Curt Jaimungal: Consciousness, Irreducibility, and the Local to Global
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Why do intellectual slogans fatigue listeners and how does it affect philosophical discourse?
Okay, well hello everyone and welcome back. We're gonna jump in straight away to our second plenary session of the day. by none other uh than Kurt Jimungle. Many of you may be familiar with Kurt's good work. Kurt is a Toronto based filmmaker and interviewer exploring a variety of topics related to theoretical physics, consciousness, and free will through his widely acclaimed podcast, Toe, otherwise known as the Theories of Everything. If you are unfamiliar with that podcast, I would highly recommend you check it out and uh see all the good content that Kurt is producing. Kurt, we're really happy to have you here with us today and we'll turn the floor over to you
now. Thank you for the invitation. It's an honor to be here. A special thank you to Matt, Matt Seagall. Now in keeping with the theme of this talk, I have some inconsistent ideas I'd like to present. First of all, What was this nameless Whitehadian scholar referring to? Is this the mental or the physical pole? A dynamic, self-organizing system defined by chaotic nonlinear feedback loops seeking equilibrium, but constantly perturbed by external energy states, resulting in a temporary, localized nexus of high intensity friction. Does anyone know if it's ph physical or mental or even who the scholar is? So it turns out this is Gemini explaining to me what a washing machine is. And so, to me, if one can't tell the difference between Whitehead and a Whirlpool, I think we have a problem.
Now, I used to be dissatisfied when I read Whitehead, but I've come to change my mind. I'll get to that toward the end of the talk. Much of that's due to Matt, Matt Seagall, who's been on the the podcast. For now, let's talk about some mistakes that intellectuals make. So one is saying alluding when they mean reference. Another is applying Girdle's theorem indiscriminately. Another is you'll hear this the charge of so-and-so is illusory because X is not fundamental, therefore X is not real. And then th it's also something that bothers me is that they'll say that uh some new physics theory will come out as in the comment section someone says, oh the Vedics said this thousands of years ago. Did they say it?
Did the Vedics make a reference to an inner a complete inner product space with tensors and you need a Born rule for probabilities? So you can always water anything down and then make it a like something else. But you do so at the expense of of both. So let's see here, using concrescence when you literally mean just happening. So this is In my former self. Dressing up mundane. Terms with White Hedian's esoteric vocabulary, one says the concrescence of prehensions in this nexus is nearing its satisfaction and mis amid misprehension. Well what does that mean? It means excuse me, I ordered the venti, but you gave me a grande. I think we have the tendency to feel if it's not four syllables or greater then it's not profound.
And the last mistake that only intellectuals make is that it engage in overly punctilious quibbling like I will for the rest of this talk. So this talk also could have been called, it's called the reverse elephant, it also could have been called why neither is greater than both. Part of this that I I'm just so antagonistic, I'm I'm an apostate. So when I hear something repeated over and over, like someone posits A, someone posits B, and then some Hegelian comes along and says, No, no, no, they're both, they're supposed to be synthesized, and every you're both right, even though though that's not Hegel, that's Fichta and and Calabius, Matt can correct me on my pronunciations. It's just it's interesting the first time I the first 52 times I hear it.
Then the fifty-seventh time I hear it, I start to realize that these maxims or slogans that I'm passing along in a say in a forest, this tree is not is not my tree. Its roots don't touch me. I'm not convinced of it. My kryptonite is once I've heard something said enough, I make a list, I put it into a a a document of banned words and banned phrases that I'm not allowed to say. It's almost like the opposite of the boiling frog.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do intellectual slogans fatigue listeners and how does it affect philosophical discourse?
0:00–5:33
2
What is the “reverse elephant” metaphor and how does it illustrate local‑versus‑global agreement?
5:33–8:26
3
Why can’t local agreement be extended to a global truth in physics and philosophy?
8:26–12:08
4
What are the three senses of irreducibility and how do they apply to consciousness?
12:08–16:23
5
How does sheaf theory reveal obstructions to stitching together local data globally?
16:23–19:59
6
How can the hard problem of consciousness be formalized using mathematics?
19:59–23:35
7
What is averted vision in astronomy and how does it relate to perceiving consciousness?
23:35–27:20
8
How does the proposed taxonomy of “everything” help organize theories of physics, mind, and philosophy?
27:20–56:13
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Jim Al-Khalili: The Ontology of Time. We Had It Backwards
She Says Spacetime Points Are Just Where Fields Meet
Tanya Luhrmann: The Experience Is Real. But Is God?
Tim Maudlin: Quantum Nonlocality Explained FROM SCRATCH
Adrian Owen: Awake. Aware. Unable to Move.
Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds