Classical Chinese Has No Hard Problem of Consciousness - Dr. Brook Ziporyn (DemystifySci +449)

0:00Welcome back to Dima's website, I'm Shailo. I'm Anastasia. This is the podcast where research for theories and ideas that are going to change the world. And today we are talking about something that has gone terribly wrong in our modern study of the natural world. In physics, chemistry, biology, any discipline that you can think of, economics, anthropology, whatever. What we try to do is we try to take some unit that we are interested in understanding and strip it away from all of its context in order to simplify the system down to some essential parts that we then seek to explain. But there's a problem with this because by stripping it away, by taking it out of the context in which it operates, we put ourselves into a position where we are forever doomed to not actually be able to understand the thing and how it relates in context to the rest of the universe. And so with us today as professor Brooks Apporin of the University of Chicago, who studies ancient Chinese literature and religion. And the reason the professor's apporin is an excellent partner for this conversation

1:03is because he has this incredible theory about the linguistic content of two traditions, the Indo-European tradition and the classical Chinese tradition, that reveals two very different ways for thinking about the natural world. And perhaps the thing that we need in order to actually be able to understand how the universe fits together can only be found in this other tradition, in this ancient classical Chinese tradition. And he leads us through why that might be and the linguistic features that make it so. Huge thank you to our supporters, particularly our patrons. We love seeing you guys every Sunday morning at the Sunday salon. If you want to make sure that this show can continue and grow and become more and more powerful at exploring these ideas, we need your support because we don't have sponsors, we don't last your ads across these podcasts. And so in addition to Patreon, you could consider picking up some of the stuff we make here at Demystify Size Studios. In particular, we make a lot of music. So if you like rock and roll, you might enjoy our music, our band's called Secretary of Nature.

2:07If you want to support the project, you could pick up a copy of our latest record on vinyl, which is you can find a link to down in the description. We also have a book out just today, hit Amazon. And it is called Paradox Lost, the Material Principles of Natural Philosophy, where we examine a finite set of problems within the larger context that we're having with professors of porn today, which is what exactly is a physical body? And can we supply explanations for fundamental physical phenomena that terminates in material bodies? So check out those two things if you want to make sure this project can continue. And before we get to the conversation with professors of porn, one more note. If you are into physics and into hanging out with people that are way into it as well, come to us Saturday morning live streams. 10 a.m. Pacific. Right now we're going through Paradox Lost, chapter by chapter. Afterwards, once we get done with that, we're probably going to be just going through more modern experiments and taking papers apart and showing a far less paradoxical interpretation for modern physics.

3:09So we hope to see you there Saturdays at 10 a.m. And for now, enjoy a little sample of our music before we get to the conversation. We'll see you next time. The Titans were born on an errant land. They banded together in those rows of sand. After reading the selection of pieces that you sent us, the way that we've been thinking about your ideas is that they seem to represent a plausible model for the way that there has been a fork in human cognition that creates two radically different world views. And those two radically different world views then create really different problems that people are trying to solve.

4:15And so there is this, it seems like you are proposing that there's this intrinsic quality of the languages that stem from Chinese versus the ones that stem from the Indo-European tradition that creates a completely different body of questions that can even really be asked about the modern, about the natural world. And so it seems like in the Indo-European tradition we have these questions that seem to have no answer. You know, like, why is there something rather than nothing? And people spill so much ink over these questions and they get lost in these topics. And I think that even consciousness kind of fits into this question because the way that we understand consciousness and the way that we build our theories around it, we get to this place where it's like, wow, it's so weird. How do we have this thing? And you're arguing that that seems to be an affectation of our linguistic structures. And so before we lay all of this out and we head towards, you know, how these differences in linguistic structures

5:20lead us to create problems that perhaps are not really problems that we then spend centuries wrestling with. Maybe we can go through and understand how it is that you got interested in these questions because you are so well versed in this classical Chinese literature. You have such a deep understanding of the language and I want to understand what your path was to being preoccupied with these questions. I encountered some translations of early Chinese texts, particularly these Taoist texts like the Dauda Jing, which was all over the place as a high school student. Dauda Jing was interesting though in a resonant way because it made claims that made absolutely no sense to me. And yet had a certain resonance because they were very unusual. I mean, I'll be more specific. Well, maybe something like the second chapter of the Dauda Jing says, when all in the world know the good as the good, this is the bad example.

6:24I had no, there's no context. There's no explanation, right? There's just these kind of claims, but there is some kind of weaving of something going on. So I was quite mystified, but the name I've given to this sort of cluster of themes of things like that is value paradox. So things of that nature. And I suppose, you know, if I wanted to analyze my adolescent self, it would be what I have something to do with that. That had a felt appeal, but also, you know, seemed to reflect something in my experience. It is slippery nature of what seems good and what seems bad, what seems valuable, what seems valueless as sort of an ultimate fact rather than something to be cleared up was a not a lie. So paradoxicality mainly in the in the realm of values to begin with. But more to the point of your question, I guess the thing was I was very interested, but that Dauda Jing doesn't really explain anything, right?

7:26It's just throws all this stuff at you. So I went in an unusual show of diligence. I think I went to look at other translations, you know, I just randomly came to one and they were so completely different. You know, there are more translations of that book than any other book. And the thing about these different translations as I've remarked in my own translation, adding to the pile of hundreds and hundreds of translations is that they're different. It's not only that they say different things, what they're saying things about different. They're very subject matter that claims are being made about or construed differently by different translators. Now I had no idea how this could be so. And so that did give me curious in what possible language. This could be that how could a text translate be that ambiguous and yet still be a text still be a thing still be saying ostensibly saying something, that's commented down from thousands of years. It's like has this important cultural role. The Dauda Jing is a can you is it very call it a religious text?

8:33I wouldn't call it that, but this is another one of those things that's among the contested things in the range of the time. I don't want to bore you too much of the historical side of this, but I can give you a little. But I'll just say this like that text has been commented on and interpreted as a text of metaphysics as a text of military strategy as a text of hygiene. The subject matter of that text is up for grabs. I maybe should have sent you this if we're going to get into this, but I mean what I look at as at this point in my life is. Actually not a book with a single author, this is due to certain archaeological discoveries and things like that that things we can kind of summarize about the origin of it. But kind of like a collection of a sort of a best of anthology around a certain kind of a theme. And then I go to my translation I sort of compared it to maybe a discussion board of a very fringe group as we would have it on the internet or a book like best of New York cartoons from dentist office doors or something like that.

9:49There are parameters of selection of what went into it, right, but these could be very different. It could be the denting office as you know, how is pain plays or it could be about expensive to dentist or whatever. There's a lot of range and some of your contributors are sort of more sharper than others and some are interested a little differently, but there is a theme. And that theme is in my view, there's something around this idea of value paradox or the relation of the determinant to the indeterminate, you know, the good comes with an intrinsic imperative to intensify increase it. But in the very act of bringing it to an extreme it ceases to be good. So the purification of something making it more what it is zeroing in on it, excluding from it the things that seem to be obstructing it actually undermines its very essence. And where this is this is kind of familiar to people probably in their daily lives to some extent, I mean, especially musicians right you know people getting 45 takes of that track and you just completely obliterated any of you perfected it any route it right.

11:03So make that a general ontological principle and you sort of have the doubt about it. It's sort of the anti play though right because the idea here is that you know what's a perfect triangle right or what's a perfect flower something. It should you should get rid of all the non trying things right like the sensory the imperfections of the lines right the fact that it is a part of the visual world rather than the pure formula of the triangle whatever. That would be sort of a platonic view right you get to the essence of the thing by defining out all the things that aren't that do not intrinsically belong to the doubted thing idea is incredibly simplified and you know i'm sort of overstating this a little bit something like the theme that ties all these little pieces together is something about how things reverse and can only exist when. Inmatched in otherness in some way somewhat is different from that so you know the kind of.

12:04Crude example sort of flowers in dirt. That's not from the data chain that's that but just okay you want a pure flower you want the floweriness you like that you like the nice pretty appearance and smell so try to get rid of all the non flowery stuff you kill the flower. That kind of an idea so now we have to rethink what an essence of a thing is right and in fact the relation between the desired part since another big scene in that and the undesired part of the noticed part or and the unnoticed part or I would put it the foreground in the background. So and that the foreground background relationship is unsurpassable but brings with it these weird effects these weird sort of paradoxical turn around was the value paradox something that was in the scholarship when you arrived i mean everybody notice that there was something. Yeah I would say some kind of people will use the word irony or you know certainly reversal was a theme everybody notice not only in Dallas thought but in Chinese thought in general and this is a very straightforward kind of.

13:13Every day naive notion right it comes from collection calendars when a thing reaches its extreme it reverses and they're really literally just thinking about the winter solstice as the beginning of the heat. When it always darkness before the dawn type of thing right just like folk a dutch kind of level of think but that is a all becomes almost a universal guiding principle on lots of so you say is it a religious text it is in it later on but much later on applied in what we would probably recognize categorize as a religion but but be aware I mean this is this again not that interesting point but just to clarify there's a thing called the Dallas religion. That Dallas religion has lots of gods the doubt is you can just no proper knowns in it that's another really weird thing about it there's no names of places or times or or agents okay so and it's I would say pretty explicitly in an atheist text by which I mean it talks about.

14:17Now background as something essential to any entity that would be proposed including it mentions this in one chapter the highest day it precedes the highest day there's a back if the day it is the flower we're talking about the dirt of that flower yeah but I mean check this out historically it's a very weird phenomenon quite a long time okay I don't think even loud is a real person or he's not that doesn't have any to do with this text. There was a figure this is this is way too into the reason we'll go into it but there's this text for for whatever reasons culturally kind of interesting it gets associated with this name louds and the name you'll see on the cover of translations of the book 500 years later so basically you know from Leonardo to us type of times again somebody claims I saw louds in a vision of the world. Okay and louds are told me here's how we should read the doubted.

15:19Yeah now there was a school the very really school of that that wrote a commentary that was very very really to even kind of a million area in movement that text was lost until a discovery in the 20th century so not very mainstream or maybe suppressed in later times but it did get integrated in then a couple hundred years after that 150 or something a huge religious movement involving these visionary experiences and louds or louds are called as an honorific constantly appears and it's dictating all kinds of stuff right so this mythical figure and of course that includes a way of reading that old 500 year old doubted. So it's as if you know Leonardo can see appeared to me and said by the way here's the key to my notebooks it's actually all about this other thing and the doubting is ambiguous enough to support that. At the same time it is that it's happening you have to talk about sort of strata of literacy and things like that to get into this and it's probably too boring to go into.

16:22But at the same time you have very highly metaphysical commentaries being written it's moved over into philosophical tradition that has nothing to do with that religion. These are concurrent things that are both talking about the same text and as I said there's also these sort of hygiene sort of martial artsy kind of applications and and anyway my point was was just going to be the text is about a structure and the structure could be a lot of things that are different. And the structure could conceivably apply anywhere and the fun the puzzle is how is it going to apply if we start talking about. Military strategy and a couple chapters are explicit about that or about government which was sort of one of the main interests of the literary class for obvious reasons so you know why does being low make you high. You know why does being weak make you strong things like that right those can be strategic with those can be reshaped into straightforward untrary and strategic or tactical matters.

