Why Is the World So Weird?

Josh Landy
Why is the world so full of paradoxes?

Ray Briggs
How can light be both a particle and a wave?

Josh Landy
Can we even be sure other people exist?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re asking: Why is the world so weird?

Josh Landy
Oh, come on, Ray, the world isn’t that weird, most of it’s pretty predictable. The sun rises every morning. If I dropped something, it always falls towards the Earth. And unless some jerks in my house moving stuff around, things stay pretty much where I put them.

Ray Briggs
There’s a lot of weird stuff about the world too, though. Like, Hey, did you know that some lizards reproduce themselves by cloning and sea squirts are even weirder. They start their lives as free swimming larvae. And then they attach themselves to rocks, they digest their own brains, and they become a completely different kind of creature. Isn’t that wild?

Josh Landy
That kind of stuff happens all the time. Caterpillars turn into butterflies tadpoles turn into frogs. That’s cool and all but they’re perfectly good explanations for it.

Ray Briggs
And caterpillars don’t even go straight into butterfly form. They become a massive goo and then they reconstitute themselves. How on earth does that happen?

Josh Landy
Well, I don’t know. But I bet someone does. And indeed, if even if not, just because we don’t understand things yet, doesn’t mean they don’t obey the laws of nature.

Ray Briggs
But the laws of nature themselves are weird. We’re all made out of these tiny quantum particles. And according to some physicists, that means that every time you observe a chance event, there’s some equally real version of you and another universe, watching that event turn out differently.

Josh Landy
That’s just some physicists. There’s plenty of physicists out there who think there’s only one world and one me talking to one ray in one studio.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but even if they’re right, quantum mechanics is still pretty weird. Like light is both a wave and a particle somehow. And there’s some kind of spooky action at a distance. And if you know where something is, you can’t possibly know how fast it’s going.

Josh Landy
Okay, look, I’ll grant you that things are weird at a subatomic level. But that’s not the world we live in. You and I spend our time around dogs and trees and shoes, elementary particles, and there’s nothing weird about any of that stuff.

Ray Briggs
Oh, are you really sure? It’s not weird? Answer me this. Do your shoes have consciousness? No way. That will be weird. Yeah, exactly. Because they’re just made out of matter. And matter isn’t conscious. But then we’re made out of matter. How do we get to be conscious?

Josh Landy
Well, Descartes would say because we have souls. So my brain is part of my body and my body is made of matter. But I’m more than just my body. Consciousness is this special thing that certain creatures haven’t shoes? Very definitely do not.

Ray Briggs
Did you hear what you just said? Did you hear how weird it was? You had to posit some kind of disembodied ectoplasm swirling around your skull. It’s like you’re living in a sci fi movie. And that just proves my point. Every single answer to the question of consciousness is a weird answer. There’s no way around it.

Josh Landy
Okay, look, that’s all very nice for the philosophy classroom, but I’m talking about real life. Let’s say I’m baking a cupcake. I measure out my cup of flour. My half cup of sugar works every time the ratios always hold. You can always count on numbers.

Ray Briggs
Well, even numbers are weird. Since we’re thinking about fractions. How many fractions are there between zero and one? An infinite number? Yeah, and how many fractions are there between zero and infinity? More than that? Nope, it’s exactly the same amount. Pretty weird, huh?

Josh Landy
You’re right, that is weird and kind of cool.

Ray Briggs
And it’s exactly the kind of thing our guest has been thinking about. It’s Eric Schwitzgebel, author of a new book titled “The Weirdness of the World.” We’ll be hearing from him in just a moment.

Josh Landy
But first, what do people on the street find weird about the world? We sent our roving philosophical reporter, Shereen Adel, to find out. She files this report.

Brooke Corso
The weirdest thing about the world.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Weird. I can’t think of anything weird that happened to me today.

Victor Tence
I think the weirdest thing about the world is how quickly we normalize incredible, weird things.

David Boyer
That exists. I think it’s weird that we’re atoms and molecules or whatever, and that it’s somehow been arranged into this.

Pat McMahon
Honestly, it’s just that we’re all on the same planet. And we’re all walking around doing very similar things in like, isolation.

Brooke Corso
In my current house, we’ve had many bizarre paranormal things. One of my roommates is seeing like orbs. And I keep hearing things and having stuff go missing and having things like fall over randomly. And there’s probably some explanation, but it feels weird.

