 Boom! What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Saakyan. We are still on site. We are now in Brooklyn, in New York. We are very excited to be talking about all things world views. We're going to be talking about math. We're talking about philosophy. We've got a lot to cover in this episode. I'm really excited to be talking to Adam Kato. Hello. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for coming out of the show. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited for this. We've had some powerful conversation in the last little bit of time. Shout out to Alex K. Chen for introducing us. So, Adam's background. Adam's currently at Stony Brook. He's double majoring in math and philosophy. He is also an undergraduate researcher there. He's a TA. He's also doing a second thesis on worldview formalisms. So, we've been talking a lot about this. There is this really gorgeous way of thinking about the way that one's mind absorbs stimuli over time and gains a perspective of a worldview. This is very different for someone that was born 10,000 years ago versus someone that was born 200 years ago or someone that was born today. They've absorbed different stimuli. They've made a different worldview then. So now, we're even trying to go as far as to literally say that, no, your brain will never disappear. We'll capture your worldview, your brain through your neurons and your synapses and your memories that you stored there. Yeah, exactly. So what? That's crazy. It's a very futuristic, almost like far out there kind of thing. But yeah, this is, I think, one of the directions in which we're heading. Yeah, so tell us about your obsessions with this idea of worldviews. Right, so I think in some sense I've always been obsessed with the concept of a worldview. Just like, you know, not so much like people watching, but like just observing like, oh, why do people act the way they do? Why do they believe the things that they do? Children do this all the time, of course. That's how they, it's a big part of how they learn about the world. Adults do it as well. Everyone does this all the time, whether or not they notice it or not. And worldviews are very interesting, I don't know, structures, I guess. Not only are they interesting in themselves, like how they can be represented or like reasoned about, like even like how we come to update our worldviews or like, yeah, the information that we intake and how we like use that information to update our worldviews. Yeah, really interesting stuff. So I should probably, I guess, talk a little bit about like how that happens or like a historical perspective. Yeah, definitely. So right, so the question I guess is like, what is a worldview anyway? Now, you ask anyone, they'll give you a different answer. I personally have been particularly influenced by like, as a, you know, philosophy major, a student of philosophy, I guess. Like, I have been particularly influenced by the like philosophical developmental like process, which like, you know, generates worldviews. Like just looking throughout the history of philosophy, you know, we can kind of depict these like philosophical systems that these philosophers have built throughout time as like their own sorts of worldviews. So you look way back, even just in the Western tradition of philosophy, like back to ancient Greece, you know, these like system builders like Aristotle, Plato, so on and so forth. Like, and you look throughout the modern period, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, etc. They've all basically been developing worldviews or like explicit accounts of worldviews. Everyone has a worldview that they work off of, you know. So that kind of brings us to the question like, what exactly is a worldview? Now, there's a philosopher at the Free University of Brussels who I think has written probably the best account, the best like even like compressed account of what a worldview is, like a normative account of a worldview. So Clement Vidal at Free University of Brussels wrote this 2012 paper called Metaphilosophical Criteria for Worldview Comparison, where he lists basically a procedure for like how we go about like updating our worldviews and like our philosophical systems and like criteria that go into, you know, like what makes a worldview good or bad or that sort of thing. So this is a very like systematic like philosophical account of what a worldview is. And this is I think a good normative account, but it also doesn't exactly like address the nuances of like people's worldviews and like determining how exactly, you know, the mechanisms that people use to update their worldviews is on like information that they encounter, people that they encounter, artifacts that they encounter. That's a big one, which I guess will probably take up to a geometry. So it's interesting. There's this trajectory of stimuli that you absorb through your life that makes this worldview, but then there's also the way you said that you update your worldview. Right. Yeah, that's interesting. The more open-minded you are to maybe saying that, hey, I'm taking a new information. I'm going to update my worldview versus staying close-minded. Yeah, things like this. One of the real kickers here is that we, you know, I guess you could say that some people are more open-minded than others about like explicitly updating the worldviews or like updating just their beliefs in general about like, you know, like, or listening to people and arguments and trying to like critically think about the arguments and like, you know, maybe, oh, you know, my position in this argument is not, you know, the best. And there are of course people who are more close-minded to that. But what's interesting is that we all take in this like, this information kind of subconsciously or like, lately where, you know, we don't even realize that our worldviews are being updated. Like this is why charismatic people are so like, like if you interact with the charismatic person, you sort of are like, some say, some could say charismatic or manipulative or whatever. Like there's certain like, like behavioral phenomena that, you know, you can, that people use to like, get you to update your beliefs in some way. So like, that's an interesting side-notice that like, yeah, you could be explicit about saying, oh, I'm going to say, well, maybe my political beliefs or whatever are, you know, I want to see if they're actually most accurate for, you know, my, what I want or like if I'm being as ethical as possible and exploring like different ethical theories or considerations or virtues or whatever. So you could be explicit about that, but also there are people who can like subtly like, permeate your worldview saying like, oh, maybe you should like, like egging you on or something like that, which is really interesting. So, so back to what I was saying about the paper that was written outlining like a normative account of what a worldview is. These are very philosophical in nature and sort of like, I wouldn't say like totally detached from like, like human subjectivity or like, human like behavior or cognition because they are like the three like, clusters I guess of like criteria for worldviews are the objective, subjective and intersubjective accounts which are like basically