What If You’re Wrong? How Uncertainty Makes Us More Human with William Egginton

just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

mechanics doesn't just challenge what we know about particles. It challenges what we think we know about ourselves and each other, and as it turns out, learning to live with that uncertainty might just be the key to feeding the good wolf within us. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Bill, Welcome to the show.

grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins, And the grandfather says,

the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work.

it very meaningful. It resonates with some of the biggest philosophical influences for me, in particular psychoanalysis Freud, this idea that we have that the self is not unitary, that the self is divided, and some of the ideas that I work through in the rigor of Angels is not only is it not unitary, but that we are down at the deepest core of ourselves relational, and without those relations we wouldn't even be a self in the first place.

So often we have, in what we call Western metaphysics, this idea of at the core of ourselves some kind of a unified identity that then fights its way out into the world, and you can think about descartes this idea of a thinking substance that works its way out and influences the world of things, of extended substances in the world, and what you're parable. And my reference to psychoanalysis tries to remind us all the time is that that thinking substance isn't a substance, not a one thing.

It's a set of relations at all times, and that it can never really be closed and become one. I also like the side of parable where the child is asking which side wins, because really we are always struggling.

The great French philosopher Jacques delhi Da the last interview or one of the last interviews he gave with the Le Monde actually gave its titles justus on I'm at war with myself and I do find who we are often at at our heart and some sort of an expression of a struggle, struggle between impulses, struggle of which of ourselves is going to win out in the end. And the fact that that's where your title your podcast comes from.

to me. The Argentine poet and short story writer Jute Luis Borges, whose life spanned the twentieth century, his almost exact contemporary, the German physicist Van Heisenberg, who first was the main force behind the invention of quantum mechanics, and the eighteenth early nineteenth century philosopher Manuel Kant, who's in some ways the most important figure of modern European philosophy just because of the number of areas that he touched.

And the story behind this book was an idea, if you will, that all of these three great thinkers from three radically different fields philosophy, poetry and literature, and quantum physics, so the hardest physics of the natural world, all converge upon this idea that when we are trying to understand the world, what we're trying to truly understand is a model of the world that we make ourselves as humans, and that we can be led astray by the belief.

And yet it's coreb that returns over and over again that in fact, we're not understanding some image we make of the world as humans. We're understanding the world itself. And as simple a mistake as that seems, it can have enormous consequences.

secret plan. So talk to me about what you mean when you say our attempts to understand actual reality and the limits to our knowledge.

that quest, but that success leads to the destruction of himself, the destruction of the world. And what Boras is trying to show us over and over again is that knowledge is inherently faulty. Knowledge of the world is inherently limited. The shortest parables since we started this show with a parable, it was a beautiful He has also parables. He has a beautiful one called the Parable of the Palace that I sometimes cite, but this one is just called a

rigor in science. I have a recording. In fact, it takes him fifty five seconds in his old age and his faltering, slightly wheezy voice to read this story. And it just tells of an emperor who has control over an entire realm and sends out his cartographers to map the realm, and the first time they come back with an enormous map, say the size of a small city, and he says, it's good map, but it's just it's

not accurate enough. So he sends them out again, and then they come back with a much bigger map, and this covers the size of a state in his realm, and he says, this is really a much better map, but it's still not as accurate as I want. And when they come back the third time, they come with a map that point for point corresponds in actual size

to the realm itself. And then Bordes finishes the tale by saying the map and in fact the realm itself, are nothing but the dusty remnants that blow across the desert of what was. So the idea that knowledge what we're seeking of the world can't be perfect, because if it's perfect, it's as useless as a map that corresponds point for point and actual size to the realm that it's supposed supposed to be mapping. You know, the old days we used to go on road trips and carry

paper maps. Will imagine you're doing a trip of the United States, but your paper map is the size of the United States. Not very helpful. It's completely debilitating in every possible way.

