Episode 33: James Ladyman on Reality, Metaphysics, and Complexity

Blog post with show notes, audio player, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Reality is a tricky thing. Is love real? What about the number 5? This is clearly a job for a philosopher, and James Ladyman is one of the world’s acknowledged experts. He and his collaborators have been championing a view known as “structural realism,” in which real things are those that reflect true, useful patterns in the underlying reality. We talk about that, but also about a couple of other subjects in the broad area of philosophy of science: the history and current status of materialism/physicalism, and the nature of complex systems. This is a deep one.
James Ladyman obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, and is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has worked broadly within the philosophy of science, including issues of realism, empiricism, physicalism, complexity, and information. His book Everything Must Go (co-authored with Don Ross) has become an influential work on the relationship between metaphysics and science.

[@kakemannlikmann6664]

Fremhevet kommentar I was a drug addict for a long time. You mister Sean Carrol cured me. I started listening to you after I saw you on the Joe Rogan show. Now Im so into Physics. How can I thank you enough Sir? Hopefully I will be able to meet you one day, just for a smalltalk 2-3 min. I wish you were my dad. You are my really new Idol. From Norway. Thanks Sean, Dont forget that I love you for all the good work you put up. Alan Guth Loves you as well. Pls respond if you can [angelface]. I laughed when you said that you took lsd with your friends to find out of something. Everyone in Silicon Valley are almost microdosing lsd every third day. More creativeness. A better medicine than adderal for adhd as well. I should get more into that, As Heroine and Benzodiazepines crushed my life over a long peroid of time. Im 5 month sober now. Thanks Sean Carrol.

[@brent4138]

I wouldn't count on a response but keep it up and dont substitute 1 thing for another (unless the new thing is just physics). You are out of the fog. Just dont go back

[@dogsdomain8458]

I wish he was my daddy as well

[@capoeirastronaut]

It's great to see a serious active research physicist engage with philosophy. And very rare, sadly.

[@dustinedward5280]

instablaster...

[@erictko85]

Wow Sean thank you for this episode and this series. It’s truly a catalyst for learning, when you align all of these powerful ideas into a dialogue that is listeners are so lucky to listen in on. 👍🏼

[@errgo2713]

'Philosophy of science is philosophy enough' - Quine

[@danielm5161]

I'd like to hear James Ladyman on the show again.

[@billlyons7024]

I love this podcast, thanks for doing it Sean.

[@paxdriver]

Favorite episode so far (again) 👍!!

[@shezcop4987]

Very entertaining and inciting podcast, thanks

[@nonchai]

Thanks so much for having James on your show! ( Did I by chance suggest him as a guest ? I forget )

[@thehotyounggrandpas8207]

Sean! One of my favourite human beings! If he were a few years younger and a woman, he'd be perfect! Subscribed, may do so again!

[@zair_salahuddin]

One of my favourite episodes so far! I wonder, if it is indeed "relationships all the way down", could there perhaps be a metastructure that could sum up a "thing" as all levels of relationships it has... And would that ultimately just be the universe et al?

[@paxdriver]

Please consider greyscale or dimming the splash page after 10 mins or something. Bright blue is hard on the eyes, tv and disrupts sleep :p

[@SortaPredictable]

Turn your phone off and continue the video with buds if you mist.

[@UHFStation1]

Use digital blue filter.

[@Gerardemful]

Brilliant

[@DraconianPolicy]

The reason people have a hard time saying numbers are real or not, is because numbers are descriptions about reality. Probably the most fundamental description we know of which is not dependent upon a specific form of perception. So, if anything exists which can be perceived by anyone at all, then on some level it can be described numerically.

[@DraconianPolicy]

The reason why many people approach atheism with suspicion is because it doesn't really say anything about what you believe... it only describes what you don't believe. So if someone is an atheist, then we have no idea what their ethics and morality are, what their values are, what their ideals are, what they do believe in, etc. It's just a generic, umbrella term that doesn't tell us anything except that a person doesn't believe in the existence of a god. It doesn't even necessarily tell us they reject the abstract concept of a god as a possibility in reality. Technically, it doesn't even tell us they reject the concept of the supernatural.

[@Yarblocosifilitico]

As an atheist, I agree about all that. But, if there's no god(s), then there are pretty much only two choices: to believe in nothing, or to believe in humanity. So most atheists are good ppl I would say, cos I'm not sure if the first one is even possible.

[@scottmiller4295]

atheism plus did not help that bunch either.

[@seankerr1187]

Will you ever video these?!

[@zair_salahuddin]

AFAIK not in the near future. He has mentioned previously that it's way more of a hassle to move from audio to video.

[@Cloudyinseattle]

Numbers abstractly may not be real but geometry is.

[@psmoyer63]

It is the single task of the philosopher to determine of the meaning of questions, not to answer them.