like, whether or not it's scientific, whether or not it agrees with your like personal motivations and experiences and whether or not it fits with like an overarching like social narrative or like, like a, yeah, like a paradigm sort of thing. Now, yeah, like, it's interesting to see how these like, these normative accounts of worldviews that people write or like philosophical accounts, they're not all that there is. There's a lot of latency that people don't see with their worldviews and like, that's something that I'm trying to capture as well with like my work on worldview studies, worldview formalisms. Not just like the like explicit, like super formal philosophical ways of like developing like philosophical systems but also capturing like the very minute sort of like, day to day like little things here and there. Yeah, oh yeah, and we'll get to some of that. I mean, yeah, even the way that you carry yourself every day has a tremendous wake in a butterfly effect across the world, smiling as you walk, cascades and impacts people, the way that you engage with other artifacts around you which we'll get to in a bit. You leave a worldview imprint in your own, in your own mind as well as you popularize things for other people to add to their worldview depending on what you're disseminating yourself. You started talking about, you know, objective, subjective and then inter-subjective. So, objective seems to be the one that society can agree upon things like the molecular compositional water or gravity or things like that. Yeah, sort of like independent of like personal or social experiences. Yeah, yeah. So like that's the, so there are in total like nine criteria that go into this or that have been outlined at least in this one paper. So the, and they're split into like three categories. So three categories of three different criteria, three different like sorts of criteria. So in the objective sense, you have like objective consistency which is like, oh, does it fit with like sort of like almost attached experience or like investigative experience of like, not even experience, but like objective fact, so to speak. Is it like internally consistent? Is it consistent with like scientific discoveries or like body of scientific knowledge that we have agreed upon that we've derived, like not derived but come to using the scientific method and you have, yeah, that's mostly what the objective, the two of the three criteria for like objective criteria. The third one is scope. So like, does your worldview like address issues, you know, broad in scope across like universal objective like properties. Now, but also there's the subjective accounts of worldview. So like, so scientism, for instance, so we can come up with like three, let's come up with like three different examples. So we have a scientism worldview which is like addressing explicitly like the objective criteria for worldviews. But we also have the subjective accounts, right? So this is where I think like religious worldviews are really popular and where they are most effective. And then intersubjective worldviews are, again, sort of, I guess religious worldviews also like address these and other sorts of like secular, even secular worldviews like secular ethical theories. For instance, like, if you look at effective altruism. So the intersubjective criteria are like, does it fit with like a social narrative? Is it like, is there like a social utility for it, right? Like, does it improve social harmony, social well-being, that sort of thing? So this is where I guess something like effective altruism is like a really interesting like movement and an interesting case for like intersubjective criteria for worldviews because it really does like address this sort of like social harmony, social like well-being sort of thing. Yeah, okay. So now we're starting to do a little breakdown of how we can look at worldviews through objective, subjective, intersubjective. There's also a way of understanding things with the dissemination of memes that I think is really important. Yes. So it's almost as though the more that we take in memes getting disseminated, especially through the information technology infrastructures like the internet now, it's so important for them to be as close in my opinion to objectively true as possible because we can get lost in what is not true and that can deter us away from a cohesive civilization at a time of exponential technology where it's most pressing to have cohesion and truth. So, yeah, memetics are really important here. Yeah, absolutely. So, memetics are, yeah, they're very important in like worldview studies because that's basically how, you know, your worldviews are updated, right? So worldview updating is like, in my opinion, like probably the biggest or not, it's hard to determine what exactly is the most important like part of this field because of course like being able to represent it effectively. And worldview updating would happen from the time you're born. Oh, yeah. Even through the time you're about to die. So worldview updating can be this extremely early education for a child all the way to when you're an adult in conversation, someone gives you some facts, you go and fact check it, you see it, you update your worldview. Yeah. Well, this is also why, like, it's a good example for like describing why like local like pocket, like political pockets stay the same or mostly the same, you know, are more resistant to change, right? Because, you know, just take, like, imagine you're born in a very, like let's say liberal town, right? All your friends are liberal, your family's liberal. And, you know, you basically adopt these, you hear people talking about, oh, like this candidate is good for these reasons because we care about these XYZ and certain praxis, right? And, you know, that sort of thing. So it's, you know, probably more likely that you'll, those beliefs will, you'll, you know, you'll adopt them earlier on in your life and especially when you're, you know, more plastic. And, but now let's say you grow up in a totally conservative town and people are, you know, doing the same sort of thing, right? It's more likely that you as a person will adopt these conservative beliefs, right? So this is a particularly like telling example of like a certain type of, a certain sort of belief which is like a political sort of belief or system of beliefs, I should say, that are, you know, formed in like a, based on like the peers that you interact with and the information that you interact with depending on like the news networks that maybe your family watches, that sort of thing. Now, updating, right? I would say now we can really tunnel down into like a silo and not really taking other information sources. Yeah. Those are our blind spots that we get and like to update our world view with those new patches of information is so important to have a well-rounded. Yeah. And that's, that's a good reason or yeah, that's why the internet is so important as well because now you're not, your information network is not just limited to the people that you talk to and like, like large news networks or local news networks, right? You can go anywhere and see what anyone's writing. Like this is, you know, you know, communication, like mass communication is like at our fingertips now and that's really important for world view updating as well because you're exposed to so much, so much content that you otherwise wouldn't have been like maybe like 25 years ago or something. That's right, that's right. And especially like within the past decade of social media. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, with the click of a button you can now update millions of people without needing to even go through a network yourself, like an incumbent newspaper or television network even and prior to that, the most you could have is your social circle. Your community could maybe know after a couple of days of some accomplishment. That's it, yeah. Those are just people like, if you grow up in let's say in like a suburban town, those are just people in your town, right? But now you can grow up in the same environment but have people across the country, across the world. Maybe we're doing too much world view updating. As in, yeah, there's, it says though we're not world view updating with the high level of efficacy towards truth. We're now just looking through too much noise. Social signaling, sort of thing. Social signaling and noise in general. It's not necessarily that because there's so much more information that that means that there's so much more signal that there's so much more world view updating towards truth. That there may even be world view updating towards fake news and deep fakes and everything we got going on now in the near future. Do you find that to be a little bit concerning as you go through like world view updating in the positive lens towards truth and towards an objective societal push towards cohesion. But then there's also this like false world view updating. Right. So the issue with that is that the, I don't know if I'd call it exactly false world view updating but the sort of the sort of like quick jumping towards like updating, right? That can be an issue because it's so, you can do it so instantly without, you don't have to like take the time to like think critically on it. Think critically. Look at more sources. Yeah. Yeah. It's very like immediate. Yeah. And you can, so you, I just like to objectively rank that as, as worse because if you're not critically thinking and you're not looking at all those additional sources, you can just be manipulated by one item of a video or an article or whatever. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a big issue. Yeah. Continue, continue. Right. Yeah. Like fake news is a big issue. And I think it's, all these reasons are why it's so important to have like a systematic account of like your own world view and how it changes and like being able to even like visualize like how, like the information that you encounter and like being able to like pair that with like how your behavior changes or like, like how your like communicative style changes, all these things, like there's so much like behavioral data that and like communicative communicative data that you can like, you know, pair I guess, like that is interesting. available. You just have to be clever. So, so the idea is that it's fascinating if we gain enough of a, of a metacognitive perspective on our own lives to say, to look in a mirror at ourselves and the stimuli we've taken in order to be who we are, to have the world view that we do and then the, and then we have to really honestly look at ourselves because then we can realize that maybe I'm not critically thinking enough, maybe I'm not looking at extra information patches that I should be in order to update more of my world view a little bit more holistically. And that's why, so, yeah, people also have to be incentivized to do this. They could be internally incentivized to do it just by like being truth seeking, for instance, they could be incentivized by like externally just like, either by like social pressures, like peer pressures or like school pressures or something like that. Like let's say they have a project where they have to do this and they have to get a grade on it, that sort of thing. Now, yeah, there are some like, there's some issues. They're like with like incentive alignment because a lot of times people wouldn't be so like incentivized to like think critically and like really reflect on whether or not they're doing it correctly. And this is where, so I didn't touch on all nine of those points. Totally. Yeah. It would take like, it would take hours for each of them. I know. But like, this is why, I think it was like the fifth point that was outlined or something, which is like personal utility. This is why that's so important for world views is because if you want to actually do something like praxeologically or like to actually like take action in like making the world a better place. Yeah. And like getting people to be like more like reflective and like, that's a bit, like you have to get them to do it. You have to make it, you have to give some sort of like utility or like some, so basically it's just some reason why people should want to do this sort of thing. So people already have like peer pressures or like truth seeking pressures or like their own internal pressures or external pressures to do this sort of thing. But it's not super commonplace. Yeah. We have to really incentivize this to help us progress faster. Yeah. And that's why this sort of like comprehensive world view study is important. Yeah. Because like if you're just focusing on like the objective parts, right, sure like I agree that's very, very important to do. Like it's like modeling the world as it is. Right. You have to determine exactly how to get people to want to do this sort of thing. Right. There's like because you know we are socially embedded. There's a lot of like stuff flying around in the social sphere that are drawing people away from like being That's right. Distractions are rampant right now. Yeah. If you want to actualize your fullest potential into the world, you have to become really good at looking at yourself in the mirror and it's calling yourself out for when you're too much in an echo chamber. Your world views not being updated what properly enough. Now Adam, I think this is important to address and we talked about this when we were chatting earlier. The idea of a potentially a best world view. The idea that they're that I know this is tough for a philosopher. This is really, it's tough. But at the same time this is really important for early childhood education is that if we say that okay, a child's born into the world, there should be just some fundamentals that we embed into the neurology of a child at a young age into their mind. And we potentially say things like, okay, well, you should understand that we were birthed from the cosmos and you should understand that the Earth revolves around the star and that the star gives us the power to have a civilization and that you have this heart inside of you and this brain inside of you. The heart beats 100,000 times a day. The brain and gives you the information processing for everything that you have in storage for the rest of your life. And maximize your time here. Find what you care about and bring value to the world. I think that if we have some sort of a bare fundamental truth that we can build worldviews upon like we've been