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24| How Philosophy Serves Science — David Papineau
182 Plays10 months ago
Are philosophy and science entirely different paradigms for thinking about the world? Or should we think of them as continuous: overlapping in their concerns and complementary in their tools?
David Papineau is a professor at Kings College London and the author of over a dozen books. He's thought about many topics — consciousness, causation the arrow of time, the interpretation of quantum mechanics — and in all of these he advocates engagement with science. The philosopher should take its cue from our best theories of nature.For example, a philosophical account of causation must pay attention to the way this concept is used in the sciences.
But the philosopher can also be a servant of science. Philosophers are undaunted, excited even, by apparent paradoxes and where such thorny problems pop up in science this is where philosophical tools can be brought to bear. For instance, when quantum mechanics appears to suggest cats are alive and dead, the philosopher's interest is piqued (even as the physicist's attention may wane).
- David's website
- Transcript and notes on Multiverses.xyz
Chapters
(00:00) Intro
(02:41) Start of conversation
(02:46) Unraveling the Mystery of Scientific Methods
(03:45) The Shift in Philosophy of Science
(04:03) The Role of Truth in Scientific Investigation
(05:34) The Evolution of Scientific Methodologies
(06:32) The Arrogance of Philosophy in Science
(08:58) The Progress of Science and its Challenges
(10:21) The Role of Data in Scientific Disputes
(11:26) The Struggle of Early Modern Science
(14:52) The Continuity of Philosophy and Science
(15:28) The Role of Philosophy in Resolving Theoretical Contradictions
(18:08) The Replication Crisis in Science
(32:15) The Asymmetry of Time & Thermodynamics
(42:45) The Everlasting Role of Philosophy in Science?
(42:53) Philosophy and Its Puzzling Subjects
(43:55) Artificial Intelligence & Philosophy
(44:39) The Turing Test and AI
(45:18) The Consciousness of AI
(46:11) The Mystery of Consciousness
(46:51) Is there a fact of the matter to consciousness?
(48:59) The Consciousness of Machines
(50:13) Different takes on consciousness
(51:43) The Consciousness of Artificial Intelligence
(53:23) Consciousness & Emergence
(53:59) The Moral Standing of AI
(01:05:23) The Future of Causation Studies
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Transcript
The Intersection of Science and Philosophy
00:00:00
Speaker
What makes science work? What accounts for the apparently inexorable increase in predictive power of the sciences over time? These sort of questions were the preoccupation of philosophers of science for many years. And although this program produced many brilliant insights, I think it's fair to say that no one came up with an account that encompassed all the varied knowledge-producing endeavors that we called science.
00:00:25
Speaker
Our guest this week is David Papineau, Professor of Philosophy at King's College London, who over a long and distinguished career has thought about many things in philosophy and continues to think about them. David argues that philosophy should be continuous with the sciences, that the philosopher and the scientist at heart have the same interests, that they want to come up with the best models of reality, the best models of the way that things are.
00:00:50
Speaker
So why then is there such a thing as the philosophy of science at all? If philosophers of science are interested in getting to better theories of nature, why don't they just become scientists? Well David argues that there are particularly thorny problems within science, apparent paradoxes such as the measurement problem in quantum mechanics that we've talked about previously on this podcast.
00:01:12
Speaker
And these sort of issues are ones where the day-to-day tools and methodologies of the scientist may be less effective perhaps than the day-to-day tools and methodologies of the philosopher.
The Replication Crisis and Philosophy's Role
00:01:23
Speaker
So that's where the conversation starts and from there we go on to touch on many topics. The replication crisis, this ongoing problem in particularly medicine where many results have been published in journals which turn out to be
00:01:38
Speaker
unreproducible. And it's not because anyone invented their findings, it's simply that they reported flukey results, they reported things that were produced by chance. And this is something where the philosopher and the scientist have something to say to one another, and the philosopher is not trying to invent an entirely new framework for doing science, they're just trying to point out some, to the philosopher at least,
00:02:02
Speaker
fairly obvious places where things are going wrong and where with just a little bit of reflection we could do better.
Evolving Scientific Methodologies
00:02:10
Speaker
And we talk about consciousness and we talk about causality and with all these things you can find that same theme of science and philosophy in dialogue. So this was a real privilege to host David.
00:02:23
Speaker
I'm James Robinson, you're listening to Multiverses. David Papineau, thanks for joining me. Very pleased to be here. Thanks for watching me. I wanted to start with a bit of a personal bugbear of mine.
00:02:50
Speaker
I've heard of such a thing as the scientific method. If I don't know what it is, can you let me on the secret? Yes. When I started doing philosophy, that was the thing in philosophy of science anyway. There was inductivism and hypothetical deductivism and falsificationism, and then Poon's challenges to these
00:03:19
Speaker
scientific methodologies and Lakatosh's methodology of scientific research programs. And the idea was that flosser of science would figure out the procedures, the standards that scientists use in arriving at and accepting their theories. And this would be a benefit to perhaps scientists knew it already, but the world in general, to be able to think like scientists and that.
00:03:47
Speaker
program interestingly has just gone away. Is it because we found out the answer? I have a view about what happened and it's a kind of
00:04:01
Speaker
You might talk more about this, but I take the aim of science and investigation generally to get at the truth, to arrive at true judgments about the world, because if you
00:04:19
Speaker
have true beliefs about the world, then your projects will succeed. You'll choose your actions and your policies based on knowledge of how things are going to go. And if your beliefs are true, then everything will work as planned. So truth is what we're after. And then I think we can ask what procedures
00:04:42
Speaker
what ways of investigating will be well-designed to get at the truth. Perfectly good question. There's plenty of good answers, but they'll be different in different areas of science. The scientists themselves are often the best people to tell you about what are the best methods to find out about the nature of viruses or the
00:05:10
Speaker
sequence of hominid species on the face of the Earth, you'll need very different methods to find out about these things. And the idea that there's one uniform method across the board seems to me silly. But I think there's a big philosophical shift behind this move away from worrying about the scientific method.
00:05:33
Speaker
which is 50 years ago when I started doing philosophy, the idea was that we built up the world from the inside out. We started with maybe knowledge of our own minds, or at least knowledge of our sensory deliverances, and we had to somehow
00:05:54
Speaker
construct an account of the world on that basis using no materials other than what knowledge of our own mental states gave us and perhaps deductive logic. So it was a cutting out about it, but we don't want to throw away what we already know about the world in deciding what's the best method of finding out more.
00:06:17
Speaker
And once you have that more naturalist view that we're natural beings within a natural world about which we already know quite a lot, then it looks like you will expect to find different ways of getting at the truth in different areas of reality. Yeah, there's kind of arrogance perhaps reflected in the idea that philosophy needs to
00:06:39
Speaker
restart everything, perhaps. And quite a program which was started where they tried to build everything up from the ground up, but it just didn't work.
