← Philosophy For Our Times
Philosophy For Our Times
The relationship between mind and matter | Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Carlo Rovelli
00:50:50
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- [00:01]
A
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B
Experience for me happens not when you have a theory, it's confirmed or not, but when something happens which literally destroys the very network of presuppositions, it literally destroys your world.
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A
Welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. I'm Zeb. And I'm Avi. And today we bring you the self and the world. So this is a debate between Slavoj Iek, who needs no introduction, Alenka Zupancic, who is a Lacanian philosopher and very interesting lady. We've got Carlo Rovelli, who joins the debate from America, and Jack Symes, hosts. And they kind of really go into how do we know ourselves? To what extent is that vis a vis the world in a kind of dialectical crash into what extent is that rid in our own materiality? And I think you guys will really enjoy. So without any further ado, we will hand over to Jack Symes. Thank you. It's great to be back. Lovely to see so many of you joining us for the self and the World. We tend to think of ourselves as observers of the world and experience as something different from the material stuff that makes up reality. Yet at the same time, human beings, we're at once part of the universe and part of our own inner worlds. And this is profoundly puzzling, this relationship that we're both part of something in our internal minds, inside of our brains, inside of our skulls and objects in the world at the same time. And this has plagued Western thought for a considerable amount of time. Materialists claim there's only physical stuff, but if so, then thought and experience in our mind seems to be more of an illusion than something concrete. At the same time, the illusionists, the idealists, tell us that only consciousness exists, that everything exists is made up of mental qualities. And dualists, the most popular view, think that both of these things exist. Both we are internal, non physical minds, as well as being physical and out there in the world. Is the self a part of the world or necessarily outside of it? Was Kant right that the distinction between subject and object is necessary for experience to be possible? Or are these deep metaphysical questions beyond us and our theories and language incapable of uncovering the ultimate state of things. Joining us to discuss these questions, we have three outstanding selves here with us in the world. Slavoj Zizek, Elenka Zupancic and Carlo Rovelli. Slavoj Zizek is one of the world's most famous philosophers, making the rest of us look bad by being the author of over 50, 50 books.
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B
Poor World, if I am the most.
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A
Patient, including his most recent zero points.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
Elenka Zupancic is a leading philosopher and social theorist and professor at the European Graduate School and the University of Nova Garitsa. And joining us from the usa, leading theoretical physicist and author of numerous best selling books and founding figure of the field of quantum gravity, we have Carlo Rovelli. I'd like each of you to sell out of your stools in regard to the central question. Is the self a part of the world or necessarily outside of it?
- [04:06]
B
Slavoj, it's an impossible task, you know, basically to explain everything in three minutes, but I can try. Okay, first distinction, which is necessary here, and it's not even specifically philosophical. Carlo developed it in detail in his work on quantum mechanics. If I would draw a distinction between world and whatever we call universe, all there is, I think world is always what there is from a single unique point. And of course, we are not out of that world. We are. I shamelessly used here Heidegger's term in Der Welzein. We are in the world, caught into it, but we are not limited. We are not limited to that. So again, world is. Is for me, for example, we can live in different worlds, even if we live in same reality. World is not just what we see, it's what we see always perceived from a standpoint, which embodies certain ideological, or however you call them, presuppositions. So this is why both versions that you mentioned, naturalism and idealism, I of course reject them both. Why naturalism? I think they both miss something that was at a different level. But I found a strange echo in it developed by Carlo, in this idea of that there is no unity of reality. Every notion of all reality or universality is rooted in certain. Is rooted in certain specific point. Every universal notion is rooted in a singularity. Here we don't have time to this. But just to provoke Carlo in his Helgoland, I think he has a wonderful chapter on Nagarjuna, you know, the Mahayana Buddhist who emphasizes this. The world is just fleeting phenomena, blah, blah. The void is behind what I would have said. I don't have time to explain. I Know, I'm very, very close to three minutes. Is that, yes, we have void in the sense of the ultimate foundation of reality, which is otherwise poorly relational. The only absolute thing we can say is void. But I think there is another void, the void of absolute singularity. Me as me. I am unique, but I'm unique in the sense of ultimately I can abstract of all properties. So I think that to be. Consequently, here I really rely on Carlo relativist. I think that we need void as the ultimate background. But every perspective on void is based on self. Self, which is also in itself a void, a singular point of void. I don't have time to develop this. Sorry, can I just add.
