PREVIEW-Ep. 68: Guest David Chalmers on the Scrutability of the World

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 68 is something like, how are all the various truths about the world related to each other? And we will be speaking with Mr. David Chalmers about his brand new book, Constructing the World. You can join the discussion and read loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:34 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:36 David: And our special guest, David Chalmers in New York.

0:40 Mark: All right, Wow. I am extremely geeked to have you on here. The reason that your name is so big in the first place is because of the Conscious mind book from 96. Was that about correct or was there something else that was equally seminal?

0:52 David: Well, just before that book came out, there was a bit of stuff that I wrote about the hard and the easy problems of consciousness that came out in some magazines and journals. And that helped, I guess, build the market for the book. But I guess the book is what people seem to remember now. Yeah.

1:07 Mark: And whereas this work seems much more. It's still written in a friendly way. I think anybody could pick it up and get something out of it. But it is, at least on the face of it, a much more esoteric topic. Or am I misreading that?

1:19 David: Yeah, no Calvin and Hobbes in this one. I had. I had Bloom County cartoons and. And so on in the last book. Although it has to be said, even that book, the Conscious Mind, was pretty esoteric in some ways. It was actually my PhD thesis from Indiana University back in 93, and somehow it caught this wave. But it got a lot of people interested, even people who didn't have a background in philosophy. I still suspect, however, that some bits of it are pretty difficult. An awful lot of copies are lying unread on coffee tables. But you know, this book, the new book, is mostly for an audience that's willing to work fairly hard.

1:50 Mark: I did feel like with both books, because I just looked at the other book with a group of listeners that we have these sort of offline discussion groups. It seemed like both of them, it's the first philosophy book I can recall that seemed to acknowledge the fact that, well, I'm looking at a wall of philosophy books here in my house and most of them, the first half are read. That's just the way that assignments come in graduate school, say.

2:11 David: Yeah.

2:12 Mark: And it's very nice that in the first chapter of Both of your books you're like, well, read these two chapters for sure. And if you get around to it, they're very. And also they're very skimmable in that you repe details sort of again and again in the different chapters. This might sound like a backhanded compliment, but that's an analogy that came to mind is if you're talking about the nature of man as being two legged and then somebody writes, well, of course, you know, some men only have one leg or no legs, but then they move on and could continue talking like that, you would bring back the potentiality for the one leggedness again and again, just so that any one given part of the book will be as precise as possible and not assume that people have read the rest of it.

2:49 David: My experience with the first book was that many, many people have read the first half and not many people at all ever read the second half. Ah. So for this book I thought, well, okay, no one's going to read the whole thing, but I would like it if the readers are distributed over different chapters of the book. So I tried to write it so that different bits of it would be attractive to different people. And up front I've got a little thing saying how to read this book as if you're interested in this, read chapter one and chapter two, but if you're interested in this, read chapter seven and chapter eight. So my hope is that although no one's going to read more than 100 of the 500 pages, at least some people might actually end up looking at page 401 hope, but I'm still hoping

3:28 Dylan: I took your directions. I read the first chapter and the last chapter and skimmed through the middle.

3:33 David: Okay, well, good. How did that work out for you?

3:35 Dylan: It worked out pretty well. I did some work applying Bayesian techniques to doing some physics analysis in grad school. So I was interested in. I had not read sort of philosophical takes in terms of confidences, credences. I'd always read it as straight probability. So it was interesting to sort of see it put down in that kind of language.

3:56 David: Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. A lot of people have been bringing probability into philosophy in recent years, sometimes in a formal context. And here I was trying to see to what extent you could take some of these big ground projects in metaphysics and epistemology and bring some Bayesian probabilistic tools in to help analyze them.

4:12 Mark: All right, Wes, give us your initial impressions.

4:14 David: I thought it was.

4:15 Wes: It's very strange.

4:17 David: That's my initial impression.

4:18 Wes: We just got done reading the Carnap, so I was prepared for it, but it's you unique. It's unlike most things I've read. Interesting.

4:24 David: That sounds like somebody straining to be polite. No, no, not at all. I mean it's.

4:28 Wes: I mean polite to myself. I mean, I like Dylan. I did the first chapter and the eighth chapter and the summary at the end, following your recommendations. Yeah, I don't know how else to describe the whole. It's very technical. I know you outlined the philosophical implications of this constructivist project, but I find it hard to grasp. I mean, I know in general there are perhaps there's some promise for approaches to the mind body problem and say, dissolving or clarifying metaphysical problems and so on and so forth. The implications aren't entirely clear to me.

5:00 Mark: A large portion of the book was defining a way to think about a problem. In other words, it's not a position, rather it's a family of positions. And you're very charitable. And it's. The big puzzle of this to me is that the parent projects to these like Carnaps or like Laplace's seem to be nasty in a certain way that they're trying to eliminate certain, like Hume saying that philosophy that is not about things that are amenable to empirical inspection should be committed to the flames. That that's sort father of all of these constructivist projects that were before yours, but yet yours is extremely non reductionist, extremely generous, extremely.

Well, I'm not going to settle here what kind of supervenience holds between mind and body and what needs to be included in the base. I'm just saying some kind of scrutability will work, sort of depending on whatever your philosophical commitments may be.

5:44 David: Yeah. So these views in some ways, in many ways go out of the views of Rudolf Carnap, who is often caricatured as a logical positivist, or somewhat more politely a logical empiricist. One of these people who tried to, you know, reduce everything just to simple experience or to some reductive base and to deny the existence of metaphysics and culture and who knows what. I think it's a little bit unfair even to Carnap, but there's also an element of truth to it. But what I've tried to do is take elements of the spirit of this project and sever it from the strong logical positivism of saying, you know, this is all there is in the world and allow arbitrary primitive things in the base and just go with the idea there's some set of primitives about the world from which a full picture about the world can be derived.

Now, for Laplace, Laplace's demon, Laplace said, the primitives about the world is just the positions of all the particles at a time and the laws of nature. From that, you ought to be able to predict everything. For Carnap, the primitives are the primitives of experience. From certain facts about this logical structure of your experience, you can predict everything. Many people think neither project quite works, but maybe it's just their bases are too small, they didn't have enough primitives. Maybe if we throw some more stuff into the base, physics and consciousness and some other stuff, if you like space, time and causation, then we have enough primitives to go on with.

By allowing a bit more in the base, that's to some extent severing it from this strongly reductionistic base. That's why sometimes I call the project in the introduction carnapian rationalism, as opposed to Carnap's own empiricism. It allows quite a deep structure for the world that we can know a priori, perhaps through the methods of metaphysics and philosophy, of which someone like Carnap might have been quite dismissive.

7:24 Mark: So, scrutability, you just defined what a generalized picture of scrutability is, that there's some set of facts from which all the rest of the facts can be. Well, I don't want to say derived, because that seems to be the innovation of talking about, in terms of scrutability, that it's not logical entailment. You're not saying that there's a set of basic facts that if we put these down, then through deductive reasoning we can get the rest of it right. There seemed to be some advantage in saying, instead, you use the Laplacian demon image that if there was sort of an ideal knower that knew all the stuff that was in the base, then that knower could figure out a priori.

Right. Without having additional experiences, because, say, the base could include stuff like the positions of the particles or things that we would get through experience. But if the knower knows stuff in the base, then it could figure out everything else. And there seemed to be some advantage of putting it in epistemological terms like that, rather than putting it as a straight matter of logical entailment.

8:12 David: Yeah. So the inspiration here is something like Laplace's demon. You know, Laplace said, tell the demon the positions of all the particles and the laws of nature, and then nothing will be uncertain. The demon will be able to, for any hypothesis it's interested in, you know, who will win the election tomorrow? Will it rain on Thursday? Will there be a third World war? Given that basic information about the particles, the demon can figure out whether that's true. So that's an instance of what I call scrutability. Laplace is saying that if the demon has all that physical knowledge, the demon can figure out anything at all about the world, even from Laplace.

I don't think Laplace had the idea the demon would figure it out through logic alone. Through logic alone, maybe the mathematics of physics, the demon could figure out where the particles are going to be tomorrow, given the knowledge of the particles. But to move from the particles to questions about who wins the election, will it rain tomorrow? Will there be a third World war? The demon needs to kind of step back and look at the world from a broader perspective and apply concepts like raining and elections and wars. I don't think you can do that out of logic.

Well, Carnap thought you could, because thought you could define all those things in terms of the primitives. I'm skeptical of that project of trying to define things ultimately in terms of definition. The approach I take is to sever all this a bit from the notion of logic and of definition, and instead do it roughly in terms of just what you could know if you knew this. You could know that in this case,

9:40 Dylan: the knowing involves concepts in the base that feed into this. They may have a completely different source. Source, but once you have those concepts in a base, then they would be the things you do your reasoning from.

9:55 David: Yeah, in a way, this scrutability relation connects different sets of concepts. So for Laplace's demon, the basic concept for concepts of physics, here are all the particles and their positions, and here are the laws of nature. Given all that, Laplace says you can know everything. You can know whether it's raining, who win the election. It's a certain basic set of concepts from which you can infer in principle any truths about the world using any concepts at all. And that's the sense in which it's a primitive base. And you've got to be able to cross the level, if you like, from the primitive concepts in the base to the derived truths using any concepts at all.

10:29 Dylan: Sorry. And in the case of Laplace, you don't have to get too wound up about what you mean by particle. Exactly right. It wouldn't matter if you had the particles be what we would think of as atoms now versus quarks later. As long as you had laws that applied to particles of that sort, you're not going to get too wound up about that.

10:49 David: I think Laplace actually said the fundamental constituents of nature, or the fundamental elements that make up nature, and he was neutral on what they were. Maybe he was thinking they were something like atoms or basic Newtonian particles, but maybe they could be quarks. Maybe in a contemporary framework of quantum mechanics, it could be a big quantum mechanical wave function. What's fundamental in the world is the wave function. And you could just use that and

11:13 Dylan: go, I think you're right about the way Laplace himself would say it, that what you meant by these fundamental particles were things that had no constituents and weren't reducible to some other either physical structure, or they were fundamental in that way. They were not reducible. But I was wondering if that was a necessary condition. I guess this just goes to the question of what your sort of minimal base is and whether or not reducing it further makes it simpler, more desirable. And that's a separate judgment, I guess.

