Josh Adam: Understanding Reality through the Measurement Mind

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Hello and welcome to Inkverse Algorithm.
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I am your host, Ookie Spitz, and this is the Writer's Pod.
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I'm thrilled to have the writer, Joshua Adam, with me today.
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Welcome, Joshua.
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Thank you, Mookie.
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Hey, thank you so much for having me on.
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I really appreciate this opportunity.
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I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about our favorite subject, which essentially is the nature of reality.
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Capital R.
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And we're we're gonna dive in deep.
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But to give a little context to our viewers and listeners, I met you on Medium, which is the writer's blog platform.
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It seemed to have its height maybe about five years ago.
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There was a lot of enthusiasm for posting on Medium.
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It enabled writers to actually monetize their work.
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So you could you could put stuff up there and Medium would pay you.
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Sometimes it was pennies per view, but pay you for other people reading your stuff.
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And people would sign up and pay the platform for the privilege of reading great content.
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Writers would get paid.
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And it seemed to show a lot of promise, but over the years, I think thanks to all the media fragmentation, all the options that are out there, and just the saturation of content, and now AI, Medium is kind of sucks, frankly.
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It's been enginified like most of the platforms.
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However, there are there are gems and great experiences still to be had.
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So I saw one of your articles pop up on perception and knowledge and what we know and why we know it.
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And I was like, this guy is a kindred soul.
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He thinks about stuff the way I do, and I want to check him out.
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And I did, and we started emailing back and forth.
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And now I want to have you on the pod, and here you are.
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Let's let's roll our sleeves up and talk about your book, The Measurement Mind.
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And I'll put a link in the description below for people to check it out.
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And give us give us a top-line overview about your point of view, why you wrote the book, and what the hell you're getting at.
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And I think that would be a great launching point into a nice dynamic conversation about this cool topic.
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Sure, that sounds great.
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And yeah, I like your description of medium as well.
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Yeah, it's uh it's fallen over the years a little bit.
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I I'm kind of newer to it though.
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I I I kind of did it in reverse.
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I wrote a lot before and wrote a book uh, like you mentioned, the measurement mind, and then sort of converted them into articles as a place to kind of dump it.
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I found it, I found Medium, I'm like, oh, this looks like an interesting website.
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I kind of dumped a lot of articles there that I had kind of already worked with.
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Um, but yeah, the Measurement Mind started for me, I would say, about 15 years ago.
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Uh driving to the gym, I'm a gymnastics coach, and I would throw in um audiobooks.
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It was an hour away there and back for 10 years at that time, going back and forth and uh listening to physicists, philosophers, and that's kind of when I decided, well, I you know, I've kind of learned all this knowledge.
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I want to I have my own ideas now.
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I kind of branched into a whole new thing, and then uh that's where the measurement mind started.
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And what it is, is and you mentioned reality, right?
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It's about reality, and uh it's about two different things.
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It's about how reality has its roots not really in science, but in philosophy.
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So if we're gonna look at reality through a scientific lens, it should divide into more scientific terms.
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And I I thought logical and animated explain our reality and what we live in, uh, more so than just the term reality.
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And then it also, for me, measurement itself, what I've found, I believe to be a force on information itself.
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So for example, every time we make a measurement, we're pulling information from uh a zero point, like a big bang, and expanding it all the way to our frame of reference where we've made that measurement, and it's 13.7 billion years worth of information with every measurement we make.
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If that makes sense.
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It does.
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And it's not too radical in and of itself, because if we take a look at the evolution of quantum mechanics, that puts measurement as central.
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The basic tenet is that if you measure a system, especially a quantum state, something that's very, very small, very high in energy, then simply your act of measurement disrupts the system.
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That's one of the foundations of quantum mechanics.
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Absolutely.
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So your assertion that measurement is an interactive experience, if you will, between that which is being measured and the entity measuring it isn't left field.
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It's pretty much accepted as the foundation of much of science right now.
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But to me, what gets even more interesting than that is you draw out the implications of what that means.
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And that's where things get juicier.
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Thank you.
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Yeah, it's it's you know, you take the obvious, and that's where all the most interesting things come from.
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You gotta just take something that's obvious and let it go.
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You gotta study it and find out why it's obvious.
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And that's kind of where you delve into the measurement mind.
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And you know, when we when we make a measurement, like you said, we're constraining information, we're taking information that would otherwise run wild that like entropically fashion going from order to disorder, um, to something that's more constrained and orderly every time you make a measurement.
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And for me, that's what gravity is too.
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When you when you make a measurement, you're bringing relationships together, you're constraining information.
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And that doesn't mean there's not a graviton.
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There's there they're absolutely probably still a graviton, but it means that's why.
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That's we're we're constraining information and we're logically holding it together.
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Well, let's hold off on gravity for a second, because that's kind of a big deal, and it's quite a leap going from acknowledging that measuring something changes it to gravity being a subjective kind of experience in and of itself.
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Right.
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Let's let's maybe contextualize this conversation around what you said as philosophy.
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And the history of philosophy, going all the way back to the Greeks and likely before that, is this apparent dichotomy between perception and reality and the role that the mind plays within the universe that it seems to dwell within.
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And there's been an oscillation over the generations, whole movements of philosophy that have either gone toward the mind is everything.
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We, in a sense, create the universe by experiencing it, all the way to the other extreme that the mind is just the byproduct of the world, and it's all about objectivity rather than the interaction.
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So philosophers like Bishop Barclay was of the opinion that it's all mind, it's all created in our minds, and the pragmatist philosophers such as uh William James were more on the objectivist side, which is it's external to us, and we're just kind of sailing along singing a song.
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So your idea, which I think is central to your book, is you can almost imagine a Venn diagram of minds and some kind of objective reality, and there's an overlap, which is where the measurement takes place.
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And reality, as we know it to be true, even three dimensions of space, ostensibly one of time, colors and sounds and smells, how we perceive the world and even ourselves, is this emergent blend of the measurement mind with whatever the hell is.
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You can say almost the backdrop of capital R reality of which we are within it, and the relationship of our minds measuring whatever the hell the backdrop of reality itself is, of which we're a part, is the essence of our perception, is in a sense our whole lives.
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Do I do I frame that properly in the way you see it as well?
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Absolutely.
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I like the way you said it.
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And I like the way how you you said some philosophers thought it's all just mind.
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Uh but where the measurement mind kind of stops that track is that it's there's a logic to our experience.
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It's mathematical.
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When we wake up in the morning and we see one stock, we think, oh, there must my other stock must be under the bed.
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Because there's a logic to that, to what we're doing here.
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It's not just mind creates everything, and we're you can ride a unicorn in space.
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There's there's also a logical reality to it.
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So yes, I I do believe that mind in a way creates reality in a sense that everything out there is information and substrate and physicality is uh comes from mind, uh, but there's also a logic to and a mathematics to out there and what out there is, and our measurements have to traverse that mathematical structure that's out there.
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But um, I want to say one more thing.
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There's something very fundamental about information's logical structure being out there that equals measurement.
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Because you you can't really have a difference between a zero and a one without having a the logic of measurement being involved.
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Distinction.
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You have to have if you're gonna have a distinction between information and logical structure that's out there, the logic behind that involves measurement.
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And it goes the other way too.
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You can't have a measurement unless out there is infinite, infinite logical structure, um, which I call mathematical cyberspace, just where information plays itself out and where information is is real.
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Let's take that one step at a time, because uh that literally and figuratively probably blows everyone's mind, and it and it is quite a leap.
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So let me breadcrumb the logic and see if if we're talking the same lingo here and the same model or paradigm.
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So, what you're saying is when you see one sock, you tacitly assume there's another sock underneath your bed.
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And what you're getting at is the essential idea or principle of causality.
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Things consistently happen in the real world.
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We see it all the time.
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You take uh a set of car keys and you drop it, it seems to fall.
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And then if you pick them up and do it again, the same thing is gonna happen.
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There's consistency in our world.
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If X, then Y.
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And this is really the bedrock of our existence, if you think about it.
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It would be hard to imagine any kind of world, contiguous world with real experience, devoid of this foundational principle of causality.
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Uh then it would just be like you say, random unicorns floating in space and i ice cream sundaes on the surface of a sun.
