Untitled episode

foreign [Music] to think that the world and Consciousness are purely material is it possible for fact checking to be impartial what makes a scientific theory successful that should be the Common Ground here is it correct me if I'm wrong yeah be sure I will correct you even if you are right okay [Music] the famous philosopher Charles Sanders purse American philosopher at the end of the 19th

century said that it was a mistake to try to Define truth but you could Define the search for truth which was the search for a point Beyond which a question is settle the point Beyond which doubt does not arise now in the case of Ethics I think there are plenty of points Beyond which doubt does not arise if if I ask for a show of hands

how many people in this audience think that it's wrong to stamp on blind babies for fun how many people think it's okay to stamp on blind babies for fun there's only about three people put their hands up okay so there's a there's something which is done and dusted it's beyond discussion to the famous phrase of the philosopher elizabethanscome if somebody chooses to the central it he

shows a corrupt mind and I have no interest in arguing with him in other words it's something Richard for the moment the ground stands firm that's where we are and then you can go on and see if we can formalize things make more abstract propositions about morality and so on and that always proves very difficult but the basic judgments from which we start you've got to

start in medias raise in the middle of things and those basic judgments from which we start like the one I mentioned those stand firm those are done and dusted they're part we can even talk about knowledge if we wish and where we talk about knowledge we can talk about objective knowledge same thing so I think the um the polarized debate which Joanna talked about between relativists

on the one hand and the madman on the other the Fanatics and the um uh the totalitarians um that can be put behind us we've got to look for more nuanced issues within the general sphere of the things we know and the things we are pretty certain of and then we can perhaps progress if you start with the abstract ideas of objectivity and subjectivity you'll get

nowhere on that note slavoy do you want to tell us whether objective morality is possible not in a third world sense but I still we like I don't know what's happening with me usually I'm just butlering around now I'm in a better mood and I try to find common language and I still think there is not a big difference between the two of us yes I

agree with you what you that ultimately in some sense of course morality expresses our senses but I would say if you permit me using one of old examples of mine that there has to be a minimum of and very anti-marxist here remarkless usually attack you know alienation I think there should be a minimum of alienation here that I don't present it just as my expression that's

why here comes my old example phenomena which always interested me are this phenomena the first known example was and I visited them in south of Greece so-called weepers we mean whom you pay to cry for you to do the morning for you people claim how hypocritical and so on now I think this is a positive phenomenon it gives you a minimum of distance you minimally objectivize

your stance the same I would say goes now you will say but this goes for primitive cultures like you know in ancient China in Tibet those prayers I love this idea you put your prayer on a paper you put the paper in a meal will you turn it around and put it installing these terms objectively you are praying even if your mind is on sex or

this but at the end I felt relieved as if I laughed and I think I don't want to dismiss this as I know our Marxist friend will say extreme commodification racification no there has to be this minimum of ritualistic alienation you do a ritual and I think it was shown I will not take too much time very briefly it our reaction to pandemic how this proper

level of minimally objectified morning didn't function and it was mostly limited precisely on this hysterical outbursts on of course on Twitter on Facebook and so on and so on so I think Consciousness is um quite a funny word in some ways um and I I want to talk about something that is possibly more tangible but relates to Consciousness so if we think of morality for example

it's a very complex behavior that relates to us as individuals and how we integrate ourselves within the outer world so when we study morality as neuroscientists what we can see is that there's particular regions particular circuits within the brain that give rise to our moral Behavior and that our genes the DNA that we're given from our mum and our dad impinge and underpin our moral code

as an individual but we can also see that there's quite a lot of different effects from the environment around us that can affect how we morally behave with each other so for example there's moral contagion if I'm in a group of people and these people have different moral codes different moral values to me then without me being consciously aware of it without me realizing I will

naturally start to Veer my moral code and transgress or increase my moral code more towards theirs and there's something really interesting that happens within our brains as our moral codes as our moral values get shifted there's different changes within the stratum which is a brain region that's involved in reward and motivation which means that once you've devalued your moral code and you're transgressing then actually your

brain gets primed towards further transgression and to receive more reward from further transgression um so this is a really complex aspect of our Consciousness a very complex behavioral phenotype of morality but as neuroscientists start to understand it a little bit more it's also posing philosophical questions such as should we be all taking moral enhancement agents so agents that would help us to increase our moral values

