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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But really the only place time appears is with us, right? Where we're, you know, so having a theory that actually could start with us, And then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third-person view back on us. That's a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem.
Is difficult, right? And so that, but that's the good work of the science ahead of us, right? So what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So, you know, we start with experience, which is irreducible. There's no atoms of experience, right? It's a whole. And we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way.
There's a philosopher, Robert Kreis, who talks about the workshop. That starting in like the 1700s, 1600s, we developed this communal space to work in. Sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory. where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated, and we went to the next step.
So this idea of pulling out from experience these thinner, abstract, structural invariants, the things that we could actually do science with. And it's kind of like, we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction, right? So the problem with the way we do things now is we take that
those abstractions, which came from experience, and then with something like a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in.
Like you literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions, neglecting experience, because that's the only way to do science, and then you think somehow, oh, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna jam experience back in and have an explanation for experience.
What I would say is that free will is a given. And that's the thing about experience, right? So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote, he says, it's not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It's the job to account for the abstract. The concrete is
what's happening between us right now is just given, you know, it's just, it's presented to us every day. It's presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn't add anything to it, right? So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent, right? To be an agent, agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, you know, they're equivalent.
And so in some sense to be an agent is to be autonomous. And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy? that captures aspects of its arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise.
But the idea, you know, the reason why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they're more real than experience. You know, and the equations are a paler, you know, they don't corral experience. They are a thinner, you know, representation.
As we like to say, don't confuse the map for the terrain. What's happening between us right now in this, you know, all the weirdness of it, that's the terrain. The map is what I can write down on equations and then in the workshop do experiments on. Super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.
An illusion looking from where? Because that already requires to take that stance is you've already pushed yourself into that third-person view, right?
And so what we're saying is that third-person view, which now you're going to say like, oh, I've got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities, meaning things that I think exist in God's living room in spite that are independent of me and the community of living things I'm part of.
Yeah, right. And that's why fundamentally the blind spot, especially the scientific triumphalist part, is following a religious impulse. It's wanting the God's eye view. And you know what's really interesting? And when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, there's a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in.
And it is actually a pretty, it's only one version of philosophy, right? So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition, right? But there's even in Europe or in the Western tradition, for Western, what we'll call Western philosophy, there's phenomenology. There's Hercel and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which took an entirely different track.
They were really interested in the structure of experience. They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle that is experience. Experience, you're not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it. It's given, so you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then
So that has not been part of this discussion about – you'll never – good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, you know, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it's a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get – the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization, right?
So there's the Western core, out of which comes the Greeks and the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia, and they developed their own. They were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions.
And they, for reasons, because they had contemplative practice, they were very focused on like direct, trying to like directly probe attention and experience. they asked questions in ways that the West never really did.
Phenomenology kind of started it, but, you know, there's philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, and they're like the Plato and, you know, Aristotle of, you know, sort of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience. In the West, I think maybe because we had –
Showing 501–520 of 594 · page 26 of 30
← Previous
Next →