David Wallace
speaker
1,940 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Jul
David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
that's kinda difficult to reconcile with the way we actually use language.
And apart from anything else, if there isn't really a laptop because it's not fundamental, then going back to what we were talking about earlier, there aren't really any atoms either, because atoms aren't fundamental.
Uh we have no idea what that actually is 'cause we don't have a fundamental theory.
So something seems problematic there.
And you might want to be just very pluralist and say, look, yeah, there's an atom level description of what's going on, a laptop level description of what's going on, but we don't know anything much about how they connect together.
A laptop level description.
Intel built the chip in the laptop and Microsoft put together the bulk of the laptop using physics principles.
They didn't kind of just make it up.
So actually we seem to understand a hell of a lot about the relation between the atom level and the laptop level.
So that's not very plausible.
Then people sometimes say, well
The laptop.
just is another word for the atoms in it.
Philosophers have this term myriological sum, um, which is like it's sort of a bit like saying that the laptop is the set of all the atoms in it, but it's not quite that.
Um
And so now th one has this in other words, one has this idea of composition as just a primitive metaphysical idea, you know, walls are composed of bricks of bricks, a laptops are composed of atoms.
Um and that's also scientifically problematic because inter level relations look a lot more rich and pluralistic than composition.
So if you
If you think about, say, how you derive fluid dynamics from microphysics, we don't really the f the fluid is not in any very simple way just the meteorological sum of the atoms.
Most of the um most of m uh the fluid occupies all of space, whereas mo atoms are mostly empty.
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