17:25It seems like a direct contradiction to the we're not in direct opposition to the Aristotelian tradition right because in the Aristotelian tradition you have the doctrine of substantial forms which is the fact that the thing in and of itself. Is where the essence is contained and so you can get down to the bottom of it and you can you can take it away from all of its context and it will still have this immutable quality of itself so it seems like. Is this the foundation of what you view as this separation and thought this like Aristotelian platonic worldview versus the Tate chain. Yeah absolutely you have the nail on the head that right so you know in that in that long in saying book I said to you that 80s and book I tried a little bit sketch this out but this is the way I would think about it thinking about early Greek thought you know from a very. Sort of most broad stroke stepping five steps back kind of point of view.

18:32There's a you know very early first of all there's the parmenody and being nothing problem and again this is one of the really interesting marks is how how those terms or equivalent terms are used in classical Chinese you do not dichotomize them second same second chapter the downaging says being and and not being give rise to each other. And then it lists them parallel to a whole bunch of other of exactly the kind of things like to say the dark in the light the front in the back blah blah blah blah blah right and they're all value dis asymmetry with the assumption that non being really just means absence in that article I talk about a little grammatically there's some some tricky pieces in that but the point of it is your exactly right let me just get up to Aristotle right the idea that a thing intrinsically have just sits there having properties right and that is. That is when you would look outside of its relations so you know you again you want to slice off everything extraneous to get itself to get at what it is right that that sort of impulse.

19:37I do think that's a really good way to sort of get at the parting of the ways here and away but if you go back a few steps you know there was this idea of a pair on in early Greece the boundless right. It is an excellent right to suggest this as the arcade right this is the first cause this is quite this is a move where where the two traditions are rather close right because the formula that the boundless the infinite but also something which cannot be determined definitely doesn't have any boundaries around it right i'm. Is then looked at is that which things arise in parishing right but as the actual general source but right after that there's a. Maybe with the Pythagorean but certainly by the time of play though and Aristotle a real reaction against a pair on it's almost equivalent to chaos or you know death right the where articulation boundedness separation becomes the not only the standard of the ontological standard.

20:40What it means to be but also that I think maybe before that a standard of value right and and this is really what i'm trying to get in that in that last book so there's a kind of rebellion against a pair on you could say or push back against it you know Aristotle denies any actual infinity right what is real most real is going to be for it's going to be definite this is going to be articulation. Articulation the separate form another way to put this is if you continue building an axiomander line which is kind of this the dallas line right what you're really thinking about is. On entity and this also has to do with these and with linguistic factors right because. In the absence of those morphological features if I take a single Chinese character in classical Chinese tax and just look at it by itself. I think at the example I used to know it's just beauty right I might that might be beauty it might be beautiful it might be an a beautiful person it might be a beautiful thing it might be to beautify there's really no way for me to know.

21:46The only way I can know is if it's in a sense right so I don't get meaning the meaning isn't there inside the character right it's in its relation to the other characters sometimes postponed for several lives until you can make sense of how to. It might right what's the clause here where does this clause and where and therefore what's the noun what's the verb is there a noun etc so. What this amounts to as I said in that in that piece is you know a very strong sensitivity to context and indeed sort of a the constitutive nature for the identity identifiability of what something is entirely dependent on context. A little further out from that this is you can read this already sort of into the doubted thing but I would say this is a this was pointed out but. For long before I got interested in these problems but a sort of tendency to look at the knowing of an object as a carving out of something from a prior.

22:50Background so again a foreground background relation and literally the metaphors are like cutting. So the downaging picks this up with a notion of like raw material and the creation of a vessel right and it it's it's sort of you want to make let's say a ritual vessel a cup would say out of wood and so you have a big block of wood or you have a tree and then you carve out this form right and that means. Throwing away the other stuff which you then call. Crap or got some of the say down means garbage you know the useless part right and in that one cut you've created to think the value and the disvalue. Now if I try to ask what was that cover what is it made of or what is there before this division I really can't call it cup I can only say it's much like that crap lying around on the floor you know the way that stuff is. Of course that's not quite accurate either right because that's already post form so there's sort of a built in ambiguity to these.

23:56Disvalued characters that. Sqewe the system but what they all basically are the thing that formed things are cut out. Right so there's a tendency to think of. Beings as divided down from a whole the whole proceeding the parts rather than the parts building up into a whole. And the qualities of things having being determined entirely by where they fit into a whole just that's the meaning of a word does right. But that starts to that everything's fine there for a while right as long as you have a finite context but the thing about context is they're by nature and limitable because they are outward pointing. I mean they are outward point in itself right they are the pointing outward of determination so. You can have the same thing in several contexts at once and that means it is going to register as several different identities at once.

24:59This is the most rational presentation for my western brain that I've ever heard for Eastern philosophy already and it's funny because like last time I really looked into it I was probably 18 or something. I read in all of these books myself trying to make sense of the universe and at some point I just gave up because I felt like they were just kind of fucking with me like I felt like it was just you know I just felt like riddles and I wasn't so you know I turned you know back to the Greeks and everything you know how it goes. But this makes a ton of sense and it my mind goes to some of the biggest open questions that we've been playing with here in the science universe you know questions like what is life right and it's it's for. We're a long time appeared to us in our conversations privately to that it's impossible to understand a life form in a jar like it's just impossible at the bare minimum they need the gases that the trees outside are producing. But you can scale it up from that I mean you put what's the worst way you can punish a human being it's like you could kill them but that's not much of I mean that's a punishment for sure but to really torture someone like you put them in isolation right so you know cutting cutting off the way that we think even about these.

26:10Most fundamental concepts and biology from their context seems to me to be at the root of a lot of our issues and trying to you know create you know engineer solutions to our biological problems it's it's devoid of context and I wonder. I wonder if you know. This isn't at the heart of why those philosophies at some intuitive level are so appealing to young people coming out of a western educational background because I think a lot of people stumble into this stuff and there was a huge resurgence of it in the 60s I know but I wonder if it isn't speaking to a hunger for some piece of understanding about the universe that isn't there for us. Yeah yeah and I suppose I mean the case of sort of the sort of the beats in the 50s right bring this sort of sad and a little bit of Taoism and then this huge thing in the 60s with also a lot of Indian gurus and things the Beatles and India but not right the beach boys over there.

27:17A lot of different things right we're coming into that picture but definitely there's there's some those are motivated by some sense that. At a pretty fundamental level there's some kind of baseline assumptions that could be reworked that are accounting for some sort of feeling of. In congruity yeah exactly into a connection yeah because like I see the value of defining things rigorously I'm absolutely a fan of that when especially in science in any kind of technical. Conversation it's really important to know what the other persons means by a word especially if it's instrumental in their presentation but the way that we've learned to define things in our western tradition doesn't really contextualize them and I can just see how that would be that has been to me without even declaring it to myself intuitively troubling over the years and I think a lot of people just feel that some sub stratum level.

28:22Yeah because it does lead to these a poor yeah right if you actually try to think through what it would mean for something to just sit there having all these all by itself right just being what it is we always have to abstract in some way right so you know it's like saying I mean recently talking to sort of about consciousness right it's consciousness produced by the brain. And it's not just for this right right and you know is breathing it produced by the lungs really spread by the lungs and oxygen you know yeah a lot of pressure in the atmosphere and the right yeah I mean one of my favorites is one of my favorites is light actually which is really funny because you know textbooks always talk about light is like this little magic can in the shoots out of atoms but you know there's this actually one of the most famous chemists this is. Guy G and Lewis who did all the little electron diagrams and stuff. Lewis actually pointed out back in the 20s he was like it's kind of absurd to talk about light without at least two atoms because there's no evidence that you ever have light without two atoms and it just kind of got ignored but it's such a good point actually and I and you know we've you know without boring you to death about the details like that seems to reveal a tremendous amounts of information about what light actually is once you start thinking about it that way and I wonder how much.

29:46Of our understanding of the natural world has been decontextualized the point that it's. Cyphered it so impenetrable that we're missing really obvious pieces of the puzzle yeah you're idea about. Concepts that are uphill versus downhill in language is really useful here and so I wonder if you couldn't kind of wrap that into this. Oh yeah yeah yeah I did want to say that before right because we're hearing this kind of talk about sort of the role of linguistic structures. For many people this gets. It's raised as some hackles right so I did did want to make clear as I did in that piece that yeah I'm not talking about any kind of linguistic determinism right I do think it's possible you know so to go back to the concrete example yeah classical Chinese has no tenses. But that doesn't mean you can't specify time you can't you just need a special extra thing added and it's not mandatory for a sentence to be a sentence right to make sense and I think that mandatory quality of what counts as a complete thought or complete.

30:53Meaning is what has a kind of influence on metaphysical intuitions but again it's sort of statistical rather than. Sort of a hard constraint so I think yeah so uphill and downhill is just a way of trying to talk about there are some things in a language that it's harder to explain is something you you kind of can experience very directly I do trying to say lecture in Chinese it's not my first language but it's not only that difficulty. I've taught sort of the same class in English and in Chinese right and leaving aside you know my limitations of my spoken Chinese there are some things that you have to explain a great length in one of those languages and nobody can get it and you have to use tons of examples and like really convoluted speech and a lot of premises that are packed packed up in the language it takes five seconds and it gets immediately right and vice versa. This idea about linguistic determinism and you had to make this caveat really like this isn't what I'm saying I think that there is a sort of influence from the language to the way that people are thinking but it's not deterministic can you give us a little bit of a frame for the controversy of why you have to make these caveats yeah yeah yeah thanks sorry I wanted to get back to that too so because this was a this was it was it's one of those ideas that was like so appealing in the in the first.

32:22Kind of generation of starting to think about these things the thing in linguistics called the warfian hypothesis right of linguistic determinism and I guess it was associated with. On the one hand I think experimentally it's easy to disprove it as a hard people can learn to make those distinctions in either language if there is motivation to do so so you try to do experiments and say okay can you distinguish this from this if I call it this with this. Very quickly people need a language can learn to do that right and can you state the hypothesis just on its face just so it's just that it's just it's literally the crudest form would be okay if there's no word for something in a language that the limits of our language of the limits of our thoughts the constanian way of putting it and so whatever you know there there are. This was kind of applied to different cultures as examples exactly right and you look at like hide a group people like that will say like we can only really think so so I would agree can turn obviously.

33:23You know and so it's built the language itself is speaking into has this primordial whatever blah blah blah so. Is that dimension of it right there was some worry kind of that and you're sort of claiming to know what the limitations of someone else's thought I do want to be really clear I don't think there's anything like. That I do think there's a whole grammatically in the way that our metaphysical intuitions are are just going to across time I mean again it's a question of effort and energy expanded right so with a lot of energy you can think against the grain of your language right things like. You know those kind of questions you mentioned beginning like well okay this is happening what's doing it. Something has to be doing it because it's happening right that just seems like baseline if you speak. A language for most of us most of the time doesn't mean you can't like try to bracket that as a way maybe is there some way I can put the piece but it's going to get complicated if you try to do that right and you get explain it to the next speaker of your language.

