Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If I gave you a single cell and said what's going to happen in a few billion years, you'd never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right? A kangaroo. So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative. So what it means is, and that's a part of a kind of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive. It goes past itself.
So give life enough time, you know, and what are the end result? Like, you know, that's why I love science fiction so much. Does at some point does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself? It becomes the laws of physics or, you know, these these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what what we mean by reality, what we mean by, you know, experience.
But I'm not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically. But, you know, they're they're open ended question about the open ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.
I've evolved in this, right? I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics and magnetohydrodynamics of star formation. But I always, I was a philosophy minor. I always had the 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 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, and this is where I'm going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency. What does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? happen. I'm not a reductionist.
I'm not somebody who's just like, well, I just put together enough chemicals and bing, bang, boom, and it suddenly appears. There's something that 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 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, however 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, um, you know, so different is to me much more. Because it's, you know, that's where being appears.
Being doesn't appear out there, right? The only place it 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.
Yeah, so the idea of The Blind Spot is that there is this thing that That is central to science. So 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. So you can't have vision without the optic nerve, but actually you're blind to the 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 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 is. But it's not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It's a metaphysics that got glued onto science.
And so 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 presence. being 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 way to say this. That is the precondition of, For the possibility of science. And the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved, is that it purposely pushed that out.
It pushed that out so it could make progress. And that's fine for a certain class of problems. 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 is always the background, that experience is always the background, then we just end up with these paradoxes and these yoga that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.
And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So 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 science 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 quarks. 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. I tend not to use the word consciousness because I think it leads us in the wrong direction.
We should focus on experience because it's a verb kind of in a way or it's verb-like. So, yeah, and 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.
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