Episode 134 - Weirdness with Eric Schwitzgebel

Transcript

David: 0:16

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:19

The podcast where two weirdos connect philosophy to your everyday lives.

David: 0:23

I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:26

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. We've talked about awkwardness before on Overthink, but today we're talking about a related concept, weirdness and a related concept to that, which is bizarreness. However, whereas our awkwardness episode was a lot about our social lives, today's episode is gonna be more about the world around us and how we relate to it because it turns out, the world is really weird, and every single theory that we have about the world from the most well accepted to the most fringe is also weird, at least according to the guests we're gonna be speaking to today. So I'd love for us to start by thinking a little bit about what weirdness is and setting us up for some of the weird ideas that we're gonna get into later in the episode. David, when you think of the word weird, I know you've read the book and we'll talk about our author's definition of it in a moment, but let's keep that to the side for now. When you think of the word weird, what do you think of?

David: 1:26

I think of something unexpected. Somebody who is creepy and bizarre, and especially if it's about a person. It's somebody that I just don't know how to engage.

Ellie: 1:38

Okay. I think about it in maybe initially neutral terms. Like I think about it as like

David: 1:43

Oh, really?

Ellie: 1:44

funky hair color, you know, and like a cool nail polish and it's like, oh, that person's weird, you know? Oh my gosh. You know what it is? The weird person is that character from, She's All That at the beginning of the movie before she has her glow up, she's got like her glasses. She's got kind of like her funky hairstyle. She works at the local falafel shop and has like awkward interactions with people all the time.

David: 2:07

Okay, but that it seems like you are equating it with quirky, something of cute, but off the beaten path.

Ellie: 2:14

Okay. That's true. That's why I said it's neutral for me. Whereas you're like, no, weird is like not a good thing.

David: 2:18

Well, I would say that it's less, that it's not a good thing and more that it's something that stands in need of an explanation. I need to know how this thing came to be, or how this person came to be who they are. And without that explanation, I just, I'm stuck in this sense that there is a bit of an abyss or a screen between me and them that prevents us from really developing a mutual understanding.

Ellie: 2:42

Okay, so you're thinking about it as a relational property rather than an intrinsic property. By which I mean it's not that something or person is weird. It's that an interaction is weird.

David: 2:53

Yeah, and I think it's based on the state of my knowledge because something might seem weird initially, but then once I get more information then it ceases to be weird, right? It becomes something that I can explain by talking about its causes, talking about its origin story, whatever the case might be. And I think that reeducation of first impressions is how things that initially strike us as weird cease being weird, but not because of an intrinsic change in themselves.

Ellie: 3:21

Okay. Okay, this is random, but one thing that I just remembered is how every time I go to France, I have a really hard time figuring out what to say when I wanna use the word weird because there's like not really such a great equivalent in French, right?

David: 3:36

There is bizarre and rare. and in fact, I've thought about

Ellie: 3:41

I use the word bizarre all the time when I'm in France because I like don't know. I'm like, oh, that was so bizarre because you also can't say strange. Strange means just foreign.

David: 3:50

Or foreigner. And the same thing happens in Spanish. In Spanish for saying that something is weird. We say it is rare or it is strange, but there is no translation for weird or weirdness that captures exactly the usage of the American term.

Ellie: 4:09

Yes. No, this is right. I'm glad to hear you confirm this because I've always been like, do I just not know the word? But no, there's not a good word for it. So the author of the book, we're gonna be discussing the Weirdness of the World, Eric Schwitzgebel distinguishes between Weird and Bizarre though. And so I think this is a nice segue into his definition. And I think his definition of weird actually encapsulates a lot of what we've already been talking about.'cause it's quite simple. He says that weirdness which I just said very weirdly, okay. Weirdness is contrary to the conventional, ordinary, and readily understood.

David: 4:45

Which is how I thought about it, right? As like something that stands in need of an explanation.

Ellie: 4:50

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Whereas the bizarre he uses in a technical sense. We love when philosophers take colloquial terms and give them technical definitions. He does that a lot in this. It's so fun. He defines bizarre as contrary to common sense. That is something that people without specialized training confidently, but perhaps implicitly believe to be false. So the bizarre is contrary to our ordinary ways of understanding the world, not just to like what is ordinary. So you might have a weird interaction, but the quantum theory of spooky action at a distance isn't just weird. It's bizarre.

David: 5:25

Keeping the distinction in mind between weirdness and bizarreness as Schwitzgebel understands these terms. I think it's important to clarify for our listeners that he is. Using these terms to think about both the world. The world is weird, but part of the reason why the world is weird is because our metaphysical theories about what the world is like are fundamentally bizarre. Meaning that they are counterintuitive. So if you look at metaphysical theories, like those of Aristotle, those of Plato, if you think about the transcendental idealism of Kant. Or the historical idealism of Hegel, all of these accounts of what reality ultimately is when you really think about them with all of their details, they are bonkers, right? There is no theory in the history of philosophy that wouldn't strike an average person as absolutely beyond the pale, which is I think why metaphysics and metaphysicians have this reputation as being the weirdest of the philosophical camp.

