Philosophy

Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage, the show that thinks it thinks, therefore, it might be.

I think I am Robin Intz, but every now and again I do worry there might be a brain in a vat, so if there wasn't enough to worry about already.

And I'm Brian Cox, and as you might have worked out from the nonsense being spouted there, today we're talking about philosophy.

Richard Feynman, unarguably one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, said that philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, as far as one can see, rather naïve and probably wrong.

So there were the battle lines are drawn.

Philosophy is dead.

Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

These were the much-publicised words of Stephen Hawking in his most recent book, The Grand Design.

So, today we ask: Is philosophy dead?

Can science tell us everything we need to know to live our life?

Brian.

Science is the collection of things we know, I would say.

And if you want to label the things we don't know philosophy or comedy or anything else, then feel free to do it, comedian.

So, there we are.

Philosophy may be a guide on how you should live your life, but give a scientist going through relationship problems a copy of Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, and they'll explain that the atmospheric conditions on both planets are incompatible towards specifically gendered life and throw it in the bin.

That's their problem.

Joining us today, our first guest is both a man of science and a man of philosophy, being a physician and a philosopher.

It's Professor Ray Talis.

Our next guest is a professional philosopher who has attempted to answer the big questions of why we are here, what is truth, and what does it mean to live in Rotherham.

Author of Welcome to Every Town and and the Duck That Won the Lottery, Julian Bagini.

And while much of our contemporary comedy revolves around marketing and arena tours, there was a time when some stand-ups were still intent on slaying the bourgeoisie when they weren't reminding us that Descartes knew nothing about the Ford Cortina.

Author, comedian, and Marxist, Alexi Sale.

Alexi, first question for you.

If philosophy is dead, does that have ramifications for the Marxists?

Yes and no.

If philosophy is dead, well, it would do if it was true, yes.

My parents were both in the Communist Party, you know, they told me it was Lenin who came down the chimney at Christmas, and

I became more left-wing and became a Maoist.

And we used to have these study groups where we studied Marx.

And I had this epiphany where suddenly it all seemed true.

I mean, as an analysis of history, Marx seemed absolutely true to me.

And this was about 18, and I haven't really gone back to it since, but so I thought Donovan was a great poet at that age as well.

So I don't know whether.

But it still seems to me that a Marxist analysis of history seems completely accurate.

So you'd certainly say that political philosophy is not dead.

No, yeah, exactly.

I mean, for the more cerebral stuff.

My wife did philosophy, and she was trying to explain it to me today.

I mean, she's talking about Wittgenstein and that, you know, if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand what it said.

I couldn't understand my wife was saying.

I mean, me and the cat were both sitting there with kind of vacant expressions.

She tried to explain.

And then you and the cat had a chat and realised that you'd refuted everything she was saying previously.

And the cat, apparently, is a Marxist.

It all ties together amazingly.

But certainly today,

for example, Marx is

as relevant, it seems to me, as he ever was.

So, Julian, what then could Stephen Hawkins have meant when he said that philosophy is dead?

Well, he's saying what a lot of scientists think.

Basically, scientists seem to have this weird idea about philosophers that they are kind of just failed scientists, really.

That what philosophers are trying to do is to work out why things fall towards the ground or why things orbit suns.

And of course, they can't do that as well as scientists.

They should just go away.

But, you know, actually, it's true.

I mean, originally everything was called philosophy.

So Aristotle was doing what we now call biology and cosmology as well as ethics and politics.

But the fact that philosophers are, at the moment, not the best people to come to if you want to understand how the physical world actually works doesn't mean there aren't leftover scraps of intellectual work for them to get chewing on, which is what kind of what we got.

That's what philosophy does.

We get all the questions which we haven't worked out ways of answering in a kind of systematic evidence-based way for.

We get left with all the conceptual stuff.

But the problem is, all that stuff is left over.

There's no solution to that.

You can't pretend it doesn't exist.

If you want to know how should I live a good life, I'm afraid you can't discover that by looking in a microscope or doing an fMRI scan and looking into your brain.

You just have to think about it, think about what it means to live a good life and work it out that way.

So it seems then you've, in some ways, accepted what he said.

I suppose he's talking about metaphysics, isn't he?

Really?

Is he saying that's dead as a discipline?

I mean, obviously, political philosophy, as Alexi said, is not dead, it's vibrant and always will be.

