The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Brendan Graham Dempsey. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today, we’re gonna be doing something just a little different. We’ve done it before three or four times. We’ve got a guest host today hosting the Jim Rutt Show, Brendan Graham Dempsey, who’s been on the show at least twice, maybe three times. I don’t remember. We had some good conversations. Today, he is going to be the host, and he’s gonna grill me on some of my recent articles, specifically minimum viable metaphysics and what I mean by metaphysics and anything else he feels like grilling me on. So Brendan Graham Dempsey, tell the crowd a little bit about who you are, what you do, and then let’s get down to it.
Brendan: Sure. Well, I appreciate this opportunity. I always love being on the Jim Rutt Show, and in this case, hosting. What do I do? I write books. I’m a researcher. I explore complexity and meaning and worldview. Currently doing that primarily at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, and I’ve really enjoyed our conversations around all of those topics. So, yeah, with a background in some philosophy and religious studies, I have a little bit of something to say here and there about metaphysics. So I suppose we’ll have an opportunity to unpack what it is you’re getting at and, yeah, looking forward to this.
Jim: Yeah. It should be good.
Brendan: Take her away. So you have published these two really interesting works. It seems like you’ve been sort of gestating these for a little bit. And what I wanna do actually is start with the second piece that you wrote, which was something of a follow-up explanatory piece called what I mean by metaphysics. I feel like that would be a good place to start given that you’re trying to communicate a so-called minimum viable metaphysics. So let’s start there. What do you mean by metaphysics exactly?
Jim: What I mean is what are the assumptions we have to make to be able to process the world in an intelligible fashion? You know, there are some things that we can learn through empiricism, through creating theories, validating them with experiments, et cetera, or we can learn participatorily, we can explore emotionally. There’s lots of ways to learn in the world, but for me, and I know other people use metaphysics differently, I think I’m closer to Aristotle’s original meaning of metaphysics, so not identical with it, and to a degree related to Kant’s transcendental natural metaphysics. But again, not exactly. In the school of modern philosophers, probably closer to Quine than anybody else, though he goes a little too far in his minimal. He just says zero. Right? And so what I look at is what assumptions do I have to make? You know, I want to generally build from data, from theory, from experience, from what actually plays out, but without a very tiny number of assumptions, I argue that we can’t get started. So that’s what I mean by metaphysics. What assumptions do we have to make before we actually start to learn and to reason?
Brendan: Yeah. Gotcha. And when I was reading your piece, I was thinking about actually that kind of transcendental framing, which doesn’t necessarily mean—again, transcendental metaphysics sounds like maybe something that people associate with new age emporia or something like that. But like in Kant’s case, right, it’s just an attempt to try to consider what must be the case for in his line of thinking for the mind to be as it is. But when I was reading your piece, I was actually reminded a bit of the work that the critical realists were doing and folks like Roy Bhaskar. I’ve been trying to get into them, and my understanding is that there’s a sort of question you can also ask that’s sort of what must the world be like for our experience to be as such? And that seems to be the way that you’re going about this as sort of the presumptions of what needs to be the case for us to have knowledge of the world and for science to work the way it does. Those are sort of transcendental abductive sorts of arguments. Is that a fair reading of what you’re trying to do?
Jim: Yeah. I think I mentioned in the second essay. I think abduction is actually something fairly close to, you know, the explanation—you know, best explanations from what we have as one of the tools that, you know, I sort of just naturally use in the Charles Peirce pragmatist sense.
Brendan: And actually say a little bit about that first for people listening who—you know, the difference between deduction, induction, and abduction, because I actually think that they play a significant role in some of the arguments that you’re making.
Jim: Deduction is where one thing logically follows from the other. You know, think formal logic, you know, think mathematics, basically systems of axioms and essentially mechanical postulates. They’re very important because they help us rule out errors in our thinking. Right? If things are stated in such a way that they ought to they kind of look like logic, but the logic fails, then that’s bad deduction. But it’s an important tool and have to use it all the time. Induction is one of the principles of science, but it’s also been the tool that humanity has always used, which is looking at many examples and seeing what patterns we can induce from the facts as we see them, and often creating either rules of thumb, heuristics, or theories about what we think we see in the patterns of observation and experience. And then abduction is basically taking the world as we find it and coming up with the best explanations that we can that consider all the aspects of what we know about the world, what we know about reason, what we know about human psychology and its failings, right? Just since I wrote those articles, I’ve started reading David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. This is a book of immense power and importance, if not the most clear thing ever written, called The Beginning of Infinity, and he lays out the concept of good explanations. And he’s quite rigorous about what he means by good explanations. Not gonna go into it. Not sure that I could because I haven’t finished the book yet, but it is closely related to the abduction principle.
Brendan: Gotcha. Now I wanted to poke a little on this languaging of this in your piece. When you’re talking about metaphysics and its difference from, say, mathematics and science, you say mathematics and logic don’t need the physical universe to exist at all. They operate in the realm of pure form and relation. I thought that was an interesting and rather bold and not particularly minimal claim to make because one way that people could read what we’re doing with mathematics is building up abstractions based off of our experience of physical reality. And to say that something like mathematics and logic exist without a physical universe is sort of seeming to say a lot of metaphysical things. So can you maybe clarify that a little bit?