Ellie: 6:32

Yeah. Although they also have the reputation for being the most serious, and so I'm curious about that because I think take philosophy of physics, for instance, philosophy of physics is sometimes considered the hardest branch of philosophy. No shade to philosophers of physics. But I think that's a strange idea. A bizarre, let's say a weird idea. No, let's say actually a wrong idea because I think it trades on this assumption that the hard sciences, quote unquote, are more difficult. Yeah, and it's also just very masculine coded. Like, oh, those ladies who work on ethics aren't very serious, let alone philosophy of gender. But it is kind of funny to think about like the people who are considered to do the most serious hardcore philosophy as also being like the real weirdos, like the ones who are standing on a table barefoot, pontificating about their views in some like Hawaiian shirt stained with ketchup, you know?

David: 7:23

Whoa. That really escalated very quickly with you now introducing the social conception of weirdness almost as awkwardness hearkening back to our awkwardness episode. But I think what connects those two things, the difficulty of physics with the weirdness of the philosophers of physics, I think is the rigidity that we often associate with those terms, right? That to be very serious is to be very rigid and to be very rigid is to be inflexible, especially in social circumstances and to not know how to navigate social spaces. Thus, creating a little bit of a bridge between this more theoretical notion of somebody who is just weird and serious, and then somebody who is socially awkward and has ketchup on their shirt without caring.

Ellie: 8:07

Yeah. To be honest, that's not actually quite what I had in mind. I had in mind the incongruence of the weirdness of philosophy that's considered really hard. And you know, the Hawaiian shirt wearing person standing on a table. But I don't wanna just call out those people, although I have myself been known to wear a Hawaiian shirt now and again, maybe not so much stand on a table barefoot yet. Not really a ketchup person. I like mayo on my fries myself. But philosophers certainly have a reputation for being weirdos. Right? Even if you think about the first philosopher whom we talked about in our water episode, known as the first philosopher ever. Thales, he fell into a well because he was too busy looking up at the stars. Then we've got Diogenese who lived in a barrel and masturbated in public in contemporary terms, we've got Jacque. I did in fact see David Chalmers speak standing on a table one time. He wasn't barefoot and he wasn't wearing a Hawaiian shirt, but that might have been where I was getting this from.

David: 9:00

Yeah, but I mean, the stereotype I think comes from two places. One, I think it comes from the idea that philosophers care about things that the majority of people don't give a shit about. Right? We start thinking about the nature of time and the predicament of human existence, things that are not directly relevant in a kind of practical, obvious sense tot he concerns of the average person. And so there is this idea that the philosopher has interests that are only accessible to other philosophers. And the second place where this comes from also is the notion of expertise. And this would apply equally to philosophers and scientists, and that is that in order to develop expertise, you really need to step outside of the social field a little bit, you need to devote yourself to your studies, and there is a price to be paid for that. A price in socialization, which is why I do want to retain a connection here between weirdness and awkwardness, where rigidity is a little bit of a bridge between them, and it's a rigidity that comes from having to spend a lot of time developing a certain kind of expertise, and that's why the definition that we get of bizarreness from Eric Schitz Gable makes Ellucian to non-experts. We define as bizarre things that non-experts don't readily comprehend.

Ellie: 10:23

But at the same time, David, I think one of the things that I took away from this book is that any general theory that we have of our relation to the world at all, any metaphysical theory that we have, no matter whether it's an expert created theory or not, is gonna be weird and it's gonna be bizarre. It's gonna be counter to common sense. And he says that there are four ways of generally conceiving of the relationship between mind and world. First, we can be materialists. Everything is fundamentally composed of matter. Second, we can be idealists and think that everything is composed of immaterial substances, right opposite of materialist. Third, we can be a dualist and think that there is both mind and matter in the world. And fourth, what he calls a grab bag of views that reject all three alternatives or attempt to reconcile or compromise among them. But those he thinks are the basic four theories and they're all weird theories. And in his book, he goes into detail about what makes these theories so weird. I think he'll give us a little bit more about that as well in our interview. But the point is that like, yeah, they're all weird. And I would add that even if we're not specialists, even if we're not philosophers. We still have a kind of working idea implicitly of what the universe is made out of, and so you don't need to be a professional philosopher to hold some weird views. You might just need to have a little training in order to see that you hold this view.