and increase our ability to have altruism and compassion towards other people and possibly Elevate our consciousness so I want to start the discussion with Consciousness by actually reducing it to a really complex behavior of morality Consciousness is actually the only thing that we understand we inhabit it we know it intimately and in that Descartes was right that it is one thing we cannot deny Mata however

is a concept that has been created by our conscious Minds we know it only as something that we experience in Consciousness and it's a construct which is very difficult to explain it seems to denote a category of things in Consciousness that resist that resist my will of course when you've got things that don't easily go together one strategy is just to deny that one of the

other one of the other parties that seem to conflict exists and this would be the position of certain sort of philosophers rather like the church friends and I I call this the Putin Gambit you know opposition What opposition um I don't think it works and uh there are people of course like Nick Humphrey who will be talking about his his view that Consciousness is an illusion

it's an intriguing idea but there is a problem with that illusion already suggests Consciousness it begs the ground of what it's already talking about how good there's already an argument carry on so really essentially what one needs to be looking at is this consciousness of something completely distinct from Mata that super vegans and some people have suggested that it does at a certain point in evolution

and their explanations are often intriguing and complicated but ultimately unconvincing they boil down to a kind of hand waving where one gestures towards some kind of complexity or some kind of um transformation that occurs mysteriously at this point I prefer the idea which seems to me the most logical position that if Consciousness is associated with matter it doesn't happen at a certain point but it must

be there at some level in some degree in the business that makes up the universe and this is a position that's been reached by a number of the analytic philosophers of the western tradition recently including Galen strawson in England and Christian De Quincy in America and essentially that position is that this is the most rational possible way of thinking about Consciousness it doesn't tell us what

it is however it only suggests a way of thinking about it my own view is that matter is probably a phase of Consciousness and I'm using the word phase in the way that chemists and physicists use it in talking about the phases of water it can be vaporous it can be flowing when it's liquid water and it can be solid when it's ice and it may

be some sort of conduit of Consciousness but what Consciousness is I rather think we won't crack I I like the remark no doubt apocryphal or at least Anonymous that if our brains were simple enough for us to understand them we wouldn't be able to understand fundamentally we we need a strategy which as you said raises the living standards of all of us and creates a society

famously derided by Margaret Thatcher in a terrible statement there is no such thing as society and one of the worst aspects of rentier capitalism has been over the last 40 years the systematic plundering of our Commons those things that belong to all of us the public amenities the Public Services the public infrastructure that provide an informal fabric the poor man's overcoated sometimes called that actually helps

make Society one of the symbolic things that Thatcher did when she became prime minister was sell off the school playgrounds of our state schools and turn it into a profit making entity in the austerity era we had a situation where we were closing thousands of libraries public libraries to save public money because of the low taxes that were creating a budget deficit and they had to

try and make savings you will see the same thing now with cuts on public spending because they've done the tax cuts they've just done we've got to square the circle so we've got to get the budget deficit down so we're cuttings public spending if you do that you deprive your parks of Maintenance you deprive your amenities you privatized your streets and squares all of this is

part of the agenda of privatization and in privatizing you deprive Society of your Social fabric um in the fake capitalism World in rigor mortis world you will you will have come across this a lot I'm sure in uh uh the media and other things you may have been reading uh markets are as it were ends in themselves they're just valuable you must have things put into

a market um markets are subject to are best understood as in terms of their freedom or non-freedom what you want is the freest possible markets freedom is understood as the absence of impediment free markets are markets that are characterized in the economists understanding by perfectly by Perfect information all the information available is as it were in the price of whatever the good is um by Perfect

rationality all the agents involved um are extreme are perfectly rational about their own best interests um and also uh perfect competition so everyone all these agents are competing with each other in an entirely frictionless way that just gives them maximum opportunity to compete okay so I think that's a deeply corrupting picture um in all kinds of different ways um and there are two or three things

that point just to notice about it the first is um that it analogizes everything to certain kinds of financial markets so it kind of builds in a mild preference in favor of financial markets the second is that it it has a a notion of group psychology which translates into a notion of individual psychology on which individuals are basically economic automata who are purely motivated by the

desire for gain or the avoidance of loss okay and the third thing is that when that's taken it into uh into that's two further effects well let's take that idea is taken into government what you get is a very centralizing government because it starts to come to see seem to people in positions of authority as though the only thing that matters is whether or not a

particular group in society has had their own economic incentives appropriately tweaked through the tax and benefit system so the desire is but we'll extend the tax and benefit system to everyone and then if there's a particular group that isn't being as it were brought into the system given the right economic incentives those are supposed to be the only incentives that matter we'll just tweak the tax