Jim: Yeah. This actually gets back to another one of my essays I should have sent you called “Paradox, No Paradox,” in which I lay out my strong belief that there are no paradoxes in the real world. The real world is what it is, and there’s a tree of causality since the beginning. And one, if one had the data and the time, one could track every single move to the present day. And there’s a second tree, the tree of emergence, and the two have to be exactly in sync at all times. And I then say that the paradoxes we think we see are always in our formal systems. A classic example from, you know, high school philosophy is Zeno’s paradox. You shoot an arrow at a target because it has to go halfway there, and then it has to go halfway to that point, and halfway to that point, the arrow could never get there. And you could lay out a logical set of syllogisms that could convince you that that’s true, but it’s obviously bullshit. Right? If I shoot the arrow, it goes to the target. And so a very important part of my meta metaphysics, I think that’s a thing. If not, what the hell? Send me a quarter every time you use it, is that there are no paradoxes in the real world, but we certainly can have paradoxes in our formal systems. And of course, that closely touches on the things that we know our formal systems are by definition incomplete. You know, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which is also very, very similar to Turing’s halting problem and other related aspects of the nature and limits of formal systems. I like to make the point that if you’re dealing with a paradox, you’re not dealing with reality. You’re dealing with how we describe reality. Think about mathematics, and you can do mathematics that have nothing to do with reality. Some of the wild non-Euclidean geometries, for instance, various kinds of category theory, et cetera, aren’t at all necessarily relevant to reality. Though, of course, it is a very interesting philosophical question, which I have not dug into in any of these writings is, was it Wigner’s famous paper, “The Unreasonable Power of Mathematics to Describe Reality”? That’s not quite the exact name, but that’s the sense. And why is it that math is in many parts of it very useful to describe reality? But real theoretical math, a lot of it’s completely has nothing to do with reality. It’s just a game of deduction that you take a starting set of axioms and just work your way through deductions. You get to all kinds of interesting places that you would have never imagined. That’s a very artistic enterprise. People, you know, think of, you know, doing algebra one in seventh grade and it hurts their head. Right? And you go, good. I mean, it’s actually good for a lot of practical things, but the theoretical mathematician’s a different beast. He’s exploring this probably infinite landscape of stuff. And is he discovering things, or is he making things? Well, that one’s above my pay grade. That’s the platonic, non-platonic argument.
Brendan: Gotcha. Okay. There’s a million things that we could potentially dig into there, but I don’t want to get too bogged down. But real quick, I will just say it is interesting. I believe that things like the square root of negative one show up in quantum mechanics mathematics, for example. Right? So some of these interesting impossible mathematical paradoxes do somehow inform the physical reality that we experience, and I find that an intriguing thing. Another thing just to kind of dig in on that a little bit further is, you know, the question of, is there a necessity for a physical universe to produce the capacity for mathematical thinking, you could almost say. And a lot of the developmental psychological tradition that I explore in the Piagetian work, for example, you know, Piaget would say something like we abstract the mathematical world out of the sensory physical world. So I wanted to just bring that up at least because presuming that mathematics and logic might exist without any physical universe seemed to be doing some metaphysical heavy lifting right out of the gate. But maybe that’s not a hill you’re going to die on there, I think.
Jim: It’s sort of irrelevant, actually. It was just a way of talking about the nature of formal systems and deduction. Now as a practical matter, you’re not going to have mathematics till you have mathematicians. Right? You know, from the causal tree and the emergent tree, no one’s going to actually create mathematics until there’s mathematicians who are playing those games, who define the rules and are playing those games. But those relationships still, I would argue, still exist. Right? I suppose I am a bit of a Platonist there in that, long before there were mathematicians, square root of negative one existed in some sense. So I guess I am more of a discover kind of guy when it comes to mathematics, but I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about that one.
Brendan: Okay. Well, nor need we at the moment, but, potentially, we can come back to some of that stuff at the end. But great. All right. Well, now I want to then dig into this minimum viable metaphysics that you’re proposing here now that we have a good sense of what you mean by metaphysics. So let’s go through these individually, I suppose. You have three commitments, and these seem to be the major kind of points you’re trying to make that you’re hanging all this on. So it’s worth digging in a little bit to them. So commitment one, the reality principle. What are you trying to do with this? What are you saying?
Jim: Yeah. This is really important. And if you all remember your sophomore college bullshit sessions, right, where eventually you figure out, I cannot prove reality exists. Right? The example I often use on my podcast is none of us can prove the universe didn’t flick into existence five seconds ago with the fossils in the ground, our memories in our head, and airplanes flying, and then we’ll flick out of existence five seconds from now. Can’t disprove that. Can’t disprove the brain in a vat, you know, the Matrix movie principle. Can’t disprove that. But if we’re going to have any fun exploring the universe, I just say ignore all that stuff. Let’s just accept. And that’s why I distinguish the commitments from what we do with the commitments. We just have to accept this as true if we want to proceed with our examination in a way that I think at least is useful. So the world exists. It is at least sort of as we think it is, particularly at what I call the meso scale. The scales of the universe, as far as we know, and again, a lot of the stuff is provisional. There’s the Planck scale down so much smaller than subatomic particles, it’s even hard to imagine. Then there’s cosmological scale, which is the whole universe or big chunks of it. We live in the middle. We live in the range from, let’s say, a micron to a few million miles where the things that we deal with exist. You know, things from the a grain of sand to the size of the sun, you know, in those ranges, at least, it’s sort of what you see is what you get. When you drop a brick on your toe, it falls and it hurts. Right? It does it every time. And the ruler you keep in your drawer, if you measure the width of a line on your yellow pad, it comes out the same every time. Your clock seems to keep good time with respect to the sun. You know, those are things that I would say as exemplars of the reality principle. And of course, it goes quite a bit more deep than that. But that’s the basic idea that if you want to sit there and argue about we’re a brain in a vat or the universe flicked into existence five seconds ago, you know, go have fun, but you’re not going to be able to do anything very useful with that.