Victor Tence
There was a time where I thought using the bathroom on an airplane was one of the most incredible experiences because of what it meant for just human progress, that I can be this far up in the sky. And in a bathroom.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Years and years ago, I was traveling in Europe. And we were on an overnight train, where you sign up for a bunk in a room of six people. So we get there. And I look at the person in the bunk below me. And it’s somebody that I worked with the summer before. Like when it was we worked at a summer camp together and like, the crazy all of the things that had to go in to that happening, right, like, I love that connection, feeling like it feels kind of magical.

Max Tegmark
The laws of physics are really weird, seem so ordinary, but you know, you’re actually 99.999% empty space between the atoms. like Einstein didn’t get the Nobel Prize for relativity theory because he thought it was too weird. The idea that everybody would have their own personal time running at different rates.

Ben Trefny
Donald Trump is the weirdest thing in the world, the way in which he addresses everything is such a LookingGlass, like Alice in Wonderland kind of worldview, where he convinces himself that what he’s saying is not lies. And so that’s not really a lie, but it’s not true. So it’s a lie to everybody else, but not to himself. Saying that actually makes me realize what a weird thing it is to even say that.

Victor Tence
I have seen a wasp, lay a trap for a spider but I believe the Wasp lays eggs within the spider. And it’s designed to trap it. And the spider is kind of a packaged meal for the larvae of the Wasp as it hatches and it’s evolved to create this trap door in which it’ll store the spider and then seal it into its fate because it’s pretty much alive for the most part and then its offspring emerge from it. It’s you know, sci fi and horror really don’t have anything on Mother Nature sometimes.

Max Tegmark
I think we should embrace the weirdness of the world and actually see it as part of its charm.

Shereen Adel
Those were the voices of Sheryl Kaskowitz, Brooke Corso, Victor Tence, Pat McMahon, David Boyer, Max Tegmark, and Ben Trefny. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shreen Adel.

Josh Landy
I just love hearing all the things that make people go Wow, thanks so much for that report. Shareen. I’m Josh Landy with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re asking, Why is the world so weird?

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Eric Schwitzgebel. He’s professor of philosophy at the University of California Riverside, and author of “The Weirdness of the World.” Eric, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Thanks for having me on again.

Josh Landy
So Eric, you’ve always struck me as a very down to earth rational kind of fella. What got you interested in the wild and wacky?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I’ve always has been interested in the unconventional ever since I was a kid and the popular girls called me weird because I didn’t dress like other people and was interested in old science fiction radio shows and that sort of thing. My parents encouraged it. My dad and mom are both fans of the unconventional. We never had a normal Christmas tree, it was always like a ladder, painted bright green and decorated with bells. And so I’ve always loved the strange and unexplainable.

Ray Briggs
Oh, I love the ladder Christmas tree. So Eric, earlier, Josh and I are arguing about whether the world is weird. I said, Yeah, it’s pretty bizarre. And Josh said, it’s pretty normal. So who do you think is right?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think you’re right, Ray.

Ray Briggs
Ha! So can you give us your favorite example that illustrates how the world is weird?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think consciousness is one of the weirdest things about the world, the fact that you can take the ordinary matter of the universe, swirl it around in some way or other and it kind of wakes up and looks at itself and says, Hey, I’m here. And we don’t really understand how that works.

Ray Briggs
Josh was saying that consciousness is made out of some kind of swirling ectoplasm. I don’t know where you get that from, I think consciousness is made out of matter. Which of our answers is more likely to be right?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think we don’t really know, there’s a huge amount of debate about this in philosophy historically. And now. My own if I had to guess, I would guess in favor of the just matter view. But I certainly don’t feel confident about that we really don’t understand these basic questions very well, at all.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and, you know, stepping outside of my character. And returning to me, I agree. This is one of those cases, I think you’ve laid out the argument really? Well, whatever the answer turns out to be, it is going to be weird. And I want to I want to ask you a little bit more about the specifics of this. Because if I understand you correctly, your thought is, there are four different answers, right? So one is, you know, even if we knew what consciousness is, which we don’t, we could first we could say, Only human beings have it. Or we could say everything has it. Or we could say some things do and some things don’t. And we can draw the line somewhere. Or we could say it’s a spectrum. And some things have a little bit of conscious, like being a little bit pregnant. All of those views are weird. Is that about? Right?

Eric Schwitzgebel
That is right. And I want to clarify the weirdness of the last few just a little bit more, because it’s not just that, everything that that there’s a spectrum where there will be things that are a little bit conscious, and things that are more conscious, right, but there will be on this last option, things that are somehow between being neither conscious, nor non conscious.

Ray Briggs
What does that even look like?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I don’t think we can conceive of it very well. So let me give you the alternative view, right. So an alternative view might be something like a light, or you can imagine a light being on or off. And once it’s on, it could have some degree of brightness. But a light is either determinately on or determinately off.

