×

We use cookies to help make LingQ better. By visiting the site, you agree to our cookie policy.

image

The Michael Shermer Show, 306. Fear of a Black Universe (7)

306. Fear of a Black Universe (7)

2 (1h 8m 11s):

Yeah, Yeah. I think we're entering into that sort of like Allison Wonderland type of place in modern physics where we would like to tell a story and, and, and grasp with some, you know, some, some picture or mechanism or physics, right? Or, or relate, relate it to things that we can, by analogy we can imagine, we can see and imagine. But yeah, I think that like, you know, there are already things in say, quantum field theory or in general activity that just simply is, you know, a set of mathematical relations. You know?

2 (1h 8m 52s):

So, but I, I, let me push this a little bit further. It could be that one of the things we'll learn about physics is that there, there are certain mathematically, mathematically consistent. Here's one example for quantum mechanics works. One of the reason why it works is that it, right? It, it uses a gadget, a mathematical gadget called a complex number, right? So if I say, Hey, you know, I, you know, I square, if I take minus one and I multiply with minus one, I get one, right? If I take minus one and I multiply it with one, I get minus one.

2 (1h 9m 37s):

If I, you know, we get that, that's all intuitive, right? You know, if I add a positive number to negative number, right? Right. They cancel out minus one plus, you know, whatever. But then the imagining numbers is like already some, a place where it's hard to imagine. So I, you know, I square a number, right? And I get a negative number, you know, I, when I say I square the same number, I take a number, right? And I, I multiply it by itself and I get a negative number every time you try to do that with a number that, you know, it's impossible to do that.

2 (1h 10m 17s):

If I take minus one and I multiply with, how do I get minus one from that? Well, I have to multiply with plus one. If I multiply with the same number, I, I get plus one, right? So, so we, we create a number called I, we just, we just, you know, call the letter I and we say I square is equal to minus one. That's how we define it. But quantum mechanics rely on that number. It uses, it's at the heart of quantum mechanics already, this quantum physics that we know and love, right? These qubits that we're trying to manipulate with quantum computers, right? That's how it, it that that's how it's animated in the real world. It uses actually this imaginary number.

2 (1h 11m 0s):

And for that, there's really no conceptual way to understand that really.

1 (1h 11m 6s):

Well, you quote Byman saying, no one really understands quantum physics. Well, if he doesn't understand it, you know, what hope does anybody else have? But this is what you mean, right? It does. Maybe like when Newton says, I dunno what gravity is, it just, it makes, it allows us to make predictions that come true. Is that what you mean with quantum physics? I mean, there's something at its foundation that's just not comprehensible by the human mind, just cuz it's so weird. But it does things that we can predict. We can build stuff and, and make run experiments and they come true. And that's how we know it's real.

2 (1h 11m 35s):

A hundred percent agree with that statement. Yeah. I'm, yeah. Okay. Yep.

1 (1h 11m 39s):

All right, Stephan, let's get to it toward the end of your book and the big question of consciousness.

2 (1h 11m 45s):

Oh

1 (1h 11m 45s):

God, yeah. You get pretty speculative there. But I like that, you know, Deepak chop and I have go way back and, and I'm a and I love that story of your encounter with him. And you know, he's interesting. He, he thinks that, I mean, I always call him a doist. He goes, No, no, I'm not a doist, I'm a moist, a mind moist. That is, there's just one substance or one thing and it's, it's consciousness or mind and physical stuff is, you know, the derivative of mind, right? So moist, not doist. And, and so this gets us to these fields, back to the fields, you know, maybe, and I forget who you quoted, I cuz I, I I know this guy, but I forget his name now, whose theory of consciousness is that?

1 (1h 12m 25s):

It's fields that you can measure with EEGs and so on, like, like that. So

2 (1h 12m 30s):

David Chamas definitely is one of the people that yeah,

1 (1h 12m 34s):

David Cham is one. Okay. Right, right. There was, but there was somebody else as well. Any case, you know, if you look in Wikipedia under, you know, the hard problem of consciousness, there's like two dozen theories. So to me it seems like there's something wrong here. Maybe it's we're conceptualizing it incorrectly or we're using the wrong words. It's such a weird thing, you know, what is consciousness, what it's like to be something? What does that mean? You know, I know what I, it's like to be me, but I don't know what it's like to be you and I, you know, the little humongous in my head can't tiptoe over into your head and go, Oh, that's what it's like to be Stefan Alexander. I see that we can't do that. So, you know, so maybe the hard problem is just, it's hard because we are, we're not conceptualizing it.

1 (1h 13m 15s):

Right?

