 The radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. The radical fundamental principles of freedom. One intro is enough. All right everybody, welcome to your Unbrook show on this, what is it, Saturday night? In April 2021, all right, just over a month into our COVID catastrophe. All right, I'm really happy to have, whoops, let's put on video, that would be good. There you go, there's Greg. I'm really happy to have Greg on with me tonight. And we are going to be taking a super chat questions. And, but we're going to be talking today about a video. We're going to go over this video by a guy named Donald Hoffman, who is a cognitive scientist. He's a professor at University of California, Urvine. And, but before I do that, hi Greg. Hi, I got that all out of order. Greg is in Austin. I think we've had you on the show since you're in Austin. I'm pretty sure I have been here. Yeah, with those cool bookshelves and the ladder. So, so I know this guy, Donald Hoffman, so I met Donald Hoffman. I don't know if I told you this Greg, but so I met Donald Hoffman at the conference. And part of this conference, you do these quick introductions. You, you move from chair to chair to chair and you do 30 seconds of one minute introductions. Each person says something about themselves. And I sit down across this guy and he says, I'm a cognitive science at University of California, Urvine. So I'm saying, okay, this is going to be interesting. He says, and I'm writing a book to prove that, that we don't actually know anything about reality and evolution has guaranteed it that way. And I said, oh, shit, this guy, I have nothing to say. Where do I even start? So I basically ignored him for the rest of the conference and, and, but then it turned out that he, I see him everywhere. He pops up in, in all kinds of places. He is very well regarded, well known. This conference I was at, he's a member and I'm a member of this group. It's a pretty prestigious place and a lot of Silicon Valley people are in this. And they have a huge amount of regard for him. He often does presentations. And then I've noticed he comes up in conversations a lot and there's a TED talk that he does. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to get a little deeper into some metaphysics and epistemology with somebody who knows metaphysics and epistemology. Greg, now some of this is, I mean, my, my response to things like this, and I think Greg's is a little bit too, is, no, this is just silly. And there's a sense it's like the brain in the vat. I mean, what do you say to that other than, but people attract it to this. A part of the question is why? Yeah, I mean, Hillary Putnam, who I think he's the one who coined the phrase brain in a battle. The idea has been around before. Part of his point was to show how silly this kind of thing is by doing it. And I don't know, I mean, you, I first came across this video, I guess it was almost a year ago. You emailed it to me and said, maybe we should do a show talking about this video. It's really popular and I thought, you know, well, okay, but I'm not too excited about it. This seems pretty goofy. All these ideas are ideas. I'd heard people teaching about 20 30 years ago and the only thing that's new in it is particularly silly and obviously easy to refute. But then then we never got around to it but then I have the same experience now I keep seeing him pop up everywhere maybe we're evolved to detect him rather than reality. And so here we are doing it. So I think in addition to this, this is a good opportunity for you guys to ask questions. So please use the super chat. Anything you want to ask Greg is is fair game. Any questions that I have said ask ask a philosopher and refuse to answer is this is a good opportunity to ask or anything in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics. And of course politics and aesthetics. I'm sure we're game for anything. So feel free to use the super chat feature to ask the questions. This is our first show in in April. I just reminded that this this organization let's see if I can bring this up this organized this conference that we both belong to this organization. Put out the funniest first of April email describing the kind of comfort you know that this is what everybody's going to be doing. And it was it was, you know, I'm not going to bring it up but it was truly hysterical in terms of what they had the different participants committing to to doing. All right, let's let's jump into this. So I'm going to. So we zoom is playing, you know, it's not working the way it's supposed to work, but we're going to try to try to see if I can make this all work together. We'll see. Let's see this. I'm going to. So here is here is the question he's posing is, do we see reality as it is. And as you can see, there's a tomato and a tomato in the bubble. And we're going to listen to just jump in. And let me know if if if you want me to stop it. In key places. Have an experience that I describe as a red tomato a meter away. As a result, I come to believe that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away. Is that what's happening. I mean, it's weird to describe the experience as a red tomato tomato a meter away. You have an experience and as a result of that experience, you conclude that there's a red tomato tomato a meter away. And you say there's a red tomato a meter away seems to me perfectly plausible happens to me when I'm a meter away from a red tomato. But I wouldn't say happen. You just you see the tomato and you describe it as a tomato a meter away and you're right or wrong about that. And then if you have to describe that experience you'd say, you know you're on I was having this experience like the kind you have when there's a red tomato a meter away but then it turned out you know there wasn't one it was an illusion. That's how I would describe what's going on here and I think that difference matters but let's let's see where he goes with this. But is that, but it's curious because I would never think of it that way so because you don't actually think of yourself as I'm having an experience as if there's a bookshelf behind Greg. I just say there's a bookshelf behind Greg. You don't think of you don't describe your experience you describe the world that you see, and then you only kind of retreat to or back up to describing the experience. If you have a reason to think that something's gone wrong, or, or if there's some other unusual context like it was such an experience seeing this bookshelf, it overwhelmed me or whatever. But not if you know it's just red tomatoes a meter away it's not that's not so much of an experience it's not the kind of thing Hendricks was on about or whatever. Yes, and, and I think I think Greg does not have a green screen and that's actually a bookshelf behind him, but yeah that's true although Harry, you know, Harry, our friend Harry James Wenger has a projection, but it's his house. He just projects his like he doesn't want to clean the room. So he projects the room that's actually behind him. And that is freaky because he occasionally just disappears when he moves too far from the camera. I just point the camera and you can see because it's messy. So I'm going to have a green screen soon. I think I think we'll see if it works but so that I can have different backgrounds with different things that I do I do too many things that and I keep moving sculptures and moving books and putting them up and putting them down. And, and I think it'll be more professional if I have different backgrounds with different events. Alright, so back to the experiencing of a red tomato a meter away. I then close my eyes and my experience changes to a gray field. But is it still the case that in reality there's a red tomato a meter away. I think so. But could I be wrong. Could I be misinterpreting the nature of my perceptions. Let's pause it here and what does he mean when he says I think so but could I be wrong. He's the guy who's got this whole theory about how this isn't really true. So in some sense he doesn't think so so what is he saying when he says I think so. He's like taking this dual perspective on himself. I'm tricked. I believe there's a tomato there, but at the same level. I believe that what I believe is wrong there's something a little bit. What is if you think about the kind of structure of it. And what do you mean by reality there anyway, if you think it's not really real but then anyway we'll see where he goes with this. Yeah, I think it's a it's a kind of a, it's a presentation trick because he's trying to get the audience to think well do you know that there's a tomato there he's trying to get the audience to think when you close your eyes. Did you did you mind created. She's getting them. Everyone knows where he's going right. I mean, yeah, everyone knows where he's going right it's. I don't know the kind of acting tricks me it's a little heavy handed but let's let's see you see that a lot in TED talks because this so that they're trying to lead you along in some way. And it seems to work. Neither of us has a million views on anything. So maybe maybe we should we just jealous one point two million views guys. We have misinterpreted our perceptions