David: 11:51

Yeah. No, I think you're right that any metaphysical account of the world, whether it's written by a professional metaphysician or by a person who has never read philosophy, will have an element or a character of weirdness to it, because that's just in the nature of these accounts of the real. It's important to note that for him, the weirdness might not be obvious initially, but it will become apparent as soon as you start trying to fill in the details of your worldview or teasing out its implications. So for example, if you think you're a materialist because you believe that only physical entities exist in the world, okay, that's fine. But then if somebody really starts asking you questions about. Well, what's the nature of experience? How do you account for pain? Then you start realizing that your position leads you to increasingly counterintuitive conclusions. And so there is no metaphysical position that is free of this weirdness. And on top of that, that is free of what he calls dubiety, which means that you're not required to believe in it. There are perfectly rational agents who disagree about the metaphysics of the world. Not because they have more knowledge than other people or because they're well or poorly educated. It's just because metaphysics is the kind of business where you can't really force people to agree with you by the power of argument, the choice of which metaphysical theory you embrace is ultimately under determined by the reasons that people used to defend their various positions. I'll say that I am really attracted to this use of the concept of weirdness to think about metaphysics, and that's because the concept weird has had a comeback, I think in the late 20th century in a number of academic disciplines. So for example, in literature, there is the new weird movement, which refers to a style or a genre of fiction that tries to produce in readers a feeling of the weirdness of the world. So this kind of writing is sometimes associated with people like Edgar Allen Poe and also HP Lovecraft. So there is this sense among people who work in literature that literature can help us understand just how bizarre physical reality is like the weirdness of objects, the weirdness of environments, the weirdness of the physical realm. In philosophy, a number of people have also used the term weird to think about our relationship to external reality. And one of these is the object-oriented Ontologist Graham Harman, who wrote a book called Weird Realism, where he argues that the world is unrepresentable either by language or by the mind. And what I mean by that is that you cannot really capture the world in a linguistic proposition or a set of linguistic propositions. Whatever you can say about the world, it will never be sufficient to really capture what the world itself is as he puts it in that book, you cannot paraphrase the world. And the reason for that is because ultimately the world is non-linguistic. And so the point of thinking for Harman is not really to close the gap between mind and world such that there is a kind of mirror relationship or a parallelism between them. The point of thinking should actually be to draw our attention to the gaps that separate mind from world and, and that's a gap of unrepresented that renders the world fundamentally weird to us.

Ellie: 15:38

From Thales to object oriented ontology theories of the world, weird.

David: 16:10

Eric Schwitzgebel is a philosophy professor at the University of California Riverside. His main interest include the connections between empirical psychology. Philosophy of mind and the nature of belief, as well as classical Chinese philosophy. He's the author of tons of articles, as well as a number of books, including the book that we're going to be discussing today, which is titled The Weirdness of the World. Dr. Schwitzgebel is also the author of the popular philosophy blog, the Splintered Mind.

Ellie: 16:41

Eric, welcome to. Overthink. We are so happy to have you.

Eric: 16:45

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

David: 16:46

Well, Eric, I have to tell you, this book was such a joy to read. Not only is it a really detailed account of many positions in the field of metaphysics, but it's also just a wonderful account of what it is that philosophers spent their time doing. Thinking about these bizarre, wild, weird questions that really put pressure on the limits of our intuition and on common sense. And so I wanna begin by having you talk about one of the juicy examples in your book, which is your chapter on simulation, because. The idea that our experience of the world might be a simulation, something like a dream or a fantasy, or in the lingo of contemporary computer scientists, literally a simulation in the sense of a computer simulation. For many people, that sounds highly counterintuitive, but you have a chapter in your book where you talk about how maybe this view is a legitimate contender, just as many other metaphysical positions for thinking about what our experience might ultimately be or be like. And so I want you to begin by talking about what reasons we have for not automatically rejecting the notion that we live in a simulation.

Eric: 18:01

Right. Yeah. So I should first say that the degree of belief or credence or extent to which I think you should find it credible after reading my chapter sympathetically that we're dreaming or living in a computer simulation or something like that is, you know, 1%, 0.1%, something like that. Not, oh, 50 50 99.9, You know, so just the thought here is to just warm us up to the idea that it's a non-trivial possibility. Yeah. So with that in mind, we could do the dream version of this or the computer simulation version of this. I don't know which you think would be better.

Ellie: 18:51

Let's do computer simulation. That's what everybody thinks these days, so that's why we wanted to start with this question.

Eric: 18:58

So the way the computer simulation version of this form of thinking, or skepticism or wonderment or doubt goes is by stacking together a few possibilities, each of which seems like, we can't really dismiss it even if we don't think it's probably true or maybe it even is probably true. And then when you conjoin these different possibilities, you end up with this thought that, okay, maybe we are in a simulation, right? So the first thought here is that AI systems could be conscious, right? That we could create genuine conscious experiences much like ours in systems. That are inside of computers are basically our computers. Right. The robot version of this has been popular ever since the early days of science fiction, and it's probably the majority view among consciousness scientists and philosophers who study consciousness, although certainly not a consensus view, but maybe the majority view is that, yeah, there's nothing in principle that prevents AI systems from being conscious. So if we sit with that thought. Don't reject it as just outta hand impossible, then a further thought is maybe these AI systems, some of them, or a lot of them live in simulated environments, worlds like Sim City. If you have AI that could really be conscious, perhaps you could put it in this whole virtual world where it thinks it's interacting with kind of base level of reality, but we outside of it could look at it and say, oh yeah, this conscious entity is living inside a virtual reality instead of, you know, our reality. You could might kind of take a little skeptical distance on that and kind of laugh at it. Ha ha. Right? That little sucky AI system thinks it's in the fundamental level of reality

Ellie: 21:02

Right.