11:44 Mark: Or is there also an issue that, like in Carnap, it looked like you could have. Because everything fits together logically. There's a certain amount of, you know, it's just a matter of sort of what is most epistemically convenient as to what you're going to consider the base, that you could link every part of existence to every part definitionally. So while we can see the logic that he had for setting the phenomenal as the base, as you mentioned in your book several times, in fact, toward the end, he thought he could even just use purely logical concepts. But in any case, it seemed like there were multiple ways that. Which you call the postulates and which you call the axioms.

12:17 David: Yeah, I mean, Carnap's book. It's called the logical structure of the world. And the ultimate aim was to get everything from just logic in the base. But for much of the book, he actually tried to get the world from experience, from states of consciousness. And he had this basic relation of phenomenal similarity among experiences that he started from. So many people have taken the book to be this sort of phenomenalist work, where we take the phenomenal or the experiential as basic and get things from there. But Carnap himself was actually a pluralist.

And he says, I could have written the Aufbau. I could have written this book starting with a physical base instead of with a phenomenal base. And in fact, you know, within four or five years, once he got to Vienna, he started moving very much from the phenomenalist perspective to the physicalist perspective and started trying to build things up from physical elements and I think he's also inclined to think there are many other bases that would work as well. So I don't think Carnap saw himself as trying to limn the ultimate metaphysical constituents of the world.

Carnap was just too anti metaphysical for that. He thought there's just a bunch of different bases you can start with. None of them is the absolute rock bottom fundamental level of reality.

13:23 Dylan: But the case there would be that although to be bases in the way he's speaking of them, and I suppose the way you would speak of a scrutability base is that they have to be transformable in some way from one to another. You may choose one as being more convenient or less convenient, but at the end of the day, because they at some level cover, then you're going to have to be able to have transformations in between them.

13:47 David: That's right. Your base has to be rich enough to be able to get everything out. Any truth about the world. You know. If it's true that the cat sat on the mat, you got to be able to get that from your base. If it's true that the quality of mercy is not strained, you've got to get that from the base. If it's true that God exists, you got to be able to get that from the base. We want to be able to recover all of reality from our base. Yep.

14:07 Dylan: Yeah.

14:07 David: That will end up ruling out certain bases. In fact, some people think that Carnap's base was in fact too narrow. From a phenomenal base you can't recover space and time and other things. That was Quine's problem. Some people think that a physical base isn't enough because you can't get to the mind. So your base absolutely has to be rich enough to be able to get all of reality out. But that's consistent with it being different bases. Maybe we can do it with the spatial and the experiential. Maybe we can do it with the causal and the qualitative. It could be there are multiple bases, all of which are rich enough to get out all of reality. And then this interesting question is whether any of them are somehow the privileged base in the sense of the fundamental level.

14:46 Mark: Now, if you don't already have a strong intuition about what the fundamental base has to be, it seems like the motivation behind most of these constructive projects seems to me to be some kind of ontological parsimony wanting to have to reduce to make things simple. But given that you and apparently Carnap had a fairly flexible and generous spirit in light of ontology, can you Describe what is the motivation, then just everything fits together somehow.

15:14 David: Well, that's a great question. And for me there's lots of motivations, and some metaphysical motivations are one among many, you know. So you might think of this project as trying to get at the fundamental metaphysical constituents of the world and getting the rest of the world built up from there. And indeed that's one motivation for me. I'm more friendly than Carnap to the idea that there is a metaphysically fundamental level. And I talk a lot in this book about the thesis of fundamental scrutability, that all truths about the world are scrutable can be recovered from distribution of fundamental truths about the world and fundamental ontology.

Now, for some people who are physicalists, fundamental ontology will just be the physical. For someone like me, who's more of a dualist, I think you need the physical and the mental in your fundamental ontology. So everything should be scrutable from there. But that's just one motivation. Motivations in metaphysics. There are also motivations in epistemology, thinking about how much can we know about the world and what are the limits on our knowledge of the world. There are very strong motivations for me also in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mental content.

That is, how do we understand meaning? How do we understand the difference between the meaning of Hesperus and phosphorus, something that Frege talked about, or Water and H2O. For me, this scrutability project plays in a slightly complicated way into that project by allowing you to build up what I call an epistemological semantics. So it's actually got all these different motivations for me. I find myself thinking about the philosophy of language, thinking about metaphysics, thinking about the epistemology, thinking about philosophy of mind with many different motivations.

And they all converged on this central notion of scrutability. Which is why I ended up having to write this big rambly book that ends up trying to do a bit of all these things.

16:51 Mark: Well, and it's not even just one book, right? You're writing three.

16:54 David: Oh yeah, there's more coming simultaneous. Bad idea to make promises like that in the introduction. But yeah, there's a book on meaning which is hopefully coming sometime before too long, and then maybe even one on possibility and necessity. I don't want to come out too close to each other. It's like I've got to give the world a chance to actually read the first one first. But hopefully at some point you didn't

17:15 Mark: pull a Heidegger for being in time and Actually put a table of contents covering all three books in the first book.

17:21 David: That would be a really bad idea, I think. Yeah, that would really lock you in.

17:25 Mark: It didn't lock him. He just said, oh, well, I'm doing different things now.

17:29 Wes: Yeah,

17:32 Mark: you raised the point about Frege. So we had a whole Frege episode. And that was a mysterious thing to us, really, how indifferent Frege was about ontological, about metaphysical matters, such that he didn't seem to care what these senses were. And that's what made subsequent philosophers of a more materialist bent at least, so uncomfortable with admitting Fregean senses or something like that in the ontology. Or we have to have a, like Russell's theory of descriptions or something that gets rid of these. But you would pitch scrutability as one way of really making Fregean senses sound very sensible.

In fact, we said Carnap, the reason he in the Aufbau had an extensional method was because the senses, the intention was too subjective. He was trying to do something that was straight up scientific. But the way that you describe your analog of the Phrygian sense also sounds much less problematic. Let me try to phrase it and you can tell me if I've got it right. Which is it? That what you are giving in place of a Fregean sense or a sense, maps a scenario, a real world scenario, onto a referent. So it maps a concept. So let's say we have the concept.

I always use Clark Kent in Superman. So we have the concept Clark Kent. And in some epistemically possible worlds, you know, for all we know, Clark Kent could be Superman or could not be. So you've got the sense Clark Kent, given a particular scenario, maps that concept. Clark Kent onto Superman, given the facts of the world, Something like that. What am I butchering there?

18:53 David: Yeah. In fact, this is an idea which I take from a different part of Carnap's work. The logical structure of the world came out in the late 20s, but the late 40s he wrote a book called Meaning and Necessity, where he really was one of the first ones to bring in this framework of possible worlds into thinking about meaning. And he really viewed it as a way to domesticate Frege's notion of sense. Frege had talked about Hesperus and phosphorus. Clark Kent and Superman, they've got the same reference but different senses. He never really told us what senses were.

Well, Carnap had an idea, maybe they're intensions. And by intensions he meant something like functions from possible worlds to extensions. So if the world is one Way Clark Kent is one thing, the world is another way. Clark Kent is another thing. This comes out really nicely. Thinking about Frege's classical case of Hesperus and phosphorus, the sense of Hesperus might be something like the evening star. Carnap will model that as a function which in any given world picks out whatever is evening star in that world. In our world, Venus's evening star picks out Venus.

But hey, if things have turned out differently, Jupiter could have been evening star. Then the intension of Hesperus picks out Jupiter for phosphorus, on the other hand, will have an intension that picks out the morning star in any given world. So then you notice we get this interesting result. Hesperus and phosphorus have different intensions. One picks up the morning star in a world, one picks out the evening star in any given world. The way you get the reference is in the actual world, you see what those things pick out in this world. And since in our world the morning star is the evening star, they both pick out the planet Venus.

So Carnap said, ah, that's how we can understand Frege's notion of senses, using the framework of possible worlds as intensions. What I'm basically using, people have gotten a lot more skeptical about that in recent years, in part because of the work of Saul Kripke and others, which is a whole other story. But I think once you approach it in terms of this scrutability framework, you can actually make a version of that project of Carnaps work out pretty well and try to understand the sense of Hesperus and phosphorus as an intension like that function from scenarios to reference, so that they actually do vindicate a bit of some element at least of Frege's notion of sense.

21:02 Mark: What's the formula for that in terms of scrutability? That the reference is scrutable from knowledge of the given scenario. How do you put it? It's an innovation.

21:10 David: Yeah. What you first have to do is to construct. We've got like a base for the actual world, the description for the actual world. But that's just one scenario, the actual scenario, like maybe it's physically like this and mentally like this, but then we can think of all kinds of other ways the world could be, for all we know, a priori, it could be physically like that, mentally like that. We get a whole bunch of scenarios, each of which have their own scrutability base descriptions of those scenarios. Given this scrutability thesis, all the truths about those scenarios will be settled by a description of them.

So to see whether, for example, Hesperus is phosphorus is true in a given scenario, you just take the basic description of the scenario and say, is Hesperus and phosphorus scrutable from that? In this world, yes, it is in another world with a distinct morning and evening star. From that scenario, you take a basic description of that, then maybe you don't get Hesperus as phosphorus. Rather you get Hesperus is not phosphorus. So the intension is basically the function that takes a scenario, okay. And yields true if hesperus is phosphorous, scrutable from that scenario and yields false.

If Hesperus is not phosphorus, it's scrutable from that scenario. That's basically how it works. Yeah.

22:20 Mark: I like that as a concrete example of the theory in action.

22:24 David: Good. Because I don't know, it does get kind of abstract, but hopefully it all eventually bottoms out.

22:28 Mark: I hope that did not sound too unintentionally ironic. You say something that loses two thirds of the audience and I'm relieved that it's a concrete.

22:39 David: But I don't know how much background everybody has in, you know, sense of reference and intension and extension.

22:45 Mark: We have episodes on them. They can go and listen. It's fine.

22:48 David: Okay, very good. Go Back to episode 37, guys. It's all there.

22:54 Mark: The Schleiermacher.

22:55 Wes: Really?

22:56 Mark: Really? Maybe let's. I think a big question that's immediately going to come up to people is you've said you do think that there are some fundamental components of the world. And you've said that on your view that there have to be physical components and there have to be mental components or phenomenal components. I know in your formula you called it pqti. So it's. It's physical. It's qualia.