Ray Briggs
So if I’ve got a dimmer switch, maybe this makes a really kind of nice analogy for consciousness. Because if you put the dimmer switch all the way at the bottom, then the light is determinately off. And if you put it anywhere above the bottom, the light is on, but it can be so faintly on, that it’s nearly indistinguishable from being off. Does that fix things?

Eric Schwitzgebel
No, that’s still a bright line view because the light is either on or off, even if it’s dim, it’s on. Right. So this alternative view would say that there is some state that is neither on nor off, but somehow in between the two. So I think the dimmer view, kind of it’s understandable, it seems common sensical, but I think it’s actually not the correct way to think about this fourth view where there’s indeterminacy, in what things are or are not conscious.

Josh Landy
Okay. So why don’t we just why don’t we say the third view, which is all right, some things have consciousness, some things don’t have consciousness? You know, we’re smart people, we can tell if a snail has consciousness, for example, what’s wrong with that one?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. So that’s the bright line view. And you and the probably the most plausible version of that is something like the dimmer switch view. So you’d have to look across all of the animals and say, Okay, here’s where the dimmer switch flips on. Right? So, toads have this genus, the dimmer switches on zero and toes have this other genius have just this flicker of consciousness. But that is pretty strange, because it seems like it’s a continuum. It’s not, it would be odd for there to be this line between the conscious and the unconscious toad or wherever you draw it

Josh Landy
And presumably another weird thing might have to do with the history of this.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right, so you have the same problem and evolution, right? When in evolutionary history, did consciousness suddenly flick on right? Given that it’s looks like a continuum, and you have the same kind of thing in development, right? When in the development of, say, a human fetus or a dog fetus? Does consciousness flick on? Right? All of these things, this kind of flick on view has trouble in making sense of what seems like the continuous graded nature of the underlying phenomena.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re asking why the world is so weird. With Eric Schwitzgebel from UC. Riverside.

Ray Briggs
What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you? Do you ever have those late night thoughts about things you can’t explain? Are you worried that the explanation might not make sense either

Josh Landy
The wacky, the wild and the wonderful—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tears For Fears
When people run in circles it’s a very mad world.

Josh Landy
Does trying to make sense of the world just have us all running in circles? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. And we’re asking why the world is so weird with Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside, author of “The Weirdness of the World.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about why things are the way they are, and not some other much more sensible way? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Eric, you’ve argued that not only is consciousness definitely weird, but that the US the country might be conscious? That’s definitely extremely strange if true. So why do you believe it?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right, so this one is a slightly complicated argument might take a couple steps. But part of the idea here is first to think about the United States not as like a government, but as a concrete entity that has people as parts, kind of like you are made out of cells.

Josh Landy
Okay, that sounds good. And but then why would there be a kind of super consciousness arising from those various parts?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right, so if we think about what this concrete entity does, it does all of these kinds of things that most mainstream philosophers and scientists think are the ordinary signs of consciousness, it reacts to the environment, it scans space for asteroids that might threaten Earth, it extends like a pseudo pod through the army to invade some foreign country. There’s massive information exchange inside of it, it represents itself. It does all of those kinds of things that ordinary researchers usually think of as the kinds of things that are signs of consciousness, right.

Ray Briggs
But it could just be an imitation of consciousness, rather than consciousness itself and other conscious beings that we know are conscious are really different from the United States. So they’re a lot more spatially continuous, for instance, like my neurons are just touching each other and can transmit information really fast. And I can’t do that with other people. I have to talk.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, but why would that be so essential to consciousness? I mean, you could argue for that. But if we think about extreme alien cases, and science fiction types of cases, it seems like the standard view as well as the intuitive view is that you could create space aliens and all kinds of ways. They might be large, they might be slow. But if they behave in the right kinds of ways and have complicated self representations and information processing, and we’d normally say, oh, yeah, those space aliens are conscious, we just don’t realize that we’re in the in living in the middle of a giant space alien called the United States.

Ray Briggs
So I know you have a couple of really cool examples of space aliens like this, would you tell us about them?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right, so one of them just to get the idea in people’s minds of spatially distributed intelligence is what I call the Syrian super squids. So these are squids that live deep in the sea somewhere, and they have 1000 attacked detachable arms. In their cognition, their brain is spread out between their central head and all those arms. And those arms then can communicate by light signals transmitted through the water. So even if they’re Her arms are separated through because the speed of light is kind of negligible. They can engage in spatially distributed cognition. So that kind of example. And it seems intuitively like, well, these things could exist and they could be conscious, they’re physically possible. That kind of example suggests spatially discontinuous things could have a single unified stream of conscious experience.

