Sean Carroll

Like the one simple trick that will explain the whole universe.

This has been something that thinkers throughout history have fallen for.

And then George Boole is another fascinating character because, again, I don't know enough about the history there, but I think it's maybe easy to underestimate his contribution because in some sense he just says, what if all numbers were zero or one, right?

Like what if everything was just true or false and that's all we cared about?

And did any, at any point along this development, I know you already mentioned that Boole talked about probability theory, but what was the thought about people thinking like, okay, this is logic, but actual people in the actual world aren't very logical all the time?

Well, it's probably a huge oversimplification, but the idea of just taking seriously that we're not sure about things, that we do assign a certain probability to something being a true belief or a false belief, that seems like the next big thing in my head.

But it's an inductive enterprise.

Let's get this clear because it confused me for literally decades.

I mean, there's a logical kind of induction, which always does get you to certain answers, right?

Mathematical induction.

But then there's this more informal kind of induction where you see, well, I see a lot of things happening.

Maybe that happens all the time.

Yeah, that's right.

I'm a huge fan of abduction.

I'm not sure if I'm more of a fan than I should be, but it seems to me to be the closest to the way that science actually works, right?

And sometimes it's mixed up with inference to the best explanation, and it's sort of admitting that this is not clear-cut and algorithmic, but still there is something uniquely sensible that we're doing.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And this is skipping way ahead to the future of our conversation, but let me just bring it in right now.

I have this feeling that a large language model or some machine learning algorithm that we have right now would be perfectly good at solving Einstein's equations of general relativity in the right context, but it would really struggle to...

have that first creative moment where it suggested that gravity is the curvature of space-time simply because they are trained on things that have already happened.