Tim Maudlin on time, quantum mechanics, metaphysics, non-locality | Thing in itself w/ Ashar Khan

Tim Maudlin is professor of philosophy at NYU and founder of the John Bell Institute for Foundations of Physics. We talk about time, quantum mechanics, metaphysics, non-locality, and a range of problems in physics and philosophy.

0:00 intro
5:16 nature of time
18:58 20th century physics
29:49 metaphysics: ontology not interpretation
38:53 John Bell, EPR, non-locality
55:39 consciousness
1:00:05 reduction and emergence
1:10:31 math, ethics, space travel
1:32:08 many worlds, string theory, QBism
1:47:41 right way to think about physics
1:55:24 role of philosophy
2:00:00 meaning in physics and fine tuning problem
2:17:49 future of foundational physics
2:21:21 read history

Tim Maudlin books:
New Foundations for Physical Geometry: The Theory of Linear Structures
Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory
Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time
The Metaphysics Within Physics
Truth and Paradox
Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity

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Podcast

[brycecounts]

I'm a huge Maudlin fan. Fantastic interview, what a range of subjects. Thanks!

[DemonetisedZone]

I only caught this by lucky accident. This guy is more than just a physics philosopher. Why have i never heard of him before?

How Tim brings such varied disciplines to bear in his arguments is quite remarkable

Video is a hidden gem👍

[johnstebbins]

I'd never heard of Tim Maudlin or Ashar Khan before watching this. I wanted to thank both of you for the most profound and interesting you tube show I've ever listened to. I'll definitely be following you both on you tube from now on. Also, I've never commented more than twice on any show before. Commenting helps me focus my own thoughts, so take it as tribute to you both. Thank you!!

[jayarava]

The irony of Schrodinger's Cat becoming the mascot of the Copenhagen cult...

[KipIngram]

1:30:55 - I'd say that's true for constantly having *negative* emotional responses to your work. But if you can manage to take joy and satisfaction and inspiration from your work, well, then you're a lucky person. NOT having an emotional response to your work strikes me as a reason to change your work.

[colintidwell]

Love the shade he throws at Laurence Kuhn. The interview he talks about around 16 minutes in is a Closer to Truth episode. Very fun to watch that interview but also frustrating. I’m a big fan of Tim Maudlin.

[Robinson]

Still waiting on his second volume... Grateful for his interview by the way

[Mentat]

Maudlin is so refreshing to listen to. Such a clear way of expressing complex issues. I will say I think there's a corner of his worldview he may not have examined closely enough, which can be sort of "intuition pumped" using the concept of a closed time-like curve. If such a thing exists, it just "always" exists. You can't make one now to connect to the past, since anything going on in the past either already happened or never happened. So, if such a connection exists (whereby Wells' time traveler might jump to today), then it has always existed. Maudlin used similar wording in the very set of interviews he's talking about. But this "always" is definitely a case of stepping outside the "block" and considering it as a whole. And such a whole is clearly static and unchanging. Change is a temporal concept and time is _within_ the block. On such a view "later" means "over there" along a special coordinate of extension (perhaps an inherently directed one). The problem is that, "over here" and "over there" and coordinates of extension are all concepts of _being;_ not _becoming._

Anyway, I agree with so much of what Maudlin has written and spoken about. I'm a big fan. I just think the philosophy of Becoming needs a little more conceptual untying than even he has come to grips with (yet?).

[jmholthuysen]

Excellent thoughtful conversation. Thank you.

[KirksReport]

I like the way Tim Maudlin thinks. He needs to re-examine the epistemology of the block universe where the fourth dimension is orthogonal to the each of the other three and is completely given at once. The future already exists in the block which is only accessable to particles with no mass. Worldtubes don’t evolve in the block. The block doesn’t change we just occupy different slices.

[snks]

11:58 Actually when we launch rockets, we're still up-counting. T minus ten means we're starting the count at time t = -10 and going up to 0 (the launch of the rocket), and continuing on after that.

