The biggest mystery in science | Adam Frank and Lex Fridman

it's an interesting thought experiment what is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer you know some people might say about like what happened before the Big Bang like some big physics questions about the Universe I can see the argument for you know how many alien civilizations or if there's other life out there you want to speak to that a little bit like why why is the why is it the biggest question in your why is it number one in your top five or I I I've involved in this right you know I started off

as a theoretical physicist I went into um computational astrophysics and Magneto hydrodynamics of star formation but I always you know I was a philosophy minor I always had these sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind and what I've come to now is the most important question in the for physics is what is life what the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell fundamentally and what I really mean by this this is where I'm going to go non-traditional um is that really the fundamental question that is the

is agency what does it mean to be an autonomous agent how the hell does that happen you know it's so I'm not a reductionist I'm not somebody who's just like well you just put together enough chemicals and Bing Bang Boom and you know it suddenly appears there something really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is and so yeah black holes are super cool cosmology is super cool but really this question of of what is life especially from by viewing it from the inside uh because it's really about the verb to be

right really what is the most what is the most impressing philosophical question Beyond science is the verb to be what is what is being right uh this is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about what what puts the fire in the equations the fire right the fire is this this presence and this is where it touches things like you know whatever you want to say it the sacred spirituality whatever you want to talk about my first book was about science and and human spirituality um so it's like you know so this question of life

what makes life as a physical system you know so different is is to me much because it's you know that's where being appears being doesn't appear out there right the only place that ever appears to any of us is us so you know I can do this kind of projection into this third person thing but nobody ever has that that God's eye view that's a story we tell this is where you know this between us is where the verb to be appears so this is something that you uh write about in the blind spot why

science cannot ignore Human Experience sort of trying to pull the fire into the the process of uh uh science uh and it's a kind of critique of uh materialism can you explain the main thesis of this book yeah so the idea of the blind spot is that there is this thing uh that is Central to science so the blind we're using the blind spot as a metaphor right so the eye has an optic nerve and the optic nerve is what allows Vision to happen um so you can't have Vision without the optic nerve but actually

you're blind to the op optic nerve there's a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is and what we're saying is that science has something like this there is something that without which science would not be possible but that science the way it's been configured and actually when we mean the blind spot I'll get into exactly what I mean what it it is but it's not really science it is a it is a set of ideas that got glued on to science it's a metaphysics that got glued on science and so um what

is that thing that is what is the blind spot it's experience it is presence and by experience people have to be very careful because I'm not talking about being an observer it's the you know there's lots of words for it there's direct experience there is um presence being um the life world within the philosophy called phenomenology there's the life world it's this sort of raw presence that you can't get away from until you die and then who the hell knows you know that like you know as long as you're around it's there and what we're

saying is that that is the the way to say this that is the the precondition for the possibility of Science and the whole nature of science the way it has evolved is that it is purposely pushed that out it pushed that out so it could make progress um and that's fine for a certain class of problems uh but when we try to answer when we try and go deeper there's a whole other class of problems the nature of Consciousness the nature of time quantum mechanics that comes back to bite us and that if we don't

learn how to take understand that that that is always the background that experience is always the background then we just end up with these paradoxes and pro these yoga that that require this intellectual yoga to get out of I think you give a bunch of examples of that like looking at temperature as a number there's a very sort of objective scientific way of looking at that and then there's the experience of the temperature and how you build the parable of temperature that we we call it so what what is the blind spot we use the

term it's a constellation it's not just materialism it's a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views they're not what sence says but because of the evolution of the history of Science and culture they got like pin the tail on the donkey they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says so what is it one is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells which are nothing but the chemistry which is nothing but you know all the way down to quirks that's it so that's

reductionism the objective frame that science gives us this God's eye view this third person view of the world to view the world from the outside that that's what science you know bequeaths to us that view physicalism that everything in the world is basically made of stuff there's nothing else to talk about right that that's all there is and everything can be reduced to that and then also the reification of mathematics that mathematics is somehow more real than this and there's a bunch of other things but all these together what they all do is they end

up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena Consciousness I I don't I tend not to use the word Consciousness because it's I think it get you know it lead leads us in the wrong direction we should focus on experience because it's a verb kind of in a way it's verb it's verb so yeah and that this by being blind to that we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science but also have been detrimental to society as a whole especially where we're at right now so you you actually

