The Physics of Free Will: A Radical New Theory | Curt Jaimungal

Reality is incomplete. That is, our view of the world can't be complete, because reality isn't

yet complete. Our common sense has no authority whatever about what the fundamental structure of

reality is. Standard classical physics assumes an initial state determines everything thereafter.

However, Professor Jenann Ismael found something startling. Relativity makes such determinism

impossible. Why? The past light cone of any event never contains sufficient information

to predict that event with certainty. In this episode, the professor demonstrates that reality,

viewed from within, is fundamentally incomplete. Ask any system to predict its own next output and

watch it fail, not from ignorance, but from an actual logical impossibility. And this

is the beginning of the flame of free will. Ismael argues that over evolutionary time,

organisms learn to exploit this openness. This is a fascinating conversation that reconceptualizes

you as a self-curating information structure that constitutes yourself via choices and beliefs. When

you die, an irreplaceable pattern of information vanishes forever. We also explore consciousness,

why time is experienced as coming into being rather than being revealed, and how thermodynamics

grounds the arrow of causation. On this channel, I interview researchers regarding their theories

of reality with rigor and technical depth. Jenann Ismael is an expert at making abstract concepts

accessible, and this is the clearest explanation of the paradox of identity and free will you'll

ever hear. Which idea of yours has faced the most resistance? It's a really good question. You know,

I don't write a ton, but I think of the things that I've written, it might be that, so I wrote

this book on free will, it's now 10 years old, but I think what a lot of people thought was that I

have a particular idea of what free will is, and that I'm trying to defend it in the book. It was

about, it was called How Physics Makes Us Free, but that wasn't actually sort of the way that I

tend to approach things. I mean, the title was How Physics Makes Us Free, but part of that was,

you know, the question was, in what sense does physics make us free? So the book was really

about trying to understand in naturalistic terms what sorts of freedoms we really have. I don't

have a dog in the fight at all about conceptual analysis of the notion of freedom. I mean, I tend

to be attracted to those questions where you're just looking at the physical image of the world,

and you're trying to understand within that image, you know, sort of broadly philosophical problems.

What are we? What is time? What is space? I think, you know, the physics problem, I mean,

the free will problem was like, what the fuck? How do we understand if you take seriously? I mean,

and really let it land in the sense that this is what the world is like. How do you understand from

within that in a way that you can make sense of what agency is, and your experience of agency,

and the idea that when you sort of, you know, lie down on one of those dark nights of the soul,

without any pre-theoretic commitment to what free will is, but just you lie down on one of

those dark nights of the soul, and you're making a decision with the idea that this was all in some

sense set from the beginning of time. So I was just trying to understand what's going on, and

then taking it for granted that that's also partly what, you know, people who are worried about free

will are tapping into. Have you personally had any dark nights of the soul? Thousand of them,

of course. I think every time we make a decision, I think from the first personal perspective,

every time you make a decision, you really do feel like, and the best phrase that I found for kind

of capturing the phenomenology of it, though in some sense language feels inadequate here,

is William James's phrase when he says, you know, what one feels when one's making a decision. And

in particular in those times when you feel like, you know, you're making a really pivotal decision,

like, do I accept the job over here? Do I stay where I am? Do I get married? Do I not?

Do I have a child? Do I not? You know, or do I let, you know, a partner walk out the door and

close the door on a relationship or not? Where it feels really pivotal. William James says,

you know, about, I think he's trying to capture these sorts of moments when he says, you know,

when you feel that the scales of fate hang in the balance and it all comes down to the here

and now. I think for me, it was, you know, I have many experiences like that. That's why we torture

ourselves over difficult decisions, because you feel in those moments that the future is really

hinging, you know, on sort of what I do in the here and now. You said language feels inadequate

here. Do you think it's the case that there are problems of existential import? That the

limitation of language isn't just a limitation of current language or current models, but maybe a

limitation of any model or any language? Yes, you know, so you're putting your finger on a really

difficult question. So I think, you know, language is an interpersonal medium of communication. It's

there precisely to allow the flow of information between different subjectivities, between my mind

and your mind. And in order to do that, it has to be objective in a very particular sense. It has to

be objective in the sense that it has to detach from sort of features of my experience that you

don't have. Like, do you see what I mean? So I can understand things in a way that, you know,

attaches directly to features of my experience that I can, as it were, display in thought. You

don't have that. It's like, you know, it's like sort of if I'm in one part of space and you're in

another part of space, you're using a map and I'm using a map. The map is supposed to be the kind

of, you know, embodiment of objective relations between locations in space, ways of representing

things that don't depend specifically on how I'm related to them, right? So the map is the

embodiment of that, objective relations, you know, invariant, objective relations between events

that are invariant under transformations between spatial locations, sort of frame independent. So

if you're in one part of space, I'm in one part of space, you know, we don't want to use words like

near and far, because the meaning of those words depends on where the speaker is located, right? So

if you're in Canada, I'm here and I say, and you say, what's nearby? And I say, oh, the, you know,

the store is a mile away. And just take, go down the road, go to the right. That's not going to

mean much to you because you're in a different part of space. It's not going to be a useful

way of speaking. So that's why we have things like maps, languages like that. You know, it

lets us communicate with one another in ways that detach from specificities of our situation. So we

are going to get to self-location and indexicals and also the definition of free will, and perhaps

even definitions of free will, as there are multiple. Before we do, broadly speaking, you

were talking about attraction earlier. There are two types of philosophers. And again, this is a

broad generalization. One that goes into problems where they feel they already have a handle on it,

and they feel like other people find so-and-so confounding, but they don't. They don't. And

then there's another that are sadistically drawn to being bewildered by a mystery, regardless of

if it's considered even to be a solved problem or not. You strike me as the mystery sort. I don't

know if that's the case. Let me know. Hundred percent. So I, you know, I think I make a lunge

for the mysteries. The things that I think I understand, I don't tend to get interested in.

This is what makes me a person who doesn't write very much, is because as soon as I think I do

understand something, like many of the problems in physics, I don't understand it in detail,

but I don't see a mystery there. That's a problem that will yield a little bit more calculation,

or feeling it like the contours are there. I don't see. So it is the places where absolutely that I

feel a real mystery, like a confounding one, the kinds of problems where if you think about them,

you know, I don't, because of the current way that I think about things, I don't see any way

through it. That means seeing my way through it, I'm going to learn something deep. I'm going to

have to change something in the way that I think. But it doesn't mean like I approach them with a

conviction that I'm going to understand them. It's much more kind of visceral than that. I

think it's just I'm interested and attracted to mysteries. You're just compelled. Yeah, I think

so. I think that's right. And I'll say one more thing, which is I always tell my students this,

which is the way that you're going to make a contribution is not that you have more brain

power, but that you're more patient. With certain sorts of problems. So focus on the problems that,

you know, interest you, because you're going to be more patient with those problems. And I

think I have like this great tolerance for being confused. And, you know, I sort of really like the

things that confuse me. What else do you tell your students as advice? One is, I think, you know,

people imagine. So what they do is they go into graduate school and they imagine, you know, sort

of they're the people that they think of as either in the field, like sort of professional examples

or people among their peers that they think of. Well, that person is clearly the smartest. I think

the fastest. I calculate the best. And all of the cool kids are working on these problems. So what

I have to try to do is emulate that. I have to get as good as I have to work on those problems,

because those are like the hardcore problems, and I have to, you know, sort of try to be what

they are. Those are the paradigms of kind of a successful philosopher. That's exactly wrong.

So you know, once you're in the field, that when you're sort of choosing who to read, or you're

choosing who to hire, you always say, oh, that's an, you know, you don't say, oh, good, this person

kind of, in the ordinary kind of pecking order, comes like, you know, high enough to the top.

You say, who's doing something different? Who's doing something interesting? Who are the really

interesting people? And even when you're choosing who to read, I think, you know, once you get to a

certain level of proficiency, you're not looking for more of the same. You're not looking for, you

know, kind of who are working on the old problems and saying the smartest things about them. You're

learning for something who's doing something a little different, coming from a different angle,

combining approaches in a way that is, you know, sort of going to yield something, something new.

And I think physicists think this way, you know, it's a kind of complex, rugged landscape. And,

you know, sort of, if you've got people starting in different areas and coming from different

approaches, you're going to explore more of the landscape jointly. As a hirer, as someone who's

hiring, how do you avoid this self-reinforcing mechanism of, okay, you are championing theory A

and whatever is adjacent to theory A, but my student has an idea about something,

not even theory B, theory not A, like the opposite of theory A. Why would you, as a supervisor or as

someone on a hiring committee, why would you want, sorry, why would you put any eggs in that basket?

Now, I was speaking to Susskind and to Sean Carroll about how string theory in

the early 2000s and 90s was extremely dominant in theoretical physics. And they just said, well,

one of the reasons is simply, why would you attach yourself to something that you don't believe in?

So, if they're a string theorist, they believe in string theory. And if a student is coming with

some other radical proposal, well, they're like, I'm sorry, I don't think that's going to work.

It seems quite clear to me at this current time, given current evidence, et cetera, that quantum

gravity is synonymous with string theory and string theory is the way to go. So, how do you

avoid that? And how do you think about that? So, I'll tell you how I think about it. It's something

I come up against a lot. So, I'm on one side of this. I'll tell you what I think about it. And

I'll use the foil of people on hiring committees that I'm tending to argue against about this. So,

I think in philosophy, it's a little bit different than physics. So, in physics, it is, you think

there is a truth and you're committed to the truth and you want the field not to be looking in areas,

you know, that are kind of, you think are dead ends. In philosophy, it's a little, you know,

people are working on problems. They recognize there's a number of views and you're looking

to build a department that, you know, is able to teach students and where collectively, you know,

will. So, but what people do do is they take their set of views and in particular, I think their

style of doing philosophy. So, you know, I'm an analytic philosopher. I think like the height of

intellectual achievement or intellectual prowess is exhibited in whether you can do logic or,

you know, or the careful analysis. You know, I think a good paper looks like this. It involves

a lot of careful analysis. Other people on other sides, you know, I think it's about insights and

intuition and somebody has a new idea, but they're not writing these tightly packaged,

you know, fussy little papers. So, the way that I think about that is you need all kinds, you know,

the insight comes from different areas and different approaches. So, I absolutely

believe in diversity. You know, there are these theorems that show like effectively if you've got,

you know, n number of people at the table, but they're all kind of, you know, proficient

in one way of approaching things or they all have the same sort of expertise. Brain power,

you increase the quality of the group for solving problems not by just adding more of who you think

are the smartest people, but by adding people who are doing different approaches, different things,

even if, you know, person by person, they're kind of lower quality thinking. So, I think that's

true in philosophy. I think you want a diversity, but you come up against colleagues who are doing

the philosophical equivalent of your friends who are choosing string theorists because they think

that's the going theory, which is we want smart people. Smart people do philosophy like this,

and I'm looking out there and, you know, you're giving me someone who's kind of a foggy thinker,

the analytic stuff isn't there, and I feel like, no, that's completely the wrong approach. If

you're using your standards of the right way to do philosophy as the criterion of what a

good philosopher is, you're going to just hire more of yourself. And as a group, you're going

to be weaker, and the refusal to recognize that kind of humility, you know, not to recognize that

insight comes from a number of places. And I think the analogy that I like to use is,

you know, it's as though even, you know, we've got in, like, it's as though, I'm not going to sort

of be personal about it, it's as though you've got a lot of people who are trained at Oxford,

and they're really, really good at kind of analysis, and they recognize what a tight,

tightly argued, you know, paper looks like, and that's for them the height of philosophy. And

you're bringing in people from other traditions that are doing, you know, sort of existentialism

or continental philosophy. What I would think of, I'm always willing to say, as rich with insight,

let's plunder it for what we can take. But they're like, that's clearly not good philosophy. I mean,

look at this. Uh-huh. It's not well-defined. It's not analytically, carefully argued. It's not, you

know, embedded in a lot of, you know, sort of as, like, sort of what... Hand wavy. Yeah, exactly.

And I was, it's like a bunch of French chefs standing in a corner when somebody's bringing in,

you know, like, sort of, you know, tacos and from a different tradition, and they're going,

oh, like, the knife work is very bad. Or like, do you see what I mean? So I think, you know,

that how I approach it is I tell students, you know, follow where your nose takes you. You

lean into your own talents and see, you know, if you can come up with something new and something

different and something helpful to, you know, sort of the problems that you're interested in. So we

talked about broad styles of motivation. And now here there's the broad style of analytic versus

continental. But there's also just, you mentioned your style. You said you have a style of doing

philosophy. How would you describe your style? And if it's best to contrast it with someone else,

like, let's say, David Lewis, you say, David Lewis does his philosophy with style so-and-so. Here's

how he tends to think about problems. Here's where I differ. Then feel free. So I think of,

I mean, you know, Sean and Carol and I started this thing called the Natural Philosophy Forum.

And in so many ways, I think the idea of natural philosophy is very much the way that I think of

myself. So I'm much more of a philosopher than a lot of philosophers of physics. You know, for a

lot of philosophers of physics, like Tim Maudlin, you know, David Albert, I think, is a little bit

more like me. But a lot of the people who work in foundations of physics, they're really interested

in foundational problems in physics. So they come from physics, they're recognizing that physics is

bumping up against philosophical problems, and they're kind of, you know, trying to understand

those. Or they think that the physicists aren't engaged enough in understanding foundations,

they're just calculating whatever. I'm really a philosopher. I'm interested in, just by instinct,

I'm interested in all of the big questions. You know, who are we? How do we fit into the universe?

But I think, you know, by far, so many of those big questions, you know, they were in the hands

of philosophers for millennia. And 17th century, they get passed into the hands of the physicists.

And we're making enormous amounts of progress. And partly what they're showing is, you know, that the

method of sitting in the armchair and trying to reflect on our concepts doesn't work very well.

And indeed, the kinds of progress they're making are by really rejecting, you know, sort of all

of our pre-theoretical common sense ideas. So the way that David Lewis did metaphysics is, and Frank

Jackson, and that whole kind of tradition was, you sit down, you think about a difficult concept,

whether it's modality, whether it's time, whether it's, you know, freedom, whatever it is. And you

say, what are my big ideas? What are my kind of central ideas about that? So time is something

that has these features, and then you ramsify it out. So you put in a variable wherever you

say time, you take the picture of the world given you by physicists, and you say, what is it in the

world that satisfies that? You know, that kind of Ramsey sentence with the X, wherever the concept

I'm trying to analyze. To me, I think, you know, our common sense has no, you know, the thing that

physics has taught us is that our common sense, you know, sort of has no authority, whatever,

you know, about what the fundamental structure of reality is. And, you know, what physics has taught

us is, you know, if you think of common sense as it's a sort of useful set of, it's a useful way

of thinking, it's the embodiment of a useful way of thinking about the world for the purposes of

creatures who need to kind of track feeding and mating opportunities. It's like a rough map that

will direct us to the things we care about, and in order to survive. But, you know, it's

certainly not made to be adequate to capturing the deep structure of reality. And I think the

way that physics works is, you know, we used to sit in the armchair, we had like, you know,

some rough ideas of the contours of experience, you know, over the course of a normal human life,

and then the imagination gets to work on that, and we imagine, you know, what could the world be like

at the bottom. What physics does is, collectively over generations, increasingly precise and

increasingly accurate records of experience, not just in the kind of what you would get from common

sense, but, you know, like, by deliberately going out and searching esoteric forms of experience,

developing theories that are mathematically formulated and precise, that quantitatively match

that, and letting the fundamental concepts be the sole criterion, is that they reproduce the full

structure of experience in quantitative detail, and they satisfy various kind of, you know,

formal desiderata. So we find simplicity and symmetry as ways of kind of exercising, you know,

kind of needless bits of the formalism. That seems to be working in remarkable ways for generating

theories that are empirically adequate, and if we take the formalism and try to imagine ourselves

into the formalism, what is it telling us about the deep structure of reality? That's, I think,

what I think of as characteristic of the method. And it's been, by all operational standards,

remarkably successful where, you know, kind of armchair metaphysics wasn't, and philosophically

fruitful. Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away. Don't be like the economy.

Instead, read The Economist. I thought all The Economist was was something that CEOs read to

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useful for myself, personally, is their coverage of math, physics, philosophy, and AI, especially

how something is perceived by other countries and how it may impact markets. For instance, The

Economist had an interview with some of the people behind DeepSeek the week DeepSeek was launched.

No one else had that. Another example is The Economist has this fantastic article on the recent

dark energy data, which surpasses even Scientific American's coverage, in my opinion. They also have

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to get started. Thanks for tuning in, and now let's get back to the exploration of the mysteries

of our universe. Again, that's economist.com.to. Okay, so here, common sense, is that a synonym for

folk intuition? Yep. Okay, so what if a physicist says, look, Jenann, with you trying to preserve

free will, you're trying to preserve a folk intuition. Physics tells us that we're determined,

even if it's randomly determined, but it's just, it's not us. We're determined by factors

that are not us, so where is this decision, and let alone a free will decision, coming

from? How do you respond to that, and what's the definition of free will that you use? Good. Okay,

so this was the misunderstanding that I meant to highlight. It wasn't like I start out with an

intuition about what free will is. So that's the traditional philosophy. What is free will? Let's

analyze the concept. Let's look in the world, see whether there's anything that satisfies that. So I

didn't do that. What I was trying to say is, well, let's take the physics as authoritative. You know,

whether there's a quantum substructure or not, let's assume that the world is at

least emergently classical for things, effectively classical for things as big and slow as us, always

provisionally, because that's the thing about physics. Everything is provisional, you know,

but let's start with that, because the problem really takes a sharp form there, you know, and

let's understand, what is a human being actually doing in physical terms when they lie down on

one of those dark nights of the soul? What is a human, and then as soon as you pose the question,

you have to pose all of these others. Well, what am I? You know, when I think, when I'm thinking,

you know, it comes down to me who makes the decision. It's like, well, what am I? You know,

what am I in physical terms? What do I look like through the lenses of physics? And how does that

show up? So, you know, the question of what is a self is one of those mysteries. It's, you know,

I know there's a body there, you know, but what am I? And so you're immediately in the realm of

raising all of those deep questions, but the way that I raise them is not with pre-theoretical

commitments about that a self is such and such, and is there such a thing in physics? Or free

will is such and such, and is there such a thing in physics? I take it for granted that whatever

it is that those folk intuitions are trying to capture, you know, or that are answering to,

whatever use they're playing for us when we think about ourselves and the world, it's something

real. It's a phenomenon. Like when I lie down at night and when I use the word I, you know, there's

something that I'm meaning to capture. And I want to understand through physical lenses, you know,

what is that? What's going on in the person? What does the word I in my mind refer to? Is it a body?

Is it a mind? What is a mind? How does it fit in? And so all of those questions arise, but you start

with them as questions. You start with, what is that? And how do I understand that? And I think

there's this beautiful phrase that Peter Strassen, again, I sort of like it really, I read it when

I was a graduate student, and I think it really kind of landed for me. He said, the problem arises

because the solution exists. And I take that to mean, like, that the problem arises, you know,

the world is consistent. And sort of if there's a phenomenon that you're trying to understand,

studying the way the world solved that problem and created that phenomenon is a really, you know,

the problem has to exist if the phenomenon is real. So I think, you know, that's why I,

you know, although I love reading, you know, philosophers like David Lewis, of course, is a

great philosopher. Spinoza is like, and Kant, just to me, wonderful. But they might be wrong. The

world is not wrong. Like, if you study the world in detail, you're going to find, you know, that it

is consistent. And if you're trying to understand a real phenomenon, the world has solved problems

and solved them in ways that you wouldn't think of from the armchair. So what would it look like

if the world was inconsistent? Um, I'm not sure. I mean, I, you know, sort of like, people who are

attracted to sort of dilethism or in, you know, for me, that has no attraction. You know, logic

is, logic and the world in the sense of reality, I think. Yeah, I don't know that. I don't know how

to make sense of that. I don't know how to make sense of that. I've been thinking a lot about, you

know, self-representation. So I have been thinking about paradoxes. But, you know, I think the people

that, you know, are in any way attracted by saying, yeah, the world is inconsistent,

or reality is inconsistent, or logic, or attracted to logics that allow contradictions don't hold any

attraction for me. And it's partly because of, you know, you think through the problem hard enough,

you see, of course, there's a solution. So you said you've been thinking about some paradoxes or

self-referential paradoxes in particular recently? Yeah, yeah. Tell me what's on your mind. So a lot.

I mean, I think, um, so I've been like, thinking a lot. So if, if, if you look at a lot of the

problems that are kind of arising now in physics, so I should say, you know, some of the things that

I think of as mysteries, they arise partly kind of within a physical theory, because physics ignores

things for a long time, makes a lot of progress. But then when it gets developed enough, some

things kind of emerge as a little bit anomalous and needing, needing work. And one of them is,

you know, trying to, it's something that, you know, people talk about a lot, but a lot of

places where what they call the observer seems to become important, and we don't have a way of

understanding that quickly. I think the agent is probably a, you know, a better description,

but I think a lot of them have to surround the structure of a view of the world from within. And

without starting to think of, I mean, without starting from the idea that self-reference is

going to be essential or starting with an interest in self-reference, I think what you find is that a

lot of those problems, a lot of the places where we're having trouble understanding You know,

sort of the role of the observer or understanding time and it's, you know, the apparent conflict

between the way time looks from within and the way it's represented in physics. Even understanding

free will, understanding, you know, why agencies are representing ourselves from the inside as, you

know, when we're represented, it's very different from kind of what it looks like if you take the

world as a whole and slice it up and compare states and so on. So a lot of these problems,

the more that I dive around in them, the more that I realize it's something about the logic of the

embedded view, like when you're representing the world from within, as opposed to the God's eye

view, which is the one that physics traditionally takes, which is you're representing the world as

a completed whole. And I've come to think that there's a very sharp way of putting those problems

that has been formally well explored in the context of physics. So I'll give you an example.

Please. So this is going to take me a second to sort of think of how to put it sharply in

the way that's good. Take your time. Yeah. So suppose, so this is the kind of the cute little

way of putting it, but suppose that we wanted to come up with a grand overarching database,

complete database of physical facts. So there's just going to be a computer sitting in a room,

whatever you like, or a person or an oracle, whatever you like. It's just going to be a system

that's going to be such that we're going to feed into it the laws of physics and information about,

I don't know, what's happening on a particular mountaintop on a particular day and about monkeys

and bananas and all of it. We're just going to feed it all of the information that we have. And

the goal is that we're going to be able to ask it any yes, no question of fact, and it can deliver

an answer. So make it easy for yourself. Imagine that the universe is deterministic and that the

laws are effectively computable. So you're just, you know, there's not going to be any

problem about computation or about information. There's always going to be questions that it can't

truthfully answer. How do we know that? Just ask it. I mean, I can tell you this without knowing

what the database looks like, what the memory looks like. Just ask it, is the question that's

about to appear in the output channel. So the idea is you feed a question through an input channel,

delivers an answer through the output channel. Is the answer that's about to appear in the output

channel? No. Right. It can't truthfully answer. What the fuck? Right. I mean, this is a mundane

question of physical fact. And again, we can make models of this if you don't want to think

about the actual universe. Oh, maybe the laws are deterministic. Imagine a universe that you

can completely control. Imagine a deterministic universe. So here's a little example. Imagine a

deterministic universe with effectively computable laws. Imagine a Turing machine in the universe

and program it with the laws. So now you know not only that the system, the internal system, knows

the laws, but you know that it's able to compute the laws because it's a Turing machine, the laws

are effectively computable. You can come up with a whole cluster of questions it can't answer. First,

what is the answer? Whether the answer that's about to appear in the output channel is no.

Can't answer that. Can't even correctly guess the correct answer to that. It can't answer

truthfully. Can't answer truthfully. How about this one? It can't answer at all. Or, well,

can't answer truthfully but won't answer at all. Feed it its own, you might think it's a Turing

machine, and the laws are computable, it should be able to predict what other, any system in the

world will do if it started on a given state, right? Feed it its own Turing number and say,

do you halt? When fed some. Can't answer. So what you see is that there's a class of questions that,

because of the structure, the logical structure of a system representing the world from the inside,

it can't truthfully answer. So I've been thinking about that partly, it's not that I started

thinking about that, it's that I was thinking a lot about determinism, I was thinking a lot about

counter-predictive devices, and I was thinking just a lot about these sort of little puzzles,

and I realized that actually that's the clearest formal expression of what's going on in all of

those puzzles, and it's a little thread that when you start to pull at it, you see has

deep roots everywhere. So for example, there are lessons about determinism in that little puzzle,

when you say, how do I understand physically? I have a little physical model, a mechanical model

of a system inside a deterministic universe, what's going on there? So that's one, but also,

like so a lot of stuff you can start to understand by just focusing in detail on what's going on with

that model, and how it can correct some of the kind of big picture ideas with which we approach

physics and questions about ourselves. One of them is free will, but one of them is time,

how do we understand time from the inside? Another one is what's going on with determinism,

like why couldn't you have a Laplacian demon in the universe? Shouldn't a Laplacian demon

be able to answer every yes-no question of that? What's going on there? So that's why I've been

thinking about those questions. No temptation on my part to think that they show that reality is

inconsistent. I think there are real lessons to learn from them. Do you find that most physicists

who aren't trained philosophically believe in free will or tend to not believe in free will? And then

those who are trained philosophically, is there also a correlation there? So I don't know about

numbers. For sure, many of the loudest voices in physics, or the kind of thing that you get at the

end of the day at the bar when people have had a couple of things to drink, and they're kind of the

loose talk is, yeah, they're very happy to dismiss free will. But I think what's going on there,

so there are two things, and philosophers, it's a mix. There certainly are prominent philosophers

who are happy to reject free will, but I'll say a little bit about what the landscape looks like.

So philosophers are a mixed bag. They really are interested in the concept of free will. I mean,

they're thinking, they have an idea of agency, and it's embedded in questions about morality,

and they're trying to understand how do we reconcile these ideas that I think a lot of them,

like moral psychologists, they take as a datum that we are free, and they're trying to understand

how do I account for determinism. So many of them are developing notions of freedom that capture

the aspects of freedom that they're interested in, like moral responsibility and so on. So there's a

lot of compatibilists, but they're mostly working on the side of understanding the concept of free

will in a way that accommodates the physics. They're not deeply embedded in the physics. They

don't really understand in detail, or they do, I mean, you get a one-sense view of what physics

says. They're assuming a classical world, and they say what physics tells us is that the initial

state of the world fixes everything that happens thereafter. So they're trying to understand,

you know, if we take that for granted, how do we understand freedom? There's some people who don't.

Some people who say, no, the physics is wrong, libertarians, because I know as a datum, better

than I know anything about physics, that I'm free. And those are called libertarians, or libertarian

free will. That's right. And then there are other people who bite the bullet, and they

say physics tells us we're not free, so we're not free, where it's an illusion, this kind of

vocabulary of illusion. A lot of the physicists think that by freedom, we mean precisely the

ability to break the laws of physics, and that's an illusion, so they reject it. So they're not,

they don't have a very sophisticated conceptual analysis of freedom. They take the idea that

we're, that, you know, to be free is to break the laws of physics in the universe, and they just say

that's an illusion. We've been wrong about lots of things. So I think the more interesting middle

space is the one that doesn't start out with a fixed idea of freedom. And that also takes the

physics seriously enough to say, no, I'm not going to take one line of physics, you know,

I'm going to take physics in detail, and a model of a human being in detail, and try to understand,

you know, sort of how life and cognition emerges, and what's going on when, like, you know, what's

going on with the onboard machinery, and how is it affected by the stuff outside, and I'm also not

just going to take, you know, a Newtonian image of the universe, I'm going to take, you know,

sort of a relativistic image of the universe. I'm going to take relativity seriously. I think

you get nudges, both in our understanding of the physics, and in our understanding of ourselves,

in a way that brings them into alignment, and it has to be that way for the reason I said. Nature

has found a solution to this problem, and there need to be corrections on both sides of, you know,

the naive understanding of what physics tells us, and the naive understanding of what we're doing,

or what our place is in the causal order when we're making a decision. Okay, so this is a great

time to get into your account of free will, and then also, so you're going to define it,

and then also, it would be great if you then state why this account of free will comports

with an intuitive account of free will, otherwise there's no sense in even calling it free will, you

could use some other name for it. It needs to have some concordance with the folk intuition that we

use to develop the word free will, and then also, well, why do we have it then? Do we actually have

this form of free will? So please. Yeah. So again, so this is going to be unsatisfying in some ways,

and I'm also going to say things that I didn't say in the book, because my views have changed a

little bit. It's not like I'm offering an analysis of what free will is. I'm happy to tell you what

I think is going on with us and the ways in which it answers to some aspects of what we think of as

free will, so it captures some elements of… So first I'll say the one thing about the physics.

So I think one of the things that's important and that's come from thinking about these sorts

of puzzles, like the self-referential one that I told you about. That is the idea that there are

questions of fact that we can't answer, even quite aside from physics. How do you understand that?

What you realize is that actually when you take relativity very seriously and you ask yourself,

okay, I'm in a relativistic setting, I should say too, this comes partly too from thinking

about counter-predictive interactions. So give you all of the information you want about the world.

Your task is to predict what I will do. You've got a perfect physical model of me. You've got, or

even like a tabletop device, you've got a perfect physical model of it. You know what the laws are.

You know the initial conditions of the universe. It has a green light and a red light on top.

Or if you're doing it to me, I'm a deterministic system. Predict will I raise my hand or will I

not? Or predict what this device will turn off or turn off. You might think you can do it.

Okay. Let's suppose that I'm demanding that you feed the device your prediction and it's

programmed to do the opposite of what's predicted. A device like that's perfectly possible. I mean,

we can write down a model of such a device in a deterministic setting, right? It's just a tabletop

device that takes a prediction. So now you can see the connection with a self-referential paradox.

A perfectly deterministic device that takes a prediction and does the opposite, right? Just

a moment. Because that sounds like a predictive device, but you called it a counter-predictive

device. Is the counter just because you told it to do the opposite at one point? Okay. So there's a

predictor and a counter-predictive device. So the predictor is trying to predict what this device

is going to do. It has a model, a perfect physical model. The system is a deterministic device. It's

given as much information as you like. Give it the initial conditions of the universe. Give it

the laws that program the device. Give it... But the constraint is it has to feed its prediction.

It has to tell its prediction to the device. What's going to happen? Now you might think,

well, it has to be right. If it's got the initial conditions of the universe and it can compute, it

ought to be able to predict this device. But hang on. It's going to give this device its prediction.

And as long as this device works, well, it's going to not be right. So what's going on?

Thinking about that puzzle makes you think, well, hang on. Is there a mechanism in our classical

theories for giving a system enough information to predict what's going to happen in the rest of the

world? I mean, naively, the way everybody presents determinism is, yes, of course. I mean, what did

Laplace say? Laplace said that if a system knew the positions and momenta of every particle, it

would—and this is his phrase—it would embrace in a single formula everything that would ever happen

in that universe. And you think, we can have information about the past. In principle, we ought

to be able to establish the positions and momenta of every particle. And if I had that information,

I ought to be able to predict what anything would do. This little tabletop device, a Turing machine,

another human being. We think that's the way that the implications of determinism

are usually presented. But when you start thinking through in detail, in physical terms,

whether even in principle there's a mechanism for having enough information to predict the evolution

of the universe, you find that it's not true. And actually, I'm going to make a methodological point

here. Again, this is why this method of thinking about philosophical problems is so fruitful.

You're given—you treat it as a physics problem. You're not starting out with ideas about free

will and is a human being a physical thing? You start out by saying, I've got a physical model of

a system in front of me. I've stipulated that this is a deterministic setting. I can set up a physics

problem. Now I've got a predictor, and I've got a counter-predictive device, and I've got a physical

model, a mechanical model. Is this a puzzle for classical determinism? But as soon as you start

to investigate it in that kind of detail, you realize, oh, hang There's no mechanism in the

universe for generating predictions of that kind with certainty. And here's the reason. So again,

this is why there's physics lessons. Well, look in a Newtonian universe. It's kind of

a little obscure, but you sort of realize, well, if you've got a system in the universe and it can

check—in naturalistic terms, how do we check the positions and momentum of this particle

and that one and that one, but it never gets to a setting where it knows it's examined all of

the particles that there are. So it doesn't just have to establish the positions and momentum of

individual particles. Specifically in Newtonian physics, you need to know the total state of the

world, and there's actually no mechanism for determining that. That was always one

of the problems with Newtonian physics, because gravitational influence travels instantaneously.