2 (1h 13m 17s):

I'm, I'm in alignment with that. I think one, one, my my one way into this was to, and, but I, it's not, it wasn't, it's not my idea, but I, I would like to think that I reason my way to that conclusion, but, and maybe it's chams, but I think that I kind of expanded the idea into the, into the picture of fields. So let me just say it this way. So, so we can ask the same question when we say what is an electron, right? What is an electron? So we say, well, we're gonna do, we do some experiment, JJ Thompson and discovered the electron and looking at probing all these properties, and then stern and Garlock and others discover that the electrons have a quantum spin.

2 (1h 14m 5s):

So there are these irreducible properties that the electron does have, right? That cannot, that doesn't seem to be reducible, it just is. So for example, it has a quantum spin that, that just, it, that that can be reduced to something more basic than a spin that it doesn't emerge from, it just has a spin. And that is just a fundamental intrinsic property of what it is, what, what the elect, what defines and what electron is. It has mass, it has electric charge, it has something called electron number. We, so all the experiment we've done to probe, we can, the, those are the things that come together to say that this is an electron and it is not a, you know, a positron, this is the electron.

2 (1h 14m 50s):

And the idea of the pan panpsychism idea is to say, well, maybe the same way the electron has energy, right? Maybe there's this thing of some subunit of consciousness, like, like the electric charge. It just, it's a fundamental property of the existence of the electron. And that property does, it's the same way spin can generate a magnetic feel, or it can interact with other electrons by the spin orientation, right? It allows the electron to interact or come together to make more con aggregate things. Or maybe this unit, this unit of proto consciousness can come together to actually create even more and more complex internal experiences.

2 (1h 15m 40s):

And so that seems to be consistent with our, you know, that that, that, you know, the way our brains are wired up does give the epi epi phenomenon of our form, our states of consciousness. Because, you know, all the subunit actually have their own, you know, fundamental units of consciousness. But when they come together, you get this, this kind of epiphenomenon, and that's why it flies consciousness, right? And the way it's patterned is different than a, a squirrels consciousness than it is ours. So it doesn't take away from the idea that, that the neurons in our brain does play a role in our consciousness. But it also kind of gets, gets around the, this question about for me, about that, you know, what is consciousness?

2 (1h 16m 26s):

Well, if I just posit as an, as an axiom, that is the, at the same level, the electric charge and left hand number and all these things are fundamental properties of matter. Well, this seems to be a fundamental, could be a fundamental property, but it can have a vast array of complexity in, in its, its quality of, of, of the existence of the object, which is that there's a notion of an outside and an inside, and that object can, can, can distinguish that inside and outside experience.

1 (1h 16m 60s):

Mm. So maybe in a way, this is one of these one thought too

2 (1h 17m 4s):

Many, and I call that, that's what I call locality, right? That's locality. Yeah. Okay. You cannot, you cannot be localized if, unless you have an external, you know, reference to. So for example, the entire universe is just a non-local phenomenon. There's nothing outside of it. Right?

1 (1h 17m 21s):

Right. Well, so if I'm following you, it's just part of the, it's just the way it's, I'm sorry. It's built into nature. It's who, it's like, why is there gravity? Well, there just is, it's just the way it is. It's

2 (1h 17m 33s):

Part of the universe. That's just the way it is. Things will never be the same. That song.

1 (1h 17m 39s):

Very good. That's really nice. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, and then we get down to, you know, does the universe, did the universe need consciousness to come into existence? Like your two slit experiment? How does the electron know to go through the left slit or the right slit? Well, it, when it's observed, then it knows, well, what does that even mean? I mean, you could have a camera as the observer doesn't have to be conscious, right? So, so does the universe need something like consciousness or mind to come into existence?

2 (1h 18m 8s):

No, this is okay. When I, when I was writing a book, I got very excited and I was like, Oh, yeah, it does. But now I'm like, wait a minute, what if there's something beyond consciousness? Right? What about that? Okay, so what if consciousness also is something that is secondary to something beyond it? And that's maybe that's what the universe, that that's, you know, another way I was like also thinking about is that in like a grant, in a unified theory, like for the standard model for example, there's an idea in which like, you know, the coexistence, right? When the forces are unified, they are all coexistent at the same time. And there's nothing within, in at that level of, of the forces being unified that can distinguish one force from the other.

2 (1h 18m 55s):

And what happens is that a symmetry is broken, right? That symmetry is a thing that break broken symmetry distinguishes, you know, what's now the electromagnetic force, what's now the weak force, right? And so the idea of breaking a symmetry, a pencil fall into the ground, right? I've broken the rotational symmetry, meaning that the pencil could have gone in any direction, right? So there's an ambiguity now, the pencil, it's a confused pencil. It doesn't know what direction to fall in. They're all nice, right? It's like the mule that refuses to eat the meal, whatever, given, Okay? And we'll starve to death.