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Whatever.
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Right, right.
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And you also end up with what Bertrand Russell called the solipsism of the moment, which is the only conclusion that you can make is okay, I'm here right now in this instance, and it's me.
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There's nothing else, because this is the totality of my experience, and I cannot guarantee that you know one second ago actually existed, and I can't really even anticipate one second in the future, because whatever, it's just happening.
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So the next the next jump you make is if there's causality, then there's this logical mathematical kind of construct.
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So immediately I just said, if X, then Y.
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That's a logical contingent statement.
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You extrapolate that and you look at it through the lens of the way science and the scientific method and our paradigms have evolved.
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We have discovered that the universe goes beyond just I have a sock and there must be another sock underneath my bed.
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We have also discovered that there are fundamental laws of nature which are consistent, they seem to be universal, and they could be described mathematically.
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And it goes all the way to Newtonian mechanics for gravity, all the way to Einstein's field equations.
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And as we've gotten more and more sophisticated in our experiments and descriptions of reality, they have become increasingly mathematical to the point where our most advanced understanding and descriptions of reality itself, down to the quantum level, the standard model of particle physics.
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If you look at one of those textbooks, there's hardly any writing.
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It's all equations.
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So then you get a you get a guy like Max Tegmark, who is, I believe, a Swedish physicist, and then he's he saw reality itself as being math.
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Yep.
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That as we get closer and closer to describing and understanding what makes up the backbone of reality, there's no more words, there's no feelings, there are literally math equations that behave themselves.
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And I think that that's what you're getting at.
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Do I do I do I paint this picture in a way that's accurate from your point of view?
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I'm definitely I'm a proponent of uh Max Tagmarks uh Mathematical Universe Hypothesis and exactly the the kind of thing that that you're saying.
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And uh, you know, he he has on his wall, he has all these pictures, and it's all these mathematical equations, and then one of those pictures has a question mark on it, and it just says you.
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So what he's trying to get at there is that you, once we figure out what you is, uh that's most likely, in his opinion, mathematical, because nothing else we experienced ever has not been mathematical.
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It's all that we've ever experienced.
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So why not say everything is math?
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Yeah, and you could push back in the same way that people generations ago pushed back against Bishop Barclay or William James, which is all right, dude, you now have gone to the opposite extreme, which is clearly our lived experience is emotional and sensory.
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And simply saying that mathematics is a great description of things doesn't mean that mathematics is reality.
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So there's pushback around that.
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But I like the idea from an epistemological point of view, and he's not the only one.
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So, for example, Stephen Wolfram, who developed Mathematica, he he was one of those prodigies where he got like a double PhD in mathematics and computer science at like age 21.
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He's he's a savant, and he has an idea of the Ruliad, which is the backbone of reality is a computational entity.
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And reality itself, basically, you can take it slice at a time, which is akin to cellular automata.
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That you have these pre-programmed entities that can go back to just this network of connections that could be mathematically described, and that's where we are.
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That's reality, is this network of mathematical causal kind of linkages.
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Have you heard of um Conway's game of life before?
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Yeah, of course.
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I mean that that that that's the foundation.
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Uh John John Conway was another savant.
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He died fairly recently and tragically from COVID.
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And he is one of the most creative mathematical minds ever.
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He's fascinating.
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He was featured a lot on Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column for Scientific American for years.
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And and and, you know, viewers and listeners, if you take anything from my conversation with Joshua, check out John Conway's Game of Life and some of his playing playing around with math.
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He was just something else.
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But like Joshua's mentioning, he pre-programmed this grid with very, very simple rules that once you started running it, it started taking on a life of its own.
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It was one of the earliest expressions of emergent behavior where you have very, very simple rules that you apply in a closed system that create unpredictably super complicated structures.
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And and Wolfram is of the same mind, even applying it to evolution and biology, that there's a natural tendency for simple systems to become even more complex organically, like just you throw them together and shit just happens.
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It's the nature of mathematics and logic for that to happen.
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I mean, it's really cool watching the automata go across the screen and move in different ways, and you you're like, oh my gosh, I I just plugged in a simple set of rules, and then you get all this, like you're saying, and in a sense, that's uh I mean, from if we were, say, an automaton because of the mathematical scientific laws that you had mentioned earlier, that we have these laws, and we arose through this situation, uh, we would see it as if it were animated and real, if you want to use the term real, but in a way, we're uh we're like the automata in Conway's game of life, um, which was instrumental to me understanding that material in the measurement mind and coming up with it.
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But for me, the the automata, the information that you plugged into this computer was already fundamental before you put it in this tool.
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And and this tool is a way for us to see it.
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The computer, we can rewind it, fast forward it, we can see the automata.
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Um, but that's not where it exists.
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Information is already fundamental.
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It's real information, and it was plugged into a tool.
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And that's kind of how I see our reality.
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It's uh the information, like Max Tegmark would say, is is real.
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Well, it also led him to the multiverse model.
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And whenever you're having a conversation like what we're having, there's several tangents that you can't help but explore, of which the multiverse is one of them.
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Because you do arrive at the conclusion, or at least the description, that A, the backbone of reality itself is nothing like what we perceive it.
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That B the best description we got for it is this logical mathematical kind of construct.
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Then C the universe that we perceive and that we ostensibly dwell within is only one of an infinite number of possibilities because you're not constrained by any physicality.
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And mathematics and logic, by definition, are way more vast in their potential expression than the few fundamental laws that we have discerned to be great descriptions of this particular universe.
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Right, right.
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And you know that the universe it can't make decisions.
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So when we we speak of probabilities, in my opinion, it's logical to say that they're they're all real, as long as they're all measured.
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Uh I mean, if the what like I went was talking about earlier, there's a logical reality and there's uh an animated reality, and measurement is sort of combines them.
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And you know, if there's a logical possibility, uh it's probably being measured somewhere there in the multiverse, like you're saying.
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And in a way, that's a bold leap.
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So there's there's the logical mathematical framework, maybe we can call it, or I'm calling it a backdrop.
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And then there's some kind of measurer measuring it, and the lived experience of the measurer is its own kind of reality, which is our experience.
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Is that fair to say and express?
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
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And uh, and you know, I'm not sure of how the if the audience is familiar with the double slit experiment and uh uh superposition and particles being in different uh places at the same time.
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Um, but whenever we we interact with anything or make a measurement, whenever we interact, we're interacting with probabilities, we're interacting with particles that are in more than one place at the same time.
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So when we interact with those particles, we uh if you're a proponent of whoever's uh many worlds interpretation, like like I am, you believe then you're also in superposition with this particle.
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If you're gonna interact with the particle that's in every possibility it can possibly be in, then you are also in every possibility that you can possibly be in with this particle at the same time.
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The easiest description is one that most people have probably heard, which is Schrodinger's cat.
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And Erwin Schrdinger is the OG of quantum mechanics, one of only a handful of people who cooked this stuff up in the pretty much in the 1920s.
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And he hated quantum mechanics, actually, even though he spawned it, he thought it made no sense and it bothered him.
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And one example that was described to essentially demonstrate the absurdity of quantum mechanics is you imagine a cat in a box, and within the box there's a radioactive isotope of some element, and there is, let's say, a twenty-five percent chance that in the next ten minutes this radioactive isotope will emit radiation sufficient to trigger a bottle of poison to be broken and kill the cat.
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Probability is twenty-five percent.
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So one of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics is that the radioactive isotope, whether or not it releases that radiation, is a measured phenomenon.
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And until something measures that radioactive decay, to your point, it's in a superposition of releasing the particle or not.
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So from the cat's point of view, the cat is simultaneously living and dead within the box until you measure it.
00:27:46.720 --> 00:28:19.599
Because the second, as an observer, you open the box, that collapses the wave function of that radioactive event, and you have a 25% chance that the cat is dead, and the multi-world interpretation that you described is that within 25% of an infinite number of universes, the cat is dead, and in 75% it's alive.
00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:31.279
And if you happen to open the box and the cat is dead, well, you happen to be in one quarter of all possible universes where the cat is dead.
00:28:32.000 --> 00:28:32.799
Right, right.
00:28:33.119 --> 00:28:44.400
So this simultaneously brings up everything we're talking about, which is part of quantum mechanics is this idea of collapsing the wave function based on observation.