before. We used to think the earth is flat, because it looks that way. Pythagoras discovered that we were wrong. Then we thought that the earth is the unmoving center of the universe. Again, because it looks that way. Copernicus and Galileo discovered again that we were wrong. What does it mean to say that the earth looks like the unmoving center of the universe. That from the perspective of standing on earth, everything appears to be going around us. Yeah, but I mean, if a, you know, like a baby looks up or a cave person looks up or a person, even in ancient Greece looks up. Does it look like there's a whole universe spinning around him. I mean, it looks like there are stars and some of them move and it's a little bit confusing. That's a complex theory that was formed. It's not it just looks like it and even the earth is flat. I mean, I don't think my son who's like a toddler has an opinion on whether the earth is flat it looks that way to him. I don't think it would have occurred to him one way or the other what shape it is. And I don't think it would occur to most people before the question is raised in a kind of pretty sophisticated context. What's the shape of the whole world the ground here is flat. And then it is flat to a certain range of precision. More on range of precision as we go. Yes. Galileo then wondered if we might be misinterpreting our experiences in other ways. He wrote, I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on reside in consciousness. Hence, if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated. That strikes me as interesting. Yeah, I don't think I think that view was around before Galileo, a kind of interesting method that's often used to argue for idealism, which is basically what's happening here in this video is you start with things like pain. Like you feel the fire and you think the heat is really in the fire, but the pain really isn't in the fire. And yet the pain it's like it's the same thing as the heat as you feel it. And that argument is in Bishop Barkley, who's quite a bit later than he's later than Galileo. But I think there are versions of things like that in the ancient skeptics as well. We can talk more about that kind of issue later I don't think that's essential to the argument that's going on here though. Yeah, it's interesting that it brings up Galileo here again I think I think this is more to confuse the audience more than anything. Well, part of the reason Galileo is coming up is he's this is kind of like a, you know, warmed over cheap version of Kant, and Kant makes his whole thing about the Copernican Revolution, right. And he's doing by saying that the world must conform to the mind, not the other way around is like Copernicus saying the earth goes around the sun, not the reverse and so we get the cosmological or like solar system example. And then we get Galileo somebody who was a supporter of the Copernican theory, and then we're getting Galileo as a kind of wedge into this kind of Kantian idealist Copernicanism. I'm guessing that's why Galileo is a convenient person to hang your head on here. So in what sense is the statement by Galileo wrong? Well, so should back up to what are they what is the statement he's talking about. I would expect the statement is about second at what what the early moderns called secondary qualities. It was like the heat, the what what can we go back to taste odor, sorry tastes odors, colors, and so on, residing consciousness, hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated. So Galileo is at a time when this kind of view corpuscularianism is is coming to the fore. And there's even there are little bodies you know everything's made of them atoms basically. And they have certain of the features that the things we think we experienced do they have size and shape and stuff like that. The one physics would study, but not other ones. Color, smell, taste, etc. And so you get this distinction between primary and secondary qualities maps on to an earlier distinction. And so you get this distinction between common and proper sensible. Anyway, then the idea you get in people like many of the early moderns is that the primary quality shape size, etc. are real and exist outside the mind, but the proper sense of the secondary color, smell, etc. only exist inside the mind and what Hoffman is going to say is no I think even the the primary qualities don't exist outside the mind he's going to do this tradition one better, as it's been done one better time and time again by Mark Lee and so forth and you can see why you would do it. If he didn't pain exist inside the mind within motion and he turned out to be the same thing and you could see why. If you, you can see whether the kind of slippery slope you what's wrong with it well I think what's wrong with Galileo's what Galileo saying and what's wrong with what Hoffman saying are somewhat different I think it's right that there's a mistake to separate out the primary and secondary qualities as much as this early modern corpus corpuscularian tradition did. It's a, it's right to separate them out for the perspective of what does physics study, but it's wrong to assume that the primary qualities have some special reality status that the secondary ones don't. And in a way that's the same point that Hoffman is going to make. But in favor of them both being unreal. I'm not worried about what I think is real later on but I think whenever anything you know is real, you still know it in a way. There's still a way you know it and there's a kind of confusion that takes place in a lot of talk about perception between the way you know it is part of you therefore what you know is part of you. And I think that's the case with both primary and secondary qualities, both things like shape and size and so forth on the one hand, and things like odor and color on the other. Now that's a stunning claim. Could Galileo be right? Could we really be misinterpreting our experiences that badly? What does modern science have to say about this? Well, neuroscientists tell us that about a third of the brain's cortex is engaged in vision. When you simply open your eyes and look about this room, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses are engaged. Now this is a bit surprising because to the extent that we think about vision at all, we think of it as like a camera. It just takes a picture of objective reality as it is. Now there is a part of vision that's like a camera. The eye has a lens that focuses an image on the back of the eye where there are 130 million photoreceptors. So the eye is like a 130 megapixel camera. But that doesn't explain the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that are engaged in vision. What are these neurons up to? Well, neuroscientists tell us that they're creating in real time all the shapes, objects, colors, and motions that we see. It feels like we're just taking a snapshot of this room the way it is, but in fact we're constructing everything that we see. We don't construct the whole world at once. We construct what we need in the moment. Now, there are many demonstrations that are quite consistent here. So what's just happened in this video? We were told that there's a whole lot of stuff going on in our brain. There were numbers of neurons and this receptor and that receptor. So we're supposed to be very impressed by how much our brain is doing, which is impressive. Our brain does a lot. And then that's supposed to surprise or worry us, right? Because you'd think you just see. There's nothing involved in seeing. You just see. You start pairing it to the camera, right? And the camera just opens the shutter and it just records exactly what it's seeing out there. Now something's happening until maybe we're not really seeing what we think we just see because all this stuff is going on. It's like tampering. What's it doing? It's constructing. So he says the neuroscientists say all these things for us. But I mean, if you stand up and you're just standing somewhere, there's a whole lot of stuff going on, right? There's all these things firing and muscles tensing and all this kind of activity in your brain and your muscles and your nerves just to keep you standing in one place just to keep your balance, right? And you think you just keep your balance, but there's all this activity going on. That's impressive. And it's a cool thing to know. But it doesn't make you think maybe I'm not really standing where I am. I'm constructing my posture. So therefore I'm not really standing this way. But notice what's being constructed in his view. What's being constructed is what we see. But why think that if there's a whole lot of work going on for me to stand someplace, right? And there is a lot of work biologically going on. Just for me to stand here or sit here as I am. We think that work is going into creating the standing, into sustaining the standing. There's something I'm doing standing and all this biological activity is making that standing happen. We don't think it makes the room that I'm standing in. We don't think it's building the house that I'm standing in just because there's a whole lot of activity going on. Why think that all the activity going on in your brain and