It can be tempting, when first introduced to a deep concept of physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to draw grand philosophical conclusions about the impossibility of knowing anything precisely. That is generally a temptation to be resisted, just because it's so easy to do it wrong. But there is absolutely a place for a careful humanistic synthesis of these kinds of scientific ideas with other ideas, for example from philosophy or literature. That's the kind of task William Egginton takes on in his new book The Rigor of Angels, which compares the work of philosopher Immanuel Kant, physicist Werner Heisenberg, and author Jorge Luis Borges, three thinkers who grappled with limitations on our aspirations to know reality directly.
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William Egginton received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. He is currently the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins. He is the author of numerous books on literature, literary theory, and philosophy. In addition to The Rigor of Angels, he has an upcoming book on the work of Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Click to Show Episode Transcript
0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Here at Mindscape you may have noticed we occasionally talk about quantum mechanics, favorite theme of ours here. And so, one name that will appear sometimes when talking about quantum mechanics is that of Werner Heisenberg, the early 20th century physicist, who actually was the author of the first fully formed theory of quantum mechanics, which was called Matrix Mechanics. We also talk about philosophy, and if you're talking about philosophy, the name that will come up is Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher from the 18th century who wrote about everything in philosophy, political philosophy, ethical philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, all of those things. And we did, in fact, I had to check this, I'll admit, but we have in fact mentioned Jorge Luis Borges, the poet, Spanish language poet from South America, Argentina, in particular, poet and short story writer.
0:01:03.1 SC: He was mentioned in the episode that we did way long ago with Alan Lightman. Alan Lightman mentioned that he was a fan of the magical realists like Italo Calvino and Borges and others. Borges is a wonderful, poetic, imaginative writer who I can heartily recommend to anyone who is a Mindscape fan, but we haven't dwelt on him. We mentioned him very briefly in passing. So we certainly have never talked about all three of these important thinkers at the same time. That's why today's episode is going to be so much fun. Our guest is William Egginton, who is a professor, a colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins, where he is a professor of literature, and he's written a whole number of books. The most recent one of which is The Rigor of Angels, Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality. So one wonders if one knows a little bit about Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant, and Jorge Luis Borges, what they have to do with each other.
0:02:03.9 SC: And so we're gonna find that out. I'm gonna give you a little hint, a little spoiler here. It has to do with the fact that when we do perceive reality, we don't perceive it in a clear, unadulterated form, right? We perceive certain aspects of reality. I like to think. I'm not someone who thinks that all of reality is an illusion or anything like that. We perceive something, and that's something has to do with reality but it's not unmediated, it's not immediate, it's not the fundamental nature of things just staring us right in the face.
0:02:37.7 SC: We have to do some work. [laughter] We have to do philosophy, science, maybe even literature, to understand our relationship to the fundamental nature of reality. And that's something that all three of these folks talked about. So the limitations on how we can grasp reality is the theme underlying this show. And I think it went very well. And it's fun to do a humanities episode. We don't often do that. If you don't count philosophies as humanities, maybe you should, but a more literary kind of episode. So I think maybe we should do more of these. That's the lesson I learned. So let's go.
[music]
0:03:32.7 SC: William Egginton, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03:34.2 William Egginton: Thanks Sean. It's great to be here.
0:03:36.0 SC: So I think we'll go separately into each of your three subjects of your new book. But let's start by bringing them together. Kant, Heisenberg, Borges, why in the world of all the people throughout history, would you pick those three to combine together into a book?
0:03:52.8 WE: I know this is always the first question. It's my first question, in fact as I look at the title of the book, why those three? And they came to me rather than me coming to them. I spent years talking about, thinking about, reading into the philosophical questions at the heart of this book. And when the time came to put together the structure of the book, I spent a long time thinking about who are gonna be the main vehicles. I knew that I wanted to write something in the form of narrative nonfiction.
0:04:23.5 WE: I'd done this before. I'd done an intellectual biography of Miguel de Cervantes, that explained what his contributions were to the history of thought, but did so via telling the story of his life. And I liked that format. So the first stab at it actually was in some ways too broad. I had too many characters on the table. I was going back as far as Zeno who... And many of these characters still make entrances in the book, but not to the same extent as the three main characters. Back as far as Zeno up as far as Einstein and Heisenberg. And my thought after putting together the structure was, it was too scattered, it lacked a through line. It needed to have a through line that was more than just the philosophical ideas that I was exploring.
0:05:10.0 SC: Did you already have a title at that point?
0:05:12.2 WE: No.
0:05:12.3 SC: 'Cause I always start with the title.
0:05:13.6 WE: I didn't.
0:05:13.7 SC: I can't write a book if I don't have a title.
0:05:14.8 WE: No. In fact, the title, that's a great question. The title was something that I struggled with for ages and... But again, both the title and the fact that the three characters ended up finding me in a way. And so after having first written this massive outline with different characters for each of 12 chapters jumping out throughout sort of a time machine through history, then I reeled it all back in and I said, "Maybe I can do the same thing by focusing on one guy." And I really liked this philosopher from the fourth century, Boethius.
0:05:49.2 SC: The Consolations of Philosophy.
0:05:49.8 WE: The Consolations of Philosophy, it's a great book. I've taught it in great books at Hopkins many times. And it brings me, and again, another philosopher really makes it into this book as well, but in a very small part. And then I realized it's too remote, too little is known about this philosopher. It would be very hard to make his life struggles without making up a whole lot of stuff, right?
0:06:12.0 SC: Yeah.
0:06:13.0 WE: Present for the readers. And then so as I was thinking, well, I've always loved this book by Douglas Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach.
0:06:22.6 SC: Of course.
0:06:23.2 WE: I said three characters who were kind of weaved together, coming from different disciplines. I had always thought sort of one of the ideas behind this is bringing science and philosophy and literature together. Okay, what if I had a poet, a physicist, and a philosopher? And then it hit me about 10 years ago in The Stone, the New York Times Online Philosophy Forum. I had actually written a piece about kind of some of the fundamental problems in the book. And there they were. All three of the characters were there. Borges had written about Kant in that little article and Heisenberg. And so I said, "Well, that's it." 'Cause these are characters who are, they've led exciting lives. We know a ton about them.
0:07:03.3 SC: Sure.
0:07:03.9 WE: Several of them I've overlapped with in my own life. [laughter] Two of the three. You never met any of them?
[overlapping conversation]
0:07:08.3 WE: I didn't meet them, no, but I could've met Borges. I mean, honestly, I lived in the DC area in the early '80s, and Borges made it to Hopkins. Hopkins is a great center for literary studies. And he was in the early '80s. He was brought here by the, I wanna say the English department or colleagues in the then Humanities center. And he was blind and completely blind by that point, I recount in the book, he was brought down to pose grave at his own request and put his hand on the face of the statue.