00:28:44.799 --> 00:28:50.400
There's an inherent state of randomness to reality itself.
00:28:50.559 --> 00:28:57.200
A particle can't be measured as being in a certain place with a certain momentum.
00:28:57.599 --> 00:29:02.640
So it's in multiple, there's only a probability that you'll find it somewhere.
00:29:02.880 --> 00:29:09.200
And then when you actually do measure it, then the wave function collapses and the particle is actually there.
00:29:09.279 --> 00:29:14.880
But until you do, it's all of these places with varied probability.
00:29:15.279 --> 00:29:18.240
That's the backbone of reality itself.
00:29:18.799 --> 00:29:20.880
And that's that's kind of wild.
00:29:21.039 --> 00:29:31.920
And that brings up this idea that it's not physical, it's not even intuitive, but it's mathematical in the sense of it being a probability distribution.
00:29:32.400 --> 00:29:33.279
Right, right.
00:29:33.519 --> 00:29:54.160
And and Schrdinger, he he, like you said, he may not have liked what was the result of this, which was that everyone started realizing, oh, the macro world and the micro world, uh, this crazy world of quantum mechanics is linked to the macro world, and we need to pay attention to what's going on here a little more than we thought.
00:29:54.319 --> 00:30:08.799
And Schrdinger, I believe, was trying to uh prove the ridiculousness of quantum mechanics, but then maybe ended up uh proving that there's more going on here that uh we could be uh studying and talking about.
00:30:09.119 --> 00:30:16.400
And you know, it in my opinion, this equation, the Schrodinger equation, it's it's absolute.
00:30:16.720 --> 00:30:17.920
It's it's math.
00:30:18.480 --> 00:30:23.759
It's not like it works only when we measure or don't measure.
00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:25.440
It it's absolute.
00:30:25.519 --> 00:30:28.160
It's it's out there, it works all the time.
00:30:28.559 --> 00:30:35.519
So I I believe that there, that's my opinion as to why there are um many worlds out there.
00:30:36.079 --> 00:30:44.160
Well, there's another explanation, or at least description, or rationale, an inductive rationale for the many worlds interpretation.
00:30:44.319 --> 00:30:55.039
In this sense, it it describes what happens when the wave function collapses, which is basically you're on a Disneyland ride with infinite many branches.
00:30:55.599 --> 00:31:14.160
And every time the wave function collapses, it's as if you switch to a different branch on your Disneyland ride of your life, and you keep branching with every collapse of the wave function within this overall universe of infinite possibilities.
00:31:14.319 --> 00:31:17.119
That's one way of looking at this.
00:31:17.839 --> 00:31:25.359
Another way of looking at it is what's often cited as the fine-tuning problem.
00:31:25.839 --> 00:31:59.839
And this is an interesting bow on this knot, which is put everything else we've just talked about to the side for a second and ask yourself the question why the universe is the way it is, not just simply in terms of measuring stuff and finding that these fundamental laws are all behaving themselves to enable the causality that we have just talked about, but you come to the realization that these numbers could be different.
00:32:00.160 --> 00:32:05.519
The mass of the elementary particles, why are they the way they are?
00:32:05.759 --> 00:32:14.000
Why are there three generations of quarks and not four or five or one?
00:32:15.119 --> 00:32:24.480
Why do things bind and have four strengths that they do instead of values that could be arbitrarily different?
00:32:24.640 --> 00:32:26.240
And here's the big one.
00:32:26.559 --> 00:32:51.680
If you put all of these fundamental, what are called the dimensionless constants of the universe, of which scientists more or less agree there's about 26 of them, if you if you look at them and imagine them as dials that you can adjust, there's something like 10 with 500 zeros, variation of these.
00:32:52.960 --> 00:32:53.599
Right.
00:32:53.920 --> 00:33:19.759
And we just happen to be in a universe where they are so finely tuned that matter and energy could exist, that stars could burn, that planets could be in stable orbits, that we have evolved as these smart primates to have this conversation about the nature of our own universe.
00:33:20.000 --> 00:33:23.359
It's just so unlikely, folks.
00:33:23.519 --> 00:33:29.680
If you think about it, we just take our natural laws and the universe we live in for granted.
00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:45.599
And if you step back for just a second and look around and realize how unlikely it is for matter and look, the nucleus of an atom being stable, elements to form.
00:33:46.720 --> 00:33:48.480
What the actual F?
00:33:48.799 --> 00:33:51.279
How is this possible?
00:33:51.599 --> 00:34:01.839
And for thousands of years, people have thought about this, and their conclusion has been well, God, some transcendent being snapped his fingers.
00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:03.440
Usually it's a hymn.
00:34:04.720 --> 00:34:11.119
Fingers were snapped, and boom, God created the heaven and the earth in six days, and on the seventh, he chilled out.
00:34:11.440 --> 00:34:17.119
Okay, that's that's an explanation, but it's a cheap shot.
00:34:17.280 --> 00:34:30.480
And it begs the question of what we've observing for millennia as to natural law and even the evolution of ourselves as organic beings within this ecosystem, right?
00:34:30.800 --> 00:34:31.599
So why?
00:34:31.840 --> 00:34:34.079
Why is everything so perfect?
00:34:34.320 --> 00:34:37.360
So just to put a cap around it, I'll give you back the mic.
00:34:37.679 --> 00:34:39.440
Here's an answer, folks.
00:34:39.599 --> 00:34:40.800
We just shared it.
00:34:40.960 --> 00:34:50.239
Whether you believe in the collapse of the wave function and the cat in an infinite number of universes or not, it triggers the same idea.
00:34:50.480 --> 00:34:55.840
What if all of those universes actually exist?
00:34:56.880 --> 00:35:34.159
And we just happen to be in one where all the dials are tuned in such a way that we could actually evolve within it to be observers, and that's to that to me is the most breathtaking and most beautiful aspect of our whole conversation, which is it's epistemological in terms of describing what we can know, and it's ontological in the sense of really getting at the origin of how we got here, why the universe is the way it is.
00:35:34.320 --> 00:35:51.920
And the answer ultimately is we live in this multiverse or this infiniverse of endless possibility, and we just happen to be in one of those possibilities that enabled us to evolve within it, and here we are.
00:35:52.639 --> 00:35:53.119
You're right.
00:35:53.199 --> 00:35:58.159
And look what you're talking about, right, is the anthropic principle, the weak weak anthropic principle?
00:35:58.480 --> 00:36:04.559
It's called the weak anthropic principle, as opposed to the strong anthropic principle.
00:36:04.719 --> 00:36:08.159
The weak anthropic principle is pretty much what I described.
00:36:08.480 --> 00:36:17.840
That uh that we happen to be in a universe where we happen to be able to evolve, and it's kind of like gee whiz, here we are.
00:36:18.079 --> 00:36:32.639
And the strong anthropic principle, which I think, and here we could dive in deeper to that, is where I think some of your ideas come from, is that the universe is actually here because of us.
00:36:33.119 --> 00:36:48.320
It puts us as central from an ontological and even epistemological perspective as the observer is necessary for the universe to even exist.
00:36:48.880 --> 00:36:52.000
That's the strong anthropic principle.
00:36:52.239 --> 00:36:57.599
The weak one is kind of the opposite, which is there's an infinite number of universes.
00:36:59.199 --> 00:37:02.239
We're in one where we just evolve.
00:37:02.639 --> 00:37:09.519
And here we are, and that in a sense explains why everything is so precisely tuned.
00:37:10.159 --> 00:37:17.440
Because in the bigger set of all universes, we're in a tiny, tiny, tiny minority.
00:37:17.519 --> 00:37:20.719
We're off in the outskirts of the multiverse.
00:37:20.800 --> 00:37:28.880
There are universes which are one gigantic black hole, there are universes with 16 dimensions of space.
00:37:29.119 --> 00:37:33.840
There are universes where time relative to us runs backwards.
00:37:34.639 --> 00:37:35.519
We don't know.
00:37:35.679 --> 00:37:45.360
And if you believe in Max Tegmark's mathematical universe, there's a universe with uh with pure platonic forms floating.
00:37:47.199 --> 00:37:47.840
Right?
00:37:48.400 --> 00:37:49.039
Yeah.
