Things Carlo Says on Podcasts

…because it's too complicated. Nobody would even dream of doing that. So we haven't reduced chemistry to physics. Chemistry keeps its entire autonomy as a good way of thinking about reality. We have just shown that the two are perfectly compatible. And when we can use both, they say the same thing.

Yeah. So, okay. So I understand that. I think I was thinking about...

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can understand that. I think.

We're just using a different language for describing what happened to us, what we do. And of course, we have, it's not like chemistry, physics. We have difficulty of joining the pieces. There's a lot of work to do. I hope it will be done. But there's nothing mysterious, I think, there.

I was thinking about the question you asked about, like, you know, when I sort of want to know what an electron is or something. And you say, well, what's the difference between the question of what it is versus what it does and the question of the chair? And I think I understand that practically…

…to relativity, you know, somebody says, oh, come on. If velocity is relative, then the moon doesn't have a velocity per se. It's all relative. It can go wherever it wants. No, the moon cannot go wherever it is. Yeah, right, right, right, exactly. The moon moves in a very unique way. It's relative,

but it's not arbitrary. It's

Sometimes people say that the difference between the moral law and like scientific laws, like I think C.S. Lewis writes about this, is, the difference with the moral law is that you can disobey the moral law. You can't disobey the law of physics, but you can disobey the moral law. That's what makes…

And if you accept that there is this level of dependence of morality on where you are, also your culture, then you're wiser in relation to others. Yeah.

Right?

…of a chair or there's only the way it behaves and affects us? I don't want you to answer that because you know Hume, you know various. I want to tell me what is the difference between this question asked for a chair and this question asked from an electron. I never understood the difference.

…of all the atoms, then I kind of know the position of the chair, for example, right? And in a way that doesn't go the other way. I can know that the chair is there, but I can't know what all of its atoms are doing. But if I know what all of its atoms are doing, I know what the chair is. Yeah,

Not the perspective.

Not the perspective.

Yeah. Do you think it's

It's not true that things get disordered. In fact, very often in nature, things left alone get ordered. To imagine that to be free, you have to violate the laws of nature is stupid. You, Brian, can be in a superposition. You can be in LA and also in San Francisco. Your head is older than your feet.

…me. He blew my mind by telling me that my head is older than my feet. And then he told me, why that's the least strange thing he was going to say. So Carlo, let's start with the frost. You're telling me that things left alone can get more ordered? That's not what I was taught. Walk us through that.

Let's talk about the early universe. You already mentioned the block

universe and Our mutual distaste of that hypothesis. I don't like that. I want to ask the why question. I really, I do want to ask the why question, but I know why questions are not usually answerable. But the universe was somewhat lower entropy, right? It was in a very special configuration. Does…

Yeah. Yeah, the two are very, very connected. It's not that one explains the other one, because we need an explanation for either. I think the past law entropy and the arrow time, psychological thermodynamics, are different manners of explaining, of pointing out to the same phenomenon about which I…