your neurons is constructing the objects. There's seeing, being aware of the world is a kind of activity. It's something you do. And it shouldn't be a big surprise to us that there's a lot of work involved in doing it in detecting things and discriminating them from one another and figuring out their edges and figuring out what things are part of one bigger thing versus two things next to each other. Clearly, there's a whole lot of work involved and that of people who work on computers trying to get computers to do some approximation of this, see how much works involved in making that happen. Edge detection and all this kind of stuff. Clearly a lot of work, but why think that that's creating what you're aware of where does that premise come from it's not from just noticing there are a lot of work. Again, I digest food. I eat it I swallow it it goes down with all this is gut bacteria we're learning more about in the stomach churned because all this stuff is happening in me. Does that mean that I'm not suggesting that food that that food isn't what gets processed and becomes a part of me. It's something else that I've constructed that I'm eating, rather than the bagel or whatever. Yeah, it's it's and the whole, I mean, by positioning our mind versus a camera, a camera's not aware of the picture it's taking. It's just taking a picture. So you'd expect it to be a far simpler mechanism. The reason why computers robots need now to be able to differentiate web edges is because they're taking another step is still not aware. But they're taking another step which requires them to know what's out there in reality. No is in quotes in in in more detail, because now they have to act in reality but our consciousness is consciously is aware of all this and ready to act within reality. It's surprising it's only a third of the brain. The real premise behind all of this is that anytime there is an awareness. If there's something that you're aware of. It has to happen know how like magic. It just comes and you're aware of it. And so if there's any work that's being done by consciousness. Or by our brain or by anything about it can't be the work to enable us to be aware of things it can't be the work to be aware of it. It must be the work to make something else, which thing then we're aware of snap like that. The idea that to be awareness awareness would have to be a kind of nothing that the act of being aware of something can't have any identity in itself. And so any identity any working anything going on in our apparatus of cognition has to be creating some an object we're aware of or distorting the objects we're actually aware of. And this is a premise is just not the only one to point it out but that I ran pointed out in the history of philosophy and particularly in Kant and what we're seeing in Hoffman is a kind of any recap capitulation of some ideas and pretending that they're established by science rather than just, you know, having been worked out by Kant years and years ago and being read into the science now. And we'll see in particular with this specifically Kantian thing how bogus his way of reading into the science he doesn't actually tell us anything in science that even seems to establish a but we'll get to that. I'm telling that we construct what we see. I'll just show you two. In this example, you see some red discs with bits cut out of them. But if I just rotate the discs a little bit, suddenly you see a 3d cube pop out of the screen. Now the screen of course is flat. So the three dimensional cube that you're experiencing must be your construction. Even that's not true. Yeah, I mean, think of it this way. Some things look like other things. Exactly. Dots moving in one way look kind of like a cube. You don't really think it is a cube that anybody think, oh crap, a cube was flying out of my screen at me. You don't experience a cube if there was actually a cube in front of you it would there be all kinds of different cues you wouldn't feel that way. You can get much more realistic illusions than that. Even that red, that dress that people couldn't tell if it was blue or blue and black or white and gold was a more convincing illusion than that. But you can get illusions that are really surprising and you know, make you think twice. But what they all are is cases where two things look a lot alike, such that it's easy to mistake them from one another and you can't tell them apart by looking at them. It's just like if you had two twins and they looked a lot alike. And I could say, look, you're experiencing bill but he's not here so it must be your construction. When really all there is is Bob here and the answer is Bob and bill look a lot alike one another and our ability to discriminate people doesn't discriminate well between Bob and bill. It's not like there's something that's in between Bob and bill which is what you're really experiencing or really experiencing Bob when bills there. You know Bob and bill apart you experience bill and he seems a lot to you like Bob and you confuse him and you look at a bunch of dots moving or whatever the thing is and looks to you like a cube because dots like that look a lot like a cube. And of course you know to create these illusions you have to understand the rules of reality of what something looks like, what a cube actually is so that you can create something that looks like it. Next example, you see glowing blue bars with pretty sharp edges moving across a field of dots. In fact, no dots move. All I'm doing from frame to frame is changing the colors of dots from blue to black or black to blue. But when I do this quickly, your visual system creates the glowing blue bars with the sharp edges and the motion. There are many more examples but these are just two that you construct what you see. There are a lot simpler examples to because it seems to me now, as though I'm seeing your arms head moving back and forth shaking like he like something is moving in my visual field but really what's happening is different pixels on my monitor are lighting up or changing some of them pinkish and some of them grayish in a way that makes it look as though your arms heads moving back and forth and that must be constructed in my mind and my mind has your on here in the room with me when really there are just dots. Yeah, we built a box that makes dots that look a lot like people in front of us so we could have entertainment and some things look like other things we've leveraged that ability to make televisions and he's leveraged a much more primitive form of that ability to make this goofy illusion and doesn't everybody know that that's what's happening. I mean you don't think the TV tricks you right you don't think I thought there was a guy in my room and would have thought of my mind must have made him. You think yeah we have a screen that makes things look like other things and that's good because this way it's very entertaining you can learn a lot that way. And then we say I see Iran on the TV but we don't think you know like you're on a television set we're in it. But neuroscientists go further. They say that we reconstruct reality. So when I have an experience that I described as a red tomato that experience is actually an accurate reconstruction of the properties of a real red tomato that would exist even if I weren't looking. Now why would neuroscientists say that we don't just construct we reconstruct. Well the standard argument given is usually an evolutionary one. Those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage compared to those who saw less accurately and therefore they were more likely to pass on their genes. Anything anything wrong with the evolutionary. Well, it's a little bit of a weird way he's even phrasing the question why would they say we reconstruct. What is that why doing is that they're evidence for thinking this or how they got people start by thinking there's a world and we see it. Then they start to notice some of the mechanisms involved in our scene yet. They assume there's a world out there for good reason and we'll talk about that. But then they think about well how does this system work. The reason why neurologists for the most part think that there's a world out there which our brains are helping us to see and they think of it as reconstructing which I don't think is the right way to think of it but nevertheless is because they think there's a world out there not because they think the theory of evolution is true. They think the theory of evolution is true because they already think there's a world out there. So what he's really asking is something like how did it come to be or what is the cause of our our brains doing this reconstruction and one. You can generalize to that what is the cause that we have a consciousness that's able to put us in touch with reality. Well evolution there's a plausible theory about the cause of it. And let's see then where he goes with that. But that's the offspring of those who saw more accurately. And so we can be confident that in the normal case our perceptions are accurate cause here so you see this. Notice that we can be confident that so what's actually happening is he's saying how do we know that our consciousness is valid how do