But is Stephen Hawking essentially saying that in terms of the questions you would answer with science or with physics, then philosophy has no place?

Well, it probably is.

Now, that is, I think, an open question.

I mean, sometimes I think that philosophy only seems dead because it just isn't moving very much and very quickly.

So, you know.

But it doesn't mean it's actually, you know, dead completely.

People really disagree about this.

I mean, if you, I mean, I think Ray's got opinions on this, probably

more informed and more eloquent than mine.

I don't think Julian's been strong enough supporting philosophy.

First of all, science has never needed philosophy more.

It's basically getting into huge trouble.

It cannot cope with consciousness.

The very concept of matter actually makes it impossible.

that there should be appearances, that there should be consciousness.

Take an object like your body.

It has a particular appearance from one angle, right?

From your front.

Another appearance from the angle, the back.

And all sorts of different appearance from different angles.

It has no intrinsic appearance as a piece of matter.

Without consciousness, it doesn't have appearances.

So how can you have a material conception or material basis for matter?

And that's why the brain theory of consciousness is going down the pan, which is a physical or physicalist theory.

So the physicists can't deal with consciousness.

They pretend they can, talk about observers in special theory of relativity and talk about the observer in quantum mechanics, but basically they're in huge trouble.

I mean, my God, I must have a death wish telling you that, because you're a real expert, but it just seems to me that nobody has quite sorted out

the status of consciousness within material physics, never mind consciousness itself.

But I would argue that the way to

answer unanswered questions is via the scientific method.

Do some experiments, observe what's happening, build some theories, check them.

Which is the way that's been successful up to now in building the modern world.

So, consciousness, I would argue, I don't see the reason to believe that there's a phenomena that we observe that is not explicable in that way.

Let's talk about success.

I'm massively grateful for physicists.

Thanks to physicists, I have greater life expectancy, health expectancy, comfort expectancy, and fun expectancy.

Thanks very much.

So, what you do works.

But actually, it seems to me that you don't even see the question sometimes.

And one good example is time.

You've completely mislaid tensed time, the difference between looking back in regret and looking forward in hope.

That's a big thing to lose.

And in fact I think you've pretty well lost time altogether.

You've reduced time basically to a dimension which is which has quantities and that basically has stripped time of all that matters about time.

So you've mislaid time as it matters to us without even noticing it.

Enter the philosopher to wake you up.

From the physicist's point of view, there's no difference between yesterday's dental appointment and tomorrow's dental appointment.

My God, for you and me, there is.

You're talking about um emotional feelings of time which are built into our language, I suppose, regrets and hopes and aspirations.

But I suppose one could argue that they're a part of the conscious experience.

So, what you're trying to do is you're trying to you're trying to take consciousness, which we don't understand, but you could argue is some kind of emergent property based on the laws of physics as we know them, and then you're trying to use that to to make comments about the physical laws.

Now, I would say the physical laws are uh they're not separate from consciousness, Indeed,

the consciousness is an emergent property based on them.

But I think I see some of the things that you have.

Hang on a second.

I see some amazing fancy footwork here.

No, no, no.

There's some confusion.

Wait a moment, wait a minute.

Consciousness and physics.

Consciousness is in your left hand and physics is in your right hand.

I'm not.

If you separate them, you have great difficulty deriving the one from the other.

Of course, matter came first before conscious human beings.

Of course, a lot of people say when matter takes a certain form, then eventually consciousness will arise, just like that, as Tommy Cooper would say.

And this is the Tommy Cooper theory of consciousness emerging out of matter.

It just doesn't wash with philosophers who can see the questions and even essay one or two answers.

Thing is, philosophers can see the questions that physicists have forgotten.

Julie, does it wash?

Well, I think, in a way, I think part of the problem here is like, you know, Ray's accusing physics of not being something else.

I think that's the real problem.

The thing is, there are all sorts of different sort of levels of description, ways of understanding, and they don't all neatly fit into each other.

So you've got physics, right?

But if you're doing biology,

you're still looking at the same physical world, but you're not looking at it in the same way as a physicist does.

You're looking at it through a different lens.

You're using a different framing.

Now, I think the point about consciousness experiences, it's not that the physicists have done a great service.

They've taken away the past and the future from us.

It's just that physics isn't to do with the subjective awareness of consciousness.

It's doing something else.