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A
Can I bring in Alenka? Because I want to hear. I'll come to you first once we've had these opening statements about your thoughts on the nature of it. This is good. Would you agree with Slavoid that the self, or would you say that the self is no different from things in the world? Or do you think there's empty singularity?
- [08:26]
C
First of all, I think I would need to use a slightly different term, not exactly self, perhaps, but we use the term subject. I don't know. I work with the term subject, which precisely is not something directly substantial or physical, but nevertheless is part of the physical work. Or you cannot simply say that it isn't. So for me, subject is, you could say, both inside and outside. But what this means is that precisely as subject. This is kind of my speculative proposition. Not only mine, but we are subject is something that names, let's say, this kind of eccentric way in which reality reflects not simply itself, but its own inconsistency, its own impasse, its own negativity? So this negativity, to come back to your question, physical or not, I mean, what is the status of precisely negativity, which is not simply physical, but at the same time it is not simply nothing in the sense of it has consequences. So there is something that. I think it's for me, the fact that there is something like a subject that reflects, that tries not only has knowledge about reality, but can actually influence this reality to the point, be it either that we talk now of whatever Anthropocene or that we landed on the moon. I mean, this is not just reflecting the reality, it is actually intervening in it with apparatus, basically of signifiers. But when can these apparatus actually enter the reality? My claim would be it precisely through this wide. From the point where reality itself has a gap, a crack, it's inconsistent. This is the point where also subjectivity has some kind of grasp or grab into it. So I would say that, just very simply that this question of relationship between subject and objective reality, or whatever, is not at all a question obviously of simple mirroring. It is a kind of mirroring that it's complicated, at least in two ways. This I use now, the more philosophical expressions. It is complicated not only with these Kantian questions of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge and so on. What does it need to take place for us to know something objectively? But I would add also, also by the question of the conditions of possibility of this transcendental subject itself. What does it happen in reality? What happens in reality for something like a subjectivity to emerge from it? This already is also an indicator of something real, of something, let's say, out there. I don't know if this.
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A
I've got a couple of thoughts, but let's go to Carlo. Carlo, are we any different from the world around us? What's the perspective of physics as you see it?
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D
Thanks, Jack. First, let me say that I am delighted to be with Alenka and Slavo. Finally. I'm not doing a panel with my colleagues, scientists, they're always so boring. So I'm so happy to have.
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B
People.
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D
Who are much more interesting. For me, the way I view the problem is that the very separation, the very question, comes from us confusing ourselves and assuming things which are. Which are not good assumptions. So, first of all, is the world out there independent of me? Yes, of course it is independent of me. What do I know about the world out there? Well, I only know what I know, which is contained in my brain. My brain, my, my, me, myself, knows, has information about the world. You can check it, you can ask me, and then look around and see that it. It matches. Sometimes, sometimes I'm dreaming, sometimes I'm not. I don't see anything contradictory or strange in the fact that we are part of the world. We as human beings, we as animals, we as biological creatures, we as intellectuals, whatever, we are part of the world, but part of the world that in a specific sense, in a very clear sense, has information about the rest of the world. And at the same time, the world that we know, that I know, that we collectively, as humankind know, as a civilization know. It's just what we know. It's not the world independent that what we know. So I don't see anything contradictory in that. Unless one starts asking questions which make no sense. For instance, how should I think of that from the perspective of nobody? I think that's a wrong Question. There is my perspective, the Slava perspective. There is our common perspective. Maybe there is a perspective that wolves have on us and they are coherent, they make sense. But every time we give a description about the world, we are giving a description, there is a descriptor who gives this description. Every time there is some information about the world, there is some embodied entity of the world that has this information about the world, that knows the world in the moment in which we imagine to be outside the world, to seeing from the outside, we create a ghost, the ghost of pure knowledge, outside reality. Or every time we sort of try to think about the world independently of somebody who thinks about it, and then we create the illusion of something without observer, that we create confusion for ourselves. So I don't think there is any contradiction in the simple fact that the world that I know is in my mind and I am part of the world.