Brendan: Yeah. So basically, it sounds like you’re committing to a realist frame here that realism is the name of the game. And there are also—I mean, to go back to the critical realist I mentioned earlier, some transcendental arguments that kind of fall into that line of thinking. I mean, why do philosophy or have conversations or argue about, say, the radically socially constructed nature of all reality if that’s not a performative contradiction because nothing’s real? There are interesting arguments that kind of buttress that that I think are interesting. But ultimately, this seems to commit you to a realism as opposed to an antirealist take, and you’re suggesting that that’s sort of an axiomatic commitment that we need to make if we’re going to do anything like science or have knowledge of the world, it sounds like.
Jim: Yeah. I think you’re just wanking if you do anything else. Right? Even though I realize I can’t prove that. Right? And I’m pretty well aware of some of the idealist philosophers who are out there. I just reject it. Say that this is not useful. Doesn’t seem to be congruent with what we actually see in the real world.
Brendan: What are you trying to say here?
Jim: Yeah. This is probably the weakest of the three and the one that I acknowledge kinda lives on the borderlands between a metaphysical commitment and an empirical observation. And it’s fairly subtle because this second part of the essay, I basically say that we do most of our heavy lifting with emergence. Right? Once we get our three principles down, our three commitments down flat, the rest is the playing out of the emergence of interesting things in the universe since the origin. It’s a kind of a technical detail. But if the universe is utterly homogeneous, no variation, things like stars never form. Right? There has to be gradients of matter concentrations in various places for the galaxies to start to form and then the stars to start to form, then fusion to happen. If all the hydrogen was exactly evenly spaced across the whole universe, basically nothing would happen. This one is not as crisp as the other ones, but that is the essence of the idea. Now it turns out you think about it a little bit more deeply. There’s a fork which did not go into the article, but I didn’t want the article to be too long. And that is in quantum interpretation, and it’s very important. On my podcast, I call people down for this more than any other thing. We don’t actually know what quantum mechanics is. The study of this domain is called quantum interpretations, and there’s at least a dozen of them out there, from things like the many worlds hypothesis, which says that every quantum event, there’s a fork and there’s a new universe. Rather non-parsimonious, but it hasn’t been disproved to the Copenhagen interpretation, which says, we don’t know shit about it. Just shut up and calculate. Right? To something like one of my favorites, though I’m not gonna commit to it, the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory, which has its attributes, consistent histories. I like that also. But the key thing is we don’t know. And one of the undetermined things, which a lot of people don’t realize is still undetermined, is is the universe deterministic or is it stochastic at its base? Do truly random things occur? And the Copenhagen interpretation and several of the other interpretations do assume at base stochasticity. Truly random stuff happens. While other interpretations, particularly de Broglie-Bohm and many worlds say no, the world is actually deterministic, and that we just don’t understand the hidden moving parts that cause the Schrödinger wave equation itself is actually deterministic. So this question of whether universe is deterministic or stochastic is still open, even though a lot of people think it’s stochastic. It’s not been resolved. And so this asymmetry principle has really has two forks. And if I were to rewrite this, so I might someday, I’d probably make it a little longer and say, in the case of the deterministic universe, then you must have some initial nonhomogeneities. Otherwise, nothing ever happens because it’s all deterministic. It’s just, you know, moving parts, billiard balls bouncing off each other, and if they’re totally homogeneous, then nothing will ever happen. And so that would be the strong form of the asymmetry principle. If the world is stochastic, particularly if a certain kind of stochasticity, which it probably would be if one of these stochastic quantum interpretations was true, we could reasonably expect symmetry breaking to occur more or less naturally from the stochasticity down at the bottom level. So an expanded version of that would be say deterministic, has to be initially a nonhomogeneous. If the universe is stochastic, then we get nonhomogeneity perhaps for free from quantum mechanics.
Brendan: What’s your read on how the second law of thermodynamics plays into this? Because as I was thinking more about this principle, I was thinking, well, one of the moves I make really early on in some of the work that I do is say, well, for anything to exist means that there has to be some differentiation from equilibrium. Then that comes with, okay, then you’ve got a thing, you’ve got an informational entity, and you’ve got energy dynamics that need to sustain, et cetera. And then that gets you going pretty quickly in terms of everything else that we wind up seeing. But to appreciate the basic kind of figure-ground style distinction that for anything to exist, there it needs to not be nothing. It needs to be a thing, and so there needs to be some distinction, some differentiation from the background context that that is in itself an asymmetry. And so I’m curious if—
Jim: have any thoughts on how something like the second law of thermodynamics is either a physical or metaphysical principle, or if we’re not really getting to the metaphysical level, if we’re just considering thermodynamics at that level?