[@I2yantheGreat]

YAY

[@jamesbra4410]

He's a REAL ladies man.

[@Stadtpark90]

What I learned from this one is the interesting role of feedback - not only with bridge-building ants. In times of the internet, the smartphone and AI we better watch out what feedback we give, because it is a loop: not only are we training the AI with our behavior, also the AI is training us (- he mentioned clickbait while discussing free will)! - We better watch out what we want to optimize for in software development and Al: having all the wrong things / anti-social behavior programmed into the future internet and the future generation will come back to bite us. - - On a side note: the amount of advertising I get here on KZbin for Zombi-Apocalypse / “Tower Defence” games is appalling: I even find it politically incorrect: there is already enough fear-mongering by right wing politics about how masses of immigrants will be storming our walls so to speak, while the gaming industry has nothing better to do than to jump on the bandwagon and trying to sell me games for my smartphone/ tablet where my job would be to mow down the masses without wasting a thought. (I’m not talking about Plants vs Zombies here!) - Sorry for the off-topic, just had to get that off of my mind, because it’s making me sick.

[@WisdomVendor1]

How many philosophers to change a lightbulb? none..by the time they are done discussing whether it exists or not, the lightbulb was already replaced with a zero point energy-light dispersion module.

[@SrValeriolete]

Thankfully philosophers invented phisics and the scientific method, now we have lightbulbs

[@DaydreamNative]

Nothing is real, everything lasts forever.

[@tookie36]

Ed Copeland :)

[@theomanification]

It annoys me that more people know who Justin Bieber is than Sean Carroll.

[@JP-re3bc]

What is the meaning of "exist"?

[@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself]

Something exists if, at least in principle, it could be sensed or otherwise interacted with. And it does not require a conscious mind to do the sensing or interacting.

[@Ometecuhtli]

Not the majority but seemingly a portion that likes to make some noise of the religious people do that helping because they believe that doing so will put them in good light in face of their god, when they are confronted with non-religious people who also help others monetarily or with voluntary work they argue they too are inspired by the same god unknowingly. In some extreme cases they believe that their religion is necessary or sufficient for morality to exist, and sometimes genuinely believe that the lack of religion or a punishing god means that people would start doing illegal things or commiting crimes for the idea of an afterlife of punishment (or the other way round) is necessary to reign some innate human desire for wrongdoing. So perhaps it is this people who would otherwise not give a care for the others that religion is necessary, but then again, who knows if this ideas are the result of indoctrination which prevented them to develop as a fully functioning social and empathic being in the first place.

[@JP-re3bc]

Some physicists claim the world may have 11 dimensions. If that were so then "reality" would encompass those 11 dimensions, right? But we only perceive these 3 dimensions of space so in this case reality would forever non perceivable, no?

[@capoeirastronaut]

Not necessarily, just not by us in our current form. For instance, it might take beings like Iain M Bank's Minds, hybrid digital-biological organisms with far greater capacities than our own. I thought they should have explicitly mentioned the string landscape when they talked about the limits our perceptions and faculties may impose

[@freeri87]

Have Thomas Nagel and/or Markus Gabriel on.

[@theobserver9131]

And after that, what other stunts to you demand that he perform?

[@sebastjanbrezovnik5250]

Instead of talking about tables and chairs and unicorns the discussions would have had more depth if you would have discussed if “time” is real.

[@websurfer352]

The quantum world is ruled by probabilities, this allows for stochasticity to come into play!! This allows for free will, without stochasticity there could be no allowance for freedom of the will!!! I believe that even the amount of stochasticity allowed by probability is just enough for us to have a deterministic macroworld yet allowing for free will!!

[@johnhausmann2391]

Both Carroll and Ladyman disagree with you and think that this is a poor understanding of free will.

[@mauzi222]

The stutter is real

[@arnoldleaf4521]

Sean I love your pod casts but this one i just couldn't make it through . Have no idea what was this guys point ! U did a great job trying to pull it off , but just to much nonsense to me . Just my opinion , dont want to start a mindscape rebellion , I'm sure it made all the sense in the world to some . I'll keep listening though so keep them coming .

[@alankoslowski9473]

@@mikeo759 It's not so much that he's not a 'real academic', but so much of academia has only limited no practical value. I would argue this is true of many, if not most branches of philosophy, which seems require a high degree of mental effort with little or no return.

[@joop5415]

@@mikeo759 He's actually a very well and globally respected philosopher of science and the stuff he's talking about does make sense to lots of people. Alan Koslowski has it more right -his particular area of expertise is esoteric and not practically useful. Don't get me wrong, plenty of it went over my head but it is interesting stuff. He, like he said in the podcast, is one of a group of philosophers who are trying to reform the field a bit to try and create a better relationship with scientific research.