- [14:29]
A
So let's open up the first theme as to what the nature of the self and experience is, what it's grounded in. Can I push you on this, Carlo? You say it's hard to grasp what it's like to see the world outside of our own perspective. You know, you can't have this view from nowhere, as it were. But what do you take the fundamental nature of stuff to be? Is it all just physical processes? Can we capture this all in the the language of science?
- [14:55]
D
I think that the world is actually fundamental. It's meaningless. There are things which are fundamental from the perspective of physics, and of course everything is physics. There's things fundamental. From this perspective of my desires, and that's something else from the perspective of economics, from the perspective of psychologist, fundamental. It's a very relative world. It means more important for me. I don't think it's a good question what fundamentally we have different ways of describing realities. What's more fundamental, the trees or the forest? Well, I mean, there are the trees and there is a forest. And if I say there are the trees, am I denying the existence of forest? No, of course not. If I say there are atoms, am I denying that there is water? Of course not. If I say that my brain functions in a certain way, I'm interested in the way function. My denying that there is a me knowing and talking to you? Of course not. I just adding perspectives on that. I don't think the self is anything mysterious more than a thunderstorm is mysterious. We haven't figured out how time works. I think that the self, which is a name, is an indexical name, is the name that a person speaking gives to itself that the speaker gives to itself. When you sort of want a metaphysical foundation of that you get in confusion. Is this idea of foundation outside everything that is the source of the confusion? I'm very close to what Slava is saying, extremely close to Slava is saying. I will interpret the vacuum, the emptiness of Nagarjuna and Buddhist philosophy in some metaphysical sense. Nagarjuna has a chapter which is the emptiness is empty. So don't take emptiness too seriously. It only means that you understand in something you have to refer to something else. So it's emptiness of independent existence, of things. Things make sense and can send them related to something else.
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A
Let's bring Slavo in on this point. Then, Slavo, what are your thoughts? The self? Nothing mysterious. And is this talk of what's fundamental the wrong sort of question?
- [17:13]
B
I wanted to go to this to the end, but I will answer now. I know in detail all this anil set and so on. Latest cognitivist theories about. About the self. And I think they. I don't have time to drive it. They miss precisely the dimension outlined also in Carlos work this loop. How we are of course part of the world, but at the same time we always perceive the world from our standpoint. So what I would say only I wonder, but maybe Carlo will agree in his latest theory. I read about this idea of I can observe others, they can observe me, and we reach some intersubjectivity here. I see this problem, the way we observe. I will be very brief, just one joke that you all know, but I think it's very instructive here because you also ask then experience. What is experience? A true experience. I speak here not just as a philosopher, but also in a daily sense. True experience for me happens not when you have a theory, it's confirmed or not, but when something happens which literally destroys the very network of presuppositions, it literally destroys your world. To give you an example. Sorry if you know the joke. It's a wonderful old joke which can be applied today to politics. Three big politicians today, Putin, Xi, the Chinese and Trump are allowed to meet God. And each of them asks him a question. Putin asks him, what will happen to my glorious Russia after we win over Ukraine? God answers, sad news, you will be a Chinese colony. Okay? Putin turns around and cries. Then she asks God, what will be with my China? He said, yeah, maybe you will get Russia, but you will have an economic collapse. Taiwan will even have to help you. She turns around, starts to cry. Then Trump steps forward and asks God So what will be with my Maga glorious America? If you are a little bit intelligent Hegelian, you know the answer. God turns around and starts to cry. And he is right. What happened now with this Trump revolution? It's not just that. Within the same horizon where we have more Democrats, more this, more that, some changes and so on. The basic presuppositions of how we perceive