Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’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
So it's the fact that you're a deterministic structure living in a random background. And also all of that selection bundled in you allows you to select on possible futures. So that's where your will comes from. And there's just always a little bit of randomness because the universe is getting bigger.
And, you know, like this idea that the past is and the present is not large enough yet to contain the future. Right. The extra structure has to come from somewhere. And some of that is because outside of those giant causal structures that are things like us, it's fucking random out there. And it's scary.
And we're all hanging on to each other because the only way to hang on to each other, like the only way to exist is to like cling on to all of these causal structures that we happen to co-inhabitate existence with and try to keep reinforcing each other's existence.
But free will is totally consistent with that.
Well, it's also – it's not just the randomness. There's two features. One is randomness helps generate some novelty and some flexibility. But it's also that, like, because you're the structure that's deep in time, you have this combinatorial history that's you. And I think about time and assembly theory not as linear time but as combinatorial time.
So if you have all of this structure that you're built out of, you – in principle, you know, your future can be combinations of that structure. You obviously need to persist yourself as a coherent you. So you want to optimize for a common, like a, a future in that combinatorial space that still includes you most of the time for most of us.
And, and when you make those kinds of, and then that gives you a space to operate in and that's your sort of horizon where your free will can operate. And your free will can't be instantaneous.
So for like example, like I'm sitting here talking to you right now, I can't be in the UK and I can't be in Arizona, but I could plan, I could execute my free will over time because free will is a temporal feature of life to be there, you know, tomorrow or the next day if I wanted to.
I think those were already decided a while ago. I don't think free will is ever instantaneous.
You are.
Or you being Lex. Whatever you want to call it.
Yeah. It exists. I think that's the hardest question.
It is the same. I try to fold all of the questions into that question because I think that one's really hard. And I think the nature of existence is really hard.
Right. So, well, I think there's sort of two questions embedded here. I think the one that we can't answer by answering life is why certain things exist and others don't. But I think the sort of ultimate question, the sort of like prime mover question of why anything exists, we will not be able to answer.
Oh, there's nothing outside the universe. So I have a very – I am a very – like I am like the most physicalist that like anyone could be. So like for me, everything exists in our universe. And like I like to like think it like everything exists here. So even when we talk about the multiverse, I don't – like to me, it's not like there's all these other universes outside of our universe that exist.
The multiverse is a concept that exists in human minds. And it allows us to have some counterfactual reasoning to reason about our own cosmology, and therefore it's causal in our biosphere to understanding the reality that we live in and building better theories. But I don't think that the multiverse is something... And also math.
I don't think there's a platonic world that mathematical things live in. I think mathematical things are here on this planet. I don't think it makes sense to talk about things that exist outside of the universe. If you're talking about them, you're already talking about something that exists inside the universe and is part of the universe and is part of what the universe is building.
I mean, what else would there be?
And you can say that, and that's an interesting philosophy. But again, this is sort of like pushing on the boundaries of the way that we understand things. I think it's more constructive to say the fact that I can talk about those things is telling me something about the structure of where I actually live and where I exist.
Well, it may not be true. It may be something that allows me to build better theories I can test to try to understand something objective.
Showing 481–500 of 510 · page 25 of 26
← Previous
Next →