[@joop5415]

@@mikeo759 I can't remember him saying "A table is real because we can push it" so I think either I've forgotten that part completely or you have missed the point he was making when he was talking about tables. What he was aiming to do was gain a more detailed understanding of what we mean, generally, when we say that something is "real". There are contentious examples of 'real' things and then there are obvious, paradigmatic examples of real things. His examples of the latter were things like tables and chairs. The contentious entities are things like numbers, fundamental physical fields and particles, etc. We aim to develop our understanding of realness so that we can make decisions about the contentious examples. The aim of the exercise was to figure out some standard of "realness" that 'explains' the non-contentious examples and excludes absurd ones. His understanding of realness has to do with real patterns and whether or not a thing takes part in explanations and predictions. It wasn't so much "we can push a table so therefore it's real" as much as it was "we can explain things we observe and make predictions based on theories that the entity 'table' takes part in (such as about the way the table moves across the room when we push it), meaning the table is real". Can you see the difference there? (Baring in mind I may have just misremembered it. I listened to it once and it was a little while ago now. Also I'm not extremely knowledgable about his metaphysics. I have read *of* it a tiny bit and have his book but I haven't read it yet so sorry if I'm making any mistakes).

[@joop5415]

@@mikeo759 I think that's unfair. It basically sounds like you've listened to some very surface level explanations of his arguments and positions and around the debate generally and you're ready to brush off everything he says as "drivel". Sure, you could prefer some other understanding of "realness" but it seems like if you're not ready to even engage with what this guy is saying, you're not going to want to engage with *any* debate surrounding the topic. Also, the problem of free-will is one tiny issue the vast vast field of metaphysics and philosophy generally. Probably the only reason you find that shocking is because it's a problem that's important in the public sphere (in pop-philosophy). His expertise is in the philosophy of physics and philosophy of science and free-will doesn't necessarily fall into either of them. Edit: Also, he clearly has given it at least a little bit of thought. He's a professional philosopher, remember, so to him "a little bit of thought" is probably more than you would expect and more than you or I have given it. He's probably well acquainted with the main arguments and proponents of each position, he probably just hasn't considered them *at the same level* as he has considered problems in his own area.

[@joop5415]

@@mikeo759 What was shit about it?

[@chrisrecord5625]

Stimulating useful podcast. Revisited Quine, Putnam and Popper afterwards. Now postulate that as we continue to advance as conscious observers, we have the opportunity to evolve or accelerate the emergence of the virtual fictive, FreeWill-E particle (E for ethical) which enhances decision making as we self actualize and become enlightened, epistemically speaking. Core theory haecceitic supplement: Free Will E.

[@chrisrecord5625]

I don't want to harshly prejudge Ladyman's upcoming book on "materialism" but after watching a five minute clip on Realism vs. Anti-Realism by John Searle and another longer video discussing the nature of reality with a Buddhist scholar and some physicist, I don't think Ladyman's new book will float my boat.

[@InfiniteCyclus]

Patterns don't have meaning without an observer.

[@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself]

Why not?

[@NerdyRodent]

If reality then maths, because I’m using it?

[@88_TROUBLE_88]

So.. Do what now?

[@CorwynGC]

I would say that love is real and exists in much the same way that fire is real and exists.

[@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself]

As a process (complex interplay of electro-chemical signals and force interactions with an environment), yes, it is just as real as any other dynamic process.

[@XX-lx4mr]

Emotions come from influence and has influence. They can be manipulated, and changed. But I would say, outside actions caused by feelings, feelings are not real to anything except the one experiencing them. But emotions can be defined and repeated. A real phenomenon from real influence having real product.

[@CorwynGC]

@@XX-lx4mr If we can scan brains and determine that someone is feeling happy, how is that not real to us as well?

[@alankoslowski9473]

I would argue they're both real, but in fundamentally different ways. As a subjective emotion, love is only real to those experiencing it, either individually or mutually of each other. Fire on the other hand is a reality that exists independent of emotion. How we feel about fire doesn't change what it is or does.

[@SrValeriolete]

Everything is a process, we just call "objects" mental delimitations of parts of processes that we cut with our mind. A stone is just a process of intemperism of a mountain, everything is flowing constantly and taking new forms. When you really start to examine things deeply you soon realize how they are all interconnected and inseparable.

[@nathanholbrook1693]

Is he just making this up as he goes along?

[@GnomiMoody]

I find that Sean's view of free will is harmful to society. He says that using the term "free will" is a "perfectly acceptable way of talking about how we go about the world", but if our culture came to accept and internalize the fact that determinism is true, then it would better off, but he perpetuates the laymen use of the term.