Eric: 21:02

Really we're just playing around with it. Right. So that's the second step, and that seems like pretty plausible. If you think that AI consciousness is plausible, it wouldn't necessarily maybe have to be embodied in robots in our world. Maybe we could take the same things and put it in some for a simulated world. Then the third step is to think, okay, maybe there are a lot of these simulated beings in the universe might be that they're relatively cheap to create. We can't create human level conscious. Simulations here now on Earth. But at a more advanced civilization might be able to create lots of them, maybe wants to create lots of them, especially if they're happy and especially if they're interesting to play with or to test scientific hypotheses or just to feel like Gods right. There might be all kinds of reasons. A high tech society might create lots of simulated beings. Some estimates are that a planet could host many more simulated beings than biological beings, if it used its computer resources well. The universe might contain perhaps many more simulated conscious AI beings than it contains ordinary biological beings of the sort we normally think of. And then the final thought is, okay, so maybe we are among those, right? So each of these steps, right, admits of doubt. But putting 'em together, I think it's reasonable to think. Okay. Yeah. I guess I can't totally rule out the possibility we've just described. Probably somewhere along that line, there's reason to kind of think, okay, probably not, but how confident can we really be that we are nons simulated, we are in the base level of reality. I think once you vividly appreciate that conjunction of theses, then an appropriate response is okay. Yeah, maybe we aren't, maybe.

Ellie: 23:05

Yeah, and you're presenting this as an unlikely but possible scenario, and it turns out though, that you think that pretty much all of the possibilities for the relation between what we might call mind and world, what you call the metaphysics of mind, all of those possibilities are also unlikely. And so I wanna lead now into the general thesis of the book, which is what you call the Universal bizarreness thesis. And this has a corollary in what you call the Universal dubiety thesis and the universal Bizarreness thesis you put as follows. All well developed accounts of the metaphysics of the mind are bizarre across the entire history of written philosophy. Every theory of the relationship between the stream of conscious experience and the apparently material objects around and within us defies common sense. And so it's not just like, Hey, we've got some weird theories like the simulation theory that don't necessarily seem likely. It's actually all theories for which that's the case, and that is then related to the universal dubiety thesis. That's the thesis that none of the various bizarre options compels belief, right? So no position deserves credence much over 50%. You said simulation deserves. Perhaps a lot less credence than that, but still it's not an unusual hypothesis in the sense of not requiring or compelling much credence. So tell us about this universal bizarreness thesis, this idea that something as strange as the simulation theory isn't just some quirk of contemporary philosophy and our obsession with computers and ai, but actually is one of the newest versions of what philosophy has always already been doing.

Eric: 24:50

Right. Philosophy has already always been bizarre. I mean, if you look, I mean, here's some empirical evidence for the universal Bizarreness thesis. Every well-developed metaphysical system I. The history of the world in every culture has violated both the common sense of its own culture. And our common sense. There has never yet been a philosopher who has been able to develop a system, a general system of philosophy that explains the mind and the world and how they fit together. Where you just lean back and say, oh yeah, that's totally commonsensical. Never, it's never happened. It's, that's some evidence that it's impossible, right? So yes, we've already always been bizarre and when a theory of this magnitude. Right. That's really trying to explain the fundamental nature of mind and world seems not to be bizarre on its face. That's always because it's not fully developed. We haven't fully explained its implications. You might think, oh, well, metaphysical dualism, the idea that there's an immaterial soul and there's a material body, maybe that's common sense, right? It's certainly a common belief across cultures. But then when you try to develop the metaphysics of that, like what does that really mean? You immediately run into questions that where there's no good common sense answer left. So for example, if you think that there are immaterial souls, and we're conscious because we have them. An obvious next question is, well, do dogs have immaterial souls?

Ellie: 26:32

I'm laughing, but like so many people would automatically say yes to that.

David: 26:35

Or do snails.

Eric: 26:38

And if you say yes to cats, you probably better say yes to mice. And if you say yes to mice, you better say yes to lizards. If you say yes, yes to lizards, you know how, where do you draw the line? Do you say, oh yeah, okay, toads of this genus have souls, but toads of this other genus. That's the line right there doesn't seem like there's a bright line to be drawn, right? So almost everybody who thinks they're immaterial souls. In this sense, either thinks only humans have them, and therefore dogs aren't actually conscious, they don't actually experience anything. And there's this parable, opponents of Descartes started this rumor against him that he took a cat and threw it out of a second floor window saying, yeah, cats have no souls. They don't experience pain, right?

Ellie: 27:21

just automata.

Eric: 27:22

They're just automata. They're just like, you know, their version of robots, which are made outta gears, right? So the idea that. The only humans have immaterial souls and cats and dogs are mere consciousness autonoma that don't feel pain, don't have any experiences whatsoever is bizarre. But also to say, oh yeah, here's the bright line between toads of this genus and toads of that genius genus. That's also bizarre and no one's really endorsed that. Or you could go all the way to some sort of panpsychism. The idea that everything has a soul, everything is conscious. The there's a giant world soul. Or maybe even electrons are spiritual entities of some sort, right? People have developed those kinds of views, but again, those views are also strikingly contrary to common sense.