Brendan: Yeah. Interestingly, thermodynamics isn’t even a law. Right? It’s just statistics. It’s what happens on average. Essentially, Boltzmann realized that there were vastly more disordered states than ordered states in normal situations, like example used as a room full of gas. Right? The chances of all the oxygen in your room pulling up in the corner and you dying is exceedingly small. Probably hasn’t happened once in the history of the universe, but it could. And so knowing where the second law lives is really important. It’s literally just statistics about what states of disorder look like, and if we had no disorder, we’d have no second law.
Jim: Commitment three, the lawfulness principle. What is that about?
Brendan: That’s one that’s probably the most controversial, at least it’s produced a bunch of feedback, and that is that I believe and can’t prove, but again, in the case of wanting to accept as axioms a few things to allow us to do further work, is that the universe isn’t entirely ad hoc. And this is where I do digress from Peirce, where, you know, he believes that maybe there aren’t universal laws and that they’re local, and that, as he calls it, the habits of the universe that it falls into through its unfolding. Doesn’t seem to be what I’m seeing in the universe, but of course I could be wrong. So I assume that there is a base level of lawfulness. And we think we have all these laws written down. I’m also quite sure we don’t know shit about the lawful layer. Or at least our knowledge is quite incomplete and maybe at a, you know, sort of at a high level, it’s sort of right. But beneath that, we haven’t a clue. But probably even at the upper levels, there’s some things really wrong. For instance, what the hell is dark energy? Right? It doesn’t fit any of the explanations that we have very well. Dark matter, it’ll maybe a little less spooky. There’s some plausible explanations for that. But nonetheless, at some level, there are some rock solid things that are true, and they may not be universal in time and space. For instance, there are alternative theories of gravity, which says that gravity could be different in different times and space. That’s not been proven, though I do know of some very interesting work that’s going on on the rotational speeds of galaxies at different times in the history of the universe, which is maybe giving a little hint that maybe gravitation is different in different time places and times. But I would expect, if you accept the lawfulness principle, that the way it varies in time and space is explainable. Right? Which is, okay, there’s some curve in time that the parameter g, the Newtonian gravity constant, isn’t constant in time and space, and it varies and it varies this way in time and space. So it’s lawful but at a different level than say, you know, Newton’s laws of gravitation would have it.
Now this is a little of an aside. It gets us a little bit away from metaphysics and a little bit to empiricism. I have a strong suspicion that there is a significant set of lawfulness that is invariant in time and space, and that is the gauge forces, basically the weak force, the strong force, electromagnetism, things like the conversion ratio of mass to energy, the famous e equals mc squared, probably the constancy of the speed of light at c and the relativistic effects that that produces. The best evidence I have—I mean, is not philosophy. This is not metaphysics here. This is one little step about, but it just make me my what my belief structure kinda looks like—is that when we look at stars very far away, I mean, very far away to the early origins of the universe, we see the spectra of the light that’s coming off the stars to be essentially identical to what we’d expect that spectra to be nearby or even in our own star. You have to adjust it for red shift and some other things, but it’s uncannily accurate to many decimal points. And if you get down deep into astrophysics and how fusion would work and how light emits and how photons going through atoms would interact, etcetera, it’s essentially impossible to get the spectra to be the same with any change almost at all in the strengths and attributes of those fundamental parameters. So a little bit beyond my metaphysical commitments, I also say that it looks to me based on that particular piece of evidence, which is well documented, that at least part of the lawful domain, it may well be invariant in time and space.
Brendan: Yeah. I read this commitment as making a sort of really important simple ontological statement, which is that there are deep regularities. And I guess maybe I’m curious to the degree that maybe those are regularities that might potentially shift over long enough time scales or some openness, I suppose, for that. But it seems like the metaphysical commitment here is just something like there are deep enough regularities and patterns and structures that we can relate to things as sort of having a stability to them rather than this sort of radical, unlawful, chaotic nature.
Jim: That gets at a very pragmatic reason why I chose it as a commitment, right? Because it explains why if I measure my nose today, it’ll be the same length tomorrow approximately. And that the more we know at the replicability of measurement down to tiny, tiny, tiny 14 decimal place kinds of accuracies, we see confirmed again and again and no disconfirmation of this lawfulness layer.
Brendan: You did mention the potential stochastic nature of reality, though. Would that undermine this, at least at some scales of reality?
Jim: No. It would just be part of the lawfulness, right? It has a stochasticity, and the stochasticity has the following attributes, right? It’s lawful. You know, as an example, one of the better arguments for fundamental stochasticity is radioactive decay. If you take a chunk of radium, weigh it, you can predict with very high precision what the rate of radioactive decay is gonna be of that radium, and that could be fundamental stochasticity. Copenhagen interpretation would say that’s what it is. The de Broglie-Bohm would say there’s hidden variables underneath which are actually driving that. And if we could get at those hidden variables, we could predict using the Schrödinger wave equation and related math to exactly when a given atom of radium would go tweak. So I would say that if we discovered the universe was fundamentally stochastic, we’d have to think of—and we’d have to do a lot of work in incorporating that into the lawful layer. We basically have to throw away any attempt to define the universe in deterministic ways because it has a fundamental stochasticity, but that’s part of its lawfulness. Deterministic and lawful aren’t, let’s say.