we know that our consciousness can be in touch with reality. Well there are different theories of how. And this way of talking about it kind of goes back to Descartes who wonders if his consciousness is valid. And he tries to come up with all these skeptical scenarios. Not because he wants to prove that it isn't but he wants to get some way to prove that even in the worst case scenario he could be sure that his consciousness could know something. And he imagines like an evil God deceiving him but it couldn't trick him about certain things and so that's how he gets off the ground. And there's this whole tradition of doing this by the 90s and it might be that Hoffman played a role in this debate that then he did write some stuff that But by the 90s within philosophy, I mean I hadn't heard of him when I was an undergraduate student that I had heard these arguments a lot. There are people raising this question of why should again, why should we think that our cognitive apparatus is is valid. Why should we think that our minds actually get us in touch with reality. I'm not sure that or confident that that that's the case, and people by then generally believed in evolution and so evolution was posed by some people as a theory of how it would come to be that our consciousness would get us in touch with reality. And if we know evolution is true then we can be confident that our minds work well. That's kind of backwards because if our minds didn't get us in touch with reality how could we know evolution was true. But anyway, there were some people who then started to put pressure on that. One was Paul and Patricia Churchland who are kind of materialist philosophers, and they, you know, said, well, you know, evolution is really to get us, you know, fed and have sex basically, and reality will take behind most and then most famously, Al Plantinga who is a religious epistemologist and philosopher of religion said, you know, evolution kind of could sort of give you a reason to think it but really, if your consciousness is evolved, it would not show you what's real it would just show you what would help you reproduce. So if you want to think that the world is real and your consciousness is designed to get it at it. The best bet is to think God made it that way after all God wouldn't lie to you and so forth. So this is all stuff that's been in the air since the 70s, 80s, I came across it in the 90s. And maybe again, I don't mean to say Hoffman's just taking from these other people maybe some of them were taking from him, but all kind of familiar ideas but there's a real humdinger that comes up soon that I found particularly funny so let's Good. Yeah, I mean it's interesting that that he presents is as if, you know, this is new, and it's coming out of science, whereas this is old, and it came from philosophy. Yeah, another particular question of is evolution, a mechanism for making our minds accurate, you know only of course comes once we have evolution, but the idea that our biological systems are here to serve functions, goes back to play to an Aristotle, it was known to be true since Aristotle's time, and what Darwin did was explained at a deeper level how that comes to be. So the idea that you know the perception serves some biological role isn't even new with evolution. It's just, you know, more deeply explained in the standard textbooks. One textbook says, for example, evolutionarily speaking, vision is useful precisely because it's so accurate. So the idea is that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions, they give you a survival advantage. Now, is this correct? Is this the right interpretation of evolutionary theory? Well, let's first look at a couple examples in nature. The Australian jewel beetle is dimpled, glossy, and brown. The female is flightless. The male flies looking, of course, for a hot female. When he finds one, he elites and mates. There's another species in the albac, Homo sapiens. The male of this species has a massive brain that he uses to hunt for cold beer. And when he finds one, he drains it and sometimes throws the bottle into the albac. Now as it happens, these bottles are dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown to tickle the fancy of these beetles. The males swarm all over the bottles, trying to mate. They lose all interest in the real females. A classic case of the male leaving the female for the model. Kind of funny. Yeah, it's a good joke, and it's an interesting example, but let's listen to what he says about the example before we... The species almost won extinct. Australia had to change its bottles to save its beetles. Now, the males had successfully found females for thousands, perhaps millions of years. It looked like they saw reality as it is, but apparently not. Evolution had given them a hack. A female is anything dimpled, glossy, and brown. Alright, so let's pause it there. What does it mean to say that sight is more accurate than the other senses? And what does it mean to say that the beetles don't do or don't see things as they really are? That's a weird binary, isn't it? I mean, so I'm wearing glasses now, and if I take them off, things are blurrier. Look blurrier to me. I can't discriminate them as well. Which way are they really? Are they really the way they look to me with my glasses on, with crisp edges? Or the way they look to me when I take my glasses off and my vision is blurrier? Well, maybe they're really the way they look when my glasses are on, where things have finer edges. But then if I had much more acute sight than I did, things would look even sharper, or maybe they'd look blurrier because I'd see words of electrons or something if I had microscope. Which one is right? Which one is reality? Is it really? Is there some confusion in the question? Whenever you're seeing what's real, you're going to be seeing it in some degree of resolution. A lower or higher degree of resolution isn't seeing it in a way that's less real. It's just picking up less detail, discriminating less. So now you have this beetle, and he can't tell apart female beetles from bottles. He can tell some things apart, but not others. That's part of what it is to be able to see. It's to be able to discriminate. He can discriminate within some margin of error, but not others. Now, basically what he picks up on, how he discriminates certain things from others. He's telling whether they're brown and have ridges or glossy or whatever it is. And he's rightly seeing that about the bottle. He's picking up on this, but he doesn't have some other finer tuned discrimination that he would need to tell apart female beetles from bottles in a world where these bottles are there. Now, why does Hoffman call that a hack? Why is it a hack? What would count as accurate perception that isn't a hack? It's a perception that like made you aware of everything magically as soon as there's a way in which it works. And as soon as that way in which it works has any kind of accuracy condition so that we can tell apart some things and not others. Then it's a trick. It's a hack. It's not really seeing things as it is. So what would count as really seeing things as they are. Something that you couldn't make an error with. I mean that anyway. No, that's all good. It's interesting that from a evolutionary perspective, so evolution in a sense doesn't grant, but the beetle evolves to see reality to the extent that it needs to. It doesn't need the finer details until the bottle shows up. The beetle will go extinct because they're not fine-tuned enough. It's not that they're wrong, they're just not fine-tuned enough. To perceive is to be able to tell things apart from one another and tell this from that. And the beetle can tell lots of things from lots of other things. It can tell lady beetles apart from everything else except it turns out this particular beer bottle which wasn't around so it didn't need to. It would be very much like if there started to be a lot more identical twins around and then you couldn't tell them apart and you would need to come up with a way to do it. The bigger the better. Even when crawling all over the bottle, the male couldn't discover his mistake. Now you might say beetles, sure, they're very simple creatures, but surely not mammals. Mammals don't rely on tricks. I won't dwell on this, but you get the idea. Let's pause again on the beetles. I mean, does the beetle think it's on a female beetle when it's on a bottle or rather are the beetles preferences for round bumpy things and it doesn't care if it's a bottle or another beetle. It's just an evolutionary problem for beetles that some of the round bumpy things they can't impregnate and others they can and so they need to develop more refined taste. I suppose you are evolved to like sugar. The taste of sugar is pleasant because it gives calories and in the situation that we're in we need calories or so forth. And then suppose that you're in another situation either where you don't need calories and you're having too much sugar and it's bad for your health or where you do need calories but you're there's like you know Splenda around and you're having that and it tastes the same. Are you deceived? You might very well know, you know, this isn't