - 46:45
    - The answer depends on the question you’re asking.
  • 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.
  • 46:51 - 46:57
    - Dan is probably the biggest expert in this group here. Only if you understand what the signals mean.
  • 46:57 - 47:03
    I think the big problem with neuroscience is that there are a lots of signals and some people think they have some
  • 47:03 - 47:05
    deep understanding of what they mean, but they probably don’t…
  • 47:05 - 47:10
    - No, but I think it’s worse than that. I think that what Maarten is getting at is different.
  • 47:10 - 47:14
    There are some instances where science, actual science, what I would consider even in my restricted definition
  • 47:14 - 47:20
    of science, actually is pertinent. Let’s say we are having a debate about abortion. And let’s say that because of a
  • 47:20 - 47:26
    number of pieces of reasoning, we started with certain assumptions blablablah, we arrive at a conclusion that:
  • 47:26 - 47:33
    ok, abortion is reasonable up until the moment in which the foetus begins to feel pain.
  • 47:33 - 47:36
    Let’s assume for the sake of argument. I know, let’s assume…
  • 47:36 - 47:43
    Well, if we get there, now at that point it really is the job of the developmental and neuro-biologists to tell us: what’s
  • 47:43 - 47:48
    your best estimate of when that happens, right? So that’s a clear example where neurobiology or developmental
  • 47:48 - 47:50
    biology really does…
  • 47:50 - 47:53
    - What you realize is that their best estimate is probably garbage, at least at this point.
  • 47:53 - 47:55
    - Maybe…
    - Not garbage, it’s a better estimate than other people’s,
  • 47:55 - 48:00
    but it's uncertain.
    - The point is: that is a clear case to me where science
  • 48:00 - 48:05
    either does already or could very very likely in the future do that sort of stuff.
  • 48:05 - 48:14
    What Maarten was getting at is, for instance: I can bring up my regular whipping boy, one of the other three horsemen.
  • 48:14 - 48:21
    - You mean I’m not? I’m sorry, go on…
    - Never, never… We’re friends, especially for drinking.
  • 48:21 - 48:29
    No, Sam Harris, who you introduced as a philosopher, I would characterize mostly as a neuroscience based person.
  • 48:29 - 48:36
    I think that he would do it that way. When I read his book, ‘The Moral Landscape’ which promised a scientific way of
  • 48:36 - 48:45
    handling ethical questions. I got through the entire book and I didn’t learn anything at all, zero, new about ethics, right?
  • 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
  • 48:49 - 48:50
    facts in the universe.

  • 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
  • 48:59 - 49:09
    mutilation of a young girl, and you do a neuro-scan. You’ll see that girl is going through a lot of pain. You think?
  • 49:09 - 49:15
    Do I really need that? Seriously? What does that add to the whole picture?
  • 49:15 - 49:22
    The 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…
  • 49:30 - 49:39
    I’m not saying ethics is irrelevant, I’m just saying it’s contextual. There’s no doubt that people who think seriously
  • 49:39 - 49:53
    about the implications of actions, our ethicists or philosophers…
  • 49:53 - 50:00
    One doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. One can learn from the detailed, complex, logical, rational thinking that
  • 50:00 - 50:08
    philosophers do in determining what ethics may be reasonable or not. And I think that’s an essential part.
  • 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.
  • 50:26 - 50:35
    The lights that are shining, the photons that are hitting my eyes, they were emitted by electrons that are jumping
  • 50:35 - 50:44
    between states in the atom. Where was the photon before the electron emitted it? It didn’t exist! But it’s enough for me to see.
  • 50:44 - 50:48
    - There was a lot of stuff around that maybe had provoked the photon.
  • 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.
  • 50:55 - 51:00
    That’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...
  • 51:04 - 51:14
    The reason I wrote the book is: it seems like a miracle that to get stuff, you get stuff from no stuff. And in fact, it’s easy.
  • 51:14 - 51:18
    It’s required. Quantum mechanics requires it...
  • 51:18 - 51:26
    ...in our universe, but it also could suggest that space and time themselves could result from no universe.
  • 51:26 - 51:31
    Now you can ask the deeper question :‘Was there anything else?’.
  • 51:31 - 51:39
    Those are questions you can ask. But the miracle, that people seem to think as a miracle, is how you get a
  • 51:39 - 51:46
    universe when there is no universe. And that is easy to imagine, without violating the known laws of physics.
  • 51:46 - 51:51
    Now you can ask: “Ok, there was no universe, was there anything else?”. That’s a different question.
  • 51:51 - 52:00
    It’s like saying: “I don’t care where the photon came from, I want to know where the atom was.”. But the simple question is:
  • 52:00 - 52:07
    how did our universe come from nothing? That is remarkably and in principle answerable.
  • 52:07 - 52:14
    And moreover, the reason I wrote the book is: if you ask “What would be the characteristics of a universe that arose
  • 52:14 - 52:20
    from no universe by laws of physics without any supernatural shenanigans?", it would have precisely the
  • 52:20 - 52:24
    characteristics of the universe we see, and it didn’t have to be that way.
  • 52:24 - 52:26
    It 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.
  • 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.
  • 52:40 - 52:47
    There are questions that philosophers have been asking for millennia, and every now and then, a scientist
  • 52:47 - 52:54
    comes along and says: “Well, instead of answering exactly that question, let me suggest a substitute question
  • 52:54 - 53:02
    which we can answer, and which, once we’ve answered it, we’ll sort of loose interest in the other question."
  • 53:02 - 53:11
    But let me choose an example where this was I think brilliant and comically failed to achieve its end.
  • 53:11 - 53:18
    That was Turing in his classic paper. He said: “Well, everybody wants to know if computers can think, if robots
  • 53:18 - 53:24
    can think. Let me ask an easier question. Let me ask one that we can answer.”
  • 53:24 - 53:26
    - This is Alan Turing, the computer scientist.
  • 53:26 - 53:31
    Alan Turing, right. And he proposed the famous Turing test. He said: “Now here’s a good empirical question”.
  • 53:31 - 53:40
    And I think everybody ought to be…. Look: if a computer can beat a human being in the Turing test...
  • 53:40 - 53:44
    - Can you briefly explain what the Turing test is, for the sake of…?
  • 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.
  • 53:51 - 53:58
    Let’s just say one judge, to keep it simple. And the judge is having a conversation with two different agents: A & B.
  • 53:58 - 54:03
    One of them is a human being, and one of them is a robot or a computer.
  • 54:03 - 54:14
    The identity is concealed, but the human judge’s job is to tell which is the human being, and which is the robot.
  • 54:14 - 54:24
    And if the robot – or the computer, it doesn’t have to have a body – if the computer program can fool the judge
  • 54:24 - 54:32
    more often than not over a half an hour test, we would all agree: that is one smart, one intelligent computer program.
  • 54:32 - 54:41
    Turing thought that this was a nice conversation stopper. It would end an interminable philosophical wrangle which
  • 54:41 - 54:45
    was not getting anywhere, and replace it with a question of some interest.
  • 54:45 - 54:50
    Not one that he thought we should set about trying to answer empirically. But he just wanted to point out…
  • 54:50 - 54:57
    ‘How about replacing that old chestnut with this more easily answerable question?'
  • 54:57 - 55:01
    Now I take it that that’s the sort of thing that Lawrence was doing in his book.