Josh Landy
All right, but coming back to the United States, let me let let’s say, I accept your super squids. I actually like your super sweats. But you claim, for example, that the United States reacts to its environment, the United States invades foreign countries. I didn’t write that seems like a lot of times, some few people in the United States are making decisions that in many cases, a majority of people don’t agree. But so is that does that go against the idea that the United States is somehow a single conscious being?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I don’t think so. I mean, so if you decide to take a sip of tea, then you’re right, pinky toes, and particularly involved in that. But that doesn’t mean that you didn’t make the decision as a whole and the toe is part of you.

Josh Landy
Is my toe protesting?

Eric Schwitzgebel
It could be I mean, maybe your liver doesn’t. I mean, let’s do alcohol. Maybe your liver doesn’t like the alcohol.

Ray Briggs
All right. So the US may be being conscious is one pretty weird thing in the weird phenomenon of consciousness. But consciousness isn’t the only weird thing that philosophers talk about, or that you’re interested in. Can you tell us about another example of how the world is weird?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think the possible future infinitude of time is pretty weird.

Ray Briggs
Why is that weird? What’s weird about it?

Eric Schwitzgebel
So the first thing to think about here is that on ordinary standard vanilla physical theory, there is no forward temporal boundary in the universe, there’s no point at which time will stop. There’ll be heat death on standard views. But after that, we’ll have this kind of thin, high entropy chaos that endures infinitely. And there’s all kinds of weird things about that.

Josh Landy
I mean, that sounds pretty weird going forward. I also have the same feeling about the weirdness looking backwards, because there’s two possibilities. And you know, to put it in very Eric terms, both of them are weird, right? The one is, yes, that everything had a beginning. That’s pretty weird. Because what was before that? Does that question even make sense? And the other is that everything didn’t have a beginning. And that’s pretty weird. Do you agree that that’s another weirdness that sort of the same weirdness looking in the backward direction and instead of the forward.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I would totally agree. And let me make it even weirder for you. By kind of continuing this idea about the post heat death universe, the standard view is that eventually, just by chance, you’ll have low probability configurations of particles that just converge just by chance, it could be a tiny miniscule chance of a brain converging out of thin casts or whole galaxy. But if you have infinite time to wait, it will eventually occur. And so in the infinite future, there’ll be infinitely many people doing infinitely many things, including infinitely many copies of you basically doing every possible thing that you could do.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but like, I know, that hasn’t happened yet. Should I? Should I be worried about it?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I don’t know if you know, it hasn’t happened yet. So this gets back to Josh’s question, right? So now, if we think about that possible infinite future, here are two possibilities. One is, somehow you’re the first one of you. Since there’s only been 14 billion years, since the Big Bang, there probably hasn’t been another one of you in the observable portion of the universe. Be kind of weird, be very weird, if you happen to be lucky enough to be very first array in the whole history of duplicates of array. But then the other alternative is to think, oh, somehow you’re in the middle of the stream. And then then our Big Bang was preceded somehow by infinitely many other things. Going back into the infinite past that you know, we can’t even understand necessarily physically.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about why the world is so weird, with Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside. So Eric, you’ve just told me that I don’t know that I am not sort of a brain that has formed by accident after the heat death of the universe. This seems pretty hugely worrying. Does this mean I should just start doubting all the things I think I know that like that They had a life and a past five minutes ago.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yes, I think you should doubt those things. Just a little bit, just a little bit.

Ray Briggs
Wait, why only just a little bit?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, we don’t know for sure that this cosmology is correct. And if it’s correct, we don’t know for sure what the odds are, that you would be one of these randomly congealed entities, as opposed to something that say a more evolved on a large stable rock. The physics of it is very uncertain. And in fact, the the worry that you might be what these are called Boltzmann brains, that you might be a Boltzmann brain, in fact, undermines the evidence in support of it. Right? Because if you are a Boltzmann brain, then everything you think about the physics is not well grounded in an understanding of physics, because you’re just a randomly congealed brain. Right? So there’s a kind of argumentative circle here that kind of undermines itself.

Josh Landy
Eric, you’re breaking my brain, and I’m enjoying it. And we have a question on our website that I think goes a little bit along with what we’ve been talking about. Harold points out, that weirdness is in the mind of the beholder. So he asks, was the world already weird before human beings came into existence? How long has this world been weird?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think that’s a little bit lucky, like asking whether sugar has always been sweet before humans came into existence? What is it for sugar to be sweet? Well, I think it is for a to tend to provoke certain kinds of reactions in us. So there’s a sense in which it always had that tendency, even before we existed, even though the fact that the tendency depends on us.