of a parable, but it's a parable about information. And the idea of the Library of Babbel is it sets up a scenario in which every possible book exists in the library, only one copy of every possible book exists, and every possible book is the result of a generative mechanism that involves the twenty two in the case of the Spanish language, letters of the Spanish language and a certain number of constraints, how many shelves and the library,

and in each room of the library, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth. But the idea there is you can imagine a scenario which a very limited set of signs conspire with each other, mix with each other, intermingle with each other to create every possible word, every possible meaning, every possible story we've ever told. But of course, within all

of that maze, and it's inconceivably large. And I talk about the size of this library in the book, truly inconceivably large, to give you a sense, our actual known universe would be about the size of a proton in comparison with the universe that Botes imagines. But it's not infinite. So it's an absurdly large maze of rooms upon rooms upon rooms filled with books. You can actually find, in theory every meaningful sentence ever created by the history of humanity,

conceivably in every possible language as well. But the chances of any one person finding a book that from beginning to end makes any sense whatsoever are calculable at zero, because the vast, vast, vast vast majority of the books will be jumples of science that don't mean anything at all. And I think in some ways, you know, as I said, I'm not the first to say this, but the world of information, of just raw data that's out there and available and that we comb through it on a daily basis,

is in some ways like that library. It's just jumbles upon jumbles of I don't even want to call it information. That's why we distinguish right between information, which has applicability and utility, and data, which is this sort of empty mess. But we're surrounded by profits, by interpreters who take it upon themselves to point the way to us, or point out what in this jumble should be paid attention to

what is meaningful. And of course those profits, more often than not now are in fact algorithms that are programmed to be the profits, that guide towards certain sets of data and identifies this as information and hence useful to us, but under which definition as determined by whom, usually by corporations who are intending to get profit out of our following that way. And I think that's exactly right, that

we are being guided at all times. And the raining ideology behind this is that we're touching ground on something real when the vast, vast majority of the time, we're not touching reality at all. What we're touching is someone's take on reality, someone's interpretation of reality. I think that go back to this cautionary tale that I'm describing the book as. This is also a cautionary tale about that.

It's about our relationship to and our belief in, our faith in all of the different stories that are coming our way across these screens on a minute by minute and by second basis.

great humanists. Yeah, right, and you know they play interesting I think roles in this book and in history as being at odds around this fundamental philosophical question. And obviously I come down hard on the side of Heisenberg, but there's no lack of just adoration and respect on my part for everything that Einstein did.

weirdness of the quantum world. But his attempts to poke holes and use of these thought experiments, in fact, as you just said, very correctly, drove the whole enterprise forward in a way that perhaps it never could have gotten without his constant provocations. So he played an enormous role in this. He was born at the beginning of the century. Eisenberg was so, respectively in nineteen twenty five in nineteen

twenty seven the papers that he published. What they respectively did was, on the one hand, show that every attempt to extract knowledge from the world involved an active intrusion on the world and the part of the know or in a way that registered itself in the events that were being measured, and that this could be mathematically shown. And in fact, what he had to come up with was for him a new kind of mathematics. It turned out that the mathematics actually existed we call linear algebra,

but he created matrix mechanics. And one of the mathematical curiosities is, unlike in the normal algebra or normal arithmetic that we learn of addition, for example, and multiplication, which have a property that's known in math is commuting, these are commutative operations. What that means is that whatever you do in one direction, you can reverse and do it in the other direction. In matrix mechanics, multiplication does not commute. It means that A times B does not equal B

times A, which is mathematically weird. But to very quickly translate this into the philosophical point that's at hand, What it also means is that if your first operation A and your second one B has to do with a measurement of either, for example, position or momentum of a particle, what you choose to begin with actually affects the outcome and a half. And this is extremely important because it means that the choice of the observer effects the outcome of this could be as simple a choice as which

operation am I going to measure first? Is going to have an indelible outcome, an irreversible outcome or effect on the outcome of the observation. So this is weird enough to begin with the nineteen twenty seven paper, which then ended up introducing into physics this term ung give his heights or ung nawi kite, so unblurriness, indeterminacy, and ultimately uncertainty, which is how it's translated in the common parlance, becomes

the uncertainty principle. And there he actually comes up with a number, basically, and that number is essentially the distance that we can drill down into reality, the closeness that we can get to measuring something before we lose all control on it. It's an equation that actually Paul de Rack derived from all of this complex mechanics. But I like to put it up on a board when I'm giving talks about it and call it Heisenberg's poem, And