Science's Progress and Its Unique Culture
00:06:50
Speaker
And it really is the last wave of the kind of
00:06:57
Speaker
Cartesian idealist, Descartes wasn't idealist, but his way of doing philosophy pretty quickly motivates idealism that you're building up from there. Yeah. Jekyll Potter's philosophy was very much part of that program. You have suggested that it's ambitious, it's impressive that logical principles were going to tell scientists how to do things. And there's plenty of pluses of science.
00:07:22
Speaker
then and now, who think it was arrogant, presumptuous of philosophers to feel that they could try to do things. I'm not very much of that mind. I'm the kind of science worshipper. I think there's plenty of areas where philosophers can show scientists that they're doing things wrong, but we'll talk about that more later. Yeah. And I think to give the logical process they're due, I think they were arrogant in some ways, but they were also very respectful.
00:07:52
Speaker
of science and they thought actually this is the way that philosophy should be done. But I want to come back to the idea of the scientific method perhaps just one more time. I think there's something laudable in the idea that there might be a scientific method, or at least in searching for that, in as much as if you could find that thing
00:08:18
Speaker
It might be a good explanation of why science makes progress, which seems to be a difference between the sciences and other disciplines, perhaps. But I also wonder if maybe the explanation for that is just simpler and it's just that science deals with the sort of subjects in which we can make progress. It deals with structures of a physical world where you can build up knowledge
00:08:46
Speaker
whereas other fields deal with perhaps human affairs and much more fluid states of things. I don't know if you have an opinion on that. Interesting thoughts. It may well be that attractable subject matter is necessary for the kind of scientific progress that is so striking over the last 300, 400
00:09:11
Speaker
Yes, but subject matter isn't sufficient.
The Struggle for Reliable Data in Early Science
00:09:15
Speaker
Many people across the world, serious, sophisticated, literate, numerous people in ancient Greece, China, the East, very interested in the same subject matters. And science didn't really get off the ground in the way it did in Europe in the 17th century. And so there's a very interesting question, which in the first instance, I think of as more
00:09:41
Speaker
historical, sociological. What was it that led to the last one videos in the Western tradition? And there's many competing answers. Michael Stravins has just written a book and
00:10:04
Speaker
about this. What's so special about science? And he's very, I'm going to oversimplify, very odd answer. But just for better or worse, it's part of scientific culture that if you are going to have a dispute, you have to settle it by producing new data. And what if you noticed to philosophers and
00:10:34
Speaker
People in humanity, social sciences generally, is very odd. If you go to a scientific talk, unless the speaker is past 60 or a Nobel Prize winner, they aren't allowed just to theorize. They have to give you some data. They have to show you what their experiments have come up with. And somehow it's built into scientific culture that they have to argue with.
00:11:00
Speaker
new empirical facts. And Michael thinks that leads people to spend a lot of time seeking out empirical facts, ones that will be informative or decide between theories, but you can't just reason and speculate. And why that became part of scientific culture, who knows? Maybe it's just a lucky break. But there's also the whole
00:11:23
Speaker
institutions of science are a lot to do with. In the 17th century, there was a big problem. One thing that happened with science is nullus in Verbier, don't respect authority. Authority has no standing in these matters. Everything has to be figured out in you. I think that's clearly part of what's different about modern science, and you might think of it as associated with various kinds of
00:11:53
Speaker
Christian Reformation, back to the text itself, don't listen to the clerics. But at that point, you have a problem about what are the facts.
00:12:09
Speaker
and the philosopher Daniel Garber once gave a lecture. It was very funny about how the 17th century struggled with this issue. He compared Francis Bacon, who at the end of the November war, says, send me all your facts. I'm going to collate them and I'm going to figure out the right theory on the basis of all these facts. But of course, there's a worry there about who
00:12:36
Speaker
How good are these facts? Who are the people who are sending them? Can we trust them? And he compared them with Descartes, who at the end of the Discourse on the Method, doesn't say, send me your facts. He says, send me your money so I'll have enough resources to do experiments myself. And so there's this tension in early modern science. How do you
00:13:00
Speaker
get well-accredited data. And you can think of one part of modern science as a compromise that, sure, nobody has to... It's not the case. Everybody has to be like Descartes and do all the experiments themselves. That would be crazy. You have to trust other people, but their experiments have to be replicated.
Philosophy's Enduring Value in Scientific Inquiry
00:13:19
Speaker
It's quite a system of accreditation who are reputable scientists, whose findings we can at least at first pass take seriously. And so that's a lot of
00:13:31
Speaker
what's special about science. But it doesn't sound like the kind of scientific method that logical impressions were after, does it? No, I think if there is such a thing as a scientific method, it's going to be the sort of thing that you can't write down very concisely. It's going to be a collection of lots and lots of practices, I think. And even this idea of
00:13:56
Speaker
having to present new evidence or data. This was one of the things that came out of the whole Logical Impresist episode. There's no clear distinction between data and theory. Your data is understood through theory. It's collected with instruments that have been devised
00:14:14
Speaker
based on theoretical specifications. So it's very hard to untangle those things, even in the simplest of cases. But there does seem value in, even if we can't find this overarching method, there's value in philosophers looking at what science does. Can you maybe speak to that and where philosophy adds some unique insights or helps science? So one question is,
00:14:45
Speaker
What's the difference between philosophy and... Some philosophers think that they're very different. The science is based on impressive investigation, whereas philosophy is all a priori, and perhaps it's an analysis of concepts and so on. But that's not how I think of it at all. I think, no, it's just concepts. If that's all science was, if that's all philosophy was, I would quit philosophy. That's very boring and interesting.
00:15:11
Speaker
I think philosophy and science are very much in the same line of business. They're both after substantial synthetic informative theories about the real world.
00:15:22
Speaker
But I think they use different methods or rather they come in when there's different problems. Often we are stuck in science. We don't have enough data to decide between theories. But in other cases, we're stuck because we've got plenty of data, but our theories are in a tangle and different assumptions we have lead us to
00:15:49
Speaker
commit to inconsistent claims, and we're in a tangle. Something's gone wrong in our theorizing, and we've got to somehow figure it out. And that happens in non-scientific areas, free will. We've clearly got free will. We act on the basis of our character and our motives. No, we don't have free will. Everything is determined. There's some kind of inconsistency in our thinking. But it happens within science too. Know about this, quantum mechanics.
00:16:21
Speaker
The reality is often in a superposed state. There's no factor in the matter. But when we observe, we get a definite result. But how can we get a definite result? That means that something other than the Schrodinger equation is governing the behavior of matter.