00:37:49.519 --> 00:37:51.440
Yeah, no, no, you're right, you're right.
00:37:51.519 --> 00:37:56.800
Yeah, there's uh and that brings me to I've been uh looking at this a little bit, your book.
00:37:57.199 --> 00:37:59.280
We got product promo, folks.
00:37:59.440 --> 00:38:06.480
Uh for our listeners lifting up my book, Johnny Fizzuli and the Transfinite Reality Engine.
00:38:06.639 --> 00:38:28.639
And that that's the backdrop for my speculative science fiction novel, where uh where a hustler decides to hustle people out of money by inventing crazy shit like a self-sharpening pencil or a biodegradable sex toy, and then he gets a bunch of money from investors, and then he walks.
00:38:28.800 --> 00:38:31.760
He never does any research, it's all a hustle.
00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:42.000
And then he's up against a wall and he needs something big to bail himself out, and he runs into a scientist who shares some of the ideas Joshua and I have been talking about.
00:38:42.239 --> 00:38:46.320
And then this hustler is like, hey, wait a second.
00:38:46.480 --> 00:38:54.239
My next hustle could be building a machine that could jump from one of these universes to another.
00:38:54.559 --> 00:39:06.960
And if we could read someone's mind or translate their wish into the coordinates for this kind of jump, then it becomes the ultimate genie's lamp.
00:39:07.360 --> 00:39:24.559
Because if you've got an infinite number of universes, there's one exactly identical to this one where I'm having a conversation with Joshua on a podcast, and you folks are listening and watching, and I happen to be a billionaire and married to Scarlett Johansson.
00:39:26.800 --> 00:39:31.519
That's the only difference, and that's what he's he's he's planning.
00:39:31.920 --> 00:39:38.800
And he actually hires a real scientist to build it, and who knew it works?
00:39:39.599 --> 00:39:41.760
And then hilarious ensues.
00:39:41.920 --> 00:39:44.960
So well, yeah, I've I've been enjoying it.
00:39:45.119 --> 00:39:51.519
I love the uh the fact that it deals with the multiverse, and that's the kind of science fiction I want to read, you know.
00:39:51.920 --> 00:39:53.119
That's awesome.
00:39:53.360 --> 00:39:55.280
Um but enough about me.
00:39:55.360 --> 00:39:56.800
What do you think about me?
00:39:56.880 --> 00:40:01.679
And what do we think about your book, Josh, which is The Measurement Mind.
00:40:01.920 --> 00:40:05.519
Let's let's dive a little bit deeper, and I'd love to explore.
00:40:06.159 --> 00:40:11.519
Uh you bring up gravity as something that's contingent on us.
00:40:11.760 --> 00:40:17.039
And I want you to argue that Roger Penrose has actually said something similar.
00:40:17.199 --> 00:40:22.559
He ties the collapse of the wave function to gravity in interesting ways.
00:40:22.719 --> 00:40:28.480
And gravity is the nut that physicists still cannot crack.
00:40:28.719 --> 00:40:40.559
The unification of quantum mechanics with Einstein's general relativity is the holy grail of physics and cosmology right now, and nobody has a clue.
00:40:40.719 --> 00:41:02.480
There's various theories, string theory is driven by that, loop quantum gravity, all sorts of theories are trying to bridge the gap between the very small and the very energetic with the very, very large and very, very low energy.
00:41:03.039 --> 00:41:03.679
Right.
00:41:05.119 --> 00:41:27.760
Well, yeah, so where the measurement mind falls in there is, and like what you were saying with the uh strong enthropic principle and the weak entropic principle, that perhaps you know you got something is it focused from here creates the universe, or is it the rules and and uh laws that we plug into or that's plugged into the universe that creates us?
00:41:28.079 --> 00:41:38.559
And we might be talking about fundamentally the same the same thing in a way that measurement and logic go hand in hand.
00:41:38.800 --> 00:41:48.480
There you can't really have a difference between say like a one and a zero without being able to make a distinction, without having measurement.
00:41:48.719 --> 00:42:01.519
And you can't have logical structure, or you can't have measurement without logical structure, without you can't measure anything unless there's uh there's probabilities out there to navigate through.
00:42:02.079 --> 00:42:15.280
Uh so in a way where the measurement mind is, is that a single measurement is the fundamental basis for building reality.
00:42:16.079 --> 00:42:27.679
So when you talk about plot time and plot scale, that actually has to do a lot with the what the way we measure or how measurements are made.
00:42:28.159 --> 00:42:47.039
And um when you when you build a structure, it's not just built out of distinctions, it's also, since they're one of the things, built out of measurements, then it's a feeling that that you feel when something is distinct.
00:42:47.440 --> 00:43:14.400
And instead of say it being a mookie and got, maybe we're just a series of measurements, individual measurements with uh a five length and a five time uh from when we're born all the way to when we die and multiple different realities, and it's just all up, and it we're built out of single measurements, and maybe not just stop there.
00:43:14.639 --> 00:43:20.239
Maybe uh the universe is all built out of measurements, and there's one mind.
00:43:20.400 --> 00:43:30.000
Schrodinger used to uh talk about that, how there's one mind, and maybe there is no such thing as mind, maybe there's only such thing as measurements.
00:43:31.360 --> 00:43:39.360
That's cool, and I'm not disagreeing with the foundation of it, because that's been the essence of our conversation so far.
00:43:39.920 --> 00:43:47.519
But let me call bullshit for the sake of conversation and getting deeper into the idea.
00:43:48.400 --> 00:43:49.280
The moon.
00:43:49.519 --> 00:43:50.159
The moon.
00:43:50.320 --> 00:43:52.719
You look up into the sky, there's the moon.
00:43:52.880 --> 00:43:59.760
We we've been there, unless you're a conspiracy theorist, and uh and it exerts.
00:44:03.440 --> 00:44:04.239
Not even.
00:44:04.480 --> 00:44:12.320
It bends space-time, if you like Einstein's description or believe that it's an accurate paradigm.
00:44:13.280 --> 00:44:26.400
And the Earth and the Moon actually orbit each other, but the Earth is much more massive and we perceive the moon going around the Earth pretty consistently.
00:44:27.039 --> 00:44:33.119
And let's pretend for a second that we never evolved on the surface of the Earth.
00:44:33.360 --> 00:44:44.639
That the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs never did, and that ecosystem kept going, and our primate ancestors never never evolved further than tree shrews.
00:44:45.119 --> 00:44:50.400
Or we can imagine an even bigger asteroid hitting and wiping out all life, etc.
00:44:50.639 --> 00:44:50.880
etc.
00:44:51.199 --> 00:44:58.079
We can imagine endless possibilities for how the earth made its way through the galaxy.
00:44:58.400 --> 00:44:58.559
Right.
00:45:03.440 --> 00:45:03.840
Right.
00:45:04.000 --> 00:45:07.039
Now, is that moon still bending space-time?
00:45:07.119 --> 00:45:09.599
Is it still hauling ass around the earth?
00:45:09.760 --> 00:45:12.159
Is uh what's up with the moon there, Josh?
00:45:12.559 --> 00:45:13.280
Sure, sure.
00:45:13.440 --> 00:45:14.639
So I love this.
00:45:14.800 --> 00:45:15.360
I love this.
00:45:15.440 --> 00:45:22.559
So and I like, you know, Einstein actually said, you know, I refuse to believe that the moon's not there when I'm not looking.
00:45:22.639 --> 00:45:25.119
And yeah, the moon is always the example.
00:45:25.280 --> 00:45:25.920
I don't know why.
00:45:26.000 --> 00:45:26.559
Yeah, yeah.
00:45:26.800 --> 00:45:39.119
But when people try to call bullshit on this subjective reality and quantum mechanics being based entirely on just the observer, then people always say, well, what about the fucking moon?
00:45:40.639 --> 00:45:41.440
Right, right.
00:45:42.480 --> 00:45:49.039
So the moon, and like I said before, I I don't believe in the term real as being used in science.
00:45:49.199 --> 00:45:52.480
So I believe that we should use logical and animated.
00:45:52.639 --> 00:45:57.760
So the moon is logical when it's not being measured.
00:45:58.000 --> 00:45:59.119
It's logical.