Brendan: Okay. Great. So those are the main commitments that you’re offering here. Reality principle, asymmetry principle, lawfulness principle. Now I wanna see what you wind up doing with these, but real quick, I also wanna throw into the mix, probably to your consternation. What about consciousness? Some people will say, well, you could have all these things, but if there’s nothing around to experience it, then what about that? So where does the observer and the kind of conscious space enter into your metaphysics? That’s a hard problem. Not the hard problem, but a hard problem.
Jim: I go, it’s completely irrelevant. Reality principle says the moon was there before there were people, before there were chimps, before there were frogs, before there was anybody that’s likely to have had any consciousness. Consciousness very strongly exists on the other side of the divide, which is in the tree of emergence. Period.
Brendan: So then having kinda laid these out, I feel like the second part of this essay then starts to kind of draw out the implications of them. You say, for example, these three commitments taken together predict something we find confirmed everywhere we look when reality’s lawful dynamics act on asymmetric conditions, novelty reliably appears. Call this the principle of emergence, which gets us to emergence. Now I noted that your principle of emergence was not one of your three kind of commitments here. There’s other kinds of principles. Why not make the principle of emergence also one of your core commitments?
Jim: I thought about it, but I couldn’t figure out how to say it intelligibly. A version two, I might get there. The other one that I punted on was one could argue that causal time is a necessary commitment as well. Both of those were deeper swamps than I was prepared to go into that day when I wrote this article, but I might revisit that. So I say that’s a fairly good critique that maybe the specification of emergence that is a commitment might be useful. But I would say that at a minimum, it’s implied by the lawfulness principle that the set of lawfulnesses we happen to have in this universe is conducive to emergence in systems far from equilibrium.
Brendan: Yeah. It seemed to me that there’s one way of reading it here where given those three axioms, emergence is sort of downstream of that or it’s implied then. You say given real stuff, so the reality principle, lawful dynamics, and gradients asymmetries to drive them, systems develop structures and behaviors not trivially reducible to their parts. So in some ways, this seems to presume those commitments that you’ve presented there and lead to a notion of emergence. But unpack now where emergence fits into this, why is this important, and you seem to spend some time in your essay giving examples of the emergent phenomena that show up as a result of these core metaphysical aspects.
Jim: Yeah. I think the core takeaway for the audience is that essentially everything interesting in the universe is emergent. That the commitments are pretty minimal and could have been true at the, you know, right after the big bang where everything was very, very similar, but not quite perfectly similar. And then things kept happening. You know, first particles came around, then nuclei, and then atoms, and then they were clumpy, and so they formed stars. Stars was very fortuitous on the tree of emergence. In fact, we think, you know, us humans like to put ourselves at the center of the universe, a mistake that countless philosophers evade and theologians and other people. In reality, by far the dominant phenomenon of our universe today is stars. Right? Those things are pouring out unbelievable energy gradients that make any human activity utterly inconsequential in comparison. And there’s a hundred million stars in our galaxy alone. Some of them a lot bigger and hotter than our sun. More of them smaller as it turns out. And there’s at least a hundred million galaxies in the known universe. So the power being put out by all the stars right now is unbelievable, and it provides a very strong gradient of nonhomogeneity, and all kinds of interesting things, you know, come out of that. You know, I’ll talk a little bit about a little more about why I laid out all these steps along the way. Initially, you had so-called first generation stars, the first ones that had to have some clumpiness in the matter to occur. They came in, got dense enough that fusion energy started being created. And if the star was big enough, the burning of the star, and for those big early stars, it was pretty short, a hundred billion years maybe, and ended up in a supernova typically. And during that amazing flux of particles in the supernova stage where the star literally explodes in, you know, a few minutes, the heavy elements got created. The universe initially, not initially, but in the first few seconds, maybe take it out to a couple hundred thousand years, when we settled down to matter as we know it, we had hydrogen, helium, and a teeny teeny bit of lithium, and that’s all. We don’t get things like life from those three elements, at least not life as we know it. But during these supernova of the earlier stars, all the heavier elements were created, you know, iron, sulfur, oxygen, carbon, et cetera. The sun, our sun, is thought to be at least a third generation star. And each of the generations was essentially concentrating these heavier elements. So when the cloud of gases and dust came together to form the star, the sun, maybe five billion years ago, it was much enriched with these heavier interesting elements that can interact with each other in far more interesting ways than hydrogen, helium, and lithium. And that provided a whole new portal into a whole new space of emergence, which gave us planets. You know, you needed things like silicon to produce hard planets like Earth. You needed hydrogen. You need oxygen with combined with the hydrogen to make water. And as it turns out, human life is dependent on a fairly long list of elements, one of which is surprising, molybdenum. All life on Earth has molybdenum in it somewhere in its metabolism. And that’s a pretty exotic material that was you had to reach a sufficient concentration to be available for something like life. And so each of these steps is an emergent phenomenon that occurred over time, and only when enough of it had occurred over time were we ready for life to occur.
Brendan: Now do you think that there are any additional commitments or axioms that you’d want to throw in to make any of the leap between essentially these three very parsimonious ones and then and then emergence does everything else? There something else that you need for emergence that you might say is necessary that we’d want to bake into a minimum metaphysics?
Jim: Yeah. So the only one that I’ve identified subsequently, arguably, is causal time.