23:17 David: Right.

23:17 Mark: Those are the phenomenal. The I is indexical. That even if you know all the physical and the mental things, you still don't know I am here and it is 3 o' clock now that those are.

23:26 David: That's right.

23:27 Mark: The Laplacian demon couldn't know those things. And then the T. The that's all. Tell me more about why you need the that's all. Is it to rule out angelic truths that are. We don't have access to, but could be truths nonetheless out there or something. What is the purpose of the T?

23:41 David: Something like that. The idea is, even once you've specified the positive character of the world, you haven't said settled all the truths until you've said that's all the stuff there is. So if I just give you all the stuff about physics or all the Stuff about physics and consciousness, then I've told you about what this bit of the universe is like. But maybe there's more in it. Maybe there's a whole other domain or another realm, like where God is or where the angels are, or where the ectoplasm is. Maybe there's six different universes came before or after this one.

So if I just tell you there's all these particles here and all these minds here, that doesn't tell you whether or not there's a whole bunch of other particles. So, for example, just say there's no God, merely telling you the physical truth about our world. It just doesn't settle whether there's a God or not. It might be consistent with there being a God and consistent with there being no God. So assuming there's no God to get all the truths about the world, what you need to do is not just give me physics or even the physical and the mental. You need to say, in addition, after saying there are all these particles and all these minds, then you need to say, and that's all there is.

Well, that's all there is in the fundamental character of the world. Once you've said that's all, then you're going to have ruled out the existence of anything else you haven't mentioned that's fundamentally distinct from them, like angels or ectoplasm and so on. Without doing that, then you've still just left open huge amounts of what's true about the world.

25:01 Dylan: To me, that was functioning basically exactly the same way as conservation claims do in physics, that you say that there is a hole by which you're going to measure everything else, and that without that hole you just can't have any purchase at all on how to divide up the rest of it. And so you are always going to take something as defining your system. And for small systems and relatively unambitious projects, you might acknowledge that you're. Well, I'm leaving out friction here, and I'm doing that on purpose because I'm just going to make it easier.

And I'm going to say that's kind of an approximation, and if I was going to be more thorough, I'd have to include things like that. But the way I'm approaching this problem assumes that whatever result I get assumes a whole that is feeding into that, and that everything that I'm talking about is comprised in that hole. And so that my answers are dependent upon those things I put into that whole, but are completely descriptive of it.

26:00 David: Yeah, we need to somehow specify the limits of the world. This is what there is in the world and this is the limits. Conserved quantities are, I guess one example of limits of the world. This is all the mass there is in the world, this is all the charge there is in the world. And so those are examples of the kinds of limits that could be specified by that sort force.

26:18 Dylan: And this would work differently than other principles that you would use to judge these characteristics, like a principle of least action or simplicity principle or other kinds of minimizations or maximizations, whatever. Those are separate from the that's all kind of condition.

26:38 David: I think they are. Yeah. Because even if that's a law of physics, it doesn't rule out that for example, there's something totally separate in the world like gods or previous universes or 26 dimensional octopi in another realm. The principle of least action is just telling you about one local bit of the world, the physical bit here. Nor does it know that that's all there is in the world and there's not these other realms. You need something else separate from that that kind of says ah, and this is the limits of the world. That's all there is what I've just told you, I'm telling you about physics. That's all there is.

27:07 Dylan: I guess in the case of the principle of least action, I guess from energy conservation or something, it might not apply to describing the whole world or all concepts in the world, but to the extent that anything in that outside the angels or octopi or whatever had effects that changed your action or changed your energy, then you would say that they had to be held into it so that.

27:31 David: Ah, but what if they don't have effects?

27:33 Dylan: Your only option there is you either have a multi factored world that have realms that don't talk to one another.

27:39 David: Yeah. That's a possibility though, isn't it? That's a possibility we have to rule out.

27:44 Dylan: Yeah.

27:45 David: So I agree that if they had effects back on the world and that would all get factored into the physics somehow. But what about the hypothesis that are all these other realms which aren't having an effect on our world, maybe you know, God is just watching us from another realm. The question is, until we've said that's all, then we haven't excluded the possibility. There's all this extra stuff there admittedly not having an effect on our world.

28:04 Dylan: Yeah.

28:05 David: But still real all the same.

28:07 Dylan: That seems right. That's the effect of that's all claim to constrain what you're going to be talking about.

28:14 David: Yeah.

28:15 Mark: Should we have in mind how different this is as a metaphysical project from the projects in physics that you're describing, Dylan? It sounds like certainly this has to be a more modest post Kantian form of metaphysics, if it's metaphysics at all. Right, Dave, Is that.

28:30 David: Yeah, I mean, if you're, if you're

28:32 Mark: going to say that we're just going to stipulate that this is all and thereby just say we're not dealing with, say, theological issues, that we're trying to come up with a scrutability within what the phenomenal realm, or however you're going to put it. It sounds like you're trying to, as Quine and Carnap seem to be doing, come up with a conceptual scheme that is consistent with science and is sort of putting some metaphysical issues aside. But yet you call this some sort of metaphysics.

28:58 David: Yeah, you know, I think it's a project which is consistent with many different metaphysical views. If you do believe there's a God, then you'll probably have something about God in the base. If you do believe the world has a phenomenal realm and a noumenal realm, then maybe there'll be something about the noumenal realm in the base. If on the other hand, you're just a physicalist, then maybe you can just have physical stuff in the base. So the Scrutability Project framework on its own is somewhat neutral on the actual metaphysical questions. Of course I have views on them.

So then the versions of the framework that I end up liking the best will build certain different things in there. But I am inclined to think that an awful lot of what they of the fundamental constituents of the world are what you get from fundamental physics. So to that extent, quite a lot of the primitive truths in my scrutability base will be the truths that come from physics, including fundamental laws, like these principles you get from unified theory or quantum gravity or whatever it is.

29:51 Dylan: Let me ask a little bit more about just going from the direction of. You brought up God a couple different times. It seems to me that this direction would in some ways scientify science. Ify notions of God, meaning that you have a way of figuring it out and knowing what the consequences are and so forth and so on. A little bit the way you would say, well, at the end of the day, anything I talk about that's magical is if I go down the direction that you would have, where you can manipulate that magic and you can begin to have concepts about how maybe something like causal concepts, really you call it magic to distinguish it as a class of things but it really is again a kind of science in that I've broadly speaking figured it out.

And what would be absent in that case, it would be some notion of, I don't know, Grace, the way Aquinas would talk about it, that things that were inaccessible, that happened to people, that the individuals had special contact with or communications from God or from outside. And so that I guess would violate the that's all case where you have communication from outside of your universe. Do all cases, like for instance, the typical cases of God amount to violating the that's all clause? So that would be not included in this kind of PQTI.

31:19 Mark: Can I try to take this and you can tell me if I'm wrong? Okay. As Dave was saying before that you just load this stuff into the base. And a point that we hadn't clarified earlier is that in the different types of scrutability described in the book, there's conditional scrutability, which is just, you know, all the stuff in the base. Can you figure out everything else? And a priori scrutability, which is maybe I'm getting this wrong, which is sort of we know the conditionals, we know that if we knew the stuff in the base, then we would know everything else.

Is that the distinction here? So you could have things that are really unknowable by humans and put them in the base. It's just that what we as humans could know in understanding scrutability is that if we knew, say, the nature of God itself, then we would be able to deduce the facts about the angels or whatever the scrutable derived facts within that realm are.

32:08 David: So yeah, so I think that basically if there's going to be a God there, the first suggestion was that it's going to violate that. That's all clause. But what I'd rather say is if there is a God, then PQTI is not going to be all there is in the base. There's also going to be something specifying God. You know, maybe it's going to be P, Q, G, T, I, where G is a specification of God. That'll be another basic constituent of reality.

32:35 Dylan: But one of my two biggest questions when I was reading through that, I kept on coming back to, which was scrutability, which I really like the word. It makes me feel like it's a claim, which again, it just feels very familiar to me from a slapdash point of view in science that I say, well, you know what, the world is basically figureoutable. And to the things that I come across that I don't understand. Now I'm going to figure them out and I'm going to figure them out by coming up with new ways of approaching it, inventing new mathematics or new concepts or new ideas.

If I'm Faraday, I'll invent the field. If I might try out caloric, I might try out mind, body duality, any of these things. But it's roughly a very broadly speaking scientific perspective that allows for revisability, allows for new ideas. And my question then is, is there a kind of defeasibility of this general approach? What would be the example that would say, well, actually scrutability just doesn't work. I mean, is there a way to think about that or is it just

33:41 Mark: flexible enough the way I'm falsifiable in itself? Or is it a framework that can be applied to any.

33:47 David: Yeah, I do think of it as a very general framework and it's not as if there's going to be simple ways to falsify it. It's compatible with a physicalist view where everything is scrutable from physics. But just say you're not a physicalist because you think there's fundamental minds or there's a fundamental God, then that would falsify a certain specific scrutability thesis. Scrutability from the physical, but it would leave open a broader scrutability thesis like scrutability from the physical and the mental, or the physical and the mental and God.

The general scrutability thesis just says there's some small base from which you can get everything so that one can't be falsified so easily. The kind of view I think that will falsify this view would rather be weirdly different philosophical views if it turned out that, you know, sort of conceptual reality was totally open ended. Here's an example of a view that some philosophers like these days that might end up falsifying it. This is a view about vagueness. But what happens in cases like when you say someone is tall and there's no sharp point, no sharp cutoff for being tall?

Well, the ordinary view is, you know, you say someone's tall, they're six foot six, then they're tall, they're five feet, then they're not tall. And somewhere in the middle, you know, if you're 5 foot 10, are you tall or not? Maybe if you're a man, maybe it's just kind of in between. But there's a view that says the orthodox view here is that somewhere in the middle it's just a borderline case and there's it's just indeterminate whether you're tall. But there's a view that says, ah, there's actually a sharp cutoff for being tall, but we can never know where it is.

It's like 5ft 10.237 inches or something. But we'll never know that because it's an epistemological limitation that that fact is somehow unknowable. If something that is true, and the guy, Tim Williamson of Oxford, has been developing this view in recent years, sounds horribly implausible, but some people like it. If something like that is right, you might get failures of scrutability because you could know someone's exact height and never know how tall they are, even on perfect a priori reasoning. Likewise, you can know exactly how many hairs are on someone's head and their distribution and not know whether they're bald in certain borderline cases and so on.

