Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And as long as they're not telling you just a complete idiot and they give you different reasons. And I mean, I'm, you know, if everyone, it's like with assembly theory and people said, oh, it's wrong. And I was like, why? And they're like, and no one could give me a consistent reason. They said, oh, because it's been done before or it's just come a goller off or it's just that and the other.
So I think the thing that I like to do is, and in academia, it's hard, right? Because people are critical, but I mean, you know,
The criticism, I mean, although I got kind of upset about it earlier, which is kind of silly, but not silly, because obviously it's hard work being on your own or with a team spatially separated like during lockdown and trying to keep everyone on board and have some faith that... I've always wanted to have a new idea.
And so, you know, I like a new idea and I want to nurture it as long as possible. And if someone can give me actionable criticism, that's why I think I was trying to say earlier when I was kind of like stuck for words, give me actionable criticism. You know, it's wrong. Okay, why is it wrong? You say, oh, it doesn't, your equation's incorrect for this, or your method is wrong, or...
And so what I try and do is get enough criticism from people to then triangulate and go back. And I've been very fortunate in my life that I've got great colleagues, great collaborators, funders, mentors, and people that will take the time to say, you're wrong because... And then what I have to do is integrate the wrongness and go, oh, cool, maybe I can fix that.
And I think criticism is really good. People have a go at me because I'm really critical. But I'm not criticizing you as a person. I'm just criticizing the idea and trying to make it better and say, well, what about this? And sometimes I'm kind of – my filters are –
kind of uh you know truncations in some ways i'm just like that's wrong that's wrong that's wrong i want to do this and people are like oh my god you just told me you destroyed my life's work i'm like relax no i'm just like let's make it better and i think that we don't do that enough because we're we're you know we we're we're we're either personally critical which isn't helpful or we don't give any criticism at all because we're too scared
I'm sure I make mistakes on that. I mean, I argue lots with Sarah and she's kind of shocked. I've argued with Jascha in the past and he's like, you're just making that up. I'm like, no, not quite, but kind of. Yeah. You know, I had a big argument with Sarah about time. She was like, no, time doesn't exist. I'm like, no, no, time does exist.
And as she realized that her conception of assembly theory and my conception of assembly theory were the same thing, necessitated us to abandon the fact that time is eternal, to actually really fundamentally question how the universe produces combinatorial novelty.
So I think assembly theory is fine in this time right now, but I think it helps us understand that something interesting is going on. And I'm really inspired by a guy called Nick Gizan. I'm going to butcher his argument, but I love his argument a lot, so I hope he forgives me if he hears about it. But basically... If you want free will, time has to be fundamental.
And if you want time to be fundamental, you have to give up on platonic mathematics and you have to use intuitionist mathematics. By the way, and again, I'm going to butcher this, but basically Hilbert... said that, you know, infinite numbers are allowed. And I think it was Brower said, no, you can't, all numbers are finite. So they're kind of like, so let's go back a step.
Cause it was like, people are going to say, assembly theory seems to explain that large combinatorial space allows you to produce things like life and technology. And that large combinatorial space is so big that is not even accessible to a Sean Carroll, David Deutsch multiverse.
The physicists saying that all of the universe already exists in time is probably, provably, that's a strong word, not correct. that we are going to know that the universe as it stands, the present, the way the present builds the future so big, the universe can't ever contain the future. And this is a really interesting thing.
I think Max Techmark has this mathematical universe where he says, you know, the universe is kind of like a block universe. I apologize to Max if I'm getting it wrong, but people think you can just move. You have the initial conditions, and you can run the universe right to the end and go backwards and forwards in that universe. That is not correct.
That's why, that's it.
Yes, and that you can have, and that's what, this is why the law of the excluded middle, something is true or false, only works in the past. Is it going to snow in New York next week or in Austin? You might in Austin say, probably not. In New York, you might say, yeah. If you go forward to next week and say, did it snow in New York last week? True or false? You can answer that question.
The fact that the law of the excluded middle cannot apply to the future explains why time is fundamental.
Impossible. Impossible. So here's why. I'll make a really quick argument, and this argument isn't mine. It's Nick's and a few other people.
Yeah, so I'll give my view, which kind of resonates with his. But basically, it's very simple, actually. He would say that your ability to design and do an experiment is exercising free will. So he used that thought process. I never really thought about it that way, and that you actively make decisions. I used to think that free will was a kind of consequence of just selection.
But I'm kind of understanding that human free will is something really interesting. And he very much inspired me. But I think that what Sarah Walker said that inspired me as well, that these will converge, is that I think that the universe... The universe is very big. Huge. But actually... The place that is largest in the universe right now, the largest place in the universe is Earth.
Showing 301–320 of 545 · page 16 of 28
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