34:27You know it's not going to transmit very far it's not going to live very long probably right so you're going to get this sort of clustering over time where the things that sort of. parallel or you know are. Elaborate on the metaphysical intuitions that would be most intuitive right so just well what does it mean to be a thing what does it mean to it's going to be something like well what does it mean to say this thing exists. Right what am I actually claiming what how what's the minimal requirements. For that for my claim that this exists while there is going to be different ways that's good together right but yeah but I also I'm and you know it in general I guess I'm sort of suspicious of historical and sociological explanations in general. I think the Wurfian hypothesis became really unpopular because like you say it had a determinism associated with it which it was saying that the language informs an absolute limit on cognition and so if your language doesn't have these concepts in it then your brain literally cannot grasp them and I think that that as as cultural diffusion in the modern day has increased and cultures are meeting it's obvious that that's not the case and so I think that that's why it's falling out.

35:48But yeah the fundamental piece of it which is that well hold on a second but you do have this you say inter subjectivity comes before subjectivity and so you have this context in which you learn to think and there's a context in which you learn to encounter the world which is deeply informed by the forms that the language allows you to construct and so to throw that away completely and to say that that has absolutely no bearing on the first order thoughts that you say. So I think the answer is that you start to form as you enter into the moment of subjectivity seems like we throw away some important piece of understanding the way that our brains work differently not as a limits but as a background as a habit you know it's like there's two two way I mean we acquire knowledge both through experience but also a great deal of knowledge just through transmission and it would be insane to try to be a human and read or have everything on your own all the time.

36:48And so it makes a lot of sense that you would just inherit these community ways of thinking as a matter of course for participating in transmission of knowledge and that that would that would predispose you towards a way of approaching certain existential questions. And I tried to limit it in another way because you know the in the case of classical Chinese it is a continuous tradition of sort of back and forth among thinkers by doing sort of. Metaphysical speculation cosmological speculation right on the logical speculation ethical speculation referring sort you know and which is not to say that you know you could say that may happen I don't know how much that had to do with Chinese society on the ground right. This was a very small elite class of highly literate people right but they their conversation partners their sources their paradigms were these texts written in this language and their own thinking I this I will want to claim the constant factor.

37:51For the body of thought that emerged from that process right is this they're living in very different time centuries apart right in different regions they were probably speaking rapidly different dialects of you call them dialects of Chinese but a lot of them are you know i'm not comfortable to each other right. So there every day life discussions that's one thing I'm just leaving that out of the discussion but there's this written discourse. That is continuous over this long period of time which is where we get the body of sort of philosophical commentary speculation that theorizing and so that factor those structural factors right when you are forming a hypothesis that's going to. Um ramify have influence for others in that same tradition I think yeah it's impossible to ignore. Um what counts as a good explanation right what is convincing what is. Uh seems to be doing the work of making a a claim that occurs with.

38:54How one thinks and experiences the world. Yeah. And so I think that this is a decent place to go into the direction that you wanted to go into which is this question of the massive linguistic differences between the two. The fork the fork yeah because you make this like super outrageous claim which is really fun. I really wanted it to be true when I was reading it and I still hope that it is true that that there's basically been two experiments on earth. With humanity and language the east and the west which is that's a really really interesting statement and uh the funny thing is the first thing that my mind thought of testing it with we were just in the yucatan last week. And uh and I was we were first of all trying to speak Spanish so doing a lot of spanglish and uh also studying the Mayan languages a bit not learning how to speak them but you know trying to understand. The people that were there prior to the arrival of the Europeans and what happened and all that.

40:01And uh this thing you know the first thing I tried it on with uh I was like okay well does do the the Mayans fit into this east west thing the language, my and language. And um the funny thing was I tried it. I just like was talking to Google about this just really briefly. And it was like no no no no there's like no overlap and then I was like well I think there's actually like. Quite a bit of overlap with respect to the structures like the syllabics and uh Japanese the pictograms the tensilistness as well which you mentioned. And then like the chat was like oh yeah well actually like historically there's no overlap but you know structurally actually there's quite a bit of overlap and I was like whoa and like the deeper I want the more fascinated I became that I actually could fit uh these Mesoamerican traditions into the eastern bin. First of all I wouldn't say he's in west right because Indo-European obviously it would include India and uh in dick languages. And of course I'm leaving out uh Semitic you know Afro-Asian languages and Mesoamerican languages I just don't know enough about them.

41:09So it's uh it's sort of a um the way I'm trying to get around that is just say well I'm just really talking about extended written traditions of philosophical speculation but I really should I mean if I were to if we were to pursue this further we would have to uh dig into at least you know Arabic and Hebrew a little more which are not in the European languages um which do have set but of course the other thing is the geographical isolation of the of the synetic languages right. Um so both classical Chinese as a tradition for a long extend it's it's in that test tube for long enough to kind of you know be able to read off some things. The Semitic language is Indo-European you're being languages start clashing into each other mixing influencing each other all the way back to you know ancient Greece really right. Um so um there's that right I haven't really I mean I know a little bit about them they do have

42:11um things like tenses right and they do have plural they singular they do the Semitic languages I mean they do have um genders for objects and things like that um but uh that would that would require an expert in those languages to sort of pursue. Yeah I mean yeah it is it is we're not going to be able to completely evaluate every aspect of that but the broad strokes are pretty good and I was just sort of floored by the fact that I picked like the most difficult one I could think of and I it actually fit pretty well into the bifurcation so yeah um and the whole Semitic distinction thing is really fascinating too because I mean there is a language we have a Phoenician alphabet which is like very tied up in ancient Canaan and I mean it's I have a feeling it would it would hold water but uh we had obviously that sounds like a whole PhD project. We need to find a way to make it. Exactly. So yeah do you want to just start by restating the theory behind this and then starting to build out where this came from obviously we've discussed how the the Tao reveals a different way of thinking uh that's not obviously evidence in whatever I mean I keep it can't not call it the Western philosophical tradition something like that.

43:29Yeah. But I let's just say Indo-European I would say I will I'll you know so ancient Greek Roman European and Indian right and in in each of those cases there are outliers that's actually said I would say Buddhism is kind of an outlier in the Indic context I mentioned Spinoza and certain other figures. This light spoke is kind of about outliers of European tradition but yeah so the basic idea is that you know certain features and those grammatical features for sure. Um are going to be the the kind of magnets for metaphysical intuitions that make certain things more easily understandable and communicable right and over a long period of time you're going to that those of things are going to get worked on most. There's kinds of questions that are going to be asked that need to be answered it felt needs to be answered to feel one has had an explanation to feel that something has been said or claimed or you know even suggested I guess so.

44:35So I mentioned those the you know it really important one I think is the number one the number the singular of plural forms of downs so a word funny you know the Dow we say the Dow you know there's no the it could just as easily be a Dow and I can tell you more about what the moment before it got sucked into this the lowest way of thinking about the problem but it could also be the Dow's or some Dow's right I mean when you think about the one many problem which is also the inside outside problem. So where do you determine where you know a thing ends and it's suddenly another right same difference problem intuitions about those things are those sort of baseline considerations it must ultimately be one thing or two things going back to your point about you know about two atoms right or two photons right.

45:45If something is always accompanied by quote unquote something else you can distinguish it you can make where you parse it. Is there do we feel there must ultimately be an answer about whether this is one thing or two things right for example huge consequences right am I different from you are the same as you are of the things in my world that I interact with right. It's not to say I'm the same as them it's also not to say I'm different from that that is not not would not necessarily be felt to be a question that admits up an ambiguous answer or needs one right because the operation of meaning making in thinking and in and discussing about it and in action that is informed by that would not require one to make a distinction except in special cases right doesn't you can't make that distinction that's the other cabinet right you can if needed. But that's an add-on right that's not baseline ontology that's sometimes it's important to specify oh I'm different I don't mean this I mean this right or I'm talking about horse but a horse or the horse this way to do it right it just requires a little.

46:59Additive like the word yesterday to make it past or something it's interesting because it almost seems to allow the speaker or the writer to really direct the attention of the reader and a more. More concerted way because if you can use word in a way that is ambiguous and you don't take the time to clarify the ambiguity in order to border it in some way then it's almost as if the writer is saying will that's not that important the focus is elsewhere. Exactly yeah exactly right and that means if you're trying to follow the logic of a philosophical argument right it's going to often depend on well what's the kind of wiggle room of moving from this term to this but how does this follow from this to follow from this kind of you know region in the scope of the sort of cloud of possible lingering kind of dangling possible meanings here and then when this other thing comes right but which is from a sort of an argument right.

48:02Another region right connected to another region are these both following from the same thing well you know it they they're not thinking these are two separate regions of the thing and then this is a thing called horse right which has sort of its many horses aspect and it's this horse aspect. It's like we'd say a front back of an object right we can distinguish them if we need to but i'm talking about the whole cloud and the way it relates over here and the way it relates over here and maybe go through steps so it's really important to follow an argument this is why when you said earlier like when you encountered this stuff I think this is true for a lot of maybe philosophically minded people if you're reading a translation of these texts right. You know I mean I experienced this as a translator you have to disambiguate sometimes you have no choice right but very often this is going to make the argument just sound like a non sequiner because the things that are actually linking these pieces together you can supply them in footnows and they just sound like weird puns or something right because oh he means chum in this sense but it also has this other meaning is it an other meaning or is it part of that whole thing.

49:17This is a whole cloud of meaning that's sort of waiting there I mean I reference it in that in that little paper you know this is one of the great things when you read Chinese poetry really literally you often do not know what the sentence means until you read the next sentence right you don't even know what's the now and what's the verb what's the you know what's the adjective you have how you divide things up this is one of the big implication points parsing as it were is the main off of interpretation right. And it requires something to compare to with certain conventions about parallelism and things like that but this question I mentioned dividing down right how you cut things up as sort of a primary paradigm of thinking about what it means to identify an object. I think this is a really important link right that by taking the exact same thing and chopping it in you know punctuating it in different ways you can get to different meanings so and that's another instance of where oh is it the same or different.

50:22Same and different are not going to be a hard and fast distinction this is where I get into ambiguity that's the coolest part that's why poetry so powerful even in the end of European tradition I mean. I've been obsessed with poetry as long as I've been obsessed with science and they they seem like two completely different tool kits right trying to be a precise and unambiguous as humanly possible when I'm writing scientific technical things and when I'm trying to explain a scientific idea and in poetry I'm like is the more that I can open this structure up and actually have you have any proliferation of experiences that conform to your lived life the more powerful it actually is. And I don't know that that that that that valence is just something that has been lost when we start talking about nature at the same time because science you know has the they're the kings of being able to say things about nature but I don't know there's probably a reason that I've held on to music and poetry for so long too because I recognize there's a lot that science can't touch at this point in time because of the limitation.