[xmathmanx]

A serious scientist who isn't afraid to talk about politics, very rare and valuable

[KipIngram]

1:24:30 - Do you think we shouldn't have come to America? It's in the nature of human character to explore and to grow. You can't necessarily foresee what space exploration and colonization might lead to. This is the kind of thing where everyone has an opinion, and we have a political process designed to carry those opinions into "chosen realities." It's not something any one person should decide. So it's great to share your opinion, but it's for all of us to make the call.

[TimothyOBrien]

Subscribed, thank you for this conversation. Looking forward to more philosophy of physics and philosophy of math. I wonder if Tim has investigated Geometric Algebra, as it provides a new angle on the formalisms that should guide our development of ontology.

[soppaism]

In my view science fiction is about telling stories, like any other fiction. It just provides the writer a more extensive toolbox to get it done. And possibly ways to bypass or short circuit some of the prejudices the reader may have.

[makanani]

The metaphysical presence is "conciousness". If we are trying to categorize it then we would need a presence that is invariant across all reference frames. If only there was such a construct that could convey information...

[johnstebbins]

There IS a philosophical benefit to calculation. The applicability or lack thereof, of an equation gives insight into the underlying structure of reality, which is revealed by whether it is "isomorphic" to the mathematical structure of the equation used. That process can be a great source of deep intuition into the nature of things.

[RichardGoldwaterMD]

Not velocity, but acceleration which is per second, per second, or per second square. That is what makes motion time reversible. The idea is protect statistical thermodynamics which requires that the motion of heated molecules is individually reversible

[Ntropic]

Physicist here: When physicists say time is reversible and doesn't have a direction, what they mean is, that due to time reversal symmetry, there is no process direction preference. They acknowledge that we perceive time as flowing in one direction and that is then argued via entropic time. In entropic time there is still not a preferred direction, but a direction in which memories are formed. This means from our theories we cannot deduce a direction of time of the universe but a direction of time for memory based observers.

[KipIngram]

1:19:34 - This is a topic I think about a fair bit. First of all, *fundamentally* I abesolutely agree with Maudlin. We are embedded in a system of economy, and we benefit from. So yes - we do owe back in some sense. That has just become clear to me from years of pondering this stuff (and at one point earlier in my life I was on the libertarian bandwagon, so it definitely has been a journey). However, there is a practical aspect too. I am convinced that if we tried to institute an "equal outcome" system, where everyone got the same slice of the pie, that the system would collapse on itself. The undeniable truth is that the opportunity to gain financial reward is the primary reason most people push themselves to contribute to economic prosperity. We work to earn money. Sometimes that's for purely selfish reasons, but much more often is because we want to provide good lives for our children and so on. It's not all just greed - often it's love. If we remove those incentives, the pie will shrink. So our goal needs to be to LIMIT the extraction of wealth from the system by individuals - not "cancel it entirely." Allowing *some* inequity in the system is the price we have to pay to get the bigger pie, and somewhere in there there is an optimum "setting" - a balance point where the total size of the pie minus the part the rich skim out for themselves is as large as possible. That is what is really the maximum benefit to the most people. I don't even think the amount we have to let people skim is that much - I completely agree that we don't need to have these super-billionaires. No one needs that much money. I've long thought we should set some "not super high" limit, like $500k a year, or a million a year, and heavily, heavily tax everything above that. That's still plenty of room to get out there and hustle. But trying to equalize everything WILL NOT WORK, and it's just self-defeating to go cripple the entire system because we have some kind of envy-hatred for the wealthy. So WHAT if there are some people who pull ahead in the game? We shouldn't care - our goal should be to achieve the highest net public benefit that we can.

I hope I phrased that in a clear way; I can already think of some ways it might get misinterpreted, especially by folks who are way into the idea of crucifying the wealthy.