00:45:59.599 --> 00:46:03.679
And the moon is animated when it is being measured.
00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:13.199
So uh if there's a dinosaur there to measure the moon, uh then it's being animated in that uh dinosaurs.
00:46:13.679 --> 00:46:15.199
Let's stick to the example though.
00:46:15.360 --> 00:46:16.000
No life.
00:46:16.159 --> 00:46:30.480
There's not even microbial life, there is nothing to measure the moon going around, or you know, the earth and moon orbiting each other, or however, whatever the hell is going on here.
00:46:30.960 --> 00:46:33.840
There's there's there's no measurement, Josh.
00:46:34.000 --> 00:46:34.559
None.
00:46:34.719 --> 00:46:37.920
There is no measurement of this system.
00:46:38.559 --> 00:46:39.760
What is going on?
00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:41.119
Is there a system?
00:46:41.519 --> 00:46:44.239
How would you possibly describe it?
00:46:44.719 --> 00:46:53.360
So the moon at that point, if there's no measurement, is zero measurement is only exists logically.
00:46:53.679 --> 00:46:59.760
Still real, because we don't really know what that term means, it's just logical, but it's not animated.
00:47:00.320 --> 00:47:10.400
Uh however, I tend to think that you can't really have logical structure without measurement.
00:47:10.480 --> 00:47:23.039
I I don't know if that's even possible because in in a sense um you know you you can't have distinctions without the without there being measurement.
00:47:23.119 --> 00:47:35.840
So just the fact that it exists logically uh perhaps means there's logical measurements uh happening, if that makes sense.
00:47:36.239 --> 00:47:42.159
Let me put it in terms of the math itself and talk about it in terms of discovery.
00:47:42.320 --> 00:47:43.199
This might help.
00:47:43.360 --> 00:47:44.400
This might help.
00:47:44.719 --> 00:47:55.440
So flipping it into mathematics, uh a journalist asked the probably the foremost mathematician on the earth that we know about.
00:47:55.519 --> 00:48:04.400
There's no doubt people working as slaves in iPhone factories in China who have the wherewithal of Terry Tao.
00:48:04.719 --> 00:48:13.360
But but of the humans we know about and have made contributions to mathematics, Terry Tao is up there.
00:48:13.599 --> 00:48:20.880
And he teaches at UCLA, and he works on cool shit like the twin prime conjecture.
00:48:21.199 --> 00:48:25.679
And if you ask any mathematician, at the top of their list is Mr.
00:48:25.840 --> 00:48:31.280
Terry Tao for being the Einstein of math of our age.
00:48:31.519 --> 00:48:33.440
So journalists ask Mr.
00:48:33.599 --> 00:48:38.559
Terry Tao if mathematics is invented or discovered.
00:48:38.880 --> 00:48:39.199
Love it.
00:48:39.599 --> 00:48:49.280
So he has paved the way for connecting pieces or branches of mathematics in ways no one else has.
00:48:49.760 --> 00:48:59.440
Uh Ed Witten has done similar, and Ed Witten is is a is a caliber of genius too, and he's actually blended physics with mathematics.
00:48:59.599 --> 00:49:15.840
Terry Tao is more on the strictly mathematical side, but both their geniuses and geniuses in general draw these these connections between branches of thinking and specialties within mathematics and physics no one else has seen before.
00:49:16.960 --> 00:49:25.039
These connections and these new maths that these geniuses create are discovered.
00:49:27.199 --> 00:49:29.760
It's not like I made this shit up.
00:49:30.800 --> 00:50:00.960
It's out there for us to think it through, to create proofs, and using our imagination and cognitive wherewithal to logically and inevitably substantiate that these are a priori realities, they're independent of experience, they're eternal by definition, and they're not subject to our own subjective interpretation.
00:50:01.360 --> 00:50:03.760
We are discovering math.
00:50:04.239 --> 00:50:07.039
It's like the truth is out there.
00:50:07.280 --> 00:50:16.639
So by extension, the moon it's like we discover the moon when we look at it.
00:50:16.800 --> 00:50:30.000
And the moon being similarly, if we like this idea, this logical mathematical kind of thing, by measuring it, we've discovered it.
00:50:30.239 --> 00:50:32.239
But it was always there.
00:50:33.199 --> 00:50:34.719
Right, it was always there in the math.
00:50:34.960 --> 00:50:36.159
Does this kind of help a little bit?
00:50:36.239 --> 00:50:48.719
I'm bridging tech's mathematical universe with this idea that we discover both mathematics and we even discover the physical world by interacting with it.
00:50:49.039 --> 00:50:52.079
And and here's the way I like to describe what you're saying.
00:50:52.239 --> 00:50:56.960
Uh you know, people, the the new thing these days is are we living in a simulation?
00:50:57.039 --> 00:51:01.280
Is it are we simulated because we everything behaves so mathematically?
00:51:01.599 --> 00:51:23.920
But to play devil's advocate there, if if information is already real, if mathematics is already real, and you are putting that math, that fundamental math, into a tool, into a computer, so that you can rewind fast-forward the simulation and look at it.
00:51:24.159 --> 00:51:34.559
You're not really inventing a universe, you're actually discovering one that already exists, and you're just using a tool to look at it.
00:51:34.880 --> 00:51:37.599
Kind of like uh your moon analogy.
00:51:37.760 --> 00:51:43.039
The moon exists in the math, but when we look at it, we see it animated.
00:51:43.440 --> 00:51:51.840
The the universes exist in the math, but when we look at it in a simulation, we see it animated, but it's already there.
00:51:52.159 --> 00:51:54.800
Another analogy is playing a video game.
00:51:55.440 --> 00:52:04.480
So you're you're playing GTA, or you're playing Call of Duty, or you're playing something that might be more family friendly.
00:52:04.719 --> 00:52:22.320
And uh it's it's an emergent experience between you as a player, the software, the code that is instructing the pixels on a two-dimensional screen to be energized and to light up.
00:52:22.559 --> 00:52:22.800
Right.
00:52:23.199 --> 00:52:26.400
It's all being processed on a computer.
00:52:26.960 --> 00:52:43.760
So when you look at the screen, the monitor, while you're playing an interactive video game, you're under the impression that you are in a three-dimensional spatial environment, the time is passing, and that causality exists.
00:52:44.000 --> 00:52:56.400
When you move your controller to the left, your uh your avatar moves to the left, and you could perform functions with causal results on screen.
00:52:56.719 --> 00:52:59.360
But what is actually going on?
00:52:59.599 --> 00:53:19.679
What's actually going on is that a CPU and then nowadays GPUs within this box are churning through millions of lines of code, and and electricity is flowing between the box and that screen, and reality in that game isn't even three-dimensional, it's two-dimensional.
00:53:19.840 --> 00:53:20.559
And guess what?
00:53:20.719 --> 00:53:27.119
It's not even two-dimensional, it's linear lines of code that are being processed.
00:53:27.360 --> 00:53:29.440
And then what's your gaming experience?
00:53:29.679 --> 00:53:41.840
Well, it's not just objectively feeding you this information, you're dynamically interacting and controlling that environment by measuring it by playing the game.
00:53:42.079 --> 00:53:51.840
And I think that's an interesting analogy, which is what if the backbone of reality itself is like software in the game?
00:53:52.320 --> 00:53:58.239
And then what if measurement is us working the controller and interacting with it?
00:53:58.320 --> 00:54:12.880
And what if our perception of reality is as far removed from the CPU processing lines of code as is how we see the world and what the world is?
00:54:13.760 --> 00:54:14.719
Right, right.
00:54:14.880 --> 00:54:33.039
And yeah, I I think it's it's a little bit more like uh Conway's game than so, like with a programmer actually out there like an alien programmer programming us, but we're we're inside the math as an automata, and we it's like the holographic principle.
00:54:33.119 --> 00:54:37.840
We it's really everything is just flat Platonic mathematical law.
00:54:37.920 --> 00:54:44.559
There's no um animation to it, but our measurements bring out that hologram.
00:54:44.880 --> 00:54:45.599
I love that.
00:54:45.679 --> 00:54:55.920
That that's really the heart of what we've been getting at, which is we live in an emergent dynamic reality, and it all depends on your point of view.
00:54:56.079 --> 00:54:58.800
From within the reality is of course, here we are.