sugar but it tastes sweet and I like sweet things or I like sweet things but I should refrain from having them, you know, in this situation. So, it's not clear that you're deceived about what's real it's just your perceptual system and your tastes are attuned to certain things and and then those things are either advantageous or not advantageous to you but you still are picking up something. You're picking up something that the sugar and the Splenda say have in common, which is what makes them sweet and Splenda was engineered to be, I have certain things in common with sugar so it would be detected as sweet. And the beetle is picking up on something that female beetles and beer bottles of a certain sort have in common. It's really picking up on it, it's just, it's not a very useful thing to pick up on, it turns out. And it can't consciously think, am I on a bottle or am I on a female? Right, if you raise the question it might work it out, but it's not like it wants to be on a female beetle. An animal, they see another animal, it looks nice to them and they go and then, you know, sometime later there are other little animals around but they find something appealing and they want to rub up against it or whatever and then nature takes its course. This beetle finds a bottle and wants to rub up against it just like it would want to rub up against a female beetle and that's what's going on, it's perfectly satisfied, it's not like pissed, it turns out it's a bottle and it's been had. Well I guess what he's implying is that because of the fact that it's going to go out of existence, that they're all going to die because it can't actually see reality, it can't differentiate between the bottle and the female. But why it's going to go out of existence is because it's not programmed to do what it needs to do in this situation in order to survive, it's perceiving just fine. It's just that it's not got, you know, a behavioral repertoire that's suitable for this environment. And we know that, we know that animals go out of existence when the environment changes, I mean, not true of humans necessarily but certainly of most other species. It probably can really tell the difference between female beetles and bottles, right, because it can piece sizes and it probably in other contexts doesn't mistake them. The problem evolutionarily for the beetle, the kind of plight of this beetle species is that it has its sexual tastes are a little too broad. So you were saying about equations in evolution, I'm sure there are some. I mean, there are equations, and I think they're actually multiple theories of how to math math math I said on, you know, that you can predict how things will evolve in various situations with various action pressures. It's kind of like a simulation kind of running a simulation on these things. It's just, I find it interesting because you can do this for everything. You can take some differential equations throw them on the board nobody can really nobody has the time to really understand what's going on here he doesn't define any of the variables, and he tells you what this actually does what this actually happens. Just a question as a matter of procedure for everyone on the Facebook chat. When, when things hang. And for me what happens is Iran freezes then he logs off and comes back on. What's happening for you guys is the is the whole thing freezing or am I still here while he's gone. You're not there they can see you anyway right now all they can see is. And here is they see this last screen from the Hoffman lecture. And this goes down and I shouldn't try to kill time. No, they can't they can't hear you because whatever sound you're doing is running through me. And if I'm off the internet for a few minutes, then it doesn't. That's what I figured. Otherwise you could you could refine that stand up routine and entertain them. Exactly. Play a little guitar or something. Oh, there you go. Good guitar play. I'm not I'm not sure about the stand up stuff. Yeah, I'd better with the guitar. All right, let's go on. All right, so. Equations is kind of simulating what would happen. worlds compete and see which survive and which thrive which sensory systems are more fit. A key notion in those equations is fitness. Consider the stake. What does the stake do for the fitness of an animal? Well, for a hungry lion looking to eat, it enhances fitness. For a well fed lion looking to mate, it doesn't enhance fitness. And for a rabbit in any state, it doesn't enhance fitness. So fitness does depend on reality as it is. But also on the organism, its state and its action. Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is. And it's fitness and not reality as it is that figures centrally in the equations of evolution. So in my can I just say, I think what's going on is that reality figures in the equations of evolution as the basis for all the equations. That is the every single assumption within those equations assumes reality. Even fitness assumes reality. Yeah, again, if we don't know what's real, then what makes us think evolution is and we'll see that this gets much sillier with this respect in a moment. But also notice the distinction between there's reality as it is as opposed to what reality as it isn't. There's reality as it is. There's this kind of idea of an appearance reality split, which is what he's working with. And he's saying that evolution causes us to track fitness, rather than a real reality. But notice what's missing any idea of precision. So when there's reality as it is, you're always knowing some parts of it, and you're knowing those parts of it with some degree of precision to know something is to be aware of it to be able to discriminate it from other things to be able to track it over time, etc. All of those things are things that happen with a certain degree of precision. You can tell how big something is, but you can tell how big it is within a range, not to the, you know, tiniest particle, you don't not really know how big it is because you know that it's bigger than a bread box, but you don't know it to the, you know, nanometer or something. So what we would expect to find if consciousness evolved for fitness is that with respect to certain kinds of things, we have very fine discriminatory abilities. And with respect to other things we have very coarse discriminatory abilities, and the things that we have finer discriminatory abilities with respect to are the things that it matters to our fitness to be able to tell apart. And the things that we of course are one of the things that it matters. And that wouldn't be not seeing reality as it is that would be seeing all of reality as it is but some parts of it in higher resolution than others. In some parts of it not seeing it all but none of it would be seeing it as it isn't I don't you know what would that mean. It's something if you're trapped in this idea of there's a reality and appearances and can I get behind the curtain of my appearances to know reality but why think there's such a curtain, because the brain is doing something because to know reality would be to know it magically in no particular way and no degree of resolution. It's as though we said like I can't talk to you because they can only talk to you in English or French or Greek or Italian to really talk to you. I have to just kind of like mind meld telepathically with you and we can't do that so you I can never communicate accurately. Well I think that if you if you make communication magic, then it's no surprise to find out that you can't do it and if you make communication with reality seeing reality into something magical, that it's easy to show that we don't have it. But where does the premise that it would have to be this magical thing come from to begin with. In my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality and some see none of the reality only fitness. Who wins? What does fitness means if you don't see any of the reality? And what would it mean to see all of the reality? Are there any organisms in this world that anyone thinks that would be God, right? You're omniscient, you know everything. To know reality is to know some part of it in some way at some degree of resolution as distinguished from some other thing, not this magic. Of course there's no magic like this. What they see is fitness. What would it mean to see fitness to what what they would do presumably is see those things which are real things if they're real that are relevant to their fitness like the difference between things they can eat and things they can't eat. But then if there's a real difference between things they can eat and things they can't eat that seeing part of reality. So notice also he doesn't tell us anything about the design of these experiments, what they are. He gives us this high level conclusion about what they do and what they show. That is not like a serious report on an experiment. But I mean it is a TED talk so it's meant to be casual, but it's not giving you any of the information you would want if you wanted to think about like what should I make of this experiment. But the conclusion he draws from it is what's really astounding. So let's go on to that. Well I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. So