and benefit system and so you see these Arguments for people for tax advantaging marriage or for changing the tax treatment of um single mothers or you know you can see how this kind of thing ramifies itself and the result of that is a hideously complex tax and benefit system which you know very very expert people struggle to understand if you're interested in this in the in

the uh the rule the benefits handbook which is the kind of standard thing uh or uh has increased from about that big 10 years ago to about that big um the tolles manuals of our tax law are greater than they ever have been I mean it's just it's a it's a form of insanity um and we lack the rabbinical scrutiny in the tax system when our

politicians to allow us to understand how these things might work and actually people don't understand it themselves and so of course their own behavior isn't is hardly suitable if you can't understand something it's hard to have have have your own behavior really affected by it an effective theory is based on the idea that at any given time we've measured certain things in a certain regime of

parameters maybe a certain distance regime a certain energy regime a certain um whatever size regime um and we can make predictions we can make successful predictions we can have theories about that regime of parameters now to mind you that regime of parameters becomes bigger and bigger as we expand our measurements as we look at more things but we have this very and and those answers are

correct up to the accuracy with which we've measured things so it could be that either by measuring things more accurately or by moving to a different regime we can find that our predictions were not absolute as you put it they're not precise but they were precise enough for everything we had to do precise enough to send a man to the moon but maybe it could get

more precise and that would be irrelevant to anything we see today which is why we're not we haven't measured that yet now that so I think it's very comforting and very comfortable and helps get around a lot of these silly debates to admit that that's the way all knowledge works we based on what we've seen what we've observed we put it together into theories we can

make predictions science is unique in that we can usually say the accuracy with which we trust the predictions and then allow things to evolve beyond that so to say there's an absolute is unnecessary in all this we don't even have to ask that question we have all we have to do is ask the question is it is it good enough for what we're trying to do

in whatever we're trying to predict whatever we're trying to build and that's the sense in which science is brilliantly successful and it's also brilliant and successful in telling us when we don't have absolute things I mean what we're doing in particle physics is we're looking for deviations from this what we call the standard model that's what tells us how to go beyond it doesn't mean the

standard model is wrong it tells us that there could be a richer structure that underlies it and that's the way science can evolve we have a theoretical framework that we are incredibly confident works for our own solar system even up to our own Galaxy so one of the core tenets of the standard model of cosmology that we have and that has led to this old big

bang cosmology and all the uh all the ideas around it is based on the implication that what we know of our own solar system is valid universally across there are certain base uh like certain constants that we just assume to be this we assume the universe to be the same in all directions we assume gravity to work the same everywhere and so one of the interesting

things about how Mond enters the scene is that this is based on observations that show actually gravity is not the same everywhere gravity is actually variable in certain places now what to do with that so what we are discussing with dark matter Dark Energy these things are they all come about uh because we have just assumed at the core that we have a theory that works

for the entire universe appeal from a philosophical background do you think that these map this matters so how we understand how gravity works and and whether the current theory is all right in terms of our philosophical understanding if you like of the universe and our knowledge of of it I mean certainly it matters a lot what these phenomena are and how uh how we come about

them I mean more I think the most important part is that uh we don't see nature or with the universe through these uh theories in some sort of naked mathematical way revealed like these are uh constructions that we have created over time based on our historical understanding of how to frame the problem in the first place so we're building on initial choices that were made initial

models and then we're trying to fill them in so I mean one of the challenges we Face uh in this is we don't know how far the validity of the current model in our own solar system actually extends into the universe so one of the implications of mind that I would where does mon like variable gravity for example come into play like how far do you

have to go out of our solar system before we could detect by one standards yeah I think the view people have is that quantum mechanics is about small things yeah general relativity is about big things yeah big things are made of small things whatever the small things are the important things now I think that's wrong quantum gravity is not the right answer okay so I'm sticking

my neck out here okay the right answer there are two different if you want to combine gravity and quantum mechanics you have to worry at least as much about the effect of gravity on quantum mechanics as on the effect of quantum quantum mechanics on gravity people think oh well if you understand the theory probably you've got to quantize it eventually yeah what I'm saying is that

that isn't it's part of the right answer but it's not the right answer the right answer is that quantum mechanics needs help yes you see quantum mechanics has an internal I call it an inconsistency yes the the people who worried about this most are Einstein Schrodinger and actually Dirac the three of the main figures the subject and they all for the quantum mechanics is incomplete yeah