[laughter]
0:07:39.3 WE: And so this is the poet that I know. So yeah, these were characters that I felt that I could really connect with, that we knew a lot about, that I could get into. And that's what ended up calling to me about those particular characters. So first was the idea. First the questions, and then the characters. And then to your other question, what about the title? 'Cause as you said, you like to have the title first. In many cases, I do too. In this case, it was alluding me, I just couldn't find the right title. And again, it was something that had found me because as I thought about some of these issues, I'd been thinking and writing and teaching about this I recalled many, many years ago, having given a lecture about one of the stories that ends up being, in fact, I quote from the epigraph, and it's where I get the title from Borges, tlen upar obrestercius. And I had called that lecture A Rigor of Angels, kind of with the idea as if a murder of crows, a rigor of angels.
0:08:34.4 SC: Okay good [laughter] Oh, I like that, yeah.
0:08:36.9 WE: That's what angels would be. And I don't think that is, it's probably something like a congregation of angels, but a rigor of angels. And then I thought, no, The Rigor of Angels and as for reasons we can probably get into more in depth. That was the right title for all sorts of reasons, both the sound of it, and that I found it evocative and poetic. And at the same time, it really went to the heart of what I was identifying as connecting these three thinkers.
0:09:02.6 SC: And you mentioned they all resonated with the fundamental problems of the book.
0:09:07.2 WE: Yeah.
0:09:07.4 SC: What are the fundamental problems of the book? Very, very quickly.
0:09:09.2 WE: Right. And so I suppose we can get into that by thinking about that title. They... The Rigor of Angels is part of it. It's in some ways I describe it as kind of a negative title or a title about what's not the answer to the ultimate nature of reality, right? The assumption or the presumption or the prejudice that Borges is dealing with when he writes that sentence, and the famous sentence comes at the end, or the postscript of this story, tlen upar obrestercius. He says that humanity believes that there's rigor in the world. And indeed there is rigor in the world, but humanity forgets and forgets again that it is a rigor of chess masters and not of angels. By which he means that what... This is now paraphrasing Heisenberg, and this is why the two come together so well about this.
0:09:55.0 WE: What we are doing when we do science, and we tend to forget this, is that we're not studying nature itself, but nature as it reveals itself to our forms of knowledge or instruments of observation and the like. And then Kant came into it because that's really what Kant's critical philosophy was all about, right? Diving into that with a sort of critical knife and dissecting those parts of our knowledge, which we can feel safe about talking about, and those that we should really be careful because we're tending to let reason trample over the borders of what's reasonable to talk about.
0:10:35.7 SC: So we can think of the issue as the intermediation of our observation in between the world as it is, and the world we think about it. Is that over claiming or oversimplifying?
0:10:48.3 WE: It's not over over claiming or oversimplifying. I think what happens is, we can accept and say that to a certain extent, but we still have a tendency then once we're in the act of observing and talking about of our observations to then forget that what we're talking about is our observations, right? And start to talk and think and believe as though that filter, that intermediary position we're no longer there. And it sounds really simple when you put it in those abstract terms, but then when you dive into it, you see over and over again, we tend to do the same thing, which is to sort of then, first start with the filter, use it really, really well, and then implicitly move it out of the way and start talking as if we didn't have the filter anyway.
0:11:27.4 SC: Yeah, exactly. Okay. So let me, before we get into the substance here, I wanna sort of ask an inside baseball for us professors kind of question.
0:11:35.9 WE: Yeah.
0:11:36.6 SC: You know, in science there's a very clear delineation between your research work and writing a trade book for the masses. In the humanities, I get the feeling it's less clear. I mean, how do you think about this contribution? Is this mostly explicating things for the person on the street, or is this an academic contribution somehow?
0:11:55.1 WE: Gosh, for me, honestly, it's equally both. But that's because I don't wanna generalize and say that that's something that humanities professors in general are doing. I would say that the majority at a school like Hopkins, of my colleagues would be very insistent on saying no. The kind of work that I do is research. It's research in a particular and in highly defined area of the humanities. It requires a great deal of specialization and practice and years and years of reading the literature in order to get to this point. And that's something that's extremely important and that they probably would make a distinction between doing that and writing a book that, in my case, was published by Pantheon. And that's sort of out there and being reviewed and read as I hope and want it to be by the general public.
0:12:49.8 WE: So what I've been trying to do now for, I would say getting close to half my career after a number of books that were in the former sense, really very specialized books of a kind of the interstices of literature and philosophy, and what we call critical theory. I do a lot with psychoanalysis. I'm just interested in 20th century European philosophy, for example. And which tends to be a kind of very literary or philosophy with a literary bent. I wrote a series of books that I'm proud of, that are often come back in my thinking and teaching. But that were read mostly by colleagues and graduate students and...
0:13:32.4 SC: [chuckle] Bought by libraries.
0:13:33.4 WE: Not bought by libraries, exactly. That a review, like a journal like Kirkus, if and when it would review, and in some cases it did, would tend to use the word impenetrable.
[laughter]
0:13:47.4 WE: And at a certain point when I got invited to write in the stone and then had several years of doing repeat performances in The Stone in the New York Times. Then I honed my writing a little bit more and found I could also publish the occasional op-ed in the times. What I found was a challenge that I really liked. And that most importantly was actually a challenge. There was nothing about dumbing down.
0:14:13.4 SC: Oh, it's not easier [laughter]
0:14:14.4 WE: No, it was actually much harder. And the writing itself took longer. And I liked both the effect, the outcome. I liked the kind of writing that I was producing, but I also found that going through the process of working my thoughts into that form made them so much clearer for myself. And then began to seem to me that some of my past writing was relying on, say, jargon or relying on maybe skipping steps in thinking through a problem by using a kind of shorthand that I felt that my colleagues and students would totally understand, but that we would hadn't necessarily all really thought through all of the steps. So I began to really like the process as a way of actually finding out more about the world. And it became a kind of research.
0:15:03.9 WE: The Rigor of Angels, just like The Man Who Invented Fiction, I still believe that they should count as academic books as well. They have an awful lot of footnotes.
0:15:16.0 SC: Yeah.
0:15:16.6 WE: Right?
0:15:17.0 SC: Yeah.
0:15:18.6 WE: The footnotes section in The Rigor of Angels is many dozens of pages of many, many hundreds of sources. Those sources, I think the fellow that I work with on my back matter, who helps me organize the notes and said this was, he was happy to report the book that forced him to work with the most languages he'd ever worked on, right? I think he counted 10 when you included Russian and Greek, and which are not languages that I claimed that I can read, but we went to the original source material in some cases. So I really do feel that they're researched books that they're...
0:15:52.1 SC: You're doing scholarship.
0:15:53.4 WE: They're doing scholarship, but also doing it simultaneously in a way where the readership doesn't have to be scholarship.
0:16:00.2 SC: Right.
0:16:00.7 WE: Yeah.
0:16:00.8 SC: Right.
0:16:01.0 WE: Yeah.
0:16:01.3 SC: Yeah. No, I love that answer. I have the same issues in my mind. Like I said, it's even more clear in science, but I do take inspiration from people like Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennet, people who are clearly doing intellectual work out there in a way that the public can [0:16:14.4] ____.
0:16:14.9 WE: And these are some of the same people that I've taken inspiration from. And honestly, you as well.