51:26Yeah totally right I mean and and you mentioned you know really important aspect of this like as I was saying about the doubted being right too large it it's not that it's it's not quite not saying it's not that it's saying nothing there's certainly something there but it's designed to be impossible to quite pin it down and that sort of makes this space which is you know a kind of participatory invitation you have to project something and I'm going to say something. And so again you know it's the relation of commentary to text for example or reader to text becomes this kind of back and forth thing right there it but a good text then it's not one that conveys information precisely it's going to be one that elicits activity you know and kind of interweaving with it in novel and expensive way.

52:26It's something like that so of course in poetry it's a no brainer right this works so beautifully but then things get really interesting when you have people trying to write like metaphysical like or you know general ontological claims of some kind and so. And so how do people handle that when they're trying to actually communicate something that they really do want to not be as open to interpretation as it would be otherwise. Yeah well so again for one thing in modern Chinese this is not a problem because modern Chinese has a lot of specifiers still doesn't have 10th so gender has morphological features that has additions of an of of character that you know an action is completed for example which classical Chinese did not have this is true many languages actually still doesn't have articles definitely. And so you hear Chinese speakers always have trouble with this or though they leave them out all the time and singular and plural right they still don't have any of that stuff but they do have a lot more so and as I said the thing with all these as you're saying about speaking Spanish if you really need to you know I can I all you do is add stuff right I can just add specifying words I can say I don't mean this one I mean this I mean this I can just add specifying words I can say I don't mean this one I mean this I mean this I just want to say I can't.

53:51I don't mean all horses I mean this horse right here and now the brown horse in the past. Right the brown horse in this past. Right so that was here yesterday right so it's it's and as you were noting like it's actually not that hard to do it right but there are some things I have to say where it becomes tricky like a I you know things we do like with the have had kind of stuff in English can you say I can't. You can be hard you have to work pretty hard to do that even in modern days like I hadn't known so you can say at that time I not know right but sometimes there's you know like I would have you know they are a subjunctive either right so there's you here if you have to sort of go as a security is route to make that stuff down and a few of them can be tricky to sort of nail down but I in principle I think they're all doable just that it take take a lot of effort and time that's all.

54:55So what do you say go ahead. I just I just want to comment just how shocked I was how how you don't really need those times is we actually one of the first days we were there I forget who we were talking to this might have actually been when we rented that boat to go out and swim with the turtles and stuff we were hanging out with this this Mexican kid who was like on his first adventure you know away from home and I was trying to ask him if there was a hack for talking about the past tense and he was busy just like you just say yesterday like I was like like of course yeah I thought at first he was trying to say something more than that then I was just just occurred to me like yeah that's all you really need right now sorry not see what we're going to say no I was just I'm shout out to Miguel by the way yeah he was watching and he very well maybe but so the the what is the lack of these things do like what are the implications because we have these structures that are present in the indoor European language they're absent in the

56:01in classical Chinese but there's not an easy way for me to say okay so the lack of the subjunctive creates some kind of grand change in cognition and so where does this where does this or does it or does it does it does it the way that we perceive time flow downstream of this and yeah I mean I'm wary of trying to make a claim about cognition at least but I mean I would want to limit this to what we can actually kind of verify in in communicative transmission of knowledge yeah transmission of knowledge right but it's not a it's not an unreasonable inference right that I guess I think a bit more again I also don't want to sort of claim that the limits like you can I think we're really just talking about prioritization right so take take the example I was just getting you like okay if I want to say I wouldn't have a I wouldn't have gone but I hadn't yet realized that blah blah blah or something like that in Chinese even among Chinese it's going to take a fair amount of efforts to communicate that okay so it's only going to be when it's super important for me to have that precise meaning conveyed I'm going to bother really that's why I like to think of a sort of just in terms of energy I mean I

57:22experienced it myself when I speak Chinese was like that is it necessary to explain this there's just something that we're chatting and I would bring up you know and it would it would assume some importance so of course I think that's going to mean when I'm constructing a story or a theory right I'm going to be kind of less likely to want to go to things that require me to do that right it doesn't mean I can't it and if there's something important enough on the other end of it I'll make the effort right but it's going to be tiring and I'm going to be frustrated by you know having to continually clarify with back up forth or something so I think it disincentivizes certain things right that so you know certain things come foreground of it back grounded in terms of what's important to convey and I think yeah you can speculate a lot about how that's going to influence cognition generally or you know life attitudes or something right there's certain things that I'm just going to be kind of deep prioritized or

58:22maybe just not become part of public communicative this question you know it's too hard to explain certain why did you do that well I wouldn't have if I hadn't been doing something like that right I may not want to go down that raid when talking about it and that mean mean that I don't articulate it very cool to myself right I mean this makes a ton of sense to for people who like anybody who plays instruments it's like you're going to write a different song if you play a piano then if you play guitar right and there's like nothing controversial about that there's no reason you couldn't write the same song on one versus the other or like take a mandolin versus a guitar it's like you could I guess you could rip the strings off of put them backwards and it would be like it might make more sense as a guitar player and then you did that recently and turns out the mandolin is still very difficult to play even one turns like a guitar right so you might be able to write guitar like songs if you did that but yeah I think that the instruments by which you know in this case the linguistic structures there's no way that they don't lend themselves towards a natural convenience in terms of the way you structure your thoughts to yourself or any came to me to leave it at transmission alone yeah that's a that is a great example and it also kind of brings up you know it is a question of skill if I were a better guitarist I would be able to play those jazz cards on guitar I can I can do them on the piano right and you're right if I want to write or if I want to play if I'm improvising

59:46I will go in a different direction right and but I'm trying to sort of maximize my value within whatever sphere that instrument but am my skill level in that instrument I want to bring that up for a related reason because one other aspect of this I don't know if it's strictly on the linguistic side but it had to be with the status of law because of you know an interesting thing in some people have made this really interesting claim about you know what is first philosophy in various cultural spheres meaning what is sort of the standard against which things are judged to be you know the gold standard of what would make a philosophical claim or the sort of baseline is subject and the this is probably a cliche and I and I again this is very broad strokes but the story usually goes something like you know in Greece it's mathematics from the Pythagorean's on to the idea of platonic forms let's say let's say mainstream ancient Greek thought as what would be or you could right as the as the gold standard of you know what is it what does it mean to demonstrate something decisively right

1:00:59conclusively in India its grammar say my colleagues in the indig languages departments okay meaning there's a great deal of thought about the very complicated Sanskrit grammar and it's even looked at as sort of like the code of the universe in some way right and any other sort of set of relations is kind of compared back to the strict laws right that regulate this very complex grammar the interesting thing in classical Chinese they never had an idea of a grammar at all until Buddhism came in nobody tried to compile like what are the laws of this grammar they obviously have conventions I think in the article I say this is maybe comparable to something like Tom and law right or precedent laws opposed to statute laws so they're really these second tier ontological status things called laws or rules and it this is kind of interesting to me and this is a very speculative link much more so I think then these other claims about one is a difference or about ambiguity but one of the really interesting things not on the not only on the doubt side but on the confusion side is very early distinction between ritual and law

1:02:14and it kind of push back against the idea of law that regularity is understood in the form of ritual which is kind of understood the way a non grammatically determined language would be understood in other words has no strict rules they're written they're not created by any one person but does have a limited force right if I speak the language incorrectly I there are social consequences or status consequences there are isolation consequences for me so there I have an incentive to do it in one way rather than another right but on the other hand it does admit of exceptions and this is the reason I bring this up because it it's an interesting model of sort of how change occurs in the North which is not through sort of a revolution or somebody going back to first principles and saying you know here was the rule that rule is not rational but that rule is not sufficiently grounded we should have a different rule and now we're going to that's going to be a universal that applies to all particulars but in the same way that a language changes or the grammar of a language changes

1:03:22and the way at least you know I would say the way the Confucian think about that is sort of distance where these sort of virtue also skilled users of the language break a rule in such a way that it becomes a new rule you know so like you know Shakespeare or good to somebody you deliberately of course this presupposes massive compliance with the implicit norms and then a very exceptional rule like if I say you know we're having this every day conversation I suddenly say if it a broke don't fix it or something right I'm going to break that rule you know to for a fact in a particular way if I do that in in in go back to poetry right if Shakespeare uses an unusual word like sea change right which he does what what what was that right that's not a thing right that's not even like what's that seconds even mean what you mean a sea change right it's talking about a change in the sea you know

1:04:26but it becomes a word right and then it becomes listen from that but it requires like sort of a genius act of virtuosity to to sort of break the norm within a context of massive compliance with it. So it's hard to not see all these parallels in the way that we think in science as well because modern physics for example is obsessed with laws right and then they just completely like their whole roof collapses when they find an exception to their law and sometimes it can be catastrophic where they just like in you know invent bizarre physics to explain something because obviously the law must hold like the law the law the law the law right so you're like oh well this galaxy is not rotating according to law like let's create some dark matter to fix it you know and it's really really good. Yeah yeah yeah yeah how that adherence to I don't even know if it's a first principle but it's a postulate told up under the context it's been examined locally and then you try to push it and push it and you know eventually it just breaks and people come up with you know a new set of laws maybe or something but yeah yeah that obsession with laws yeah yeah and which is a very vague which is itself a metaphor right is it it's a theoretical metaphor right of a of a command structure that presumably would you know being one

1:05:46of the things controlling the activity or you know incentivizing or constraining the activity of something else again depends on a similar way of constrain the same difference relationship and the establishment of this sort of unchanging level right this relation instantiation to universal all that stuff is on the table I think right and so if you if you were to adjust I mean I'm way too ignorant about how scientists now think about this or philosophers of science even for that better but I'm not sure if you know what I'm going to do is that I mean that's one of those terms that's plugged in and it has a lot of baggage with that right one of which is exception list for it to even make sense right any regularity or even even dorms right is I was saying right which is much higher bar. I'm also just excludes the interpretive muscles that your brain needs to exercise to actually produce or really solid explanation at the end of the day if like if the law is enough for you and you're like okay I

1:06:46understand how my variables relate to each other and I can make predictions and great but you know they give us doctorate the philosophy when we graduate from the highest level of scientific training right that's probably for good reason like you need to have exercise for that interpretive level and it seems like perhaps our linguistic structures don't aren't as amenable to that as they could be in other parts of the world or they force us to interpret in specific ways and so I think that in some ways this is a hinge to this question of the hard problem of consciousness because we have suddenly the emergence of the study of what it means to have a sensation of being alive and the hard problem sort of emerges for why is it that we as humans have this particular sense that appears to report to us that there is an experience of being alive and it seems like brains are really necessary for it and so there's there's a very unnatural cleavage point that is introduced into the story because it's like okay well if you have to have brains in order to have the experience of being alive then that kind of means

1:07:52that everything before that point is just a tomato that's just doing stuff in the world that books like it's alive the same way that we are but it's definitely not and so creates this strange fracture because we have a frame in which we're like there is there's a law that we have the brain and the brain does this thing and there's a there's a specific experience that only we can have and now we have to answer how it is that we have it rather than anybody else. Yeah and again I mean yeah so this is as I said I was sort of working progress for me but I'm very interested in pursuing this down this kind of a line right because in a way it's still a question of parsing a question of where you're dividing between what is the thing having the consciousness right is it the brain is a necessary condition you could say but you know to put it in really you know when you say you can't really do that. There was not consciousness before right that depends again on the absolute distinction between the before and the after you know I can make trivial I can trivially claim that every universe we know about has consciousness right there's never been a universe without consciousness right because right and and so even if for a trillion years there wasn't right as soon as there is that's not the right.