306. Fear of a Black Universe (7)

2 (1h 8m 11s):

Yeah, Yeah. I think we're entering into that sort of like Allison Wonderland type of place in modern physics where we would like to tell a story and, and, and grasp with some, you know, some, some picture or mechanism or physics, right? Or, or relate, relate it to things that we can, by analogy we can imagine, we can see and imagine. But yeah, I think that like, you know, there are already things in say, quantum field theory or in general activity that just simply is, you know, a set of mathematical relations. You know?

2 (1h 8m 52s):

So, but I, I, let me push this a little bit further. It could be that one of the things we'll learn about physics is that there, there are certain mathematically, mathematically consistent. Here's one example for quantum mechanics works. One of the reason why it works is that it, right? It, it uses a gadget, a mathematical gadget called a complex number, right? So if I say, Hey, you know, I, you know, I square, if I take minus one and I multiply with minus one, I get one, right? If I take minus one and I multiply it with one, I get minus one.

2 (1h 9m 37s):

If I, you know, we get that, that's all intuitive, right? You know, if I add a positive number to negative number, right? Right. They cancel out minus one plus, you know, whatever. But then the imagining numbers is like already some, a place where it's hard to imagine. So I, you know, I square a number, right? And I get a negative number, you know, I, when I say I square the same number, I take a number, right? And I, I multiply it by itself and I get a negative number every time you try to do that with a number that, you know, it's impossible to do that.

2 (1h 10m 17s):

If I take minus one and I multiply with, how do I get minus one from that? Well, I have to multiply with plus one. If I multiply with the same number, I, I get plus one, right? So, so we, we create a number called I, we just, we just, you know, call the letter I and we say I square is equal to minus one. That's how we define it. But quantum mechanics rely on that number. It uses, it's at the heart of quantum mechanics already, this quantum physics that we know and love, right? These qubits that we're trying to manipulate with quantum computers, right? That's how it, it that that's how it's animated in the real world. It uses actually this imaginary number.

2 (1h 11m 0s):

And for that, there's really no conceptual way to understand that really.

1 (1h 11m 6s):

Well, you quote Byman saying, no one really understands quantum physics. Well, if he doesn't understand it, you know, what hope does anybody else have? But this is what you mean, right? It does. Maybe like when Newton says, I dunno what gravity is, it just, it makes, it allows us to make predictions that come true. Is that what you mean with quantum physics? I mean, there's something at its foundation that's just not comprehensible by the human mind, just cuz it's so weird. But it does things that we can predict. We can build stuff and, and make run experiments and they come true. And that's how we know it's real.

2 (1h 11m 35s):

A hundred percent agree with that statement. Yeah. I'm, yeah. Okay. Yep.

1 (1h 11m 39s):

All right, Stephan, let's get to it toward the end of your book and the big question of consciousness.

2 (1h 11m 45s):

Oh

1 (1h 11m 45s):

God, yeah. You get pretty speculative there. But I like that, you know, Deepak chop and I have go way back and, and I'm a and I love that story of your encounter with him. And you know, he's interesting. He, he thinks that, I mean, I always call him a doist. He goes, No, no, I'm not a doist, I'm a moist, a mind moist. That is, there's just one substance or one thing and it's, it's consciousness or mind and physical stuff is, you know, the derivative of mind, right? So moist, not doist. And, and so this gets us to these fields, back to the fields, you know, maybe, and I forget who you quoted, I cuz I, I I know this guy, but I forget his name now, whose theory of consciousness is that?

1 (1h 12m 25s):

It's fields that you can measure with EEGs and so on, like, like that. So

2 (1h 12m 30s):

David Chamas definitely is one of the people that yeah,

1 (1h 12m 34s):

David Cham is one. Okay. Right, right. There was, but there was somebody else as well. Any case, you know, if you look in Wikipedia under, you know, the hard problem of consciousness, there's like two dozen theories. So to me it seems like there's something wrong here. Maybe it's we're conceptualizing it incorrectly or we're using the wrong words. It's such a weird thing, you know, what is consciousness, what it's like to be something? What does that mean? You know, I know what I, it's like to be me, but I don't know what it's like to be you and I, you know, the little humongous in my head can't tiptoe over into your head and go, Oh, that's what it's like to be Stefan Alexander. I see that we can't do that. So, you know, so maybe the hard problem is just, it's hard because we are, we're not conceptualizing it.

1 (1h 13m 15s):

Right?