Brendan: Yes. Say maybe a little bit more about that. That sounds intriguing.
Jim: Yeah. Lots of theories of time. People don’t know anything about anything. They know less about time than anything. But causal time is a specific variety of time that says A happened before B, which happened before C, which happened before D, and we here at D can say we’re at time D and C, B, and A happened before us. Now that seems like very intuitively true, but physicists say, well, basic physics says it’s not true. So called block universe, that it all happens simultaneously, that the present and the past are psychological hallucinations basically. And ten years ago, probably 90 percent of physicists would subscribe to the block universe as the nature of time. It’s, oh, it’s an illusion. It all happens simultaneously. I would say, subsequently, probably the majority still believe that by the way. Subsequently, there’s, I think, a lot of evidence that that’s not true. I think emergence theory is a pretty good indicator that things had to happen in some order. You needed molybdenum before you had life. Sorry, people. Just the way it is. So there had to be some temporal connection. And there’s some very interesting work recently by Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin on so called assembly theory where they get quite mathematical on they say, you give me any molecule, I can tell you about how far we are from the origin of the universe. Right? Woah. Right? And a molecule the size of our DNA basically implies 13 billion years. And I think that is one of the stronger arguments against the block universe. And I actually did a podcast with Walker and Cronin, and then I did another podcast with Walker on assembly theory. And we all agreed that, take that block universe. We don’t think that’s true. So I would so I guess anyway, the one additional thing I might add is causal time, that things happen one after the other in a way that if we were if we had a god’s eye view, we could record everything that happened.
Brendan: It sounds like then, yes, there’s been a kind of revolution or paradigm shift in physics that’s allowed for theories of emergence to be more commonplace and more commonly accepted even if still not a majority position. At the same time that there’s still—I see even any given day across my social media feed, I might see an article from some science popular science journal or something saying, ah, emergence is magic and it’s nonsense. It doesn’t make sense. And I don’t know if you wanna just unpack that a little bit more. Is there a definition of emergence that you’re using that doesn’t give any room to folks who just wanna say, well, that that’s just a magical hand wavy thing and I mean, using these axiomatic commitments, someone could say, well, this does just then lead to emergence, which then takes over and does everything else. But yeah. Maybe just define that a little bit more so that, that’s clear what you mean by
Jim: Yeah. Great question. And it’s actually the area that I’m working on in scientific work. I’ve got a paper that makes a small step in trying to clarify this. The history of the use of the term emergence is kind of interesting, right? And there’s the argument of weak emergence, which is talking about emergence is just a handy way to describe what’s going on. And then the so-called strong emergence is there something spooky and mysterious and it’s real, right? I don’t accept either of those. I believe that emergence implied by lawfulness and causal time and that we can actually lay out the mechanisms. And I’m working on a hypothesis called temporal reciprocal emergence, which tries to do just that. And the key takeaway is, what emergence is and why it’s so amazingly difficult and seemingly paradoxical, is the main claim of emergence, not having to distinguish between short, weak, and strong, is that there’s top-down causality.
Here’s the example. Here I am, you know, a pile of chemicals, right? If those chemicals were a 55-gallon drum sitting in my driveway, the probability of those chemicals leaping out of the drum, walking down two blocks to the convenience store and buying a six-pack of beer and walking back is essentially zero, right? But if it’s Jim Rutt sitting on his easy chair in the front yard and he goes, I’m thirsty. I think a six-pack of Budweiser going really good here. That top-down decision basically causes all those poor molecules to do shit that they normally wouldn’t do, which was to get up off their ass, walk down the street, buy a six-pack of beer. And it seems to me obvious that downward causality is real, and we just have not been able to explain it very well.
Think about the paradox, which is, if we accept realism and maybe a little bit stronger form of materialism, I am made out of those molecules. All my matter is those molecules. And how is it that those molecules, being just dumbass molecules, are able to organize themselves in a way that they can be told what to do by something at a higher level? And this is one of my core holdings about emergence and complexity in general, is that that view that it’s a paradox misses the fact that our universe is about both the dancer and the dance. So the molecules are dancers, but the things that they’re doing at any given time are the dance. And one of the dances that they’re doing is this very complex and complicated homeostatic metabolism, which as long as I’m doing it, I’m what we call alive, right? And when they stop doing it, I’m not alive anymore, and I’m a bag of chemicals that’s fairly quickly breaking down.
And one of the things that this bag of chemicals does is—and we’ll get to your topic of consciousness—is, you know, first we had neurons, then we had clumps of neurons. Now we have quite variegated and complicated neural systems in higher animals, probably from amphibians on up. And it’s somewhere along the line, one of the manifestations of these neural systems is what we call consciousness, where we can say that I said to myself, I’m going to the store and getting the six-pack. But I would say that consciousness came long before verbalization down to probably a frog, or a frog is seeing in its sensory movie, if you want to call it that, something that looks like a fly, and so it sticks out its tongue and grabs the fly or misses. And the fact that the tongue flipped out based on information in the sensorium is its own kind of downward causality. And so don’t even really need anything like human consciousness to get downward causality. You need to get something that exists amongst the aggregations of the pieces that nonetheless tells the pieces what to do and that not being a paradox.