  • 55:01 - 55:06
    He was saying: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a question about how you get something from nothing, or why is there
  • 55:06 - 55:14
    a universe rather than nothing. We can wring changes on that ancient philosophical conundrum, but how about this:
  • 55:14 - 55:20
    here is a question which is at least very closely related to that. And we can answer it!
  • 55:20 - 55:28
    And 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…
  • 55:31 - 55:36
    Sometimes the other question is simply not a good question. For example… no, no, this is very important!
  • 55:36 - 55:41
    Because science can tell us that the kind of ways we’re framing things are wrong.
  • 55:41 - 55:45
    Most 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.
  • 55:49 - 56:00
    Turing, I thought it was a brilliant move, but it failed miserably. Because people don’t want to settle for that
  • 56:00 - 56:03
    question. They should want to, but they don’t want to.
  • 56:03 - 56:07
    - People want to know the ‘why’ question, because they really want there to be some reason.
  • 56:07 - 56:09
    - That's right.
  • 56:09 - 56:12
    - And there may be no reason and science has to recognize the fact that there may be no reason.
  • 56:12 - 56:17
    But better than saying the ‘why’ question is not a good question – which it isn’t, because it makes a presumption
  • 56:17 - 56:23
    of an answer that there must be a reason, and there may be none – but a better one is: it may say, for example, that
  • 56:23 - 56:29
    our whole notions are wrong, which is why science – especially physics, but I imagine it’s happening in other
  • 56:29 - 56:31
    fields – changes the playing field so much.
  • 56:31 - 56:37
    For example, it can say: the question of "What happened before, where did it come from?" is not a good question, or
  • 56:37 - 56:43
    may not be a good question. Because if space and time are related in general relativity - when space is created time is
  • 56:43 - 56:46
    created - and the question “before” may not even have a meaning.
  • 56:46 - 56:54
    “Before” may be something that arises when time arises. And time may not arise until after the big bang.
  • 56:54 - 57:00
    So 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.
  • 57:05 - 57:12
    You described exactly the process. Sometimes science shows that what we thought was a good question, turns
  • 57:12 - 57:15
    out to be either badly put, or in fact completely meaningless.
  • 57:15 - 57:24
    In other cases, I don’t actually think that the Turing example is going quite in that direction.
  • 57:24 - 57:29
    It’s a good example in terms that, yes, Turing failed abysmally to convince everybody else, certainly
  • 57:29 - 57:35
    in philosophy departments, that he figured out the answer to the question, or that he had a better question.
  • 57:35 - 57:40
    But 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 - 57:48
    There are interesting issues…
    - Well, then we’ve got a disagreement…
  • 57:48 - 57:54
    I know, we do. But there are interesting issues about the nature of intelligence, the relationship between intelligence
  • 57:54 - 57:57
    and consciousness, for instance, which are not at all the same thing.
  • 57:57 - 58:02
    You can imagine a being, either biological or artificial, that is very intelligent but not…
  • 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 - 58:15
    sometimes I see my colleagues in the sciences, and remember I’m a scientist myself, so I’m talking to myself,
  • 58:15 - 58:18
    which happens often. And usually when I argue with myself.
  • 58:18 - 58:20
    - You have to be careful about that…
  • 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.
  • 58:26 - 58:34
    Anyway, one of the problems with the science/philosophy antagonism: I think it’s unfortunate that it’s seen by so many
  • 58:34 - 58:39
    people, some philosophers and some scientists as well, as an antagonism.
  • 58:39 - 58:42
    Because there are other ways to put what we just talked about.
  • 58:42 - 58:48
    For instance, there is a model of progress, of philosophy making progress, that goes something along these lines.
  • 58:48 - 58:53
    There are certain questions that philosophers are trying to clarify. Philosophy is mostly about clarifying things.
  • 58:53 - 58:58
    It’s about thinking about ‘What does that mean?’, ‘What do we mean by this?’, ‘Let’s talk about this stuff’.
  • 58:58 - 59:04
    Then at some point some of these questions become actually amenable to empirical answers. They go into the
  • 59:04 - 59:12
    scientific arena. We have several examples of entire disciplines, including science itself of course, originally from philosophy.
  • 59:12 - 59:18
    Now what happens at that point is interesting. We can mention several cases. Science itself came out of
  • 59:18 - 59:24
    what used to be ‘natural philosophy’. People like Descartes and even Newton actually, thought of themselves as philosophers.
  • 59:24 - 59:26
    And then it becomes science.
  • 59:26 - 59:28
    - But they also thought of themselves as theologians too, so…
  • 59:28 - 59:33
    - Yeah, I agree. But what used to be called natural philosophy became science.
  • 59:33 - 59:41
    What used to a branch of philosophy became eventually psychology, independently. And to some extent what is now
  • 59:41 - 59:46
    philosophy of mind is turning into a combination of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and
  • 59:46 - 59:52
    so on and so forth. Now, what happens at that point to philosophers? Are philosophers therefore out of business?
  • 59:52 - 60:03
    No, what happens is that philosophers switch their interests to observing that newly spawned discipline from the outside.
  • 60:03 - 60:09
    So now you have philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology and so on.
  • 60:09 - 60:14
    What happens is that… This is progress, I think.
  • 60:14 - 60:19
    Because it’s philosophers coming up with certain questions, a question becomes amenable to empirical answers.
  • 60:19 - 60:24
    The scientists take them over. Now there’s something else that is the problem, which is:
  • 60:24 - 60:27
    ok, how is it exactly the scientists are doing? What are they doing?
  • 60:27 - 60:32
    - The value of philosophy is actually the next topic. I just want to resolve this issue of nothingness.
  • 60:32 - 60:40
    Because I have a quote from your book which I found interesting and provocative. It’s from an article maybe.
  • 60:40 - 60:48
    I assume that you agree with professor Dennett that sometimes scientists can subtly change the issue and
  • 60:48 - 60:54
    answer a more interesting question, and then find out that the old question was maybe not worth asking.
  • 60:54 - 61:04
    We have this issue of ‘nothing’ and the standard philosophical definition of what nothing is.
  • 61:04 - 61:06
    - I don’t know. Nobody has given me a standard definition of ‘nothing’.
  • 61:06 - 61:08
    - Let’s say that it is the absence of something.
    - Well, that’s easy!
  • 61:13 - 61:18
    Right. You have written that, before the advancements of science, there have been “abstract and useless debates
  • 61:18 - 61:26
    about the nature of nothingness”, and you say that “to insist on this philosophical notion of ‘nothing’ is backward and
  • 61:26 - 61:29
    annoying.” So we have a specific issue here.
  • 61:29 - 61:36
    There’s this quantum mechanical notion of nothingness, which is not really nothing because it’s teeming with
  • 61:36 - 61:41
    energy and particles. And then we have those philosophers and also theologians insisting on:
  • 61:41 - 61:43
    “Yes, but it’s still something. You haven’t explained…”
  • 61:43 - 61:49
    Well, my point was just simple, and I suspect again, well we'll see, I suspect there will be more agreement,
  • 61:49 - 61:56
    I mean obviously one provokes, but the point is that you can't define 'nothing' without knowing what 'something' is.
  • 61:56 - 62:05
    So as we are, as our scientific understanding evolves, the absence of something evolves, our understanding of that.
  • 62:05 - 62:11
    So to require something without knowing very carefully what you mean by it - and what I mean by what you mean by it
  • 62:11 - 62:18
    is what science has discovered about that - to do that in the absence of that, is a useless debate.
