Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term it’s a constellation. It’s not just materialism. It’s a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They’re not what science says, but because of the evolution of the history of science and culture got like pin the tail on the donkey, they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says. So what is it? One is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but all the way down to quarks. That’s it. So that’s reductionism. The objective frame that science gives us this god’s eye view, this third-person view of the world to view the world from the outside. That’s what science bequeaths to us, that view. Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There’s nothing else to talk about that, that’s all there is. And everything can be reduced to that. And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this. And there’s a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness. I think it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience because it is a verb kind of in a way. It is verb-like and by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we’re at right now. So you actually say that, that from a perspective of detrimental society, that there’s a crisis of meaning, and then we respond to that in a way that’s counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right. I think the postmodernist on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right, and then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning? Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we’re insignificant. We’re not important. We’re just biological machines. And so we’re basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant. In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside. At cosmology, we’re always the observers. We’re at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in, it comes the measurement problem just puts us front and center. And we’ve spent 100… Some people spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we’re insignificant, and on the other hand, we’re central. So which one is it? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability, we can’t do science without already being present in the world. We can’t reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal… A lot of it is about we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we’re substituting. That’s one of the things that, there’s two philosophers we really like for our heroes. One is Husserl, who is a mathematician, who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And Husserl came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of The Blind Spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience that that’s more important. And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let’s just do the parable of temperature because I think people can… It’ll help them understand what we mean. So think about degree Celsius. We have in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degree Celsius. They’re out there. The universe, the molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we’ve forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience. We started off with science by, we had the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold. Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michel Bitbol philosopher calls, “The structural invariance.” The things that we could both kind of agree on. So we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that’s got mercury in it and that hot things will be higher in on that gradiated cylinder, cold things will be lower, and we can both kind of figure out what we’re going to agree on are our standards for that. And then we have thermometry, yay. We have a way of having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold.…

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