Everything affects the force on this particle in the here and now. You need to know everything.

Okay, so you might think, okay, but that was always a bad thing about Newtonian physics.

Rectified in relativity. Now in relativity, we have an interaction-by-interaction understanding

of what's going on on the ground, and it's explicit in relativity. This was one of the big,

wonderful things about relativity. One of the innovations that made it a great advance is,

to predict anything, you don't need to know the total state of the world. You just need to know

its backlight cone, or indeed any cross-section of its backlight cone. Great. Okay, so let's

look again in physical terms at this puzzle. You've got a system predicting another system,

deterministic, perfectly deterministic. Let's give the first system all of the physically accessible

information, knows entire contents of its past light cone. Trying to predict this next system,

does it have enough information to do that with certainty? No, it doesn't. Why? Because of the

way that the light cones are nested inside one another. Never sufficient information in the past

light cone of the earlier device to predict. Indeed, not only to predict what this system

is going to do with certainty, in fact to predict anything with certainty, because you always need

information outside the light cone, because the later event. So weird, right? So there's

a physics lesson there about what happens to determinism when you take relativity seriously,

and it's one that falls right out of the light cone structure. It's something that happens

directly when the temporal order is brought into alignment with the causal order. So that

temporal past now means causal past. This little puzzle that Einstein certainly never thought of

dissolves. So let me see if I got this correct. So you're an event in space-time, and then usually

when we're two-dimensional, one space, one time, we just show these light cones. It looks like an

X. I'll place an image of that on screen. So you're at the apex of this, and the past will

be down and future is up. Okay, now you think, well, can I not just predict something that's

even an epsilon in my future light cone? You think naively. In a finite interval, right? You think,

yeah, well, why not? Well, no matter how far or close you are in the future, it will impinge on

something that was outside your space-time, your light cones from that event. So you won't be able

to. That's exactly right. Yeah. So another way to think of it that makes it kind of visually

clear is take the contents of any past light cone, right? So take the full causal past. Ask yourself,

how many models of my physical theory can I embed this in, and do they have different futures? The

answer is always indefinitely many and with very different futures. So it's, again, a lesson about

determinism. So this physically naive idea that we have, which is the first line in every kind

of line about the puzzle about free will, is sometime long ago in the past, initial state

of the universe was laid down, and since then, everything was fixed. So I don't need to know

anything about give me a physical model of you and what's going on in your mind. Total illusion that

anything hinges on your... The idea here is that actually, if you take the physics seriously enough

to think that that image of the universe where there was an initial condition, if you really

exercise yourself of that, then at least that naive version of the problem goes away. And so

now you really do have a problem of understanding. I mean, you're in the space where you're, okay,

so let's rethink what it is to be a system in the universe and the role that that system plays

in kind of... you know, in making the future what it is. Maybe that's a sort of silly way to put it,

but that's what I mean. You use the physics to get yourself out of the space where you think

that your common-sense ideas of free will and time and, you know,

that you're trying to recover those. It's like, no, you're in a completely different space,

and let's understand ourselves from within the space and see if we can, you know, make sense of

life and cognition in a universe like that, and how is that going to change our conceptions of

ourselves? What's it going to rescue? What's going to go away? So so far what's been established is

that you can't predict. Not only can you not predict because of some practical limitation,

it's an in-principle one, and it's not just you, it's an ideal device that could be outside you.

You cannot predict what you're going to do. Okay, so that's been established. Now,

this seems like a necessary condition for free will, but it's not a sufficient one, so there must

be more to this argument, so please. Of course. Yes, yes, sorry. So all this was doing was,

you know, breaking down the naive ideas, so now we can ask, you know, so what kinds of system are we,

and how do we work, and what is our role in it? So now I'm going to give you like a little like

sort of really silly baby schematic description of like huge contours of... My middle name is Silly

Baby Schematics. Okay, good. So here's this big visionary description. I'm going to ignore the

quantum substructure of it. I mean, I think it's important in all kinds of ways, but for now, just

to talk about free will in a perfectly classical way, though relativistic. This is the way that I

think of it. So here's, I know you've talked to lots of people about thermodynamics and stuff,

so your listeners will have some sense of, you know, kind of the sort of big picture stuff I'm

talking about, but this is the way to think of it, you know, kind of the substructure of reality

we're going to assume is classical or effectively classical. So geometry is Minkowski or it's GR,

you know. There's a matter distribution over that. The matter distribution over that obeys laws that

are, you know, sort of temporally symmetric, but how do we get asymmetries? We get asymmetries from

something like a thermodynamic gradient. What the thermodynamic gradient does is it creates

this sort of asymmetry in the part of the universe that we live in that, and I'm going to put it in

this way for reasons that are going to set up how to think about life in cognition. What it does is

it both creates the need for systems like, you know, living systems to metabolize energy from

the environment in order to maintain their own internal integrity, but it also makes information

about the macroscopic past available for systems like that to use. So it sort of creates

opportunities for systems to use information to guide their behavior in a way that's going to

promote survival. So, I mean, if you want to have an image here, you know, and evolution in all

kinds of ways takes advantage of this. So there are these little bacteria, magnetotactic bacteria,

that have little magnets inside them that point in the direction of magnetic north,

and they'll swim in that direction. Why do they do that? Because that turns out to be kind of

nutrient-rich environments that they need to survive. So their nature in designing that system

has effectively used information, namely about the correlation between magnetic north and where

the nutrient-rich environment is, to construct a system that will behave in the way that it needs

to promote its survival. So that system's design is, in a way, a record of the fact that that's

where the nutrient-rich environments are. So in all kinds of primitive ways, nature makes use of

this, but also in much more sophisticated ways. So I think, you know, one of the things that you—so

think of a deer, for example. A deer responding to the smell of a recently-passed predator or a prey,

like a sort of a fox following footprints in the sand. Both of those are making use of the

information-bearing properties of their environment to guide their behavior in a

way that's going to allow them to avoid prey and to get food, right? And why did you call that a

thermodynamic gradient, like in the case of the fox or the deer? Okay. So part of what happens

in thermodynamics is the macroscopic state of a system that's, you know, kind of semi-isolated,

adiabatically isolated system, bears the traces—you know, any kind of ordered state

of a system like that bears the traces of previous work that's done on the system. So the idea is you

do some work in the environment, and it's going to take a while for the state of the environment

to relax back to equilibrium. So footprints in the sand, you know, sort of cream in coffee, those are

all one thinks of as records of work that was done in the system. You always take a system,

if it's in a semi-ordered—any adiabatically isolated system that's in a semi-ordered state,

you can use, you know, kind of the ordinary kind of thermodynamic inferences to say, oh,

this system must have been in a more ordered state in the recent past. It didn't fluctuate into that

state sort of randomly from equilibrium. So that's the sense in which thermodynamics,

you know, makes the macroscopic state of the world rich with information. Got it. So I have, like,

scars on trees, footprints in sand, think in those terms. But even, you know, sort of, you know,

the smell of recently, you know, all those are all, you know, kind of records of things that

have recently happened. And in all kinds of ways, systems, living systems, because of the

metabolic needs of survival, have to, you know, sort of organize their behavior in a way that

is kind of counter thermodynamic. So it turns out information is a very rich, kind of rich resource

for them. So I think, you know, life from the bottom is, you know, making use of information.

Cognition is a natural step on that. So, you know, we start getting thinking systems more and more of

the kind of the burdens of using and processing information are, you know, put inside the system.

So it's selecting behaviors now in ways that are, so you think about magnetotactic bacteria,

nature is selecting response to that stimuli because of the information in that stimuli carries

about the location of nutrient rich environments. But what's happening with cognizing systems is

the selection of behavior, the processing of sensory information, the selection of behavior

is happening increasingly on board. By the time you get to systems like us, so a lot of my book

on free will is spent looking at what's happening with human cognition and, you know, how much of

the burden of selecting responses to stimuli is happening inside of us. So think about like,

or another good, I'm going to give you a couple of model systems. So the magnetotactic bacteria,

these are like huge landmark for, just think of these as kind of landmarks along the phylogenetic

scale complexity. So think magnetotactic bacteria. A nice model system is frogs. So frogs have these

like very sophisticated brains, but their brains are designed so that their tongues will snap out

automatically at, you know, images of passing flies. So if a passing fly there's a boom,

you know, and it's incredible how fast and how good they are. And it's because their brains are

designed like to carefully filter, you know, sort of process visual information so that anything

that looks, has the right shape and the right speed and so on, they'll respond to it. So again,

you know, a much more sophisticated kind of brain, but again, the brain has been designed to do,

designed, you know, sort of every frog will do that. And the only way to get it to change that

behavior is, you know, sustained pressure from the outside. So there's, you know, there's adaptation,

but it's slow and it's, you know, kind of costly. But we're not like that. You and I,

same stimulus, very different responses. What's going on there, right? So here's the way,

and I think this taps into something that I think is essential to free will or essential to kind

of the sort of free will that I think that we have. And that I think is specifically human,

though acknowledging there's lots about other animals that we don't know. So I'm not at all

wedded to this being specifically human, it's characteristically human, is that we don't just

respond to stimuli. We come into the world with a brain that was designed to uptake information. We

have language and all kinds of formal resources for storing information in complicated ways.