say that that from a perspective of detrimental society that there's a crisis of meaning and then would respond to that in a way that's counterproductive to these bigger questions scientific questions so the three ways the three responses you mentioned scientific uh triumphalism and then on the other side is rejecting science completely both on the left and the right I think the postmodernists on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right and then just pseudo science that kind of does this in between thing um can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis

of meaning right right so the crisis of meaning is that you know on the one hand science wants to tell us that we're insignificant we're not important we're just you know biological machines um and uh you know so we're basically an insignificant part of the Universe on the other hand we also find ourselves being completely significant in cosmology we have to figure out how to look from the inside at cosmology we're always The Observers we're at the center of this you know uh collapsing wavefront of light um you know quantum mechanics it really comes in

it comes in you know the measurement problem just puts us front and center we've spent 100 some people spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem so on the one hand we're insignificant and on the other hand we're Central so which one is it right uh and so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience this inability we can't it's we can't do science without already being present in the world we can't reduce uh what happens in science to some sort of formal it's a lot of

it is about we love our formal systems you know our mathematics and and we're substituting that's one of the things that we there's two philosophers we really like or Heroes one is um herel who is a mathematician who invented phenomenology and the other is um Whitehead who's one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and herro came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution part of the blind spot is substituting a formal system a calculus of you know data for actual experience that that's more important than and so let me just do before

I go to those three responses let's just do the parable of temperature because I think it'll people can it'll help them understand what we mean so think about uh degrees celi right we kind of have in the modern scientific culture we live in we think like oh yeah degrees Celsius they're out there Universe it's you know the the molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees you know Kelvin um the way we got there is we've forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience right we started off with science by we had the exper the subjective

experience of hot and cold I feel hot I you I feel cold you feel hot you feel cold science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what uh Michelle bitbol philosopher calls the structural invariance the things that like we could both kind of do agree on so you know we figured out like oh we could make a gradiated little cylinder that's got mercury in it and that you know uh hot things will be higher in that you know on that gradiated cylinder cold things will be lower and we can both kind of

figure out what we're going to agree on our standards for that um and then we have thermometry yay we have a way of sort of like having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal uh experience of hot or cold and then from that we can come up with thermodynamics Etc and then we end up as at the bottom of you know at the end of that with this idea of like every day I wake up and I check my phone and I'm like oh it's going to be you know 60 degrees out great

and we start thinking that 60 Dees is more real than hot and cold that thermodynamics the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from you know it required that bodily experience that also not just me you I have to tell you know it's part of my communication with you cold today isn't it right that from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world you know with everything that involves I developed degrees Celsius but then I forgot about I forgot the experience so that's

called the Amnesia of experience so that's what we mean by the you know how the blind spot emerges how we end up how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress but then it forgets that experience was important so where does this show up why is this uh you know what are the responses to trying to get this back in and where where where this crisis of meaning emerge so scientific triumphalism is the idea that only the only thing that's true for us are scientific truths right unless it can be

codified in a formal system and represented as data you know captured in some kind of scientific causal uh uh Network it doesn't even exist right and any anything else that's not part of it part that can be formalized in that way is an epip phenomena it's not real so you know scientific triumphalism is this response to to the m you know the weirdness of you know I could call it the mystery the weirdness of experience by kind of just ignoring it completely so there's no other truth you know art music you know human spirituality it's

all actually reducible just to neuro you know neural correlates uh so that's one way that it's been dealt with the other way is this sort of right you've got on the on the uh postmodern you know the left academic left you get this thing like science is just a game you know it's just a game by from from that the powerful come up with um which is also not true science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening uh so that's another way to push sort of science away um or respond to

it the denial science denial that happens that's also another way of of sort of you know not understanding the balance that science is trying that we need to establish with experience and then there's just pseudo science which wants to sort of say like oh you know the New Age movement or whatever which wants to have you know wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way or you know so that doesn't have the rigor of science um so you know all of these ways all of these responses we

have this difficulty about experience we need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning um and we don't really have an accurate we don't have a good way of doing it yet and the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests what the problem is and what its effects are in the various sciences and by the way we should mention that uh at least the the first two responses they kind of feed each other there's a just to observe the scientific Community those who sort of gravitate a little