reality, changed experience mean that the very way we experience with measured reality standards fall apart. They disappear. As for the self, very briefly, with human subjectivity following both of you, I will say this. There is another loop. Loop in the sense of something give birth to something else, which retroactively then grounds its own presupposition. Isn't this. I hope you, Alenka, as a dogmatic Lacanian fellow will agree. Look, there is human subject only within language, symbolic universe. But at the same time, we are never at home in language. There is always a gap. You say something, you fail exactly to say what you wanted to say, and so on. And now comes my point, very precise one. The subject names this very failure. How do you know that I am a subject and not automatic monster when I try to say something but fail and only true if this failure is not programmed, an authentic failure. Can we see, can we grasp the direction of the self? You see the paradox again. The self tries to express itself. It's always inadequate. And this very failure retroactively constitutes the self. And to evoke the 19 immediately, the best known. I hate the movie, I hate Hugh Grant. But did you see Three Weddings and a Funeral? You know, that famous scene where he flirts with Andy McDowell? It's all staged, of course. How you know, he stumbles, repeats itself, blah, blah, blah, through that, at least in the movie. Not for me. He may appear as a subject. If somebody gives you a lady. Sorry for my traditional heterosexual perspective, a perfect love speech, it's by definition not authentic. So authenticity and failure go together.
- [22:49]
A
Okay, thank you. I didn't think we were going to go to Three Weddings and a Funeral at the end, at the brief point I, like Slavoj in there, said he hopes that you agree with this fundamental point. I was, I was a little confused with your opening remark. You said the self comes from something negative, as it were, like a kind of shake up. Could you elaborate on that?
- [23:06]
C
No, I'm just trying to make this more ontological point, that if you just juxtapose, let's say, the subject outside and then on the inside we have some kind of substantial reality, or vice versa. The point is that this substantial reality is not as substantial as it is may appear that it is inconsistent, that it has cracks and in this sense negativity inscribed into it, and that the subject kind of emerges and precisely in this temporal loop sense that Slavo just evoked as something that kind of presupposes this negativity, ontological negativity of the, let's say, the reality itself, but it's not directly reflecting it, but reflected through this double movement in which subject actually becomes something gives form in a way, even as a symptom or as this kind of failure that actually is the emergence of the subject when it comes to gives form or to this failure of this inconsistency of the structure itself. So this is why, if I can relate to what Carlo said, and I really much agree here, very much, it's that what is the basic fantasy that actually fills in these cracks in the universe? It's this fantasy that there is some big outside out there to which we have no. This is precisely something that is very much tained by our perspective, which is not, I would say, precisely reflective enough or taking into account this kind of negativity that subject is. And also in a way embodies. And so, I don't know, for me, experience. One thing to. To point when we talk about experience is precisely the fact that experience is never immediate, even the most. What we call the most basic experience. I mean, and here Kant was right already presupposes a whole lot of things. So there is this intermediation or non immediacy is also there when we talk about apparatus of language in terms of mathematical or physical formulas. I mean, this is the crucial question then becomes is this mediation, this kind of rupture, this kind of intervention? Language does not belong to me and it does not belong to the world. Exactly. Is this an obstacle necessarily to our, let's say, knowing something or getting in touch with some real and having consequences in this. Real or not? And my claim would be that no, not necessarily. Why would this necessarily be an obstacle? Perhaps this kind of thing that seems to alienate us from the real is actually something that is real in itself to the sense that it can put us in touch precisely at these points of rupture, not failure, also impossibilities, but it could be something that actually connects us to reality, rather than simply isolate us in some kind of discursive cage or whatever. Are these formulations?