[laughter]
0:16:19.7 SC: Ah, well, I'm trying. We'll see. So, okay, good. So then back to the substance of it, and let's just dig a little bit deeply into the three people we're talking about. So you have Immanuel Kant, I've heard of him. Famously, influential philosopher, a little bit difficult for people to wrap their minds about, writes these giant critiques of various kinds of reason. And probably if the person on the street knew anything about Emmanuel Kant, it would be the categorical imperative, right?
0:16:48.6 WE: Right.
0:16:48.7 SC: A sort of deontological approach to morality. But that is just not the aspect, if I'm not mistaken that you are interested in for this book.
0:16:56.3 WE: Certainly not exclusively. Although again, following on what I said before about learning more by using this method of researching, right? I actually ended up teaching myself a lot more about the entire Kantian system by virtue of wanting to dive into the epistemological problem, right? So the entire Kantian system is vast as you know, but it's often divided into aesthetics, epistemology and ethics. And as you just pointed out, I think very correctly, the Kant that most people know about is the ethical Kant. The Kant, who's responsible for like one entire half of the two ways of thinking about ethics, right? We think about.
0:17:37.1 SC: Deontology.
0:17:38.5 WE: Right. Deontology versus what everything else is consequentialism, right? But Kant has deontology, right? It's, that's his wheelhouse, that's his corner. And so this is true. I'd actually dealt a lot with Kantian ethics before. I'd been going for years to my kid's former private school and invited to a course for seniors on ethics. And they always wanted me to come and talk about Kant. And it was always a lot of fun because people get up in arms about it. He said, [laughter], you can't really be saying this, right?
0:18:09.4 SC: Yeah.
0:18:09.5 WE: And these sorts of things. The consequences don't matter, what matters is a pure will, what did you intend? And then the categorical imperative that okay, you have this sort of algorithm that you can run your thought processes through, and then you kind of test whether you're being ethical or not, based on whether you can universalize the maxim according to what you act or not. It turns out, and you're right by saying that's not what my original interest in Kant was. It's the epistemological question, what can we know and how sure it can be about what we know, that is the obsessive question of the Critique of Pure Reason.
0:18:42.8 WE: The first great critique that he wrote. What happens as you read through this carefully and work out the arguments behind it, is that that book has already laid the ground work for everything else that he's gonna do. And it in fact lays the groundwork for what eventually becomes the ethics. And it lays the groundwork for what eventually becomes the aesthetic theory. The book on judgment, of judgment of the power of judge. And then I felt not just obligated, it was natural for me to try and show how all of these arguments flow from the initial problem of knowledge for Kant.
0:19:19.7 WE: And as a result of doing that, the book followed this path into existential questions of human being, of what it is to be a human in the world, lost in space and time, always reaching for some kind of certainties that would in some sense from the perspective of being lost in space and time, adrift in space and time, seem to be anchors outside of space and time, or at least anchors that would guide one in space and time. And it's that same relationship between the adrift-ness of being and the presumption of certain points of certainty that allow one to make judgments that is in fact the exact same pivot that works in all of the Kantian system. And so by discovering that, the Kantian system started to become clear to me. And then I said, well, part of what I'm tryna do in this book is to make it clear to everybody.
0:20:10.9 SC: That's good.
0:20:11.0 SC: Yeah.
0:20:11.6 SC: But let's make it clear to everyone what exactly that first move is. What would Kant tell us if you had a elevator pitch about epistemology? [chuckle]
0:20:21.4 WE: So this is what he would tell us. In fact, this is what he does tell us. Kant begins the Critique of Pure Reason with some very famous introductions and then re-written introductions from the end of the same decade. So we're talking about the decade of the 1780s to 1790 More or less. He's been thinking and thinking and reading and promising this book for years and years and years, and people are beginning to fret, and they're saying, What is happening? When is this book gonna come out? And then it finally lands and everyone's... There's this collective "What is that?" Right? No one can really get it because it's so big and so complicated. And then bit by bit people start to become clearer. And so what Kant then describes at the beginning of the book, is he describes this moment that he then, he calls this his own Copernican revolution.
0:21:10.7 WE: And this Copernican revolution is provoked by having been in a kind of at a time in his career been in a situation of sort of, "Yeah, we know all of this", of certainty. And he called it, he refers to it as dogmatic slumber, very famously. Dogmatic slumber refers to dogmatism, rationalism. He was part of the school of philosophers who believed that, and this is me paraphrasing it, but the world as we sense it is the expression of some kind of an ultimate reason or ultimate code. Right?
0:21:44.4 WE: And they didn't have machines like we have now, but one way I think of thinking about it would be like a matrix-like world. That everything that we experience is like the decoding of some kind of very complex language. Someone, namely God, speaks that language, knows that language. If you could be God, you would then see and intuit everything. And so out of these fundamental laws, everything that you experience would flow naturally. And there would be no distinction at all between the experience of the world and the world itself. As Kant admits, he was sort of he had drunk the Kool-Aid, he was part of that group. And then he read David Hume, and was gobsmacked.
[laughter]
0:22:30.0 WE: David Hume had come to entirely the opposite of conclusion, and he challenged everything about the self-certain confidence of the rationalist. What David Hume said is, well, every time that I dive into an experience of the world and try and find anything else than just the experience itself, I can't find anything if it's other than a sensation, other than a feeling. I can't even find an I that's feeling that thing. All there is are these what I would call, me again paraphrasing, sensual slivers of space time. That's it. You're just being smacked by one impression after the other. And then we have the hubris, thus says David Hume, to put those all together, repeat them several times and on the basis of a few miserable repetitions, we think we know the answers to the universe. Right?
[laughter]
0:23:20.6 WE: We get into habits and then we say, "Oh, because of these... "
0:23:24.1 SC: I feel seen by David Hume.
0:23:24.2 WE: Yeah, we do. Exactly. And Kant famously said, "Well, that just woke me up." This was a challenge. He didn't like it, not one little bit. He wanted to resist it, but he felt that it was a massively important argument and he needed to face it in some way. And so what he came up with, and this is what took him so long, was he realized no, we neither can know the world as it is out there and it's a perfect code, however nor are we stuck just in the sort of wash of sensual here's and now's and here's and now's. The argument that he used to prove the latter, why we can't just be caught in that, was a real smackdown argument. He's absolutely brilliant. What he figured out, what he realized is, if one were really only ever present for one particular moment in space-time, those slivers of space-time, and then again another sliver of space-time, and then another sliver of space-time, you wouldn't even know that you were just having one sliver of space-time after another. There really would be no you there to stitch them together. But if there's no you there, there's no synthesizing of anything over time...
0:24:32.9 SC: There's no accumulation.
0:24:33.7 WE: There's no accumulation whatsoever, then there's no experience. So the mere fact that we're experiencing anything means that there must be something that Hume then called conditions of possibility of experiencing anything. And those conditions of possibility, which he then works out in the first part of this magnificent book, fundamentally are space and time, the forms of intuition. These have a priori structures to them. These you don't actually find in the world through experience, they are the conditions of possibility of finding anything in the world. And once you have those, and causality is one of them, you start to build up a system that then can make sense scientifically, and that is independent of the actual content that you're finding out there in the world. So in a nutshell, that was the problem. And that's also the problem that connected for me to the other two characters.