David: 28:07

Yeah, and Eric, so much of your book is an argument by elimination, right? Where you say there is this metaphysical theory, but that's not particularly reasonable. It's weird. It's wild, it's bizarre. There is this other competing theory that's also weird and bizarre and so like you go argument by argument sort of showing that all of these metaphysical positions ultimately end up betraying the tenets of common sense no matter which position you begin with, whether that is a position that there are immaterial souls, or whether that is the metaphysics of modern science, which is just naturalism, right? The idea that there are no souls and everything is just atoms in motion that leads to its own contradictions and hyperbole and paradoxes, and I really like also the kind of historical meta induction that you just gave us that look, in the past, no metaphysics has ever really made really good sense. At least not good enough to compel widespread ascent by rational agents.

Ellie: 29:07

All metaphysical theories are turtles all the way down.

David: 29:11

Yeah, it's like weird turtles all the way down. And I have a question that is partly curious and partly critical about your position about metaphysics, because even though you do this argument by elimination, I notice that a couple of times you add a clarification to your position where you say, all these metaphysical predicaments and conundrums we don't have a good answer to. And then you add, based on our current capacity to know. Based on our current tools. And so my question to you is, are these metaphysical conundrums things that we don't have answers to just because of the contingent fact of the state of current knowledge? Like we don't have the right FMRI technology, we don't have the right microscopes and telescopes, or is there something constitutive either about the conundrums themselves? Or the nature of the human mind that will prevent us forever from having an answer to these questions. So I wanna know why not say that we just will never know the answers to these questions, rather than we don't have an answer at this point in time.

Eric: 30:25

Right. So I have three thoughts about that. The first thought is to make clear that it's not just about a slightly higher powered microscope, right? So we're talking about for the foreseeable future, 30 years plus out. I don't think we'll know the answers to this.

David: 30:42

You do say, in our academic lifetimes, so I imagine like 30 to 50 years.

Eric: 30:47

Right. So the second thought is to notice that science has been capable of some pretty amazing things. One of my favorite examples of this is the early history of the Big Bang. We look up in the sky. For all we know, there could be just a giant computer screen out there shining spots of light at us. And if we're a sim, that's probably what it is. But somehow, despite the kind of paucity of the evidence and the difficulty of theoretical construction, scientists have been able to build a bridge back to plausibly our understanding of the first fraction of a second of the Big Bang. And 200 years ago that might have seemed unimaginable. I don't want to rule out the possibility that in 200 years we might have solved some of these questions that currently are so puzzling. But that then leads to the third reaction I have to this question, which is I don't think we will ever be philosophically unpuzzled. What happens is. You pull back the curtain and then you find there's another curtain behind that one, and then you find there's another curtain behind that one, and behind that one, behind every ground, there's a deeper ground or a deeper question to pursue. Like if we go to the Big Bang case, right? Of course. Now we can ask, okay, well, what caused the Big Bang, if anything, right? Or what about the first tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a section second that we haven't yet? Figured out or are there other universes with other kinds of big bangs? Right. And that question opened up further questions, even if we made a lot of progress toward what it might have seemed mysterious before.

David: 32:38

If you don't mind, let me follow up really quickly on this, because your example of the Big Bang, I think it's a really good illustration of this. We now have a clearer picture of what was happening physically in that microsecond, in that moment in time when the universe comes into being. But I take it that the fundamental metaphysical problem that people often asked about in connection to the origin of the universe, which is sometimes expressed with the question, what was there before the beginning. That has not been resolved by modern physics. Right? And I, I don't see that changing in 30 years. I don't see that changing in 300 and maybe even 3000 years. And so would it be correct and tell me if this is not exactly your view that maybe we solve some problems related to metaphysical conundrums, but we're not resolving those perennial metaphysical problems outright, like the origin of the universe. Is the universe finite or infinite? What is the relationship between mind and reality and connected to that? It seems like the only thing that changes is just like we're playing hot potato scientifically with these mysteries, right? Where maybe the mystery is not what happened in the first second of the big Bang, but maybe it gets shifted to something else that comes out of the discoveries that we make in relation to that first second.

Eric: 34:03

Right. So if we take something like. We imagine a little farther backwards. There are some theories about how the Big Bang got started, right? That there's some kind of pre inflationary foam from which lots of cosmic big bangs have arisen. Maybe you would say over time, but actually that's probably not quite the right way to think of it. Time might be a universe specific phenomenon rather than one that applies to these other universes, right? So maybe it turns out we decide, oh, okay. We can now explain the big bang in terms of this earlier and more general thing. I don't know if that theory will prove to be scientifically well-founded enough to draw consensus or maybe some other theory will. Now you might think, okay, well now we have a new explanatory problem, which is, okay, well why that? Why that foam instead of something else and what caused that foam? Or does the idea of causation even make sense? Right? So some physicists think causation is not fundamental. Some physicists think time is not fundamental, right? So the, maybe the question what happened first or what caused already turns out to be based in presuppositions that don't map onto the fundamental nature of reality. So we might make progress on these questions and then find that there are deeper and harder questions behind them, whether there's always the same perennial question, what is the origin of the universe? That I'm not sure. I mean, it could be that your concept of the word origin brings in it some presuppositions. That will be challenged by a deeper theory. I mean, maybe origin has to be temporal, and maybe it turns out the temporality is not fundamental and better. Physics says, yeah, you shouldn't think of it that way at all.

