Mindscape 244 | Katie Elliott on Metaphysics, Chance, and Explanation
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- Опубліковано 23 лип 2023
- Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the latter. Rather than building specific quantitative theories about the world, metaphysics aims to get a handle on the basic logical structures that help us think about it. I talk with philosopher Katie Elliott on how metaphysics helps us think about questions like counterfactuals, possible worlds, time travel, mathematical equivalence, and whether everything happens for a reason.
Katrina (Katie) Elliott received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After being an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, she is now on the faculty at Brandeis. Her research covers topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, including explanation, chances, and the logic of time travel.
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#podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture - Наука та технологія
One of my favorite episodes. Katie is hilarious
Physics in Buddhism called Abhi ( Higher) Dhamma (Realities) is the real science. Modern science is metaphysics.
The back and forth questioning between the host and guest should be encouraged in the future as it enhances the conversation a great deal. In that vein, I wonder if you could ask future guests ahead of time to come prepared with some questions for you related to your expertise/interests in physics and philosophy that possibly relate to their expertise. This was an interesting exchange.
Agreed. I'd also like some more debate-focused episodes so that we could see some sharp but good natured debate between competing ideas. It might aid the audience's understanding and maybe even help us be better/nicer/more constructive human beings too.
This feels like we are listening in on a conversation between friends during a long and interesting lunch. I love it.
One of the most amusing and enjoyable episodes in a while. Well done, both of you!
lol, best intro from a guest Katie is great, perfect energy for the subject matter down to earth, much thanks, good show 👍👍
This may be one of my favorite episodes ever exclamation point period
What a wonderful guest! Very engaging
Well...this is the MOST IMPORTANT EPISODE Sean brought so far, period.
Great episode. I don't see how anyone can be a casual viewer of the podcast. I am a hardcore viewer watching all episodes at 2x.
True hardcore watch episodes at 0.5x
@@CurtOntheRadio 0.5x, wow, i never thought of that.. i keep replaying, and stopping/taking notes. I think that is a great experiment (especially for the AMA)
@@CurtOntheRadio i also have it on two screens and i blink at high speed :)
@@HarryNicNicholas Super hardcore. Take a bow. ;)
Thank you Sean Carroll, I enjoy your podcast, I love listening to your explanation of scientific subjects, I'm just an average person. With just a high school education you make topics relatable to me,that helps me think deeper thoughts. I appreciate your work thanks again.
i really enoyed this talk. Sean's way of viewing philosophy iives with my own most of the time. He seems to be able to question things as an almost true atheist,, which is something I would like to grow up to be.
Loved it! And was very surprised that I could follow everything
RIP Jim Hartle 🙏 nice podcast as usual
Jim Hartle
@@dimitrispapadimitriou5622 Thanks for correction mate both Jims had made contributions to the field of cosmology so i was a little confused.
Wonderful work, as usual! Thank you :)
Agree with the previous comments. Katie: "That is the saddest thing I have ever heard." Funniest end I've heard to a Sean Carroll podcast.
You sad man! lol
Excellent podcast. Ms Elliott is a veritable Rubik's cube of, "Ok, so what about......?" Very enjoyable listen, much thanks.
Pretty good speech
Katie and you are hilarious together
You guys don't only amuse yourselves. I did not understand that joke until I thought about it
1:09:00 Blew my mind, that if you allow classic time travel, determinism and eternalism is necessary. Loved this talk. However doesn't entanglement with you in the environment and decoherence, in case of a quantum dice, change the outcome, and thus change the future? If this is not your conclusion which it isn't for both of you, doesn't this imply you think the Born rule is unaffected and thus time travel doesn't imply eternalism or determinism, but even more it implies superdeterminism in which the born rule is obsolete?
Re mathematical equivalence of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mathematics, I would encourage both interlocutors to take a look at the 2009 North paper and the 2014 Curiel paper. Both very highly cited.