0:25:20.7 SC: I guess, I probably should resist this temptation, but we're all friends here, we're having a good conversation, I want to argue against this right now. It's probably gonna get down to rebuttal, but what I want to say, being more Humean in proclivity, is there is a give and take between us and the world, and Hume is right that we have all these sensations and so forth. But rather than relying on a priori conditions of possibility to fix that problem, I would tend to say like we come up with hypotheses about structures out there in the world. We have some intuitions, we might revise them, but it's a constant dialectic between our models of the world and these sensations that we get. And I don't really need anything a priori other than a hope that there are patterns out there to be discerned.
0:26:06.9 WE: That makes a lot of sense. And I would say, and again, this is distilling the Kantian position far more than...
0:26:10.8 SC: Sure. [chuckle]
0:26:11.6 WE: You would put it this way, but what is fundamentally there of importance to Kant here, is that there still has to be a distinction between the knower and what's being known. And the knower is not exclusively just the object, so to speak, in that situation. So this idea of something synthesizing the different moments is already implicitly problematic in Hume, and that's what Kant pulls out. Right?
0:26:39.2 SC: Right.
0:26:39.9 WE: And the idea of the a priori becomes a big problem. It becomes a big problem for Heisenberg when he's wrestling with Kant later. He will out and out say, we had to move the border of the a priori. But he still accepts this idea of this distinction. The distinction in that case between the knowing subject and what could be known in the world.
0:27:02.7 WE: One of the thought experiments that I play around with this, again it's a very Kantian one, but it's also one that is brought to me by reading Kant through thinking with Borges a lot, is the distinction between having a memory and then actually re-living that memory.
0:27:20.3 SC: Okay.
0:27:22.0 WE: If one... You think about some moment in the past that you really enjoyed. And now you try and intensify that thought, and intensify it more. And we've seen there's great science fiction about this, like in the British series Black Mirror. It's something you can click into your mind and you're now really re-experiencing something. But if you push that all the way, you get to a point, and I'm sure you see where I'm going, where that full-on experience, five sense full technicolor immersion in that moment in the past, if it's really gonna be absolutely perfect, it's no longer a memory, and you're just doing it again. And not only are you just doing it again, there's not doing it again, again. There's no again there anymore. You've lost whatever distinction is there between the subject who can actually enjoy this as a memory and simply being in it.
0:28:14.7 WE: And it's that minimal distance that's required ultimately for anything that we would call perception as well. So you sort of intensify that and bring that moment of the past right up into the present, and you realize in that what Kant was saying is something has to be different between the knower and what's being known in order for known experience perceived to be known experience perceived in the first place.
0:28:36.3 SC: Have you read David Chalmers' book Reality+? Do you know about it?
0:28:39.3 WE: I have not read that one. No.
0:28:40.8 SC: He's arguing that in fact a virtual reality experience sufficiently real, is just real.
0:28:49.3 WE: Yeah.
0:28:50.3 SC: The ways that you get your sensations and your experiences and whatever are almost immaterial. I don't know whether I go along with it or not, but I am sympathetic.
0:28:57.5 WE: And that plus in that formulation. And thank you for the recommendation.
0:29:01.2 SC: Yeah.
0:29:01.6 WE: I'm gonna run out and read it. But that plus is really what ends up being for Kant, what he calls the pure point of our perception. It's the fact that something, whatever it is, remains the same long enough for a difference to be registered. That kind of pivot is what we would call the human subject.
0:29:20.3 SC: Okay, well, you've given us a nice segue into person number two, who I'm gonna nominate to be Heisenberg. Heisenberg and Borges are pretty contemporary in some sense.
0:29:29.8 WE: They are, very much so. They actually are.
0:29:29.9 SC: Yeah. Very much so, but as you said... Well, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Do you wanna summarize Heisenberg's contributions?
[laughter]
0:29:38.5 WE: This is where I always feel, especially talking to you, I'd rather just pass the mic over to you, but I'll do my best, and subject to the physicists' corrections, of course. The greatest contribution from Heisenberg came in 1925, or at least in published form '25 and '27. In '25 he worked out what he was calling at the time matrix mechanics, what became known as quantum mechanics. He was... He decided, as he said at the beginning of that famous article, that he put it in I think in the passive, but it occurred... It was sort of... The thought occurred, the thought occurred...
0:30:14.8 SC: Who knows how it happened.
0:30:16.8 WE: To sequence, to essentially put it in layman's language, to think about, to work out not what's happening is if we had a position into momentum of particles like electrons. But rather to look at frequencies and work backwards from frequencies. And when you... What was so complicated about the mathematics is that the frequencies have a lot more variables than just a position into momentum. So you start having to multiply strings of numbers, columns and rows of numbers instead of individuals. And something weird happens. When you do it in one direction, you get a different answer from when you do it in the other direction. As his computations weren't commuting, even though according to the rules of arithmetic, they were supposed to commute and yet they were still accounting for the experimental results.
0:31:05.8 WE: And so he wrote a paper saying, We should do this anyway because I'm getting the right answers. And let's kind of stop worrying about what's happening between the before and after measurements and just stick with that because it works. And then I think it was Dirac who boiled all of these amazing calculations down to something kind of sublimely beautiful and simple and impossible to understand, which was XP-px = I, so the imaginary square root of negative one times, h-bar. And everyone who looks at it says, Yeah, well, that's it in a nutshell, and it doesn't make any sense.
0:31:48.1 SC: I taught it in my class literally is morning, so it is kind of important.
0:31:53.3 WE: And it's an amazing equation that sort of carries everything about that discovery in a nutshell. There is no way to make an observation of the ones starting with position, and then do your multiplication by momentum. And do it in a way that if you then go back and do it the other way around, you're gonna get the same answer. So there's always that minimal difference. There's always that minimal difference that sort of results or in some ways for me, and maybe now I'm starting to philosophize already about it, but that minimal difference that already imports into the act of obtaining knowledge from the world, something about the agency, not in any kind of a metaphysical sense, but of the one who's acting on the... Or the action on the world required to get that knowledge from the world.
0:32:41.5 SC: And I will say even though I'm the professional physicist, of course, we physicists have never read these papers, by Heisenberg or whatever. We never read the original paper, so you have that advantage.
0:32:49.7 WE: And they're very difficult.
0:32:51.6 SC: Well, I think that my experience when I have written books of my own and been forced for the first time to read some of the classic papers, is there a wildly varying in approachability. Some people could write. Like Boltzmann was great. But then Heisenberg, not so great.
0:33:04.6 WE: Heisenberg, not so great. Even I have got this...
[overlapping conversation]
0:33:08.7 SC: Not so great in writing in an understandable way.
0:33:11.2 WE: Oh my god, no. Great in thinking these thoughts, but he's a clunky writer. And as I'm going through this with my students right now, we're reading, this is the English translation, but Physics and Philosophy, which I think is an extraordinary book.
0:33:23.0 SC: By Heisenberg.