1:09:19Just something about this universe right so it's fundamental if I just can yeah if I consider this one thing right is where I divide like what is the process that's having the consciousness right I have a lot of options about where do we attribute that right who is having the consciousness I mean that what where does it belong how to who owns it as it were right so brains necessary for it for sure right even let's admit that let's let's sort of concede that right but even if even if that's the case right you may contest that right but I'm just saying like how anyway you want to slice that up I mean I might even say if the universe means everything that exists ever then I can know with absolute certainty that every single possible universe has consciousness. Absolutely by the way can we I really loved your definition for consciousness I think it's the best one I've ever heard actually trust me there's been a lot of people on the other side of that screen proposing definitions can you can you state how you define it so that I was really really on the nose and interesting and you mentioned a little short 500 worth I mean I can summarize it for you if you want you can tell me if I'm wrong but the way I read it was your busy saying that conscious entities have the ability to distinguish one thing from another essentially and that's

1:10:38you know you can almost put that down to the bacterium that doesn't eat itself or or anything that's alive essentially right exactly and that's why there's a paragraph in there where I sort of say look in a way just being an entity means having a contact boundary that has to be maintained right I mean what we mean by there being a thing is that it's bounded in some way but that boundary is a relationship distinguishing it from something else right so if you want to loosely speak I mean I'm very happy to do that and I'm happy to do that and I'm happy to do that. This is sort of a spinosa he move right is this but I would like to just do a drag man I say to say look you can say those are proto forms of consciousness and I'm very happy with I don't want to make a sharp ontological distinction between animate and inanimate even or conscious unconscious I would say white head has my idea like this to you know this thing main painting itself against my action on it is in some way whatever in some context it will be appropriate.

1:11:38I'm not going to speak about maybe not a lot right but there will be some one I could but I'm not going to say oh it's conscious or it's not conscious as a definite answer right. The other thing about that is so interesting to me which I hope and I would like to develop more so I'm very very curious about how you respond to this I mean the weird thing about a boundary right is that it's sort of it's dividing and connecting at the same time right it's the thing you know and consciousness and it's not. You know and consciousness as what is by the very act of distinguishing from is what is connecting one to and making one conscious of the thing right so whether I distinguish between two objects right that's why I want to say distinguishing from differentiating between right and the maintenance of that the action of doing that involving engagement with both both sides of that. So in a weird way you know people talk about the unity of consciousness and I want to say yes consciousness is a unity but only by means of its constant division in other words the very fact of dividing is what unifies if I may really be paradoxical it's not very paradoxical right I mean I'm just saying all we have when we have an object is a boundary which is a relationship to the external world.

1:13:01And the things that are living entities appear to have some kind of active ability to maintain that boundary and to commit a recognition that seems higher than the level of inanimate but not necessarily purely different in form because I immediately go to think about like chemical reactions yes you can learn certain chemicals together and they'll they they've nothing will happen you put other chemicals together and all of the same. So you have this reaction and it proceeds and you can do extraordinary things with it and it seems like the process of life is just usually just blow yourself up or die mercury poisoning. But so exactly. No exactly right so things are resisting I mean even just material resistance as I'm saying like you might want to say that's a very I just don't want to draw a sharp ontological line right but but that doesn't need to commit us to saying. There are a lot of different kinds of if you're going to define consciousness that broadly and I'm very happy to just have to say there's many many many types of that right but I'm just as happy saying.

1:14:09You know our sophisticated consciousness which I try to describe there's well this is distinguishing self from all these distinguishing of objects from each other and their various forms of this you know it's obviously very complex for that but it's still the same basic move right. I'm not going to explain the interruption but I have to ask you for a favor and actually tell you a little story so ever since I was a kid I always wanted to spend my time looking for the greatest ideas that I could find in the world. It's a little bit of a weird quest for a 12 year old to set out on but here we are we have built the spaceship where we can do exactly that. The thing is is that the other piece of this that I always wanted to accomplish was to be able to do it without advertisements but I always felt a little bit strange that programs seem to just be billboards for people who are trying to sell stuff that may or may not be very useful to you the listener. And so in order to help us meet that goal I have to ask you to come over to patreon.com slash demystifyci and sign up to support us for just 75 cents a week.

1:15:09In return you get to join us every week at our Sunday salon and you get to know that you have kept our scoing in perpetuity free of advertisers free of slogans free of friends and so see you there at patreon.com slash demystifyci. It's really interesting especially because if we if we allow things to be the same I feel like we lose the ability to think about it in terms of this like classical Greek enlightenment tradition of the science where like Tyler saying earlier you have to put something in a bin and you have to cut it away from everything else then you have to say OK this is definitely different we have drawn our boundary here it is a good boundary and we're going to explain how the thing has this shape with us. How does this shape within this boundary but if you if you completely excise it then you're left with with what do you how do you even try to explain something that is sameness in this scientific tradition you're kind of left without something to study because you're like well there's a unifying principle and it operates at all scales and we're just a more complex version of that and and there we go problem solved.

1:16:20Yeah yeah yeah I mean what is the interesting part right is going to be the question right what are we trying to accomplish what do we want to do if and it part of that that is if we have sort of practical goals about how to create a particular effect we're definitely going to want to pay close attention to where those distinction lines fall. It's it's required and you know there's need to be translated into an ontological claim that these things are absolutely distinct in some way there's like some extra added you know quality called consciousness that sort of suddenly drops in at a certain moment you know. Well that's the obsession with the final cause thing that we have in the west it feels like a little bit. I was going to say that this also reminds me of the same different game that you and I always end up playing. Which one's that we'll end up in a conversation and one of us will be like you know it's really interesting how these two things are totally different and the other one will be like no those two things are totally the same. Oh yeah right we take turns playing the same or different.

1:17:21Yeah exactly. That sounds like again an ideal working relationship actually. But where are we going with this. I like a bunch of different thoughts that I want to get out on the table. Oh the final cost thing yeah because that's how that's actually a really interesting piece the puzzle as well. And I find it to be the last step when you present a new idea to somebody you know I think it was show. Open hour. It's it's very pretty to show in power and William James but I think that William James might have totally cribbed it from ship and horror. But there's another layer to this I'm starting to realize too which is so show up in our James somebody gave this list of the ways that people will push back on a revolutionary idea the first time they hear yeah right so at first they basically tell you that it's stupid it doesn't make sense once you explain to him how it makes sense then they're like oh well I see what's saying but it's not important and then you explain to him how it's important and then they say oh we knew that already. And then I would say the final stage often is like yeah but it doesn't explain everything.

1:18:25And so that's that's the one I've been encountering most recently which is a really fascinating point to get to. But you seem to imply in your writings that this isn't so much a problem in the Eastern Asian expressions. No, no that's what this whole book of this this sort of a he isn't book is about right because that was. That was the thing putting all these two things together right where you run into these limitations. Okay if you if you're giving me space to sort of talk a little about this I would welcome that is. So yeah it is what is missing and it's interesting because in the in the in the classical Chinese world particularly this really hardcore Aristotelian like. You know hardwiring baking in of perpacility as the final explanatory principle and one of the things I'm trying to argue in that book is that you know we normally oppose mechanism to finalism as you know two of Aristotle's four.

1:19:33But the I'm trying to from the sort of side of the Chinese side taking a step back and looking at them they're kind of actually both derivative of this prioritization of final causes. And so in other words the very idea of separating out cause and effect as definitively different in the mechanistic sense. As downstream from the dichotomization that is necessary for purpose of activity this whole thing we've been sort of circling around right so the need to definitively establish statements of difference when is that really required is when we are acting purposeively which we very often are we can't ever totally avoid doing right because we care about this outcome rather than that outcome it's a practical need I need to got what I wanted. I didn't get one of that's the very nature of a desire or purpose so when that is made ultimate and I mean by that sort of the first the bedrock explanatory principle and I kind of try to track track that to a moment play though where you have softness reading from an exagerness who says news is archa meaning mind or intelligence is archa the good meaning that people disposed all things again.

1:20:57So both all things according to a plan basically right and of course they're not that need to play an honest on all is just a naive creationist in that way but they both are very taken with this as a way to really solve that I pay run. Pay run problem we were talking about before what is it that gives forms to things what is it that actually explains. You know socrates says in that house in the Fido where he says I heard this guy reading this book of an exagerness we said that mind not fire not water right it's this move away from natural philosophy to this kind of ethical philosophy but right away says finally when I heard this idea that would mean you know why is the sky blue because mind made it blue basically this sort of God idea. And that would mean if I want to understand why this guy's blue I should look at why it's good for the sky to be blue and any other kind of explanation maybe you know fire water.

1:21:57Adams and the boy the kind of explanation would be like asking why am I here and then describing my bones and instead of I come here to talk my friend. So right there that that's putting the final cause first in this very human. Even ethical dimension right and that I'm going to answer you see all these experiments in Plato to try to make that work including the form of the good right as the actual load of the unmoved mover and Aristotle and the ultimate teleological purpose a single. Tailos at defines the form of an actual entity is its ultimate explanation this is really totally missing like monotheism is missing in the Chinese tradition which is not saying was not kind of proposed but again it didn't gain traction the same way we've been talking about doesn't make intuitive sense it will when TV technology works in that way and I think that that. The sort of crude form of mechanism which sees all objects is absolutely separate is not although it presents as sort of the opposite of finalism of TV technology is actually an outgrowth of it because I look at the Chinese case and we get neither of those two things right.

1:23:17These are not these are the competing to saw it's but they both depend on the idea of making a sharp distinction between one thing or another as a as a as a logical baseline and I'm trying to. Sort of experiment was seeing that as an as an off shoot of the the absoluteization of purposeivity and then a pushback against it in the terms defined by that very sort of dichotomization that comes from this byvalent way of looking at results. So that was one piece and then I was looking kind of more at at ways that this is. Ramified in Western tradition and one really interesting piece of this is this thing is I think we'll tie into some of the things we've talked to me it's one of the most fascinating things that happens in European philosophy is with Kant and he's trying to define beauty. He's trying to define purpose of action right and he says well purposes of action is when usually a concept right an idea is a way of unifying particular is that actually exist right like a general idea right.