Ray Briggs
This kind of makes me wonder more, actually. So I would say that the world being weird has to do with it’s somehow defying my expectations. Yes. But that means that whether the world is weird, depends partly on what my expectations are. So are our expectations just particularly badly set at this moment in time where they keep getting surprised?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think they’ve always been badly set, our expectations or common sense was evolved to deal with certain kinds of local problems, and not with fundamental questions about things like consciousness and the structure of the universe.

Ray Briggs
So could we get better at at forming reasonable expectations? And should we should we make the world less weird by kind of improving our outlook?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I’ve kind of a two part answer to that. So the first part is to one of my favorite examples of weirdness disappearing is heliocentrism. So back when Copernicus said, Oh, the Earth travels around the Sun, that was a totally weird thing to say it violated everyone’s common sense at the time, there wasn’t really strong, compelling scientific evidence for it when he proposed it that really came in later. So it was this bizarre idea. And people thought it was just shockingly strange. And yet, over time, people come to think, Oh, that’s not so weird. So what we think of as weird can change. And that seems like an improvement. It does seem like an improvement. But but here’s the here’s the other part of the thing I want to say about this, right? So think of the metaphor that people sometimes use about the circle of light and the circle of darkness around it. So I think what happens is as science and philosophy and prove things that were in the darkness, can come to be in the light, we come to understand things that were mysterious and weird to us before. But there will always be I think things beyond the border. So in a certain sense, our understanding of the world becomes better. But it’s not like the world ever yields its mystery, so that it just becomes plain and ordinary and thoroughly understandable.

Josh Landy
I very much like that, I have to say, because you know, one of the things I love about thinking of these weirdnesses is that it makes us a little bit more humble, right a little bit, you can give us a better sense of how tiny we are in the cosmos and how limited our capacities are, right? I mean, just how little we we even are aware of the world. I think our eyes are picking up something like 120 8,000th of the electromagnetic spectrum and there’s so little weed No, but it does make me wonder along with Ray, well, how should we be given that? I mean, should we just sort of suspend judgment about everything? Should we be keeping an open mind about everything? Should we should maybe some of us be it’d be sort of proponents have weird views like we need Eric to to say Yes, super squids really exist or something like that. How do we deal with a world where you know overnight, so to speak. geocentrism gets overturned. I mean, germs used to be a weird theory. And now we all accept them. Yeah. So how should we be? How should we think about a world that may turn out to be very different tomorrow from the way we think about it today?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I like your idea of starting with something like humility there. Right? So I think of some of the great what I think of as humane skeptics in the philosophical tradition like trongsa and mon 10. Who, because they were so skeptical, and so has such a, an understanding of their own lack of understanding, tended to have a kind of, in my view, humility and open mindedness about things.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so this point about open mindedness also brings me back to your story about being called Weird in school. So if I recognize that weirdness of other things, and phenomena and people is a lot about me, and not just about them, should that make me more tolerant of weirdness?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I would hope so. Yeah, I really like that we can celebrate the diversity of ways of being and the diversity of philosophical and scientific views that are out there, even if we have our favorites. And I think it’s totally reasonable to have your favorites and not be totally indifferent and throw your hands up in the air. But even if you have your favorites, then I think appreciating that it’s valuable, that there’s a diversity of perspectives on things, I think that’s super important. And also one of the things that I hope is, comes out of an understanding of our limited perspective on the world.

Josh Landy
There. I love that. And I love the thought of you, with your ladder, Christmas tree, and your unconventional clothing and, and just, you know, the idea that we would keep our minds open for whatever the new version of heliocentrism is, you know, that something that defies common sense for now. But I wonder if you know, there are other favorite examples for you. I mean, for me, that materialism, right? Some people think the universe is just matter. That would be weird. Some people think everything’s just mind, that would be weird. Some people think it’s a bit of both. That would be weird. Why are all those things weird?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. So I mean, if you think about, say, the idea of an immaterial soul, one thing that I think is creates weirdness there is to think about what sorts of entities would have immaterial souls, right? Is it just humans? If it’s just humans, and the immaterial soul is why we’re conscious, then dogs wouldn’t be conscious?

Ray Briggs
Oh, no, my dog definitely has.