he does one of the nineteen twenty five theory. But Heisenberg's poem, the uncertainty principle is written out in an equation, and I like to think about it as a kind

of pivot. What it does is it takes two values, which is the difference in your measurement of momentum and the difference in your measurement of position and it says if you reduce the differences down to zero, which would be in essence, knowing exactly where something is or knowing exactly how fast something is going, and you multiply them together,

you're not going to get zero. And that's a very strange thing in mathematics again, because as we know from high school math or from junior high school math, anything

multiplied by zero should be zero. But you can, in fact, in this new mathematics that's required by the universes discovered by Heisenberg, you can reduce the difference in positions in theory of where a particle is to zero and what you're going to have on the other side of the equation when you multiply it by The difference in measurements of momentum is a number that, as long as there's a positive value on one side or the other, is always very very small. Is why we don't see it

in normal measurements. But if you reduce your difference to zero on the part of the position, which means you know with exactitude, hyper exactitude, absolute reality where something is, you now know absolutely nothing about its momentum, and vice versa. If you know exactly with absolute precision how fast something is going, You have no idea where it is. It

could be literally anywhere in the universe. And what this means is that the vast majority of the time we know roughly where things are and how fast they're going, but it is actually physically impossible to know exactly how fast they're going and also know where they are, or know exactly where they are and how fast they're going. And again it's something that we don't usually run into because we live in this macroscopic world in which we don't need to know reality exactly. But it gets back

to the parable from Borges. What Heisenberg showed, as you pointed out, with scientific exactitude of its own, is where the limit is how close we can get to reality. No matter how precise our instruments are, we're ultimately not going to get a picture that gets those delta's, those changes down to zero, because then we'll ultimately know nothing. Or to go back to the parable of the map, the map that's absolutely perfect will ultimately not be a map at all. It won't show us anything.

reality actually is. This is what Heisenberg is showing, Borjes is telling us that through some parables, and then Kant is sort of bringing this together from a philosophical position, and ultimately where I want to tie this back to the sort of work that we do here at the one you feed is this idea that you know you're talking about the cautionary tale of when we assume we know what reality is and what that does to our science.

Right in our day to day life though, I think the same principle applies, which is when we think we are seeing reality as it is, we are in trouble. Very often. I think we're likely to wander into some trouble. Right if I go home and I assume that I know exactly why my partner did a certain thing, Yes, yes, I'm in danger of really messing things up. And so talk to me a little bit about this idea that we're always seeing everything through some perspective.

with nails it. You got it right. There's no more room for questioning I know exactly what this person's intention was or something like that. Yeah. Right. And so Kant's view of the world was we're always going to be tempted to think of the world this way, and that we need to have in fact. This is why he called his philosophy on the great three volumes that formed the core of it, the critical philosophy, and they consist of three critique of pure reason, of practical reason, and

the power of judgment. These critiques are all about trying to find one hundred years ahead of the fact, or a little bit more of one hundred years ahead of the fact, that version in moral philosophy, in scientific philosopher philosophy, the real and aesthetics, that version of what Eisenberg will ultimately run into as this kind of limit of what human reason can do, the limit of our ability to know the world, and Kant's in a similar way to

board cases, realizing through kind of pure thought thinking his way through these problems as opposed to wrestling with you know, turning into equations the result of the observations of nature. He's going to realize that, yes, those limits are there, but also those limits are fundamentally necessary to being the

kind of creature that we are. So the kind of creature that we are is a creature that is dilogic, that is in relationship with other creatures, that's trying to know the world, albeit imperfectly, and trying to make the best decisions possible in the world. And one of the surefire ways of mistaking the world, of getting it wrong, of falling into error, or even more dangerous than error.

