Carlo Rovelli: Loop Quantum Gravity, Relational Time

LINKS MENTIONED (affiliate links for books):

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:27 The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics
00:12:29 Why is there consistency in the world?
00:16:35 How can "relationships" be more fundamental than "things"?
00:24:05 Visualizing the relations
00:33:43 Philosophy and physics (why modern physicists are philosophobic)
00:45:11 Definition of the "Universe" (does physical law stand "outside" the universe?)
00:51:06 The problems with the concept of "Universe"
00:56:00 Many Worlds (why Carlo doesn't like this interpretation)
01:00:40 Mathematics alone isn't sufficient ("between reality and math, there's a gap")
01:06:13 It's not false to say the Sun revolves around the Earth
01:08:45 An ecumenical approach to understanding the Universe and religions
01:15:29 Anti-foundationalism has taken over philosophy
01:20:04 Entropic Time / Thermal Time (illusion of time)
01:38:18 Lee Smolin's view on time (that time is the MOST real quantity)
01:48:26 Julian Barbour's theory of time
01:56:00 Thoughts on Wolfram's model
02:05:08 Thoughts on Sean Carole's Many Worlds
02:14:08 Donald Hoffman (and briefly Eric Weinstein)
02:22:04 What do we mean by "real"? (Wittgenstein's language games)
02:28:09 Does there exist what lies outside your knowledge?
02:32:25 "Philosophy is a cure against wrong questions"
02:43:11 Information paradox is like "falling in love with holography" (based in dogma)
02:50:23 Does learning math / physics get easier with age or harder?
02:51:33 What Carlo would have done differently in developing LQG?
02:53:27 [Stephon Alexander] How does time play into Quantum Gravity?
02:55:48 [Bernardo Kastrup] How does Carlo's view of "relations" not lead to an infinite regress?
03:00:43 Idealism vs Materialism (science doesn't presume a metaphysic)
03:12:33 Hard Problem of Consciousness is a "confusion"
03:17:36 Forget about Philosophical Zombies -- Think Philosophical Babies
01:38:29 [Nikhil Ns] Quantum principle of relativity
03:23:53 [goodsirknight] Carlo's LSD experience and the satori moment's influence on LQG
03:34:25 [Aaron Heidari] Alfred North Whitehead
03:38:13 We don't need new ideas for quantum gravity

* * *

[benheideveld]

Time is an illusion. Premieres in h hours…

[danzigvssartre]

It's good to see physicists like Carlo Rovelli asking philosophical questions. Sadly, not enough of this happens in psychology, biology and especially neuroscience.

[isaachagoel]

This is Curt at his best: challenging the interviewee in a positive manner

[primetimedurkheim]

"I took psychedelics when I was younger - 5 or 10 times. No more. Maybe 15." - Carlo Rovelli

[krystlewolfram]

He misunderstands what 'mental' means in the idealism context. And that leads to pretty strange conclusions that are easily dismissed, which is what is going on here. But that is a small fraction of the overall conversation. Very interesting, thank you. Curt is bringing it every episode and I have great admiration for his project.

[BoRisMc]

The 'order of time' is as solid a recommendation as they possibly come, Curt is right on the money there. The book leaves you with a feeling that's only comparable to watching Inception on a bit of a THC intoxication at an Imax venue but on steroids. Other than that, terrific episode as usual. At this point I feel like every interview on this channel becomes the de facto best interview of each interviewee, so no surprises here. Thanks man!

[barrettcameron]

I really enjoyed this. Thanks to Curt and Carlo for their time and efforts here. That orange pencil being called a yellow pen with regularity was a novel element to add to the discussions around perceptions of reality ;)

[ed.puckett]

Fantastic interview, and I can't help but love Carlo Rovelli, such a gentle yet powerful thinker!

[johnstickevers]

Curt you have been killing it. I love your curiosity. I see how hard you work and how you keep pushing to get better. Never satisfied. Keep going!!

[SrValeriolete]

I'm happy you're pushing Rovelli on consciousness. He already accepted madhyamaka thinking, now let's see if we can bring him to accept yogachara.

I understood his problem with the zombie argument. The zombie argument was a good chalange for behaviorists who thought consciousness is only behavior and if they could make an AI question it's existence it would be conscious. He says he is a neutral monist and doesn't see a strong divide between mater and consciousness, I think that entails panpsychism. Tononi theory is panpsychist because if he says that his phi is a measurement of consciousness, everything that has some amount of it has some amount of consciousness. His theory is panpsychist regardless of what he believes about it, it is just a logical conclusion.

Carlo asks what it means for matter to be conscious, well it means it has experience, there is something that feels like to be certain configuration of matter. Mary room thought experiment ilustrates much better what's being talked about. If we believe consciousness emerged it adds new information to a system besides it's mere description. That information has to come from somewhere. By consciousness I mean experience. Love, hate, devotion, transcence, colors, smells, etc. Those can be broken down into more basic experiences but to say it came from something non experiential is just arbitrary. Also, everything we know is experience. It seems every theory that hass a physicalist basis in order to not invoque new information would imply either that it came from somewhere else (like another world) or that it was a rearrengement of things that where already there.