Stimuli, we have memories and memories of a kind, you know, again, this is a very rich topic,

but completely fascinating and all of it relevant to understanding ourselves and the types of agents

we are. The sort of memory we have is not just, you know, that we encode information about the

past and we have autobiographical memories. So we have language, we have formal tools, we have an

explicit memory of ourselves or, you know, into the distant past and explicit representations

of the future. You say to me, you know, what are you going to do on Christmas Eve 25 years from

now? And I can entertain a specific thought about a specific time on a specific day at a

great distance from me. So I have the capacity to do that. You know, the mental technologies

that we've developed allow us to do that. So we've got a lot of kind of on-board machinery

that's characteristically human and that allows us to have a narrative conception of who we are,

where we came from, to store lots of specific information about the things that have happened

to us over the course of our lives. You and I come in, let's suppose that we come into the world,

not true, but we come into the world, let's suppose, molecule for molecule,

identical, just to wipe out the sorts of differences that there are between us. Over

the course of our history, as soon as we start having experiences and encoding those experiences,

we're going to differentiate. And all of that is good. Anything that makes an impact on us mentally

is going to potentially make a difference to our behavior. So where the design of the frog's brain

was really what was the fixed design of the frog's brain, though with acknowledging the

ways in which there's a lot of soft structure too, the fixed design of the frog's brain was

what was responsible for it doing what for us it's the opposite. It's when we're doing, when

we're deliberating about voluntary behavior, it's the stuff that's encoded in the soft structure of

our brain, the information, and the way that that information is organized, our plans, priorities,

hopes, and dreams, that's stuff that all takes shape over the course of our lives, from internal

processing of reflecting on our experiences and so on. And it's not just that, okay, my experience,

which is not up to me, impacts what I will do. It's much more complicated than that. When I'm

young, of course, I get carried around and I eat when I'm fed, and a large part of what I

believe and know and think and hope and so on is a product of stuff that passively happens to me. But

that stops, you know, as soon as you're in the position of making choices about what to read,

who your friends are going to be, who you're going to pay attention to, you educate yourself. So you,

over the course of your life, are constituting yourself by making those choices. And when you're

making a decision, in the sense that it's calling on your plans, dreams, hopes, and priorities,

I think that's the product of your own choices. You have made yourself and put yourself there

in a position on the dark nights of the soul to make the choices that you do. So in that sense, I

think, you know, it does come from me. If you ask me, you know, what's the problem of free will? The

problem of free will is getting myself into the causal chain in such a way that those choices come

from me and not from something outside me. I want to say, of course they come from you. In physical

terms, they come from the on-board machinery, you know, and the on-board machinery is encoding all

of the information that you've not just stored over the course of your life, that you've curated

and organized. And so to me, when I make a choice, it comes from me. I'm an essential and integral

part of the causal chain that produces it. And then when I'm making, you know, one of those

dark nights of the soul, it really does come down to the here and now. Not determine my past like

cone. Over the course of that night, I'm churning through the information in my head. And that when

it's a difficult decision, I'm organizing it in a way that it wasn't organized when I let down.

Because what are the difficult decisions? Maybe I have to make a choice between a risky surgery for

a daughter and a chronic condition. And so I don't know what I'm going to do when I lie down because

I have competing commitments. I love my daughter. Everything that over the course of my life has

led me to this point and I love my daughter and I want her to survive. On the other hand,

I want her to have a good life and how risk tolerant am I and what are my obligations

to her? I don't want to impose my risk tolerance on her. So you're over the course of that night,

you've got a kind of, you know, a utility function that's not articulated enough to make that choice.

You're turning to it and you're articulating that function. You're saying, okay, when I

finish this night, I will have made the choice. I will now have organized priorities in a way

where before it wasn't clear which one I'd made a choice. Now, okay, I'm going all in on the risky,

whatever it is. But again, so I think that's the sense in which it does come down to the here and

now when you're making choices. You're always over the course of your life constituting yourself in

that way. And nature has kind of organized things in such a way that when it comes to your voluntary

behavior, it's not the stuff outside. It's not the fixed structure of your body and brain. It's not

your genes, but it's you that makes that decision. So that's the way that I think of it. So what's

the common response from other philosophers or physicists to this? Yeah, I don't know. I don't

know that anybody reads myself. I think everybody has their own ideas about free will. Again,

I haven't really engaged. I'm not really bad at that kind of thing. I tend to be just in my own

head. I think when you talk to people about this, they already have settled ideas. So physicists,

they don't have the patience to sit down and listen to a long story. They think, free will,

of course it's an illusion. I'm a physical thing. And I think a lot of philosophers who have thought

about the problem, either they think, oh, I never thought it was incompatible with determinism. I

think freedom is. So I think it's one of these things that most people, if they think about

it at all, if they're not just dismissive of the problem, you know, they've made their own choices

about what freedom is. So for me, this was, it was a personal trying to understand. But I do think,

again, it's one of those problems where there are lessons. I came through it,

changed because I had a much better understanding of what determinism doesn't entail, new things to

think about that I hadn't been that interested in before, better understanding of myself. I didn't,

you ask me, what are you? I don't know. I think a better understanding of what's special about human

cognition. Hi, everyone. Hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper

dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll find it

all on my Substack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the

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By joining, you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at

the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here, hit subscribe, and let's keep pushing

the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're

listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org, CurtJaimungal.org. So how has it affected you

personally? You just mentioned it affected your view of physics and maybe your philosophy,

but what about your day-to-day life? That's a good question. That's a really good question.

I don't know that. I don't know that. So maybe, oh, this sounds so totally maudlin, but I guess,

you know, one of the things that all of this does is put you a little bit in awe of nature and sort

of what incredible constructions we are. So maybe things like that is a little bit reflective about,

you know, sort of how incredible it is that we make decisions and what's going on, how

complicated it is, what's going on in us and the sense in which. So it makes you think about things

like loss, like the sense in which, so everything I just said, I already get my parents died,

like all in the last couple of years. So this is something I was thinking about. So this is

a kind of daily life thing. So when a frog, you know, survives, it's like, you know, it's frog,

you know, sort of is gone from the world, you know, something is lost, a living being is lost,

you know, but I think when a person is lost in the world, because of what I just said about how what

we're doing over the course of our lives is where we're pulling information and we're processing it,

and it's this kind of incredible structure of information that that person, over the

whole course of their lives, everything they've read, everything they've done, all of the kind of

reflection that they've done, that's completely gone. And it's not, it's not made up for by the

birth of another person. The sort of loss that there is, because it's a loss of information,

that happens when a person dies, is I think it's absolute, it's irretrievable, it's not

fungible with, you know, other people coming, you know, with other people. So I think for me,

that's a real lesson, that every person is a kind of unique structure of information,

their whole inner world, and when one person is lost, they're lost. So I don't know if you've

read Gödel, Escher, Bach. Of course, yeah, yeah. Okay. In it, well actually outside of it, there's

another book called You Are a Strange Loop or I Am a Strange Loop. I Am a Strange Loop. Right.

Hofstadter then argues that what makes you is somehow related to the patterns inside your brain,

and that even if your parents are gone, or some other loved one is gone, that their patterns

still persist in minor ways, in the way that you now hold your cup of coffee, in the way

that you think through events, in the lessons that they imparted to you. So to Hofstadter,

and he articulated this in his book about his ex, well, his dead wife, he said that no, actually,

in his model, she does persist. There's a low resolution version of her that persists. Does

your conception of what you are, or what a person is, or what I am, the self, does it comport with

that? So he's certainly right, in one way, but I'm going to disagree deeply with him.

He's right in one way. One of the nice things about this view of what a person is, is that

it's reproducible. So patterns are reproducible, and they're generative, in the ways that he says,

and it makes persistence, non-persistence, much more a matter of degree than it would

if you were a primitive locus of mental life. That part's correct. You know, and I know,

that what's left after a person, even a person you know really well, is a tiny fraction of what

they are. Like, ask yourself, what's going to be left of me when I'm gone, in the memories of the

people who know me. Ask yourself right now, what is there of me in the—take your closest person,

who knows you best—what is there of me in them, and it's a shadow. You know, so

I think he's right in some sense, but a very weak sense. I mean, I think one of the yeah,

I guess I'll leave it at that. One of the amazing things about another person is the

kind of endless generaticity of, you know, a mental life. I don't mean that in the like,

but of the kind of structure of information that allows that sort of reflexive grasp of itself, and

how much information is built up over the course of a life. So I think it's, yeah, it's very little

that's left. I mean, very little. Something's left, but yeah. So Jenann, who are you? Who are,

or when am I? I don't know who am I. I mean, I could give you like, autobiography stuff,

and yeah, I don't know. I think I'm a structure of information, yeah. I think, so there's a couple of

things about the use of I. So here's my form. I am a virtual object, the subject of mental

states and a mental life. What does that look from the outside? It's a structure of information. So

I think I'm an embodied mind, and that's what I think the I is when we use I reflexively

like that. I think it's the proper subject of mental states, and when Descartes says, you know,

what am I? What is this I whose existence is made known to me in the very act of denying

that it exists? And that can persist without the body, and so on. That's what I think. I

think that that's the answer you should say. I'm a virtual object. I'm something that's supported

by the machinery in a head, but I'm a certain kind of cognitively organized structure of information.

So this I is what created you now? Mm-hmm. So that implies that there is some continuity of the self.

A hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The continuity is exactly that.

I mean, sort of, so this is why I think, oh, you asked me, actually, sorry, I'm going back to a

previous question. You asked me, you know, how is it, how is this, so not so much a freedom stuff,

but one thing that did change me in practical ways was I was a vegetarian for many, many years,

and that was partly because I didn't think that, and this is going to offend all of your,

you're going to get, like, hate letters. Okay. But it did, partly because I didn't know what was the

difference between the loss of a human being and the loss of a cow. I think, you know, creatures

like cows are primitive creatures that aren't doing quite as much as we are, so they're not

storing information. They don't have a conception of themselves. Over time, it's not the same kind

of loss. It's still a loss, and suffering is bad, no matter what, for any living thing. But I think

for a human being, there's a kind of loss, not just human being, but anything that has the sort

of sense of continuity over time. This is how it connects to your question. Sense of continuity

over time that comes from, you know, sort of this view of oneself that spans, you know,

the past and the future, where, you know, you're not just, you know, kind of retaining records of

what happened yesterday in your dispositions and feelings and stuff, but you're explicitly,

you know, kind of have an idea of yourself in the past, and you're making plans for the future.

So you're doing things now that are meant to be contributions to projects, you know, that you have

this sort of, you know, holistic commitment to. So that kind of narrative conception of oneself and

sense of oneself over time and commitments and plans that span long periods of time,

that is a deep kind of continuity. So when I say, you know, I, I don't mean the momentary,

you know, kind of time slice. I mean, I have a rich conception of myself as an extended agent,

and an extended agent that will end when I die. You know, I think if you asked Hofstadter's wife,

you know, when do you end? She would have said, well, there's going to be traces of me left,

but I end, you know, my, this continuity, this continuity of this particular inner stream

of information will cease. There will be records of it. There's this part, sorry, I'm talking so

much. Please, no, no, continue. I, I love every word of what you're saying, and the audience is

hanging on to every word as well, so please. Okay. So there's this beautiful passage in,

in Death of Ivan Ilyich, where, and then this was where this kind of, this aha moment came for me

about, about what, what's lost when a human dies, where, you know, he's talking about his death and,

and he's sort of, it's landing on him, you know, that he's on this, like this long excruciating

passage is where he's really kind of hitting him that he's going to die. And he's, and he says,

famous passage where he says, you know, you know, all men are mortal. I am a man, therefore I am

immortal. I kind of knew that applied to me, but I mean, I can't die. Like, it works for

Socrates and it works for a Kurd, but it doesn't work for me. How can I die? And he says, I mean,

if I die, who's going to remember, and he's got these beautiful, like, who's going to remember

the rustle of my mother's skirt when she held me on her knee, who's going to remember, you know,

the ball that, right. So it's, I think that's the sense in which I, there are things that,

that, that I know from the inside, you know, the kind of most precious things that only I really

know the inner, like my parents are gone now, you know, and there are things about them that I know,

things that we experienced together that will be lost when I go. Lost, lost. So I think, you know,

that, that kind of continuity, you, you carry with you over the course of your life. I mean, you,

you cull and curate and pull treasures from your experience and pains, and it all becomes part of

who you are in a particular kind of configuration that no one will ever know. No, like even,

even Hofstadter doesn't know in the heart of hearts. You know, he knows his image of his

wife and the things about him that he loved most. He doesn't know what she loved about herself most.

