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
But about, you know, for the entire history of the species, we've had this experience of, for 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 it, they can't even see the role that experience plays in how they came up with their formal systems. You know, and experience fundamentally is weird, you know, mysterious. It's like 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 standard model of cosmology, that they're idiots, that's not going to bode well for the advance of your project.
Yeah, but I wouldn't do it – I wouldn't – because, you know, there's panpsychism, right, which wants to say that – Right, so that's all the way there. Yeah.
But 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. Mm-hmm.
And that third-person view, we want to really emphasize, is a fiction. It's a useful fiction when you're doing science. If I want to do the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don't want to have to think about experience at all. But 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'm going to argue that experience always involves all of us. Experience always originates out of a community. That you're always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being inexperienced. So whatever account we want to give –
is of the world is going to have to take that 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 your 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. 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 experience.
It always starts from this field of experience or in phenomenology, the word is the life world that you're embedded in. You can't un-embed yourself from it. So how do you do... So one of the things that Whitehead said was, 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 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 epiphenomenon.
It's just, you know, brain states or whatever. He said, you can't do that. They're both real. They're both accounts. They both need to be integrated. And so that required, I think, a really a different conception of what we mean by nature.
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 chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who's a wonderful philosopher, and Marcelo Gleiser, who's a theoretical physicist.
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 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, and no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right? Quantum mechanics slams you. with the idea of the measurement problem, you know?
The most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger equation, which, you know, you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions and now you've 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 Lagrange 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 nother set of rules for you. You know, that's the born, what we call the born rule. And it was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right?
So when you're asking like, how will we do this? Quantum 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 a new
Like 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?
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.
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