or I would say even inconsistent because the way quantum mechanics works you just have to go into the details of this right I don't know what to do here you well there's a thing called the Schrodinger equation which tells you how a Quantum system evolves in time yeah and we have lots of evidence that said yeah it's right however it's not right as schroding himself knew

and he had this thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat to draw rather demonstrate this but if you follow his equation you get nonsense yes and that what you to make sense of it you have to have What's called the collapse of the wave function that following the schroding equation doesn't give you what the world does it's like yeah we don't see cats that are both dead and

alive we see them very determinately one thing or the other that's right you see A or B rather than sort of A and B at once yeah that sort of thing and what is it that does that well my view is it's gravity and that to fix quantum mechanics which is this very problem yeah collapse of the wave function you're going to have to bring gravity

in so you you need to gravitise quantum mechanics as much as you quantize gravity and in fact gravitis in Quantum is the important thing that's all over the place where it's quantizing gravity maybe it depends on the singularities and black holes and all that stuff but that's only a little tiny problem yeah the main problem is how to make Quantum Mechanics Work we live in a

complex multi-dimensional landscape of risk and what we're doing all the time is trying to optimize within this multi-dimensional landscape of risk um to find this Optimum to try and live the richest fullest you know life possible and also to discharge our responsibilities and to honor our social contracts as best we can within this very complicated architectural risks now how do we do that obviously we are

not or we do not actively see us see ourselves as sort of constantly engaging in some kind of dance of trial and error to to reach that Optimum because some of these trade-offs have already been worked out for us by society and by ourselves by the fact that we've lived lives so we tend to follow a set of General guidelines and within which we try and

accommodate our individual preferences and tolerances but what seems to me that sometimes in this process and then this covert incident has really crystallized for me that we lose sight of these trade-offs and of the social contract in which they are embedded I mean it's clear to me Dave probably won't like this that unregulated markets can certainly serve to distort perceptions of risk of a product or

an activity and also promote expectations of a life without compromise um as I'm sure can um some sort of other authoritarian framework but um that's fundamentally what I think we should be that's got me thinking is okay I you know we I think most of us have accepted that we live within this kind of really complicated system within which we're all continuously refining and changing our

ways of dealing with risk um and obviously but this whole covet event has seems to have um at least presents to me a picture of people who are not aware of the choices they're making every day I mean we live in close association with a multitude of microorganisms some of which have the propensity to cause disease and kill us particularly if we have no previous acquaintance

with them and managing this ecological relationship is a critical part of our lives and it requires very careful thought and in my own work mathematical models and statistical methodologies kind of help us determine the best course of action um but we what's really important is that we cannot act along a single dimension of minimizing risk um towards a single pathogen one thing to to perhaps make

clear to the audience is this is happening in everybody in this room because we had the pandemic that arrived with coronavirus now of course we've fortunately developed vaccines against the virus and that's been our great saving uh Grace but what would have happened anyway with a lot of people dying of course would have been that our immune systems would have done exactly what we're describing that

is they would have used that mechanism for hypermutating that is mutating extremely quickly to produce millions of new DNA sequences and then that is used to be what then it gives you the immunity the acquired immunity obviously now what Richard is questioning is okay maybe that can occasionally be passed to the journal line we don't know that yet whether an immune response can be passed to

the journal line and I would readily say we don't know that yet but what is important is Rich's point about how temporary it is now it's very important indeed and I agree with Richard about the importance of temperiness or permanence because it seems to me that what these mechanisms give is the option for The evolutionary process to as it were try it out if there's an

environmental change that makes it very difficult to survive and all organisms are under stress and they alter their genomes and pass some of that even temporarily onto the next Generations what the next Generations can do is to find out whether they do experience that change environment or not if they don't then it's great that it's temporary you don't have to alter the main genome if it

is more or less permanent and goes on for many generations then how can it get assimilated in the genome Conrad Waddington showed how to do that way back in the 1950s incidentally his book the strategy of the genes has been rightly republished in 2014 so you you can buy it again it was published in 1957. he did beautiful experiments on fruit flies he induced changes with

very tiny gentle persuasion as it were from either heat or ether or some other experimental techniques in which he could as he would persuade a few of the fries to show a new characteristic and he actually determined how many generations would you have to continue to do that in order for it to become assimilated into the genome it's about 14. it's not very long now what

he was showing is what he called genetic assimilation I think it was a great mistake that Waddington was ignored by The evolutionary biologist not a shame [Music]