doing like, okay, we learned agriculture. We're here. We learned some scientific method principles. We're here now that if we keep building on that and if more people gravitate towards that and potentially away from the echo chambers where there's potentially people coming in with propaganda to try and lure their eyeballs and attention into things that are fake news that are actual that are actual false for the greed and pockets of other people. So what do you think about potentially an ideal truth seeking world view? It's definitely a hot topic amongst pretty much anyone. So, yeah, that's a tall drink of water. It depends. So like, some people would view it, various people would view it in different ways. So you'd say you'd have like postmodernists, right? Who the like, the meme that's spread is like, oh, you know, postmodernists say there's no such thing as like objective truth. Everything is subjective, that sort of thing. Which is, yeah, like, that's one like view of it. Then you have other, you know, other philosophers or academics or anyone really who say, oh no, there's like some objective truth out there. Some objective truth in, or like, maybe like even localized objective truths like within like aesthetics or like ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, so on and so forth. Like, is there such a thing as objective beauty? Is there such a thing as like objective like structure of reality? Like, that we can maybe like formalize mathematically in some way. Is, you know, there is some objective like nature to like mathematics also. Anything like that. Right? So, it very well could be the case that these are, there are objective truths in these like localized senses. And, you know, it's very difficult question. But, you know, maybe there could be like objective beauty versus maybe not like objective like nature of mathematics. Is mathematics cognitive? Is it like platonistic in like the abstract detached sense of mathematics? Like, there's a lot of different like, sub questions that this question is begging, I think. So, whether or not there is one explicit like one, one true world view, it's also a very open-ended question. I think if we frame it in the sense of like, is there one world view that under some like, some normative account of world views is the best world view? That is a different question. I think that has an answer. Oh, okay, cool. Let's, let's answer that question. Right. So, you could say, well, you know, we want our world view to be as scientifically valid as possible. We want our world view to be as, you know, emotionally, you know, drawing in as possible, that sort of thing. And so, you could say, well, maybe we have some like optimization function or something where we want to optimize like some certain metric, which is already problematic. But maybe there's like something that we want to optimize for, some interplay between the different criteria that go into world views or philosophical systems or anything like that. Right. Okay. Optimize flourishing. What is flourishing? Okay. So, Aristotle will tell you something differently that he's going to classical. Yeah. Raising the baseline of living for all beings. Okay. Yeah. And then, now you break that down. There's a lot of metathical concerns here. Like, oh, which normative theory do we pick? Is there like some static normative theory that we pick? Or are we constantly in this dialectical process of updating our ethical principles? We are. That's right. And so, what is really left to argue about? If we're, yeah, seriously, what is left to worry about? If humanity engages in a continuous dialogue about updating our world view over time and continuously updating what we believe is the best logical structure, the function for raising a child's mind into the world, what is there to argue about after that? Anything that's localized within the dialogue. And also, that just gets sorted out. Sure. But then that just gets sorted out. Of the dialogue itself. Sure. Okay. How does it take place? There's like rhetoric, argumentation, logic, all this sort of stuff that you have to reflect on the like dialectical process or the dialogical process. Yeah. And, you know, you have to think, oh, what is this dialogue for? Like, for what purposes are we having this dialogue? You know, some people will say, oh, well, to get at, you know, to maximize human flourishing or human well-being or like human balance or something like, in, according to whatever like, theory they subscribe to. So, like, Aristotle will tell you something different than like, ineffective altruists or like, someone who subscribes valence realism versus like, virtue ethics or something like that. Right. So, I feel like, I feel like we can get, we talk about this a little bit lost in just, the incessant drive to be like, oh, well this is just such a little bit different than this is. And, because if we get so lost in that, then we don't, we just, we gotta drive towards some unity code, that drives us towards that flourishing and then constantly have dialogue about how to update that unity code. Well, yeah, this is why I think, worldviews are such a good, like all-encompassing tool for this. Is that, you know, we can do like, we have certain values, right? We can subscribe to different value systems or theories of value, right? So, one of them could be like, utilitarianism, where we say we value, like the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and if you're really like, into it, you can say, oh, we can give you some like metrics and some like ontological restrictions saying like, oh, yeah, like, this is how exactly we measure well-being. So, we should calculate what we ought to do in order to like, maximize that sort of well-being on those metrics. Other people will say, oh, you should just subscribe to these virtues. So, let's throw the utilitarian framework completely out of the window and say, oh, subscribe to this system of virtues, and another virtue, as this would say something similar, but like, give it a different system of virtues, and then you have contractualists and deontologists and so on and so forth, right? We'll tell you something completely different. And so, we can actually like, systematically track this, using, not only systematically track, like, our ethical considerations, but like, how they relate to our ontological considerations and our like, you know, systems of action and political beliefs and so on and so forth. So, like, there are like, a lot of considerations here and I think world views are like, good systematic tools for like, tracking, you know, how we ought to like, even using the word odd is like, a presupposition, but like, how we, you know, in what ways we do already like, you know, reason about the world, model the world, that sort of thing. And you said, you said something that I think I forgot, like you said, like, why should we care about like the, like, what is there left to argue, I think. And I think you said something after that. Maybe, maybe not so much, like, there will always be things left to argue. Oh, but we're going like too far into one like pocket or one corner. I think you said something about that. Yeah. And we get to, and we're getting potentially too caught up in, irrelevant things. And yeah, and there's got to be some sort of a, of a, of a basic level of, like, we all agree that we came from the cosmos. We all agree your heart beats 100,000 times a day. We all agree that you're going to get about 25,000 days to live and that the stimuli that you put in your mind are really important for where you end up going in the world, the formulation of your world view. So I think if we can agree on these fundamentals that we're all children of evolution of the cosmos and we're all one tribe as the planet and we write these things into our code and then we write into the code that we're going to maximize resource flows to raise that baseline. And we got to figure out how to maximize the flows and how to raise the baseline. This is through dialogue we get there. But that, that, those are the things left to talk about. But I mean, how many people, how many people, how do we update the minds of the people that disagree that we came from the cosmos? How about do we update the minds of the people that say, my heart does not beat 100,000 times a day? You know? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a very big issue as well. It's a big, even like political issue. But, I think I have a question for you. Yeah. My question is, for you, where, how do you update your world view? So, it's a good question. So, I update my world view basically by having, I don't exactly have a static world view that I keep at all times and then say, oh, here's how I, like, based on this new information, here's, like, how I can look into it and this, like, formal system sort of thing. I don't, I don't exactly have that, like, explicitly mapped out. But, I do have this sort of, like, rough picture of, like, oh, here's a normative account of what a world view is and here's how, like, I can represent my beliefs and like, personal history and so on and so forth with this, like, world view tool basically like a, almost like a modeling tool. So, like, the different parts interact, right? You know, whether I have certain ontological beliefs or like epistemological beliefs or whatever I consider to be, like, first philosophy or like most, like, philosophical area that takes most precedence, that sort of thing and like, what reasoning tools I use, so on and so forth. So I have, like, a rough model of that and I say, okay, well, based on this new information that I run into and where are the weak points in my beliefs and should I alter those or just like, think more critically on them because maybe they're right, that sort of thing. So that's, so argumentation is a good way to update your beliefs and I also use, so, also like the, the online nationalist community uses the term updating to mean something sort of different in some sense, like, but I just, I don't mean it in the strict, like, Bayesian sort of context, in like, the context of like, formal like, belief revision. It's more like a rough picture, but anyway, like, yeah, like, that's basically what I do. It's argumentation. I read a whole bunch of different, you know, like, philosophy, mathematics, you know, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, so on and so forth, politics, like, yeah, so in one sense, like, that's more towards like, the objective accounts, usually, so the objective criteria, but also like, you know, updating your, like, moral beliefs is not as simple, like, you know, there is some, like, human emotionality aspect to it, whether or not this, this like, is what ought to be, like, the normative case, that's up for debate, like, you could say, oh, these like, ontological considerations, right, like about, like, you know, like, pain, suffering, happiness, joy, so on and so forth, which you could, like, I guess, roughly characterize as valence, so like, how much well-being or suffering you have, you know, people say, oh, there are actually ways like experimentally, like, determine your valence, and if we take this, like, a grounding for the, like, an ontological grounding for the rest of our system, and if we take ontology as first philosophy, then we have a completely, like, philosophically grounded system, and like, a system of action even, because we have like, methods for like, determining exactly how to go about, like, finding out what is, you know, the correct action to take, not only just what is, like, the correct process, like, you know, for determining what actions to take, and actually like, figuring out what those are and doing them in the world. Um, We may have ramped our population up too fast, in the last hundred years, and with that population being ramped up so fast has made it harder for us to update our world views more effectively towards that basic unity of truth that we needed, because now we have so many world views that are so all over the place, so far away from truth, in so many different ways, and those are 10 year, 30 year, 50 years into their lives, the formulation of those minds, that now it's becoming more and more difficult as the population's increasing, but the ability to create media that can update people's world views is something that we care a lot about, and that if we can properly do that and get people to awaken and drool to how gorgeous it is that we are all from Earth and that there have been a hundred billion people that lived and died before us to build all of the infrastructure that we have today that then maybe there will be a deeper sense of awe and connection to each other even though our population has skyrocketed so much. You spend a lot of time I can tell and in lands of philosophy that are really deep that I haven't scratched the surface of and that a lot of people haven't scratched the surface of and that going that deep can be both a tremendous advantage because you can more granularly break things down but it can also potentially be a disadvantage when we are trying and the same things true about anyone at the edge of their field that understands the granularity of everything in their field but then the lateral thinking your lateral thinking is still really good at them but there is a lot of lateral thinking that needs to still be developed to gain that multidisciplinary holistic understanding of things and making things simple the Occam's razor approach to just going and making it the most simple way to disseminate to people that can then get them most easily actualized I want us to talk about artifacts this is extremely important you made me really realize that every time that we say the word water we say the word bowl or cup or car or whatever we are further baking this artifact into our mind every time we make a purchase that's a digital log of something that we've bought and then that if we can open up these data silos of the things that we buy and the words that we use and we can really understand how people have gained a world view they have and how to best help people update their world views that goes back to what you were saying about lateral thinking and multidisciplinary interdisciplinary thinking is that we have all these people working in different areas on different silos and there's not as much connectivity between them as maybe there should be maybe philosophers would do philosophy differently if they knew more about biology and neuroscience physics there's only so much that you can specialize in or know