Ellie: 35:52

And as we think about the potential difficulty or even impossibility of resolving some of these questions, I have these like kind of inner potential critics in my dead and they're, they're critics of our very discipline of philosophy and the practice of metaphysics, which I, I always like this definition of philosophy that Wilfred Sellers gives to understand how things hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. And these inner critics that I'm thinking of are the scientists and maybe, let's say the romantic, the scientist will say. Yeah. The reason that you're never gonna figure out the answers to some of these questions is that metaphysics doesn't offer us the right tools. We need to be moving towards natural scientific explanation thoroughly and metaphysics is an outdated pseudoscience. You know, that's something you hear sometimes from people like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, scientists of different Stripes. And then the other inner critic, this romantic might say, yeah, metaphysics is useless because these kinds of broad questions are taking us away from the actual important work of daily living, which has to do with all of the messiness and uncertainty, the essential mystery of what it is to be a human. And maybe there's even like a third inner critic there, who's the ethical or political philosopher being like, yeah, what? What philosophy can help us do is figure out how to live with each other. And I take it of course, that the whole project of your book is like, no, the weirdness, the bizarreness is amazing. Let's hold on to the fact that metaphysics can reveal it to us, but I'm curious what you might have to say specifically to critics such as this.

Eric: 37:27

So let's start with the metaphysics is bunk because it's a bad tool

Ellie: 37:32

Yeah.

Eric: 37:34

My answer to them is, the only tools we have are bad.

Ellie: 37:41

Yeah. You know, quantum physics is super weird too.

Eric: 37:44

Quantum physics is super weird too, and you can't just take a telescope and point it at the sky and say, okay, here's how the mind and the body are related to each other. Or a microscope or an FMRI, right? All of these scientific tools bring within them presuppositions of various sorts. There are implicit metaphysical assumptions such as that the mind is a material thing that can be examined through the tools of science, and we're not living in a simulation and all those sorts of things. There, there implicit metaphysical presuppositions in the science and ordinary non metaphysical science isn't gonna give us the answers we want. If we want a scientist to help give us the answers, the scientist becomes a meta physician. And don't think there's a bright line between a very theoretical big picture scientist and a scientifically informed meta physician or philosopher, right? Those two things kind of become each other from slightly different angles. I. So I don't think there is a better tool. Right? And I think our basic tools are either we do kind of wild speculation or we do kind of ordinary science or we rely on common sense. These are our three approaches to dealing with these questions and all of them are flawed. So we could just give up home. And this gets to your second critic, right? And say, yeah, what's the point of this anyway? We should like be doing maybe just ordinary science and forget the big picture stuff that's unanswerable. We should be doing the, the philosophy of politics and ethics and figuring out how to get along. And I guess my reaction to that, my primary reaction to that is that that abandons one of the most awesome and amazing things about the human condition and about the planet earth itself, right? So one of the most amazing things about the world that makes us a bright spot in the galaxy is that there are these bags of mostly water that can ask questions like what is the origin of the Big Bang? And could I be in a simulation and is there really an immaterial soul? Or are we all just material stuff that can speculate on those, struggle with them, maybe make some tentative progress to at least figuring out what the options are and if we gave up on that aspect of ourselves. Something about us and something about the world would be, I think, intrinsically less worth celebrating.

David: 40:19

Hmm. Yeah. We lose that, that weirdness, right? That somehow adds value to our very existence. But I also want to to note just how important it is this point that you just made about science having its own metaphysics, because it highlights the extent to which many modern scientists are still stuck in the 19th century in so far as they're just regurgitating

Ellie: 40:40

Mm-hmm.

David: 40:40

What was very popular in the 19th century with people like August Comte, that, you know, rational thinking moves in stages. You begin with like a theological confused stage where you're using religious concepts. Then those transform into metaphysical concepts. But then those, if you're smart enough, will ultimately drop off and you will get a purely scientific empirical positivist stage. And it seems like that's still how we think about our scientific culture without recognizing that there is a metaphysics that's always there lurking in the background of any scientific position. And in fact, as you pointed out earlier. New scientific discoveries give birth to new metaphysical questions. So it's not just that science can't escape metaphysics, it's that it's actually the father of some of the metaphysical conundrums that then we philosophers love to play with.

Ellie: 41:31

Yeah, as you were just answering, I was thinking about Daniel Dennett's claim that there is no philosophy free science, which I always teach in my introduction to philosophy class. I love to, to show that to students, reveal that to them. You think that this is some ivory tower pursuit, but there is no philosophy free science. I do wanna think though, about maybe a different, sorry to throw so many critics at you here, but hey, we're philosophers here. We can, we can handle potential critics and I know you have answers to all of these people. The potential critic I have in mind now is somebody who would just deny the weirdness altogether. This goes back a little bit to something David was talking about earlier, but. I think a lot of us have as part of our common sense, which as you note is flawed and weird, a sense that the simplest explanation is the best explanation or what's known in philosophy as Occam's razor when we're faced with these weird theories. I mean, I can say that for myself when it comes to the simulation theory. I'm just like, there's no way the simulation theory is real. It's way too complicated. The simplest explanation has to be the best explanation. But you point out, when discussing Occam's razor, that simplicity is a complex business. So tell us about why you don't think that we should be relying on something like the simplest explanation is the best explanation when we're considering metaphysical theories.