0:33:23.8 WE: By Heisenberg.
0:33:24.2 SC: Yeah.
0:33:24.4 WE: A massive, fantastic book. But since we're reading... I mean, Kant is a difficult writer, but he's not clunky in the way that Heisenberg is. There's a certain elegance, difficult, but elegance. And then, of course, there's Borges, so that's...
0:33:37.0 SC: Well that's not fair.
[laughter]
0:33:40.5 WE: It's like at a different level. So they all have their different areas of strengths and sort of just a clear exposition in a beautiful German is not what I would call Heisenberg's great strength.
0:33:49.8 SC: I don't know if you ever read the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
0:33:54.1 WE: I did. Yeah.
0:33:54.2 SC: Where Phaedrus refers to Immanuel Kant as the master diamond cutter. He was able to exactly find the clear...
0:34:00.4 WE: The precision.
0:34:01.4 SC: Yeah.
0:34:01.7 WE: The precision of the language is extraordinary. It really is. And that's also a difficulty in translation, because we do come up with translations that... I think David Lindley has this amazing book Uncertainty. I really like it. It's beautiful. My students in the first year seminar started off with this. But even Lindley, I think, maybe he doesn't... And I would take this back if I had a conversation with him and he said, "No, no, no, I really did understand this", but in the portion where he's talking about the title of the paper we were just discussing, there's a word in German, "anschaulich". "Anschaulich" is sometimes translated as "perpetual", sorry "perceptual". Not "perpetual", "perceptual", sometimes is intuitive. And Lindley says, who got intuitive? That kind of doesn't make any sense.
0:34:48.5 SC: Yeah.
0:34:48.7 WE: And the reason that it in some ways does make sense is that in the standard translations of Kant, what are referred to as the a priori forms of intuition, space and time, are referring exactly to anschauung, to this idea of what comes in through our senses to us in the world, that there must be a form for that. And that is, I think in a very intentional way, what Heisenberg is getting to with this use of anschaulich in that title. So it's not intuitive in the sense of what we tend to think of "Oh, an intuition, I have a hunch, I have an intuition." It's not about hunches, it's about the form that the outside world, whatever it is, is kind of forced to take in order to be rocked by us in the first place.
0:35:40.0 SC: So you know, I've long been fetching about the fact that the world has not really taken quantum mechanics seriously in a fundamental way. And those years of the 1920s, et cetera, were just remarkable, and we're gonna have to keep studying them over and over again. Because you can see very clearly Heisenberg, and Bohr, Pauli and the friends were fitting the data, like you said, but they were also carrying out a revolution in epistemology and metaphysics.
0:36:09.1 WE: They really were.
0:36:09.6 SC: And maybe they went too far. I think they went too far, honestly. And they would complain about people like Schrödinger and Einstein who are still trying to understand how the world really worked. Like that's not... We've decided that's not what we do anymore. And you could buy half of that program without the other half.
0:36:27.0 WE: I agree with that, and I think the idea of throwing out how the world really works is not something that I would wholeheartedly embrace. I think it's the cautionary note. They're critical, if you will, in the Kantian sense, of saying, just be really careful about what you presume. Right? That you care... The assumptions that you carry with you about the world. And I think in those moments of these great... I couldn't agree more with you about just how great it is to re-live and die back into all that's happening in these heady moments from the mid-20's to mid-30's with the Solvay Conferences, and you just want to go back in time and have been a fly on the wall, or a guy drinking wine at the table as these conversations were going on in Belgium.
0:37:11.6 SC: Yeah. It was beer, it was Belgium.
[laughter]
0:37:12.4 WE: Beer. Good Belgian beer. But one sees, in reading through these accounts, how very much influenced Einstein in particular during those debates was by a sense, a gut feeling he had of how the world in itself must be. And so it's not that I would say... And I think in some ways, the Copenhagen-ites were probably pushed, or push themselves, to the extremity of their own positions in part [0:37:47.7] ____ in a dialectic, with Einstein and Schrödinger. Right?
0:37:53.6 SC: Yeah.
0:37:54.0 WE: And I think with the 20/20 hindsight, we can say, Well, look, there's actually something to be gathered to be appreciated about both sides. Absolutely, certainly, the acuity with which Einstein threw one curveball after another at the Copenhagenites to try and get them to rethink their problems, push science forward immeasurably.
0:38:19.7 SC: I've occasionally thought that in some sense, in the United States came into being, we had a constitutional convention, we were pretty lucky really, that we had such smart cookies there, people who really read classical philosophy, et cetera, in a way that we wouldn't now if we tried to do it again. And likewise, I think we were pretty lucky as a race to have such thoughtful people there, at the dawn of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg, but also Bohr and Einstein and Schrödinger people really thought things through at such a deep level that again, I'm skeptical that we would pull off now. [laughter]
0:38:54.7 WE: And I share your concern, and one of the reasons I think that they were so... That they had the kind of insights that they were able to produce was that they transcended their own specializations. Yes, they were all absolutely at the top of their game in the kind of physics that they were doing, but they were all thinkers as well, and more than thinkers in some cases. Heisenberg could have been a concert pianist. Right?
[laughter]
0:39:17.9 WE: And he was a real musician, and not to mention that he was clocking apparently extraordinary times on the ski slopes, when they would take a break from doing physics.
0:39:29.0 SC: Apparently Einstein was not a concert level violinist. [laughter]
0:39:31.6 WE: No apparently not. I wasn't gonna make the same claim for him. But he loved playing Mozart. Right?
0:39:35.9 SC: Right.
0:39:36.2 WE: And Heisenberg, loved playing his Beethoven's.
0:39:40.0 SC: And you mentioned a connection between Kant and Heisenberg. How explicit was that? Did Heisenberg read Kant and directly influence him?
0:39:48.5 WE: Yes, he did. He read more classical philosophy at first because his father was a classics professor.
0:39:55.8 SC: By which we mean the Greeks and the Romans.
0:39:58.1 WE: The Greeks, exactly. And he read the physical theories of Plato in Timaeus, and he was kind of not overly impressed at first, but towards the very end of his life, he was thinking actually it was some of... Puzzling over these philosophical problems in Plato that actually helped loosen me or loosen the grip that what he would refer to as the erector set model of atoms and molecules had on me and allowed me to think a little bit more freely. But Kant was absolutely very influential. And in fact, some of the most important conversations that occurred after the great discoveries, so in the 1930s and then into the 1940s, was Heisenberg with philosophers with members of the Vienna circle, and then also with neo-Kantians, and they were at odds, but in a very interesting and productive way.
0:40:57.3 WE: I'm thinking in particular of the debates that took place, I think they were in Leipzig I think Grete Hermann came to Leipzig in a very highly publicized series of conversations, public conversations between one of the crown thinkers of the neo-Kantians and the inventor of quantum mechanics with Friedrich von Weizäcker the assistant and good friend and also philosopher as well as physicists of Heisenberg. And I think Weizsäcker in particular had a formative influence as well. I think he had read Kant probably more thoroughly than Heisenberg. In this book, "Physics and Philosophy," Heisenberg goes into some length and draws the parallels between his thinking about the world on the basis of his discovery...