Eric Schwitzgebel
There’s this there’s the story about Descartes, of course, one of the great dualists flinging a cat out of Oh, second story window, saying, See, cats are just machines, they don’t really have consciousness out. He probably didn’t actually do that. Right. But that displays the weirdness of the view that we have immaterial souls, but cats don’t. But if you say cats have immaterial souls, then do you say mice do then you say frogs do where do you draw the line? Like, we get again, to this line drawing problem like which animals have immaterial souls? And which ones aren’t lucky enough to have them? Or do we just say, everything as immaterial souls, even, you know, sea squirts, after they’ve eaten their brain, you know.

Ray Briggs
I just have this great mental image of a missionary preaching to sea squirts to save their immaterial soul.

Eric Schwitzgebel
And then the materialist view also has this weirdnesses I mean, that’s part of the idea of the United States being conscious chapter right is to bring out that the kind of standard things that materialists say, cause us to have consciousness or in virtue of which we have consciousness. There are strangely structured entities that have those things, but some of them are not. So I guess the United States is not so strangely structured, but it’s not a kind of thing that we normally think of as having consciousness. And yet it does seem to meet the standard materialist criteria for consciousness. If you interpret them at face value.

Josh Landy
consciousness, but maybe not rationality, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re asking, Why is the world so weird with Eric Schwitzgebel UC Riverside, author of “The weirdness of the World.”

Ray Briggs
When you think about how weird the world is, do you find it demoralizing? Or does it delight you? Could it even help you live in the moment?

Josh Landy
Flying your philosophical freak flag—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

They Might Be Giants
Purple toupée and gold lamé will turn your brain around.

Josh Landy
Could considering something out of the ordinary turn your brain around? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Eric Schwitzgebel from UC Riverside and we’re asking, Why is the world so weird?

Josh Landy
So, Eric, we’ve talked about a lot of weird and wonderful things. What I’m wondering is, do you think these should be occasion for delight or despair?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I vote for delight.

Josh Landy
Tell us more.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I mean, you might think, hey, look, I can be a Boltzmann brain. And if I am, then I might dissolve in a few seconds, because there’s, I’m just here in this thin post heat death chaos. But you know, and that could be a source of despair, but, but I’m inclined to instead celebrate that we don’t understand the world, that there’s mystery for us, it would be so boring. If everything were completely understandable.

Ray Briggs
I find the Boltzmann brain idea delightful and playful until I think about my practical life and how many things I care about being around for in the near future. So I think one of the things that you’ve said is weird is that I don’t actually know I’m going to get to be around in the future, not just because of ordinary bad things that might happen to me. But because I might just dissolve in the next 10 seconds. And like, my friends who I love might not have existed ever at all, like, isn’t that terrifying?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I don’t feel the terror of that maybe partly because the cosmology that suggests this suggests that there’ll be infinitely many duplicates of you and infinitely many duplicates of your friends in the future. So even if this particular local instantiation of you dissolves? Well, there are many other versions of you that will live all kinds of interesting lives. Are you so attached to oh, it has to be this version of me.

Josh Landy
Okay, but Ted Chiang has a lovely story, that imagines the scenario, right that there is a scenario where there are lots and lots and lots infinite number of parallel universes, and you can get a glimpse into some of those universes. And in this story, many people worried that their choices were rendered meaningless, because every action they took was counterbalanced by a branch in which they had made the opposite choice. So that seems kind of demoralizing.

Eric Schwitzgebel
You know, he’s got a little bit of a darker vision of these things that I do. I don’t feel like it’s meaningless. It’s, it’s kind of cool that if I choose to do one thing, maybe there’s another version of me in the future that chooses the opposite. So we get to kind of live out both possibilities.

Ray Briggs
I do love your embrace of all of this weirdness. To what extent do you think that this is a choice? And to what extent do you think that it’s the only rational way to behave toward weirdness?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I don’t know. Maybe it is partly a choice. And maybe it’s partly a personality thing. I don’t, I wouldn’t want to say that if someone is distressed by the fact that they should reserve a little bit of their creed and space, so to speak for doubt. You know, that they find that upsetting. But I would I guess I’d invite people to try to reconfigure their thinking, so that that’s not upsetting to them.

Ray Briggs
I like this too. Maybe we should return to some of the less disturbing weirdness of the world. I want to talk about math, because I’m always excited about how weird math and logic are. And I know you’ve got some stuff to say about the weirdness of math. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, you already mentioned one of my favorite things about the weirdness of math is all the strange stuff, stuff that happens when you think about infinitude and how to compare infinity foods. I mean, the number of points on standard views and the number of points in a line segment is equal to the number of points in all of three dimensional space. It’s, even though one is a subset of the other, which is kind of mind blowing.