  • 62:18 - 62:25
    And I think, it more or less agrees with what Massimo said, that in some sense philosophers try to understand the
  • 62:25 - 62:36
    meaning of things by thinking about what the results of science does. And so to have a discussion and debate
  • 62:36 - 62:41
    on what the absence of something is without talking about quantum mechanics or without talking about the vacuum or
  • 62:41 - 62:51
    without 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.
  • 63:00 - 63:09
    Well, there is one way of studying causation, and that is: look at the best science and see how science uses the idea
  • 63:09 - 63:18
    and look at work by scientists, conceptual work on causation, people like Judea Pearl. Then you really get
  • 63:18 - 63:27
    a topic. Otherwise what you’re talking about is the folk notion of causation and then you’re doing anthropology, which,
  • 63:27 - 63:37
    I mean, not that that's bootless, but it's naive if you think that it's getting at the truth, as opposed to simply getting at
  • 63:37 - 63:42
    what 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
  • 63:50 - 63:56
    notion and requiring and not all…
    - Oh, come on. Nobody holds Aristotelian notions anymore.
  • 63:56 - 64:01
    If you did hold to an Aristotelian notion of something and saying that is the thing that I want to describe, you are
  • 64:01 - 64:08
    having an interesting conversation about a concept but that concept may not be related to reality.
  • 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,
  • 64:13 - 64:18
    I have to say, about causality. Yes, you're right that certainly the early discussions about causality, beginning with Hume,
  • 64:18 - 64:24
    which still is the starting point in philosophy for any discussion on causality. They definitely do refer to what you
  • 64:24 - 64:31
    called the folk concept of causality. But I think that, you know, I've actually read recently some of that
  • 64:31 - 64:36
    technical literature in philosophy of causality because I'm preparing to teach a seminar about this,
  • 64:36 - 64:42
    that includes that sort of stuff. And actually the philosophers who are now working on that stuff, very much do what I just
  • 64:42 - 64:46
    described a minute ago which is: they do take on board the best notions of science...
  • 64:46 - 64:52
    - They have to!
    - Well, of course. Well, they don't have to. You are making a moral statement.
  • 64:52 - 65:02
    Well, they are, so the point is that they are. But I do get nervous when I hear scientists - some scientists because
  • 65:02 - 65:11
    I don't want to make the generalization too broad. When I hear sometimes, well, that "most of philosophy does x or z or y",
  • 65:11 - 65:17
    I bet that most of those scientists have never actually read a technical paper in philosophy. So, that's my
  • 65:17 - 65:23
    empirical question: how can you make a generalization about what most philosophy does, if you don't have it?
  • 65:23 - 65:27
    - You hit the key point of what I was gonna get to, which may sound judgmental but it's not.
  • 65:27 - 65:31
    - Really?
    - Yes and that is: your picture I would agree with, about how
  • 65:31 - 65:38
    how philosophy proceeds, and it then is a simple empirical fact - I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing but
  • 65:38 - 65:48
    it is a fact - that the reason that most scientists don’t read philosophy is it doesn’t have any impact on what they do.
  • 65:48 - 65:55
    And that’s fine. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. I don’t want you to suggest it’s bad. But the presumption that scientists
  • 65:55 - 66:02
    would have to read philosophy of science is just not true. Scientists go about doing what they are doing, being
  • 66:02 - 66:11
    ignorant about detailed questions that are not uninteresting from an intellectual perspective, but they’re irrelevant to the science.
  • 66:11 - 66:16
    So it is a true statement that once philosophy generally gets to the point where the science is producing knowledge,
  • 66:16 - 66:21
    and the philosophers are discussing the meaning of that knowledge, it's interesting.
  • 66:21 - 66:26
    And you can read about it if you are interested from an intellectual perspective, but it has no impact upon the science.
  • 66:26 - 66:34
    - Let me give a different case though because I think there is a better job for philosophers and...
  • 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.
  • 66:52 - 67:01
    And some people are either brilliant or lucky and they never consult any philosophers and they don’t make any howlers
  • 67:01 - 67:11
    philosophically, and so they’re pretty in good shape. And anybody like that, I think, is in a certain sense entitled to
  • 67:11 - 67:19
    say: ‘I'm just going to ignore philosophy, I don’t seem to need this’. But the fact is that in the areas which are
  • 67:19 - 67:26
    particularly controversial -- everything to do with the mind, all of neuroscience, in particular in the life sciences.
  • 67:26 - 67:31
    Maybe 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
  • 67:41 - 67:44
    that 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 - 68:00
    science is at the edge, it doesn’t really know yet how to define things, that’s where philosophy generally has had
  • 68:00 - 68:03
    an 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
  • 68:11 - 68:17
    the other quote that I had about "there is no such thing as a philosophy-free science, there is only science whose
  • 68:17 - 68:23
    philosophical baggage is taking on board without examination", but the other quote that I wanted to bring up is
  • 68:23 - 68:33
    from your latest book. I am paraphrasing a little bit. You say that you derive some sort of guilty pleasure from watching
  • 68:33 - 68:40
    eminent scientists who have expressed what you call withering contempt for philosophy, and to watch those
  • 68:40 - 68:47
    scientists stumble embarrassingly in their own philosophical efforts. Can you give us any names, professor Dennett?
  • 68:47 - 68:51
    Who 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 - 69:21
    working on neuroscience, who frame the issues in just bizarrely unsuccessful ways and they include some really heavy hitters.
  • 69:21 - 69:28
    And I name them in the book so I can name them here. I mean Francis Crick had some really simpleminded
  • 69:28 - 69:34
    ideas 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,
  • 69:46 - 69:50
    and yet Crick had a real tin ear for some of these issues when he turned to neuroscience.
  • 69:50 - 70:00
    And he sought out the help of Christof Koch, who is a wonderful neuroscientist, but he has not outlived his
  • 70:00 - 70:11
    catholic upbringing. And he is still sort of hankering for a soul. I can point to the places in his work where you see,
  • 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.
  • 70:16 - 70:23
    I can multiply that by twenty.
    - So he doesn’t think that he needs to read philosophy..
  • 70:23 - 70:29
    He just brashly enters into philosophical territory and thinks that he can just solve...
  • 70:29 - 70:42
    But notice that Francis Crick, Francis got better. He learned his lesson and he took on some philosophers, mainly
  • 70:42 - 70:47
    Patty Churchland and Paul Churchland but also to some degree me and he began to take us seriously
  • 70:47 - 70:50
    because he realized these were hard questions.
  • 70:50 - 71:01
    What really gives me guilty pleasure is seeing the books, there’s been dozens of books about
  • 71:01 - 71:10
    consciousness by eminent neuroscientists. Most of them are pretty dreadful and they sink like a stone and that
  • 71:10 - 71:21
    is what they deserve. But very often their authors even come that close to acknowledging, if you look at the book
  • 71:21 - 71:30
    carefully, that ‘oh oh' they suddenly realize they are in philosophical hot water and they need help from a
  • 71:30 - 71:36
    philosopher. 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
  • 71:44 - 71:48
    questions need to be formed. Like philosophy of quantum mechanics, forgive me, but philosophy of quantum
  • 71:48 - 71:55
    mechanics is a lot of philosophers who know something about quantum mechanics, but the progress in
  • 71:55 - 72:03
    understanding quantum mechanics has not come… I mean there are incredibly interesting philosophical questions
  • 72:03 - 72:06
    about 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.