B towards the scientific triumphalism they there's an arrogance that builds in the human soul if I mean it has to do with phds it has to do with sitting on an academic Throne all all those things and the natur the human nature with the Egos and so on it builds and of course that nobody likes arrogance and so the those that reject science that the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science I absolutely agree it just goes back and and it just is this divide that builds yeah no that was a problem like

when you saw so like I said you know my first book was about science and human spirituality so I was trying to say that like you know science is actually if we look at what happens in human spirituality not religion religion is about politics right but about you know for the entire history of the species we've we've had this experience of for a better lack of a better word the sacredness I'm not connecting this God or anything I'm just saying this experience of like the more and then you know with the new atheist movement you

got people saying that like anybody who feels that is an idiot you know they just can't handle the hardcore science when in fact their views of the world are so denuded of they can't even see the role that experience plays and how they came up with their formal systems you know and experience fundamentally is weird you know mysterious it's like it's it's you know kind of goes down forever in some sense there is always more so yeah that arrogance then just if you're telling everybody who's not hardcore enough to do the you know standard model

of cosmology that they're idiots that's not going to bode well for your you know the advance of your project so you're proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is a is fundamental experience is Not Just an Illusion that emerges from the set of quirks that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is like at the core of reality yeah but I wouldn't do it I wouldn't because you know there's pan psychism right which wants to say that's all the way there psychism is like that's literally one of the

laws of physics is see what all those do is like just the idea of say like physicalism versus idealism which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with physicalism says all that exists is physical idealism says all that exists is mind we're actually saying look both of these to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third person view right and that third person view we want to really emphasize is a fiction it's a useful fiction when you're doing science right if I want to do like you know

the the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table great I don't want to have to think about experience at all right but you know if I'm asking deeper questions I can't ignore the fact that there really is no third person view and that any story I tell about the world is coming from it's not just first person but it's literally because I I'm going to argue that experience always involves all of us experience always originates out of a community that you know you're always telling those stories from the the perspective of already existing

of already being in experience so whatever account we want to give is of the world is going to have to take that as IR experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point so ultimately like we don't have an answer like that's when people are like well what are you suggesting as the alternative it's like look that's the good work of the next science to come well our job was to point out the problem with this but what we would argue with is and we're thinking about the next book is this is really going to

require a new conception of nature right that doesn't sort of jump right to that third person that fictional third person view and somehow figures out how to do science recognizing that it always starts from EXP experience it always starts from this field of experience or or in phenomenology the word is the life world that you're embedded in you can't unemed yourself from it so how do you do so so the one of the the things that Whitehead said was you you know we have to avoid the bifurcation of Nature and what he meant by that

is the bifurcation into like sort of scientific Concepts wavelength you know think about like the seeing a sunset you can say like oh look it's just wavelengths you know and scattering particles and your experience of the redness the actual experience of the redness and the all the other things it's not just red there's no qualia there's no pure redness everything that's happening in the experiential part is just an epip phenomena it's just you know brain States whatever he said you can't do that they're just they're both real they're both accounts they're both they both need

to be integrated and so that required I think a really a different conception of what we mean by nature is it something like incorporating in the physics in the study of nature The Observer the experiencing Observer or is that still also from a third person I think that that's what we have to figure out right and so actually you know a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics right because one of the things we're arguing is like look in the in the chapter that I wrote on because it was I wrote this with

Evan Thompson who's a wonderful philosopher and Marcelo gazer who's a theoretical physicist um when I was writing the chapter on the origin of the blind spot like you know sort of what how this emerged out of History my the subheader was like well it made sense at the time because it did you know it really there was a reason why people adopted this third person God's eye deterministic view this view of sort of like yeah the perfect Clockwork of the universe yeah totally made sense but by the time you got to the beginning of the