1:24:23But there are special cases when I actually has causal power to instantiate itself and that's what we call purpose so an idea instead of being you know after the fact description. Or characterization is an actual causative agent what is an idea concept for Kant he says well you know concept is this operator way of unifying basically a concept is a way of unifying particular is so it is actually there isn't a finite set of particular is it's a way to relate particular to each other. And if I would to expand that I'd say not just unify but unify and distinguish which ultimately I'm going to come down the same thing so the reason I'm sort of obsessing about spinosate miss book is he was the he's sort of break breaking with the teleological tradition from within kind of theological language so.

1:25:23You know even against a card even against live that's both of whom maintain a place for a purpose of God figure spinosa will say no buy the very definition of what you have always meant by God God cannot have a purpose and the world cannot have a purpose but everything being a type of motion is an endeavor to continue that motion and we're going to get local purposes everywhere therefore to be and to have a purpose in that sense but not a conscious purpose. Right now the common idea but when these two ideas come together so I was done with this the inseparability of things the unity of things that has infinite causative power now takes the place of actual preconceived concepts so you can drop out the middle man of a purpose it world and still have it function as if purpose it and the point I'm trying to make there is you know count has this incredible definition.

1:26:23Of what beauty is it's part of the same inquiry in the third critique which is purposeivity without purpose I'm as artists I want to ask you what you think of that purposeivity without a specific purpose the idea being that when you know what you're trying to do clearly in advance this is no longer beautiful this is no longer art this is utility right this is purely you know craftsmanship let's say right now but on the other hand totally random activity that I'm going to do is that I'm going to do that. It's not purpose that structured like a purpose but without an identifiable specific purpose is where you have this kind of open space you're talking about before and this can apply even to the artist himself right which is to say he's not acting randomly but he doesn't quite know what he's doing either right is unifying the parts toward an obscure goal which you can either think well that goal must exist somewhere or you can just say. You don't it's the very form of purposeivity that is acting the structuring of this thing rather than any specific.

1:27:32I think people just love to see artists like at the verge of falling apart like they want to see you struggling to like it's the struggle that people respond to that I respond to at least in music you know when I go see a live performance like I want to see that horn player just like. Low in his brains out like just trying to make that that sublime moment happen searching for it and just eventually when they hit it you know it's just could make you cry right because everybody is just on their edge of their chairs like I was going to pull it off is you can just fall apart right that that that struggle it seems like what. The experience of creating that's what everybody who makes art is really drawn towards once you start just refining and perfecting and. You know comping and doing all this like technical stuff you just squeeze the absolute essence of what you were trying to do in the first place yeah you can see this also in bands the play stuff that's so. So tightly rehearsed that it's always the exact same song like you go and you listen to it and it's the exact same thing that's on the record and all of the attention is aimed at achieving this goal that is well inscribed exactly and yet that's not the place where inspiration and creation.

1:28:46Yes and but there is a really interesting thing because when you do hit this poorly defined goal you know and that's the weirdest part of it which is that there isn't a goal there's just this iterative process of one step forward making sure that the threads come along that you're weaving something as you go and then the end all of the sudden you look back on it and you're like wow okay it it's not. That's such a cool point yeah right in other words you can only recognize it sort of after the fact right after it's complete and even while it's happening you're not quite you might you but you something you know you're you're at risk right I think we're thinking about like improvisational music maybe right or even when you're you're playing a cover to go back to our earlier topic you know the song. In some way is the the nebulous goal but what is that song right you're your interpretation or you're the way it's going to come out in this particular instance.

1:29:47It's completely up for grabs right you you know how to play the song you know how to sing the song you know the words the song but that what is this song going to be this time. Remains something here you're you're with grouping for I think you discover it with the audience it kind of brings back the contextualization thing like an artist about an audience is a really. It's it doesn't make sense totally yeah because you you learn so much by standing up and playing for people like you can see if the words are hitting or if they're not or if the melody setting or you can feel it probably in that moment and it yeah you can do recorded music it's the same thing but there's something about discovering what you're even. Synthesizing as it's happening that's so dependent on the context of having a subject really what is the what did we say it was called in in in the Chinese tradition not subject but the what was so brilliant. Respective versus guest yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and I think that's why we do this podcast to honestly it's like we learn so much about how we think about things by bouncing them and and going back and forth like this yeah.

1:30:58To me I mean if I may just to go back to your previous point about sort of the retrospective recognition right oh that's that's where all that really landed there right afterwards I mean in a weird way this is this is another presentation of that question of okay. To be this is sort of a Buddhist viewpoint okay but the idea being. Inter subjectivity exists it's a matter of scale between myself and my past selves and my future cells future moments of my experience I don't know if you know if you listen back to a performance of your own you're in a little mini intersubjected relationship with yourself right like you are there it's it's it's not sort of constitutionally ontologically different from an actual dial there is a small degree of unpredictability there were like. Of mis recognition of each other and sort of a working along to so that's what he was doing there you know and also to some degree what the hell was he doing there you know.

1:32:01And then you can think of that as a matter of scale when when we are actually with other people and it's sort of multiplied it exponentially right there's me in my past moments six sagging back and forth with my model of you and and you. And you know but you can never really escape the intersubject about this model right if you don't assume that the self is just a monolithic essence right i'm in negotiation with my own past and future right which made judge me and may reconsider everything that i'm saying now you know maybe repudiated or may react badly or well or run with it in some way right and in an even larger scale hugely larger scale i'm at that risk. What I open my mouth to you guys right or an odd yeah yeah well that the language allows you to structure that internal relationship to some extent right I mean it's like anybody has written a book like you think you know what you're talking especially a technical book you're like oh I have these great ideas i'm going to write them down it's like.

1:33:01Whoa yeah I did not understand what I thought I understood you are in dialogue with yourself totally right you're like. And you are learning from this other that you are you know like you and how you misunderstood misrepresent you and right and goes beyond you sometimes right and like fills in you know extends your thoughts beyond what you thought they were. And to tie this back to what you're saying about the you know like why is the sky blue and why is it good for it to be blue I feel like it's also in there as well because okay so. This sky happens to be blue because there's a lot of molecules that scatter blue light and they also with because they scatter blue light they also absorb ultraviolet light. The absorption of ultraviolet light is absolutely imperative for the survival of beings on the earth and so it's hard to imagine. But there could be another color of the sky because if it was a different color we would have a lot more UV light and nothing would be alive the surface would.

1:34:07Is there a lot because all of life depends on this blessed little window where we're not just getting irradiated all of the time and so there's this and it's impossible to. Tock's gases or anything else like Guatemala city or something yeah but it's like it's impossible to say that there's a purpose to the sky be it sounds crazy to say that there's a purpose to the sky being blue and yet if you assume that there is some kind of like I hate to say this but if there is a tealology to the way that the universe evolves that there does there is a will for the universe to produce living beings. Then there are forms that the universe must take and it's not like I'm going to produce living beings it's just the fact that all of these inert physical chemical systems interact in such a way. To conspire the production of the thing that eventually look around and you're like yeah it's actually really nice here but it's like there wasn't a designer that's that out to say okay we're going to have a you trees and we're going to have elms and we're going to have fish it just.

1:35:12It creates the space for this different initiation to occur and so in some ways it is similar to the creative process in the absence of a creator. It is like the entire whole conspiring to create that this is might become like very defensible once we discover life on other worlds to because it turns out that they're all exactly you know on planets that look exactly like this and you basically end up with all the same stuff that we went through I mean it would be kind of a slam dunk of a thesis at that point. Yeah good good good that there's a really interesting thing put it that way and about the skies but obviously the sky being blue. Is a relationship between us and the sky right I mean the blueness of the sky is actually describing us in the sky right I mean it's not blueness but I mean if you just break it down to like the electromagnetic wavelengths that correspond to the blue I mean they are sort of objective. Those are phenomenon let's say right right right and and in terms of their effect on making life possible or impossible that would be the same right but I'm just saying those two things the.

1:36:19Sky appearing blue because it has that particular composition and therefore doesn't kill us right and us existing with these particular types of sensor guns that we have our can be redescribed let's just say as part of a co evolution right in other words they they go together. And this is what I was trying to get out with that that move about and it it of course I know I wouldn't say I wouldn't put it quite that way that the world has a will to produce living beings I don't think we need to go that far or purpose to create living things even without a career a little bit there was that idea post county idea and it was a it was a beautiful kind of romantic idea of sort of the world spirit not as a designer not as like intelligence but as an artist who doesn't quite know. What it's doing the way an artist doesn't but is not just acting randomly right again mechanistically either just. Groping so like you know sketch the character called that's what I'm going to do with this shallow character you know but I'm getting it something here you know it's a beautiful idea and I think you're you're make I would agree right you can actually make that kind of work.

1:37:34Without a creator without the world spirit itself or even for me I wouldn't even put it as a will because I would think the will would be just the very fact of continuing to exist as the endeavor to continue to exist but the way those pieces co here right so that. Is doing the work that a purpose would do if there were a specific purpose right is a coordination of parts right and that I think is is the idea of beauty and can through as purpose is without purpose these things are adjusting to each other and sort of moving into the spaces left by each other right and taking the net co becoming as it were forward and it's just their inextric ability from each other which is sort of driving these neutral adaptations and that actually structurally. Kind of reads out as the will or purpose just without a specific end so I'm always a little where I don't want to say life is is.

1:38:36Per se as a specific kind of thing or state would be the goal or anything or consciousness even but that those are exemplifications of the process of sort of indivisible mutual adjustment. As the as things grow with every otherness they have to encounter right that ramified that can't stop ramifying maybe put it that way that can. In a way it's anti TV logic that it it couldn't stop anywhere I'll go that far right why couldn't it just inertly any somewhere because it's not stable. As an isolated thing right at any any any simple describable state it has to kind of. Bleed out of that into more otherness because what it is is the selfness of otherness which is about reading bait to be an entity you know. Yeah and I think I think that we agree on that the way that I see it is sort of there's a useful concept from computer design called abstraction layers.

1:39:39Which is that like each layer of computer design has its own set of rules and they kind of like speak across to each other and when you're working on a certain piece you're usually only working. On a couple of layers around you but you're almost never working on like the full stack so somebody who's writing software is not thinking about how some a conductors work but somebody who's developing chips. Is also not necessarily thinking about how software works they're working just on the level of being able to produce something that does computation. And so if we if we look at life as having also these sorts of various abstraction layers you have the abstraction layer of the the artist that is trying to create something and is aiming for some poorly defined. Destination where when they reach it they arrive but there's also. Another like much more primary abstraction layer of the process of like fruiting and generation which is that like all creatures on earth have a process by which they create some sort of seed that then grows the next generation and it feels like when I talk about the like the tealology of it.

1:40:49Think about how insane it is that there is a at least a 3.8 billion year long unbroken chain of being that every single one of us sits on the end up. Think about how many resources how much how much time and effort was spent into creating this moment it seems that there is. The same way that an apple tree produces a fruit specifically so that has some kind of reservoir for its seeds in order to be able to grow to produce the next tree. It really does seem like it's possible to then place that same abstraction layer of like okay fruit and seed onto the planet where life as an endeavor is the seed and the planet is the fruit and so there is. This the only purpose would be to continue the process. I think that in some ways it's it's it's very optimistic because if you live in a universe where there's no purpose in your your your your your lineage is 4 billion years old and you're just kind of here and you're looking around you're like.