Eric: 42:49

Well, here's a candidate for the simplest explanation, only your mind exists. Nothing else.

Ellie: 42:57

Yeah, that's exactly what I already believe, Eric. Okay.

Eric: 43:01

The world is composed of only your stream of experience and nothing else that is, that's so simple. There's only one object. You right? Who needs this whole planet full of stuff? This whole galaxy, a whole cosmos. Ah, so simple. So by one standard of simplicity, you might say, okay, let's take Occam's Razor and we slice off everything except for my own mind, or maybe even everything except for my own current thoughts. Slice off the past in the future too. And then you end up with a very simple metaphysical view. So I invite your readers who are attracted to simplicity to become solipsists. They're legitimate applications of Occam's Razor. But yeah, simplicity is a complex business. Like, okay, so we probably don't wanna be solopsists maybe there are other ways in which things can be simple and other ways in which things can be complex other than, say, counting the number of objects. Maybe a simpler view can have a lot of objects, but simple laws, you know, on a solipcystic view. Maybe the laws are complex because you don't have, you can't, you know, just do do the gravitation equation to explain what your next experience is gonna be. So you end up with complex relationships or laws or regularities, even though you've got a simple number of objects. So, just as a first step toward understanding the complexity of applying principles of simplicity, you can think about the trade-off between simplicity of law and simplicity in the number of objects. And then on top of simplicity, that might not be the only theoretical virtue. There may be some, like in philosophy of science, people will often say, ah, well, there's competition between a simple theory and a theory with more predictive accuracy. So if you have a theory that is slightly less accurate, but it's vastly more simple, you know, by some standards, maybe that's the better theory. If you get a little bit of accuracy, but you have to add all these dongles onto your theory. Maybe you've gone down the wrong path. So there are standards besides the simplicity that we can apply to theories that we balance it against each other. And so we end up back in our original conundrum, right, that we were in before of, okay, we've got a bunch of considerations that don't weigh cleanly against each other. We can't just whip out Occam's razor and say, ah, here's the simplest solution.

David: 45:39

Yeah, and it seems like metaphysical questions dull that razor precisely because they blurred the distinction between simplicity and complexity, right? We're talking about the most simple questions that are also at the same time, the most complex. Like, you know, we talked about the origin of the cosmos, or finite versus infinite space, so and so forth, and it actually seems like the very notions of simplicity and complexity misdirect us when we use them as if they very clearly divide good theories from bad theories. It seems like we have to decide what degree of complexity we feel comfortable with and what trade offs we're willing to make. Now, Eric, I have a question about the title of your book, the Weirdness of the World, because you define weirdness as that which is contrary to common sense, right? So something that surprise us that is unexpected, that's what we experience as weird. But part of me is thinking that the weirdness maybe shouldn't be attributed to the world because I'm not sure that, I think that the world itself is weird, right? The world is just the world as people say. It is what it is. The world just exists. It becomes weird. When we try to capture it in a scientific or philosophical or metaphysical description that makes sense to us. And so I want to say something like the following the world is that on the basis of which we build expectations, it's that which allows us to make predictions. So why talk about the world itself betraying our expectations? Why not instead, turn the question around and say that the weird thing in all of this, the thing that gets metaphysics off the ground is the weirdness of common sense? So why not attribute weirdness to us rather than to the world?

Eric: 47:35

Well, I think we are weird. We are one of the weirdest things about the world.

Ellie: 47:39

I mean, the three of us certainly as, as much as we're philosophers, are.

David: 47:43

Bunch of weirdos.

Eric: 47:45

Let's celebrate that. So I think you're absolutely right that weirdness is a user relative or cultural relative idea, right? Something is weird, only if it's bizarre, contrary to what we perceive as normal or our common sense. Unexplainable to us and that all is in some sense about us. So to say the world is weird, really is to say the world is weird to us.

Ellie: 48:22

Okay, well with that we can go forth. Keep wondering, as you advocate in this book, keep wondering about the weirdness of the world. I, for one am gonna be thinking about a lot of these puzzles moving forward. But I think one thing that you've really encouraged us to do is understand that these puzzles aren't just something fun that we do because philosophers have extra leisure time and you know, they're actually something that's fundamental to who we are as humans. So, with that, thank you so much Eric. It's really, really been a pleasure.

Eric: 48:52

Yes. Thanks for having me on and chatting with me.