0:41:50.0 WE: Their discoveries 'cause he never takes credit for anything, for the most part, it seems like and Kant's. And as I said, that's where he makes this comment about, we have to change kind of what we're thinking about when we think about a priori, but the distinction still needs to remain between the knower and what can be known with some degree of certainty, and the outside world. So he's thinking about these issues very carefully, but I think Weizsäcker would later say, and this I thoroughly agree with him about that they're thinking together was coming closer and closer to Kant's all along.
0:42:25.0 SC: I mentioned for podcast regulars that Grete Hermann's name has come up before. She does make a brief appearance in the history of quantum mechanics as the first person to point out that John von Neumann's supposed proof about the impossibility of hidden variables didn't work.
0:42:41.8 WE: Wow.
0:42:42.9 SC: And no one believed her, and it was...
0:42:44.8 WE: I didn't know that.
0:42:46.5 SC: Yeah, yeah. She said this, and no one listened, and von Neumann had written this book saying, "You can't do hidden variables," and the only person besides Grete Hermann who wrote an article about it who appreciated von Neumann's mistake was Einstein.
0:43:00.2 WE: Wow.
0:43:01.9 SC: And Einstein pointed out von Neumann's mistake to David Bohm, who had written a textbook mentioning von Neumann's proof and David Bohm went off and invented Bohmian mechanics.
[laughter]
0:43:12.1 SC: And that inspired John Bell, and that's why we won the Noble Prize last year for entanglement, and et cetera.
0:43:15.2 WE: Wow. Wow.
0:43:16.9 SC: If people remember the name that's where it's from.
0:43:18.8 WE: That's terrific, and I did not realize that. What did come out of this conversation was with this absolutely fascinating moment where... Because again, in the spirit of good dialogue, Hermann is asking questions that are forcing Heisenberg to really stake his claims in very clear language. And she at some point says, "Well, then what is an atom?" And his answer is, "We don't really have the language to say."
0:43:44.8 SC: He didn't wanna talk about what things really are.
0:43:46.4 WE: Yeah. Right.
0:43:49.5 SC: That was a big leap philosophically, so therefore, let's put it all in poetic terms were does... How does Borges fit into this? He might be the least familiar character to this audience, so tell us who Borges is.
0:44:02.3 WE: That's an interesting point, I hadn't thought about that. So Borges, backing up a little bit, Borges is from Argentina, he grew up when he was very young for a little while in Switzerland, moved back to Argentina, felt very Argentinian wrote poetry. Wanted to be a poet. He wrote poetry that in some ways was very rooted in his own culture at the beginning, and he had middling success. He was shy, he was, I guess what we would refer to nowadays is kind of a nebbish, a little bit clumsy, deeply passionate.
0:44:37.9 WE: And would often fall in love, and almost always the love was unrequited. And he would write one book after another, he would have a close group of associates who would really, really appreciate what he was doing. And for the most part, they would land with the kind of great big thud of silence in the critical world until when he was around 60 years old, out of nowhere, a book that he had us, on the basis of some books that he had published in the early 1940s, a new literary prize had been invented by a whole group of the world's most prominent publishers in Europe. And his work had been making the rounds in France, it had been...
0:45:25.8 WE: Some of it had been translated by the people in South Coast Group [0:45:29.2] ____ in Paris in particular by now quite famous French philosopher [0:45:38.1] ____. And all of a sudden outcomes the publishers, the international publishers prize for the first time, the first ever inaugural international publishers prize with an ungodly sum of money for that time, I think it was $10,000 or a thing like that. Squarely split between two authors and one of them was someone no one in the rest of the world had heard of Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina, and he instantaneously... This was along with Samuel Beckett was the other people had...
0:46:08.4 SC: We'd heard of him, yeah.
0:46:13.2 WE: Instantaneously became the most famous man in Argentina. And from there, his fame only grew, people went to the back catalog and started reading all these extraordinary stories that he had written over the years, and then the next thing, he became a fixture American campuses. And he died some 28, 25, 26 years later. The most famous man in Argentina.
0:46:35.1 SC: Overnight success at 60 plus.
0:46:37.6 WE: At 60 plus overnight success. He now had... That success had started to build the beginning in the 1940s from a series of publications of a new kind of story that he'd invented, and he invented it out of a number of different interests that he had. He had been writing stories before, but he had also been writing essays, and they were essays based on really in-depth readings that he would do in philosophy and theology, deep dives into problem, mathematics.
0:47:07.6 WE: He was a huge fan of Bertrand Russell. And he would read these books that he often got from his father's library exhaustively, he would consume them, and then he would sit and think about the problems that they created for him. And then he would write essays about them, and then bit by bit, he started messing with the SA form until he came up with a kind of [0:47:28.3] ____ synthesis between essay and story, there's sometimes fictional essays, sometimes stories that seem to have the trappings of an essay. But what they do is they are stories that were collected in a group that's now called fictions that was published in 1941 and '44, and two different sets, these stories are kind of the ultimate metaphysical thought experiments. Take certain problems and presumptions that we say have about the world or the way the world is, and then he'll just start in a kind of gadfly or sort of impish way pushing them further and further. So the reason that this is a general introduction to Borges now specifically, what does Borges happen to do with these other two thinkers, it's really Borges who led me to them, in a way. I like to say that, I'm maybe one of the only people in the world who has taught how to understand quantum mechanics by reading Borges.
[laughter]
0:48:25.0 SC: Might not, we don't know. But, yeah.
0:48:28.2 WE: And then through that kind of then went back and read Kant and realized, "Okay, Kant is getting at this from a philosophic... In a philosophical language as well." So the story, I try to introduce the readers to the understanding that I have with quantum mechanics, and then ultimately some of these other big cosmological problems that Borges has led me to as well through the story that launched me in that direction. And it's a story about a man who can't forget. And there's some evidence that Borges was influenced by stories that were circulating internationally at the time about a man, a mnemonist named Solomon Shereshevsky.
0:49:04.6 SC: Okay.
0:49:07.3 WE: A Moscow journalist, who was called out at a meeting one day by his editor because he was not taking notes and Shereshevsky says, "Well, I don't know what you mean. I don't need to take notes." And the editor was angry at him and said, "Tell me, what do you remember?" And he proceeded word by word to recount the entirety of the the morning meeting without missing a bit of it. And so Shereshevsky's memory feats were making it around the world, and I think that many scholars think that word got to Borges and he invented a story about a man who literally can't forget. So he sort of takes this idea of someone with a really vast, extraordinary memory, but pushes it even further and because he's intellectually curious, what would it really be like not to be able to forget.
0:49:51.5 WE: Well, one of the first things that Boris realizes is not being able to forget quickly impedes upon perception itself. So not being able to forget is also kind of like not being able to not perceive anything, so because to be able to perceive something involves putting aside something else for a moment. But this guy that he creates Funes is the name of the character story, an eponymous story, Funes the Memorious. Funes can't not perceive absolutely everything, and he also can't not forget absolutely everything. But that creates a problem because then the temporal, the now moment in which he's perceiving is constantly being invaded by the past moments that he also can't get out of his mind and it becomes very difficult for him to distinguish between the two. And Borges starts to play with this... The way that he does with the logical conundrums that are created by this, as he points out at one point in the story, Funes could reconstruct an entire day, in fact, he'd done so on several occasions. The problem was to reconstruct an entire day, he needed an entire day.