So you're right, it leaves something else, understanding consciousness, but

since when did physics claim to be explaining the nature of thought?

Hang on a moment.

It seems to me.

First of all, I'll start

with the moment.

By the time we are beginning to journey away from our snappy 27-minute show,

and

many people who haven't actually listened to module one to five as yet

may well be missing out on some of the points.

Is it becoming contaminated with thought?

That's not the same thing.

No, it's

I think what we have got is later on, if you want to see both Ray and Brian in their swimming trunks surrounded by mud fighting this out,

an Italian listening to this, you know, where everything is run by Berluscone and is all topless models wrestling, even on the radio.

And listening to this

in the entertainment slot at 4:30,

they will respect us as a nation.

They will quake in their boots.

This is the simple entertainment.

Well, what can the science programs be like?

I think we have had some very deep thoughts so far.

Actually, the thought I haven't got on my head yet is, you know, Alexis' idea of Lenin as Santa Claus.

Imagine him coming down.

What does he do?

He redistributes all the toys, does he?

That's fantastic.

See, Loving as Santa Claus is alright, Stalin as Santa Claus was a disaster because always last year it turned out you saw these pictures where you had a huge number of presents.

That you have no memory of receiving those presents, but the photos are there.

I think Santa and Stalin were the same people, because if you think about it,

they both had big sort of hairy faces and red uniforms, and their headquarters were in the northern snowy waste and were based upon a system of slave labour.

You've never seen Santa and Stalin together, have you?

And if you were good, Santa would give you reindeer meat, and the same thing happened with Santa.

Well,

certainly Stalin made a little list who was naughty or nice.

But if you were naughty, you got a bullet in the back of the head.

The the uh Come on, Robin, Robin, trivialise it.

Go on.

No, no, no.

Please, please, Leviticus.

No, I do think that listening to.

I don't know what you, because Lexi, I have this moment where sometimes when I hear philosophers and scientists arguing, there is a point where sometimes it sounds like all the parents from Charlie Brown.

And I want to understand, and then there's a certain point.

Basically, the concepts you have, you're almost talking about two entirely different ideas.

Well, that's

a certain idea.

When he said it there in the middle, Julian.

I thought that was right, actually.

Which is absolutely fine.

I mean, I'm both a philosopher and a clinical scientist, so all my research is in brain science and so on.

But it seems to me that the claim that ultimately philosophy is now losing ground and all it can do is pick up a few scraps that are thrown to them by contemporary scientists who say this is a dull problem, that's one for you, it just seems to me that that is not where philosophy is at, and always the appropriate relationship between philosophy and science.

As far as I'm concerned, it's very interesting to look what the brain does in relation to epilepsy and stroke, which are my two main areas.

As far as I'm concerned, there's a very very interesting piece of work to analyse what would amount to a good theory of consciousness and what is the relationship between this mysterious thing called the brain and consciousness.

It's not at all straightforward and it's not explained by the laws of physics.

Surely there would come a point.

I've completely changed my point of view now.

It's good though, isn't it, really?

Because like, you're so clever, all you people.

But because I'm a comedian, society cares much more about what I think.

How long for?

But surely there will come.

Don't you think there will come a time when physics will actually explain everything?

That that time is just extremely distant.

And Hawking is just speaking far too soon, really, because certainly now in this world, in this universe, and for the foreseeable future, that physics cannot explain consciousness.

But there could come a theoretical point when

by physics you mean as it were laws of mass and energy, no.

It's the difference between the observed world of physics and the observer.

And what physics cannot encompass is the extremely complex consciousness of the physicist.

Now I know as it were the consciousness of the physicist creeps in here and there in Einstein's theories of relativity but the fact remains that is not a genuine point of consciousness.

That is not what ordinary human consciousness is about.

I'd like to ask Julian there's a deeper question here though isn't there um Which is that I'm talking about in principle now.

So it's like a precise weather forecasting, like precisely predicting exactly the way the atmosphere moves all around a planet.

In principle, we know how to do it, but in practice, it's just too complex.

So the system is too complex to apply those simple laws and understand what's happening.

If consciousness is just that problem, then it comes within the realm of science, doesn't it?

So the question is, is there something else besides complexity?

Well, I'll say, in principle, I wouldn't be with Ray in the sense I think we have to, these are open questions.

It remains to be seen.

I wouldn't rule out science being able to explain anything in the long run.