2 (1h 13m 17s):

I'm, I'm in alignment with that. I think one, one, my my one way into this was to, and, but I, it's not, it wasn't, it's not my idea, but I, I would like to think that I reason my way to that conclusion, but, and maybe it's chams, but I think that I kind of expanded the idea into the, into the picture of fields. So let me just say it this way. So, so we can ask the same question when we say what is an electron, right? What is an electron? So we say, well, we're gonna do, we do some experiment, JJ Thompson and discovered the electron and looking at probing all these properties, and then stern and Garlock and others discover that the electrons have a quantum spin.

2 (1h 14m 5s):

So there are these irreducible properties that the electron does have, right? That cannot, that doesn't seem to be reducible, it just is. So for example, it has a quantum spin that, that just, it, that that can be reduced to something more basic than a spin that it doesn't emerge from, it just has a spin. And that is just a fundamental intrinsic property of what it is, what, what the elect, what defines and what electron is. It has mass, it has electric charge, it has something called electron number. We, so all the experiment we've done to probe, we can, the, those are the things that come together to say that this is an electron and it is not a, you know, a positron, this is the electron.

2 (1h 14m 50s):

And the idea of the pan panpsychism idea is to say, well, maybe the same way the electron has energy, right? Maybe there's this thing of some subunit of consciousness, like, like the electric charge. It just, it's a fundamental property of the existence of the electron. And that property does, it's the same way spin can generate a magnetic feel, or it can interact with other electrons by the spin orientation, right? It allows the electron to interact or come together to make more con aggregate things. Or maybe this unit, this unit of proto consciousness can come together to actually create even more and more complex internal experiences.

2 (1h 15m 40s):

And so that seems to be consistent with our, you know, that that, that, you know, the way our brains are wired up does give the epi epi phenomenon of our form, our states of consciousness. Because, you know, all the subunit actually have their own, you know, fundamental units of consciousness. But when they come together, you get this, this kind of epiphenomenon, and that's why it flies consciousness, right? And the way it's patterned is different than a, a squirrels consciousness than it is ours. So it doesn't take away from the idea that, that the neurons in our brain does play a role in our consciousness. But it also kind of gets, gets around the, this question about for me, about that, you know, what is consciousness?

2 (1h 16m 26s):

Well, if I just posit as an, as an axiom, that is the, at the same level, the electric charge and left hand number and all these things are fundamental properties of matter. Well, this seems to be a fundamental, could be a fundamental property, but it can have a vast array of complexity in, in its, its quality of, of, of the existence of the object, which is that there's a notion of an outside and an inside, and that object can, can, can distinguish that inside and outside experience.

1 (1h 16m 60s):

Mm. So maybe in a way, this is one of these one thought too

2 (1h 17m 4s):

Many, and I call that, that's what I call locality, right? That's locality. Yeah. Okay. You cannot, you cannot be localized if, unless you have an external, you know, reference to. So for example, the entire universe is just a non-local phenomenon. There's nothing outside of it. Right?

1 (1h 17m 21s):

Right. Well, so if I'm following you, it's just part of the, it's just the way it's, I'm sorry. It's built into nature. It's who, it's like, why is there gravity? Well, there just is, it's just the way it is. It's

2 (1h 17m 33s):

Part of the universe. That's just the way it is. Things will never be the same. That song.

1 (1h 17m 39s):

Very good. That's really nice. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, and then we get down to, you know, does the universe, did the universe need consciousness to come into existence? Like your two slit experiment? How does the electron know to go through the left slit or the right slit? Well, it, when it's observed, then it knows, well, what does that even mean? I mean, you could have a camera as the observer doesn't have to be conscious, right? So, so does the universe need something like consciousness or mind to come into existence?

2 (1h 18m 8s):

No, this is okay. When I, when I was writing a book, I got very excited and I was like, Oh, yeah, it does. But now I'm like, wait a minute, what if there's something beyond consciousness? Right? What about that? Okay, so what if consciousness also is something that is secondary to something beyond it? And that's maybe that's what the universe, that that's, you know, another way I was like also thinking about is that in like a grant, in a unified theory, like for the standard model for example, there's an idea in which like, you know, the coexistence, right? When the forces are unified, they are all coexistent at the same time. And there's nothing within, in at that level of, of the forces being unified that can distinguish one force from the other.

2 (1h 18m 55s):

And what happens is that a symmetry is broken, right? That symmetry is a thing that break broken symmetry distinguishes, you know, what's now the electromagnetic force, what's now the weak force, right? And so the idea of breaking a symmetry, a pencil fall into the ground, right? I've broken the rotational symmetry, meaning that the pencil could have gone in any direction, right? So there's an ambiguity now, the pencil, it's a confused pencil. It doesn't know what direction to fall in. They're all nice, right? It's like the mule that refuses to eat the meal, whatever, given, Okay? And we'll starve to death.