Thomas Nagel and Andrés Gómez Emilsson explain the problem much better. Andrés specially goes to remarkable lengh to demarcate the subproblems within the problem of consciousness and strategies to tackle It. The Qualia Research Institute is working to mathematize experience. If we get a real theory of consciousness It might even be possible to understand those experiences outside the human domain.

[think]

I independently came to similar views. Here's how I explain it:

All that 'is' is entanglement. And we chose the right word there because it really is like tangles. The more entanglements you have, the more "real" something is. It's easy to visualize this luckily, as a graph.

Another way to view it: a spider's web. A single strand is relatively weak but a lot of them become substantial.

Entanglements happen via information exchange between your imagined entities. But of course, those entities are just the ends of the bearer of the information. For example, photons from my skin to your eyeballs, allowing you to perceive it. The photons are more fundamental than "my skin" (which is a human construct) and your eyeballs, themselves been fractally composed also of photons, via chemistry, etc.

It's not that simple. I'm oversimplifying here, but you get the gist hopefully.

Entanglements are what make "things" "real" *relative* to other "things." So-called "reality" is just a web of these entanglements. (Compare Category Theory with arrows). I am entangled with you right now, not directly, but indirectly. I do not have photons bouncing off my skin and hitting your eyeballs. But I do have a keyboard and my fingers are attached to that. And my keyboard is attached to my computer and my computer to the Internet through a bunch of routers, and the Internet to your computer and your computer to your screen and your screen to your eyes, with lots of smaller steps composing each of those fractally. Thus there is a chain of entanglements. But that chain does not transmit all information: it only transmits the relevant information at each step, throwing away the vast majority of it otherwise. Reality is under no obligation to reveal to you the irrelevant details, like the color of my hair or my ethnicity, or what I had for breakfast this morning. It is ONLY obligated to provide this text that you are reading right now: that is the extent of our entanglement. That is the extent--and the only extent--to which "I" am real to you right now. In a sense, technology (and life itself) is a chain of machines that do *dimensionality reduction*. (This is also how machine learning and human learning work.) The bandwidth reduction really helps keep the universe efficient.

However, from the future to the past, the universe picks out a consistent chain of causality, such that whenever you look, it follows some rules and is consistent--somehow. I call this *retrocausality.*

The entanglements--or "relations" as called here--that occur in the universe are stronger when combined. So things that are weakly entangled, struggle to remain entangled.

But yet, here on Earth we don't see kids running through walls, or our breakfast disappearing and reappearing on the ceiling. (Though, socks do seem to disappear a lot.)

This is because this whole planet is a highly entangled web. We have a very solid reality going on here because we keep "each other" together longer via those entanglements.

For me type this, the universe calculated a causal chain (from my perspective) that lead me to it. So whatever happened before this moment owes "its existence" to this moment, in a sense. On the other hand, you don't need all that information, but you do need "me" (whatever I may be) to be "real" enough to have typed this.

The "things" are always composed of smaller things, themselves "relations, " or "entanglements."

"Energy" is necessary for "information" and information is what defines the relation itself. Therefore, the more entanglements, the more energy. Matter is HIGHLY ENTANGLED clumps. That is why matter is so incredibly energy-dense.

Going a step further, I'd surmise that spacetime itself is merely an artifact of entanglement (and this starts to explain how it could be so relative).

This also explains how "a photon" can experience no time or space, starting and ending its life in the same instance in both, even if from our perspective it stretches across the universe for billions of years. The photon is really just the relation between two electrons. But really, the electrons are just the ends of a relation we call a "photon." It is the exchange of energy that defines a relation.

The more mind does matter actually. Because the mind is a web of entanglements with lower *entropy*. And the mind holds specific facts, and models. Having models is crucial to reality. All that you experience as "consciousness" is a model, and models are made using feedback loops to trap energy (EM energy in this case, or photons). Your mind is a web of entanglements that can do modeling by resonating with the universe via some causal chain that your eyes set up between your brain and the outside world. When you model things you have lower entropy. This means roughly "higher resolution" entanglements. This means more *coherency* is required by the universe to provide the information you probe of it. The compensation is here is that most bandwidth is thrown away as you only need to retain specific facts, not the entire wavefunctions. That's key to understanding: *reality is only as real as it needs to be to provide you the information required.* This allows the universe to optimize. Retrocausality does as well, only computing really instead of virtually, as needed.

Energy is motion between two places. And everything is energy: matter is really highly entangled--therefore highly energized. The resolution of this information (or in other words, how "noisy" or "how clear" the data is) is a relative property depending on the resolution of the entanglement. Brains are high resolution as mentioned earlier. If you had an identical twin and somehow (just suppose) remained completely identical to you until one day your twin died, the freshly dead brain of your twin would weigh nearly identically to your live brain, except a little extra mass in your brain from all heat and chemical interactions going on inside of you, which add to the mass somewhat.