So people who have this epistemic theory, they might well say there's no compact base from which you can recover all the truths about the world from any set of truths about the world that aren't specified in terms of tallness. In some of these cases, you'll never be able to figure out whether someone's tall or not. You basically need to build in all the truths about tallness and baldness and so on, enter the base, and then you won't have a compact limited base at all. So that's one view that would falsify the thesis. Okay. It's handy for me that the view that falsifies it is a view that seems pretty crazy, but at least it's an example.

36:32 Mark: For some reason I expected you to attribute the view to Mick X mc.

36:36 David: Okay, very good.

36:37 Mark: Yeah, but you named names. I'm glad. We'll put a link to the guy's article.

36:41 David: Tim Williamson is out and proud and has developed this view very resourcefully. He's even found a few followers in recent years. All right, all right.

36:49 Mark: But surely it was not bitter rebellion against his view that motivated you to get involved in this in the first place.

36:56 David: Part of it is, for me, scrutability is meant to be a very plausible theory. Almost obvious. I think some people find it obvious, almost trivial. Something like this has to be right. To which I say, great, fantastic. Now you're on board. Now you're with me through chapter four, because I spend the first four chapters arguing for this thesis because quite a lot of people in philosophy might be skeptical one way or another. But I agree, it's obvious. Great. You're with me that far, now it's all about the applications. If it's true, look at all the stuff you can do with it.

I can use this to define up this notion of meaning that can play the role of Fregean sense. I can define up a kind of contents of thought which is internal rather than external. I can start doing some metaphysics, I can start doing some structuralism and science and so on. So that's the second half of the book is where all the applications come from. After all, Russell once said, and I mentioned this in his introduction, philosophy is the art of moving from premises that are so obvious that no one would ever question them to conclusions that are so outrageous that no one would ever believe them.

And so if I can start from a pretty plausible premises like scrutability and then get to interesting conclusions, that's hopefully something worth doing.

38:05 Mark: Okay, well it's good to hear you say that, because I certainly hit that point of aren't you being so generous with this thesis that it's just true by definition? It's just obvious. You started the book talking about Laplace's project, but said, you know, of course we know from quantum mechanics at least that it's unlikely that even if you did know the positions at a given time of all the particles, that strict determinism is true, that you wouldn't be able to figure out where they will be in the future. So you just say, well then, and let's just put all the positions of the particles over time in the future and the present and all. Let's just put those right in the base, say that the demon knows all those like, so you're cheating right from the start. And that's the point.

38:40 David: It makes this predictive task much less impressive. So if you're interested in Laplace's demon for something like, ah, I want to predict the future, this would render it pretty damn useless because the demon has to know where the particles are in the future. Fortunately, that's not one of my purposes. I'm interested in these broader metaphysical, epistemological and semantic projects. Turns out, for those purposes, building in all that extra stuff about the physics of the future into the base still makes the project just as useful. But you know, the devil ends up being in the details and in all the particular applications.

39:09 Mark: That's what I liked about this and I guess was something you got the subtlety out of Carnap. The reason these past constructive projects are dismissed is because in the specific way that they've been outlined, they don't seem to Work that what I just said about Laplace means that, okay, I guess we can't have a strict determinist system or scrutability in that way. Empirical scrutability and then with the specific kind of reductions that the logical positivists were known for, whether or not this is an accurate description of what happened in the Aufbau or for that matter, modern attempts in the philosophy of mind to reduce all mental concepts to straight ahead physical concepts.

The fact that none of those seem to work is usually an excuse for just throwing away the project in question. And you've said, no, I still like the form of that. I still like the form of the project. Let's just tweak it, let's continue to tweak it. Or consider this project as an example among a field of possibilities of different kinds of scrutability with different bases.

40:01 David: Yeah, that's very much the spirit of the project. People think Carnap is a noble failure and Carnap's construction of the world just doesn't work. But I say let's just modify his assumptions a bit, okay? Turns out his primitive base wasn't quite big enough. Let's make it a little bit bigger, okay, his definitional relation was too strong. Let's make it just a little bit weaker. Then we can get something like this, the scrutability project that works, and I claim it has many of the good applications and effects that Carnap's project was going to have.

So if someone says, oh, that thesis is now obviously true, I say fantastic, that's what I wanted. If there's an objection there, it's got to be something like that thesis is so obviously true that it can't have any of those interesting applications that you said it was going to have. In which case I wanted to say, okay, well, tell me where these applications go wrong. Tell me where my construction of Fregean sense goes wrong or where these applications to metaphysics go wrong or something. I guess that shifts the bump in the rug. Now to the second half of the book.

But if someone finds it all obvious up to there, well, I'm pleased, because now they're halfway home.

40:58 Wes: So ultimately definitional scrutability just doesn't work, right?

41:01 David: So carnap in the alphabau the way he got from his primitive base of logic plus experience to high level truths about chairs and tables and everything else was to define every higher level notion in terms of lower level notions. So maybe a chair is something with a seat and legs and a leg is something with such and such a shape and Blah is this and blah is that. And ultimately you define everything until you've defined everything in terms of your primitives and that allows you to deduce the high level truths. Now the last 50 years or more, 70 years now I guess, of philosophy have led to people being very skeptical of that kind of definitional project.

You know, people have tried, basically, turns out you try to define anything in philosophy and you fail. People thought knowledge was justified true belief, but then this guy Gettier came along and said, here are cases of justified true belief without knowledge. People came up with new definitions. Maybe it's justified true belief not grounded in any falsehood or something. And ah, someone finds a counterexample to that. It turns out for just about any interesting notion in any purported definition, a resourceful philosopher can find counterexamples.

So most people now think the moral for this is most terms in ordinary language just aren't definable, perfectly and precisely definable in simpler terms without counterexamples. So that's why I go on to say, okay, well we can get a version of Carnap's project going that doesn't rely on definition and that's the scrutability project. What that matters is that from the base truths, PQTI or whatever, you can get to the high level truths about it's raining or someone will win the election tomorrow. You don't need to have to do that through definitions.

You can do it through kind of one way transitions. I make cases like this counterexample involving knowledge. You can go from a description of that scenario to ah, it's not a case of knowledge whether or not you have a definition of knowledge. That's what I call a priori. You can move a priori from the primitive truths about the world or a description of a scenario to the judgment they know that's a chair, it's raining. And you can do that even in the absence of a definition.

42:59 Wes: This seems to require sort of an intuitive ability on the part of the person making the judgment. Right? You can recognize a counterexample, for instance.

43:07 David: I think they need to be competent with the concept, but I think it's part of what it is to be competent with a concept. If you're presented with a case and you know you're reasonably rational and so on, you can tell whether it is an instance of the concept. You can call it any intuition if you like, or it's an ability to make judgments about cases. But you know, if we got the concept of a cat, you can give me A scenario. And I can tell you, yeah, that's a cat. We've got the concept of a circle. You can show me something and I can say, yeah, right, that's a circle. From enough information about the world and enough rational reasoning, you can apply the concept. And that's what this is basically turning on.

43:40 Wes: But in this case we rely on, say, someone who's competent with the concept. It's not like we could construct a machine in the way that we might construct a machine to perform derivations, some sort of computing machine. There's no machine that's going to get us from the base to everything that we might derive from it. It sounds like.

43:58 Unknown speaker: That's right.

43:59 David: The way I'm imagining it. There's a person at the center, a reasoner, maybe an ideal reasoner, if you like. I like to idealize them. But it is a person who uses concepts. I'm not at this point replacing them by a computer and so on. Maybe you could get a computer to do the same thing, but if it did, it would have to be a computer that used concepts and the reasons and so on. Right now we don't have computers to do that.

44:19 Dylan: So along this line I'm interested in the possibilities and the cases of generating new primitives. So things that would end up in your, whether it be a Bayesian argument or not, that you would ultimately, in this framework, be open ended in the possibility of adding primitives. So the case that comes to mind immediately to me is the notion of the field, only because I'm a physicist, I guess, and that notion took a while to sort out and there were pieces of it that were unclear, but that it was understood from the beginning by Faraday as being a new substance or a new entity in the world.

And it seems to me that even though it's mathematically described, it's not a particle, it's not a mass, it's a different kind of entity. And it would seem to me to be a candidate for something that would be a new primitive. That you would, if you looked back into the intellectual history, you would say, well, here's a time where I had to add something to the base in order to continue to explain the world. Here's an example of what I would consider to be the birth of a primitive that would expand my base. And now I can explain more things, but I can't explain those things without it.

Is that a roughly accurate way to think about this? And if it isn't, then are there examples of the generation or birthing of a primitive that you can point to.

45:42 David: To. Yeah, no, I think that's good. In physics, of course, it's the most obvious place to look to for the birthing of primitives. Another example would be Maxwell. People used to think you could explain electromagnetism in terms of mechanics.

45:54 Dylan: Yeah.

45:54 David: In terms of force and motion and so on. Turns out you couldn't do that. So Maxwell came up with these basic laws of electromagnetism that took charge as a fundamental. As a primitive.

46:04 Dylan: Yeah.

46:05 David: And after Maxwell, charge is one of our primitives for a description of the world. So that's I guess adding a metaphysical primitive to the base. Now it's a bit complicated in the context of scrutability because I think maybe you can actually define charge up in terms of the structural or mathematical role it plays in a physical theory. But it still gives you the feel, at least for what counts as a new primitive. There are also kind of philosophical ways this might happen. Some people think you can't reduce morality. You can't get the moral truths from the non moral truths or the natural truths even by deduction or by a priori reasoning.

I don't know if that's true, but if that was true, then we'd need some further primitive of morality. I think we need further primitives of consciousness. It turns out it's really hard to explain consciousness in terms of underlying physical processes. I have consciousness built in right to the base. I think it is a primitive. See, every now and then that happens, it can't happen too often. We don't want too many new primitives in our story, otherwise the picture starts to get crowded and cluttered. But you know, I don't mind having a few.

46:58 Dylan: With the case of morality and the notion that it's not a genuine primitive, it makes me wonder if the way in which normative primitives would be genuine, for lack of a better term, that if you say, well, no morality. Moral truths are not scrutable from physical truths or any other thing. In fact, they don't really exist. What they do is they come out of a set of normative judgments by a community. Are those examples of a way that would say morality is inscrutable in this respect, or would these sort of normative judgments count as elements of a base?