And my work on temporal reciprocal emergence, paper publishable soon I hope, is that the way you break the paradox is that it’s a spiral, not a circle. That the state of the aggregate in the recent past basically changes the probabilities of what happens next. And it is quite a complicated story, but that’s it in very short form. So I talk about the time-space spiral that allows us to escape that paradox. And so something like that, I suspect is how we ground emergence in physics. And no magic. I’m, you know, I’m strong. No magic, dude. No strong emergence, but more than weak emergence.
Brendan: Yeah. Something about information there seems really important.
Jim: And, I mean, I think what the work that Eric Hoel is doing is also very significant here. My TRE formulation is completely compatible, but goes beyond Hoel. Hoel is very information theory and basically says that you can determine that your coarse-graining of the world into layers is approximately correct if the explanatory power of downward causality is a local maximum. So the information theory measures show that the downward causality is strong. When I talk about a person versus its molecules, that’s a powerful information theoretic way of explaining. I think that’s almost certainly correct. But what he doesn’t provide is any explanation of the mechanisms or the dynamics of how that actually occurs. And TRE, temporal reciprocal emergence, is at least an attempt in a limited number of cases to provide a rather rigorous mathematically defined way that those things unfold and it’s completely compatible with Hoel causal emergence.
Brendan: Yes. This is a rather parsimonious and, maybe for some controversial, presentation. Well, I guess one question there is like you said, you’ve gotten some feedback. Has anyone brought out the pitchforks or anything coming for your metaphysical system yet?
Jim: No. But of course, you know, anytime you throw out a metaphysical system, people bitch about it and complain about it. You miss that. You’re wrong about that or you’re, you know, etcetera. And I will say that I’m kind of proud of my audience for this. The most consistent pick has been the asymmetry argument is, does that actually belong in your commitments or not? And I acknowledge in the essay it’s right on the borderland. And we talked about that in some length. I think if I were to rewrite this, I would distinguish between a deterministic universe and a stochastic universe and have two different stories. One, that the stochasticity itself would provide the necessary asymmetry, but if we’re in a deterministic universe, we had to have initial conditions that were asymmetrical. So that’s been probably the biggest one. Though, of course, there’s also people say, what about God? And I go Laplace said, I have no need for that hypothesis.
Brendan: I was gonna say I was very surprised by commitment number four that there must be a benevolent creator deity that made everything six thousand years ago. I didn’t see that one coming, Jim. That was surprising.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah. No. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, friends. You know, don’t do that one.
Brendan: I will say so. In the past, you’ve had a reputation for drawing a firearm whenever the word metaphysics came up. I think I’ve been staring down the barrel of that myself once or twice. It’s come up, I know, in conversations you’ve had with, like, Gregg Henriques. I think you’ve talked to Matt Segall and others. So and yet here, you’re proposing your own metaphysical something or other and even going so far as to talk about meta-metaphysics. So what’s happened? Have you had some kind of conversion experience or a shift in mind, a metanoia? How have you come from that stance to writing something like this?
Jim: That’s a super good question. The truth is this has been my position all along, and what I was actually objecting to is way too grandiose metaphysics. My good friend, Gregg Henriques, and I constantly—he calls everything metaphysics. Right? And I constantly give him shit about it. And I go, well, that’s not metaphysics. Consciousness isn’t metaphysics. Life isn’t metaphysics. It’s emergence. It’s stuff. Right? Metaphysics is the things I need that I have to assume that I can’t deal with otherwise. I can’t deal with induction or deduction or abduction. And because, as you know, most of the blather about metaphysics are these gigantic palaces, as I call them, that people carry around. I try to explain everything from top to bottom and all that stuff. And so that’s why I would always say, when I hear the word metaphysics, reach for my pistol. But I’m no fool. Well, maybe I am a fool, but I’m not a fool on this particular. I of course knew that I must have a metaphysics. Everybody must make some assumptions. At least I’ve always assumed so. But I never actually settled down to figure out what my minimal commitments had to be. About 18 months ago, I wrote a quick paper called Minimum Viable Metaphysics and posted it to a mailing list that we both belong to. And they shredded it pretty well. It was like 12 points, way too many. Right? And then I came back, I think last November with a minimum viable metaphysics number two, and they had like seven points. And, you know, they dunked on that too. And again, appropriately. And then I, you know, contemplated some more and said, alright, these three seem like a fairly minimal set—time to publish. So I always knew there was a little metaphysics in there, but my grandiose pistol waving was about these palaces of metaphysics that were far more assumptions than we needed to actually get started to understand our universe.
Brendan: Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, so if this is a minimum viable metaphysics and very, very sparse, very parsimonious, if there is something, let’s say, more like speculative metaphysics that is presuming these axiomatic commitments are the case, one has to wonder, for example, why are these the case? Why not some other set of commitments? So maybe that starts to get you into a not so minimal metaphysics, but I have to ask you some questions there at least. How you think or why you think this set of commitments is the nature of the world that we live in or requires these and not others?
Jim: Because to do the work of figuring out the universe from this point forward, you need these. And I probably should have addressed this, that I make no claims at all about what happened before, why it’s here. Is there a point to the universe? Was there a big bang? Don’t know. And on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I don’t care. You know, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I say, oh, yeah. I care a lot. Sunday, I take the day off. But this does not address those kinds—that class of questions. This is we have a universe, we have this universe, whatever it is. We need to be able to do some things in our universe, and we need to assume this set of things to have any reasoned approach to figure out what to do.