However, your brain would have a higher resolution of entanglement with the outside universe. What this means is that the universe is obliged to provide your brain with more detail and coherency than your twin's dead brain, which only receives some high entropy heat mainly from its surroundings, as well as a little visual light. But it can't see that light, therefore the resolution of the information it receives is lower.

The universe is a sort of computer with two modes of operation: *virtual, * which is efficient, aka. *superposition*; *realized." Realized is very expensive, were it to be computed everywhere in the universe. So it isn't used mostly. Virtual is.

The universe is very efficient at giving you this extra resolution information--which your twin's brain now lacks--and by stripping away the extraneous, which remains virtually computed, and only realizing the aspects needed to satisfy causal chains, aka. graphs of entanglements, or relations. Matter is realized, and very, very, very expensive, being made of internal entanglements (internal from our scale of view, that is), which can also be viewed as trapped energy, being trapped by bouncing within the boundaries that are created for it by the rules of QFTs.

Modeling is a way of storing and controlling entanglements, using *memory, * which is a way of taking advantage of this notion of "bouncing energy" in a controlled manner. In this case, leaving the energy in the form of photons, which are how our sodium and potassium ions create the EM field in our neural networks, instead of turning it into the clunky matter. This allows us to compute and track the universe, maintaining coherency longer.

Consciousness is a way of both increasing entanglements (via body), and increasing resolution of those entanglements (via mind, or in other words, via organization, or via "the software"). This has been accomplished via *selection.* The universe is obligated to "do better" to satisfy those entanglements, and thus in a sense, via retrocausality, consciousness is responsible for the universe being as coherent as it is (and no more!) If there were only rocks and clouds of gas and light, then the universe would be a lot lower resolution, as those things lie far lower on the "consciousness scale" as a result. It is the resolution of feedback loops that model the universe that is the definition of how intelligent "something" is, and it is a special type of these feedback loops that allow you to feel your experience that is "consciousness." So a rock has very little consciousness, receiving very dull signals from the universe, but a human being has a very high degree of consciousness, receiving and being able to feel with detail, much higher resolution information from the universe.

It is our nerves (of which we have trillions) and our neurons (of which we have tens of billions) that together in a feedback loop create memory/modeling. The rocks and gas clouds and light do not have this until they evolve via selection into us. But because the universe retrocausally computes, it doesn't matter that we didn't evolve until recently. Indeed, the "now" state is being determined by the future in the same way.

"Real" as most people think of it requires an "absolute" frame, but an "absolute frame" is inherently inconsistent and impossible to define. The universe is more like a question trying to answer itself, or what you get when nothingness attempts to define itself. Both nothing and something are inherently unstable ideas. Reality is the result of the tension between these unstable ideas.

[mesokosmos]

I haven't seen Prof. Rovelli brought to thinking like that before in public interviews. Genuine sign of philosophical approach, which is unfortunately lost from todays discussion in math and physics. Thus, Rovellis work is important. I also liked that Barbour was brought up. His work is a wonderful example of historical study combined with rigor theoretical work and still formulated in beautiful and understandable language. Keep up fantastic work, both of you!

[Anton_Kirillov]

I've been waiting quite some time to see this interview. I wonder what mr Rovelli thinks about analytic idealism of Bernardo Castrup. It's really interesting because mr Castrup uses relational interpretation of QM for his metaphysics yet mr Rovelli seems to be emergentist about consciousness.

Sorry for my poor English, and greetings from Russia. Love your podcasts, cause you ask your guests very important questions and do so in a very systemic way.

[JosephMcChristmas]

So exciting to see you interview Carlo. His 'The Order of Time' is such a phenomenal book! You have a new fan here for sure :D

[CSOne_]

You ask the right questions and by doing so, you attain the full attention of your guests.

Great Work!

[richk]

Meditation helps us to focus on a relationship with the universe library of knowledge. We also should try to meet frequency and vibration by breathing and humming. Try the hum = OHM.

[templetetradactyl]

I liked his description of science as a method used to organize our thinking. It reminded me of machining. There is an acceptable tolerance for each part, depending on its use. More delicate parts have less of a tolerance for error. It seems there is always room for improvement.

[Aloka]

Thank you so much for all those interviews, as an aerospace ingineering studying now theoretical physics, I think next step, particularly after Carlo Roveli would be autodidact Nassim Haramein and his unification Holofractal theory, I have been folowing him for almost 2 years now and I really think his ideas and theoretical results should really be put forward. Also very interesting things can be asked on UFO's, personal contacts, story of his life and research, his plans for humanity on gravity control and new sources of energy, new understanding of whormholes, radioactivity and so much more.

[WAVEFUNCTION_TV]

Curt, Ive only been aware of your podcast for about a month, but you've rocketed to the top of my list in that short amount of time. You're doing an amazing job, and i think you may have tapped into your own potential in a way that so many of us are trying to do in our own ways. Cheers man. Ill spread the word ✌

[michaelciccaglione]

Curt, thank you for creating this channel and opening this portal to the masses for all of us to listen, learn, and ultimately make decisions.