00:54:58.960 --> 00:55:08.480
We're in space and time, and we're on a podcast, and we're doing this meta exercise of talking about reality, is being on this podcast.
00:55:08.960 --> 00:55:16.400
But we're like characters in a video game, and to your point, we're not even characters, we're like NPCs.
00:55:16.639 --> 00:55:37.840
Because the essence, even depending on your point of view, is we're just this composite emergent entity that is doing what we're doing within this bigger block universe, which is simultaneously infinitesimally small and infinitely large.
00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:53.760
There is no absolute time and space, and it's not like a piece of software is running, there's just this eternal essence of everything this, everythingness and nothingness.
00:55:54.400 --> 00:56:00.320
And you could say we're in a tiny part of it, but that doesn't really have meaning because it's tiny part of what?
00:56:00.639 --> 00:56:03.679
Tiny part of everything and tiny part of nothing.
00:56:03.920 --> 00:56:08.000
So you can't help but get real zen about this shit real fast.
00:56:08.800 --> 00:56:09.599
Right, right.
00:56:09.920 --> 00:56:12.559
And and you know, life is beautiful.
00:56:12.719 --> 00:56:16.639
You here we are, we're looking at it under a microscope.
00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:24.880
And it and it it doesn't when you look at something under a microscope, you don't see how beautiful it is and what it's all about.
00:56:25.119 --> 00:56:28.000
Um, but it's it's that's what we we do.
00:56:28.079 --> 00:56:32.880
We want to figure it out, we want to know what it's all about, but uh that doesn't mean it's still not beautiful.
00:56:33.039 --> 00:56:38.960
When you scroll back out and look at it, and you have all this love, all these relationships, life is beautiful.
00:56:39.119 --> 00:56:47.440
Um, but I I I can't help but use that microscope and try to figure out what's going on and how this place works.
00:56:47.760 --> 00:56:53.039
And uh I use the word microscope because it's it's it's measurement really good, you know.
00:56:53.199 --> 00:56:56.960
And uh we're not the only things that make measurements.
00:56:57.119 --> 00:57:08.639
Thermometers make measurements, you know, it's just you know, and uh I I think consciousness is a spectrum, it's like a thermometer or it's like a a human.
00:57:08.880 --> 00:57:12.320
It's a how advanced can measurements be?
00:57:12.960 --> 00:57:27.920
And you know, the difference I'd say between us and say AI, because AI is mathematical as well, is that we have like pleasure and pain algorithms built into us.
00:57:28.079 --> 00:57:35.760
Like our measurements matter to our survival, whereas in AI's measurements, it doesn't matter to its survival.
00:57:35.920 --> 00:57:46.960
So it doesn't have it hasn't evolved to have uh pleasure and pain mathematical algorithm rhythms associated with living, if that makes sense.
00:57:47.360 --> 00:57:49.360
Absolutely, and these are great points.
00:57:49.519 --> 00:58:10.159
And it also highlights the reality that we've just discovered, frankly, over the last three, three, four years, and especially over the last year or two, that intelligence and language are not contingent on self-awareness and even sentience.
00:58:10.719 --> 00:58:38.079
So you could be conversant just like a human being, you could be intelligent in terms of solving problems and cogitating and have absolutely zero sense of yourself as separate from the world or existing in any kind of way that we at least understand.
00:58:38.559 --> 00:58:44.400
And that I think is the heart of your point, which is AI is entirely mathematical.
00:58:44.480 --> 00:58:53.440
The transformer model uses matrix math to find associations predictively between different words.
00:58:54.000 --> 00:58:59.679
If you say, I say queen, and then the AI is like waiting.
00:58:59.840 --> 00:59:01.039
Okay, queen what?
00:59:01.199 --> 00:59:02.960
You saw queen in concert?
00:59:03.119 --> 00:59:05.760
Are you talking about the band with Freddie Mercury?
00:59:05.920 --> 00:59:10.320
Well, I'll find out depending on what that queen is associated.
00:59:10.639 --> 00:59:19.519
Music, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, and then the LLM knows that it's Queen the band.
00:59:20.239 --> 00:59:42.000
And if it's if it's a queen, a pair of queens, then it instantly knows that it's a card game, and then it shifts its knowledge and its prediction about what to anticipate next and how to aggregate this into some kind of cobble-together response that is intelligent.
00:59:42.239 --> 00:59:51.679
And if you say king and queen or the queen of England, see, it it branches and it knows and it associates.
00:59:52.000 --> 01:00:04.000
But the thing itself has no lived experience of seeing rock bands, hearing music, playing poker, having thoughts about English royalty.
01:00:04.320 --> 01:00:05.920
None of that exists.
01:00:06.159 --> 01:00:08.880
Absolutely Z fucking row exists.
01:00:09.119 --> 01:00:14.320
And that, in a sense, puts the limit on what the architecture of an LLM can do.
01:00:14.480 --> 01:00:18.000
Everyone's talking about AGI, artificial general intelligence.
01:00:18.159 --> 01:00:21.679
Everyone's freaking out that the machines are smarter than we are.
01:00:21.920 --> 01:00:28.079
But you bring up a great point that measurement has different forms too.
01:00:28.239 --> 01:00:32.960
In ways, the AI is measuring as well, it's calculating.
01:00:33.760 --> 01:00:52.800
But a lot of what we're talking about in what makes life beautiful, to your points, which are very poetic, is it's math might be the foundation, but what makes us uniquely human and what makes our lives particularly special, and it's the theme of the book that I wrote too, which is what is true love?
01:00:53.280 --> 01:00:54.000
Right, right.
01:00:54.800 --> 01:00:58.400
What are the most important things to us as humans?
01:00:58.880 --> 01:01:06.559
And they're completely irrespective of any of the stuff we've been talking about over the last hour.
01:01:06.800 --> 01:01:11.440
We could live in an infinite multiverse or infiniverse.
01:01:11.760 --> 01:01:18.719
None of this really ultimately matters because we love our kids and we want them to be safe and educated.
01:01:19.039 --> 01:01:23.519
We're with a life partner if we're lucky, and then we feel affection.
01:01:23.840 --> 01:01:28.000
Uh, we ate a steak or a burrito and it was yummy.
01:01:28.239 --> 01:01:28.960
You know what I mean?
01:01:29.840 --> 01:01:34.639
None of this is mathematical, none of this is multiverse.
01:01:34.800 --> 01:01:38.320
It's all about our lived experience.
01:01:38.639 --> 01:01:38.960
Right.
01:01:39.119 --> 01:01:40.880
Yep, absolutely, absolutely.
01:01:41.039 --> 01:01:44.239
And we we make meaning of the madness.
01:01:45.360 --> 01:01:46.079
Or the logic.
01:01:47.760 --> 01:01:49.360
Yeah, yeah, that is part of the fun.
01:01:49.599 --> 01:02:04.480
I think what what brought us together is this natural curiosity and this tying in that we're speaking the same language and lingo, we love the same pundits, we read a lot of the same books, and you're you're a gym coach, right?
01:02:04.719 --> 01:02:06.960
I am, yeah, yeah, coach gymnastics.
01:02:07.440 --> 01:02:26.400
I do marketing consulting, so we're we're not professional pundits or philosophers, but we love the same stuff, and I think it comes from a natural curiosity about what makes the world the way it is, why we have this sense of wonder, why?
01:02:26.719 --> 01:02:33.840
And we get it in terms of integrating all of this philosophy and science, and this shit is amazing.
01:02:34.000 --> 01:02:46.880
This shit only happened over the last hundred years or so, and even less, and it keeps changing and we keep learning, just like we learned how intelligence and language has nothing to do with consciousness.
01:02:48.239 --> 01:03:00.079
And now we're we we might learn, you know, who knows that that uh you know, when finally quantum gravity is figured out, then it could be a whole new ball game from there.
01:03:00.559 --> 01:03:01.039
Yep.
01:03:01.280 --> 01:03:02.880
Yeah, absolutely.
01:03:03.199 --> 01:03:06.320
And you know, a lot of a lot of people say, well, is there free will?
01:03:06.480 --> 01:03:07.519
Is there free will?