00:16:42
Speaker
And how can that be? Isn't everything made of small particles that are governed by Schrodinger's equation? So there's an inconsistency there. In biology, Darwinian natural selection theory seems to imply that behavior that's good for your conspecifics and bad for you will never evolve. There'll be no altruism in the animal world, but look there, here's lots of experiments, lots of data showing there is altruism in the animal world.
00:17:11
Speaker
And in these cases, it's not that we're short of data, it's that our theories lead to inconsistency, to paradox. And scientists aren't generally
00:17:23
Speaker
very good at dealing with that. Quantum mechanics is a classic case. The physicists want to brush that difficulty under the carpet and led by Bohr, they succeeded in doing so for nearly 100 years. Not all physicists are like that. Some physicists have philosophical inclinations and they want to unpick the tangle, but most of them say
00:17:49
Speaker
that argument isn't going to be resolved by no more data, it's therefore not a scientific question, and shut up and calculate. So in those areas, I'm not interested in demarcation disputes, I'm a credit to philosopher and the scientists aren't any good at it, but you need to have the philosophical turn of mind to deal with those kinds of problems. And I've just got very interested
00:18:12
Speaker
we're talking about the scientific method in the replication crisis. About replication crisis? Yeah, so I guess this is the many false positives that you might get. I suppose it's probably best known within psychology and medicine, right? And the standard is just you have to have your p-values above 5%, which means
00:18:35
Speaker
only a 5% chance of your results having been produced by chance. But of course, if you run a hundred experiments, you'd expect to get five interesting looking results just by chance. It goes straight into the journals. So my supervisor was Ian Hanking and his book was the logic of statistical inference.
Critique of Statistical Inference Logic
00:18:57
Speaker
And he could see and so could plenty of philosophers that the so-called logic of significance testing
00:19:07
Speaker
was a load of cobblers, to be honest. And Floss has been saying that for quite a while, and it's surprising in a way to me that it's taken so long for the chickens of significance testing to come home to roost. As you just put it, the whole methodology designed to
00:19:27
Speaker
if we keep testing rubbish hypotheses, it's designed to commit us to 1 in every 20.
00:19:45
Speaker
that don't produce interesting things. That's just a corollary of solid supposed logic of significance testing. That's what Fischer and Neman and Pearson said so long ago.
00:20:00
Speaker
Since any data are logically consistent with any probabilistic hypothesis, how can we ever know that a probabilistic hypothesis is true? And they said, okay, wait until you get some data that would only happen.
00:20:16
Speaker
Very rarely, if it weren't true, and if that's what happens, then you can take it to be true. That's what they urge. That's what significance testing is. And if we publish all the results, which of course we should, nowadays we can on the internet, then you're not doing significance testing anymore. You can note how likely or unlikely the data are on various hypotheses, but you ought then to leave it to good judgment to decide on that basis.
00:20:45
Speaker
how seriously you ought to take different hypotheses. The point is, if somebody comes along and says, I've done a really quite extensive survey, and look, these data about voting patterns, I'm just trying to think of a crazy hypothesis.
00:21:01
Speaker
There's classing like ice cream sales in Italy or something. And you'd only get data like this one time in 20 if this hypothesis weren't true. And I say, yeah, but that's still a completely crazy hypothesis. My credence in it has gone up from one in 10 million. It should go up if you get data that are more likely on the hypothesis than the alternatives, but it's gone up from one in 10 million to one in one million. That's what's happened.
00:21:31
Speaker
So what you're describing there is a kind of Bayesian updating, where I do think that has to be part of the answer, if not the answer. But there's an obvious problem with that, which is...
00:21:45
Speaker
How do we set a prime? For that to get going, you need to have an initial idea of the probability of something. That's not always easy. But maybe- While that raises its own problems, that's not sufficient reason for saying, oh, but so we don't want to be Bayesians because it involves arbitrary prides. We want to be frequent to significance test. It's because frequent to significance testing is in effect
00:22:15
Speaker
Take any crazy hypothesis with a put to one side that it's crazy and try and treat it as we treat any other hypothesis in deciding how credible it is given certain data. And that's just clearly absurd. The truth is in reasonably developed areas of science, people in those areas have a pretty good sense of which hypotheses are likely to be true and which aren't, and they
00:22:45
Speaker
They use that to decide what adjectives to take when they see some new study. I've got quite a lot of medical friends and I say, you think about this stuff about mad codices being caused by prions. And look here, these data's strongly supported. And they'll say, I'm not so sure. It doesn't, runs counter to my understanding of how infectious diseases work. They need more convincing than just
00:23:10
Speaker
a strong p-value because they know from the start that the hypothesis is dodgy. And I don't think you should try. Of course there's a worry, there's a standard worry that traditional prisoners, white old male doctors have come up with these kinds of assumptions that have got no basis in fact at all. But I don't think one should just throw out all scientific judgment because of that kind of worry.
00:23:36
Speaker
So coming back to the original point, which was something like the philosopher being a kind of theoretical scientist without a portfolio. So samurai roaming around the academic landscape, looking for problems where paradoxes arise. This is an attractive
00:23:59
Speaker
This is an attractive view of things. And I'm just wondering, is this something that's just confined to science? Do philosophers, can philosophers help with other disciplines as well? Oh, yes. I'm not sure I want to push this kind of samurai for, you know, there's a philosopher's biology, they work in biology and then you need to know quite a lot of biology in order to be an effective philosopher of biology and simply a philosopher of physics. So there's a kind of philosophy as trying to solve
00:24:28
Speaker
theoretical contradictions, paradoxes in our thinking. That applies across the board. My point was only that these kinds of paradoxes arise within science as well as elsewhere, but of course they arise
Revisiting Complex Scientific Issues
00:24:43
Speaker
elsewhere. They arrive in everyday thought all the time, and that's what we have.