  • 72:21 - 72:27
    This is it, I want to go back to what Lawrence said about philosophy of science and the role between philosophy of science
  • 72:27 - 72:32
    and the relationship between philosophy and science and science, because I'm both a scientist and a philosopher of science.
  • 72:32 - 72:39
    I’m going to put forth – and this is the presumptuous part – that what you said a few minutes ago was both conceptually
  • 72:39 - 72:45
    incorrect and empirically wrong. This is what I mean by that.
  • 72:45 - 72:50
    So if you actually take a look at the philosophy of science literature, by the way there is no such thing as
  • 72:50 - 72:53
    the philosophy of science literature. There is a philosophy of quantum mechanics, there is a philosophy of other parts
  • 72:53 - 72:57
    of physics, there is a philosophy of biology and so on and so forth. So it is a bunch of different things.
  • 72:57 - 73:07
    So what you find are two things, or at least two things, to simplify. First of all, most of philosophy of science is not
  • 73:07 - 73:13
    at all about helping scientists answer questions. So it is no surprise that it doesn’t.
  • 73:13 - 73:20
    So when people like your colleague Stephen Hawking - to name names - starts out a book and says that philosophy is
  • 73:20 - 73:25
    dead because it hasn’t contributed anything to science, he literally does not know what he is talking about.
  • 73:25 - 73:31
    That is not the point of philosophy of science, most of the time.
    - Yeah, but philosophers get offended when some
  • 73:31 - 73:39
    scientist says, or some philosophers do. It’s just a fact. It’s got other goals and aims and techniques
  • 73:39 - 73:42
    and there is nothing wrong with that.
    - Right, but when there’s nothing wrong with something,
  • 73:42 - 73:46
    you 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 - 73:59
    Well, so that was the conceptual part that I objected to. We need to realize that philosophy is largely in a different kind of business.
  • 73:59 - 74:04
    And so, yes, it doesn’t contribute to science, just like science does not contribute to, you know, English literature.
  • 74:04 - 74:07
    Or literary criticism, whatever you want to put it.
  • 74:07 - 74:13
    But so what, no one is blaming the physicists for not coming up with something new about Jane Austen .
  • 74:13 - 74:19
    The other part is the empirical part. When you say, you know, they don’t talk to each other,
  • 74:19 - 74:26
    they have nothing to say to each other. I am not as familiar as Dan probably is with areas of philosophy of quantum
  • 74:26 - 74:29
    mechanics for instance. But I’m certainly very familiar with philosophy of biology.
  • 74:29 - 74:36
    And there are plenty of scientists that actually do work with philosophers to clarify conceptual issues that come
  • 74:36 - 74:43
    out of live problems in evolutionary biology. So there are subfields of philosophy of science where
  • 74:43 - 74:48
    knowledge 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
  • 74:53 - 75:02
    thought about those questions can never be a bad thing. And so I'm talking from a point view of the area of science that I work on.
  • 75:02 - 75:11
    And that’s the area of physics. Absolutely, where science is at the edge of thinking about questions, then there is a very
  • 75:11 - 75:16
    fruitful 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
  • 75:32 - 75:37
    physics 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.
  • 75:56 - 76:03
    That's why I also wrote this book, because there’s been a revolution in our empirical understanding about the universe.
  • 76:03 - 76:08
    So we can address questions that we could talk about before but it was just talk.
  • 76:08 - 76:15
    We can now actually ask questions that we might be able to get empirical answers about and that is remarkable.
  • 76:15 - 76:22
    But the fact that some scientists say something, I mean, some scientists are Republicans, it doesn’t say anything
  • 76:22 - 76:26
    bad 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.
  • 76:32 - 76:38
    - But the key question is: you can talk generalities, but the questions in cosmology, the fundamental questions are
  • 76:38 - 76:42
    ones that basically have a huge amount of intellectual baggage that is scientific.
  • 76:42 - 76:47
    That the questions are gonna only be resolved by understanding aspects of quantum gravity and
  • 76:47 - 76:55
    measurements from the early universe. And so you can talk all about them all you want but the progress is gonna be
  • 76:55 - 77:02
    made in very technical areas of science, be it either theoretical physics or experimental science.
  • 77:02 - 77:12
    And there are conceptual questions that, I mean, the basic conceptual questions, the ones people… they are bland
  • 77:12 - 77:20
    and general and we’ve had them for millennia and they are not new, they’re not gonna add anything to that, the really
  • 77:20 - 77:27
    detailed questions that unfortunately may require a new language. I mean...
  • 77:27 - 77:40
    - Now let me just name four physicists: Laughlin, Penrose, Smolin and you.
  • 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
  • 78:09 - 78:18
    who 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 - 78:37
    No, it is just dishonest… you can frame, you can dress it up in all that language, but the question is:
  • 78:37 - 78:46
    are you saying something that you are justified in saying on the basis of what we know about the world or not.
  • 78:46 - 78:52
    And if you’re not, you are not being intellectually honest. And that is something I disagree with, whether
  • 78:52 - 78:56
    you 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 - 79:11
    The fact is, all four of you are very strongly opinionated, you are all brilliant and you don’t agree and…
  • 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
  • 79:18 - 79:24
    not 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
  • 79:31 - 79:38
    we have these discussions, I think that we really should resist, unless we are talking about republicans or theologians,
  • 79:38 - 79:44
    the word ‘intellectually dishonest’, because that really imputes motives to people. I think there is better reason
  • 79:44 - 79:48
    to 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.
  • 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..
  • 79:58 - 80:02
    - No look, Massimo could say any time you think you are doing philosophy.
  • 80:02 - 80:09
    Of course philosophy is asking questions about the world like science is and so science was natural philosophy.
  • 80:09 - 80:14
    But the key… those are, as you just said, if you expand the definition enough… it loses meaning.
  • 80:14 - 80:22
    The question is, am I talking… I tried to talk specifically about the way we do science, what science has told us,
  • 80:22 - 80:29
    what science hasn’t told us, what’s plausible, what’s implausible, what’s known, what’s likely, what’s unlikely…
  • 80:29 - 80:34
    Those are scientific terms and of course they all impact on philosophical questions.
  • 80:34 - 80:38
    Look at the title of my book, you could say it’s a philosophical question.
  • 80:38 - 80:40
    - Can I give the example?
  • 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?
  • 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
  • 81:23 - 81:32
    for the big bang, our basic picture of the cosmos, will disappear beyond what is called the observational horizon.
  • 81:32 - 81:39
    Very quickly, so all the traces that we now have of the origin of the universe will be erased.
  • 81:39 - 81:46
    And so future scientists, maybe in a different galaxy, even when they are using the best available methods, will end up
  • 81:46 - 81:51
    with a completely false picture of the universe. Just because they don’t have the evidence.
  • 81:51 - 81:58
    This is a fascinating idea of course. It strikes me as quite philosophical. And it’s also a sobering thought because
  • 81:58 - 82:06
    it raises the question, is it possible that we find ourselves in a similar predicament, in a similar situation?
  • 82:06 - 82:12
    Could 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
  • 82:18 - 82:27
    to realize that we have a picture that holds together, but… all of science is based on a limited amount of data and
  • 82:27 - 82:31
    there’s things that we haven’t measured and there maybe some things we’ll never be able to measure.
  • 82:31 - 82:40
    And therefore there could be some questions which are ultimately, may ultimately - and I say ‘may’ because it’s not
  • 82:40 - 82:44
    obvious - may ultimately be unanswerable. But it’s a leap...