01:03:07.679 --> 01:03:24.960
And I I'm not sure I I understand that that question because in order to have options, in order to have free will, you have to have logical structure, you have to have different logical uh probability paths that you can take.
01:03:25.119 --> 01:03:29.760
Those already have to be uh in the map, they already have to be there.
01:03:29.920 --> 01:03:33.679
And I think in the multiverse, I think we traverse them all.
01:03:33.920 --> 01:03:36.639
So uh I think that is free will.
01:03:36.800 --> 01:03:41.360
You know, I I I believe you know we we get all our choices realized.
01:03:41.519 --> 01:03:53.760
It's uh it's sort of like uh uh we have all our potentials realized, and it's not necessarily uh a bad thing to look at life as being mathematical.
01:03:53.920 --> 01:03:56.400
I think that it's a good thing.
01:03:56.800 --> 01:04:17.199
Again, I'm a hundred percent aligned, and that's one of the themes that I work at in the book, and I'll elaborate on sequels too, which is all of these paradoxes and these conundrums of philosophy, if you do believe in the multiverse, I call it the infiniverse because it's not just multiple, I think it's infinite.
01:04:17.599 --> 01:04:28.000
Uh, a lot of these are in a sense solved because to your point, free will it begs the question of what decision is.
01:04:28.239 --> 01:04:52.320
And if every decision you could possibly make plays itself out with some kind of probability distribution across the infiniverse, then we can simultaneously be free and at the same time determined, and our feeling of free will is legit because within this universe, we are autonomous agents making decisions.
01:04:52.559 --> 01:05:08.079
But when you change your perspective, there's an infinite or even transfinite number of Josh's and Mookis having this conversation with every possible variation, and uh, and are we free?
01:05:08.239 --> 01:05:10.000
Well, look, I'm gonna raise my right hand.
01:05:10.079 --> 01:05:10.639
I just did.
01:05:10.960 --> 01:05:11.840
You just did, there you go.
01:05:12.239 --> 01:05:13.119
I have freedom.
01:05:13.360 --> 01:05:17.360
But in an infinite number of universes, I raised my left one.
01:05:17.760 --> 01:05:18.880
Right, right.
01:05:20.800 --> 01:05:25.599
And and it's and it's liberating and enslaving at the same time.
01:05:27.599 --> 01:05:41.599
And and I even extrapolate this there's a civil war going on in the infiniverse between the one and the many, and the many are proponents of the of the consequences of the infiniverse in terms of endless possibilities.
01:05:41.679 --> 01:05:49.920
They're hedonistic, they're fearless because if they die, they don't care because there's an infinite number of themselves.
01:05:50.320 --> 01:05:50.639
Right.
01:05:51.840 --> 01:05:59.760
And then and then they go for it, and then in opposition is the one, which is there might be an infinite number of media.
01:06:00.559 --> 01:06:07.280
Out there, but right here, right now, is the only me that counts.
01:06:07.599 --> 01:06:08.000
Right.
01:06:08.239 --> 01:06:26.800
And with that comes personal value and responsibility, doing the right thing, and being the best person that I can be right here, right now, and not using this multiplicity and this variation and this mathematical whatever as an excuse.
01:06:27.440 --> 01:06:27.840
Right.
01:06:28.159 --> 01:06:34.159
That from a almost Sartre existential perspective, it's on me.
01:06:34.400 --> 01:06:35.519
I make a decision.
01:06:35.599 --> 01:06:44.960
I'm not going to commit suicide and I'm not going to just give up or be reckless because I know there's an infinite number of mookies, and it really doesn't matter in the bigger picture.
01:06:45.280 --> 01:06:49.519
But I'm going to live my life the best I can and be a good person.
01:06:50.239 --> 01:06:50.719
Right.
01:06:50.880 --> 01:06:54.000
And that's that's definitely the true moral of all of this.
01:06:54.159 --> 01:06:55.679
I I absolutely agree.
01:06:55.920 --> 01:06:58.159
Yeah, and and it's exciting.
01:06:58.400 --> 01:07:04.960
And and I'm going to put links in the description below for people to get your book.
01:07:05.280 --> 01:07:05.840
Excellent.
01:07:05.920 --> 01:07:06.239
Okay.
01:07:06.480 --> 01:07:30.239
And uh and I would love to continue the conversation because we we only touched on a few things that that could be a conversation unto themselves, like Bergstrom's simulation hypothesis that you were hinting at, that there's probably you know, if you do the math, there's infinitely many more simulations than what would be considered basement realities that spawn them.
01:07:30.800 --> 01:07:32.559
It's all turtles all the way down.
01:07:32.800 --> 01:07:33.679
All the way down.
01:07:33.840 --> 01:07:44.079
And then to your point, mathematically, there's really no difference between a simulation and what we would consider reality because it's all just code in a way, right?
01:07:44.159 --> 01:07:45.920
It's just playing itself out.
01:07:46.079 --> 01:07:48.320
And there are there's measurement.
01:07:48.480 --> 01:07:55.760
So if you're measuring something in a simulation or you're measuring something in a basement reality, it's still measurement.
01:07:56.079 --> 01:07:58.000
Same rules apply, right?
01:07:59.360 --> 01:07:59.760
Absolutely.
01:08:00.480 --> 01:08:04.400
Cool, con cool conversation there too, and it has tons of consequences.
01:08:04.639 --> 01:08:07.440
So let's get together again and do part two.
01:08:08.000 --> 01:08:09.199
All right, I'm all about it.
01:08:09.679 --> 01:08:13.199
In a little deeper, maybe we can get some feedback from listeners and viewers.
01:08:13.280 --> 01:08:14.960
They might have some questions.
01:08:16.079 --> 01:08:21.680
It was a real joy in this universe happening to run into you on Medium.
01:08:22.479 --> 01:08:23.520
Likewise, here.
01:08:23.840 --> 01:08:37.920
It's inspirational that kindred souls can still connect in the mess that is the internet, that among this tsunami of content, you can still connect with people and and have a great conversation.
01:08:38.399 --> 01:08:43.039
And it really inspires me because lots of times I feel like it's just me.
01:08:43.119 --> 01:08:46.880
I mean, I'm having these ideas and I think it's crazy time.
01:08:47.119 --> 01:08:52.159
And then I meet a guy like you and it's like, hey, that guy, Josh, believes in the same shit I do.
01:08:53.199 --> 01:08:56.239
And he knows as much about it as I do.
01:08:56.319 --> 01:09:00.800
And, you know, we can have a great hour-long conversation and just scratch the surface.
01:09:01.119 --> 01:09:03.199
That's exactly why I appreciate it too.
01:09:03.359 --> 01:09:07.279
I mean, I really I can't have these conversations with anybody else.
01:09:07.359 --> 01:09:08.720
So I really appreciate it.
01:09:09.039 --> 01:09:12.880
I've been doing it with Claude or Claudia, you know, my AI.
01:09:13.840 --> 01:09:15.760
And that, frankly, has been reassuring.
01:09:15.920 --> 01:09:21.279
I'll bring up, you know, let's talk, you know, Tegmark and Wolfram's Rulia.
01:09:22.079 --> 01:09:28.640
And I thought that maybe I read it somewhere, and now I'm hallucinating, and all of a sudden, Claudia will be like, Sure, Mookie.
01:09:28.880 --> 01:09:33.359
And then I have an hour-long conversation with my AI bot about this stuff.
01:09:33.680 --> 01:09:46.880
But it's but it's eminently more worthwhile and satisfying, especially emotionally connecting with another human about why we're here, how we're here, and how perception is nothing like reality.
01:09:47.039 --> 01:09:51.119
And I think I'll just part with this one question for you.
01:09:51.520 --> 01:09:52.000
Sure.
01:09:52.319 --> 01:09:55.199
What what the hell do you think the is?
01:09:57.039 --> 01:10:04.159
Like, you know, you on on the one extreme, you have the omega, which is a mathematical concept in set theory.
01:10:04.239 --> 01:10:11.119
It's the set that contains all other sets, including itself, which is the infinite, infinite.
01:10:11.279 --> 01:10:15.920
Everything imaginable, everything possible, everything impossible.
01:10:16.159 --> 01:10:20.720
The totality of everything is the big omega, right?
01:10:21.279 --> 01:10:29.359
And then you have just us here like shooting the shit, and we know we're in this like little suburb of Omega.