47:31 David: Well, I think moral truths are scrutable from a non moral base. You can describe to be a situation. You know, someone's torturing a cat, here's what's going on, here's what they're doing. Describe it in non moral terms. If there are any Moral truths I think I can then know, yeah, that's an instance of doing something wrong. I don't need any more empirical truths to do that. I think I can figure that out more or less a priori given my moral concepts.

47:53 Dylan: Given your moral concepts, yeah.

47:56 David: But you've always got to have the concept. The person that's figuring out these high level truths always has to at least have the concept.

48:01 Dylan: So those moral concepts are going to be like good and bad, that kind of thing.

48:05 David: Yeah.

48:06 Mark: So you're saying those have to be in the base or those themselves could be scrutable?

48:09 David: I think they can be scrutable actually. I'm not even sure to be honest about the status of morality. I'm not sure I'm a moral realist. If I'm a strong enough moral anti realist I'll say, well, there just aren't any truths about what's good and what's bad. But let's say, let's presuppose moral realism so there are some facts about what's good or what's bad. Then I think the most natural thing to say is that, well, given a big enough description of the world in non moral terms, I can know the moral truth. Given a description of the situation where you know someone's helping someone else, I can say yeah, they're doing something good, they're doing something bad.

And I think you can make the case that's actually a priori. If I'm right about that, then there are moral truths which are scrutable. Some people though might say you just can't figure out the moral truths based wholly on the non moral truths. If that's your view, then you might say no, there's no a priori's credibility here. And then you might need to build moral truths into the base have good or bad as basic concepts.

49:01 Mark: Well, it does seem like scrutability is looser here. It's not a kind of reductionism, just saying that it's scrutable that you know the natural facts of the situation and therefore you could figure out the moral facts. That's not the same thing as saying that the moral facts are definable in the way that a utilitarian would want to define them in terms of pleasure or anything like that.

49:19 David: That's right. And that brings up one of the ways in which the scrutability relation is weaker than definitional relation or definitional scrutability. Because it needn't give you a definitional connection, it needn't even give you that much of A reductive connection. Someone like G.E. moore who thought that moral truths are metaphysically unnatural, even he might well have thought there was an a priori connection from the natural truths to the moral truths. So that kind of brings out that a priori scrutability may not be a perfect guide to what's the metaphysically fundamental elements of the world.

At least if you've got a view like that one that G.E. Moore has, it's only an approximate guide to get to that more perfect guide. I talk about this kind of later in the book, but one thing you might do is distinguish between for example a priori scrutability from something like analytic scrutability. A lot of people think moral truths are a priori. You know, if killing people is wrong, maybe that's a priori. But it's not analytic, it's not true by definition, or it's non trivial. You might think that that's what allows G.E. moore to say that there's a priori connections here without reductions, because it's something like a synthetic a priori truth in Kant's sense.

Likewise mathematics. Some people think mathematics is fundamental, but it's still a priori. It's a priori 2, 2 is 4. But that doesn't yet imply that mathematics is reducible to the other stuff. So that goes with mathematics being synthetic a priori too. So you might want to use something more like analytic scrutability as a guide to metaphysical fundamentality.

50:45 Mark: Yes, we had a question from a listener today when I put up this announcement. He wanted you to explain whether mathematics should be considered part of the compact set of basic truths, or if mathematics would be included in the set of things scrutable from the compact set. For example, is the infinite set of whole numbers considered to be contained within the basic truths? Or would it be a scrutable unnecessary consequence of certain basic truths?

51:06 David: Well, I think mathematical truths are all in principle knowable a priori. So two plus two is four. There's an infinite number of primes. Those are all knowable a priori. If they're knowable a priori, it follows automatically that they're a priori scrutable from any set of truths whatsoever. If it's a priori, the two plus two is four. Two two is four is a priori scrutable from physics or even from nothing. If I'm right, the mathematical truths are a priori. They don't need to be included in an a priori scrutability base. But it could turn out the mathematical truths are not analytic.

That's a very common view. They're not true by definition or anything. So 2, 24 is still non trivial synthetic a priori in Kant's sense. If that's right, then the reasoning that showed they have to be in an a priori scrutability base doesn't show that they have to be in an analytic scrutability base. So you might think if we wanted a base such that everything was analytically scrutable from that, then we might have to include mathematical truths in the base and likewise you might have to include moral truths in the base and so on.

52:06 Mark: Yeah, that's a great clarification there, because I was wondering about the a priori. I mean, when we discussed that in terms of Carnap and other empiricists, they seemed to rule out the synthetic a priori, so there really wasn't a much of an issue there. Anything that's true is true by definition or true because of logic. Sorry, anything that's a priori is for one of those reasons. But if you add in the possibility of synthetic a priori true as well, that's still the amount of things that Kant thinks falls into that category is still fairly limited. And it seemed like scrutability. If we say scrutability is ultimately a matter of, oh well, we just look at what our intuitions are, what we in fact think we can figure out from a given base, then that's not putting the restrictions on the a priori that I think even Kant would want to put on them.

52:47 David: Yeah, Kant absolutely would reject the synthetic a priori in many of his periods at least. And that's part of what made him an empiricist. Part of why I call myself a Carnapian rationalist is I believe in a notion of the a priori that goes beyond the analytic. And in that respect I've got something in common with Kant. Now, what is it you're saying that Kant would reject?

53:07 Mark: So the things you're allowed in addition to truths by definition that are a priori are, well, mathematical truths. You're a lot fundamental moral truths. It seemed that you were trying to leave room for many more kinds of things being a prioriscrutable from a given base than just things that have to do with the structure of the human intellect or something like that. I mean, it seemed to be the way that Kant was describing it, that there are just the way that we think means that reason will give us some basic moral maxims. And so, I mean, it sounds like that if for Kant really moral truths are truths of logic essentially, then they don't even have to be in the base either. They'd be apri excruciable from macro physical natural facts without having to put it in the base.

53:47 David: Well, I think Kant thinks that moral truths are synthetic a priori. Right. So he'd say that they don't need to be an a priori scrutability base, but maybe they do need to be in an analytic scrutability base. And if you think something similar about mathematics, then we get something not that different from my own view here. Now he has very different views about what makes up the a priori about the roots of the a priori. I don't think that's so much going to show up in the scrutability base, but somewhere else in some other part of the story.

54:15 Mark: Well, so what is it that makes something a priori? I mean, is it intuition that there are things that we know? It seems that you were using an almost empirical take on a priori by looking at the way that we give counterexamples to definitions. And I thought that was a great move to undermine the objector to say Wittgenstein's in the Philosophical Investigations objection to the traditional view of necessary insufficient conditions by pointing out, hey, you're the one giving the counterexample.

54:38 Unknown speaker: So.

54:38 Mark: So you do have this conceptual knowledge. We just need to think of conceptual knowledge in a way that's wider than giving a definition.

54:45 David: Yeah, that is one of the big mysteries in philosophy. What is the grounds of the a priori? Where does it come from? Where does any knowledge come from? That's one of the most difficult questions in philosophy. I wish I had an answer to that question. I don't have a really good answer.

54:57 Mark: Also, what's the meaning of life? And just give us the rest of

55:00 David: the big questions in the next five minutes. Between good and evil and why is there something rather than nothing? Yeah, I got nothing, sorry.

55:08 Mark: Actually, I mean, are some of those questions ruled out for you by having a constructivist system? Is one of the motivations still lurking back there? What I think was still in carnap. As generous as he was with admitting different ontological presuppositions for different contexts, he still wanted to have a corrective that. To just be able to say that a question like why is there something rather than nothing? It's just not the kind of thing that philosophy can say anything about. I mean, do you have any of those sentiments in you?

55:32 David: Well, I don't know. I don't have a good answer to that question. I tend to be more sympathetic to metaphysical projects than Carnap is. But it does strike me that some things have to be taken as fundamental. And it may be that some questions in the vicinity of why is there something rather than nothing Are just fundamental. Maybe there's no good answer to them. Why are the fundamental laws of nature the way they are? Well, maybe what makes them fundamental, you know, is that there's no further explanation. If there was a further explanation, they wouldn't be truly fundamental.

And you know, maybe one thing we've learned is you have to take some things as primitive explanations have to end somewhere. I think as philosophers as well as scientists, we want that fundamental end to explanation to be as small as possible. A set of fundamental laws so simple you can write them on the front of a T shirt or something, as physicists say. But still I think it's got to end somewhere. So that may be that with questions like why is there something rather than nothing has to end somewhere? Still, I'm not opposed to trying. If someone can try to give an explanation of why is there something rather than nothing?

And I'm all for it. It's just none of the attempts I've seen so far have looked terribly successful. And I suspect that's not our problem. I suspect that maybe a systematic problem to be expected with a question like that.

56:34 Mark: Well, it sounds like you're not willing to give a global maxim like that example you just brought up of whether we should consider laws of nature fundamental or not. So you talk about this, this is one of the one legged man things that you. I was using the analogy that you keep bringing back in different contexts. You could be a human about causation or you could believe that there's just, just fundamental causal necessity and you just have to put that in the base.

56:56 David: Yeah.

56:57 Mark: Now is it just a matter of pragmatism whether you're going to put something in the base or not? Or it sounds like you're not willing to make any global statements like, you know, beyond of course a commitment to simplicity you've mentioned. But even that's just a heuristic that there really is no guiding heuristic of what you're going to put in the base or not. It's a matter of, well, let's do an in depth philosophical investigation of that particular thing, whether we should have a humane or non humane account of causality and we'll adjust the base to meet the results of that detailed exploration.

57:24 David: Yeah, you know, I'm open to different principle. Fundamental scrutability basis you know, a human principle like if you can't get it from experience and mathematics, consign it to the flames. Or, you know, if you can't get it from physics, consign it to the flames. I'm open to different principled scrutability basis. In the last chapter of the book I talk about some possibilities, but for the most part I aim to see this as a global framework. Some such scrutability thesis is true. Now what is the fundamental one? And to some extent in the book I'll leave that open.