What do the papers say? That the two formulations are not completely equivalent? Nobody in physics cares because physics is not mathematics with ropes and pulleys. ;-)
Physicists might not care but philosophers of physics do. It is certainly something worth addressing in a podcast such as this one.
@@gregorspv Philosophers are bullshitters. Physics is when you do a measurement on a natural phenomenon, not when you bullshit all day long about what measurements other people have done or what theoretical ideas they might have had. In science you either put up or shut up. ;-)
Before this episode, David Albert was my favorite guest. Sorry Dave.
I agree with Baas van Fraassen that it is unfortunate that metaphysics was exhumed during WVO Quine's time. I think Wittgenstein's and Carnap's attitude towards metaphysics is the most mature one: metaphysics is not directly about reality, but it's a discourse about language use (often about the use of the word "existence" in natural language or other types of language).
Wonder if there has been satisfying classification of metaphysics and the reaction to it? Heidegger seems to be in a class of his own. Where does Buddhist nonduality fit? Etc.
I always feel like there’s something wrong with my brain compared to other people when I hear these kinds of thought experiments. Does the magical being have perfect (or near perfect) prediction powers? And is he looking into *my* brain and predicting what I am going to do based on what he sees in my brain?? Does he know I want a million dollars and I”m only going to pick one box and he’s going to put the million dollars in the opaque box for me? How does he decide what I am going to do?
P.S. I assume there’s some math involved that tells us that picking two boxes is “better.” Fine. But I am not going to make a rational decision here. I want a million dollars. I hope the being knows that and isn’t going to assume that I’m going to be rational just because I listen to podcasts like these.
P.S.S. What if we impose a sizable fine on the magical being for predicting incorrectly? I wonder how that affects the math in this game.
It's irrelevant how it does it. You know it has never been known to make an incorrect prediction so, what will you do?
There are no magical beings. There, solved it for you. Would you also like an introduction to the difference between the fiction and non-fiction sections of the library? The fiction section is where you can usually find the copies of Harry Potter. ;-)
I have one question for sean carroll and I also don't know if this is a science or philosophy question, imagine, if nothing in our existing world flies over our heads, we can still have a dream of flying?
that's a bit like trying to imagine a fruit that doesn't (yet) exist.
if there was a world with no god or notion of a god, what would atheists be called?
Yes. Metaphysics, historically, is a solid field of knowledge. Important subject. Useful do demistify adulteration of the concept. 🙏Ethymology does not define the evolution of the field. Around scientific positivism era it has been diminished, middle ages have overrated it... We have at least 24 centuries of explaining to achieve.
A relation between extended mereological simples and philosophy concepts of extended simple may be defined as?
At 50%, grokking suggest a beautiful podcast. ✨
Here at the last remarks, expectations have been exceeded, our host is becoming better every arc of episodes. Causation and correlation, yes, there still physics, not a clapping sound skeptic is a good point.
Scrubbing spookiness with openness.
Congrats. Thank you
Yes, that was bullshit, too. :-)
Regarding time travel back to before you flipped the indeterministic coin. It seems to me that if you are about to re-flip that indeterministic coin and you think you can predict the outcome with 100% certainty, you’re implicitly admitting to some kind of “hidden variable theory” of the world. That is, you *could* have known the original outcome of the flip if you just had more information (Laplace’s demon.) But if QM is to be believed, this information simply does not exist. So in my mind, the coin flip should be allowed to come up differently. I’m a many-worlds guy, so I interpret this as there are two universes in which both outcomes obtain, and you are time-traveling back to a point before this branch occurred. (Of course this makes me question what are “you” that feels like you are experiencing only the single outcome of the coin flip. There should be another you somewhere else experiencing the other outcome. And both of you “feel” like you. But that’s an entirely different discussion.)
good thought. it hurts my brain.
Why are you telling us that you can't count? That's all MWI is... a counting error. :-)
'meta' is Greek for 'after', highlighting the fact that metaphysics necessarily follows physics, while physics itself follows nothing but the laws of nature, so that's a difference between them or a hierarchy among them.