[@darishennen898]

We live in an as if free will world. I'm not sure people are quite ready for or understand what someone means when they say free will is an illusion. I think people would assume that means nobody should be held accountable for their actions since they had no control, which in reality, knowing free will is an illusion wouldn't really change much in terms of how we approach criminal justice and the law.

[@CorwynGC]

Convincing people that the world is deterministic has the empirical result of increasing crime and other disagreeable behavior. This is both an argument for free will, and for convincing people that they have it.

[@CorwynGC]

@@piefiuma Determinism is back. Prof. Carroll is of the many worlds school of quantum mechanics, which is (he claims) completely deterministic.

[@CorwynGC]

@@piefiuma It isn't MY understanding (or whoever Miss Understanding is) of many worlds, it is Prof Carroll's. p.s. Anyone who says 'just a theory' has left the path of science. p.p.s. The Many Worlds interpretation ISN'T a theory, it is an interpretation, hence the name. It will need to acquire testability and falsifiability (at minimum) before it can be 'just' a theory.

[@CorwynGC]

@@piefiuma He talks about determinism in his video on the many worlds interpretation. And again on one on free will. He never said that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was wrong, nor did I, that is your misunderstanding. When you said 'just a theory' that is the exact phrase that creationists use to discredit science. And not much of an argument, when it isn't even pertinent.

[@anubhav21dec]

Get over it. Reality as a concept is but a theological notion. Get over theology.

[@AlanWil2]

Reality is one of many illusions, no?

[@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself]

No, but your perception of anything real is necessarily a neuronally-filtered hallucination.

[@WisdomVendor1]

Here is something that will never be real... Classified Ads in a Newspaper : "Philosopher needed, great hours, no productivity required, salary negotiable depending on past thoughts. Retirement benefits? Use your imagination."

[@joop5415]

Close-minded.

[@Basjejo]

Have you ever heard of a university? If you go to the job-openings page of a university website, this is almost literally what you will find (except for the no productivity required bit). How do you think James Ladyman earns his living?.

[@UHFStation1]

Don't think I learned anything. Any metaphysical people that research paranormal coming up?

[@abhisheksali56]

Sean please invite Jordan Peterson

[@HigashiBashi]

1st

[@88_TROUBLE_88]

Oh cool.. Have a thumbs down =) 👎

[@frankxeroxz]

Ladyman : so hesitant in everything he says I forget where he starts his sentences before he stumbles somehow to the rambling end of them . I'm sure he's a great guy but this was so annoying I gave up after about 10 mins. 😮

[@granthubick8684]

Frank Xerox I came here to say the same thing.

[@parityviolation968]

@@granthubick8684 I had a similar experience. I had to force myself through the entire podcast. His style of presentation and verbal communication is exhausting to say the least. Most common feature: one sentence: First 95% of time = 5% of the words, last 5% of time = 95% of the words... In any case, his flow is just so discontinuous that it almost makes his content appear incoherent. But at least he did oust strong emergence for what it really is: a backdoor to magic. But that alone doesn't make up for the time I wasted on this -.-

[@IIRemy]

hesitance signifies carefulness and precision of language. smartest people i listen to talk this way and i always pay extra attention lol

[@johnhausmann2391]

Funny, I thought he was incredibly clear and on point.

[@semidemiurge]

Is this the wise use of a man's time? Philosophy is mostly (not completely) arguments over the meaning of words.

[@MontyCantsin5]

Critical reflective thinking, contemplation, acquiring knowledge, being aware of how little we know about the nature of reality, defining terms properly so that conceptual clarity can be reached: How could engaging with the world in this way possibly be a poor use of one's time?

[@johnhausmann2391]

lol Amazing you should say that. Ladyman just spent an hour explaining why this is not the case, and how Phil should be grounded in science.

[@utah133]

The argument about whether something is real is a false dichotomy. There are just different types of "real." For instance, people's belief in God is real. God is not.

[@jordancox8294]

rationalguy God is real.

[@fullblowngaming]

@@jordancox8294 nice assertion, got any proof

[@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself]

That sounds like equivocation.

[@noahway13]

Uh, The BIBLE says GOD is real. And GOD said the BIBLE is real. So there!!!!! Air tight logic!!!! (JK) @@fullblowngaming

[@classickettlebell2035]

God exists because of faith and belief in your heart. He is more real than anything!

[@matthewrichmond4139]

He sounded the least real of any guest so far.. For someone who is an alleged expert on reality and metaphysics he was constantly umming and ahhing throughout and was anything but scientic in his analysis.

[@ApolloBeatz1]

Just because he isn't the best at speaking doesn't mean he doesn't know his shit. Read his books, it's good stuff.

[@BuceGar]

He's just unfocused. He didn't hit the topics in any decent order, he just rambled. I wish he or Sean had come up with some sequential questions to organize this a bit.

[@ASLUHLUHCE]

So mind numbingly pedantic