1:41:57I don't really know what this is about. I don't really know why I'm here. Yeah. It's a little depressing but if you're like okay there actually is a purpose and the purpose is to continue this unbelievably beautiful project that we're all uniformly a part of. That gives it a frame of great half then you don't know where goes you don't know the outcome. Sorry plant you don't know exactly like how it's going to coalesce into the next phase and yet. I think that it soothes me to believe that I'm part of that process. Well I would I would maybe put a little bit differently I think I think there's some common ground though I mean in other words. Can we can you. Part of this whole problem is that is it the of the many dichotomies we've been talking about you know we were talking about it in terms of language. What it is the constitute meeting is something meaningful or not meaningful does it make sense does it make sense I think this can be also applied to this question of.

1:43:01purpose and meaning fullness in the sort of more robust kind of general sense right so. Meaningless life or a meaningful life right this actually does go back to these conceptions of purposeivity. Are we serving a particular purpose are we achieving a particular purpose that's one of the primary ways we think about whether something is meaningful about. But I would. Again I'm drawing on resources of this isn't just totally for me but I but the way it's comfortable for me to think about this is because otherwise I don't want to be in a position where I have to assert it is meaningful. And then sort of defend against all signs that it might not be okay so once I have that I'm insecure because it so you say it's depressing if we exclude meaning completely and I agree. But I don't want that to be okay I can definitively say it definitely has a tealology it has a goal this is why I like the purpose of it without purpose kind of move because.

1:44:07I would want to say they're pushed to their extremes again that there is a way in which those two things can. Coinside and I think that's the this idea of your idea about seeding right about generation ceaseless generations of. Maps on do kind of neo Confucian idea you can state it negatively as. The basic instability of everything in other words the inability of things to reach a final state which is you know rather than sort of a vitalist picture that it's sort of striving toward complexity or toward life you can you can say there is any particular configuration. doesn't have enough. ontological self consistency that could be isolated from every other possible state that it could maintain itself so it's very endeavor to continue as itself always makes it have to change adapt rearranged renegotiate and given infinite time in space let's say you're going to get every kind of configuration right and every kind of.

1:45:20Creature environment pairing right and all kinds of complexity so I don't think that life is accidental but I also don't think it's. Purpose you know that there's a purpose or that it's anybody's aim I think it's sort of a necessary consequence of the inability of any determination to. Stand up forever and keep all the otherness. Out just existing is becoming other you know it because nothing is. isolated because nothing can stand alone because it's you know it's going to be exposed to an infinity of new conditions and in some cases it will perish in in some cases it will change and adapt and persist in new ways because every new relationship is going to change it. So. I don't know is I'm suggesting kind of a middle ground position here and I. Not life as an accident but also life not. Willed or the aim life being just more of what being is you know just to exist is already to be adapting parts and continuing and changing to to remain the same and remaining the same to change.

1:46:33You know so we're doing that in a really complex and sophisticated and intricate way and I think there's all kinds of ways of doing it right there's really simple ways like the rock is doing it and but because it can't just stay with that level because that would be drawing a line around that that could somehow stay believe. Resist you know the imposition of other possibilities so we're going to get these two and probably more things down the line which will be even more. Estonishing right I just think it's really hard to say like the purpose of life without being really sure what you mean by life which again requires you to I think in the future requires you to specify the context dependency of the whole matter I always thought even when I was like 10 years old I thought it was really weird I think that was when I first heard people being like what's the meaning of life you know and I remember just being like that's a really weird question like who's life and under what conditions and like what are they like and what are they you know it just it seems like. And also the meaning to who right I mean things mean something to someone right to us or to me right now or to you know someone in the future who's looking at it or some you know God's I view or what you know.

1:47:48The things that mean something to me mean a lot to me might just be completely insignificant to somebody else that doesn't have to be a conflict or anything but it we all have such an intimate relationship with our own purposes it's something you have to negotiate continually. I think so right so I mean I think meaning you know meaning is context dependent as we've been talking about so there's going to be but I also think it means why this isn't like a crisis point from my point of view is to say you can't exclude meaning at all right you couldn't get rid of so meaning even if you tried right because meaning is happens whenever there's a relationship and something impacts something else right just how you put those things together are they going to be in us you know they're always going to be in a process of kind of adjusting to each other and morphing and so doing you know I love it this is like the most same treatment of these subjects that I've ever encountered quite honestly. Yeah I mean I guess the way that I see it is that there is I know that there's a lot of skepticism about ascribing you know large scale.

1:48:53And I agree with that and yet I'm always struck by the strangeness of our own existence and the fact that if we look at everything we've talked about so far what we're talking about is we're talking about that the whole conspires to create the part and the part that feeds back and affects the whole and so there's this recursive there's a recursive loop of influence and when I say purpose I think that that's what I mean it's recognizing that recursive loop of influence and then finding some way to navigate it. Yes yes I think I'm sorry I just want to say like we're really charitable with I think that's what religions trying to point out like I think that's the most charitable interpretation of what at least the scholars originally mean when they're talking about God right they're recognizing that strange loop that you're talking about Nastya like they're recognizing the conspires the conspiracy between the whole and the parts and it's this attempt to sort of point a finger at something you can't actually put your finger on.

1:49:59Like religions totally fine and tell people forget that it's tell people forget that it's all allegory you know what I mean it's like it's all it's like the thing you were talking about with the towel at the beginning it's when you try to purify something beyond its limits it just turns into garbage and actually can become quite terrifying destructive. Yeah I mean it definitely can can be attempted to sort of map back down to this thing which I think is sort of unavoidable I mean in other words this as you've described it very well it's the whole part I would maybe not say the word conspiring but it's a good metaphor right yeah that they adjust to each other and they can't not right and they have to keep morphing I mean it's a question of whether you. Um a squat if you know I would want to suggest maybe that it's just in treat you if you try to think of the alternative to that right of what it is for anything just to sit there existing I think you will it's intrinsic to the very idea of a thing being a thing that it's going to have to be relating to something beyond itself obviously right that's what it is the thing is to have a beyond it's something beyond itself.

1:51:13Which is it so you know having an outside is intrinsic to be it yeah this is also why you know to go back to the China stuff it's it's why they never have a creation but you know why there is never a need hello because you there's got to be there can't be a single being but being always has a background right so there's always a kiss and a that and so that being the case you draw a circle around that this and that and it's just a different way to do it. And then you can do this you know and then you don't need another that you know so I mean even in a way that may feel very abstract but I'm just trying to say like even if you try to think of the most basic condition you know you don't need to add an extra thing to make it run to make it develop or make it I I thought I wouldn't want to say direct in one direction I think of it maybe more again sort of spinosy way it's just every possible direction so we're we're in a sort of.

1:52:13Again I'll pair on boundless condition where all kind you know the weirdness of our existing talk about this a little in the 80s and book right the ancient Adamist had a funny phrase that's called the force of infinity right which meant you know given infinite time in space let's imagine it I'm talking about like Epicureans and the Cretus people like that you're going to get every possible combination of things right and the the marvel kind of the weirdness. This is sort of a crystallization of the vast vastness of that space in time right that's necessary for right here you know this force of infinity and they got isonomia you know equal distribution where all these states are going to occur but they occur because these things cannot be stable they cannot come I mean a weird way precisely cannot come to an end cannot have a goal.

1:53:13Right they cannot stop anywhere right because to stop anywhere would be them to draw that line around it which would then to be that thing would require a more a more to it a beyond events. That's so interesting because okay so this lens is somewhere where I initially was motivated to reach out to you. Which is that something that we've been really thinking about a lot recently is that there's a there's a mathematical frame that is often used in modern science to serve as the foundation by which you can say that you know something if you can parameterize it and quantify it and have a formula that does something and that formula is predictive that is the gold standard for being able to say that you have solved a thing. Whether or not you can explain why the formula looks that way is kind of set on the back burner and so there's there's like an entire other philosophical domain there but I feel like there's this other realm in which it's necessary to think about the way these pieces fit together philosophically.

1:54:23Which tells you about exactly what you're saying which is that if you have an equation that describes some current state and it is accurate and predictive it is not an equation that will hold. As the universe around you changes because the conditions require a new frame and the immutability of the mathematics forces us into not considering the changing of the frame because there's no. Like yes you have like differential equations and integrals but they don't really work with the fact that it's like perhaps the form of the equation must change in order to accommodate the coming future that you inevitably will arrive on. Wow that's so cool I was aware I mean this mathematical question so interesting right goes back to what we're talking about about law right it's sort of a presumption that forces. The filling in the blanks of a theory on the basis of an assumption about how universality and unchanging this of a rule or a law works right so.

1:55:28That's the thing about the math paradigm right going back to the Greek right the grammar paradigm of math paradigm and sort of the you could say ritual paradigm that you know. It will yeah they can't I mean it has certain presuppositions that are going to curve what you are able just like we're talking about at the very beginning right that is a language right that is going to prioritize certain ways of. of thinking and preferring and into itting right what comes as as you were saying as the gold stand with an explanation to you so do you let me ask you this do you do you think. What do you guys how do you guys think about natural law do you think natural law is something that. Is constant everywhere and everywhere and then so what I mean what is what even what even is it. I That's a really big question can you define natural law a little bit. No that's why I'm asking you guys. I mean they're just they're just sort of yeah it's like a generalizable statement where you relate some parameters that seems to hold in every condition that you examine and the truth is like I said earlier they usually fall apart and then you have to create

1:56:39I was supposed to magical entities to save yourself until people stop believing in those and then you create a new condition like the most. The most famous example of this we've talked about a bunch so but is the ultraviolet catastrophe right so when the people started first started studying light they realize when you heat up any body that it gives off light you know you put a iron in the fire. Close right and it gives off this particular spectrum of light the problem was that the theory that they had to describe that predicted that it should give infinite quantities of ultraviolet light like they just fitted a nice slope to this like as you. Yeah more and more it should just produce more and more ultraviolet radiation until it went to infinity and like they knew this couldn't be the case like well that just clearly isn't the case but all of our laws seem to point to that's what should be happening. And so this actually births quantum mechanics because the solution was that actually the energy can only be delivered in these little packets which is what moxplunk derived and formalized and so. You see these kind of things happen all the time where the laws are really good given some experimental conditions everything we know seems to say that this power law fits really neatly with you know the kind of energy distribution that we would expect in the system until it doesn't.

1:57:49And so one of the things we have obsessed about on our show is the difference between these descriptive equations and an actual explanation. Why does the light why is why does the heated body give this light. This is something that's gotten really lost in the backseat of the speeding car of mathematical physics in the last century or so where the obsession with the descriptive precision has trumped every attempt to make sense of what's actually happening. So so we try to like be really careful about about not like laws are fine and everything they might point you in the right direction. But they're probably incomplete and furthermore they don't really touch on explanation ever math actually never explains anything right. I was going to say if the law is a mathematical principle it would seem odd to attribute a causal role to it right it's not actually doing something it's describing relationships that are doing things with each other right.