And the question we've got to ask here is: what does it actually mean to explain it?

What would it mean to have explained consciousness?

Now, I'm not a scientist, you tell me this, but I've had a scientist friend say that although he's done physics, degree level, all that kind of stuff, and understands in a way about electricity, they still doesn't really understand

why it is, you know, that electricity does what it does, right?

This is a very technical explanation for the benefit of anyone who, like me, knows nothing about science.

And in a way, that's true.

What you do is, once you've kind of got a good enough knowledge of how the regularities work, what reliably

causes this to occur or that to occur, that's as much as you could get from an explanation.

So, I'm kind of, in a way, I'm afraid, Ray, I'm more with Brian on this.

I think that the best we could do to explain consciousness is to have a very clear sort of understanding of all the particular physical processes that occur and how they correspond to.

And in a way, to say, yes, but there's something missing from that.

Well, isn't there then something missing from any scientific explanation?

I'll give you an example

of what I mean.

If we built a computer and we programmed the computer such that we essentially created artificial intelligence and it passed the Turing test.

Now this is the Turing test is

an idea for working out whether something is conscious or not essentially.

You ask it questions and if after a long time you perceive it to be conscious, then you ascribe it this property.

You say it's conscious, which is as good a definition as any, I suppose, although you may disagree with that.

So so my point is, if you could build a computer and program it such that it was conscious, then you would understand that in principle consciousness were an emergent property because you have silicon chips and some algorithms and you get conscious if it works sufficiently well.

The Turing test is a good one.

This is the imitation game.

Turing said that if you could have a computer that could fool people into so people wouldn't know whether as a result of answers to questions it was a conscious creature or it was a machine, then that machine was effectively a conscious creature thinking.

Well, I can tell you there are lots of machines that have gigabytes and ziggabytes of RAM now that could fool me any time, yet not one of us believes for a moment that a computer is conscious.

So in fact, the the pat the Turing test doesn't actually deliver what we expect.

There are many machines that could pass the the Turing test.

But you say that, you say we don't believe computers are conscious, but the number of people in this room alone who have punched a computer directly in the screen,

which probably says more about our animal instincts, but nevertheless, my computer, I'll tell you, when I turn round and I can just hear it beeping away with another sense of how it can fail me.

But can I make a confession?

I have kicked a stone that stepped my toe, but I wasn't attributing consciousness to it.

But is there a problem where we're talking about science and philosophy?

Both of them ultimately are trying to fulfil a similar thing, aren't they?

To give us a purpose and to, even if there is no afterlife, et cetera, to go, I have some satisfaction.

And so, there is quite a lot of common ground there.

Oh, I think the common ground is that we just want to understand things, don't we?

And if you kind of say, well, why should we understand it?

Because what's the point of philosophy, eh?

Well, you know, because we want to understand things.

And, you know, people can say, well, science is useful because it leads to all sorts of practical things, like, you know, pens that write if you hold them upside down, and, you know, iPhones and things like that.

But actually, you know, a lot of people are interested in science not because they're bothered about the practical outcome.

They just want to know how the world works.

And I think it's the same.

Now, the thing about philosophy is we're trying to understand things which, as I say, we don't really have any experimental way of doing it.

So Brian thinks, you know, the way to investigate every problem is to find an experiment.

But, you know, what experiment could you do to discover

what the role love should play in the good life?

Or what experiment could you discover which would tell you whether or not you would be better off pursuing

art or science, for example?

You can't do an experiment which will tell you that.

I'm working one out at the moment, though.

yeah it's a kind of Truman show based thing obviously

one of the children born is unfortunately given the unlucky number which means they will constantly be spurned throughout their existence right another lives in a house made out of nails

and the third is brought up by very soft rabbits and then we find out is that would that work as an experiment?

No, you'd find out which one was happier maybe.

You'd find out which one lived longer and things like that.

You wouldn't discover by the facts alone which was the better life.

You know, I mean so for example you've got something like Wittgenstein who on his deathbed says tell them I've had a wonderful life and he was a miserable soul he you know he had a in many ways you'd say he had a horrible life.

It was very tough and difficult.

But he said he had a wonderful life not because he was happier and this is what bothers me now when we're trying to use science to sort of like guide policy by measuring general happiness and so forth.