20th century science itself was telling you like eh and no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics right quantum mechanics slams you with the idea that the of the measurement problem you know uh the most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation the schroer equation which you know you put in like we talked about before you have initial conditions and now you got a differential equation and you crank out the differential equation and it makes predictions for the future right exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the

lrange or hamiltonians but then this other thing happens where it's like oh by the way as soon as you look at it as soon as the measurement is made I have a whole another set of rules for you you know that's the born what we call the born Rule and I was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters right so when you're asking like how will we do this Quant mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it so you know there's been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics many of them

try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there go to enormous lengths like the uh the many worlds interpretation literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them which is that measurements matter and then you get something like cubism which is I'm going to advocate for is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics which puts the born rule at the center right right instead of like focusing on the Schrodinger equation and the weird things that come out of it like Schrodinger's Cat and all that other stuff it

says no no actually the real mystery is the born rule let's think about the born Rule and like you said that puts the agent the agent and information at the center of the whole thing so that's not a thing you're trying to get rid of that's that's a thing you're trying to integrate at the center of the thing in quantum mechanics it becomes super obvious but maybe this same kind of uh thing should be incorporated in in every uh layer of of study of nature absolutely that's exactly it so you know one of the things

that's really interesting to me so I'm I'm you know I have a project I'm part of a big project uh that Chris fuks and jacqu spaner on cubism so I've been part of that and what I've been Amazed by is the language they use so what's cool about cubism is it comes from Quantum information Theory it's a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics and it's always about um you have an agent who makes a an action on the world and then the information they get from that action through the the experiment that's the

action on the world updates their priors updates their their you know their basian that's why it's called cubism Quantum basian ISM updates how the information they've gotten from the world now this turns out to be kind of the same language that we're using in a project that's about the physics of life where um we have a grant from the uh Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells so you know we have Shannon information which is a probability distribution that tells you you know basically how

much surprise there is in a in a message semantic information focuses on meaning right focuses on and and a very simple way just like what is how much of the information that I'm that the agent you know the Critter is getting from the world actually has uh helps it survive right that's the most basic idea of meaning right we can get all f opical about meaning but this is it does it help me stay alive or not and the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do

cells move up a a chemical gradient to get more food kind of has the same feel the same you know sort of architecture as what's going on in quantum mechanics so I think what you said is exactly it how do we bring this sort of recognition that there's always us the agent or life the agent interacting with the world uh and drawing in both giving information and passing information back as a way of of doing science doing hardcore science with experiments but never forgetting that agency which also means experience in some sense is at the

center of the whole thing so you think that could be something like cubism Quantum bism that creates a theory like a Nobel prize winning Theory sort of like hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center yes that's what we're looking for I think that is really that's the exciting part and it's a move you know the scientific triumphalist thing says you know you understand why people love this like I have these equations and these equations represent you know there's this platonic idea that they are you know they exist eternally on their own it's

kind of Quasi religious right it's sort of like somehow look these equations are the you're reading the mind of God but this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you're saying is there's us and the world they are in able right it's always us and the world and what we're now finding about is this kind of co-creation this this interaction you know between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account like in no way am I saying these laws aren't important these laws are amazing

but they need an account but not an account that strips you know that turns the experience turns the agent into just a you know an epip phenomena that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent not the most important part of the story so if you pull on this thread and say there's a whole discipline born of this putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory in a physics theory like how is it possible it just like breaks the whole thing open so there's this whole effort of uh

you know um unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of like coming up with a theory of everything what if these are like the the tip of the iceberg what what if the the agent thing is like really important so you know listen that that would be like kind of my dream uh I'm not going to be the one to do it because I'm not smart enough to do it uh but you know Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while with strength Theory

I've spent my whole life listening to talks about strength Theory real soon you know um and it's gotten ever more disconnected from you know data observations there were people talking for a while that it's post empirical uh and you know I want always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like SM physicists have been smoking their own stash right there's this way we've gotten used to like you know you have to out weird the other person like my theory has 38 dimensions and my theory has 22 Dimensions but it's got you know

uh you know psychedelic squirrels in it and so there's been a problem there's a problem I'm I don't need to tell you there's a crisis in physics or there's a crisis in cosmology other people have used that that's been the the headline on Scientific American stories so there clearly another Direction has to be found and maybe it has nothing to do with this but I I suspect that because so many times the agent or the the the having to deal with the the view from the inside or the the the role of agency like when

it comes to time thinking that you can replace the block Universe with the actual experience of time you know clocks don't tell time we use clocks to tell time so it maybe that even like the fundamental nature of time can't be viewed from the outside that there's a a new physics theory that is going to come from that comes from this agential informational computational view um I don't know but that's kind of what I I I think it would be fertile ground to explore yeah like time is really interesting one this time is really important

to us humans what is time yeah that's a right what is time so the way we have tended to view it is we've taken this is what when heral talks about the syruptitious substitution we've taken Einstein's beautiful powerful formal system for viewing time and we substituted that for the actual experience of time right so the block Universe where like next Tuesday is already written down you know it's in the block un the four dimensional Universe all events are already there uh which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the sort of you