He doesn't know, like, the little things that she remembers from her childhood and stuff. So that,

the continuity of that stream, what gets carried forward, what, what gets left behind, that sort

of, that, that kind of continuity is, I think, a rich part of, you know, who I am, who you are. So,

Jenann, I'm sure you know, Einstein famously was consoling a grieving friend who lost a loved one

by making an appeal to the block universe and saying that while it's akin to being etched in

ice, so they're there. Now you don't have access to them currently, but they are there somehow in

the universe, if the universe is this block of ice. What do you make of the block universe? So,

I like that quote. I don't think it's a commitment to the block universe, at least in the sense that,

so there's some feature, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say something about that quote, but there's some

feature of the block universe I want to reject in the end. The part of it that's right is, yes,

of course, it's always there in space and time. And there's this like Rilke poem where he says,

you know, having been, you will always have been. That's right. That doesn't go away. Like sort of,

you know, my parents are gone. Hofstadter's, like Hofstadter's wife is gone, but she always

will have been. It is, you know, so in that sense, nothing is temporary. Everything is

permanent. Subspecie eternitatis, everything you do is etched in eternity. I love that. I think

it's right. I want to build on that. So, Viktor Frankl, who has the book Man's Search for Meaning,

he was saying that the fact that you are only here for a glimmer, well, relatively, and that

you can't come back to it actually implies your permanence because you can't be re-etched over.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So your temporariness implies your permanence.

Right. And in fact, that's one good thing about death, too, is there's some sense in which you

don't write over, but you do overwrite in the sense that later events... Kind of, you know,

always color what happened. Like, so if somebody's living and they were generous in their youth,

but they've done bad things, it's like, yeah, do you know, like the overall is that you can,

there's no closure, like, you can always redeem yourself, you can always, you know, the meaning of

a person in some senses is written over by later events, but when someone dies, you do get closure,

there's a final assessment of who they were, because there's no more of that. So I think that's

right, too. So I think it's all of those things, and it's illuminating to look at it, you know. So

you were expanding on Einstein's quotation. Yeah. So the part of the block universe that I don't

like is this idea that we do have a well-defined idea of the totality of facts. So it goes back to

the self-reference stuff. But very often when people say, talk about the block universe,

they say, there is the totality of facts, past, present, and future. For the self-reference

reasons I was talking about before, the very same thing. I think for any embedded creature

in the world, there is no such totality. You can diagonalize, I mean, you can show that there

are contradictions involved in it. And I think what that shows is that it's actually a mirage,

this idea that when we try to take the God's eye view and say that there is this totality of fact,

and the incompleteness of the universe is just because we don't see the whole of it at any time.

We're looking from a limited—I think that's a mirage, a perfectly useful mirage to have when

we're doing physics and stuff. But not to be taken fully seriously. So I thought that the mirage is

that a particular person inside the universe can't take the God's eye view, but not that the

God's eye view doesn't exist. So do you think that the God's eye view doesn't actually exist? Okay,

what do you mean by exist? Like where exactly? What does that mean? So there's no question that

it seems to be a very intelligible idea. We can write down models of complete universes, right,

and look down at them from a God's eye point of view. But the universe, our universe, do we have

a well-defined conception of that? Well, there's nothing formally wrong with saying, well, we can

formally construct a point of view outside—even though we can't take that kind of point of view

on our own reality for self-reference reasons—we can formally construct a point of view, this is

what God's supposed to be, outside of space and time, who looks down at our reality, right? That's

what you might think. But now you see, yeah, but God can make our reality take it in as a totality,

but that's only because he's outside of it. He can't do that with his reality, right? But there

is only one reality. There is no all-encompassing view of reality itself. I mean, that's the thing.

Reality is supposed to be the totality of all that there is. You can take any subtotality of it,

and yeah, you can formally construct a point of view outside of that totality. But if reality is

supposed to be all of there is, then this idea of all of it is a mirage. There is, in reality,

no point of view that encompasses the whole. Interesting. So I was having this debate off-air

with some friends last night or a couple nights ago about, I don't believe you can just take a set

bracket around everything and just say that that's everything, as if it's a well-defined set. So some

people say, well, reality is just all there is. I don't know if you can have a well-defined notion

of all there is. Good. You can't. I mean, this is what the formal paradoxes are about. So the little

paradox I gave you is actually a version of that. But you can show formally that there can be no

such set of all sets. Why is that? Because you can construct a set, the set of all non-self members,

which can either be in the set or not in the set. So here, do you know these formal paradoxes? Yeah,

we've talked about it before on this channel a few times, actually, but feel free to outline

it again if you think it's necessary. Yeah. So formally, it was precisely trying to come up

with a well-defined notion of what it is to take a plurality as a single thing. And that's what

set theory is all about. So the idea is we need to have rules. At first, people thought that you

can take any plurality or any kind of meaningful linguistic statement that applies to some things

and use that statement to define a single thing, a totality, the set of all things that satisfy that

statement. And it was what these set theoretical paradoxes were showing that that's not in fact

so. And it was precisely because when you say something like the set of all things that there

are, so you're trying to take the things that there are and making of them a totality. When

you talk about something being a totality, you mean there's a definite fact of anything about

whether it's inside or not inside. So now you say, OK, so assume for reductio that it's a

totality. Now construct a set, namely the set of all sets that are not self-members. Is that itself

inside or outside the set of all sets? It can't be inside, that's self-contradictory because it's

not a self-member. It can't be outside because then it would be inside because it contains all

non-self-members. Did I say that right? I think I said that right. But anyway, so it was precisely

the idea of an all-encompassing totality that the set theoretical paradoxes were showing

us couldn't exist by constructing this sort of paradox. So what did people do? Again, formally,

we know how to do this. What you say is, OK, we know about the paradoxes. So what we do to have

a well-defined notion of totalities, we can have a kind of unending hierarchy where each level of

the hierarchy can take the things below it in the hierarchy as totalities. It can make totalities,

but it's not a candidate. But then there can be another level that takes it because it

will fall below. So what you do is you get these hierarchies, none of which allow self-inclusion

on pain of inconsistency. So what we're always trying to do is a very natural psychological move,

but take a transcendent view of reality itself. But as soon as you do that, you've slipped the

net. You've taken yourself outside of reality. Now you know there's at least one thing, namely you,

that aren't in the reality that you're looking at. The subject of that thought that's trying to

take reality into its grasp. So I think these are connected to the self-referential paradoxes. And I

think they, in a weird way, they come up again. Well, come up again and again. When you dig,

you'll find that they come up in physics. If you take them seriously, you shouldn't think

that there is a transcendent view of reality because that view would have to be outside of

reality. And in particular, you can't have such a view because you're part of reality.

So why do self-referential statements feel paradoxical? And it's not all self-referential,

but the ones that we discussed. So one view is that language evolved for object-level

communication and not some meta-level reflection. And so maybe the confusion isn't in logic,

it's just in our current cognitive architecture. Maybe it reflects something deeper. What do you

think? So I guess language is a living, breathing thing. So it's not a question about language as it

exists. It's a question partly about any possible language. And these paradoxes are inherent in

any possible language. I don't think they show contradictions are true, but they do show that

any representation of a system from the inside is incomplete. So I take that horn of the dilemma,

which was exactly what Gödel thought. By the way, if you're interested in Gödel's theorem,

I did a deep dive on the misconceptions of Gödel's theorem as well as what it actually

says. That video went somewhat viral. The link is on screen and in the description.

I take that horn of the dilemma, which was exactly what Gödel thought. In the mathematical case. And

why do I say that and what does it show about physics? So again, this is why thinking about

this in physical terms is really illuminating. Because, you know, in the formal systems, there's

two things that you don't have that you do when you can think about a physical system. So go back

to the little puzzle I started with. The system that's going to be a grand overarching database of

all possible, of all physical fact, you can ask it a question. Is the answer that's about to appear

in the output channel? No, it cannot truthfully answer that. Okay, but it's not an inconsistency.

There's no inconsistency in reality, because reality is perfectly consistent. It can say yes,

it can say no, it can say nothing. Those are all perfectly consistent the ways the world can be.

No matter what it does, it won't be answering correctly. So its view of reality has to be

incomplete. So that's why I say it shows something about incompleteness, not something about reality.

But what does it show? Well, we have a nice mechanical model of what's going on there. It

has two features that the formal puzzle doesn't. One feature is that there's an uncontested notion,

a kind of ground layer of physical fact that we're going to take for granted. In the formal cases,

in the mathematical cases, people were precisely trying to lay mathematics on a firm foundation.

So this sort of incompleteness was worrisome about the ontologies. But the second thing is the role

of time. So you're not in any way inclined to think that reality is inconsistent because you

see, well, I can just wait a minute and answer that question truthfully. So it's not a problem

about the fact. So I think the right way to think of this is, at any given time, for us, for systems

in the world, reality is incomplete. That is, our view of the world can't be complete because

reality isn't yet complete, so to speak. Because anything I try to add to it now is going to be

inconsistent. Anything I say right now is going to add to reality in a way that's going to undermine

the description I just gave. I see. So I think, you know, the right thing to say here is reality

is perfectly consistent. But if you're a system inside reality, your view of reality has to be

incomplete on pain of saying something false. So on pain, not logical inconsistency, but on pain of

inconsistency with fact. And how are you supposed to understand that? It's in the most mundane way.

And, you know, we can create this sort of negative interference, is the term that I use for it,

between what you're saying and what you're doing. And because you're part of reality, no matter what

you do here, if it disagrees with what you say, it's going to make what you said false. So we're

finding the point where you're representing reality from inside, and what you're doing is

what you're saying. So you're finding the fixed point in the representation relation, and you're

creating negative interference between what you're doing and what you're saying. That's formally the

way to describe what you're doing. I can always find a question you can't answer truthfully,

because in the very act of answering it, you're going to be doing something that undermines what

you said. But if you look at all of the formal puzzles too, that's what you're doing with Turing

incompleteness. You're saying, okay, you think you have a general method for answering all questions.