Here's the issue I have with two-boxer's in Newcomb's paradox. They get hung up on the 'magical being' aspect of the question. Replace that being with a smart person with access to the internet, and advanced warning of who is coming to the test. Do they REALLY think that that smart person could NOT determine which they were likely to choose? Most people who have heard of the question ANNOUNCE IN PUBLIC what they would do. Getting a 90% correct rate wouldn't be that hard. Writing an AI to do the search would get 95% at least. Given that, who gives up a 95% chance of $1,000,000 for a 5% chance of 1,000,100?
As far as I can tell they are just virtue signaling that they don't believe in 'magical beings'.
Put another way, your opportunity to use your free will to influence the outcome comes BEFORE you even approach the test.
@@CorwynGC i know this is probably not the point of the thought experiment but i would consider the two-box choice to be the humble option rather than the greedy option. im risk-averse and i would rather take a guaranteed $100 than gamble everything, especially in paradoxical situations where i cant be sure i can trust my probability reasoning, or where i might be being deceived. i'd be willing to completely decline the opaque box and just go home with the clear one if that was the choice instead. anyway, the opaque box would have been empty for me.
@@nathanisboredTaking two boxes is definitely greedy. Taking just the clear box might be humble, feel free to think of that as what you would do.
42:12- Were everyone on earth just like a philosopher taking, this world would be a happy 'utopian' 😁
52:53, 53:17- The game rule is inconsistent.
All you need to know about metaphysics is that "experts in the field" cannot even agree on what metaphysics is, what defines it, what problems it is to solve, nor how to go about solving them. Even worse, an individual metaphysician cannot seem to clearly state what their own person views on the above are without running around in metaphysical circles.
Counterexample at e.g. 29:00
Do you reject solipsism? Are you a realist or a naturalist or a reductionist about the world? Are you a brain in a vat? Then congrats you are doing metaphysics.
TIL that the roadrunner was the coyote's grandfather.
in a counter factional world these two are married
Strangely this interaction didn't quite work for me. Her definition or explanation of ontology and other terms wasn't clear. We use ontologies in life sciences and for me it's a knowledge graph with relationship, association and dependencies between entities. Similar examples throughout the talk.. unfortunate as Sean seemed quite taken with her
They are both using the terminology as it is used in philosophy. It's unfortunate we use the same words in many ways. :/
Logic is based on the law of noncontradiction, which is a result from the Pauli exclusion principle being exposed to evolution, creating us thinking beings with the Pauli exclusion principle logged inside our brains: the law of non contradiction, which is the first law of thought. So if nature and natural law was different, thought would be different. Hence a metaphysics based on the law of noncontradiction is not fundamental, in a reality before the big bang is my opinion. My two cents
Indeterminism is not compatible with Eternalism! One thing is to claim epistemic indeterminism to justify compatibility and quite another to absolutely posit the world can be undetermined and at the same time assume all Reality is finished and complete which includes all the future state of affairs. We are talking here about fundamental indeterminacy not epistemic indeterminacy which totally different!
The Multiverse hypothesis doesn't change the picture at all!
The fact that you don't know on which future Universe you will end up being when you are about to make a choice and haven't made up your mind yet is an Epistemic problem.
A Multiverse where all possible state of affairs, all possible Universes exist is Deterministic period! If you don't like cause and effect in an Eternalist set use perfect correlation instead!
Wrong
I did not enjoy this at all! Kept listening because of the quality of other podcasts I had listened to in the hope that it will turn the cover before it runs out of time! It didn’t!
metaphysics is the study of the highest science of All things.....do a better study on Metaphysics and you wont confuse it with common science
Please explain to me what a sandwich is in metaphysical terms. ;-)
I never took science for "accessible". It's actually hard work to pay attention in science class... which she obviously didn't. What surprises me most is that for a philosopher she lacks even basic language skills. Everything she says is just muddled nonsense. ;-)