  • 82:44 - 82:47
    What worries me, and I don’t want to give the people the wrong impression.
  • 82:47 - 82:52
    The reason people in the far future will get the wrong answer is that they don’t have access to information.
  • 82:52 - 82:56
    So I am not saying that the big bang is gonna ever be wrong. It’s not.
  • 82:56 - 83:01
    The big bang happened just like evolution happened. Because we have access to that data.
  • 83:01 - 83:07
    Now, we don’t have access to the data right now to what happened with t (time) equal zero and our picture of that
  • 83:07 - 83:12
    could change dramatically. We don’t have access to information about whether our universe is unique and
  • 83:12 - 83:15
    what’s beyond the visible horizon. So that could change dramatically.
  • 83:15 - 83:20
    It is just the fact that we don’t know everything, doesn’t mean we know nothing.
  • 83:20 - 83:24
    And that’s a presumption that a lot of people make. They say ‘oh well, because science doesn’t know this,
  • 83:24 - 83:27
    I 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 - 83:33
    misunderstanding that people have about science.
    - Professor Dennett, would you say, as an expert on
  • 83:33 - 83:41
    evolutionary theory and cognition, that our brains, or the brains of future scientists for that matter in different
  • 83:41 - 83:48
    galaxies, are evolved, or will have been evolved, to grasp the fundamental structure of the universe?
  • 83:48 - 83:54
    Maybe our minds are just not equipped for that.
    - Well, I’m glad you asked that question because it gets very
  • 83:54 - 84:04
    close to what I consider the bad pseudo-biological argument for the limits of science.
  • 84:04 - 84:15
    And that’s the ‘our brains are just finite brains and just as the fish cannot understand democracy and the dog cannot
  • 84:15 - 84:19
    understand quantum mechanics so there must be all these realms that we cannot understand.
  • 84:19 - 84:23
    Because 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 - 84:37
    that it has some rather eminent exponents. Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Colin McGinn, in order of eminence.
  • 84:37 - 84:41
    - Increasing or decreasing? Nevermind.
  • 84:41 - 84:46
    - You can figure that out. So what’s wrong with that argument?
  • 84:46 - 84:50
    What’s wrong with that argument - in fact it’s sort of comical when you think of Chomsky and Fodor -
  • 84:50 - 84:58
    is that the dog, the fish, the monkey, they can’t even understand the questions. We got language,
  • 84:58 - 84:59
    we can understand the questions.
  • 84:59 - 85:06
    What makes you think that there are questions that we can understand yet the answers to which are not available at
  • 85:06 - 85:19
    any cost, at any price? Particularly what I think is important is that Chomsky rightly for decades has been heralding
  • 85:19 - 85:26
    and praising the near infinity of the human mind. Why? Because of the generativity of language.
  • 85:26 - 85:37
    Now if there are questions that are simply beyond our ken, that is: the questions we can understand, but the answers
  • 85:37 - 85:46
    will stump us forever. Like a question as simple as: what is consciousness? Do we have free will? I think I understand those questions.
  • 85:46 - 85:52
    The idea that we could not understand the answers, the true answers to those questions,
  • 85:52 - 86:02
    has got to mean something quite bizarre. It’s gonna have to mean that there is no finite set of books in natural language
  • 86:02 - 86:12
    which will gradually bring the reader of those books to an appreciation of the answers. Now that might be true.
  • 86:12 - 86:16
    But nothing in biology tells us that that should be true.
  • 86:16 - 86:20
    - Yes, it’s making a presumption about something you don’t know. Saying we’ll never understand something
  • 86:20 - 86:22
    assumes you know all the things we can understand and…
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 86:46 - 86:54
    Look, I am sure without the benefit of thousands of scientists and philosophers who’ve worked over the eons
  • 86:54 - 86:58
    I’d be unable to understand all sorts of really simple things.
  • 86:58 - 87:06
    The fact is that I can benefit from all their hard-won understanding, it means that I can understand things.
  • 87:06 - 87:16
    I like to point out that my grandchildren can easily understand concepts that my parents’ generation
  • 87:16 - 87:26
    were baffled by. And now of course, there may be limits, but it’s not as if we’re facing a stone wall somewhere.
  • 87:26 - 87:33
    The idea that there is somewhere, where there’s this stone wall and we’re just gonna hit blank incomprehension
  • 87:33 - 87:44
    when we get there… It’s not biological. It’s mystical. It’s the idea that there is no trajectory through ‘book land’
  • 87:44 - 87:52
    and ‘science land’ that gets you there. But that has nothing to do with the limitations of neurons.
  • 87:52 - 87:57
    - It also goes against the history of science. There haven’t been any brick walls yet.
  • 87:57 - 88:02
    That doesn’t mean we won’t come up yet, but there is no evidence for that so far, so why should you make the
  • 88:02 - 88:04
    presumption 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.
  • 88:09 - 88:16
    Certainly the evolutionary argument for human limitations is false on the face of it.
  • 88:16 - 88:24
    We didn’t evolve to solve Fermat’s last theorem and we did. And there’s no way you can argue that natural selection
  • 88:24 - 88:29
    somehow favored that kind of abstract level of mathematical understanding, what the hell.
  • 88:29 - 88:32
    Mathematicians… do mathematicians have a lot of children? Well, I don’t know, but certainly not in the Pleistocene.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 88:50 - 88:56
    I also don’t think that the position, the so-called mysterian position, you mentioned Colin McGinn, the mysterian
  • 88:56 - 89:01
    position about certain issues, like consciousness, you know, ‘Oh, I think there are reasons to think that we’ll never get there’.
  • 89:01 - 89:07
    It’s utterly useless. It doesn’t tell me anything actionable. It says ‘Oh, maybe there is a limit’.
  • 89:07 - 89:13
    Okay, well, if I get to the limit I will recognize it presumably, I’ll know. I will hit the wall and then I will figure it out.
  • 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 - 89:26
    Now I do think however there are some interesting issues actually that science, certain areas of science,
  • 89:26 - 89:30
    are actually facing right now in terms of a certain human ability to understand things.
  • 89:30 - 89:35
    For instance, there has been a debate in the last few years about massive datasets, coming from
  • 89:35 - 89:40
    molecular biology and now eventually from neuroscience. Neuroscience is not quite there yet.
  • 89:40 - 89:47
    Molecular biology started out, for instance, a few years ago, not so many years ago, with the human genome project,
  • 89:47 - 89:56
    sort of proposing things like ‘Oh well, we’re going to have the human genome on a cd and then you look at the cd and
  • 89:56 - 89:59
    and then you'll figure out how to make a human being.’ Well, clearly that didn’t happen.
  • 89:59 - 90:04
    But not only that didn’t happen, things got much worse. We’ve gotten into genomics, as an entire discipline…
  • 90:04 - 90:08
    And for a while it was kind of comical in biology; that every few days there was a new ‘-omics’ coming out:
  • 90:08 - 90:15
    genomics, metabolomics, proteinomics, blabla. And finally phenomics, the entire phenotype.
  • 90:15 - 90:18
    It’s like, what the hell are these people talking about?