too much about but yeah opening up these silos and connecting these silos is very important for getting more holistic there's no other way to get a more holistic picture than by just doing it connecting learning about all these different areas and trying to connect them and build new sorts of disciplines we see this all the time in pure math as well where mathematicians synthesize different areas of mathematics to create new branches you said something earlier that I found interesting there were a lot of things that you said that were interesting so I kind of forgot it but I think it had to do with I associated with the term global connectivity so I think you were saying our population has been increasing so much over the past 100 years and not only that but we're becoming more globally connected thanks to the internet you can talk to anyone around the world people like Dunbar's number is probably increasing in some sense because you can use different people very quickly and have periodic reminders that sort of thing so of course that's only under one definition of what it means to communicate with someone or sufficiently I guess but we're becoming so much more globally connected and we're being exposed to different world views that we've never seen before different political theories or social hierarchies and that sort of thing than we've ever been exposed to before and so this is why systematically understanding people who are not like ourselves who did not grow up in the same conditions why that's so important and how we can figure out how to more effectively come to or be socially harmonious and not only that but this is also where I know social justice gets a bad rap but this is where some sort of social justice comes into play where there are people across the world we are fortunate enough to live in first world country with all these running water and so on and so forth social justice about raising the baseline of living for all beings across the world and eradicating the violences that occur in greed and corruption and racism and sexism and bigotry of any sort I think we also get very caught up in our own basically we've had such a lot of us have had such good educational opportunities that sort of thing where we sort of like there is a quote from this book Philosophical Dialectics an essay on Metaphilosophy by Nicholas fresher where he taught I don't remember the exact quote verbatim but it was like systemic interconnectedness of philosophical disciplines philosophy we can really get we can hop on our hobby horses and just go in one direction without considering the rest what's important sometimes it seems like we're even doing this with I hesitate to say first world philosophy but it seems like we often discount people in underdeveloped countries which is why effective altruism is a good starting point I think there needs to be more infrastructural development or something that's a completely different topic of discussion I want to hear how you want to help us understand how we engage with artifacts and how those update our world views so we should first just explicate what exactly an artifact is artifacts are just any technological gadgets basically any item that has been human made a table could be an artifact or a computer could be an artifact the internet in some sense could be considered an artifact it's describing the ontology of the internet you can do it in several different ways the internet is an artifact it's a man made construct that we interact with we interact with different parts of the internet of course it's shaped our lives so much not just our belief systems based on what we've interacted with on the internet but even just our neurology or the way we our cognition there's general trends going more towards instant gratification that sort of thing thanks to twitter and video games and so on and so forth yeah so you said how can we use artifact understand our engagement with artifacts and how that updates our world views yeah it's hard to systematically track that because we don't have enough obtaining the behavioral data is also very difficult but I think also with the internet of things it would be easier to track just what you interact with not even how you interact with it when we open up the data flows it becomes easier to do this to see what we're interacting with and become decentralized and then gain better insights I feel like I also sort of gave a mischaracterization of the internet of things it's not exactly like it's hard to describe exactly but one example I could give is WeChat Pay we have all these different so WeChat Pay is Venmo for China basically but it's ubiquitous you can use it to purchase pretty much anything in big cities in China and so if you can you have a catalog of all these different things that you're selling and you can say here's a transaction that I made I purchased this thing or spent money to do whatever that would be one way of determining here's what I interact with in terms of the artifactual world now with people it's sort of similar it's very difficult to do this data science there's going back the reason why we're trying to do this is to determine how our worldviews change based on what we interact with so of course they change based on how we interact with different things around us and different people around us and different ideas that are around us so you could call them meme plexus collections of memes that form that tend to form together and how we interact with those higher order complexes of ideas so this is a very fruitful research area there's so many artifacts because everything is an artifact it becomes really difficult to identify which artifacts we should actually log first as part of making up our world view and then better understand how we're updating our lives with those artifacts it seems as though there's so much data in the silos of the facebook's and amazon google's and apples of the world even our banking data just to be able to decentralize those and be able to scrape them to find where what artifacts we're engaging with how often we're taking uber or lift rides how often we are purchasing food versus purchasing groceries and what groceries we are purchasing with farmers we're supporting this goes again it's the cybernetics view of things it's just all super interconnected the whole causality thing is interesting too you could say oh there were these trends in my life where let's say I did purchase more of this type of food or this food at this type of place let's say like a fast food place and you know what caused that there could be extra stressors travel or something like that you could totally start finding relationships and starting to this is a big research area that sandy pentland's lab the social physics lab at the MIT media lab is working on this sort of thing I'm not sure exactly how much they use causality really things but there would be an interesting thing to look at alright how about we go into the benefits of semantic publishing oh yeah so this is a bit different from semantic publishing is just like we should first I guess look at the history of by semantic publishing I mean like scientific publishing like publishing scientific results in like a semantic like let's say like markup language some like like