Curt Jaimungal: Reality Is Bloody Terrifying

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Curt Jaimungal** (0:30)
Recently, I spoke with Slavoj Žižek on the podcast.
What separates you, the recent Slavoj Žižek of the past decade interested in quantum mechanics, from a Hegelian Deepak Chopra? It was an extremely fun podcast. You could check it out. One of the reasons he chose to come on The Theories of Everything podcast is because this is a podcast on the nature of reality, which is a notoriously vague phrase. What is reality? And what does someone mean by nature? Let's briefly define terms.
When I say that I'm investigating the nature of reality, other than this being an extremely deep pickup line, I usually mean that I'm exploring something fundamental about existence, truth and the structure of the universe. Almost every single one of those words is important from fundamental to structure to exploring. In terms of topics, philosophically, it means that we have metaphysical questions, like what is real? So the famous debate between realism and anti-realism lands squarely here. Do objects exist independent of perception? That's an idealism, materialism debate, for instance. And what is the nature of space, time, causality? This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Now, physics, when people speak about fundamental physics, they usually mean fundamental laws governing reality or governing physical reality, such as quantum theory or the standard model or relativity, usually general relativity, cosmology also. Something like chemistry, even though it's derived from physics, is not considered to be fundamental. On the mathematics end, we're investigating whether mathematical structures are discovered or invented, whether they underpin physical reality. So mathematical Platonism versus formalism. Actually, we talk much more about the foundations of math. In this episode with Harvey Friedman here, who's the inventor of something called reverse mathematics. In cognitive science, fundamental questions means studying perception, consciousness, how the brain constructs reality, questions like subjective versus objective reality. And is there a third option? Is there something like transjective that mediates between these or is not expressed by any of these? Now in theology and also in mysticism, it means to explore reality that extends beyond, potentially beyond a physical, including concepts of God, spirituality, non-material existence. Then there's also an entire class that I just call why the laws of more meta question, which is why does the universe follow laws at all? And if it's even well defined to think of the universe as a single set, perhaps reality is patchworked with consistency in overlapping regions, but yet it's inconsistent somehow globally. I talked about that in this reverse elephant lecture for the Mind at Large conference. That is, maybe it's ill-defined to think of reality as a total, like capital R reality, as in here it is, here's reality.
You also get into questions of fundamental as distinct from reductionism. So often people will conflate what is most fundamental to what is at the most reduced layer like they may point to some subatomic particles as being fundamental. Well, it's useful to define reductionism. In order to study some object or structure, you could potentially completely do so by analyzing the parts and the interactions between the parts. That's reductionism. Fundamentality may seem like it's about the smallest part. However, you could be fundamental about spacetime, and spacetime itself is decidedly not small.
No one fat shames the bulk. But fundamental is different. Something is fundamental if its existence isn't in virtue of anything else.
So what does this mean? Well, the laws of nature themselves may be fundamental, but it's not like they're a part of something else which you break down, and then you get little pieces of the laws of nature. That's why I was insisting to Slavoj Žižek that when I study what's fundamental, I do so withholding judgment as to whether reductionism is true or false. I find many people on the idealist end, so those who take consciousness as primary or even on the materialist end, that they apply a reductionistic framework and find that everything is made out of consciousness or everything is made out of the physical and form their philosophical substance abutment there. Many people also conflate fundamentality with reality and say that if something isn't fundamental, then it's not real. But that would be quite odd because that would imply that almost all of what we mean by real, the word real loses its meaning. So the mountain is not real, the grass is not real because the world is not made up of mountains and grass. There's also a similar issue going on with people who say that it's all information, that reality is merely information. This is something that I speak about with John Norton, so you can feel free to watch this podcast for more. It's difficult to conceive of what's fundamental as completely disembroiled from reductionism. But it is necessary because reductionism may be incorrect as a guiding principle toward understanding the nature of reality, despite reductionism's clear practical success. Remember, practicality also doesn't imply fundamentality or reality or what have you. These are all distinct concepts. Of course, different fields approach the question with different methods, and there's empirical science which uses logical reasoning, and then there's phenomenology, there's meditative drug-induced introspection, there's hermeneutics, there's even art.