Brendan: Totally. And that’s a very pragmatic approach, and I think that keeps it very clean and tidy. I guess I’m asking Jim Rutt what Jim Rutt thinks about why it is this way and not another, or do you not go there? You just don’t ask the questions.
Jim: Oh, I of course. I think about this regularly. We’ve talked to people all the time. And you remember those sophomore lounge conversations full fueled by Colt 45 and weed. Right? Of course, we talk about this sort of stuff a lot. In fact, our little table of bloviators came up with a simulation hypothesis in 1972 as a possibility, that, hey, our universe is a simulation running in some higher realm’s PlayStation being driven by a mad 13-year-old. Right? Can’t disprove that. Right? In fact, my term for all these things is metaphysical speculations. And I love metaphysical speculations. I just refuse to accept any of them as being true until there’s some evidence. Purpose of the universe, having a clue on that one, frankly. Of course, lots of speculations. I read many of them. I have no way to choose one from the other. You know, is the Christian metaphysics about the point of the universe the right one? Walk away and I see no evidence one way or the other. And there’s some scientific-ish metaphysical speculations. Lee Smolin, I had on my podcast, his theory of evolutionary universes, which is that new universes emerge out of the asshole of black holes basically, and that universes therefore select evolutionarily on the settings of these fine constants such as to maximize the probability of creating black holes. And that that’s what’s going on. Of course, Aristotle already saw the hole in that logic, which is, well, what about the plenum in which these things are operating on? Where did they come from? This is the unmoved mover problem. And I gotta say, yep. An unmoved mover is a problem, but way above my pay grade. And I’m happy to hear stories about it, but I’m not prepared to make any commitments to any of these hypotheses.
Brendan: Yeah. Well, I guess this might be a reason for thinking about these as a kind of meta-metaphysics because I also—it occurs to me that whatever those other alternative options are, metaphysical, speculative options for where these things came from, seem to also continue to presume these principles that there’s a reality, that there’s at least lawfulness, and as you say, maybe the asymmetry one is a little questionable there. But I suppose that is sort of where this gets to is, you know, what set of conditions must be the case in any metaphysical system whatsoever to be entertainable as a viable possibility. And I think these are sort of getting, maybe at that level, which is even deeper.
Jim: There’s two theories—well, many theories, but two fairly reputable scientific theories on why is it that the settings are what they are. One of them is called the Weak Anthropic Principle, which is well, of course, they have to be what they are because we’re here. Right? And then there’s a variation on that, which is, maybe there’s lots and lots and lots of universes. There’s numerous cosmological theories of how there could be multiple universes, let alone the metaverse theory, and that there’s some kind of jiggling with the constants between each of the universes. And so of course, there’s a whole bunch in which life never happened, where stars never happened, galaxies never happened. But if we have lots and lots of them, all kinds of things could have happened. And one of them is our universe with the settings being what they are. The Strong Anthropic Principle is a little spookier, a little stronger, which is somehow the universe needed humans or consciousness or life or something to emerge. I’m not sure why. Can’t think of a good scientific reason why it would need that, but there are some—there are a few fringe interpretations of quantum mechanics, which imply maybe sometime we needed an observer. I think it’s all bullshit, but there are some halfway reputable people that argue that way. And so whatever it was that formed the universe knew it needed consciousness in it, so it tuned the parameters so that at some point in time, the observer would arise. And of course, you could say the mechanism that set those parameters was the guy in the sky. Right? Or it could have been something else. You know? It could have been a, you know, the United Nations of the higher plenum said, we need to explore this consciousness thing. What would it take to create a universe in which consciousness emerges? And they said, oh, probably something like this would do the job. And they set the knobs on the machine, pulled the lever, and out popped the new universe. Yeah. Hard to say. Don’t know. Doubt—I just wouldn’t say doubt we’ll ever know, but I suspect it will be a long damn time, how we’ll know on such things. We may well never know. I think that’s a very important—it actually fits the philosophy of where I’m coming from, which is there are things we know, there’s things that we think we might know, there’s some things we don’t know. And keeping those straight in your head is really important and not locking in like, for instance, the one quantum interpretation before the evidence distinguishes or locking in onto one. What’s the point of the universe and how did it get to be this fine-tuned way that allowed life? There’s many, many, many speculations. And of course, we know humans have a huge tendency to lock into one then kill each other because, mine is 1 percent different than yours. Therefore, I’m gonna burn you at the stake. It’s a rather unfortunate attribute of humanity, but I say resist that, people. Allow the mystery to be until we have some reason to choose between the alternatives.
Brendan: I’d like to think we’re getting a little bit better at the burning at the stake thing, hopefully. We’ll also see how that plays out, but fingers crossed that that doesn’t keep being such a thing. Jim Rutt, this was fantastic. I appreciate it. Is there anything else you’d like to throw into this conversation?
Jim: I think I said about as much as I got to say on this topic, at least for now.
Brendan: At least for now. Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on the Jim Rutt Show and for the opportunity to be the one peppering you with questions and put you in the hot seat. So thanks for the opportunity to let me do this. This is great. Really appreciate it.
Jim: I really enjoyed it. And thank you, Brendan Graham Dempsey, for agreeing to do this and mud wrestle with the man himself.
Brendan: Till next time.