Ray Briggs
So I have I have a favorite infinity phenomenon to talk about, which is calculus, actually. So when you try to do calculus, you’re trying to work out like, how fast is the instantaneous rate of change of something? How fast is a car going not just from point A to point B, but like when it’s at point C in the middle at some particular moment? And one way to do calculus is to do it, I guess, the way we’ve all settled on, which is to say, we just kind of we consider sort of shorter and shorter segments of roads and how fast is the car get across them? We take a limit. Another way to do it is to think, look, there are segments of roads that are so short, that they’re shorter than any finite segment of road, but they’re still not zero. They’re like infinitely small. Isn’t the mathematics of the infinitely small? Cool, sorry, this is more of a comment than a question.

Eric Schwitzgebel
It is cool, right, this idea of infinite decimals, which is disputable? Absolutely. I think that’s really fascinating.

Josh Landy
Well, it takes us all the way back to Zeno, right. I mean, one way of thinking about Zeno’s paradoxes is that, you know, some of them prove there is such a thing as an infinitely small unit, right, a smallest unit of time or space, and some of them prove the opposite. And so again, it’s a very Eric point, whichever way you look at it, Well, turns out to be weird. But I want to come back to the upshot questionnaire if that’s all right. We’ve talked a little bit about you know, you very graciously pushed back on the thought that maybe these weirdnesses could induce anxiety. I mean, that’s what the skeptic ancient skeptic Sextus empiricus thought that these these doubts, just keep people up all night. And and you know, they might do some demoralisation. What about positive effects? I mean, I think here, you mentioned Chuang. So before, he’s clearly someone who thought that having the right kind of epistemic modesty would lead to tranquility. And you might think of some someone like Michel de Montaigne, who thought that the right kind of epistemic modesty leads to peace, right? We won’t have all of these religious wars breaking out. What do you think is the sort of the best possible case for an outcome of embracing the weirdness of the world?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think Sextus also thought that in the right kind of mood, skepticism leads to tranquility. I mean, suppose that you’ve forgotten your umbrella. And now you need to head out into the rain. And if you’re in your conventional mindset is like, Oh, crap. But if you think, Hey, I might just be a Boltzmann brain. Or maybe it’ll be good to be wet. Because who knows what happens after I get wet? Maybe I’ll discover something new or have some new thought from this new experience, right? Then, even just entertaining those ideas. Even if you don’t think they’re the likeliest, I think we’ll have a tendency to relax you just a little bit out of your grumpiness.

Ray Briggs
So how would you recommend that our listeners cultivate more of an appreciation for the weird?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think one way to start is by reading things that they disagree with, and trying to keep an open mind about them and see what the value is and what the attraction might be in these other things. Maybe not political things, those are a little hard. Sometimes, right? But other kinds of things like a say a pan psychist, someone who thinks that all of matter is conscious, right? Almost none of us believe that. But to kind of settle into thinking, Okay, what’s the attraction of this?

Ray Briggs
So is there a bit of a danger there? In shaking, free the knowledge that you do have? And starting to doubt it? Like, like, is it all positive? exposing yourself to weird ideas? Or could you lose your bearings?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, I suppose you could lose your bearings. I don’t feel like that’s the natural response. I feel like the natural response is to still hang on to your favorite thing. But just decrease your confidence in it a little bit so that you’re a little more open, we don’t want to be so they say, you know, so open minded that your brain falls out. You just want to say, Okay, well, look, here’s an interesting idea. It’s worth thinking about maybe taking seriously, I don’t think that has to go too far down the road toward just complete collapse.

Josh Landy
Okay, that makes sense. And maybe, you know, as we were saying a moment ago, not only do you not collapse, but you enter a kind of more tranquil state of mind and more open minded state. Maybe even more than that. We were talking recently on the show to Helen to cruise about wander. And one of the things that she was saying is that having wonder about the world might actually motivate us to want to save it. Is that going too far? Or do you think, look, a certain kind of appreciation for the wonderful weirdness of the world could be motivating?

Eric Schwitzgebel
I like that idea a lot. Yeah, Helen to Cruz is a fascinating and wonderful philosopher. Here’s, here’s one way of thinking about it. I mean, what makes our planet amazing, right? It’s partly that it has life. And it’s also partly that it’s got complex life. And it’s partly that it’s got complex life that’s able to look at itself and think about the hardest questions There are and challenge itself and get confused about the fundamental nature of reality. I mean that that’s, you know, in our galaxy, there may be no other planets that have that that makes our world this amazing, wonderful world, I think we ought to appreciate and celebrate that fact about our planet that we can look at these super hard, super profound questions, and not really know the answers. But try. That’s like, kind of the most amazing thing I think. Well,

Josh Landy
Eric, you’ve given about us about 100 reasons for embracing that beautiful, inspiring and uplifting worldview. So I want to thank you at least 100 times for joining us again today.