[laughter]
0:51:01.5 WE: And that really puts the problem of a perfect perception kind of in a nut shell for you. And it's this idea that the very idea of perfect perception is it crumbles under it's own.
0:51:14.4 SC: Right. Incoherently.
0:51:18.1 WE: Exactly, it becomes incoherent. In fact, there becomes very little difference between something like perfect perception or perfect memory and perfect forgetting or perfect oblivion, you can't... You need to be somewhere in between the two in order to be knowing or learning anything about the world. So what Borges did with that story is he really focused in, for me on the question, a philosophical question of what is an observation? What constitutes kind of the minimal conditions of something like an observation? And it would be that you have something that... In essence something or some person or some point that remains unchanged long enough in order to register changes in space time, but in order to do so, it also can't be identical to those changes in space time. And hence whatever knowledge or impression is coming out of that must have some sort of a minimal difference carried in it.
0:52:08.9 SC: Right.
0:52:09.9 WE: And obviously, what I do is there's no mathematics in that, there's no attempt to say, and "hey, presto, I've discovered through Borges the uncertainty principle," but there's a lot in common about that, that somewhere there's a limit to how close you can get to reality. And that limit is not something that we can get out, we can kind of erase and somehow then eventually get perfect knowledge, it's built in, it's baked into the structure of knowing the real.
0:52:36.7 SC: I think, yeah, I always have mixed feelings about this particular connection to quantum mechanics, I truly make positive as well as negative. I do think that the Immanuel Kant did not know about quantum mechanics. He was talking about a different thing than the fundamental laws of physics, it was our human access to the world, and then... So I think it'll be wrong to give people the impression that quantum mechanics is a version of the same problems we had in the classical world. But it's more like it takes advantage of the fact that our observations are necessarily incomplete and change the world. There was some room there that we didn't know was there, that quantum mechanics kind of makes use of in an unanticipated way.
0:53:20.7 WE: I like that. I like that specification. I would say that the room there that we didn't know is there, that there are thinkers in history who kind of showed that it had to be there. That there was no getting closer to it in a way. And that's as close as the similarity comes, but it's a pretty profound similarity, nonetheless, I guess, would be my position.
0:53:38.7 SC: And did Borges, again, interact directly with either Kant or Heisenberg?
0:53:43.5 WE: Kant, absolutely, and you even see one or two references to the name, but then the philosophy is all there. He claims, and you never know with Borges, you never know.
[laughter]
0:53:52.5 SC: He was mischievous.
0:53:54.4 WE: That's right he was mischievous. But he claims that he learned to read German by reading The Critique of Pure Reason.
0:54:00.1 SC: Yeah, I don't believe that.
0:54:00.8 WE: We don't believe that. Right?
[laughter]
0:54:03.6 WE: But along with another novel by Gustav, I think, Meyrink called "Der Golem," so The Golem which also is a myth of Promethean, Promethean Jewish myths about a Rabbi and Prague who recreates life, but because it's a recreation as opposed to creation, does so very badly and creates a monster.
0:54:29.1 SC: They're always collection tales these...
[overlapping conversation]
0:54:31.6 WE: They're cautionary tales. Exactly, and this was written... So it's another version of the Frankenstein myth way. But figures very frequently in one way or another in Borges, but Kant is all over the place, but often unnamed Kantian preoccupations with certain problems. But from time to time, Borges does focus in on Kant and what he in particular focuses the focuses in on is a part of the "Critique of Pure Reason" that one would be forgiven for thinking that in some ways, Heisenberg, when he says critical things about Kant simply failed to read or just isn't thinking about that, because we talked a lot about the analytics side of... Which is the first half of the book. It's the part of the book in which Kant says, he saves what science can know from this human attack. But the other side of the book is truly the critical side, it's called the dialectic, and it's the dialectic of Pure Reason is all the problems that we're gonna run into when we forget to be critical, when we forget that there are these kind of limits built into what knowledge. One of the forms of those problems that they arise in, he calls antinomies, Borges unlike his Heisenberg, didn't pay much attention to antinomies, didn't pay much attention to...
0:55:51.6 WE: Whoa, there's this whole other side of Kant's philosophy that says, "You're gonna make all sorts of mistakes and all sorts of weird things are gonna happen when you allow your presumptions about the way the world should be to kind of run ahead of your observations." Borges loved his antinomies.
[laughter]
0:56:07.5 WE: And in some ways, what his stories kind of one after the other, do is something like provoke us or push us to the edge of antinomy. And I think that's one of the things that the aspects of Borges' writing that made me return to Kant and read Kant and Heisenberg.
0:56:22.0 SC: It's worth mentioning Borges's probably most famous story, which is the Library of Babel, I think, right?
0:56:26.5 WE: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
0:56:27.4 SC: Tell us about that.
0:56:28.7 WE: So it's an extraordinary story. It's one of the ways that I deal with the library... Well, first of all, just to tell what the Library of Babel is. It's a thought experiment about, if you will, combinatory mathematics. It's a story in which...
0:56:43.3 SC: That makes it sound drier than it comes across. [laughter]
0:56:45.1 WE: Yeah, you're right. It's an existential journey through hell.
0:56:49.6 SC: [laughter] There we go.
0:56:49.7 WE: Based on the problems that arise from combinatory mathematics. Is that better?
0:56:53.4 SC: Much better, yes.
0:56:54.9 WE: Borges imagines a world that is nothing but a library. And that library is nothing but books built into hexagonal rooms, each room having four walls and then two doorways, each of those walls having a certain number of shelves, each of these shelves holding a certain number of books, those books being identical in size, number of pages, et cetera. And the librarians, who only know the library and have never been anywhere else, and they march through and they pick out books, and they look at them and then go on to others bit by bit have formed a theory about the world that they live in. And the theory is that the library contains one copy of every single book that it's possible to make with 22 orthographic symbols and all those other constraints. And the other theory is that there are no two books in the library are the same.
0:57:46.8 WE: And then out of that so a simple set of constraints, Borges creates, as I said, this kind of existential journey through hell, where he imagines generations and generations of librarians searching through the library for books that even have a single word that makes sense to them. Or a single string of words that come together. And when they do, whole religions are founded on the meanings of these and prophets rise and fall, wars, battles are fought, people are thrown off the balconies into the netherworld. And he does come up with also a theory of the shape of the library based on this. At least that's one of the claims that I make in the book, because he does refer to the neo-platonic idea of the universe being a sphere whose center is everyone's circumference nowhere. He does make the point that the universe, the library, which he says in the first sentence of the story, are the same. That it must be finite because there is a finite number of these books.
0:58:52.2 SC: Yeah.