Is it scrutability from structure? Is it scrutability from the metaphysically fundamental? Is it scrutability from consciousness and causation on different moods? I've got different views about this. I've been a bit reluctant to go in and take one to be my own specific guiding scrutability principle and then use that to lay down the law and say anything not scrutable from that is not even true. You could do that with scrutability from pqti. You could say if it's not screwable from pqti, it's not real. But I'm more inclined to, you know, just take the cases as they come and say, well, either it's scrutable from PQTI or it's not.

Well, if it's not, then we've got to add something to the base. We better not do that too often, but every now and then we may need to. Still, at the end of the day, it may turn out that, you know, scrutability is not true by coincidence. It may have some deep explanation and this deep explanation may be some Hume style thesis, like if you can't get it from structure plus consciousness, it doesn't exist or something. I wanted to stay neutral on that in at least developing the framework.

58:43 Mark: Well, certainly that makes it less easy for people to reject your whole project.

58:47 David: It's true.

58:47 Mark: Can't look at your specific version. Yeah, and you could have a limited tolerance or a tolerance in different moods to some of these attempts to expand the base. You're not consigning any of it to the flames. You're consigning it to cold storage, say. So you're putting it out of commission for a while. It does seem like you run with PQTI for quite a lot of this book. That that seemed to be the thing that you are famous for, that the phenomenal is part of the cue is

59:08 David: in there, the physical and the phenomenal. So I think that's a nice respectable dualist base P for Physics Q for consciousness. Yeah, T for that's all and I for indexical. But that's just around the edges. There's a nice physical phenomenal base. But if someone finds something you turns out there's a God, turns out there's intrinsic quiddities and matter or something then to add then I'll say well more power to you. I may not go for that, but you can have that in your base. One thing that comes out of this is that different people might have their own like scrutability base codes also.

And I've seen every now and then, you know, people in certain online communities sign off of their profile like you know, I'm blah positive, I'm straight and I'm white, I'm this, I'm that and you get a big list of codes for all your properties and a big acronym. So maybe we can all have scrutability code. Here's what's in my scrutability base. I will have the structural and the phenomenal. You can have something else. You know, you can have the moral and God and causation and your base and so on. You can still have the framework.

1:00:02 Mark: I think we've come up with the Chalmers vision for how your philosophy can affect the world that everybody will have these. Think of these terms such they'll put that as their email signature.

1:00:12 David: Everyone will have a national issued ID card with your scrutability code on it like your driver's license. There we go. It's a brave new world.

1:00:20 Dylan: Well say we have all these different scrutability bases and they all cover. Does the question of the transformation from one to another matter? Makes me wonder if they really do all cover.

1:00:32 David: Well I think they don't all cover is one thing I think for example, if you just had a physical scrutability base like maybe Dan Dennett is going to want to have just a physical base in there. But I think he's wrong. Not all true. The scrutable from there. The truth's about who's conscious and what it's like to see rapid. Those just aren't scrutable from there. So that's not an instance. So not all differences between scrutability bases are going to be just a choice of where you start versus where you finish. Some are just going to be wrong. Some on the other hand will have too much.

I think that if you have got in there well I'm an atheist, I think you don't need to have got in there because there is no God or some will have morality as well as Physics and consciousness. I don't think you need to do that because I think you can get morality from physics and consciousness. So that's again, that's just a disagreement about what. That base at least just isn't a minimal base. It could be that among different bases, though, there's more than one possible minimal basis. And this is the question of covering. Right. It could be that there's two or three different bases, both of which are minimal, but each of which is interdefinable.

And I don't rule that out. But that's a special case. It's different from what's going on in these cases in general.

1:01:31 Mark: So scrutability is one of the reasons you hit on this is because it's a way of generalizing the concept that you talk about at such length in your earlier book, logical supervenience.

1:01:39 David: Yeah, it's very much a close relative of that. Logical supervenience is a kind of way of thinking about scrutability. I think in various ways I wasn't quite clear enough about it and so on. But chapter two of my book on consciousness was almost everything is logically supervenient on the physical. And what I meant that was almost all truths about the world are scrutable from the physical truth, except for the ones about consciousness. And then I went into argue consciousness is not scrutable from the physical truths. And I went on to argue from there to a form of dualism.

1:02:05 Mark: I think the distinction you made in there between logical supervenience and natural supervenience is important here as well. That scrutability, again has to do with knowledge. It has to do with.

1:02:15 Unknown speaker: With.

1:02:15 Mark: If we knew all the physical truths, would we be able to figure out the mental truths? And you're saying no because they're not logically supervenient. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't think, if you have set all the physical truths, then that would, as a matter of natural fact, also set all the mental truths.

1:02:30 David: That's right. So in my book I talked about logical supervenience versus natural supervenience. Logical supervenience is roughly you can deduce the mental from the physical. Natural supervenience was if, as a matter of fact, you create a physical duplicate of the me, it'll have the same mental truths about it. That's just as a matter of natural fact. Natural supervenience could come about if there's just some law of nature that says where you've got this kind of physical structure, you've got this kind of mental structure. And I think Even a dualist could allow that kind of natural supervenience. But they won't say it's a matter of deducibility or scrutability.

1:03:02 Mark: Well, that just demonstrates how scrutability and metaphysical foundedness, for lack of a better word, come apart. I took natural supervenience as a way of saying that as a metaphysical matter, if you have all the physical facts set in place, that will determine all the mental facts. So we could put it in a different epistemic category. We could say there's no way to logically deduce or do a reduction in the way Carnap would like from the mental to the physical, or vice versa. But it doesn't mean that metaphysically these are separate realms, because natural supervenience, at least according to my interpretation, that's all you would need to establish that there really is. I mean, that's why you're a property dualist instead of a substance dualist list. Does that seem right?

1:03:42 David: Well, yes and no. I mean, I do think that because the mental is naturally supervenient on the physical and not logically supervenient, that goes along with the fact that the mental is not completely grounded in the physical. Of course, I'm a property dualist. I think that there's fundamental mental properties in the world. They're not reducible to physical properties. And that goes along with the lack of scrutability. I mean, it's true that I'm a property dualist. I'm not a substance dualist. That means I don't think there are fundamental mental entities in the world, but I still have fundamental mental properties.

And, you know, I think the catalyst of fundamental properties of the world is going to include space and time and mass and consciousness. And that's a strong, robust metaphysical claim. So, you know, I'd say that the lack of scrutability of the mental from the physical goes along with the fact that consciousness is not metaphysically reducible to the physical.

1:04:28 Mark: I'm having difficulty when I compare this division, say, to the one you talked about with G.E. moore, that he argued that the moral was a non natural basic property. So, so the moral for him would not be logically supervenient upon the physical. But you could say in the same way that it is naturally supervenient, that there just are some things that have this property good and some things that don't.

1:04:51 David: I think it's a bit different in the moral case. In the moral case, you do have a priori scrutability, which you don't have in the mental case. In the mental case, you've got no a priori scrutability. And I think metaphysical fundamentality. In the Moorean case, what's interesting is you do have a priori scrutability, but on Moore's view, you also have metaphysical fundamentality. In the consciousness book, I say if you don't have a priori scrutability, then you don't have metaphysical reducibility. That doesn't mean that if you do have a priori scrutability, you do have metaphysical reducibility.

And the moral case brings out that you might have a priori scrutability even without metaphysical reducibility, which is to say a priori scrutability. Slightly too weak a condition for being non reducible. That kind of gets back to what I suggested earlier, that maybe the criterion there is something more like analytic scrutability. The moral is apriori screwable, but it's not analytically scrutable from the physical. Maybe it's something like analytic scrutability that really matters for metaphysical groundedness or full metaphysical reducibility.

And that's something which I just discussed in one of the later bits of the book, the seventeenth excursus on scrutability and supervenience. I'm sure you guys never got to it. Maybe one day somebody will read it. But that actually kind of connects all this stuff, which is about metaphysical grounding and conceptual grounding, and really tries to work through the connection to fundamentality.

1:06:06 Mark: Well, this is your chance if you want different readers across the world to be spread across different parts of world the book. You can just highlight some particular excursus here. And that'll be the specially partial examined life audience portion of the book.

1:06:17 David: Excursus 18 on Scrutability, Supervenience and grounding for thinking about metaphysical fundamentality. That's one good one. And don't forget excursus 17 on the structuralist reply to skepticism where you can read all about the Matrix and its role in scrutability.

1:06:32 Dylan: I read that one today.

1:06:34 David: Oh, very good. What do you think?

1:06:35 Dylan: I'm very sympathetic to structuralism in general. It seemed like the case to be made is that either you are sensitive to being in the Matrix or it doesn't matter at some level. And so all the truths that you would find out to be true about the world in the Matrix versus outside of the Matrix would be either true about the Matrix itself or it would be detectable. And so you could revise your base and learn more about it.

1:07:04 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:07:04 David: So detectability though, I think is all there is. I Mean, even the skeptic will say that some truths about the Matrix are not detectable, but still they'll say your beliefs about the world are false in the Matrix. That's the standard skeptical view about the Matrix. Even though it's not detectable, your beliefs are false.

1:07:22 Dylan: That's where I've never really understood that notion, that if I can't. That if I can't tell, that if it's impossible to tell, then how is the judgment that it's not true going about?

1:07:32 David: Ah, great. So I'm talking to an old fashioned verificationist here.

1:07:36 Dylan: Well, I mean,

1:07:39 Mark: push him on it.

1:07:40 David: Yeah, this is great.

1:07:41 Mark: He needs to examine his pragmatism.

1:07:43 David: So it could be if someone says there's an invisible unicorn inside a black hole that never leaves any traces, and you say, not only is that false, but it couldn't be true because, you know, I couldn't even imagine what it would be for there to be such a thing. How about the distant past? Someone says, here's the hypothesis, there are previous universes that never left a trace on our one. Then you think that's just not even a coherent hypothesis.

1:08:06 Dylan: Yeah.

1:08:08 David: Wow, okay, good. You and Carnap have had a lot in common in his verificationist days. I guess I go with the view that, you know, I can imagine a world where we set it up so that there are different cycles and the first cycle never leaves a trace on the second. So I'm inclined to think that's at least coherent. But if you don't think so, okay, then you've got a stronger structuralism than I do. I've got structuralism? Your view starts to come closer to, to, I don't know, phenomenalism or idealism, where basically reality is defined by what you experience. Is that fair?