Eric Schwitzgebel
It’s been wonderful talking with you.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Eric Schwitzgebelm professor of philosophy at the University of California Riverside, and author of “The Weirdness of the World.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I’m wanting to both go read a bunch of math and go read a bunch of marine biology and maybe also read a bunch of philosophy of mind and just marvel at the so many weird things in our universe.

Josh Landy
We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and get as weird as you like in our library of nearly 600 episodes?

Ray Briggs
Now a man so fast, It’s positively surreal—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Philosophy has always been challenged by reality, or maybe it’s the other way around, which would be the same thing? At any rate, what is reality?  This question, behind every LSD trip, I’ve been told, has been replaced by tentative assertions that there is no reality, which is not helpful if you’re thinking about buying a house, or going to the grocery store, or washing your hair.  Real or not, you can’t escape it, though it is contingent on terms which we ourselves invented using terms based on our perception of reality, which does not exist outside perception.  Clearly, the so-called stuff that makes up reality is also the stuff that drives reality.  It’s the mower, gas, and fumes, but do we even have a lawn?  Which reality is this?  Which brings us to another problem, our human urge to measure stuff.  How big is it?  Can we eat it?  Does it burn?  Can we use it to make bombs?  The more we knew, the more the interface between philosophy and mechanics became blurry, which led to quantum physics.  We learned that when things get really really tiny, a thing exists in two states at once- a thing, and a not thing thing, only becoming one or the other if you look at it.  That’s not so hard to understand is it?  That’s a rule.  Is it REALITY?  The early 20th Century is when things got iffy.  Heisenberg said we just don’t know and Wittgenstein said the hell with it.  Even before we started trying to micromanage reality, we made Darwinism, Freudianism, Marxism, straightforward theories, immediately mutated and put to work to inform racism, fascism, various forms of oppression, and even arson, ranging from burning down cities to setting small fires on the edge of town.  Some blame logical positivism, which is a name given to the thought processes of the early twentieth century, which seems like a positivist thing to do, doesn’t it?  The idea being that it’s all science now.  Philosophy’s job is to organize and name, not develop new knowledge.  Into that maelstrom stepped one Charles Fort, a freelance writer who’d been collecting filler for most of his adult life- news items about frogs falling from the sky, wheels of light in the ocean, animals where they’re not supposed to be, weird animals never seen before, unidentified flying objects, poltergeists, teleportation, telekinesis, telepathy, synchronicities, etc.  With the encouragement of Theodore Dreiser, he wrote his first book on these phenomena, called The Book of the Damned, the damned meaning phenomena rejected and ignored by science.  Right there you can see the difference between Fort and, say, Robert Ripley’s Believe Or Not, also popular at that time.  Fort fan Colin Wilson, existentialist chronicler of the paranormal and true crime, said Charles Fort’s central message was, people with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.  That’s if Charles Fort took his tongue out of his cheek long enough to take himself seriously.  All in all, he wrote four books around all this, which became catnip to skeptics, and writers of pulp fiction, most especially science fiction writers, who also sprang into being around this time.  Mesmerism and monsters became embedded in our culture!  The end of the world is difficult to think about, so instead we scare ourselves with zombie movies, and good looking people trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Some things man was not meant to know is the warning.  Charles Fort seemed to think, well, maybe not know, but maybe fun to think about.  He was surprised, shortly before his death in 1932, to discover that he had a cult following.  He found this hilarious.  But the joke was on him.  His followers are called Forteans.  They even formed a Fortean Society.  One of its members was the splendid screenwriter, Ben Hecht.  There was never a manifesto, but for him membership meant making holy a distrust of all authority, without actually believing in all the strange content Fort threw into his books.  After all, Fort was now an authority too.  The Forteans still exist, and since 1973, there has been a magazine out of England, to which I subscribe, called The Fortean Times.  In it, you can find unexplained deaths, amazing animal rescues, flying saucer sightings, haunted houses.  It’s a trove of this sort of thing.  Can science explain it?  Never.  Forget about it.  And always remember, hyperspace isn’t real.  And yet, behold Star Trek.  Behold Star Wars.  Real as a dime. I gotta go.

Firesign Theatre
We think that is a fair and a wise guileful rule to be guided by. Whart is reality? And we’re not afraid of it, are we. Eat it! You bet!

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, from subscribers to our online community of thinkers, and from the members of KALW San Francisco where our program originates.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
That conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Firesign Theatre
What is reality?