  • 90:18 - 90:21
    Just because they rebrand something they think they’re inventing something new. Anyway,
  • 90:21 - 90:27
    the point is that we may have hit at least a temporary wall in some of those areas already. Because it was
  • 90:27 - 90:33
    really interesting to me to see, as a member of the department of biology. We had at some point in Stony Brook university,
  • 90:33 - 90:42
    a whole series of seminars about genomics. And these people were coming in telling us all these very fascinating
  • 90:42 - 90:49
    things about gene-gene interactions and networks and all that sort of stuff. And then I realized that the data analysis
  • 90:49 - 90:54
    that they were doing, the statistical techniques to analyzing that sort of stuff, were things along the lines
  • 90:54 - 90:59
    of 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 - 91:06
    multivariate statistical analysis to deal with complex data sets.
  • 91:06 - 91:11
    In other parts of biology, is what you do when you have no idea what you’re doing.
  • 91:11 - 91:16
    Cos it’s an exploratory analysis that sort of tells you: 'well, there is a cluster there over here,
  • 91:16 - 91:19
    there 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 - 91:29
    that there may be areas where we are already hitting walls - they may be temporary walls.
  • 91:29 - 91:33
    - But there are only walls because... In a sense you are validating what Dan said earlier.
  • 91:33 - 91:38
    What you are really saying is that there's some areas where you find you’re asking the wrong questions.
  • 91:38 - 91:44
    And you find you’re asking the wrong questions by doing it and you find it doesn't lead anywhere, so you move somewhere else.
  • 91:44 - 91:47
    - I am not sure. That actually is a good example where there could be a difference.
  • 91:47 - 91:52
    And I know a little bit about that, more certainly than I know about quantum mechanics, so let me
  • 91:52 - 91:55
    elaborate 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
  • 92:00 - 92:05
    how is it that gene-gene interactions and then interaction of genes with the environment during development create
  • 92:05 - 92:12
    phenotypes, that is, the way organisms look, behave, and so on and so forth. That is a perfect valid question and
  • 92:12 - 92:16
    we’ve been making progress in certain areas, you know, with that question.
  • 92:16 - 92:22
    But we seem to be hitting a moment now, which as I said, could be temporary, but a moment where the data is
  • 92:22 - 92:29
    becoming so complex and so variable that we do not seem to have a way through the maze.
  • 92:29 - 92:32
    We just see a bunch of complexity there. There's all sorts of interesting patterns.
  • 92:32 - 92:36
    But 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 - 93:04
    the new data mining that people are doing. And that is: what if it turns out that we find that we can use data mining
  • 93:04 - 93:13
    algorithms to get answers to all sorts of questions which we are very sure that they’re the right answers,
  • 93:13 - 93:19
    but we can't understand how the process works at all.
  • 93:19 - 93:28
    But we can go ahead and do science sort of flying blind, relying on our algorithms to give us the right answers.
  • 93:28 - 93:35
    And 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…
  • 93:41 - 93:49
    Scientific predictions will go right on and scientific fact finding will go right on but scientific understanding will
  • 93:49 - 93:56
    sort of… it's not that it will hit a wall so much as people will stop trying.
  • 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
  • 94:02 - 94:04
    a 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.
  • 94:09 - 94:15
    If the experience of science is… You'll have like what we call phenomenological models.
  • 94:15 - 94:21
    An exactly similar thing happened in the 1960s. Accelerators were built, all these particles were discovered,
  • 94:21 - 94:25
    and people just said ‘the more energy you have the more particles you have’. And they came up with these
  • 94:25 - 94:29
    weird zen-like things called bootstrap models: every particle is made up of every other particle… You'll never...
  • 94:29 - 94:37
    It’s too complicated to ever really have a fundamental idea about. And we’ll just try and look for patterns, see things.
  • 94:37 - 94:43
    And for a long time that’s what was done. But eventually someone had a good idea and it moved forward.
  • 94:43 - 94:48
    And it could be that it forever is that way… I don’t think that it necessarily has to be. It may be that
  • 94:48 - 94:56
    a different way of thinking is required and some young person here may come up with that way of thinking.
  • 94:56 - 95:00
    And certainly that what’s happened in physics.
    - Agree, my intention was definitely not to show that 'haha',
  • 95:00 - 95:08
    we got it, we hit a wall. But I am a little less optimistic, I suppose, than you are because the kinds of problems that
  • 95:08 - 95:16
    we're talking about that physics faced in the 1960s is literally billions of orders of magnitude less than what we are
  • 95:16 - 95:20
    talking here .... So yeah, it may be, or may be not. I don't know. We’ll find out.
  • 95:20 - 95:23
    - I agree, you’re absolutely right. That's why I’m into physics cause it's easy.
  • 95:23 - 95:30
    These questions are much harder, and it’s taking a lot longer to do it. But I think it's unlikely, and I could be wrong
  • 95:30 - 95:36
    of course. They seem so daunting now that they don't seem solvable.
  • 95:36 - 95:41
    But I wouldn't be surprised if in a few hundred years they’re be solvable.
  • 95:41 - 95:46
    - Maybe not tonight. So, which reminds me, it's getting late, so I want to...
  • 95:46 - 95:49
    - But people are having fun, right?
  • 95:54 - 95:56
    So what if we are all jetlagged here?
  • 95:56 - 96:03
    - So one of those fun-having people out there in the audience has submitted this question through text message:
  • 96:03 - 96:11
    - That's fancy.
    - "If politics were based more on proper science,
  • 96:11 - 96:19
    how would it improve our society?"
    - Yeah, well, I've written a lot about that.
  • 96:19 - 96:27
    I mean public policy should be based on empirical evidence. And it's that simple.
  • 96:27 - 96:35
    If you gonna try to make a policy you should generally have some empirical basis for why that policy is reasonable.
  • 96:35 - 96:41
    And if you don't you should employ the policy and then second see if it is, and that's a really simple thing.
  • 96:41 - 96:49
    And if it were done more generally and used by most political parties, I think the world would be a better place.
  • 96:49 - 96:53
    - But there is a downside to take very seriously and that's this:
  • 96:53 - 97:00
    what if the science in question is basically the science of spin doctoring?
  • 97:00 - 97:13
    And political parties who were already using technology in novel and interesting ways... And what if they really discover
  • 97:13 - 97:21
    that they can craft messages which have almost no content, but that will win votes…
  • 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.
  • 97:33 - 97:43
    Because instead of informing the populace, the populace is being manipulated by images that are scientifically honed.
  • 97:43 - 97:47
    This worries me a lot.
    - Well, I agree with you, and I wanna make something clear
  • 97:47 - 97:50
    that may not be obvious. I am not saying that scientists have the answer to political questions.
  • 97:50 - 97:56
    I’m saying that science should be the basis. So what we need to do, is not what the politicians want.
  • 97:56 - 98:03
    It is the obligation of some scientists to inform the public of what we know and what we don't know,
  • 98:03 - 98:08
    how we learn, and how we ask questions. So that they can make informed decisions about what they are hearing
  • 98:08 - 98:15
    from the politicians. But even having said that I'm not saying that scientific result should be the basis of public policy.
  • 98:15 - 98:20
    For example, there are political questions. So you may... what you need to know is that global warming is happening,
  • 98:20 - 98:23
    and you need to know that humans are impacting on climate.
  • 98:23 - 98:31
    But you could easily say, ‘ok, I accept that scientific fact, but as a political decision, I need to burn coal'.
  • 98:31 - 98:39
    And that's a political decision. But to make the correct decision, you have to know and the public needs to know
  • 98:39 - 98:44
    what the implications are. But that doesn't mean that the scientific answer, which is ‘burning coal is bad for
  • 98:44 - 98:47
    the environment’, is always going to be the correct political answer.