David: 48:56

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Ellie: 49:19

David, what a fun interview. I'm just like so impressed by the way that Eric can make these very challenging debates in metaphysics appear so saliently for non-specialists. So I really enjoyed talking to him and I wanna ask you, based on his answer to your last question, what you thought of it, 'cause I mean, you seemed pretty concerned that the weirdness of theories is well established by his account in the book, but that doesn't necessarily mean the world itself is weird. What do think about his answer?

David: 49:52

Well, he roughly agreed with the characterization, but I think maybe my question could have been phrased in a slightly different way where it's not so much that the theories are weird, but that even common sense itself is kind of weird. Right. And the issue here is definitional. In his book, he defines bizarreness and I think by extension weirdness as that which betrays common sense. And so common sense is the baseline. And by definition, common sense can never be weird. But I actually think common sense is extremely weird. Many of our commonsensical folk intuitions, about identity, about the world, about time, about space, about consciousness are bonkers, right? So, you know, if you think about like widespread belief in the existence of a soul, how weird is it that we believe that we have an immaterial substance that somehow moves our material bodies? And so I want to suggest that what's really weird here is not just our metaphysical theories that betray common sense, but it's actually common sense itself. Our starting point for developing an epistemic relationship to the world is already weird, and so I don't know what it would mean to overcome that. I guess that's part of what's motivating my question here. Not that he necessarily wants to overcome it, but I, I don't know that we should. Define the weird as that which betrays common sense.

Ellie: 51:28

Or that which is contrary to common sense. So that's how the bizarre is defined. And then the weird is defined as contrary to the conventional, ordinary and readily understood, which I think that doesn't change the substance of what you're saying. I think what you said is still in line with that. But yeah. Then the claim about the bizarre though is that to be contrary to common sense is for something to be a thing that people without specialized training confidently, but implicitly believed to be false. So maybe the way that we could thread the needle between his claim that the bizarre is contrary to common sense and your claim, that common sense is weird and bizarre, which I think is also totally right. Like I think that's actually a great point is to say that what we confidently believe to be false. Actually, maybe we believe to be true once we dig a little bit deeper, like for instance, with common sense. I think, yeah part of what's weird about common sense to me is that it often is extremely inconsistent. We'll think for instance, that everybody should do their own research on the topic, but then we'll also confidently trust expertise. There's an inconsistency there, and that's an invitation for us to think a little bit deeper about what we think. It doesn't mean that we need to let go of one or other of those views. Maybe actually they're compatible, but we have to prove that they're compatible by doing a little bit of a deeper dig and realizing that we're currently not thinking about them in a compatible way. Right. Does that, does that make sense? What I'm getting at?

David: 52:52

Yeah. And it actually goes back to the question that I also posed Eric about why say that these are weird right now, right? Like that these theories are weird, but maybe in the future we will have an answer to them because I do think that the weirdness of the metaphysical conundrums that he's talking about is not going to go away in 30 or 30,000 years because there is something about the kinds of minds that we have and the kind of world that those minds inhabit that creates a gap between them that will not be resolved, even if it maybe will shift in nature, right? So the gap can take a different form. We will ask different questions. And so the way I would articulate it is not that in the future we will have answers to current metaphysical conundrums. It's that some of the current metaphysical conundrums we care about, we will not care about any longer because there will have been a reeducation of common sense, which is what you were alluding to. So, you know, just like nowadays, we don't really care about some debates that Plato and Aristotle were having. It's not that they were resolved, it's just like they don't appeal to us because our worldview has fundamentally shifted. So I wanna say that it's a question of interest rather than resolution.

Ellie: 54:12

Yeah, and related to that kind of orthogonally, but what you just said made me think of it. One of the things I really appreciated about this book is that it encouraged me to think about those debates that people might have been having in the past, which we think are super weird. Or maybe debates within our own society that we're like, why are we having this debate? Like for instance, I am so over the mind-body dualism that seeps into our culture in so many different ways. I think it's flat out wrong. I think we need to move beyond it. And I think there are probably better cultures that think about this better than we do. But I think one of the things that this book made me realize is if we move beyond mind-body dualism, for example, we realize it's, you know, as weird as some of the debates that people were having way back in ancient days that we've moved beyond, that's not because we've come to a simpler, better theory. I actually wonder if maybe phenomenology is a simpler, better theory than mind-body dualism. But anyway, it's because we've come to see another, also weird theory. It might be more or less weird, but still gonna be weird as preferable. And I think that removes some of the hubris from the present moment of being like, we know better than people in the past, or like these, you know, sheep in our own culture.

David: 55:24

Yeah. No, and I think that sense of moving away from hubris is also central to the spirit of the book because in the final chapter, Eric talks about what he calls a metaphysics of disjunction, where he's encouraging meta physicians who have, you know, their preferred little theory, that they will defend to the death to say, look, this is my preferred account of reality. But it could be that the world is like this, or that it is like one of the competing theories maintains, and so that sense of it's A or B or C or D, that disjunctive approach to metaphysics, I think is one way of moving away from the arrogance or the hubris of thinking that our theory is a mirror reflection of reality when the truth is that we don't know, and the reasons that we have for believing in our theory are not strong enough to compel ascent in other people.

Ellie: 56:21

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David: 56:31

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Ellie: 56:46

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