00:24:50
Speaker
philosophical puzzles of outside philosophy of science. I mentioned freewill, but you could take all kinds of things. What's the nature of persons? Philosophers say persons. I don't know why. What's the nature of people? What kind of things are people? What's morality? It's easy enough to show that we have strains in our thing that lead us into conflicting ideas in all those areas. And philosophy's job is
00:25:17
Speaker
to figure out. Common sense plus science kind of leads us into theoretical puzzlement and something is wrong in our thinking and we've got to figure out what it is. That's a job of philosophy. And I'm wondering as well when things stop being philosophy. So the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a good example. I also think of other interpretation problems within physics like understanding the nature of space and time, which
00:25:45
Speaker
As you point out, are commonly picked up by philosophers, but there are physicists who work on these. I feel often the reason it's philosophers who work on them is it's just they're the ones who are permitted to. David Wallace, my tutor at Oxford, was initially a physicist, or his first PhD was in
00:26:08
Speaker
physics. And then he did a PhD in philosophy because he just realised he wouldn't be able to work on the particular physics that he wanted to within a physics department. And I wonder if these problems of paradox and things, at a certain point, once they're resolved, I suppose they just become subsumed within the field. They're no longer part of philosophy. So if everyone accepts, as I think they probably should and I think you'll agree,
00:26:35
Speaker
the Everest interpretation of quantum mechanics, so the many worlds interpretation, that would no longer be something that philosophers thought about. It would be taught in physics textbooks and be something that physicists think about and use to understand the work that they're doing. Does that sound right or do these things just never get resolved? I mean, there's an issue about
00:27:02
Speaker
Philosophy doesn't seem to settle things, the way that things get settled in science. And I'm also wondering whether even the multiverse interpretation, Everetti interpretation, I'm hesitating to say many worlds because it's the vulgar version of Everett, but let's just say many worlds. I don't think it will become to be all cut and dried and settled, partly because it conflicts with common sense. So new generations of
00:27:32
Speaker
students, young people coming up, will struggle with how to make their ordinary, naive, everyday view of the world consistent with Neveretianism. It might be all settled for the physicists, but there's still going to be awkward problems. I have no very clear views on this. I've been doing philosophy long enough that I'm now getting a sense within
00:28:00
Speaker
philosophy, let alone within the wider world, that problems don't get settled because we sorted this out 40 years ago, and now all the young people are coming back and want to sort it out again. And I'm not sure I regard this as an unhealthy thing. I think that
00:28:21
Speaker
I'm thinking at the top of my head because I haven't really thought very hard about this, but I think there's something about this Tangle business, what's particularly about philosophy, that means that people do need to re-engage with the issue.
00:28:36
Speaker
every so often. You need to do it for yourself, partly because there are issues about everything is physical, there's nothing over and above the physical world. Where does that leave the everyday world? It's
00:28:53
Speaker
metaphysically necessitated by the physical world. We have kind of reduction and supervenience. And now there's a whole new wave of tools for thinking about reduction and supervenience. And I think that part of what goes on in philosophy is that if you look back 40 years, the way people were thinking about it strikes the new generation as
00:29:13
Speaker
not quite the right way, premised on certain assumptions that have now disappeared, and you've got to do it again.
Thermodynamics and Time's Arrow
00:29:20
Speaker
So the world is bifurcating all over the place all the time. I mean, don't worry about the flabbergasting multiplicity of the bifurcation. Just focus on one, right? So you're going to turn into these two of you in a second or so. So here's a problem. When you talk about
00:29:44
Speaker
yourself. And now you're going to be two. What are you referring to? What kind of thing is a person? And if you've done this personal identity business, you realize that there really aren't any good answers. Derek Parfitt thought pretty much that when you split, you cease to exist. He thought it didn't matter too much, provided
00:30:08
Speaker
There was continuity between you and your various descendants. But the thing you were referring to as you now ceases to exist when you split. And David Lewis says, no, the two of you and your, they overlap in you now. And I prefer a yet third theory, John Perry's theory that when you talk about yourself, now you're referring to the Hydra that consists of all your future selves. But in fact, most.
00:30:38
Speaker
Philosophers working on Everettianism don't really engage with this issue. I think if Everettianism becomes generally accepted, philosophers have to think about it quite hard. But as I said, it's the kind of thing that needs to be redone each generation. So that's why.
00:30:58
Speaker
Everett's interpretation just makes Sharper some problems that were already there in philosophy. Part of it had thought experiments about putting people through splitters and transporters and all sorts, and he didn't really care about whether those things were real or not, but I suppose it provides extra motivation for thinking about those problems. I would say one other thing...
00:31:22
Speaker
It's all very well for him to say, if you split, you cease to exist, but there's continuity and that's what matters. If it's a thought experiment about something that might happen very occasionally now and then, but if it's happening constantly all the time, the idea that you don't exist ever for more than a millisecond,
00:31:51
Speaker
Yeah. That looks like you better start saying something more than that. Yeah. No, I think that's fair. Here's another take on.
00:32:00
Speaker
maybe what's going on with philosophy in terms of it working on things that never seem to get resolved. You've talked about philosophy being continuous with the sciences and other disciplines, but if we think more precisely about the places at which it's continuous, so where it meets the sciences,
00:32:22
Speaker
tends to be at foundational issues. I remember Harvey Brown commenting that the philosophers of physics get stuck on all the terms on the first page of a physics textbook frame of reference, and they go, what's that? And that never gets explained anywhere else in the physics book. It's just taken as read.
00:32:40
Speaker
And so philosophy is, well physics is a good example because physics was an actual philosophy. There was a kind of pre-theoretic stage of physics where people were struggling to find the right ways of thinking about things. And I wonder if what philosophy does is just let us revisit the assumptions and the models of the pre-theoretic stage. So it takes us back to the foundations. And of course those things
00:33:07
Speaker
are always up for some kind of interpretation or maybe even questioning. When I said that the philosophical issues need to be revisited,
00:33:22
Speaker
I didn't mean to be denying. I think there's two thoughts here. The thought that you aired earlier, that when some of these theoretical tangles are resolved, they become part of established science, they cease to be philosophy anymore. And I think that's right for certain problems. If you think about Newton versus Leibniz about
00:33:44
Speaker
absolute space is there, absolute rest. I take it that's resolved. We've got new Newtonian space time. We could understand this all. Nobody wants to go back to that. Certainly the problems moved on. My thought was that there will always be problems at the interface of these possible scientific views and common sense. And for that reason, people are going to have to
00:34:07
Speaker
keep revisiting them just to deal with the issues that come up at that interface. Some of the foundational problems within science are horribly long-persisting. A lot of space and time is resolved with the move to specialty and relativity, or even before, though there's other problems there. But think about the other thing David Wallace works on a lot.
00:34:34
Speaker
the asymmetry of thermodynamics. I've been working on that a lot because I've been working on the asymmetry of causation, which I think covers very closely related. It's a complete nightmare, the asymmetry of thermodynamics. People have been banging their heads against this for 150 years now.
00:34:59
Speaker
not only does in philosophy, there's plenty of different views, people just don't agree. It's almost within statistical mechanics, there's all kinds of different approaches, there's no clearly agreed foundations, there's different ways of approaching statistical mechanics. I don't think this is something we've discussed before on the podcast, so perhaps we can give a little bit of detail on this issue. My gloss is something like,
00:35:25
Speaker
The laws of physics, as best we know them, are symmetric in time, at least in most foundational laws. The basic dynamic laws. You can think of billiard balls heading each other.
00:35:41
Speaker
you can rewind that video still looks absolutely physical and normal. With the movie backwards, what happens is still in accord with the basic requirements of dynamics. Exactly. And all our kind of most fundamental laws are exactly like that. You can reverse the arrow of time in them and it's the same equation. But when we look at stuff in the world, it doesn't look like that at all.