know the scientific framework but you know it is not lived time and uh you know this was pointed out to Einstein and he eventually recognized it very famous meeting between HRI burkson who was a the most famous philosopher of like the you know 20 early 20th century and Einstein where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and burkson whose whole thing was about time and was about duration he wanted to separate the scientific image of time the map of time from the actual terrain which he used the word duration like we humans where where duration

for us is full it's it's sort of um it's stretched out it's got a little bit of the past a little bit of the future a little bit of the present music is the best example right you're hearing music you're both already anticipating what's going to happen and you you know remembering what's going on there's a kind of phenomenal structure there which is is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics and what uh you know the way we would look at this is that the problem with the syruptitious substitution

the problem with the blind spot is it says oh no no the formal system is time but really the only place time appears is with us right where we're time you know so having a theory that actually could start with us you know and then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third person view back on us you know could that's a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem I just wonder who is the Observer I mean defying what the agent is right in any kind of frame is difficult

is difficult right and so that but that's the good work of the science ahead of us right what so what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about so you know we start with experience which is irreducible there's no atoms of experience right it's a whole um and we go through the whole process which is a communal process by the way there's a philosopher Robert cre who talks about the workshop that starting in like the 1700s 1600s we developed this communal uh uh space to work in sometimes it was literally a

physical space a laboratory where these ideas would be pulled apart refined argued over and then validated and we went to the next step so this idea of pulling out from experience these thinner abstract structural invariance the things that we could actually do science with and it's kind of like we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction right so the problem with the way we do things now is we take that those distractions which came from experience and then with something like you know a computational model of Consciousness or experience we think we can put it

back in like you literally pulled out these super thin things these abstractions you know neglecting experience because that's the only way to do science and then you think somehow oh I'm G to put I'm going to jam experience back in and and you know have a an explanation for experience so do you think it's possible to show that something like Free Will is quote unquote real if you integrate experience back into this physics into the physics model of the world what I would say is that free will is is a given and that's the thing

about experience right so one of the things that Whitehead said I really love this quote he says it's not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete it's the job to account for the abstract the the concrete what's happening between us right now is just given you know it's just it's presented to us every day it's presented to if you want an explanation fine but the explanation actually does doesn't add anything to it right so that Free Will in some sense is the nature of being an agent right to be an

agent agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are you know that they're they're equivalent and so in some sense to be an agent is to be autonomous and so then the question really to ask is can you have an account for agency and autonomy that captures aspects of its it's arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co- arise um but the idea you know the reason why argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of

our equations which themselves we treat the equations as if they're more real than experience you know and the equations are a paler you know they don't Corral experience they are a thinner you know representation as we like to say don't confuse the map for the terrain what's happening between us right now in this you know all the weirdness of it that's the terrain the map is what I can write down on equations and then in the workshop do experiments on super powerful needs an account but experience overflows that what if the experience is an illusion

like how how do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion an illusion looking from where like right because that already requires to to take that stance is you've already pushed yourself into that third person view right and so what we're saying is that's a that third person view which now you're going to say like oh I've got a whole other set of entities of ontological entities meaning you know things that I think exist in God's living room in spite you know that are independent of me and the community of living

things I'm part of so you're pushing it elsewhere this just like there's a stack of turtles is probably if if this experience The Human Experience is an illusion maybe there's an observer for whom it's not an illusion so you always have to find an observer somewhere yeah right and that's where that's why you know fundamentally the the blind spot the especially the scientific triumphalist part is is following religious impulse you know it's wanting the God's eye view and you know what's really interesting and when we think about this and the way this gets talked about

especially publicly you know there's a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in and it is actually a pretty it's only one version of philosophy right so it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition right um but there's even in Europe in the or or in the western tradition in the you know for Western what we'll call Western philosophy there's phenomenology heral and Iger and meru panti which took an entirely different track they were really interested in the structure of experience they spent all their time trying to understand trying to develop

a language that could kind of climb into the circle that is experience right you experience you're not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it it's it's given so you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure but then so that that has not been part of this discussion about you'll never good luck finding a YouTube video where someone you know a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view even though it's a huge branch of