- [26:17]
B
Yeah, this was basically the one sentence. Shut up, just a reply to you and link with Carlo. Why we, we, the Lacanian Stalinistroika, me, Umlad and dollar lacanias. Why we are so fascinated by quantum physics? Because we want to be ultimately materialists. But we are aware the lesson of quantum physics, not only of it, but especially of it, is we have to abandon this seventies and onward century notion of materialist means. There is empty space and then some small particles floating there, no emptiness, waves whatever, all that. The matter should be radically redefined. So our fascination with quantum physics with Carlo, and also you also have your troika, which is you, Francesca and Lee Smallin. Now you are for me the quantum counterpart of our Stalinistroika. What we are looking for you is as Alenka, set, okay, Subjectivity, yes, something unique, blah, blah, blah. But how must reality itself be structured so that something like subjectivity can emerge? We reject here this vulgar evolutionary materialism, which is empty words, but also, I hope you, Carlo, would agree, guys who are amusing to read, but I radically disagree with them, Donald Hoffman, guys like him, who give to quantum theory a mystical obscurity term. The idea is quantum physics explains not how consciousness emerges from reality, but how reality emerges from interacting consciousnesses. A certain gap disappears here. And the big ontological question, as you said, Alenka, is, is precisely how to formulate this gap. Impossibility, Tension, which must already be in under quotation marks, out there in reality, prior to self, in the sense of human self. That's our big philosophical problem. That's why we need people like Carlo.
- [28:48]
A
Well, let me bring Carlo back on, on this onslaught.
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B
That was my idea.
- [28:51]
A
Second thing, you know, put me out of a job if you're not careful. Carlo, I was reading the piece that you did for the festival this morning where you wrote, in Quantum Physics, an observer can be a detector, a screen or even a stone, anything that's affected by a process. It doesn't need to be conscious or human or living or anything of that sort. You're talking about an observer there. But we typically think observers, subjects can't be things like, you know, bicycles, chairs and carrots and things like that. They need to be like integrated brains, complex processes. Could you clarify what you think could count as a subject? Because it sounds like you might be coming towards the sort of idealist position there in that quote that I imagine you don't want to associate yourself with. Yes.
- [29:43]
D
Let me try to answer to this and to the very interesting point that. Let me start from this last thing and what you're asking, which is strictly connected to what Sliver was saying at the end about quantum physics. Quantum physics, it's interesting and relevant here precisely for the reason that Sly was saying. Namely, there was a time where science and physics in particular. Seemed to offer a foundational view of reality called materialism. Made by an empty space with material little stones moving around by forces. Quantum physics completely destroyed that for sure. Physical reality is not that. The phenomena that are clinically incompatible with that. Now, these phenomena are often described in terms of observer phenomena. What I think is a crucial idea here is to not be confused by words. Observer. The notion of observation, which is used in quantum physics. Even if some confused people say the opposite, has nothing to do with consciousness. Has nothing to do with a specific brain of something like us. Or the subject of anything like that. It's observed in a very simple sense. When we say the velocity of the Moon relative to the Earth has a certain value. The Earth is not conscious. It's just a way of saying that velocity is relational. If we say the velocity of the Earth with respect to an observer in the sun has this value. You don't need an observer in the sun. It's just relatively to the sun. So forget about consciousness being at the root of quantum mechanics. That's a profoundly confused idea. Or at the rootness of reality, however, and that's a point that Slavoj was making. It's the other way around. Once we realize that to understand the physical reality, we need this relationalism. We need to say, and that's what quantum theory is telling us, that the property of an object makes sense relatively to another object. We have a materialism, if you want, much, much wider than much, much rich than the naive materialism of the 18th century of particles moving around, which include the possibility that reality has actual. This relational aspect. Out of which one extremely specific particular version of it is what comes about when a number of biological things happening. And then cultural things happening. And we have our brain. So if reality is itself relational in this way, it's much less surprising that we can talk about reality with respect to us in a way that doesn't contradict science. And doesn't contradict our sort of subjective, perspectival view of reality. Now, let me go to the main point here. Experience and loops and gaps. We are in the middle of all sorts of loops, right? The world that we know, it's our information about the world, what we know about the world, okay? Yet we're part of this world. You can look at me, and for you, I'm a part of the world. Which world? Well, the same world which I describe in my information. There's a circularity here. And there are plenty of these singularities. Slavo, you mentioned the one about language. Everything is language, etc, but languages respectively, and so on and so forth. Well, what's wrong in singularity? That's our human making sense of reality. It's full of singularities. When you pretend to not have a singularity, you get confused. And second point, ignorance. We are largely ignorant about the world. We're not going. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. I don't know what's going to happen to me tomorrow, okay? It's not. Nobody knows what's going to happen to him or her tomorrow. So the large part, our we shouldn't pretend or make this belief that we have a picture of reality which is complete. Come on, it's not incomplete. For some details is majestically incomplete. We just have little hints of what reality about us. The future is completely unknown to us. The point is love how often and you know, when the future come, we rearrange the past, as lava is telling us to make sense of the future. But it's new, it's experience. Choose a point in circles and put it a fundamental. You need a gap and a mystery because you don't expect. You don't explain that point from that perspective. You need something else for explaining it.