1:08:37 Dylan: I guess what I'd say is that it seems to me that saying that it's incoherent is the wrong. Is not what I would say. I would say that you could make it coherent. What I'm wondering is if it's a distinction that makes any difference. So it could be that, say, a multiple world possibility of simultaneously orbiting circles or whatever that do not affect one another in say, one realm has some other kind of effect. Like it might be that physically it's undetectable, but that the concept of it leads to other kinds of elements of a base. That would be the strong case where you could, as a result of such concepts, end up with new elements of a base that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

That would be a kind of Distinction that would make a difference. It wouldn't be the difference that you originally thought it was going to be make, I guess in general, distinctions that don't make a difference. I guess I'm kind of skeptical about.

1:09:30 David: So the very idea that you're in a matrix, you think actually there may be no difference between being in a matrix and not being in a matrix.

1:09:36 Dylan: I think that if you can't tell, I'm willing to be very, very broad in the notion of tell, then I don't see how it's a distinction that makes a difference.

1:09:45 David: Well, maybe there are distinctions that don't make differences to you, but how about if they make a difference to somebody else?

1:09:50 Mark: To the robots that are feeding on the energy coming from brain batteries, they care.

1:09:59 David: God can see the tree falling in the quote.

1:10:04 Dylan: I can see the coherence of that notion. I guess I confess I'm not sure what to do with it.

1:10:09 Mark: Yeah, let me shift that because this is related to. There's a lingering question with me is to what extent are you doing metaphysics here? That I described a shorthand for the history of philosophy that before Kant you had a lot of people doing straight up speculative metaphysics. After Kant, well, at least in the continental tradition, you had a bunch of phenomenologists that said some version of what Dylan has been saying, that the thing in itself is inconceivable, that the realm of our experience is our world. So metaphysics becomes ontology and ontology becomes a matter of spelling out the structures of experience.

And we know that Husserl taught a class to Carnap, and so Carnap at least got some of this. And Husserl was himself influenced, influenced by Frege. So there's a lot of overlap there. And I was trying to figure out whether we can say something comparable about the analytic tradition that has gone through Russell and Wittgenstein and Carnap into you that instead of doing straight up speculative metaphysics, you might admit in the abstract that you could still ask these questions. It's not like they're meaningless. It's not like you're a verification list.

But the focus needs to be something like instead of doing an analysis of the world in itself, we're doing an analysis of the connections between the concepts that we. With the fact that we're looking at what is a priori and how we can figure out one thing from another. And this ends up being something that you're calling conceptual metaphysics, is that right? Yeah, or conceptual ontology.

1:11:36 David: Conceptual metaphysics is the application of all this conceptual and epistemological framework to thinking about questions about what's fundamental in the world. And that's an approach to metaphysics, which I have a lot of sympathy with, that our concepts and our epistemology very strongly constrain our metaphysics.

1:11:51 Mark: But that's not incompatible with still saying that there could still be possibilities that are differences, that don't make a difference, that yet are perfectly valid distinctions and possibilities. And it's just that we as humans start where we start and we have to do the best that we can and consider actually reasonable alternatives from our perspective.

1:12:07 David: Also, I think there's always fundamental truths, and fundamental truths aren't all that constrained by our epistemology. There's how the world is at the fundamental level, that's kind of up to the world. But what follows from that, you know, that's kind of. Well, that's a matter of epistemology to some extent. And it turns on concepts and there's a connection between, you know, if you've got fundamental truths and non fundamental truths, they stand in. The metaphysical relation of the macro is reducible to the micro or grounded in the micro. And that goes along, I think, with an important conceptual and epistemological relation.

So that's why I say scrutability goes along with something like certain kinds of metaphysical reduction. But that still leaves open the question of the fundamental level of reduction reality. What's in the base? What's in the base, I think, is not so much epistemologically constrained. I mean, that's up to reality. What's the ultimate constituents of reality? I do want to embrace this thesis of fundamental scrutability, that all truths should be scrutable from the fundamental truths. But I don't think there are that many epistemological constraints on what the fundamental truths are to that extent.

I think there's a world out there. Even if there are fundamental truths about black holes that will never make a difference to us, they still could be out there and they still could be true.

1:13:15 Dylan: I'm wondering a little bit about the extent to which fundamental truths scale with size. It's often the case that we end up with particle physics when talking about fundamental truths and field theory and stuff like that. But I'm wondering if something like species or higher order things are fundamental and if that would mean that they would be part of a different base, or if they're all reducible both logically and sort of size wise, or just to

1:13:46 Mark: throw in another possibility like Schopenhauer's will Or something. It seems that there are other candidates that people have put forward for a potential base that are not microscopic in any way.

1:13:54 David: Yeah, some people these days take seriously the idea of monism. The idea that the fundamental entity in the world is the whole universe and everything is just states of the whole universe. Everything like the parts will be non fundamental because they're parts of the whole whole which is fundamental. So that's not small first, that's big first. Some people think that you get to from quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, what's fundamental is a wave function. Wave function of what? Not for one individual particle. It's a wave function for the whole universe.

So some people have said, you know, against smallism or against microphysicalism. I think it's very much an open question whether the fundamental level should be taken as the micro level or some large scale level. I talk quite a lot about the microphysical in my book. When I say that I usually mean the fundamental physical. And it's an open question exactly what that translates into size wise.

1:14:41 Mark: And it was the same thing with the phenomenal that you're not saying that the fundamental phenomenal pieces, the fundamental qualia are my experience of red. Now it sounds like reading it from your other book that it could be these proto phenomenal properties that any information system at the atomic level or something might have, that those could potentially be the fundamental Q properties.

1:15:03 David: Yep. And I also take serious the idea that the fundamental states of consciousness are whole states of consciousness of a subject at a time. You know, that was Carnap. In the Aufbau he took his primitive things were lxs elementary experiences, whole states of subjects at times. And then he tried to analyze out the individual experiential states of subjects and ground them in that. I take seriously that idea too that maybe that we should take total states of experience for subject is fundamental and then get the smaller things out. That's like the monistic idea of state of the whole universe is fundamental and then getting the parts out.

1:15:37 Mark: Well, let me throw the paradox that we were talking about with Carnap last time. So if you have as fundamental a whole experience and then the only way I can get the concept green is by comparing a bunch of these whole experiences. And he says that the concept green, we can't call it a component of those experiences. We'll call it a quasi component that we're doing quasi analysis because we're not looking through and seeing saying ah, there's the green part of this experience. We're only making a set of different experiences and calling that whole set green. And that seemed absolutely bizarre to us. That how do you determine which ones go in that set. Unless you already know what green is like? Green has to be a component and thereby more fundamental of the whole experience. Is that. What do you think about that?

1:16:17 David: You know, my view isn't as strong as Carnap's. Yes. And his method of quasi analysis. He just wanted to tell. Take as fundamental these similarity relations. You'd get these similarity circles between experiences and reconstruct green from there. I don't want to be quite so austere with my properties of whole experiences. I'm prepared just to take as basic properties of experiences. Things like being red on the left and green on the right. Or something like that. As a property of a visual field. So that's to say, although I'm taking whole experiences as fundamental.

I may appeal to big distributional structural properties of these experiences. That bring in more than just similarities and differences. Like, you know, red on the left, green on the right. You know, we are mentioning green right there. And I suspect you may need to, I think, for it to be plausible. I mean, especially given what I think about consciousness. There's no way you can derive facts about red and green Just from structural facts alone. I think you need something like red or green in there. But it might be sort of holistic facts about red or green.

Like the way the red and the green in your visual field. Are interrelated. Rather than single local atomistic fact.

1:17:17 Mark: Right. I recall that from your other book. That to understand, say, color perception. We not only have to have an idea of these phenomenal basics. Whatever they may be color or secondary quality experiences. But also the structure. What is essential to colors is that there's a color space. And that you could reproduce on some other information system. Besides just the way we think about this in our conscious experience. The scale that goes along the spectrum, say, the difference is if you turn up the hue and turn up the brightness. And the other ways that we can mechanically shift one color to another.

1:17:47 David: Yeah. You know, there's these big sort of structural spaces of colors. And there may be that there's kind of a phenomenal structuralism. Where you can characterize all these different states of experience. By their locations within a structure. Again, Carnap would be at all in terms of just very abstract mathematical structure. I think you can't get the difference between red experience, green experience. From abstract mathematical structure. But still, you could get this from a somewhat different kind of structural approach. Where we take, you know, certain basic dimensions like red and brain and then characterize all of consciousness as complicated states along those complex dimensions.

1:18:21 Mark: Even though you are denying that, say, concepts can be interpreted as definitions, as necessary insufficient conditions, say. It seems that you don't see that as an insurmountable obstacle for artificial intelligence, say in the way that Hubert Dreyfus falling on Heidegger does, that those folks think that we have some sort of sort of that the a priori, as you would put it, that conceptual knowledge that we have that isn't captured by definitions for Heidegger and Dreyfus following him, that it's because of this sort of fundamentally unanalyzable embeddedness that we have this background knowledge that we're immersed in that really cannot be cashed out in terms of information. And I gather that is not something that you are a fan of.

1:19:03 David: Yeah, I've never been an expert on this aspect of the Heideggerian views, although, you know, I'm certainly open to elements of these ideas. But how would that impact on. Somebody told me, actually a friend of mine who works on Heidegger said, I think this project is very Heideggerian in a way. What he's trying to do in Being in Time is something kind of similar. But I take it you're not seeing it that way.

1:19:23 Mark: Well, we have yet to do our actual Hubert Dreyfuss episode or something like that. But I know the upshot of your consciousness book is that you are a non reductive functionalist and that you have views about strong AI, that there's something about the physical structure of you that if duplicated would then cause a duplicate of the phenomenal structure. And I know from reading parts of that book that it's not a matter as say John Searle says, that it's specifically a matter of your biological content of your neural network, that it is something to do with the structure of the components involved that could then be duplicated on a computer or elsewhere and that would be sufficient to generate consciousness.

So if you're any kind of functionalist, that is exactly the kind of thing that Dreyfus falling Heidegger was arguing against. Yeah, I'm trying to still connect this because so many other points of your other book connected up so closely with the current book on screwtability. I'm trying put these things all together in my head.