00:36:07
Speaker
It's very obvious that there's a sort of one-way nature to the way that things happen. And I suppose the explanation that I'm sole on this is to do with the past having started in a very special state that explains why all that happens, because obviously what is not just a product of physical laws, but it's a product of physical laws acting on things in the world.
00:36:31
Speaker
things were set off. Our universe began in such a rare state that it's bound to progress in such a way that there appears to be an arrow of time. It's going to take a lot more cashing out to explain what that means. I don't know if you want to... I don't know. So why did I say it's still a mess? I think there's probably consensus that the asymmetries we see in time
00:37:02
Speaker
are an upshot of the fact that down one temporal end of the universe is a very low entropy state and not
00:37:15
Speaker
No reason to suppose it's at the other end of the universe, and that's why we call that end of the universe the past, the origin. So, there's consensus about that. But exactly then how it works out, because standard view is that the laws of thermodynamics, which are extra to the basic... Dynamics laws, yeah. ...dynamical laws.
00:37:42
Speaker
are probabilistic in nature, that if you have an isolated system in a low entropy state, it will probably, very probably increase in entropy. And you need some statistical postulate to add to the low entropy initial condition.
00:38:06
Speaker
And then there's horrible questions about what's the nature, what's the truth maker of that statistical postulate. There's a strong, powerful thought that
00:38:16
Speaker
that reality consists of what actually happens. And that probably shouldn't be any commas. With the probabilities, where did the probabilities come from? It's probably a very strange thing. And so a lot of the puzzles about thermodynamics come from that element of it. And you somehow got to tie together
00:38:38
Speaker
probabilistic aspect in thermodynamics with this low entropy initial condition. So we have an effectively isolated system in a low entropy state. And you can say nearly all the ways in which it might be in low entropy state will be ones in which later on you'll get a high entropy state just because there's an awful lot more.
00:39:04
Speaker
higher entropy states and low entropy states. But that thought tells you that this isolated system of low entropy state almost certainly came from a higher entropy state as well as is about to evolve into it. And that's not what we want. We want to be low entropy increasing all the way along. And so somehow you've got to tie up
00:39:26
Speaker
the initial condition with probabilistic assumptions you apply to particular systems. It's very difficult. I've been reading a lot of David Wallace papers about this, and it's very interesting. He's taken issue. David Albert, along with Barry Lowder, have developed a way of thinking about similar fabric asymmetry, and David Wallace is rather skeptical that they brush over a lot of details that are important.
00:39:54
Speaker
Is this a case, actually, that we're just going to continue revisiting? Or is it the sort of thing where we can get a consensus because some argument is so good or some evidence comes along that changes the state of things? I can't really see there being any new evidence to add to this unless it's a fundamental change in physics.
00:40:21
Speaker
I wish I knew more of the theories within physics. What I'm understanding is that even people who theorize are in physics aren't really in agreement about how to think about these matters. There's various
00:40:39
Speaker
effective mathematical techniques that you can apply to analyze and predict how systems are to equilibrium or move towards equilibrium, but they're pretty kind of
00:40:52
Speaker
Nancy Cartwright, the ad hoc, they know mathematical techniques, we know they work, they give us the right predictions, but exactly what's the underlying basis for them?
Philosophy's Expanding Reach Across Disciplines
00:41:02
Speaker
People aren't sure. And at the theoretical level, there are different approaches within statistical mechanics. There are people who use the Gibbs framework, there are other people who think that the Boltzmann framework is better, there are people who say they aren't really different, these two frameworks. So while they're,
00:41:20
Speaker
effective techniques used by more practical scientists within the science. There's no clear agreement at all about the foundational assumptions you need to make in thermodynamics. Yeah, interesting. All up for grams. Another thing that just struck me recently was that
00:41:39
Speaker
It makes sense to talk of the physics of biology, physics of chemistry. In fact, those fields exist. You have bi-physics and quantum chemistry and things. But one doesn't really talk about the chemistry of physics. But when it's the framework, the something of something, you can almost say the philosophy of X. So philosophy is this reflective thing. There are clearly cases where it applies better because there's still open questions.
00:42:07
Speaker
like the case of the arrow of time in physics. I'm wondering if it also allows us to look at any discipline and open Pandora's box at second. As you know, the philosophy of law, the philosophy of engineering, right? You can ask questions which you can't ask within those fields. Okay, so philosophy of law is a pretty weird area actually, because it's often done by lawyers and they have special training. But philosophy of law is a very
00:42:37
Speaker
live area, full of problems, difficult. Many people work on it. Philosophy of engineering, not so much. Maybe it could be. I think there should be a philosophy of software engineering. I mean, things differ in this way. Some subjects are more philosophically puzzling. On others, philosophy of chemistry. I have friends who work in philosophy of chemistry, but
00:43:03
Speaker
There aren't many of them. There's not a lot to do there. Philosophy of engineering, I know one person works in philosophy engineering. Yeah, not a very exciting area of yours. Why is that? Why do you think philosophy then tends to look at the
00:43:19
Speaker
It's because philosophy is at the bottom of the stack and physics is at the bottom of the science stack, as it were.
Philosophical Implications of Artificial Intelligence
00:43:24
Speaker
It's just that philosophy comes in when we have some nasty, intractable puzzle there. So here we are, the basic laws of dynamics are time symmetric. The physical world is not time symmetric. That's a puzzle, ought to be time symmetric, but look, it isn't. And that's puzzling. But there's nothing very puzzling in
00:43:47
Speaker
engineering. I'm just trying to think, is there philosophical? Can we think of engineering philosophical? I don't know. I have to ask your friend. What do you think are going to be the fruitful subjects for philosophy over the next decades? Oh, that's so hard. That's so hard, but it's not so hard because there's one obvious one right in the face, artificial intelligence.
00:44:12
Speaker
It's already a huge amount of philosophy going on about artificial intelligence. And every philosophy department is trying to hire artificial intelligence philosopher. And I don't have to go around to be honest, but it's the hot area. I mean, it is something that philosophers have thought about artificial intelligence for some time.