- [34:53]
A
Thank you, Alenka.
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B
No, actually, you know what? You disrespect. You didn't read his work where Carlo how there is no homogeneous time, you know, like that we measure it all. Each interactive process has its own temporality. So when you say three minutes, this is your standpoint. Sorry, we have a different standpoint here. Don't be brutally imperialist, imposing on us your notion of linear time. Okay.
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A
I'll be limiting Slavoway's time as well if it's my decision. You just lost it all.
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D
You're right.
- [35:34]
C
Yeah. No, I just wanted to add, because what Carlo just said, this fact that our knowledge is majestically incomplete, I guess what we would add, I think slow, I would also agree here is we perhaps could also speculate that the reality itself that we try to know is majestically incomplete. That it's not just our knowledge, that there is something that. And this is precisely where the interesting question of knowledge starts, which is not simply description of reality, but also has kind of more intimate connection to this reality itself. It's not simply, as I said before, this kind of a mirroring or observation. And of course I understand very much this point that. I mean, I'm completely ignorant of Quantum physics. This is really slow.
- [36:21]
B
We all know this. You don't have to repeat obviously, but I quite.
- [36:25]
C
I mean understand very well that observer here means like a reference point or something like this, which is of course not how the subjectivity is meant in this philosophical or whatever psychoanalytic way that we use it. It's not simply a reference point or a perspective point. Precisely. Subject usually don't. They're. I mean, Latin even has this interesting point. You know, when you look at things in reality where you are. It's not your perspective, you are looking at something. It is the point of the gaze which is out there and looks back at you. This is where you are really as a subject. So it's not the same as perspective, it's not a point, it's not the same as reference point. It is this kind of highly speculative proposition, but which nevertheless I think has some material proof in the way in which things happen and evolve and we think of them.
- [37:19]
B
Maybe ask very benevolent. I'm a Stalinist with a human face. You know, like once they wanted socialism with the human face. I go. But a very serious question to you, Carlo. I noticed that when you in your polemics against. If I will simplify you very much. I hope I at least got your basic point. When you oppose the. I used consciously a wrong term. Objective reality of wave function. You said that waves are the way for us to calculate. And then at that point, I hope I will quote you correctly, you wrote somewhere that the state vector becomes a description of the correlation of some degrees of freedom in the observer. Doesn't this mean nonetheless that before you observe something but you know that will observe you somehow there are different options or decisions in you. Will I observe this, that, and so on and so on. Now would you now I will appear a naive idealist. Why do you use here the term freedom? What does this mean for a stone? I don't think the stone has. Oh, will I approach in this way or in that way? Doesn't this already, this term of freedom imply a notion of life? And I'm here very precise. I'm like you, totally opposed to that bullshit of idiots who if we take power, me and you, Carlo, they get instantly a free first class ticket to Gulak. Those idiots who think observer that what quantum physics calls different names, incompleteness, indeterminacy, that this is the foundation of freedom. No. So you don't mean use. Why did now my Stalinist point. Why in what sense did you use the term some degree of freedom? Does this apply to a stone?