perceiving reality goes extinct. Because they perceive fitness. Now is the fitness real? Is it really the case the steak is good for this organism and not that. And if it is then why isn't what that organism is perceiving part of reality. What is what does he mean by perceiving all of reality. What is going on in this software. Is it like a one little thing that's programmed in the software has access to the whole database that's constructing it. And the other has, I mean it the experimental design is completely opaque. I'm sure you can look up his papers and find it out. But he's not telling you any of the things you need to know to draw any interest and conclusion from this. But what's really striking is, is what he goes on to say about the particular Kantian aspect of this. So what's distinctive to Kant as opposed to a lot of other people is this idea that space and time are constructs created by our mind. They're not in the real reality lots of people think you know, other things are created by society or by your mental apparatus. But if space and time are then wow whatever is really real is non spatial temporal it's totally different than anything you can conceive of. And let's hear why he thinks space and time. So the bottom line is evolution does not favor vertical or accurate perceptions. Those perceptions of reality go extinct. Now this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage. That is a bit counterintuitive. But remember the jewel beetle. The jewel beetle survived for thousands perhaps millions of years using simple tricks and hacks. What the equations of evolution are telling us is that all organisms including us are in the same boat as the jewel beetle. We do not see reality as it is. We're shaped with tricks and hacks that keep us alive. Still, we need some help with our intuitions. How can not perceiving reality as it is be useful? Well fortunately we have a very helpful metaphor. The desktop interface on your computer. Consider that blue icon for a TED talk that you're writing. Now the icon is blue and rectangular and in the lower right corner of the desktop. Does that mean that the text file itself in the computer is blue, rectangular and in the lower right hand corner of the computer? Of course not. Anyone who thought that misinterprets the purpose of the interface. So what's he trying to say here that our minds are kind of an interface to reality, that the stake is not there. It's something else. But we're perceiving it as a stake because it's got fitness value to us. But how can it add fitness value to us if it's not a stake? Something like the physical world is or the world as we experience it is to whatever reality lies behind it, which we can't know like a, you know, computer interface is to what's really going on in the computer. But again, what's the reason for thinking that I don't think we actually have one. If you if you were convinced that you couldn't know reality and you were trying to think about how what could be a good metaphor for that maybe this would be an easy metaphor for that. Although I don't think it really would we can go into why but I'm interested in the space time stuff. It's not there to show you the reality of the computer. In fact, it's there to hide that reality. You don't want to know about the diodes and resistors and all the megabytes of software. If you had to deal with that, you could never write your text file or edit your photo. So the idea is that evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. Space and time as you perceive them right now are your desktop. Physical objects are simply icons in that desktop. Wait a minute. There's an obvious connectivity. What's that? That's the first time he mentioned space and time, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, isn't that interesting. So what in his argument made us think that space and time was an illusion? Oh, something about evolution. Evolutionary fitness. If you run the equations in evolution, you see that we track fitness, not reality. And I guess that means we don't track space and time. But evolution is a theory about what happens over time. Yeah. And it's just a weird, you know, if you were to say like color perception or distance perceptions way off or this or that other thing, much of it, but to think that time is a mental construct. Because the theory of evolution shows us that if in the past people had made up this mental construct over time, they would survive more is particularly goofy. And then is really what the computer's interfaces designed to do. This is a point to hide what the computer does for us to us. No, it's to show us those things about it. It's to give us a way of interfacing with those things about us that are useful and to really give us a way of really interacting with real data that's stored on the computer. It's not unreal, just because it's designed and just because it happens in a certain way. And like documents really say what they say, and they're really stored on the computer and the clicking interface gives me a way to get to get through to it. So even if it is in some sense something is in some sense an interface. How does that make it unreal because to know reality for him would be to be in this magic state of a God that just grasps everything know how. And anything other than that he's going to call a hack. What I would say is kind of, you know, not getting at reality. But then how did this space time think I mean it's just a bolt from the content actually has an argument about how you can tell that space and time are unreal. I don't think the argument work but a specific argument that specifically about space, and specifically about time, and you can see why they have to be these things that there's no argument here you just helps himself to that space and time are constructs. No, it doesn't. And so I'm thinking at this point, you know, maybe we can, I think we've had enough of Hoffman. I'm curious how much of this is you mentioned Kant a few times so how does this fit in with Kant is is this really just a way of rationalizing Kant's ideas or giving them a veneer of science. I mean, it seems to me like Kant for tech geeks. I mean there's no arguments here that aren't in contact for name dropping evolution and math a few times. Yeah. And then it lacks the arguments that are in Kant, which are, you know, like much better arguments for these conclusions and in that they're the things that he sites in the argument or at least relevant to the conclusion which we're not getting from this guy they're like, you know, much more competent. So it's like I think like, you know, a little bit of a sexier tech bro Kant. I mean, I know this seems to me goofy and frankly it seems to me like something philosophers would think of as goofy. It's philosophy rather than science there's a lot that goes bad I think in philosophy departments but this is like pretending certain scientific things are philosophical arguments when they're not and philosophers right or wrong on this you know are familiar with these arguments and know the kind of state of the argument and there's nothing really new here philosophically or interesting here philosophically and there's nothing interesting here scientifically at least not that is germane to the point about space and time being a construct. What do you think is the appeal. And, you know, we could go back because we could ask the same question about Kant, right, because he obviously incredibly successful in in in Dominic think but what's, what's the appeal of these ideas particularly to young techie types to, you know, to people who are oriented towards engineering and science who you would think would know better or should know better. That's a good question I'm surprised that this particular thing is as popular as it is so I don't have real insight into why the reasoning is fallacious and bad. Now, some of the reasoning that I think is fallacious is clever deep tricky puzzling kinds of issues that are just not at all new to him. So they are clever interesting deep they were come up by other people hundreds of years earlier. And whenever you first encounter them, they really head scratchers and you have to think your way through them and and they're worth thinking your way through. And I suspect a lot of people just haven't heard these arguments in other forms. This is the, the place in which they're meeting them for the first time the kind of arguments that you get in Descartes and in Barkley and in others and he doesn't really have the arguments from Kant although he has the Kantian conclusions but these are the the first forms in which people are meeting these arguments the arguments themselves. The ones that aren't new to him and to do with evolution are kind of compelling, and then putting them in terms of evolution and some kind of sci fi sounding things about simulations and so forth is people do, then you know kind of dovetails with some of other interests. And I suspect that that is you know why videos like this are popular and among you know some very smart people you get people like Elon Musk saying well we must be in a matrix or whatever a simulation, which is, you know, not not a good reasoning. We can