For fanaticism, fundamentalism is precisely to make that category mistake, where we think that our knowledge isn't a picture, isn't through a filter, isn't through mirror darkly, but rather is the world it self. We're always tempted by that, and at the same time most likely to be led astray when we fall to that temptation.

unbiased perspective. Is not possible. So if we just start there, which is just, then we can open ourselves up to maybe I don't know the answer, you know, And a question that I love is, you know, kind of what am I making this mean? And what else could it mean? Like that question? And I think you can take that at what's happening with my partner, or you could take that down to the core scientific level, right like, even when you get to quantum mechanics, there are people who

are interpreting what all this means. And I think that the math ends up being sort of undisputed, but the question of what it means has been disputed for a long time.

is that Hawking wasn't making a scientific point. He was making a philosophical point, right, So he's entered the world of interpretation already. Philosophy is the world of interpretation. Literature is the world of interpretation, and yes, scientists interpret the world. Einstein was entering into the world of interpretation when he was dialoguing and debating with Heisenberg and those of the school of interpretation of quantum mechanics about what their discoveries meant,

how best to understand their discoveries. There's something along the lines of seven sort of dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics that are out there today. You know, there's no final decision, right. These are all pictures of the world that try to make sense of what is ultimately a very difficult picture

of the world to make sense of. And one of the sort of points that I'm trying to make in this book is you can be a scientist You can be a physicist and have these interpretations, or you can be a non scientist who's done his best to understand the mathematics and the physics behind it and learned from my fellow intellectuals and physicists about how to understand it and then use, for example, philosophical perspectives or even literature and stories to come up with and to reason your

way to one or another interpretation. We shouldn't be surprised that this is the case, considering that the greatest physicists, in particular Einstein, used stories to come to the truths that they discovered about the physical world in the first place. Right so I'm famously told himself stories in order to understand to have the breakthrough that led to relativity, especially nineteen oh five paper Special relativity, and then general relativity

in nineteen fifteen. His happiest thought was what became known

as the equivalence between gravity and acceleration. Occurred to him when he thought about a story, which is, he put into his mind an image of a person in an elevator like box or chest being accelerated at a constant through space outside of a gravitational field, and realize that for their perception there would be no distinction between that and being in a gravitational field, and needed some very similar work to lead to its breakthroughs with special relativity.

So we shouldn't be surprised that stories can help us interpret the mathematical explanations of the physical world that are at the basis of physics.

but slow down the processes of the mind enough through meditation to apprehend things in a slightly different way. And I would say Taoism in particular, which then went on to influence Zen, has this idea at the core of it that our field of experience is always construed from one perspective or another. As I've heard someone say about Taoism before, and I just love this line, there is no view from nowhere right right? And I just love the fact that we can sort of tie those things

in as well. And I think that in Zen there's also an idea of emptiness, right, and emptiness as we hear it in the West, we think it means nothingness, but it more means that everything exists in relation to something else, to everything else. And this is what you mentioned when you just mentioned Carlo Ravelli, who I believe his interpretation of quantum physics is called relational. And so let's talk about this idea that everything only exists in relation to something else.

different names. These are called antinomies in his work. But one of those, the way my interpretation of it for the sake of this book is called the question or the imperative not being God. So one way of thinking about this is that we have an idea that there is a way the world is in and of itself, and it exists kind of as if it were an object that could be seen by an all knowing, all seeing being. But that implies an outside to everything, and there is no such thing as an outside to everything.

The universe is everything, so there is no outside to it, which means that any of us at any time can only ever be positioned within the universe, and that also means in relationship to other beings in the universe. So the idea that somehow there is a self that is meaningful, that is consistent, that is self contained, and then enters into relationships to other cells and then develops out of that.

If you think about that very carefully, that implies that if you took all of those other things away and imagined just nothing, you could still have that self, that entity. But the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics that I fully buy into, and that is Rovelli's, actually denies that. It says, if you accept the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. Everything results from what is at core a relation. So a measurement is a relation, an observation is a relation. It

always involves coming together of things. But the things that are coming together don't precede any logical or chronological sense the coming together, because that would imply that there is such a thing as a view from nowhere of you from outside. But since there isn't, Since all there is is this network of relations. That is why at core

there are relations rather than things. And this, in fact, despite Einstein's resistance to accepting it, this is highly compatible with his theory of relativity, which says the same about velocity and time and simultaneity. That there is no such thing as God's clock that's ticking away in the background, Ali Newton. That tells us that no matter when you see it or her, how long the information took to get to you and someone else, that there was a

time when this event took place. No relativity says there's only time is measured by you in a particular inertial framework in relation to whatever was happening. And the same thing with gravity and with as I say, the biggest question of where the universe is the great poet Dante's words, it has no other weare than here, and his here was the eternal mind, of the mind of God. But the here there is that the universe holds itself, It

contains itself. There is no outside from which to look at the universe as if it were some object and say and measure it and weigh it against something else. You are only ever in It is an outside that you are only ever in itself. There is no outside to it. And this is exactly what general relativity allows, in fact demands, which is that there's no framework from which to measure everything in the universe and say, and everything else exists or is measurable with regard to this.