1:58:50Somebody's doing something yeah. I mean but is that a controversial view of your new paradigm or is that a general reason. I mean I mean how do physicists now think about when they talk about natural law it's sound let me the metaphor is of a causative agent of some kind it is because of the law that I think. That's what's so crazy is when you start reifying these variables into physical actors that have extension and boundaries. I mean yeah this would be a whole other podcast to get into this but it's that that that that's reason I mean the language is broken to the extent that you know they have words that have every day meaning like particle like for us which is like a mode of dust that is not what a particle in physics is it's like a set of of predictably measurable attributes qualities quantities that you can experience at these different locations under these conditions and they've been trans trans morphed like they've been totally forgotten about what they actually are because the language has been so

1:59:51right. Misapplied at this point so I mean there's also this crazy piece of it too which is that you know when you talk about a force as a cause you completely erase the underlying principle so it's like quantum field theory it tells us that you know the universe is made out of these fields and when you ask okay like well what is the field they're like well it's a set of measurements that tell you the force that you will experience at every point in space. And then you have to ask yourself well how does a measurement generate any kind of physical effect and there's obviously no answer for that and so when you really get down to the very bottom foundations of it it literally diffuses into something that cannot be understood. I love it yeah I get what you mean yeah and I mean it ties nicely into what you're saying we know to go about religion right because it's that same reification you're actually who is doing that. So I'm doing the whole and the part interchanging it's them right. This is why I also don't want to say it's a will in addition to them or that there's a will in addition to just what it is to be existing it's the participants themselves right and if you say well the whole as if that were it's an entity that has a causal role right and then you sort of verify that into God and then you're going to have a second step in the specific tradition

2:01:21that maybe we're most familiar with is going to then also because it the whole part interchange cannot be a linear causality in our ordinary you know efficient cost since it's going to take the only alternative they think there is to the official causality which is final cost out in which means this thing being causally manipulated to fit together you know by an external agent and of course what happens then is once that agent becomes sort of left out what's left over is this completely in ner stuff because you you were implying that it needed this extra thing to do the causal work right so you take it out and then you have this completely kind of mysterious in nerds matter that doesn't itself interact with other things right it's just these closed off pieces that unless something pushes them are just aren't going to act are going to do anything are going to adjust or morph in their very continuing to exist.

2:02:32Yeah absolutely it's I mean we spent a ton of time trying to figure we spent a ton of time trying to figure out the moment that this happens and when we got into it we were sort of naively thinking that it started right around the turn of the 20th century with the advent of quantum mechanics and the inability to detect the luminous earth there where you know they were looking to see if there was some kind of change depending on the path that light travels and it couldn't find it. And over the course of doing a lot of reading we kind of realized just how old the debate was where people have been arguing about how to actually fit this picture together for such a long time like matter and void discourse is 2500 years old at this point we've been going for a long time. Yeah matter and void I mean I was thinking about that you're talking about like back to the democracy and the ancient animus I mean what interests me so much about that I didn't talk about him much in this book but I mean you know one of those things that we were getting at was the sort of being and nothing distinction right and if you look at a really great value of parmenides making this absolute destruction right so what you can only be being there cannot be non being.

2:03:50And in a weird way it atomism starts with this attempt to say no no nothing happens without both nothing and something which he conceives as this atoms at the void picture but the whole work that the void does there is just keeps those animals moving right yeah you got to have to go. They got to go and then they can interact with each other and they can link up and they can do all this stuff right but without the nothing I mean that was that was like a so again looking at this from the other side from like oh there was like these proto dougas like you really can't separate nothing and being and nothing this right they're always working together and even what what the beingness of being really depends on the nothing right I mean he's thinking of it in kind of quite abstract. I guess but but like that was the impulse there and then you have to push back on the when it leaves a protagonist but definitely suffered is played or Aristotle side who want to say that whole atomistic thing and it's the final cause thing we need we need not just atoms bumping into each other the void is doing what the work that purpose would do in other words right you can't stop these things from combining and recombining because they're always on there's no one.

2:05:08We're for them to dwell right they can stop anywhere. It's funny because like we've arrived at this moment where the the smartest physicists you know the smartest people in the world are just like you know what let's just stop talking about that who cares that there's things or that what the things are doing we could just make these nice equations and the equations will tell us how the experiments are going to go we can build space planes or you know whatever and forget about it. It's like it's a 3000 year old argument that people are just like you know what that's impolite we don't talk about religion politics or matter void discourse in this room. To like to give one last closing thought on the nature of the the natural law like I think that there's there's a real difficulty in being able to theorize about that which is invisible. And I think that natural law has a really hard time reaching into places where you cannot put it at least under a light microscope and be able to say that there's something down there and we can see it and we have evidence of it and this is I think the echoes of the positivists that are basically like well if we can't see it we can't touch it we probably shouldn't think about it because that's just pure speculation.

2:06:24And so I think that there's a realm in an under discussed realm in which our ability to measure directly influences how transgressive it is to theorize about what is not yet seen. And so it feels like there's a really deep cut off that happens with natural law where people are very very concerned about trying to reach beyond that which the evidence strongly supports like experiential evidence and yet it seems obvious that there must be principles that are operating behind the scenes that are producing the layer that is visible. But the structural aspects of that are lie beyond the realm of natural law I think because of some cultural preoccupation or despite how effective we've been at making predictions about the unseen. It's just it's really remarkable like the atom is kind of a given thing at this point right like you can.

2:07:24There's different ways you can even image atoms by touching them with these tiny little micro can of everything stuff but that is so recent. But then you also ask people like what's the automata of they're like math. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we've been through this before guys like slow down. My favorite is that's that's philosophy. Yeah, we don't do that. And I'm like but you probably wouldn't have said that to the guy in the 1600s who was like, I wonder if stuff's made out of atoms. Yeah, but when they say that's philosophy, is that is that a slur? Oh, yes, absolutely. So I mean, why not just own it? But it just declared yourselves doing philosophy. I see that natural philosophy, which was what philosophy used to mean, is in the Tyler book, right? Well, yeah, I think the scientists forgot that they're not just engineers. I mean, all of the right, if you're trying to look, you don't get much in the way of material benefits from being a scientist unless you invent something.

2:08:26Or maybe you went a prize or something, but you know, we don't pay, you don't get paid a lot for being a scientist who just comes up with understanding. So I think people, I really just think the word science has gotten totally wrapped up in the concept of technology and engineering to the point that people don't even realize science is a philosophy. First of all, so what are you guys talking about? Of course, it's philosophy, but you know, this is the world you find yourself in. You know, I mean, again, there's an outsider to the endeavor. And so also to the social pressures that that operating the way those words are used. There is spheres. I mean, yeah, it does seem to me like that. That is implicitly and to some extent explicitly the standard of what counts as a successful scientific theory, right? So it's a very geared to technological application, again, to some kind of purposes and shared purpose or at least defined purpose or designated purpose. Right. And so things that succeed in producing those things technology, which obviously I have no objection to.

2:09:29But the interesting thing is if you're doing pure philosophy, right, which would be disparaged by that standard. And so I think it's a little bit of a spinosa riff, but I mean, what are we doing when we understand something? I think we are doing that same thing we've been talking about, which is an actual expansion of our ability to think and thereby to act. In other words, an overstepping of a limitation, right? An expansion of the number of ways we can interact. And be affected to use the knows this language, right? And what we are actually able to do. So actually technology is that too, right? It wants to be able to do things we couldn't previously do, right? But pure understanding itself is an act of that same nature, right? In fact, it I would argue, you know, that is the primary instance, right? Why are we motivated to know, you know, knowing is a is a deed that oversteeps a limitation, right?

2:10:35It is becoming more, yeah. And I think I would say that it's the highest. I would go so far as to say that it's the highest aim. Because if you do stuff with no sense of why it matters or how it fits together or the tapestry that's woven as you go through and you discover. I think that you just end up painting yourself into a corner that you cannot ever get out of because the paint number dries. It is an inescapable trap that you're in. And once you're in the trap, what happens is that there's a really deep-seated conviction that it's okay to be in the trap because everybody is trapped with you. And when somebody standing on the outside and is like, you guys might not be, there might not be a good thing that you've done. I think that that's where the defense mechanisms come out and they're like, oh, well, that's a philosophical question. It's like, well, I think that if you're not wrestling deeply with the philosophical questions of what your data means, can you even be doing science that just seems like you're just crunching numbers and doing engineering, which is fine.

2:11:44It's great. It's just nothing. Very akin to the artist we discussed earlier with the pure scientists. I don't know that there really are any pure scientists, but because all your grants have to terminate in some technological promise. But you're a little bit just discovering. You're just discovering. And that's what it's like making a piece of art. You're just kind of discovering new ways for these sounds to fit together. And you don't know. And somebody's like, well, what good is this? And you're like, I don't know. But I don't think that the guy who was discovering bacteria like had any idea that they were going to be designing Christopher cast technology 200 years later, whatever it was. And so it's a little bit of a strange thing to be under assault by when somebody demands that there's some explicit application for your discovery. And like the minute that you point something out. And I think that's fine. I don't know. I can enjoy that. It's all right. Well, I mean, it is, as you say, right? I mean, there are institutional things that mean you have to package anything you do as if it serves some identifiable purpose, right? And I'm trying to say that it's like it's still a practical practical activity and pure understanding are the same thing.

2:12:50You know, it's still an expansion of our activity. That's all we ever want. That is why existing and endeavoring to exist more are the same thing. You know, it can take any four, but you can't say one is practical. The other is incredible. But there you have it. It's like, I don't know for what comes in the purpose, right? Yeah, what this will be for. It's like understanding the little bacteria in the dish might just help your marriage or something like you don't know. Like somebody might come along and make an antibiotic or something, but that might not be your particular power, what a power of boost that you get out of it. It's a very narrowing way of thinking about human activity, right? That like you have a plan. You know, it's the intelligent design of human life. Like I have a plan. Here's what I want to achieve that I'm going to do the following things and achieve that one particular thing that that is going to be that my life is empty now. I don't know. I got everything.

2:13:51I got the house in the car and what happened? Anyways, I feel like we've taken enough of your time for one afternoon. Oh, I was great. I was super fun. I love the long form where you guys do this. This was really a treat for me to get to go. Yeah, me too, man. It's been a really enjoyable conversation. And like I said, you really ticked off a lot of the boxes that have been bothering me in these subject spaces that I've been kind of avoiding them otherwise. So thank you so much. And we'll definitely link your book and. And I hope we get to talk again. We're we travels through the Midwest and we're in New York occasionally. And so if we happen to be in the same place at the same time, maybe we can do it in person. Yeah, that'd be great. Have a chance. Break out that Melody and right. I'll do that right. That's the post-festive for this conversation. Absolutely. Excellent. All right. Well, let you get on with it. All right. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you.

2:14:51It was really fun to talk to you guys. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'll go get a straightaway. Okay. Bye. Bye.