00:44:39
Speaker
Turing test. Turing wasn't a philosopher exactly, but I think we can think of that as a piece of philosophy of what he was doing in trying to define what it is that makes a, or when we should say that machine is intelligent. And I think people have now probably casting around for a new Turing test. So GPT-4 clearly passes the Turing test. That's quickly becoming
00:45:07
Speaker
a real social problem that you're talking to a device you don't know if it's human or not. That's what it is to pass the Turing test. It's going on all the time already. It shows that the Turing test is not a regular test either for intelligence or consciousness. I see to very few people in my admiration for GPT-4, and I'm very ready to think that artificial machines can be conscious and probably will soon, but I don't think GPT-4 is, and I don't think it's
00:45:35
Speaker
particularly intelligent either, though it's very impressive. I think it is exciting because we have seen emergence of particular abilities with these LLMs. We're starting to actually get some data, which maybe philosophy can use, stick in the realms of complexity and emergence, of course, but no one is able to say if consciousness will emerge. I'm with you. I see no reason that machines can't be conscious, but we're still
00:46:06
Speaker
have very little understanding of what it would take to produce consciousness in a machine. Is this a purely scientific problem or is this really the coalface of philosophy of mind? I think this is clearly a philosophical
00:46:23
Speaker
issue. It's another case where you might feel philosophers can guide the scientists. There are many people who think consciousness is a scientific problem, and there are many reputable scientists who work on consciousness and develop theories of consciousness. And I'm afraid I myself think the whole program
00:46:50
Speaker
is misplaced. I don't think sometimes I say people think consciousness is a thing. They've got to realize consciousness isn't a thing. Partly, is it a thing in the slang sense? It's become a thing, science, but it oughtn't to be. But also people are too inclined to reify consciousness. And I think a lot of what's going on is that pretty much everybody
00:47:19
Speaker
has an overwhelming intonation to think of consciousness as something separate, extra to the physical world. Overwhelming intonation to intuitively think in terms of dualism. And so they think there's this extra stuff that arises in certain places and the job of the scientist is to figure out where it arises. And I think that whole program is misguided. There's no extra stuff. There's just a whole lot of physical processes.
00:47:47
Speaker
And because of that, I think that when it comes to other animals and even more so artificial intelligences, we find it hard to know if they're conscious or not.
00:48:07
Speaker
It's that there's no fact of the matter about whether they're conscious or not. I think our notion of consciousness is grounded in introspective awareness of many of our mental states, and in effect, the notion of consciousness is states that are like these. And now we, as it were, point to all the states that we are introspectively aware of when we have them.
00:48:33
Speaker
And if that's what the notion of consciousness is, like these in what respects, and then you suddenly get people arguing about whether a system that was like us
00:48:50
Speaker
Structurally, he behaved in rather the same way, but didn't have biological wetware inside. Would that system be conscious? It's got states that are like our states in terms of their causal interactive structure, not like our states in terms of the way they're biologically realized. And I don't think there's a factor no matter about whether those systems are conscious.
00:49:17
Speaker
I do think there's a fact of the matter about how we ought to engage with them. Are they deserving of moral respect and so on? But I think that comes first, the question of whether they're conscious. It's interesting that there's one thing which I really can't doubt.
00:49:35
Speaker
which is my own consciousness. So if I can say that there's a factor of the matter about one thing, it's that I'm conscious. And it feels odd to admit that perhaps there is no test that can be done that would adjudicate whether someone else is conscious. And that aligns with your idea that there is no factor of the matter about that. When does one move too quickly from
00:50:04
Speaker
There's no test that will tell us the answer to, there's no fact of the matter. So it's not just that there's no test, it's that think about how we give meaning to the term conscious. Do we do it in a way that will draw a line in fancy artificial intelligence machines or in octopuses as to whether they're conscious or not?
00:50:33
Speaker
Do they have states that are like these ones, the ones that we know are conscious in us? And they're like ours in some ways and not like ours in other ways. And Peter Crothers has a nice analogy. He says, imagine I say that
00:50:54
Speaker
This is a nice neighborhood. Not thinking very much about what nice neighborhood means, right? There's a number of respects. And now here's another, and I say, look, there's another neighborhood. There's a nice neighborhood too. And you say, no, it's not. And I say, look, it's got, the streets are clean. And you say, but look, none of the houses aren't really well painted. And now we start arguing about
00:51:15
Speaker
which of those, it's the right criterion for being a nice neighborhood. And clearly there's no factor. There's no factor that matter. It's a loose concept. That's what I want to say about the concept consciousness. Of course that sounds wrong, but that sounds wrong because it's so natural for us to think that consciousness is some kind of extra aura, inner light, cloud of stuff that arises in certain systems and not others. But that's a wrong way to think. I think, yeah, I mean, it comes back.
00:51:45
Speaker
I'm remembering as Patrick Russell, he said, just because I have a beetle in my box, doesn't mean you have a beetle in your box. But what you're saying is something different, which is that. It was Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was exactly. Yeah. You did too much physics and not enough science philosophy. But what you're saying is slightly different because saying there's a beetle in box or not is still talking about facts of the matter. And you're saying, no, it's just not a question of there being, whether there's a beetle or not, it's a value judgment.
00:52:15
Speaker
or similar to a value judgment, at least if we buy into the analogy of the neighborhoods. I just don't know if that's right. There are. In Flossy of Mind, Flossy of Confidence of Science, there's a long-standing debate about do mental states generally, pain say, but consciousness more specifically, does it depend on
00:52:46
Speaker
causal structure of what's going on, albeit at some level abstracting from the detail.
00:52:54
Speaker
physiology, physics of your brain? Or does it depend also on the way that causal structure is realized? And people talk about role and realized views about pains or consciousness generally. And it's a long-standing and irresoluble philosophical dispute. Okay. It's got quite
00:53:18
Speaker
definite consequences. So there's Commander Data. Do you watch Star Trek New Generation at all? He's an android. He behaves, looks just like a human. I mean, he's slightly funny and cold in some ways. I know he's quite humourless.
00:53:38
Speaker
that role-realizer issue is the issue where the commander data is conscious. Is he conscious because he behaves just like us? Was he not conscious because he's made of silicon chips? And my view is there's no factor in the matter. This is an indeterminate issue, but I don't think there's no factor in the matter about
00:54:03
Speaker
commanded Data's moral standing. It seems to be pretty obvious that if he walks and talks like us, he deserves to be treated morally, just like one of us. And the idea that, no, you wouldn't treat him morally because he's not conscious. It's a bit like Descartes saying, you can be nasty to animals because they're not conscious. And in fact, it's worse. Okay. So I think the issue of how something like that should be treated
00:54:33
Speaker
should be addressed independently of prior to the question of whether they're conscious. And I also think this is all, in fact, very Wittgensteinian and driven by the idea that there aren't really Beatles in these boxes, even if people say so. But I'm sure that we'd come to think and treat Commander Data as conscious because
00:54:57
Speaker
We'd include him in our moral circle. He's the one whose moral interest is deserving as consideration as ours. Look, this is going to become a live issue. They are going to be, very soon actually, they're going to be
00:55:15
Speaker
large language models, which are more than large language models and are designed to be social companions to people. It's already happening, but they were doing it before they were good language models. I'm sure it's happening very fast. And if you ask me if there's some aspects of artificial intelligence, it should be regulated. It's the development of social companions. It's going to be weird and strange. And I think quite soon, many people are going to
00:55:47
Speaker
think that these entities, their welfare needs to be taken into account. Certainly people will start thinking that about their own social companions, but they'll start thinking about other people's social companions, and they'll start thinking about systems that are used as slaves. And then there'll be other people who say, no, all these things are just machines. You people are crazy to be worrying about their welfare, and we're going to have to address this issue.