There's no standard perfect framework fits itself immobile. Every measurement everywhere, including of acceleration, including of gravity, always is in relationship to other things. So again it's the same thing as with that one particle. If you took away everything else in the universe, we can't even say that the particle exists.

The same thing with this wonderful thought experiment would is Newton's bucket, where Newton imagined a bucket of water spinning, and if we spin a bucket we know that the water is going to light up the sides because of a centrivigal force. And then Newton asked this really excellent question, which was, well, what happens if that bucket is just spinning in the middle of nothing? How does the bucket

know that it's spinning? And his answer was because it spins in relationship to absolute space, and so yes, it will feel it. And Einstein's answer was exact opposite, which was Einstein said, no, it spins in relationship to everything else in the universe. So if there is no everything else in the universe, it's not going to feel it. It's not going to know it. Any There is no such thing as spinning if there's no other object to spin against.

the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. I think that we can take this really small and then kind of back up to the everyday level. On the really small level, you

sort of just addressed it. But when you get down to a small enough level, the quantum level, one of the implications of quantum mechanics is, as you said, until you measure the thing in a sense, it's not quite there, which makes no sense, but yet again seems to be the truth. And that measurement, as you said, is is a relation. You know, we talk a lot in the quantum world about an observer, and again, an observer observing

something creates a relationship between those things. And then we can sort of jump all the way kind of back up to the day to day level with this and realize that we often think that we or let's just go back to a discussion with me and my partner. I think that I bring who I am to those discussions, and I think she brings who she is to those discussions. But the reality is we are a certain way in relation to each other. I relate to you differently than

I relate to her. It's not saying I'm fake that I have like multiple faces. It's just a simple fact that the relationship between you and me is a different thing than my relationship between me and her. But we often don't take that into account. We think that what we see from someone is who they are, without realizing that who they are in that moment is partially because of who we are.

you can get. Heisenberg had a very famous sentence in a letter to both Gong Pauty as he was working out the uncertainty principle, and he said, basically, the result of this is the following the path that a particle in this case, an electron takes doesn't exist until we measure it and there's a revolutionary statement. And that's precisely the statement that for the rest of his life Einstein couldn't accept. Just think about it a little bit. What is a path? What is the path that something takes?

It only exists over time, right, and it only exists from some kind of a perspective. So a path without a measurement, it's an empty category. It's a non sensical things. So anything that has a path, it's a connection, if you will, of dots through space, time of moments or or right that then retrospectively, necessarily retroactively connects certain dots. Heisenberg figured that out, right. Heisenberg's figured out the mathematics of it, but he also figured out in some ways

the philosophy of it. And he said, we're always applying some kind of a theory, a bias of the world, in order to decide in advance what kind of a path, what kind of an entity we're producing after the fact. So your connection to who we are when we're in a relationship with another person is exactly the same. What is a personality. Personality has potentially some consistency, but it's only a consistency that, if you will, is constructed among

the various relationships that we are in now. They're very complex, they last over a long period of time. We have many different manifestations that go back from our youngest ages, our earliest memories, our earliest encounters with other human beings, with other places and things. But that infinite, intricate and complicated network over space time that we then ultimately call

a personality. The hubrist to then think that this is just some sort of a self contained pure essence that then expresses itself differently over time, I think that's in a way part of the problem. We have to recognize that, no, we actually are constantly constructing it and having it constructed for us by all of these infinitely complex web of relations that constitute us over time and in our lives.

or we're this way because we have whatever right. And it's often seemed to me that at a certain point in my life, I think recognizing and making stories out of how what happened in my childhood turned me into

who I am could be useful. But I also at a certain point started really wrestling with this idea that you're talking about, which is that I am made up of countless causes and conditions, and to say that I'm this way because my father was that way is in many ways a vast oversimplification of a lot of variables that we don't know. And so I'm just curious how you think about that and psychoanalysis, because I kind of go back and forth with my feelings about it as an approach.

