Jack Symes

You're 100% confident that you are conscious right now. So it's not a non-existent thing. So following that reasoning, which has been embraced by public figures such as him more recently, you'd have to say that everything is conscious in this way in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience. But leaving aside the how the big mind can break itself up.

There is still a question, this might be a bit of a boring terminological one, so you can tell me to shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary corner, but it's the idea that I spoke about earlier that all theists think that God is the perfect being. If God exists, God has to be perfect. You can't have a unicorn with no horn on its head, like uni-cornu, one horn. A unicorn has to have one horn.

In the same way, a triangle needs three corners, God needs to be perfect. But on this definition, it seems like God isn't perfect. At the beginning of time, if God is the universe, God wasn't perfect then. There was a greater being that God could have been. And even in the fullness of time, perhaps God won't be as perfect as the being which is described by... Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

So what we're seeing is people embracing, I think this is Goff's term as well. I think he's coming out as this, or maybe I'm coming out for him. He's describing himself as a heretical Christian. So to be a Christian, he thinks you don't need to believe in the virgin birth. You don't need to believe in the resurrection.

You don't need to believe that God's perfect, but you can still believe that there's this big cosmic story that you're a part of and that there is something God-like at the essence of it all. I think that's the kind of view that we need to start carving out. Theism's on the decline. Are we just speaking about the numbers?

Yeah. I mean, I think that seems to be that's the general view. I think that it's the zeitgeist of the time. It's the feeling of the age that we think in such a way. But there is still that movement. And this is my view.

I just want to shed light on like an alternative idea, which is go back to Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher who thought that all change and all individuation is an illusion, that we live in this block universe, this big one thing. Have you heard of Zeno's Paradox? You've done this one before? No, no, what's that? Zeno's Paradox is great. So you've got two, like, see these two cups here.

For that cup to reach that one, it needs to go from point A to point B, say in the middle. And then to get another half, it has to do another half journey from point B to point C. And that goes on infinitely for Zeno. Like there's always another halfway point in between point A and point B because you need to keep making these half journeys.

Which seems ridiculous because we quite clearly can move the cup next to the other one, right? Right. But theoretically, if time and space is infinitely divisible, then you can always make another half journey in between point A and point B. Okay. It gives the example of like...

Yeah, every step of the way. Like, is it Hercules or somebody racing a turtle? Maybe it's not Hercules. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, Achilles. There you go. So the turtle and Achilles are having a race. And the idea is like for Achilles to get to the finish line, Achilles needs to go halfway. But then he needs to get three quarters of the way.

And then there's another half point between three quarters and the full way. And it will go on and on and on and on. So the answer to the question, who wins the race out of Achilles and the turtle, is neither of them win. It's a draw. No one can finish the race. But we quite clearly finish races. We quite clearly move the cups next to each other.

So Zeno thought, and people like Heraclitus thought as well, that this means that it's all an illusion. Like the idea of change and motion isn't actually something that's out there in the world. It can't be possible. Right. So when you're seeing change in motion, what are you seeing?

It seems like that's not true. Well, take, like Einstein tells us, and this is, let's bring in the multiverse for this too, right? Einstein told us that space is like stretchable. So it expands. So we have the moment of the Big Bang and the universe or existence as a whole, we might say, space and time, evolves according to the law of inflation.

So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space. And some physicists think that this inflation happens eternally, that it isn't reasonable to say that it just stopped as soon as our universe was created or one or two later.

So what you have is this popular view in physics where you keep getting more and more of these universes and end up with a popular multiverse view where every single possible physical reality is realized. So there's worlds, according to this view, where we're having this conversation in Spanish or, God forbid, French, right?

Or there's a very nearby possible world where we're having this conversation in Italian, German, or Japanese, right?

Yeah, yeah.

There are worlds, though, and I think the real question we want to ask, there are a bunch of these multiverse views. We spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy, Mary Midgley clarifying these concepts. This is an idea my friend Ellie Robson convinced me of recently, that it's a really important job in philosophy.

We haven't done a good job in physics and philosophy of defining the multiverse. We keep using the word, but you've had Sean Carroll on the show, who's fantastic, and I've spoken to him about his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. You've got views in philosophy that give you every single metaphysical possibility.

The easiest one to illustrate, it's just this inflation model that I've just given. But what we really want to know is why this matters. Does this change the value of the world? Because there are universes where little girls are born, they're tortured for their whole lives, they're executed, and it repeats. There are universes where Matt Damon's career didn't get worse, but it got better.