Increments - #24 - Popper's Three Worlds

#24 - Popper's Three Worlds

05/11/21 • 73 min

This episode begins with a big announcement! Ben has officially become a cat person, and is now Taking Cats Seriously. Vaden follows up with some news of his own, before diving into the main subject for today's episode - Popper's Three Worlds.
In this episode we discuss:

The TCS parenting movement
Chesto's tweet to Deutsch
How Popper's Three Worlds differs from Deutsch's Things/Qualia/Abstractions classification
Would prime numbers exist if humans didn't exist?
What constitutes reality?
The existence of non-physical entities and the reality of abstractions

Having a quick glance at the following wikipedia pages will help ground the conversation:

Errata:

Somewhere Vaden says English is a formal language. Nope definitely not - English is natural language, which is distinct from a formal language.

Send us your best guess for whether or not we're real at [email protected].

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The TCS parenting movement
Chesto's tweet to Deutsch
How Popper's Three Worlds differs from Deutsch's Things/Qualia/Abstractions classification
Would prime numbers exist if humans didn't exist?
What constitutes reality?
The existence of non-physical entities and the reality of abstractions

Having a quick glance at the following wikipedia pages will help ground the conversation:

Errata:

Somewhere Vaden says English is a formal language. Nope definitely not - English is natural language, which is distinct from a formal language.

Send us your best guess for whether or not we're real at [email protected].

Support Increments

Previous Episode

#23 - Physics, Philosophy, and Free Will with Sam Kuypers

We are joined by the great Sam Kuypers for a conversation on physics, philosophy, and free will.
Vaden spends most of the episode preparing for a huge debate on free-will, and Ben spends it worried about what alternate versions of himself are up to in parallel universes. Still, we manage to touch on a few topics:

Realism and antirealist interpretations of quantum theory
The advisory styles of Dennis Sciama and John Wheeler and the standardization of education
Reconciling the Harris / Deutsch perspectives on Free Will
Restorative and Rehabilitative justice
A universe in which Ben spontaneously explodes into dust while speaking

Links:

Sam's recent paper with David Deutsch
From Micro to Macro, by Vlatko Vedral
Hayek's Constitution of Liberty

Sam Kuypers is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, where he researches foundational issues in quantum theory. He's also one of the founders of the Oxford Karl Popper Society, an Oxford-based student society created to facilitate discussions about science and philosophy.

Follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/crit_rat.

Send us an email or explode into dust - your choice: [email protected].

Special Guest: Sam Kuypers.

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Next Episode

#25 - Mathematical Explanation with Mark Colyvan

We often talk of explanation in the context of empirical sciences, but what about explanation in logic and mathematics? Is there such a thing? If so, what does it look like and what are the consequences? In this episode we sit down with professor of philosophy Mark Colyvan and explore

How mathematical explanation differs from explanation in the natural sciences
Counterfactual reasoning in mathematics
Intra versus extra mathematical explanation
Alternate logics
Mathematical thought experiments
The use of probability in the courtroom

References:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner.
Proofs and Refutations by Imre Lakatos.

Mark Colyvan is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, and a visiting professor (and, previously, Humboldt fellow) at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. He has a wide array of research interests, including the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, decision theory, environmental philosophy, and ecology. He has authored three books: The Indispensability of Mathematics (Oxford University Press, 2001), Ecological Orbits: How Planets Move and Populations Grow (Oxford University Press, 2004, co-authored with Lev Ginzburg), and An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Special Guest: Mark Colyvan.

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