- [39:32]
D
Also, Ah, yeah, a lot of Stalin.
- [39:37]
B
You don't make jokes with Stalinists, you know.
- [39:41]
D
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not a Stalinist with a nice face. I'm a Leninist with a nasty face. The group of freedom. Freedom here means lack of constraints. It's an extremely weak notion of freedom. If you don't know what's going to happen about something, your first thing, you consider that free to happen one way or the other. So freedom here, it's a very weak, weak, weak thing. In some sense. Nature is. Look, physics is model. Physics is all about if this, then that is not a description. Science is not a description of what happened. But physics in particular, there's something called phase space, which all the possibilities, you don't know the possibilities you look at, you go and approach a system and it could be this way or this way or that way, you don't know. A priori. This is the majestic incompleteness of our knowledge or the freedom of nature with respect to us. So a degree of freedom in physics is just a name you give to the open possibilities. When I say that there is a system and an observer, okay? And I talk about the degrees of freedom, I'm using this language with respect, thinking that I'm an external observer which can interact or internal system which can interact with both. And with respect to me, I don't know what is this, I don't know what is that. But if I know that there is a correlation, I know that one knows about the other one.
- [41:31]
A
This fundamental question, whether we can eventually resolve the relationship between the self and the world around us. You already think this has been solved? From what you said already, we already understand how the self is embodied in the world.
- [41:47]
D
Let me give a precise answer to that. My understanding. Well, the way I might be wrong, of course, but my understanding. There's a guy, David Chalmers, Chalmers, who made a very interesting point separating two problem of consciousness that he called the easy problem and the hard problem. What he called the easy problem is just the physics of the brain. Just understanding all that happens in a human beings when a human being does what it does. And then the hard problem in his, in his language is the following. Suppose we have understood everything there is to say physically about the brain, okay? There is some other open problem, okay? Are there zombies in the way that Slava was using? Could it be that something is exactly physically like me in all the minute detail of the atoms, and yet mentally different? Okay, so there is something else. Now I think that this distinction by David Chalmers is brilliant. It just Misnamed two problems. The easy is horrendously complicated. We are most, most closely complicated machines, of course. So we have no idea what happened inside of our brain. We just have a vague picture from. From outside. And we call it Carlo, we call it Alenka, we call it Jack. But of course, all sorts of things happen in there which we don't know, which is the normal situation of. Of us. Okay, so that's what David called the easy problem. It's horrendously hard to understand what happened. If you have understood all that. The open problem, well, that's easy. That's just confusing ourselves, making ghosts into machines. They're not zombies. If there's another copy of slavery, not just looks the same from the outside, but such that inside every single physical detail of him would be like him. He would be like him. I mean, he would have a subjectivity.
- [43:56]
A
Yeah, this. So you can't have a replica of a Slavojoy which lacks the consciousness, so it necessarily has to emerge. Is that the right way of putting it? Like you couldn't have emergence is that.
- [44:09]
D
It'S a world which is all possible use and misused. So. So one get confused when we say. If I say yes and no, somebody jumps up and say no. But by emergence, I mean something else. So I. I think that, you know, Slav is real. It has a conscious experience, It's a squalia. It's all that stuff. And these things are real. There's nothing illusory in all that. And these things are the name to the complex phenomenon which is. Which is lava. And there are other complex phenomena which are very complicated. And we describe it with correct language. The language is, Slav is angry, Slava is talking to me. I like Slava. I don't like that. That's an appropriate language. If I wanted a different language, all the atoms, all the photons and all things. I can't because it's far too complicated. In principle it couldn't, but it would be stupid, Right? If your car breaks and you bring it to the mechanics, you don't bring it to a partic physicist to fix it, you bring it to mechanics. That's the right level of knowledge to understand your car. The right level of knowledge to understand with Slava is just talking with him. But there's no contradiction between mechanics being able to fix my car and the particle physics that makes my car function in that way. And there's no contradiction between the very complicated physical picture, which is relational, is intricate, it is difficult. Quantum fields, quantum space, who Knows we don't know it. And Slava as a human being, with the complexity that we assign to human beings.