talk about why it's not good reasoning if people want to know. Yes, I think it's worth doing that I think it's worth talking about why is all of this not good reasoning why why is this approach I don't know if I put the right word to reality, or to the idea of reality wrong. Well, take the, all the kind of the simulation ideas or matrix like ideas, or brain in a vat type ideas that the actual phrase brain in a vat least the earliest I know of it is from this paper by Hillary Putnam which makes a good point. You can't be a brain in a vat. You can't be anything you could mean by the phrase brain in a vat, because what you mean by brain and that and in are all the things that you've experienced through your senses and come up with words for and come to understand. And those things are things that you're not your, you know, if there was an actual other world that was totally different from the one we were in and so forth. You don't have any words to refer to it like in the movie the matrix, the people wake up and they come out of these pods and lo and behold they look just like they did in the matrix they've got a little goo on them. If there's some other thing beyond what you can perceive that's different from what you could perceive. You wouldn't have any way of being aware in any form of it you wouldn't be able to have words for it you wouldn't be able to access it. So all you could say is like some deeper thing that's a cause of all the stuff that I'm aware of. All right, so you could say maybe there's some deeper thing that's a cause of all the stuff I'm aware of. But then we know there are deeper things that are causes of the stuff we're aware of. We know that the big objects we see are made up of little things that are governed by little forces. And maybe there are other forces behind them we haven't discovered yet. We know there's a lot of stuff we don't know yet. And we know as we learn about it will we hope to learn more and more discover more and more surprising new things. So where's the profound thought, the profound. Yeah, of course, there's more stuff to know. Of course there are things that are fundamental causes of things that you know I don't know what the fundamental causes are. There's something that causes you know relativity be to be true or whatever it is. But why would you call that a simulation what you're doing and calling it a simulation, or I'm calling it a matrix or calling it is your analogizing it falsely to some very small subset of the things that occurs within your experience, which there's no reason to think the fundamental causes of things is any more like than anything else. And I will say, you know, maybe I'm a thermometer, or maybe I'm, you know, you can come up with some analogy, but there's some causes by the other. Anyway, so there's a. We could talk about some of the specific arguments people make if they want to raise them but really what you're saying there's this thought maybe everything is way different than I think. And then that thought, maybe the micro structures of things or the, the deep fundamental causes of things or the, the, the first thing science will discover someday is so radically different than what I would guess it would be that it would be shocking to me. Yeah, that's almost certainly true. That's every new scientific discoveries really surprising and shocking and so forth. But then to say, so let me make up a particular thing that it would might be like that I would feel really dumb if it was, let's do some of these. So, wouldn't a camera completely disprove his premise. If we do take a picture of the tomato, then show it to 10 people in the room, and we all agree that the pictures and accurate representation of the scene. I don't think it would disprove his premise any more than the 10 people all looking at the tomato itself and degreeing would he would see say they're all, you know, constructing reality the same way and according to the same evolved principles which is that the real reality as it really is, but only get us at fitness potentials, and that those fitness potentials pick up, pick up whatever that those fitness potential detecting mechanism just whatever you would call them pick up what's taken by the camera I don't think you need a camera to see what's wrong with it there's no reason to think this in the first place, unless you imagine that what it would be to perceive reality as it really is would be to through no process and in no way with no degree of resolution, just have automatic causeless omniscience about things. And if that's what it would be to be aware of reality, then you think well then we're not really aware of reality because we don't have that it really all of these kind of arguments come down to that. So the sense in which they're starting with God, and then we're not God and therefore. Basically that's it they're starting with how you'd imagine God's consciousness to be. And as soon as you accept that to be aware is to be aware in some way with some degree of resolution with more attention to with you know, better abilities to discriminate certain things than others that none of that is distortion or faking or quote a hack. That's the nature of being aware of things. Then, you know, there are all kinds of great questions about how does it work what things are we more aware of than others. Is it the case that we notice certain things more than others and so we need to space special attention to those other things and you there's all kinds of fantastic things to learn from cognitive science and brain science, and so forth, but you've got to drop this idea that to be aware would be to be magically omniscient. It's just like saying, you know, I can't hold this knife, because to hold something as it really is would be to in no particular way have control of it and all things about it at all times and places. But really, I'm holding this knife in this particular grip with these three fingers, as opposed to holding in this grip or this grip. So what I'm holding is not really the knife, but the grip that I have on the knife, and the knife would be part of reality but I'm only gripping this part of it in this way so I can't hold reality. So I can't take anything or touch anything or grab anything. Really, all I can do is grab fitness. I can grab on to fitness because my hands evolved to make me fit. And so I can grab fitness but no things that would make me fit. It's the same structure of the argument. And it also reminds me, I think it's related, but it also reminds me in economics of what I've called the Garden of Eden argument. The starting, the ideal is somehow everything's available, everything's there, you know everything, everything's successful, you don't have to produce anything, nothing's required of you. And then it's a demotion, now that you have to actually work and actually shape your environment. You get versions of this all the time. I mean, perfect competition theory is also another example of this. What actual competition would be is this thing that couldn't ever occur and wouldn't be any good if it did. But you know what we really have is some kind of distortion of that that we need them to regulate away. Right, so Greg, when something moves, it is in relation to another entity. If a rocket when nothingness, no other entities and fired attention, would it be correct to say that the rocket had kinetic energy, but it was not moving? What are you, are you imagining a rocket in a universe where there's nothing but the rocket? Or are you imagining like that space is a void and it's in between planets or something? If there's nothingness, there's nothing other than the rocket, I don't even know what that would mean, but what would it mean to say it had kinetic energy then? Kinetic energy is, kinetic just means moving, and it would mean that it's moving with respect to something, but there's nothing else to move in with that. And what would the thrust be thrusting against if there was nothing else in the universe but this rocket that came out of it. So I don't think there could be a rocket in a universe where there was nothing else. Now, if you mean the view that space is a void and there's nothing in it, then it's really a kind of physics question or philosophy of physics question and I don't really have much to say about that. But if you mean it literally there's just nothing, just a rock, a universe that's just a rocket, then yeah, there'd be, it wouldn't move. Yeah, I mean I think he's trying to get to what is movement, right? The movement is something relational and if the other things don't. But it's one of these questions that it's meaningless because there is... Man, I don't think you could say you would have kinetic energy as I understand it is just another way of saying movement, how much it's moving or how energetically it's moving. But maybe someone who knows more physics would read it a little differently than I do, I don't know. Could you explain the idea of dualism and non-dualism and how it pertains to objectivism? Well, something's called dualistic if it posits that there are two things. And usually when we, and you know, exactly two not three or one. And the two are kind of equal importance of something that we need