philosophy and then you get the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization right so there's the there's the Western core out of which comes the Greeks and the you know the judeo Christian Islamic tradition but then you get India and you get Asia and they developed their own they were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions and they for reasons because they had contemp of practice they were very focused on like direct trying to like directly probe attention and experence they asked questions in ways that the West never really did

phenomenology kind of started it but you know there's there's philosophers like um narina and vasu bondu and they're like the Plato and the you know Aristotle of you know sort of those philosophies and they were really focused on experience in the west I think maybe because we had uh the judeo-christian tradition where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame the in the uh the Traditions that came from the classical philosophies of Indian Asia they started always with they wanted to

know about experience their whole philosophies and their logic and their their argumentation was based on I've got this experience I can't get out of this experience how do I reason from it so I think there's like a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from you know not like slavishly we don't have to become Buddhists to do it but there are Traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western Traditions just didn't but there's also the Practical fact that uh is difficult to build a logical system on top

of experience it's difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience and so it's as science advances we might get better and better like the same is it's very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to uh uh why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects sort of the Santa Fe questions yeah I think but I think we can do it I think there's aspects of it I mean as long as you're never trying to like this is what experience is like I think that's kind of the

where we you know you're never going to have a causal account of experience because it's just given but you can do lots about and that's what the good work is is to how do I approach this how do I approach this in a way that's rigorous that I can do experiments with also um but so for example I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in the you know this is what we're ING with our semantic information too causal closure love this idea right the idea that so we talked about autop poesis

a while back right the idea that living systems are um they are self-creating and self-maintaining so the the membrane cell membrane is a great example of this right the cell membrane you can't have a cell without a cell membrane the cell membrane lets stuff through keeps other stuff out right but the cell membrane is part of the processes and it's a product of the the processes that the cell membrane needs right in some sense the cell me cell membrane creates itself so there's this strange it's always with life there's always this strange Loop and so

somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange Loop is you know the science that's ahead of us and so this idea of causal closure accounting for how the you know we talk about like um uh downward causation right so reductionism says everything only depends on the micro State everything just depends on the atoms right that's it you don't really if you know if you know the lran for the standard model you're done you know of course in principle you need God's computer but fine you know in you know in principle it could be done

colossal closure and there's I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this there's ways in which using Epsilon machines and all this Machinery from information theory that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the micro States now the macro State fundamentally no longer needs the micro state for its own description its own account of the laws whether that paper is true or not it's an example of heading down that road there's also Robert rosen's work he was a theoretical biologist who he was

you know he talked about closure to efficient cause that that living systems you know are organizationally closed are are causally closed so that they don't depend anymore on the micro State and he made he had a proof which is very contentious nobody knows if it's you know some argue it's true some argue it's not but he said that because of this living systems are not Church Turing complete they cannot be represented as formal systems so you know in that way they're not axioms they're not living systems will not be axioms they can only be partially

captured by algorithms now again people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof was you know is is valid or not but I'm saying I'm giving you examples of like you know when you when you see the blind spot when you acknowledge the blind spot it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations you know the book we thought was going to be really heretical right you know obviously you know most most public facing scientists are very sort of in that especially scientific Triumph so we were just like waiting you

know waiting for the fight and then the review from science came out and it was like totally Pro yeah they was very positive we're like oh my God you know and then a review came out in nature physics and it was totally positive and then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal cuz we kind of criticized not capitalism but we criticized sort of all industrial economies for that they were sort of had been touched by the blind spot socialism communism doesn't matter these extractive you know had sort of had that sort of view

that the world is just reducible to you know uh resources The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review so I feels like there's actually out there there is some among working scientists in particular there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist View and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to like jump past these hurdles that we've been arguing about forever and we're not you know we sort of stuck in a Vortex well it is I mean I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there's an elephant in the room like

that we're just removing the agent like it's everyone is doing it and it's like yeah yeah we there's a the the experience and then there's the third person perspective on the world right and so to man science from a applying scientific riger from a firstperson perspective is very difficult I mean it's fascinating I think we can do it because it's also the thing you know what's really interesting is it's I think it's not just first person it's first and second right because science because when so like one idea is that we you know the idea