  • 98:47 - 98:53
    That's not the case. People have the right to make the vote based on informed decision that "you know what,
  • 98:53 - 98:57
    I don't give a damn, I want to burn coal." Because that's just the way democracies work.
  • 98:57 - 99:04
    So we need to inform people so that they don't buy the crap from politicians, that they learn the scientific process
  • 99:04 - 99:10
    of how to be skeptical, how to ask questions.
    - And in fact, that's a point I want to underline,
  • 99:10 - 99:23
    All the methods, all the propaganda methods are counteractable, actually quite straightforwardly,
  • 99:23 - 99:35
    by simply informing people about those very methods and getting them tuned in to the fact that an attempt is being made
  • 99:35 - 99:38
    to 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...
  • 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,
  • 99:52 - 99:57
    again 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
  • 100:04 - 100:09
    politics and policy. Absolutely policy ought to be informed by the best empirical evidence that we have because
  • 100:09 - 100:16
    otherwise you literally are blundering into nonsense, into bad notions. So yes if there is such a thing as
  • 100:16 - 100:24
    climate change, antropogenic climate change, and there is, that has to be part of any policy decision.
  • 100:24 - 100:31
    Now the other part, however, this is sort of analogous to the discussion we were having early on about the
  • 100:31 - 100:36
    empirical imput into ethical decision making, into ethics.
  • 100:36 - 100:41
    There definitely has to be empirical input into political decision, but part of political decision making also
  • 100:41 - 100:47
    is concerned with people's ways of looking at the world, their values, their judgments about
  • 100:47 - 100:55
    what is important and what is less important. So for instance, you could say, if in fact you want to solve the problem of
  • 100:55 - 101:01
    of poverty - let's say in the US - then you need to enact certain redistribution of wealth measures and so on.
  • 101:01 - 101:08
    And that is a fact, but it flies politically, only if we actually convince people that that ought to be a priority.
  • 101:08 - 101:15
    If people say, well no, personal liberty or freedom of acting as an independent agent is more important than…
  • 101:15 - 101:21
    in other words, that value is higher to me than the other one, then there is nothing you can do factually
  • 101:21 - 101:24
    to convince those people. You have to argue about: 'well, what do you mean by that?',
  • 101:24 - 101:26
    'have you thought about the implications from an ethical perspective'?
  • 101:26 - 101:31
    What that means is that, in order to allow for some people to be obscenely rich,
  • 101:31 - 101:36
    you are actually condemning a bunch more people to poverty. That sort of argument is clearly
  • 101:36 - 101:43
    informed by the facts but it doesn't stop at the facts. Again the facts in some sense underdetermine the answer.
  • 101:43 - 101:48
    The answer has to imply value judgments, and therefore I would say ethics.
  • 101:48 - 101:56
    - I agree with you. In some sense, the job of the politicians, if there is one, is to then say:
  • 101:56 - 102:01
    here are my value judgments, do you agree with them? Elect me if you do.
  • 102:01 - 102:05
    But not: here's the facts. Here's my facts. I've invented them.
  • 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.
  • 102:13 - 102:21
    Just put it out there and there’ll be people who agree. If democracy has any value, if you believe in it,
  • 102:21 - 102:25
    then you say well, if more people like that value, then that's the way we're gonna live with it.
  • 102:25 - 102:30
    - We are all entitled to our own opinions, but not entitled to our own facts.
  • 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 - 102:44
    There was a lovely paper by a philosopher whose name escapes me, a young philosopher from Australia, who
  • 102:44 - 102:51
    challenged that idea that we are entitled to our opinions. And I thought: he's right, we all pay lip service to that, and
  • 102:51 - 103:02
    in fact: in what sense, if your opinions are ill-informed and incoherent, in what sense are you entitled to it?
  • 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
  • 103:08 - 103:14
    entitled to find their opinion ridiculous. The point is: they can express it, but we should be able to ridicule it,
  • 103:14 - 103:18
    and that's why we should be allowed to ridicule religion like we do sex or politics.
  • 103:18 - 103:26
    - What's ridiculous about sex?
    - All of you are entitled to your opinion about the following
  • 103:26 - 103:30
    question, 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 - 103:48
    what is good for humanity. Is that a form of science, or will that eventually lead to a form of religion?" It is basically
  • 103:48 - 103:53
    a question about the status of economics.
    - We're not economists, but I am very sceptical that
  • 103:53 - 104:00
    economics… Economics is an attempt to make decisions about very complex systems, and obviously they're so
  • 104:00 - 104:09
    complex that those conclusions are not necessarely reproducable, if you look at the history of economics.
  • 104:09 - 104:20
    I think that economics is fascinating because if you think of it broadly – and again we're back to a sort of semantic issue –
  • 104:20 - 104:29
    there’s lots of issues which actually are well addressed using the tools of economists that have nothing to do
  • 104:29 - 104:39
    with money or standard economic topics at all. They have to do with organization and influence, and all sorts of other
  • 104:39 - 104:44
    things. I think that, in fact, let's have more of that.
  • 104:44 - 104:55
    But what is also true is that economists, being under the gun to provide hard data and predictions that can be quantified,
  • 104:55 - 105:08
    have this lamentable practice of operationalising everything in terms of money, and then as I think even
  • 105:08 - 105:17
    very unreflective people recognize: is something really missing when economists reduce everything
  • 105:17 - 105:28
    to monetary values? It’s not that there is some magic ingredient missing, it's just that putting monetary values on
  • 105:28 - 105:36
    everything (everything has a price) is just a very blunt tool.
    - But so is putting an equation on everything when
  • 105:36 - 105:42
    the equations are unjustified. The Noble prize in economics, the Nobel memorial prize (it’s not a Noble prize) this year...
  • 105:42 - 105:49
    I was so amused because two people who won the prize have two completely different ideas about what the results
  • 105:49 - 105:53
    of the same phenomena are, which to me represents economics.
  • 105:53 - 106:05
    - Again, I like to make some distinctions again. So, first of all, there's fundamental differences between macro-
  • 106:05 - 106:12
    and micro-economics ... certain areas of economic theory actually work pretty well. They produce reliable predictions
  • 106:12 - 106:15
    in terms of empirical verification and so on, and other parts don't.
  • 106:15 - 106:24
    Also within, there’s different approaches to doing economics, right? There's sort of a classical economist who
  • 106:24 - 106:29
    might start with the assumption of a perfect rational agent who has perfect access to information, that sort of stuff,
  • 106:29 - 106:36
    and do mathematical models that are pefectly fine as far as models go. They don't match up with reality very well
  • 106:36 - 106:41
    because, guess what, we don't have perfect information and we are not perfect rational agents.
  • 106:41 - 106:45
    There is another way of doing that sort of economics which is behavioral economics
  • 106:45 - 106:52
    and that imports psychology and sociology into it. And it's much more interesting and probably
  • 106:52 - 106:55
    more 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.
  • 106:59 - 107:05
    Economists seem to have this idea that what they do is ethically neutral, and it's not.