- [45:49]
A
Okay, Savage, you want to come in on the part?
- [45:51]
B
Would you agree? Then I answer both. You know, the problem with Chalmers and guys like him is of course, as you said, they mystify the question. They first dig a gap and then they are survive. They are surprised. Oh my God. But I cannot jump. Yeah, but you dig up the gap.
- [46:11]
D
You build a gap and then you're surprised that there is a gap. That's exactly. Yeah, that's so the diagnosis.
- [46:16]
B
Yeah. So don't tell me how much I will pay you for agreeing with me. Sorry. Then I will. Would you agree with this? I have great trust in cognitivism brain sciences that maybe now I will make a very precise point, that maybe they will discover some strange shift in our brain neuronal biological mechanism which gave birth to awareness. But I don't think there was any teleology with it. My sympathy is with those. There are a couple of them, neurologists, who I love this theory, who claim something went wrong biologically and then the brain developed not as an adaptation, but what Stephen Jay Gould called exaptation. Something went. You know, it's like. To give you a popular example that I like to use, like French cuisine. Why do we love it? Because it's all based on failures. You know, you do wine, the wine goes wrong. Fermented, you say, oh my God, champagne, you know, no, it was a mistake. Or those bad smelling cheese, they ruined it. Like, you know, I like this idea that if we will come at the origin of what triggered consciousness, there will not be a deep divine intervention or any teleology. Something very stupid, probably even malfunctioning happened, which then triggered a process well beyond it. I don't believe in teleology here.
- [48:00]
A
Alain, you have any thoughts you want to share?
- [48:03]
C
Very, very briefly, I mean just. But first let me just move away possible misunderstanding. My implication before, my implication when I used the wording description of reality was not at all that this is what quantum physics does. I don't think, and I absolutely agree that quantum physics and science as such is much more involved with reality just to be the description of reality, right or wrong description. I don't think this is the right picture at all. So just to make this clear, Very much agree, but otherwise, I mean, I would just part of this last question. When you wrote this, it was also. Are our theories and language incapable perhaps of answering this question? And I would say, but you ask this question in language. And for me, this is not to bring in some impossible paradox, how can you within the English ask, but precisely to once again emphasize that if I limit myself to this question of language, that language is precisely not simply something that kind of encloses us in this kind of a discursive cage when we cannot break out of it. But the real is part of the real, erodes language within it kind of sticks on it and sometimes breaks it down. So actually we don't know if when let would say that all the language will just kind of explode and cease to exist, we would come then closer to the real or whatever. We really don't know this. And I think it's a good question, but it's this one we cannot actually answer, but we have some access to it with language.
- [49:40]
B
Can I just a brief point, a concluding joke.
- [49:43]
A
Yeah.
- [49:43]
B
I was dreaming to tell this to you, Carlo, since you live in Canada and are not exactly probably for Trump. It always comes to me, this legendary debate, Zelensky versus Vince and Trump. I'm sorry if some of you know this joke at me, but now comes and please be serious. I'm only talking to people whom I really love like this. This is my way of saying I love you, Carlo, I'm very disappointed by you. You treated me disrespectfully, as they said to Zelenskyy, you didn't call me doctor, doctor, doctor and so on. Just a second point, you didn't thank me. So in other words, you want war, it's over. But now I will be Trump. Do you maybe own in Italy some land? Because if you do, you can repay me by Trump giving me minerals from that land. No. That's why I love you.
- [50:42]
A
Thank you all for joining us. Join me in thanking everyone working behind the scenes and Carlo as well, and our wonderful panelists. Thank you for listening to philosophy for our Times.
- [50:55]
B
Please let us know what you think.
- [50:57]
A
Our email is in the show notes. And if you want to hear more from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas, head over to IAI TV for thousands more talks.
- [51:07]
B
Bye bye.