Let me find a question where you can't answer it without doing the opposite of what you're saying,

namely halting. If and only if you don't halt. So they all find that spot where there's a fixed

point in the representation relation, and they create negative interference. So in

your account of free will, I want to get back to that. What makes you say that you made a choice,

like you made a choice, rather than the next event happened? You see what I mean? You could say,

I made the choice, or we can just say, well, the next event occurred, and there's nothing

about choice making. It just happened. Okay, so that was one question, and we're going to get to

that. I just want to say my second question before it escapes me. Is consciousness required for free

will? Because the account that you described of free will seems to also describe my computer. My

computer can do something that makes itself across time, and then I can imagine it making choices,

and then we would say the computer has free will. From my understanding of what you've described as

free will. So we'll start with the first question about what is it that makes you make that choice,

or makes you say that you made the choice, and then consciousness. Good. Okay. So again, this

goes back to what am I? What is a choice, and what is it that makes me say that I made it? It's all

the things I said before. A choice is something that, when it comes from me, in all of the senses

that I care about, is something that draws on my hopes and dreams and memories and fears, and

that's what it is to make a choice. And that's all I believe in when I believe that the choice comes

from me. People say sometimes, okay, but your choice is themselves. They come from your genes

and your history and your experience, and that's where that whole bit about, you know, yeah, that

stuff is all there, physical encoding of me that I had a role in constituting over the course of

my life. And you shouldn't have any notion of free will that doesn't make that enough to be free. I

mean, some people do, for sure. But I'm happy to say, okay, you do. I mean, that's a notion

of free will that's well lost. It's not one that we need. You shouldn't inflate it that way. Okay,

the question, does that answer that question? Yes, yeah. Okay, so the consciousness one is,

it depends what you mean by consciousness. So if you mean phenomenal consciousness, so that notion

of consciousness that has really come, that, you know, that's become the focus of the hard problem,

and that a lot of people, right, you know, like Chalmers introduced it, and a lot of people that

are engaged in that debate are really interested in. Then I don't think consciousness in that sense

is needed for free will. Nothing that I said hinges on it being phenomenally conscious.

And indeed, the very notion of phenomenal consciousness is one that makes it physically

inert. So the hard problem is set up so that they say, look, the hard problem, the reason

that you know that nothing physical can constitute consciousness is because you can describe to me a

complete physical and functional description of a brain, including, you know, sort of its role

in producing, you know, motor responses and so on. And even all of the things that you can say

about how it stores information and processes information, all of that stuff can be done in

a computer or a non-conscious thing. You can settle all of those questions and not settle

whether it's conscious. Therefore, consciousness can't be physically reducible. So that notion of

consciousness is quite specifically one that can't play any role in guiding behavior. It's

completely inert. And everything that I described to you about, you know, storing information and

self-constitution and then bringing that to bear on behavior when you're making a voluntary choice,

all of that stuff was physically and functionally characterizable in terms of what brains are doing.

You have a recent paper called Why Physics Should Care About the Mind. I'll place it on screen and

in the description. Tell me about that paper and what mind is and how that's different than

consciousness, a conscious mind, if it is. So I'm thinking of the mind here as, you know, a kind of

virtual machine running on physical hardware that guides the movements of bodies, whether human or,

you know, other cognizing systems around space. Why should physics care about it? Because minds

and bodies move matter around. So if you think physics should describe the movements of matter,

there's all kinds of things that happen in the natural world and all kinds of things that

happen in the part of the natural world that we occupy that you cannot explain without minds. So,

you know, why is there a car in my driveway? Why am I sitting in a house? Why am I talking at a

screen where it's talking? Those things do not happen without minds. So cognition and mental

activity is essential and integral to producing certain kinds of movements of matter. I think

of them as entirely a part of the physical world and entirely part of the progression of, you know,

sort of complexity from, you know, sort of simple systems up through living systems. So I think,

you know, so that's why I think physics should care about mind. More, I think I also talked a

lot in that paper. I can't remember, but I'll tell you what I think. I think increasingly in physics,

partly because physics, to its credit, makes progress on lots of all of the easy problems

that it can do without thinking about hard, philosophically difficult problems. Made a

lot of progress without thinking about minds or observers. But because it's made so much progress

now, and because we've got this developed picture, highly articulated picture of reality, there are

little places where it's emerging as an important anomaly because minds are involved in one way or

another. One of those, I think, not everybody will agree with this, is quantum mechanics. So

clearly there's something about the interaction between information gathering systems and the

quantum world that's mediated by, you know, sort of what we're calling measurement interactions

that we do not know how to understand well. So that puts the, what's often called the observer,

I would call the agent, in the foreground of needing to be understood. Other places where some,

you know, again, observers are emerging as important, cosmology in various ways,

understanding, you know, probability distributions and anthropic reasoning and those kinds of things.

They're putting observers into the focus. But in terms of understanding minds, I think, you know,

so that the first answer I gave you is really, you know, we need to understand minds because they're

part of the physical world. And indeed they're a big part of the physical world in the immediately

salient parts of our, you know, everyday experience. Tell me more about why you say

agent and not observer. Because it really matters that we're not just looking passively at reality,

but actively using information. To, um, to move ourselves around, but also to manipulate our

environments. So if, if all we had were passive observers, um, you know, well, so two things,

first nature would have never made just passive observers. Nature constructed observation,

partly to guide behavior. Um, but also too, I think for the reasons I just said, it's really,

it's really the agentive aspects of, um, cognition that make a difference to the

physical world. So we are by our nature, you know, you information utilizing systems. Did you say at

one point that you don't like counterfactuals? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's hear. Okay. So, um,

a lot of, this is a legacy. One of those like bad legacies of the kind of the way that philosophy,

I'm, I'm all about, I love modality. I'm all about hypotheticals, but, but, um, a lot of

modality in philosophy is expressed in terms of counterfactuals. And people think that they need

to understand, for example, the modal aspects of physics by trying to understand the truth,

the truth, um, conditions for counterfactuals by counterfactuals turn out to be as soon as you try

to address. So we want to know what's possible. What's not possible. That's what modality is. Um,

we try to understand what physics tells us about what's possible and what's not possible or what

can happen in a given situation, what can't happen in a given situation. And if we're in the space

where we think that needs to be understood in terms of counterfactuals, then what do we need

to do? We need to get the truth conditions for counterfactuals. And then what do we find? We find

that the truth conditions for counterfactuals are very difficult. You need to talk about, you need

to consult your intuitions and you need to talk about a space of possible worlds in which worlds

are closer to you and which weren't. And then you find you're, you're like fully in the kind

of realm of this weird semantic exercise where there are intuitions about counterfactuals, uh, in

my view are really just kind of guides for what people have in mind in ordinary conversations when

they're asking like about what's possible and what would have happened, what they're holding fixed

and what they're not. They're just those sorts of linguistic conversational rules, nothing about the

deep structure of reality. I believe what physics does tell us is it gives us definite truth values

for hypotheticals. What would happen under some fully specified physical setting and our physical

theories will tell us that without any intuitions about, you know, semantics for counterfactuals.

Very often we're interested in what would happen if, you know, um, the world had, I don't know,

like, you know, 20,000 more tons of matter. So I don't know, but there we, there, what we do,

we can, without talking about counterfactuals, we can consult our physical theories. We explicitly

say what we're holding fixed about the actual world. We explicitly add what, um, you know,

what, what features of reality we're transforming or, or adding to that. And then we evolve forward.

Our best, you know, tell us, use our best physical theories to model that and see what would happen

under those conditions. I don't think we need to talk about counterfactuals. What keeps drawing you

back to the mystery of time? I think cause it's a mystery. I mean, I think it's one of the, so

first it's a really beautiful topic. So it's one of those topics that, um, it's not just physics,

it runs through every single field. So, you know, you talk to physicists, you talk to a biologist,

you talk to a historian, you talk to someone writing novels, you talk to a human being,

all of them. As if the previous weren't human beings. Oh yeah. No, sorry. I mean, biologists

aren't human beings. Yeah. But you know what I mean? Like someone who's none of those things.

I've met some who, it was tricky to discern. Um, but, but like time is just a topic that, that runs

through like every field of human inquiry, but also just to, you know, human life. So I think

it's one of these unifying topics that at once, you know, sort of unifies, but also distinguishes,

you know, the ways in which these fields of inquiry are organized. So time to a physicist

is something different than time to a biologist and something different than time to a historian.

And I think understanding the relationships between, um, time as it appears in those different

fields of human inquiry and also time, you know, in our everyday experience is a really, um,

a kind of really fruitful vein to mind for trying to understand kind of, you know, the architecture

of the world as a whole, but also just because I think it's, it's, yeah, I, I don't know how to,

it, it, it is a central and very mysterious, um, I think thing. It was like a useless answer, but.

So earlier when I asked about does the block universe exist, you were joined. Well,

what do you mean exists? Right. And then you'd said, well, exists where? And I can't

give a space time location of where the block universe exists. Cause I don't think that would

be meaningful. So anything that exists, must it exist in space slash time or in space time?

Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. You made exactly the right correction. Yeah. So it's a,

it's the quantifying over everything rather than over any individual thing that's problematic. Um,

so I, I don't think so. No, I mean, um, numbers, Sherlock Holmes, God,

you know, I'm, those are perfectly well-defined ideas and they don't, um, uh, at least some of

them don't exist in space or time where the in part is crucial. So, um, you know, we make

references to them from within time, but, but, um, they don't themselves exist in space or time.

I heard you say something about Hermann Weyl, where Hermann Weyl says there's a mountain

that's out there and we change our gaze. We cast our eyes. And then it's as if we're revealing

properties about this mountain that, that we're seeing now from different points of view,

whereas time is somehow experienced as coming into existence. I want you to expand on that.

Okay. So the, I think the quote you probably have in mind is this idea again,

you know, I'm sort of always on the lookout for ways of characterizing,

um, kind of the difference between, uh, space and time. It is very hard to put your finger on.

And that, that Weyl quote was a really nice one. He said sort of, if we cast our gaze across a

landscape, we experienced the landscape as a fixed object coming into view in stages.

So we think that it's being revealed in our experience in stages,

but the object itself is there. Right. They're independently of our gaze.

And so the idea is that we don't experience time that way we don't experience, although,

you know, people who defend a block universe often think that we should,

I don't think we experienced it that way and I don't think we should.

So I'm describing something that I think of as characteristic of the phenomenology and

illuminating and revealing to take seriously.

But what he says is, you know, when you, when, when you're, you know, you're, um, you

do experience space in that way, but you don't, when you think of the future, think that, oh,

the future will come into view, you experience the future is coming into being as it's experience.

So it wasn't there already. And now you're just seeing

it is coming into existence. I think that's right.

So I think that's the right way to understand becoming. So that's

how we experience time, but is time like that?

Good. Okay. So now in the attempt to say what that might mean,

exactly how to characterize that difference is where this idea of,

um, of interference that I introduced with the self-referential puzzle is helpful.

So, um, so think of what was going on in the self-referential puzzle. The reason that the

machine couldn't, um, truthfully answer whether the word that's about to appear

in the output channel was no, is, and this is a phrase that I've deliberately

developed to describe this phenomenon, I'm going to use it when we come to time,

is it can't stabilize the fact that it's trying to describe independently of the description it

gives, right? That's crucial to why there's a paradox there. If there were an object there

that were detached from the representation, then the object could be correctly described,

but it was precisely because those two things were tied together that it couldn't.