formal ontology or something that is machine readable like natively machine readable as opposed to like having to like do all this like text mining on like corporate of text now semantic publishing is sort of like I wouldn't say like not disrupting like publishing industry but along those like lines where for the past several hundred years I think like 300 years or something we've had this like journal sort of publishing or like a paper based publishing so you write up a paper and then you disseminate it you like submit it to a journal and then you know if it's good it gets accepted and it gets disseminated to all the people who want to read the journal that sort of thing and we've seen like a more like open source type of thing with like the archive and like plus one all those like open access journals now that's really really good especially for like opening those like data silos to like people who otherwise would not be able to form the journals but they're still also in this format that is not machine readable right or it's like hard to like get actual like content like scientific content from those papers right so to get actually like semantic like meaning that's very difficult now what semantic polishing does is it says okay you can still like submit these papers but you can also define like these semantic networks of like you know like high level scientific information or just information about the study that you've done or you know whatever research you've done so this was developed at the Free University of Amsterdam by Tobias Kuhn so he has this like so they're called nano publications so there's a series of like different sorts of semantic publications so there's micro I think I think it's like micro publications is what it's called is another like form so it's still like these like a paper based sort of publication but it's like a very short paper with like also with like semantic data so the more machine readable our scientific papers are the more we can make connections between them and better understand how to update our world view faster more effectively not even so much that but just like like deriving like new like avenues for like scientific exploration and like also determining like this person uploaded or like uploaded this network of data there's like prominence there as well you see an array of data being published and then you realize well what about this area or that area or intertwining these two and so then those are the those are the black and or those are the gray areas that we haven't explored yet and so then we're prompted go invest into the investigate into those areas and even like like for visualization purposes it's really good to totally yeah okay how are you going to take your your undergraduate research how are you going to take the the thesis of of these world views how are you going to take this and disseminate it as an entrepreneur an artist as a professor how are you going to get this out to more people yeah um so that's the classic like academic issues like oh I'm working on this stuff that's really cool but like oftentimes very few people care about it it like especially like um if you're let's say even in like pure math um like highly specialized fields of pure math like I heard one person say like yeah I dropped out of my hd after my like fifth or sixth year because after working on it for like all these years because I realized um I wasn't passionate about it or like as passionate as I used to be and like uh you know only four people could understand it outside of myself much less care um so that's the classic like academic issue um and same with philosophy like uh outside of like typically like pretty narrow so you want to be translational to hopefully billions of people yeah that's a big issue but like um so the way I the way I yeah the way I'm trying to do this I I'm very much like um impact focus first um I would not do it I would not um do this work if I didn't think it would it could actually have like um positive social impact um there are of course issues with this sort of thing as well but not just uh I don't want to just uh like do like meta philosophy or like like work on formalizing the worldviews that sort of thing I want I'm doing that for the particular reason that I can you know actually create um like applications uh for people to like their own worldviews uh track how their like worldviews are updating um and that sort of thing and how would you with other people how would you make those applications for people to better update their worldviews and debate with others um so this goes back into like uh determining what exactly is a worldview so there are certain like representation issues that you have to um consider like how do I actually model things um and how do I get people how do I incentivize people to actually like uh write in their own worldviews right so one way of doing of starting to do this is saying like oh you can just like uh get it from like polls that people answer right like oh like do you prefer like this political candidate or that political candidate or do you prefer this um like uh in in this situation would you prefer to you know um in this like ethical minded situation like the trolley problem for instance would you prefer to do this or that uh and you could say oh well you know different answers um that you give on these like uh survey questions can determine uh certain certain things about your worldview um and maybe like let's say uh you're given this like this uh you know uh like a political compass or something like that we say oh maybe like maybe that's not an accurate description uh let me like investigate this for that sort of thing um there are that's that's only one trajectory there's a whole bunch of different trajectories that are possible for this sort of thing so you're just going to keep exploring yeah and like do like another um another thing to consider is like you can also use it to uh help philosophers do better philosophy or like um more like interconnected philosophy um where you know they say okay here's here's like a philosophical system that I'm working with that I'm working in right or like uh some like some uh some some theories and some some fields that I subscribe to and advocate for um and maybe there's some people who oppose this so I'm going to argue with them and we can come to like either a compromise or like whatever that sort of thing um now the data silos seem to be a really hot place to go to because if you can scrape that data and incentivize people to work together across the silos then you can really gain a good psychometric footprint on what someone's world view is and you can also like um say like you can suggest like communities for people to join based on like certain um like you know then you can pass them that as the next step yeah and there are also a lot of ethical concerns here um there's like privacy concerns and like well if it's all encrypted and decentralized uh anonymized then maybe it's a little bit easier to do but also um you do want to be uh little like little nudged out of an echo chamber and you know you can get that if someone's making a recommendation for you based on um your purchase history and your chat history and stuff like that um I want to ask you a couple quick