early relationships. At the same time, Freud, I think, was a visionary, but also Freud had his own limitations, like any human who invents theory, and those theories are always subject to revision. I'm more influenced by a post Freudian psychoanalyst, a Frenchmen by the name of Jacques Lacan, but then he himself, you know, when I read Lacon's writings, which are famously difficult and themselves intentionally, I would say, subject to,

you know, necessary interpretation. My version of it is going to be slightly or in some cases very different from interpretation of others. And there's no question that my interpretation of this particular kind of psychoanalytic philosophy is itself going to be subject to the variety of relationships that have created me as the interpreter and reader and thinker that I am. So yeah, I do believe there's primordial relationships and experiences that are going to perhaps be more formative

than others as sure. Absolutely, leveling of formative experiences and relationships, but I also believe that there's a good deal of change and fungibility that happens over time. We talk about plasticity and neuroscience as well, right that the brain is an extraordinarily plastic and changing and evolving organ as all of our embodied Attributes's.

down with the force of gravity. Then perhaps we look at an antelope running from a cheetah and the cheatah following in certain ways and either getting or not getting the antelope, and we say, could the cheatah have decided otherwise?

And perhaps we decide no, they didn't. And in legal jurisdiction, what we say, was someone acting, you know, under the influence of for example, chemical or drug or perhaps a mental illness, Yeah, they couldn't have decided otherwise, and as a result, they were less responsible if they were legally inebriated while they were you know, who was the person who decided to take the drug that inebriated them led to the articular so homicide for example, Well, that makes

them then responsible. So we asked this question, could you

have decided otherwise? And if we say in a big philosophical sense, well, no one could have decided otherwise, because from the beginning of time until the end, we live in a physical universe, and every single one of our atoms is subject to the laws of physics, right, and so many of the arguments against free will take precisely that side that that form say, well, free will's a complete camara, How could it possibly exist where physical world

we're inserted in the mechanistic chain of being in the universe, so we could not have decided otherwise. The content perspective is to say, well, sure, in some kind of a vast metaphysical sense, that may be true, because Kant did not believe in the idea of a kind of dios ex machina deciding soul who sits behind our eyes and makes these decisions, says well, now you go left, now you go right. And how would that solve As Daniel Dennett famously asked, how would that solve the problem? Anyways?

Because what's deciding what that decider decides? Right? Right? That's not the point. CONT's point is how overwroughtly metaphysical can you get then to assume that there is an answer or someone who knows who could have decided otherwise, right, because that person or that perspective would precisely have to be standing outside of the chain of being, would have to be situated at the beginning of time, outside of

time and space. And to say, oh, well, in this universe, Eggington would have made a different decision, or could have made a different decision, but in this one he didn't know. Consp point is, like all other beings, we are in time and space, and some beings, namely beings endowed with what we call reason, we hold responsible for their decisions.

And the great story that I find as a way of explicating exactly how Kan goes about this comes from hundreds of years earlier than Kan, and it's the story of Boethius in his cell awaiting execution, who's asking the exact same questions. And what Boethius asks is the question that the theologically minded ever since him and before him

Augustine was asking as well. If God knows everything from the beginning of time to the end of time, If God knows ahead of time every single decision that I'm going to make, how can it possibly be that I'm making free decisions? And the answer is the realization that when we imagine God having that kind of a perception, that God, who's having that kind of perception, isn't inhabiting time the way that we do. He's collapsing time. There's no difference between before and after all of eternity is

smashed down into one a moment. But if all eternity is smashed on into one moment, then everything that I've decided has already been decided. But that doesn't mean that I wasn't deciding. When I was doing the deciding right, I'm still in space and time making those decisions right. And this is really from a theological perspective, from a

very old theological perspective. They already worked out the problem and said, there actually is no incompatibility between something like your supposition or your imagination of what a perfectly knowledgeable infinite being knowing everything that you have done or will have done, and free will. And if that's the case, if not even a perfect your imagination, your ideology of a perfectly omnipotent and omniscient god, if not even that contradicts free will, then certainly AI is not going to

contradict free will. Certainly, all the electrodes we put in your brain and tell us that our decisions, big surprise, take time because we're beings in space and time. That doesn't contradict free will. Right, Predictability doesn't contradict free will. It just means that some decisions take time and occur in embodied wet brains. That's all that that tells us.