that oh science gives us this objective third person view that's one way of talking about objectivity there's a whole other way is that I do the experiment you do the experiment we talk to each other we agree on methods and we both get the same result that is a very different way of thinking about objectivity and it acknowledges that you know when we talk about agents agency and individuality are flexible right so there's a great paper speaking of Santa Fe by David krackow where they looked at sort of information theoretic measures of individuality and what

you find is it's actually pretty fluid like my liver cell is an individual but really it's part of the liver and my liver is you know a separate system but really it's part of me but I'm so I'm an individual yay but actually I'm part of a society like and I I couldn't be me without the entire community of say language users right I wouldn't even be able to frame any questions and the my community of language users is part of ecosystems right that are alive that I am a part of a lineage of this

is like Sarah Walker stuff and then that those ecosystems are part of the biosphere right we're never separable as opposed to this very atomizing the triumphalist science view is want like boltman brains you're just a brain floating in the space you know yeah there's a fascinating degree to which uh a is fluid like you are an individual but you and I talking is the kind of individual yeah and then uh the person listening to this right now is also an individual I mean that's a weird thing too that's a weird thing right because there's like

there's a broadcast nature too this is why information theoretic so so the idea that we're pursuing now which I get really excited about is this idea of information architecture right or organization informational organization because you know right physicalism is like everything's atoms but you know Kant recogn Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism cuz he recognized that life has a weird organization that would see specifically different from machines and so this idea that how do we engage with the idea that organization which is often I can be cast in information

theoretic terms uh or computational terms even is sort of it's not really quite physical right it's it's embodied in physical you know in the physical has to instantiate in the physical but it also has this other realm of of design you know and some not design like intelligent design but there's a you know organization itself is is a relationship of constraints and information flow and I think again that's an entirely new interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that so going back to content organism versus

machine so I showed you uh a couple of uh Leed robots very cool is it possible for machines to to have agency I would not discount that possibility um I think it you know there's no reason I would say that it's impossible that machines could whatever it manifests that strange Loop that we're talking about that autop poesis um I don't think there's a reason to say it can't happen in uh in a in Silicon I think whatever it would it would be very different from us like the idea that it would be like oh it

would be just like us but now it's instantiated I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature um I don't think I don't think what we have now like the llms are really there um but uh but I yeah I I I I'm not going to say that it's not possible I wonder how far you can get with imitation which is essentially what llms are doing so imitating humans and I I wouldn't discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve uh what you call Consciousness or uh agency or the ability to

have experience I think for most us humans they think oh that's just fake that's copying but there's some degree to which us we humans are just copying each other we just are really good imitation machines come from babies we were born in this world and we're just learning to imitate each other and through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations we uh gain personality perspective all that kind of stuff yeah I think so I I you know it's possible right it's possible but I think probably the view I'm advocating would say

that one of the most important parts of agency is there's something called E4 E4 the E4 theory of Co cognition embodiment inaction embedding and there's another one extension but so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the of the extension in with other living systems as well is essential so that's why I think the llms are not gonna the it's not just imitation it's going to require this goes to the brain in the vat thing

I did a an article about the brain in the vat which was really Evans I was reporting on Evans where they did the brain in the vat argument but they said look in the end actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the vat is actually to have a brain in a body and if it could be a robot body you know but you still need a brain in the body so I don't think llms will get there because they can't you know you really need to be embedded in a world at

least that's the e four idea the E4 the 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head but is also embodied embedded enacted and extended by way of extra cranial processes and structures the very much invogue 4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations this is a paper by reflecting on two uh recent collections this article reviews the 4E Paradigm with a view to uh assessing the strengths and weaknesses it's fascinating I mean yeah there the branches of what is cognition extends far and it could go real far right there's

a great um story about an interaction between Jonas Sul who is very much a reductionist you know the great biologist and um Gregory baton who was a cyberneticist and uh Bateson always loved to poke people and he said to sulk he said you know where's your mind and you know Suk went up here and Bon said no no no out here and what he really meant was this extended idea it's not just Within your cranium to be to be to have experience you know experience in some sense is not a thing you have it is

a thing you do right it's a you almost perform it in a way which is why both actually having a body but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies is from this perspective is really important and it's very attractive to me and you know seeing again if we're really going to do science with them we're going to have to like have these ideas crash up against data you know crash up against we can't just armchair it you know or or you know or quarter you know couch quarterbacking it um but I

think there's a lot of possibility here it's a very radically different way of looking at uh at at what we mean by Nature