questions that we typically ask on the way out and of course we've only scratched the surface on world view understandings uh and and updating and period this is a very interesting subfield and we'll hopefully be able to dive into this uh in more depth over time yeah the the typical question is I think it was good though it was a good first uh conversational start to things first question what's a core driving principle of yours uh oh man um it depends on the day I guess um but I'd say most of the time it's uh social harmony the reason why I'm doing this is like it's a communications project pretty much I wouldn't even characterize it as like a philosophy project it's a communications project um for people to uh more effectively like collaborate with each other and cooperate with each other and just understand each other um so that also can get us close to the truth right yeah um if you know we're not so caught up in like these like bickering and that sort of thing um so yeah probably uh I'd say social harmony it's a very like complicated answer that I wouldn't have enough time to go into here because the way I got to that um to this you know um this like uh conclusion I guess or this like core driving principle um is like very strange and like convoluted and um like the a better explication of social harmony in the way that I see it is like also like a bit like convoluted um but yeah basically just getting like increasing like I guess like global connectivity and like yeah yeah that's a good answer social harmony um the communication infrastructure and design that that we have today will directly produce the world we live in tomorrow so um it's a good good answer what about next question if you could rebuild civilization from scratch how would you design it oh yeah so I got a similar question at uh like an icebreaker thing um or an icebreaker session at a conference that I went to about like six seven months ago um I had I didn't really have a good answer then uh I'm still not sure if I have a good answer but um if I could design civilization from scratch um like human civilization uh is there like a starting point that I'm going towards or hmm um how do I design it I don't know exactly how I would design it but I would probably just uh get people to be more cooperative or like like I don't know that's that's a very loaded question um but yeah um I don't know if I'm supposed to be there's so many different like factors here like am I supposed to be designing like um like the biology of humans or like uh like communicative structures or something like it very much pick um yeah um so like if I were to like let's say like program my own like world um where you know we don't have like um the several billion or however like 14.7 billion years of of cosmic like evolution um and then like you know biological evolution so on and so forth um yeah that's that's a really cool question um I would there's like population concerns as well um yeah I definitely change um how receptive people are to like uh you know people who's I guess worldviews oppose their own and just pretty much make people more open to like uh new information new experiences that sort of thing um there's my like um like comprehensive answer would take much more time to explain but yeah that's this is good um it's it's thought experiment wise I'm glad that you're uh you also ran in a bunch of different ways which is very important um next question do you think we're in a simulation? um I definitely did at one point um in fact that was the grounding for my entire worldview for several months um and that's a long story as well but um I when you were in that worldview tell us about what it was like um so I I sort of like latched on so I had these like ontological um beliefs I guess or like uh on like arguments I wouldn't say ontological arguments because that typically has a connotation or like a reference to like um certain like philosophical arguments throughout history like by Aquinas and um Gordel and like other people um but uh these like arguments basically like they were started um based on Zeno's paradoxes of motion um and so I got to thinking like oh maybe uh space time is discreet because I think I can better refute the arguments against like uh continuous space time than I can against discreet space time and like I have all these like computational tools that I've been exposed to that sort of thing and like oh yeah like okay um and of course like growing up with the internet and like computers I was probably more biased towards that view as well um and then like things such as like the simulation argument um like Boston's simulation argument um and stuff that max time mark has written those sorts of things uh definitely uh like push me further towards that um and so I the you said I uh am on my second undergrad thesis my first undergrad thesis was actually on it was motivated by um this simulation aspect where it was actually giving like like uh computational formalisms for um um like like uh you know the base like ontological structure of the world um and how we can um basically abstract from certain um like computational models um to you know give a natural like account of uh that's like this simulatory sort of yeah yeah yeah because when you do go back and compute what happens with this this code in this universe and you fast forward 13.8 billion years you see us here having this conversation alright last question what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world oh yeah okay um I don't know if it's like I think math honestly that that's that's my honest answer is math like there's um it's so nicely compressed and uh like I've I think the strongest like emotional reactions that I've had to things in my life was actually to like um mathematical results that I've seen I love it so probably like I don't think there's like I don't subscribe to objective um beauty but in from me personally in my own subjective yeah experience I love it I love that um most generally like in most cases yeah yeah this has been such a good episode across world views across understanding how best update them across understanding how to best parse all of the information finding signal updating our world views through that helping understand how to best guide children through their stimuli and their world views and there's a lot to unpack left but I like I like the I like the path towards it towards a civilizational truth and building on top of that and having dialogue to build on that towards social harmony towards social harmony yeah thanks for coming on the show thanks for having me this is great yeah it's been such a super pleasure thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love to hear from you let us know your thoughts in the comments below on the topics we were talking about do join us in the conversation also do check out Adam's links below in the bio check out his links and join us join simulation we need your help to continue sustaining the project growing it coming to more great places like New York to interview diverse leaders so do join us and go and build the future everyone manifest your destiny into the world we got 25,000 days each let's build the future we love you very much and we'll see you soon peace that's it cool awesome good job