00:56:16
Speaker
Do we need to be concerned about the welfare of these entities? And at that point, it seems to me, ah, but first of all, we have to figure out if they're conscious or not. I think that's just going to be the wrong way to go. And I hope that people will see that's just a, that's not going to help to start. Let's wait for the scientists to come up with a good theory of consciousness and it will help us to solve this issue. That seems to be the bad thought.
00:56:46
Speaker
I think that's fair enough. I do wonder though, if one takes the alternative view that there is such a thing as consciousness, which could be correct, right? That we can actually start, could this be a place where you can do experiments, right? You could say, oh, let's try the marry the color scientist experiment. You can actually try that. So look, I don't want to say, okay, this is, I didn't want to say there's no consciousness.
00:57:10
Speaker
I never said that. You wanted to say, look, in your own case, there are philosophers, illusionists, who say, look, it's an illusion to suppose there's consciousness. In truth, my position isn't very different from theirs, but I don't think I'm forced to say there's no consciousness. What's the difference between saying... Who is this?
00:57:35
Speaker
I don't think they're no good neighborhoods and no bad neighborhoods. I think it's a loose concept, but it works well enough for everyday purposes, thinking about neighbors. And sometimes people are conscious, sometimes people aren't conscious. So I think it's a perfectly useful notion, but I don't think it refers to a particularly determinate property. It's hard to put the
00:58:05
Speaker
There's a definite thing that science could identify and discover the nature of. I don't want to think of consciousness like that. So if that makes me an illusionist, then okay, I'm with the illusionist. But I don't think I'm forced to say there's no consciousness on it. Our conscious lives are terribly important when it comes to human morality. How things are going consciously for a human is the main part of it. And I don't want to deny that.
00:58:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think I certainly agree that there's no such thing as a binary, conscious is not binary, it's not a light bulb, which switched on at some point in our evolution. That makes it even more interesting in some ways, particularly with these AI topics. If we accept that it's an emergent thing of some sorts, if we can get some kind of view on where it comes out of,
00:59:02
Speaker
the pre-conscious void, I don't know how to call it. That would be fascinating. And I think there's another reason for being interested in consciousness in AI, aside from the moral obligations. And I think you're right. For certain purposes, we should just put consciousness aside and ignore it. Stuart Russell has also said, we shouldn't care whether AI is conscious or not. If it's something that can kill us all, who cares? What its feelings are.
00:59:32
Speaker
On the other hand, I do think there is additional risk with consciousness because it just complicates the whole thing so much more. When something starts to reflect on itself, and I do take that as being a part of consciousness, it becomes even more difficult to debug if we look at LMMs already.
00:59:52
Speaker
it's so different to any kind of computer program that you might have. And I spent a lot of time trying to debug computer programs, but good luck trying to understand, trying to trace out exactly why chat GPT has produced a certain response for you. And consciousness will just add an extra layer of unpredictability in my opinion. And actually that may be the best marker of looking for it, but you think of
01:00:21
Speaker
consciousness as something that will make a difference to how the system behaves.
01:00:37
Speaker
structure of connections within the system leads it to behave? No, I think it's a way of categorizing that structure of connections, right? It's something that appears once you hit a certain kind of complexity, which we don't know how to define yet. Okay. Yeah. I think you need to watch that you're still thinking in a duelist way. There's some special extra thing that... I don't think it is. I think it's the same as arguably
01:01:07
Speaker
one of the GBDs at some point figured out how to do maths, right? And it was able to solve novel arithmetic problems, not maths in general, but it can do arithmetic. And that was just an ability that emerged. And it's not, that's not new. And I think of consciousness in exactly the same thing. If we build complex enough things within them, the ability to reflect on themselves,
01:01:34
Speaker
will emerge. And that's not a property. I think just looking at the way that the models work at the moment, I don't believe that is a property that they have. There's sort of a single pass circuit. I don't think it even structurally allows for that at the moment, but I'm not entirely sure to be honest. A lot of language models are very simple. And so they, certain things might start that weren't designed into them emerging, but I think a lot of the stuff that
01:02:03
Speaker
We're looking at what we'll need to have more complex machines with different dimensions to the design. But think about the theories of what makes for consciousness in humans and maybe other high level animals. So there's some theories that say you're conscious of what's in the global workspace. So we have a
01:02:31
Speaker
a bit of the system that processes various bits of information and then distributes and makes them available to all other bits of the system. And then there's theories that say consciousness comes with
01:02:46
Speaker
tension that when the system devotes all its processing resources to one issue, when it's conscious of that issue, there are systems that say consciousness comes with certain kinds of resonance, certain kinds of feedback loops between perception and other things. So in the business of scientific theories of consciousness,
01:03:13
Speaker
They're different accounts of which bits of our cognitive processing constitute consciousness. Now, all these bits of cognitive processing make a difference to what a system can do.
01:03:28
Speaker
I don't see that if somehow, and I don't see how this would happen, we have evidence that one of those systems, there's supposed to be incompatible theories about what constitutes consciousness.
Exploring Causation and Counterfactuals
01:03:39
Speaker
One of those systems, that's the conscious bit. It's going to make any difference to what it does. That's why I'm suspicious of the whole program as if there's a
01:03:53
Speaker
question that will have some explanatory significance. It's of all these overlapping processing powers constitute consciousness. I think that's right. It may be more an issue by the time that thing emerges.
01:04:12
Speaker
It's already so complicated that it's possibly beyond our control. Maybe not, but certainly behaving in a way that's very difficult to understand. Um, yes. So maybe it's more of a way marker rather than a phase change. I don't know. Yeah. I'm very interested in what large language models show us about the nature of human intelligence and consciousness.
01:04:40
Speaker
Because it seems to me we're very analogous. We do all this talking, but if you try and figure out what gives rise to it, what's going on inside our cortex that accounts for this, it's very difficult to explain. In fact, neuroscientific theories don't even really start getting to grips with where is thought. How is thought being produced and expressed in the human mind, the human brain?
01:05:11
Speaker
Yeah. There's a lot of mysteries, a lot of mysteries to pick up. Yeah. I know you're on sabbatical right now. Perhaps this is my final question. I'm just curious what you're working on. I'm working on the moment on causation.
01:05:30
Speaker
still that one paper to get out of the way. And then I hope I've got a book, I've done lots of papers, nearly all the bits are ready to go. I hope I'm going to be able to write it straight out. And this is another case where science and philosophy, as I see it, need to get together.