1:20:14 David: Yeah, maybe that connects a bit less the connections there are a bit less essential and that I think you combine the Scrutability project with a functionalist view or with a non functionalist view about the basis of consciousness. That would be a question about what the psychophysical laws are, as I put it, the laws connecting physics to consciousness. Likewise, Dreyfus. Heidegger is only one way, I think, to be a Heideggerian. I think there are other Heideggerians who'd be quite happy with a functionalist version of Heidegger. It's all about the actions and the patterns of actions.

And some of those might be much more open to artificial intelligence than Dreyfus is. So I suspect the connections here are kind of complicated. You're right that Dreyfus view on consciousness doesn't agree with my view on AI. I'm not sure to what extent that reflects like a fundamental disagreement between Heidegger's metaphysics and my metaphysics. Maybe there's some connection there, but if there is, I haven't yet understood Heidegger well enough to figure it out.

1:21:03 Mark: Yeah, well, he's a difficult case even in the phenomenological tradition. For somebody that is so keen to admit first person reports that that's an essential part science. That's one of the arguments of your older book. In one lecture I just heard of you. You did acknowledge traditions like of Husserl and other phenomenologists that made a systematic attempt to describe first person experience. But yet I don't see a lot of name dropping from that tradition, say in the Structure of the World book. That's obviously not where you're coming from. It's not what appealed to you in your studies. Can you sum up why that might be?

1:21:35 David: Yeah, well, I guess, I mean, this was more abstract. Abstract metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language. For me, the phenomenological tradition is most interesting as philosophy of mind, as a way of studying the mind and the character of consciousness from the inside. To some extent, those issues were bracketed here. I wasn't really working on the specific fine structure of consciousness. Now, of course there is a rich phenomenological tradition of metaphysics as well, and to some extent of epistemology. And I guess there's some philosophy of like language and the post war continental tradition.

I guess those are elements of the tradition that I know less about and that I feel less resonance with. But I was interested to hear this friend of mine who worked on Heidegger say they thought there were some resonances with Heidegger's approach here. I haven't fully found it. Maybe it's their. Husserl is a somewhat more familiar figure for me than Heidegger. You know, I've actually read Bits and pieces of Husserl here and there, and his project of conceptual and metaphysical analysis may well have some connections here. But again, it's more of an interest of mine than and area of expertise, and that's that maybe I'm somewhat reluctant to go out there and build too much on a basis making broader claims about Hussel and Heidegger when I'm so an expert in those areas.

1:22:43 Mark: We're glad to draw you out a little bit. That's sort of the purpose of this whole thing, is that we're reading from all the different traditions, and a lot of it we're not going to know a lot about. But all of your readers are in the position of that there's so much division even among professionals in philosophy, in specialties, that unless you're really just holing up in your one area of expertise, then you're always an amateur and embracing new things.

1:23:07 David: I just went to a workshop earlier this year, spent a week thinking about Buddhist approaches to consciousness, and that was actually terrific. I learned a lot about the Buddhist traditions and all the ideas that they had had centuries before any Western philosopher had been thinking about some of these issues now. Yeah, there are many connections there. Maybe I'm best at figuring out these connections in the areas where I'm closest to home, which is in the philosophy of mind. The philosophy of mind is my own comfort zone, and in this book I'm already moving away bit from their comfort zone to metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.

Maybe one thing it brings out is it's hard to move away from your comfort zone in two directions at once. I can move away from Western philosophy of mind, say, to Buddhist philosophy of mind, or I can move out to Western philosophy of language. But to move out in two directions at once, say, to, you know, continental metaphysics, sometimes all at once is okay, well, maybe that's the next project. It's a lot to be biting off at one time, so.

1:23:54 Mark: You know, I had an amusing misread of your email from yesterday when you were asking, are we going to be talking more about Carnap or my book? I can't say I have huge expertise on the issues about Carnap. The way I read it on my phone quickly is I can't say I have huge expertise on either of those. And I thought that was a brilliant bit of modesty. So I'll impute that onto you, even though.

1:24:14 David: Okay, very good. They say the author is the last to know, Right. So there we go.

1:24:19 Mark: Well, geez, thanks. I guess we're kind of winding down. Do you have any major issue we didn't talk about yet that you would like to get out about the book or how this relates to. To life in general?

1:24:29 David: I don't think so, but I think every reader should go out there and buy it. You will find it will. It will change your life. You'll be happy, you'll make a lot of money, and the answers to all the questions of philosophy will immediately become apparent to you.

1:24:40 Mark: Do these books sell enough to sort of recompense the time involved or you're just, you know, you have your academic appointments, so you don't have to worry about that. You're just happy that.

1:24:49 David: Not even remotely close. Actually, my first book sold a lot for an academic book. I mean, it's probably sold 50 or 60,000 copies, but in the grand scheme of things, you know, maybe you make a dollar per book or something. Okay, it's nice money, but count that out over a decade. And you don't count on your income from your books for any serious kind of income. And this one will probably sell many, many fewer copies because it's not going to reach the same general audience. You know, 2,000 copies of fine.

1:25:11 Mark: It wouldn't have. But now since you came on this.

1:25:14 David: Ah, well, okay, tell your friends. Thousands of readers are going to buy it and make me rich. You know, book royalties may have gone up.

1:25:21 Mark: Can you at least like, tell.

1:25:22 David: I may get to it.

1:25:23 Mark: Nagle and John Searle and those folks that this did happen so that they'll

1:25:26 Dylan: come on the show.

1:25:27 David: Very good. Okay, I'll tell them. Tom. Tom Nagle, if you want to be professionally successful, you're going to have to go on Partially Examined Life. Otherwise you're always going to be a nobody.

1:25:40 Mark: Because they had Lucy Lawless.

1:25:42 David: Oh, yeah, great. Okay, well, that's going to move Tom Nagle, I'm sure. I think he's a regular watcher of the Warrior Princess.

1:25:49 Dylan: Mark your shame. Shameless. You're absolutely shameless.

1:25:54 Mark: I am curious, you know, you've done a great job. It looks like you actually man your own website and you put a lot of stuff out there and you have been much more successful than just the fact that we've heard of your name and not of others, that you've been successful in putting yourself out there. What's the secret here? Is it just that you did well with the first book and now it's pretty easy to get papers published and you're just a prolific guy in general or what's the difference Here, what should people emulate in your career?

1:26:20 David: Oh, boy, I don't know. I came to philosophy from the outside, you know, from mathematics and science, without so much of a background into it. And I got into it and I was glad I got to think about philosophical problems myself for a few years first before studying philosophy professionally. And then I came to it, you know, having had the background of having thought about the issues for myself a bit. And I'm glad to have had the chance to do that before I thought about what the great philosophers thought. And I probably reinvented a lot of wheels and made a lot of mistakes, but at least of a couple got to do it for myself.

So I encourage your listeners to, you know, do that and think about philosophical problems for themselves. And if at some point, you know, at some point, the philosophical ideas that I was thinking about for fun started overtaking my mind so much that it just became an imperative. I had to be thinking about this, I had to be working on it. And that was when I switched from mathematics to take up thinking about philosophy, you know, seriously, first of all as a student and then eventually as a professional. But I think it's that motivation that really filling the motivation to the philosophy, you know, I still think it's.

I still can't believe that people actually pay me to think about this stuff. It's, you know, from way back then when I was the dream of. I used to think about consciousness for fun. The thought that somebody would. You could make a living, you know, sitting around thinking and writing about abstract ideas about the nature of consciousness and the primitive constituents of reality. I still find it kind of hard to believe, you know, but it's just a. It's a good life and it's interesting and it's a fun thing to do. And if you've got that attitude, then.

Well, I can't say that, you know, success will automatically immediately follow, but it's a good start. What you then got to try and do is combine that enthusiasm with some kind of level of rigor and your thinking and hard work and with a distinctive haircut. Yeah, that helps. I just, I just chopped. You'd be sad to know, I just chopped it all off about. Oh, my. Two or three months ago. Hasn't yet made it onto my website yet, I guess, but I now have short hair.

1:28:02 Mark: Well, I will not tell our caricature artist before this goes up because we now have a resident artist that draws all the people. And if she draws you with short hair, nobody, they're going to say what's this. I'm not going to listen to this. This is probably a different Java Chinese.

1:28:14 David: I see. Okay, very good. Well, I'll be pleased to have this caricature.

1:28:19 Mark: All right, well, thanks so much.

1:28:22 Dylan: Thanks for coming on.

1:28:23 David: Well, thanks. It's been a pleasure. It's been a very interesting conversation and lots to think about.

1:28:27 Mark: Excellent. Next time we're going to talk about the Gorgias by Plato, about the division between philosophy and rhetoric. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com if you have comments you want to make about this episode, about other episodes, we'll post all of the videos, other podcasts. In fact, David gave a series of John lock lectures in 2010. What? It's like six hour long lectures that really lay out the majority of what is in this book. So that was my way of cheating that I could just read the cap chapters. But I did listen to all that thing, so I got a lot of the subtlety in there.

Hey, folks who are supported by your donations, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Recent big donors, including folks who signed up for a year of pel citizenship, include Frederick Peterson, David Pascal, Steve Coutinho, Mark Alberdane, Nicholas Komanos, Jeff Edwards, Paul Donahue, David Rogers, Frank Hogseth, Warwick Hook, Wally Knox, Michael Stroud, Jesse Holding, Marija Michilaskayne, Hema Ahmed, Jocopo, Lenzi Bogdan, Petrasor, Gregory Miller, Taylor Reichel, Ernest Prabhakar, Michael de Camp, and Robert Nolan. Thanks also to the smaller donors, including the many who signed up for a monthly pel citizen member.

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1:29:51 David: All right.

1:29:51 Mark: Good night.

1:29:52 Dylan: Good night.

1:29:52 Wes: Good night.

1:29:54 Dylan: That went pretty well.

1:30:02 Unknown speaker: Me is exactly what I want to be I'll sing the words on key though the actions be beyond me I've got the moon to sell you and I've got to tell you that I want us to be happy what you want from me is exactly what I want to be I'll say the words all three I will try I love you I'm sorry I've got the moon to sell you if I don't compel you then my words might seem empty it. What you want from me is precisely what I want to be to be engaged, actually. And all that we want to be I've got some time to spend and this is not the end the pit in my stomach will eventually mend I owe my life to you and if you want me to I can change change. Change what you want from me into something that I might achieve Please try to believe there's nothing for the mountain Leave deceased and if I try to fold you could you try to see through what's dividing you and me. Sa.