And so now think about us in time. Okay. We are part of the world. Some of what happens is stuff

that we do, right? So that means that there's at least some features of the world that are tied to

what we're doing in the here and now, including in particular our representational activity.

So, so it was the fact in the case of the computer that it was

producing a representational act that was describing itself that was problematic.

So the representational act was tied to what was happening. That was the problematic thing.

But we're in the world. We're representing the world. The purest form of self-referential

paradoxes that are going to arise are ones that describe our own representational activity, right?

You know, this sentence is false, or this thought is false, right? That's a, you know,

the problem there, again, is the same. In the very act of saying it, I'm producing a truth,

a false truth, right? Or in the very fact of affirming it, I'm making it not false,

or asserting it, I'm making it impossible.

So you can't detach the representational act from what it's asserting.

So you might think, okay, so fair enough, we know self-referential puzzles arise

when you're describing your own representational activity, blot out your representational activity.

Why should it matter if we're just looking at the public physical landscape?

Well, it matters because my actions are guided by my beliefs, and my beliefs guide my actions

in such a way that when I make a prediction about things that are, so this is the way,

so there's a lot more to say here, you know, but I'm going to give you a little scheme of it.

This idea of interference is really about when you can't

detach what you're representing from your representations of it.

Why are we in that position sort of natively by being creatures that deliberate about the future?

Well, because we're always representing the world from a particular point in space and time.

When I'm looking into the future, I have knowledge of the past, and I think

about the future, I make predictions about what's going to happen tomorrow.

But when it comes to my own behavior, I make conditional predictions, and then

I act in such a way as to, if I predict this would happen if I acted that way,

and I predict this would happen if I acted that way, and I don't like that one, I do this thing.

So my representational activity is deliberately designed to act

against predictions that I don't like, and to promote futures that I do like.

So I'm not describing, I'm not explaining this very well, but the idea is that you're always in

a position where your predictions are interfering with themselves, because they're guiding action

that's meant to counter predictions that are going to lead to unfavorable outcomes.

So this concept of interference, the idea that I'm producing predictions,

and then the predictions are going to produce counter-predictive physical responses in me.

That's kind of the native position of the system that's using information to guide its behavior.

Another example of this, think of, you know, sort of poll predictions or stock markets.

There what you have is predictions being made, but then the system is responding to those

predictions in a way that... So we're sort of always, that's what a mind is, it generates...

That's a great, easy to understand example.

So we're always doing that, you know, oh no, this will happen if I act that way, I'm going to do

this way, or oh no, that's going to happen, I'm going to do what I can to counter it.

So we're always acting in a way that's going to sort of feed back and counter

predictions we don't like, and so we're in this regime of interference.

And because of that, the future is going to be inherently unsettled,

because any prediction that we make is subject to our own actions trying to influence the

system in a way. It's going to feed back into the system and affect what happens via our actions.

Newcomb's paradox is germane here. So why don't you describe it and then tell us

your potential resolution of it? Or if you think it resists being resolved, and why?

Good, okay. Yeah, so it's perceptive of you to see this.

So I am going to back up a little bit.

So there's a lot of apparatus here that I didn't describe,

but part of what this apparatus does is it introduces this notion of interference.

And this notion of interference is precisely characterized by this idea that you get this

funny phenomenon when you can't stabilize the fact that you're trying to describe

independently of the description or prediction that you give of it.

Now normally, when we're in the position of making decisions, that's what characterizes

the difference between our relationship to the future and the relationship to the past.

My representations of the past are indifferent to how I represent them.

My representations of the future aren't, because predictions I make are going to

guide my behavior and be subject to being undermined by how I act.

So the idea is my representations of the future are kind of, okay.

So here's what's weird. And interference, I mean, again, I can write a paper on this,

but this is partly meant to use the thermodynamic arrow to describe what's different between your

relationship to the future and the past in a way that's not merely captured by thinking we

know more about the past than we do about the future. It's meant to describe that.

No, no, our representations of the future have an influence on how the future goes.

So normally, in the ordinary deliberative situation,

our beliefs, the facts about the past, our beliefs about the past don't have any probabilistic effect

on the past in a way that's not screened off by the present state of the world.

So all probabilistic influences that our beliefs have into the past are

screened off by other facts about the world.

Not so in the future for the reason I said, because the beliefs I have about the future

are going to guide how the future goes by way of having influence on my actions.

So the way probabilistically to characterize the ordinary choice situation is exactly that.

My choices, which are representations of the future, are correlated with what happens. Yes.

Think about the structure of a Newcomb's problem.

You're given these warring intuitions.

You're told on the one hand, whether you choose one box or whether you choose two boxes,

highly correlated with whether there's a million dollars under the one box or not.

But you're also told, ah, but there's no causal connection. Why? Because the

demon or whatever puts the money there before you make your choice.

So you're put in this situation where, as I would describe it,

there's interference between your choice that is non-screened-off probabilistic correlation

between your choice and whether there's a million dollars there.

But then you're told, but there's no causal link.

So you're kind of put in this position where

normally, I think in the normal choice situation, what are causal relations?

Causal relations are probabilistic correlations between interventions and

the fact that you establish that there's a causal link between A and B just in case

interventions on A retain a correlation with B. They're correlated with what happens at B.

So the ordinary choice situation is one in which

you have causal influence over the future, but not the past.

Newcombe's paradox is precisely putting you in a situation where your choice is going to be

probabilistically correlated with what's there. And then you're told, but there's no causal link.

And then intuitions are wheeled in to say, of course,

there's no causal link because the choice was made in advance.

And so this whole cluster of things that normally conspire together to make you

think that the future is subject to your choices and you have an influence over

the future and all causal relations run in that way, they're deliberately fooled with.

I want to put interference at the bottom of that. I want to say, what the right way

to see this whole cluster, the relationships between this whole cluster of concepts is this.

There's always been this mystery about how do we get the direction of causation out of physics.

If physics gives you these laws that are temporally symmetric, here's the way to do it.

You take the physics, you take the geometry, the matter content,

and then you take the thermodynamic arrow, and then you notice that

your own actions are going to have the status for you of interventions in the world.

And then you notice that in a situation where there's a thermodynamic arrow, all probabilistic

effects of interventions are going to run into the future and leave the past untouched.

So that's where causation comes from. Intervention is at the root of it. The

asymmetry comes from the thermodynamic gradient.

So here's what's going on in Newcomb's paradox. You're given the situation where

you're told probabilistic effects of intervention without being given any mechanism. Probabilistic

effects of intervention run into the past, but there's no causal link. Now make your choice.

Jenann, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you. I can tell that you care not

only about me through this conversation, thank you, but to the audience as well,

and how simple and clear your explanations are. You're an expert explicator. Thank you

so much for spending over two hours with me now. It's been really fun. Thank you for having me.

Now one question. What one lesson, if you had to pick one, from someone else was given to

you or imparted to you that's had the most positive influence on your life? Can I say

anything? Can I say anything or does it have to be? Okay, so Baas van Fraassen, my advisor,

just like a year or maybe a couple of years after I graduated, told me this story. This is going

to be a little bit of a long story, but it's worth because it really did make a huge impact.

So he tells this story about there was this guru and there's this guru, this kind of mystical guru,

that was supposed to have this amazing influence. Amazing effect on people who are troubled,

and there's this guy who's really troubled, and, you know, it was weird because by all

external circumstances, I mean, by all external observations, he had everything,

you know, beautiful wife, beautiful family, super successful career, really good-looking guy,

you know, he just looked like a superstar, but he was really deeply troubled inside,

and, you know, nobody understood it because he looked like he had everything,

and yeah, his life was easy, but he was deeply, deeply troubled.

So he decided to go see this guru.

This guru would go, like, travel around, and, you know, you would

have to line up for hours to see him, and the guy would just be sitting on a mat,

but he would speak to anyone who wanted to speak to him.

Sitting in a room, you know, and what would happen is people would line up,

and one by one they would go in. Front door,

there's a back door to the little kind of flat, people would walk in one by one.

Sometimes it would take, like, long, long time, you would talk to someone. And then they would

go out the back door, another person would come. Sometimes it would be, like, really quick, someone

would go in, they'd go out the back door, the next person would come in. There's, like, a little

ding that would happen. So someone would go in, you'd wait a while, sometimes an hour, sometimes

three seconds, ding, next person would go in. You wouldn't see the other person going out.

So he goes, when the guy's coming, as close, you know, a couple of hours away,

goes there. He just takes the whole day off, so I'm going to line up. He's the first person

to line up, but there was already, like, hundreds of people there, so he lines up.

And he's really sure that this guy's going to understand him. He's, like, really worked up

about it because, you know, nobody really sees, like, the suffering that he has in his soul.

So he waits, and he waits, and he waits. He waits as one person goes in, ding, goes out. One person

goes in, ding, goes out. And he's getting closer and closer to the front, and he's becoming more

and more emotional because he really feels like he's got this, you know, thing that he needs to

unburden himself of. And he feels sure that this is his last resort, he's going to understand him.

So he's getting closer and closer to the front of the line. A guy in front of him goes in,

and he's completely overcome, you know, with anticipation.

Waits and waits, ding, that guy goes out.

And he sits down in front of the guru, and he can see,

looking into his eyes, that the guy's going to understand him.

And he looks up at him, and the guru looks at him,

like, with just unfathomable gentleness. And he says to him, you have much pain.

And he just sobs because he feels this is the one person that understands him.

And he looks up at him, you know,

tearfully. And the guy looks at him and says, get rid of it. Ding!

So I think that, to me, there are optional forms of suffering,

and you don't really have problems a lot of the times that you think you

do. So for me, I swear to God, that changed the suffering of my soul in a lot of ways.

Well, why don't you tell me about a problem that you thought was something externally caused,

but then you realized it was internally, and that you had control over it. I couldn't care.

Okay, so this is probably personal. I don't care a lot about things like professional success,

and things like external status stuff.

And I think realizing that made it much easier for me to think about the things

I wanted to think about, and have the sorts of freedoms that I wanted to have.

That, for me, was amazing.

And I don't know whether that's what Baas meant to teach me, in that.

But as soon as you get rid of all of that, and you're fortunate enough to have your health,

and sort of enough money, all you need.

So you mean to say that you don't care about getting these appointments, or fellowships,

or what have you, but does that eliminate your intimidation by

someone else who is critiquing you, and they have a 20-year fellowship

at the Institute for Advanced Study, or something like that?

None of it matters that much to me. So I neither seek it, nor... I mean,

of course that stuff is hurtful, but in some ways I don't seek to

be a tall poppy, so it makes me less of a target. So all that's true, yeah.

That's beautiful. Thank you so much. This has been lovely. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.

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The Physics of Free Will: A Radical New Theory

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