  • 107:05 - 107:12
    Because a lot of stuff – the very fact that Dan pointed out that everything is measured in one particular currency,
  • 107:12 - 107:18
    that is just one example. But a lot of assumptions that go into certain economical models actually sneak in
  • 107:18 - 107:25
    a lot of... Dan will say philosophical baggage, I would say ethical baggage in particular. And it is simply not
  • 107:25 - 107:35
    the case that economics is ethically neutral. There are these assumptions, they ought to be put out into the open, and say
  • 107:35 - 107:40
    ‘wait, look!’ If you approach economic problems from this perspective - let’s say a libertarian perspective as opposed
  • 107:40 - 107:47
    to a progressive perspective, whatever it is - this is what you're sneaking in, you’re bringing in to the reasoning.
  • 107:47 - 107:53
    The reasoning may be valid, it may be good reasoning; but you now have to expose these assumptions and then you'll
  • 107:53 - 107:59
    have to let people say: ‘well actually, I don't think these assumptions are the ones I wanna have when I'm thinking
  • 107:59 - 108:02
    of running an economy’. And so you may be formally correct in terms of your models
  • 108:02 - 108:05
    but the assumptions you start with embed some kind of ethics that I don't like.
  • 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.
  • 108:13 - 108:24
    You 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
  • 108:31 - 108:41
    (I'm adding this now) that you deny the existence of conscioussness. That you are a so called eliminativist.
  • 108:41 - 108:44
    Is 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,
  • 108:55 - 109:05
    people don't WANT to agree on a definition, because a lot of people want consciousness to turn out to be
  • 109:05 - 109:13
    whatever it is that is just so supercalifragilisticexpealidocious that it defies science.
  • 109:13 - 109:19
    And anybody who puts forward a theory of consciousness which says: 'oh and by the way
  • 109:19 - 109:31
    it's a biological phenomenon. It's very wonderful but then so is reproduction, so is self-repair, so is blood clotting,
  • 109:31 - 109:41
    so is metabolism.' For a lot of people, if you take that view on consciousness, I often put it:
  • 109:41 - 109:48
    it turns out that consciousness is not one big trick, it’s a bag of trick. It's not something that sunders the universe
  • 109:48 - 109:56
    universe into the things that have it and the thing that don't. The question: ‘gee I wonder if star fish are conscious
  • 109:56 - 110:05
    or maybe mice, or maybe how about ants or cockroaches?' And they think there’s this magic dividing line somewhere
  • 110:05 - 110:12
    between the oak tree and the human being where bingo the consciousness starts.
  • 110:12 - 110:21
    I think that very idea, which is deeply engrained in the thinking of many people, who think that consciousness
  • 110:21 - 110:27
    divides 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
  • 110:35 - 110:42
    people to recognize: as long as you insist on that as a sort of a defining characteristic of consciousness,
  • 110:42 - 110:47
    then you get your wish: we’ll never have a theory of consciousness.
  • 110:47 - 110:54
    But abandon that idea and start looking at what different kinds of consciousness or
  • 110:54 - 111:01
    so-called consciousness or hemi-semi-demi consciousness, as soon as you start getting out of that essentialist mode
  • 111:01 - 111:09
    and looking for the dividing line, then consciousness is a very real family of phenomena, not a single phenomenon,
  • 111:09 - 111:15
    a family of phenomena.
    - Right, do you have any short final statements about
  • 111:15 - 111:21
    consciousness or maybe in general?
    - Yeah, I think I am agreeing, if I hear correctly Dan,
  • 111:21 - 111:27
    with what he said but I might be about to just step into a really bad situation.
  • 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 - 111:44
    philosopher of mind. So I agree completely that there is this fallacy of: 'there is a dividing line'. This essentialist idea,
  • 111:44 - 111:50
    that is bizarre to me. If consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and I think we agreed it is a biological phenomenon,
  • 111:50 - 111:57
    unless we are talking about something completely different, then it ought to come gradually, or that doesn't mean
  • 111:57 - 112:03
    exactly gradually – there may be jumps here and there – but it must be in degrees and therefore it makes no sense
  • 112:03 - 112:07
    to say: well, here's the dividing line, these things have it and these things don’t have it.
  • 112:07 - 112:13
    Of course there is another dividing line. There is an entire universe that is inanimate as far as we can tell.
  • 112:13 - 112:17
    And that one I'm gonna bet pretty strongly that doesn't have consciousness. Rocks don't have consciousness.
  • 112:17 - 112:23
    But if we’re talking about the biological world, clearly it is a question of degrees and not a question of yes or no.
  • 112:23 - 112:29
    That said I really never understood – I agree again with Dan before stepping into the problem here,
  • 112:29 - 112:35
    the self inflicted problem – I also agree with Dan, yes there’s plenty of people who seem to equivocate
  • 112:35 - 112:41
    almost on purpose on the term, to make it more fuzzy, more mysterian, more whatever it is.
  • 112:41 - 112:45
    But honestly everytime that I read a paper about, you know, definitions of consciousness,
  • 112:45 - 112:48
    I don't get why the thing is so damn complicated.
  • 112:48 - 112:53
    I don't mean the answer to how it works, that is complicated. But the thing itself.
  • 112:53 - 112:59
    To me consciousness is the ability, that is shared pretty much as far as we know by at least all animals,
  • 112:59 - 113:10
    of experiencing, having phenomenal experiences, things like heat, cold, color, that sort of stuff. This is the ability…
  • 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?
  • 113:19 - 113:26
    Of course it does. But what I’m saying is, if you look at your own ability of doing the kinds of thing we’re doing
  • 113:26 - 113:32
    right now, now that’s consciousness. Now in the case of human beings, and possibly of other organisms,
  • 113:32 - 113:39
    you have a significantly more interesting, additional level, which is the ability to reflect on those experiences,
  • 113:39 - 113:45
    of having this consciousness that you really are having those kinds of experiences.
  • 113:45 - 113:51
    Now, there is nothing mysterious about it, it seems to me that that goes down to biology.
  • 113:51 - 113:56
    We don't have the answer, but it’s gonna be some combination of, well, certain materials interact in certain
  • 113:56 - 114:03
    ways, and they create that sort of capacity, just like materials interacting in certain ways create all sorts
  • 114:03 - 114:07
    of biological phenomena.
    - The one trouble with that definition, simple as it is,
  • 114:07 - 114:13
    is that it flies in the face of many people's intuitions. Maybe just you’re happy with this,
  • 114:13 - 114:17
    because it turns out that on that definition Athlete’s Foot is conscious.
  • 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,
  • 114:23 - 114:32
    takes energy, but then fire is life. So as a physicist, the good thing is, it is far too complicated an issue for me
  • 114:32 - 114:36
    and I plan to continue drink this tonight until I lose conscioussness.
  • 114:36 - 114:45
    - Prof. Dennett once wrote, I think, that nothing that is complicated enough to be interesting could have an essence.
  • 114:45 - 114:52
    Or something along those lines. Maybe that's a good way to bring things to a close. An open ending...
  • 114:52 - 114:55
    - That's the essential message of this debate.
  • 114:55 - 114:59
    - So I want to thank all of you, you have been a great audience, it has been terribly exciting.
  • 114:59 - 115:04
    Unfortunately we have to stop at some point, we could go on and on forever of course.
  • 115:04 - 115:10
    I wanna thank all of our volunteers of Het Denkgelag for their tremendous support and help in making this possible.
  • 115:10 - 115:15
    I want to thank Ghent University for hosting this event,
  • 115:15 - 115:19
    all the people that have been handling the technical equipment,
  • 115:19 - 115:27
    and 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

more » « less
Video Language:
English
Duration:
01:56:20

English subtitles

Revisions