01:05:52
Speaker
In fact, in this case, it's not so much that the philosophers have some stuff to bring to the scientific table. It's other way around. I have some background in mathematics and statistics, so I've always known. In fact, in my first job, before I had a job in a philosophy department, I was teaching philosophy of social science to
01:06:17
Speaker
sociology students. So I've always known about the business, what's now called causal inference, Bayesian networks, stuff developed by computer scientists in the 90s, Judeo-Pill being a leading figure. I've always learned about the business of taking in
01:06:38
Speaker
a pile of correlations and conditional correlations and figuring out on the basis of those what the causal structure is. There are problems and issues with that kind of program, but it's clearly effective. Look, take a little example. Private schools better exam results, correlating between private schools and exam results, primary fashion education that private schools cause better exam results.
01:07:07
Speaker
But then we do a bit more statistical analysis and we discover that when we separate the population into rich parents and poor parents, private schools don't make any more difference. Within the rich parents, the poor parents of private schools don't include the exam results. It's all due to home back. So the two things are joint effects of the common cause of parental income.
01:07:34
Speaker
very natural thought. A lot of social science, epidemiology, marketing research, people use that kind of technique all the time. Philosophers have lots of theories of causation, kind of factual theories, powers theories, process theories, regularity theories. None of them
01:07:54
Speaker
give any account at all of why those inferences work. It's something of a scandal. Political theories of causation do not engage with the large scale scientific business of causal inference. I think that's true. Although I have to say the kind of counterfactual theories of causation, you can see how that is relevant to this case or how they could touch
01:08:21
Speaker
They can work within this kind of a system because you say, look, if a parent had been for private school, it wouldn't have mattered. There's what you're doing with the blocker or the additional piece of information that actually wants you control for. I wonder if there's a close link between counterfactual and causal planes, but
01:08:47
Speaker
David Lewis is a person who pushed counterfactual traits of causation. I think he's got it completely the wrong way around. I think that we want a causal theory of counterfactuals that once we have causation on the table, then it's easy to explain counter facts. That's why you think that if this kid whose other state school had been sent to a private school, they would have got better exam results. No, that's not true. The reason we make that counterfactual judgment
01:09:17
Speaker
is because we know the causal structure. Yeah, I think that's right. I guess Lewis's program was another many worlds program, nothing to do with Everett, but he was saying, yeah, what you're doing when you're talking about causes, that you're talking about
01:09:31
Speaker
additional possible worlds. It was never completely clear with Lewis if they were real worlds or not. He thought they were real and it was a bit of a glitch in his program. On the face of it, he was making causal planes
01:09:49
Speaker
depend on how things were in this other space of alternative realities, but you might think that causation is something that does its work in this actual world. How can facts that are constituted by what's going on in other worlds make a difference in this actual world? And Lewis didn't, his followers, have said things about that issue, but that was a puzzle for Lewis.
01:10:14
Speaker
But as I see it, the way to do this is to what comes first are the statistical patterns used by causal inference people. What comes next is the causal structure in this world. And what comes after that is what you want to say
01:10:36
Speaker
in terms of counterfactual language. That's the direction to do the analysis, but it is counter to how most philosophers do it. But most philosophers, as I said, they really don't engage. Yeah, there's connections between causation and counterfactuals, but I would challenge you to start with a counterfactual theory of causation and explain why you can infer causation.
01:10:59
Speaker
from the disappearance of a correlation when you control for something else. Maybe it's a challenge that can be met, but nobody in mainstream metaphysical philosophy so much as asks the question, why do the Bayesian network causal inference techniques work? They don't even ask it. Anyway, so that's what my book's going to be about.
01:11:28
Speaker
And it will relate to the asymmetry of thermodynamics as well. I have a theory of causation that I hope will happily explain why causation is asymmetric in time. Why causes always come before the effects. That's something to look out for. That sounds really fascinating. That's why I've been reading lots of David Wallace on the foundations of statistical mechanics. I'm giving a tour in
01:11:54
Speaker
sterling in a couple of months, which is supposed to, I haven't done it yet, I'm still thinking about it, showing how close an analogy between the temporal asymmetry of causation and temporal asymmetry of entropy. I'm not aware of accounts of causation, compelling ones at least, where they show why there is a temporal arrow. It's not clear. That's certainly something that is not apparent in the counterfactual
01:12:24
Speaker
What does Lewis say about that? Are you all right? So no, but Lewis, when he first did the counterfactual theory, the very first paper, took it for granted. He thought that a natural measure of similarity between possible worlds would show you that if I
01:12:50
Speaker
If I had jumped out the window, I would have fallen to the ground. It's true. But if I had jumped out the window, I would have put a parachute on first. That's false. He wanted his counterfactuals to be asymmetric in time. But he came under pressure quite soon after the original causation paper from people saying, come on, show us why the counterfactuals are asymmetric in time.
01:13:17
Speaker
And being Lewis, he then sat down and thought very hard and amazingly came up with something which is very close to a kind of thermodynamic asymmetry to explain why counterfactuals are asymmetric in time. Counterfactuals are supposed to come first. Causation is going to come later. He had to explain why the counterfactuals are asymmetric in time. And he appealed to the fact that
01:13:46
Speaker
The present needs many traces of present events in the future. There's a million records of the fact that the Battle of Waterloo happened in eight. But supposing there's going to be a battle of whatever, a battle of Borgograd in 2025, there may be facts around now
01:14:15
Speaker
that determine that's going to happen, but they aren't as rife as the facts that, as it were, retrospectively determine the Battle of Waterloo that happens. So Lewis talked about the asymmetry of over-determination. The present vastly over-determines the past, but doesn't over-determine the future. It might just determine it, but it doesn't over-determine it. And he said, that's why it's ripe to think that changing the present
01:14:46
Speaker
can change the future, but it can't change the past because there's a million other things that you aren't wiggling that will really fix what the past was like. So he pulled out of the air this, when I think it was a pretty thermodynamic fact that the asymmetry of traces, asymmetry of records, and used that to explain asymmetry of counterfactuals. So he did address this asymmetry question, but only later on.
01:15:12
Speaker
And it sounds like thermodynamics is going to be key here as well. Yeah, exactly. Okay, brilliant. Yeah. I think we better stop. We better stop. If anything, just because my brain is exploding, there's so much things to think through here.
01:15:28
Speaker
Thanks so much, David. I don't know if you have a final comment or mic drop. I think the looking out for your book is certainly something to... It's still got to be written, but I hope we talked a little bit about all the things you might cover, and I think we probably have covered them all. I think so, yeah. And more things as well. So, Brinn. Thank you again.
01:15:52
Speaker
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