01:10:30.079 --> 01:10:33.520
But what what the hell do you think it is?
01:10:33.760 --> 01:10:54.960
It's like, what is is what is reality, and and it's been there forever because there's no time, there's no space, there's no way we could even conceive of it because all of our frames of reference have to do with how we've evolved to perceive the universe to survive within it.
01:10:55.199 --> 01:11:00.479
That's that's Douglas Hoffman's point of view, another great book, The Case Against Reality.
01:11:00.800 --> 01:11:03.760
Oh, I love yeah, Donald Hoffman, the yeah, I love that.
01:11:04.000 --> 01:11:07.359
Which is like I think Donald or Douglas, I think Donald Hoffman.
01:11:07.680 --> 01:11:08.800
Donald, Donald, yeah.
01:11:09.039 --> 01:11:14.880
It's like uh, look, there's the tiger, so run, and then look, there's something yummy, eat it.
01:11:15.199 --> 01:11:23.520
And and we just evolved to survive, but it's got nothing to do with this basement bare bones reality of is this.
01:11:23.680 --> 01:11:27.920
What when you like stare into the sky or you're up at 2 a.m.
01:11:28.479 --> 01:11:33.439
and you think about this shit, because I know you do, what is it?
01:11:34.000 --> 01:11:36.079
What what what is it?
01:11:36.479 --> 01:11:42.000
And and I think I think kind of like what you're asking almost is like, why is there something rather than nothing?
01:11:42.079 --> 01:11:54.239
Maybe is that kind of and and you know, I you know, for me, one plus one equals to whether there's anything here or not, that's it's just a logical uh statement.
01:11:54.399 --> 01:12:22.720
I I think logic is is logic is a is uh and I do think that logic has a uh it's kind of like kind of space, it has this relationship where it's the same thing as measurement, and that uh you can't have logical structure, a difference between two sets of information like a one and a zero without the logic of a measurement separating that.
01:12:23.279 --> 01:12:28.239
So I I think logic is here because it's here, and measurement's a part of the logic.
01:12:28.479 --> 01:12:31.920
That's kind of how I what I think the is is the is.
01:12:32.960 --> 01:12:33.680
That's cool.
01:12:33.920 --> 01:12:51.840
I I sometimes ruminate about this, and one conclusion that I've arrived at is this logical mathematical backbone or backdrop is really just a tiny, tiny part of the rest of everything.
01:12:52.159 --> 01:13:26.479
So there's if you can imagine it as a space or a landscape, we happen to exist within a tiny part of reality, capital R, which is a tiny part of this logical mathematical realm where where this stuff actually makes sense and opposites, and there are huge swaths, if we could describe it that way, of reality where there's no math, there's no logic, there's just something, something.
01:13:26.640 --> 01:13:29.279
Maybe we can't even conceive of what it is.
01:13:29.920 --> 01:13:30.239
Right.
01:13:30.560 --> 01:13:38.880
And reality capital R is even bigger than all possible realities that we can conceive of.
01:13:39.039 --> 01:13:41.119
It goes even further than that.
01:13:42.159 --> 01:13:49.199
My one question though is any math that's not really logical, can a measurement really happen there?
01:13:49.359 --> 01:13:55.359
And I I think measurements only happen where math is logical, if that makes sense.
01:13:55.680 --> 01:13:57.119
I think it does.
01:13:57.439 --> 01:14:14.960
But at the same time, you can imagine these realms, if you will, that don't have math, don't have logic, and maybe have some other kind of conditions where different kind of shit plays itself out.
01:14:15.199 --> 01:14:15.439
Yeah.
01:14:15.680 --> 01:14:19.119
And maybe there's just a whole lot of nothing, nothing.
01:14:20.239 --> 01:14:20.560
Right.
01:14:20.880 --> 01:14:23.359
Our universe is mostly empty space.
01:14:23.439 --> 01:14:26.239
There's an energy womb that's there, you know.
01:14:26.319 --> 01:14:34.640
I mean, there's energy pervasive throughout space and time as we understand it, with virtual particles coming in and out of existence, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
01:14:35.439 --> 01:14:37.600
But most of it is empty.
01:14:37.840 --> 01:14:40.640
Maybe most of reality is like that, too.
01:14:40.720 --> 01:14:46.479
That it's just these huge swaths of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
01:14:46.960 --> 01:14:56.800
And and we're just like Gdel's incompleteness theorem that of all this nothing, there's gotta be something like a knot in the wood.
01:14:59.359 --> 01:15:00.239
Right, right.
01:15:00.479 --> 01:15:28.640
And may maybe dark energy is uh just where measurements aren't happening, and information just runs wild, and all possibilities run wild, and then when measurements happen, information is constrained, and that's uh where our galaxies, our solar system, and dark energy is runs off, and we all run away from each other because there's no measurements being made in the darkness of space there.
01:15:29.039 --> 01:15:29.920
Maybe.
01:15:30.319 --> 01:15:40.079
Yeah, the Roman telescope that just launched, I think, the other day, uh, is gonna measure huge regions of the night sky.
01:15:40.159 --> 01:15:43.760
It's like uh a hundred Hubbles in one telescope.
01:15:44.000 --> 01:15:44.560
Oh man.
01:15:44.960 --> 01:15:57.119
And uh maybe we'll get a few answers to that dark energy, is if dark matter even is a thing, and it's a flaw in our math, right?
01:15:58.319 --> 01:16:17.039
It could be, or you know, it could be the measurements made in uh the multiverse, like in uh the quantum multiverse, the the superposition of us measurements being made that we can't see that are in our universe holding, still holding our information together, possibly.
01:16:17.439 --> 01:16:19.920
We just don't know, and that's part of the fun.
01:16:20.319 --> 01:16:20.880
Right.
01:16:21.279 --> 01:16:23.600
So thanks so much, Josh, for making time.
01:16:23.840 --> 01:16:31.439
Incverse algorithm, a slightly different episode than usual, but I love using this platform to talk to writers and thinkers.
01:16:31.840 --> 01:16:37.840
And the other important point I want to make is that we put so many creds on creds in the society.
01:16:37.920 --> 01:16:44.560
You got PhD, M B A, B A, B S after your name.
01:16:44.800 --> 01:16:52.720
Uh, my character Johnny Faszuli in the novel has W-I-T after his name, which says whatever it takes.
01:16:54.239 --> 01:17:03.359
I just want to emphasize that there are a lot of thinking people with a lot of interesting ideas who actually put good content out there, and they're not typically accredited.
01:17:03.520 --> 01:17:14.319
It's not like you need to be a professor of of mathematics at Columbia University and have legit creds to be able to speak.
01:17:14.399 --> 01:17:23.199
And the opposite is also true that you've got a lot of charlatans and you've got a lot of people writing off their reputations, spewing bullshit.
01:17:23.520 --> 01:17:50.560
So one of the greatest aspects of the democratization of the internet is people like us being able to have these conversations in a civil, intelligent, polite, and interesting way without having to prove ourselves with classroom experience or uh you know prior author author authority, like Eric Cartman says in South Park.
01:17:51.039 --> 01:17:52.560
I agree 100%.
01:17:53.119 --> 01:17:53.920
Absolutely.
01:17:54.399 --> 01:17:55.600
Keep it going, folks.
01:17:55.680 --> 01:17:57.439
So like, comment, share.
01:17:57.520 --> 01:18:01.279
Uh, if you want to leave a comment, there's a little link in the description.
01:18:01.439 --> 01:18:09.039
You can email me and check out the link for uh Joshua's book and tell us what you think.
01:18:09.279 --> 01:18:10.319
Thanks, Joshua.
01:18:10.399 --> 01:18:11.359
Take care, bro.
01:18:11.760 --> 01:18:13.199
Thank you so much for having me on.
01:18:13.279 --> 01:18:14.079
I really appreciate it.
01:18:14.159 --> 01:18:14.880
It was a lot of fun.
01:18:15.119 --> 01:18:16.159
Let's do part two.
01:18:16.560 --> 01:18:17.359
Yeah, absolutely.
01:18:17.439 --> 01:18:17.920
Let's do it.
01:18:18.479 --> 01:18:19.600
Rock and roll.