Well on that basis a lot of the greatest people who ever lived really shouldn't have bothered because you know this weren't jolly enough, you know.

And this is a problem, isn't it?

We say you know, the thing about Michelangelo was, you know, if he wasn't really cheerful, his life wasn't a success.

You know, that's nonsense.

And so if you're going to say, well, what then does make old life worthwhile?

You can't have just facts, you can't have just experiments.

You have to just think about it.

But it seems to me that what you're saying is, again, you're talking about the human experience, right?

Essentially, we're back to consciousness again.

So I could accept that philosophy, which talks about political philosophy as well, it does clearly have a place in defining political ideologies, and you say talking about questions like happiness and sadness.

Does it have a place anywhere else?

I mean, Rustam, there's a little bit of what the Romans have ever done for us about you, replied Brian.

It's like saying, well, you know, the thing about philosophy is apart from like ethics, the good life, you know, politics, how we should organise society, value of art, and so forth.

What use is philosophy to us?

I'm giving you that.

Well,

who would you say was harder?

Who's the best fighters, physicists or philosophers?

I think we've got the Large Hadron Collider.

Bare-knuckles.

They've just got poppers.

We've got lasers and everything.

No, no, we can't have.

This is bare-knuckle fighting.

You know, Wittgenstein once apparently threatened, was it Russell with a pop-up?

Okay, yeah.

I mean, threatened with a pop-up.

Pop-up.

Yes.

Poppy.

Most of Wittgenstein's students used to kill themselves as well, didn't they?

He was such a depressing man.

Well, but then he used to tell his students not to bother, which isn't very motivating.

He said,

Go do something useful like engineering.

Philosophy is a waste of time.

There you go.

Which is interesting advice.

I'm a philosopher.

My wife described it as picking arguments with dead people.

I can't argue with that.

Who would have ever imagined that physics and philosophy would have ended up getting in this mire?

It's been very, very exciting.

I don't even know now whether I live in the past, present, or future.

Have you

been to see your physicist?

He can't even heal himself.

Right.

Alexi, after the discussion, I have to ask you, but the real question I have is: are you any more enlightened about either philosophy or physics after the previous 26 minutes?

About the same, I would say, really.

Pretty much.

Can I just say that?

I was pleased about that.

This is the point, isn't it?

We've spent a long time discussing philosophy, now we've learnt nothing.

Oh, I said, no, no, no, correction, correction.

Brian has learnt nothing.

Well,

so, and if anyone at home heard the crack there of an elbow, that was an arm resting accident, very similar to a scene from The Fly by David Cronenberg.

So we gave the audience a series of questions.

Well, no, we gave them one question actually.

And the question was: whose philosophy would you live your life by and why?

Brian, what have you got there?

This is quite a miserable one.

It says, Doctor Who, because there is surprisingly always hope.

Also, Bruce Springsteen.

Why is that miserable?

There's hope in Bruce Springsteen.

It isn't miserable, is it?

No, it's not miserable.

Homer Simpson, because to quote the Archbishop of Canterbury, he is the most complete human being.

I don't quite know how the two things mix, but I like a mixture of the general synod and an excellent cartoon don't go together enough.

Cannabar Bero's Adventures of Robert Runcy never took off, and I have no idea why.

SpongeBob SquarePants, he's perpetually optimistic and happy, a great friend, never has a bad word to say about others, even those who don't like him, and is very hard working for little reward.

And he's very patient with stupid people and starfish.

If there is one wrong thing with human society, it's the lack of patience with starfish.

Brian Cox, because he rocks my world 24/7.

There's a phone number at the bottom of that bit of package.

Tom Smith says he's new to London.

Have you got anyone else there?

Well, that's the end of another series.

Meant for the Monkey Cage.

We'll be back in May, so until then, here is your homework to be getting on with.

Show that a space-time metric with ds squared equals dx squared plus c squared dt squared is non-causal.

Show that by introducing a hyperbolic geometry, that's a minus sign to you, Robin, causality can be restored providing that c squared is an invariant by introducing the energy momentum for vector or otherwise show that equals m C squared.

That's Brian's homework.

My homework is: why not find out which is the tastiest element on the periodic table?

I do have to also say that do not try boron, thorium, protactinium, fluorine, chlorine, or any of the halogens.

Oh, hang on a minute.

In fact, to be honest, Tom Leara, I think, tells it a lot better than me.

Goodbye.