we have? And I think about this. I'm a former heroin addict, right, and I think about the amount of choice that I had once upon a time in picking up drugs and the amount of choice I have now. They feel radically different. And I think we all fall somewhere in this spectrum. And I think this what gets to be sort of so hard because on one hand, if you buy that there's no free will, then like you said, there should be no consequences for anything, because

you couldn't have chosen differently. And yet it seems like in our justice system we have sort of tried to wrestle with this question by saying, well, if you're insane, we're not going to hold you responsible in the same way. Right, how do you think about this in a day to day since the degrees of freedom that we actually have.

fantasy that has no impact in the real world. And the idea that you're simply a cog in the machine at any particular moment is a scientifistic view that assumes a god's eye view that has no relevance for what am I going to do right now? Right? What is the right thing to do given the situation that I'm faced with right now? What is very relevant is the question of how much duress am I under? What are

the circumstances that are constraining my actions right now? Something like addiction is going to be one that has a great deal to tell us about the range of freedom, the degrees of freedom of our actions. Something like coercion would be one as well. Right, you're perfectly free when given the choice of your money or your life, But really it's a forced choice. Right, If you choose your money, you're not going to get your money, You're going to

lose your life as well. Right, So, under those situations, it's a so called false choice. And there's many such situations right in life where we're presented with something as if it were a choice, when it's not a choice because in fact, under duress, under coercion, under the influence of something. So then the question becomes when, And obviously standards change over time, absolutely right. Legal jurisprudence wrestles with this,

as it should. It's extremely important the standards change over time. What used to be called the reasonable battered woman standard has become the reasonable battered person standard because it carried a certain bias to it that was highly sexist, misogynist, for example, that only a woman would be battered, but that a man under similar circumstances in an abusive relationship would clearly have the agency and spine to be able

to make decisions that would be different. So the very language that we convey these standards in tells us some of the biases that come along with it. But you said the right thing. There are degrees of freedom, and I think if we take a Sam Harris view about human freedom, that's simply a negational view, that it's a straw man, that there's no such thing as a free will,

and let's sort of get rid of it. What you've done is you've thrown out the baby of actual notions, meaningful, pragmatic notions of responsibility and freedom with a bathroom water that you wanted to get rid of, some sort of metaphysical idea of an ultimately free agent, which I think anyone who's thinking about these things in a rational, reasonable way never really bought to begin with.

break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook. All right, I'm going to ask you to end with something that is an example you give in the book about understanding

the relation of space time to each other. Which is the first time that I feel like I was able to sort of see in some way this relation of space time which constantly I read about and I just feel like my mental picture is blank. I'm like, I don't get this. Give me that example, just because I found it so useful, maybe our listeners will too.

And the way to think about this, and I believe that some version of this I borrowed from Brian Green, so giving credit where it's due, I think he helped me understand this as well is to think about my image was a cart like a golf cart that you're driving down It has a maximum obviously much slower velocity than the speed of light, and it's trying to get from one end of a football field to the other.

And if you think about that one end of the football field to the other as being one of the axes of space time and the other being sort of the width of the football field, and you have this maximum velocity, you soon realize that if you're trying to veer off the straight line with a maximum velocity, you're

going to make less progress. You might get more. So if you called the width of the football field speed for example, if you wanted to maximize your speed, you can veer off in the direction of the other line, but you're not going to make any progress in space, So I think about that or the other way around, right, So I think about the photon traveling at the speed of light is like the cart veering completely off in one direction and not making any progress anymore in time,

but crossing vast distances of space, right, And you can choose and do one or the other. And of course most of us are making some progress through space and progress through time simultaneously. But if we keep on increasing our speed, and we can't because relativity tells us that we become more and more massive the closer we get to the speed of light. But you can still accelerate massive objects. The more you accelerate them, the slower they're going to perceive time from their perspective.

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