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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Absolutely. That's exactly it. So, you know, one of the things that's really interesting to me, so I'm, I'm, you know, I have a project, I'm part of a big project, uh, that, uh, Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pannier on cubism. So I've been part of that. And what I've been amazed by is the language they use. So what's cool about cubism is it comes from quantum information theory.
It's a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics, uh, And it's always about you have an agent who makes an action on the world. And then the information they get from that action through the experiment, that's the action in the world, updates their priors, updates their Bayesian. That's why it's called cubism, quantum Bayesianism.
updates how the information they've gotten from the world. Now, this turns out to be kind of the same language that we're using in a project that's about the physics of life, where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells.
So, you know, we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you, you know, basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning. It focuses on, and in a very simple way, just like how much of the information that the agent, the critter, is getting from the world actually helps it survive. That's the most basic idea of meaning.
We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not? And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food kind of has the same feel, the same sort of architecture as what's going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it.
How do we bring this sort of recognition that there's always – us, the agent, or life, the agent, interacting with the world and drawing it, both giving information and passing information back as a way of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.
Yes, that's what we're looking for. I think that is really, that's the exciting part. And it's a move, you know, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you know, and you understand why people love this. Like I have these equations and these equations. equations represent, you know, there's this platonic ideal that they are, you know, they exist eternally on their own.
It's kind of quasi-religious, right? It's sort of like somehow look, these equations are the, you're reading the mind of God. But this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you're saying is there's us and the world, they're inseparable, right? It's always us and the world.
And what we're now finding about is this kind of co-creation, this interaction, you know, between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account, like in no way am I saying these laws aren't important.
These laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, you know, that turns the experience, turns the agent into just a, you know, an epiphenomena that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent's not the most important part of the story.
So, you know, listen, that would be like kind of my dream. I'm not going to be the one to do it because I'm not smart enough to do it. But, you know, Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while with string theory. I've spent my whole life listening to talks about string theory real soon, you know.
And it's gotten ever more disconnected, right? From, you know, data observations, there were people talking for a while that it's post-empirical. And, you know, I always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like physicists have been smoking their own stash, right? There's this way we've gotten used to, like, you know, you have to outweird the other person.
Like, my theory is 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it's got, you know, psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there's been a problem. There's a problem. I don't need to tell you there's a crisis in physics or there's a crisis in cosmology. Other people have used that. That's been the headline on Scientific American stories. So clearly another direction has to be found.
And maybe it has nothing to do with this. But I suspect that... Because so many times the agent or the having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency, like when it comes to time, thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time. You know, clocks don't tell time. We use clocks to tell time.
So maybe that even like the fundamental nature of time can't be viewed from the outside, that there's a new physics theory that is going to come from, that comes from this agential informational, computational view. I don't know, but that's kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.
Yeah, that's a... Right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we've taken... This is what... When Herschel talks about the surreptitious substitution, we've taken Einstein's beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time, and we... substituted that for the actual experience of time, right?
So the block universe where like next Tuesday is already written down, you know, it's in the block universe, the four-dimensional universe, all events are already there, which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the sort of, you know, the scientific framework. But, you know, it is not lived time.
And, you know, this was pointed out to Einstein and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Bergson, who was the most famous philosopher of the early 20th century, and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity, and Bergson, whose whole thing was about time and was about duration. He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of
Of time from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration. Like we humans were, were duration for us is full. It's, it's sort of, um, it's stretched out. It's got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present music is the best example, right? You're hearing music. You're both already anticipating what's going to happen.
And you're, you know, remembering what's going on. there's a kind of phenomenal structure there, which is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. And what, you know, the way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot is it says, oh, no, no, the formal system is time.
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