to think about both of them. And usually when people talk about dualism and philosophy, they mean dualism of mind and matter. And there's a sense in which you can say, and then if you do think that there's a duality, there's a distinction between mind and matter or between any two other things. You might then think about in what way are they too? Are they like two different entities? Like, you know, a mouse and a rabbit are two different things. Or maybe they're two different properties, like, or two different part, like the, you know, color and size are two different things, but they're not two different entities or two different parts of the same entity or two different aspects of the same entity. So in a sense, you can call objectivism dualistic, if you like, in that it thinks that there's consciousness and that consciousness is something distinct from the various properties studied in physics. It's not a separate entity, but it's a distinct attribute of the things that have it distinct from their other attributes and materialism as it's generally boils down to the view that there isn't consciousness. So you can call it dualism if you want, but I don't think that's really the right way to describe it, because it makes all the other attributes of things sound like they're one thing and they're not. So for example, are you a dualist because you think there's size and shape? You don't think shape is just more size or size is just more shape. So you're a dualist about size and shape. Well, I guess you are. You think size and shape are two different things, but there are lots of different things. There's also motion, there's size, shape and motion. So is physics dualist or triple list or, you know, a quartetist or whatever, however many different things there are, they turn out to be that many different things. And some of them may be reducible to others, but some of them are just irreducibly different. We think size and shape presumably are irreducibly different. And within shape, there are different dimensions and they're not just more of the other dimension, you know, having width is not just having more length, right? And yet you can, there are ways in which you can rotate things, you know, whatever. So there are more than one feature of things. And consciousness is one of the features. But I wouldn't say that all the other features go together with one, and then there's the second one consciousness so that there are two. Consciousness is no less unitary with all the other things we call physical than the various aspects of things we call physical are related to one another. The only respect in which they're importantly different is we understand a lot more about how the properties features attribute things that we call physical fit together with one another, how they relate to one another. So we understand now how consciousness relates to that group of them. But that's just because there are things we don't know there was a time when we didn't know how electromagnetism related to gravity and we still don't know that as much as we'd like to. There was a time when we didn't know how magnetism and electricity related and then we learned that they did. So where you would do a list about electricity and so there are things we that now those turned out to be just one force right, but not everything that we've learned to relate turned out to just be one fourth they just, we learned something about how they were related. In the fullness of time I expect we'll learn more about how consciousness relates to electrical charge and gravity and quantum this and that. And you know we don't know now but that is a whole lot of different things that are distinct from one another in physics to treat them all as one and then consciousness is the second thing. So anyway, I understand why can't think can't think his revolution is Copernican, but it's always seemed anti Copernican, I'm not in the world, the world emanates from me. Yeah, you, I mean it's meant to be Copernican in that you're turning things around things revolve around something different than you thought they would, but in the Copernican Revolution. People prior to him thought we were closer to the center of the universe and learned we were more peripheral and for con your mind becomes much more the center of everything. So in that sense it's it's anti Copernican true. Can you, can we say that we truly know the laws of physics are true permanent. What if, what if the passage of time they comes a point where the laws of nature change. I mean, I'm not sure what that means. There are lots of things we don't know. Some of the laws that we think we know, or some of the things that we call laws now might turn out to be more local than we thought they are we don't know what their boundary conditions are or something like that. We have to go through the particular laws and what the proofs of them are and I'm not a physicist so you know I'm not going to try to say to do we know that general relativity applies everywhere or to everything or, or whatever, I don't know, I don't know that myself, maybe someone does. But if what we mean by the laws of nature is that things have identities that they act in accordance with which are discoverable. If things don't happen, know how and in no way, then I think that's part of what it is to exist is to have an identity and part of what it is to act is to be a particular thing that's capable of acting in particular ways. And so that there's some kind of regularity and identity to how things behave yeah I think we know that. And then we've learned some about what that is and hopefully we'll learn more, and maybe there'll be surprises, you know, at some points in it. So in your opinion was Renee Descartes, a positive or negative influence on early epistemology. Is the speaker Hoffman a positive or negative influence on society for reviving and highlighting forgotten philosophies. Well let's start with the latter. No one's forgotten Descartes or Kant so I don't and every generation, there's you know, some movie or some cutesy YouTube video or something that presents the same ideas over and over again so I don't think he's a significant force for the good or for the bad he's just this content is just a kind of flotsam that comes about every now and again, someone else would have done it if he didn't. I don't think of this is really significant it's just you know it had a lot of views but in one way or another these ideas would have gotten in front of everybody. Well to what extent I mean the people like this popularize these views and make it so that we hear people all over the place saying well, who knows what reality is none of us know what reality is. I mean it seems to me these views have been steadily popular for hundreds of years. And I don't think there's any particular achievement or villainy or whatever your opposite of achievement of someone's just pushing the meme on, you know, a little bit further I think his role here is like the role of everybody who clicks a meme and forwards it. It's, he just happens to be at the kind of nexus of where it went viral this time. And I'm sure there are skills to why he did that I mean he's, you know, good at getting attention, but the ideas would have gotten attention, you know, in some other form, some other because they always have. I mean, as for Descartes, it's there I think it's harder to say because you have to think about whether he was a force for good or bad. But the primacy of consciousness, which is the thing I most associate with the car, the thinking that you start from your mind and have to reason outward was I think a real force for the bad. And I think that's really the fundamental thing about him, which, and therefore I see it as a force for the bad. However, Descartes was part of a wider movement that was taking seriously the question of what are the foundations of my knowledge. How can I tell, how can I take really seriously the issue of some of my knowledge is based on other knowledge, how can I find the foundation, how can I achieve a method to get clearer. And everybody if they had the right method could think more clearly so you don't need a God or a priest or someone to tell you if you just follow the right method, and that movement which he was an early figure and I think is a very positive movement. I think the prior to Descartes and roughly contemporaneous, but also part of it and better I think is Francis Bacon, better in the content of his thought and similar in the emphasis on method. And also I think better than Descartes a little later is John Locke. But what all of them have in common if you look at those three guys is this emphasis on method and attempt that objectivity and attempt at finding a basis for knowledge and seeing how everything goes on that Descartes distinctive role then if you think of that as a wider whole that there are these people doing this at this point in history Descartes particular role is introducing a certain method the method of doubt for locating the foundations which I think is a wrong method that depends on the history basically and there's a fantastic essay by Leonard Peacock called maybe you're wrong, which was published the objective forum a much.