0:58:52.7 WE: And at the same time it can't have a boundary because they know the rules of the library are such that all of the cells of the library are the same. And so it can't have a boundary, and if there's something like that, then it's gonna be, this is what I argue in the book, hyper-spherical in its shape.
0:59:11.3 WE: And he makes this point as well. He just, in one sentence, said, "The universe must be finite," and then when people get thrown off the balconies and they fall, they never end falling. He says that they fall for an infinite amount of time and space. So he creates this world, but he also, as I say, in some ways, kind of points to tendencies that humans have, that in our sense-making drive, we are likely to come up with mythologies, religions. He comes up with this idea of the man of the book, the great book man would be that somewhere in the library there is a book that explains, by virtue of every possible book existing, that explains the library. And that book must have been read by someone and the person who will have read that book then becomes all knowing and is the man, the book man. And then, in some ways, he says, "Look, even if it's not true," nope, it's true, right?
[laughter]
1:00:09.3 WE: Because otherwise, "If there's no explanation to this, let me be torn apart, let me die a death of desperation, let me be tortured in hell, but let there be some justification for this."
1:00:22.7 SC: But if there is a book that correctly explains the library in the library, there's also a huge number, vastly huger number of books that purport to explain the library and are incorrect. [laughter]
1:00:31.8 WE: And Borges himself points that out. And there's gonna be one with one error in it, or one word wrong. And there's gonna be...
1:00:39.2 SC: Many, many more.
1:00:40.9 WE: Many, many more like that. Exactly.
1:00:41.0 SC: [1:00:41.2] ____.
1:00:42.3 WE: And so one of my great finds ever, and it's not... And I'm not claiming that it's my find, someone recommended the book to me, but it blew me away, is... It has the title the Inconceivable Mathematics of Borges, and it's by a Mathematician. Eco, Umberto Eco once said, "Oh, this is library must be very big, but it doesn't really matter, let's not think about that." But what this mathematician did was actually do the combinatory mathematics, which are not that difficult, and he worked it out, and the size of the library is truly unimaginable. At some point, he makes him... This is very memorable. He works it out and says, "Our known universe is about the size of a proton in comparison with Borges's universe." And that is just like, wow.
1:01:28.3 SC: Just the size of the thing, yeah. And it does recall the memory story. Because just like a full memory of the day takes a day, for the library the full card catalog would be the same as the library.
1:01:39.9 WE: Would be the same as the library.
1:01:42.6 SC: There's no compression possible.
1:01:42.7 WE: No compression possible. And in fact, this made me think about something very... This is very... I talk about it a little bit in the book, but not this what... The specific example that I'm gonna mention right now, I was listening to, I think it was on the radio, was a conversation between Brian Greene, the String theorist, and an interlocutor at the 92nd Street. And he's...
1:02:02.2 SC: Brian Greene, a former Mindscape podcast guest.
1:02:06.3 WE: I'm sure, I'm sure. And Brian, whose I've many of his books here and the more recent one, or the most, I think, recent one, Until the End of Time, I think he was... This is a scenario that he's describing in the End of Time, where this interlocutor pressed him on this. He says, this is a brilliant man with some very strange ideas. And one of these strange ideas, the podcaster says, is that, here we are at the 92nd Y, and he describes the scenario, he says somewhere out there, it's so far away, you can't even begin to think about it. There is another scenario and with exactly the same kind of set up, but maybe just one or two atoms off from us. And then there's another one just unimaginably further out there. And so what he's playing with, Brian there, is this idea that if the universe is indeed infinite and there's a finite amount of the kinds of stuff that you can build things out of, that inevitably in that infinity because infinity is just so darn big, the configurations that lead to us speaking here at this podcast, some very, very similar version of it is going to exist somewhere, and some also very similar version with just a few changes is gonna exist somewhere else and on and on. And so on.
1:03:17.1 WE: Well, to go to your point, Borges cites that problem many, many years ago. And he cites it already from the 19th century, he cites specifically in Friedrich Nietzsche's Theory of Eternal Return.
1:03:30.4 SC: If he were more physically up on it, he would have cited Boltzmann, 'cause it's really the Boltzmann fluctuating universe.
1:03:37.2 WE: It's the Boltzmann fluctuating universe. Yeah, yeah. So I think what is interesting about citing Nietzsche there is that there's an existential problem.
1:03:43.7 SC: Nietzsche is a perfectly... I cited Nietzsche as well you know.
1:03:47.4 WE: It's okay to. It's okay to.
1:03:49.3 SC: He drew moral implications from that.
1:03:50.7 WE: Moral implications from that. And what Borges's absolutely brilliant response to this idea of infinity that's being invoked there is, as he says at one point, like in an infinity and talking about an infinite universe in time and space, thinking forward that something is gonna last for an infinite amount of time or has a lasted for an infinite amount of time in some ways is no different from saying infinity to the left of you to the right of you. And that the problem that's invoked or that's overlooked by Nietzsche, and then I would extend this, I guess in this critique, is as Borges puts it in this repeating, because it's the eternal return, this repeating universe in which the same thing happens over and over again in time, is whether it's happened for the first time or the 500th time, or the 10th to the 500th time, you would need a special archangel watching over you in order to tell. Something needs to have been the same during all of those transformations in order for that new configuration to be a configuration in the first place. Otherwise it's what pragmatists would call like a difference that doesn't make a difference, a distinction that doesn't make a difference. Yeah.
1:05:03.1 SC: And so when you're in that and here, time to let our hair down and bring it all together, what do we learn by reading about all three of these folks together? Limitations on our knowledge. We don't have an unvarnished view of reality.
1:05:19.3 WE: That's right.
1:05:19.4 SC: Therefore, what?
1:05:19.5 WE: Therefore, whether we're doing science, whether we're engaging perhaps in politics, whether we're thinking about our role, our existence in the world, we try to approach everything with a certain amount of humility. Not presuming that there is a way that things have to be. Or a way that they are out there in the world. But rather that we're constantly engaging in a very proactive and constructive way in the realities that we create. Be they social realities, but also scientific realities. That that's important for doing science well, is not to let your presumption of what the answer should be get in the way of the experimentation. But it in a similar way, in order to do personal interactions well, it's important not to let your presumption of how those personal interactions should be get in the way of those interactions. You sort of react to things with the kind of humility, patience, understanding and always trying to use the tools of your disposal, the tools of communication, the tools of your knowledge to make the best sense you can, given the situation.
1:06:18.6 SC: I love that motto actually, because to put it in a less generous form, if we pick physicists, fiction writers and philosophers, these are three categories of people who often help themselves to infinite knowledge and precision in ways that are not quite warranted, right? [laughter]
1:06:34.7 WE: Right, right.
1:06:36.3 SC: Maybe this is a useful corrective for us professionally as well as personally.
1:06:40.0 WE: I agree, I agree.
1:06:41.2 SC: [laughter] Alright, William Egginton thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
1:06:42.6 WE: Thank you Sean. Real pleasure.
[music]
Émile Meyerson published a very provocative history of the philosophy of science early in the last century, Identity and Reality. Largely a polemic against Comptean positivism, a central thesis is :
“Metaphysics penetrates all science, for the very simple reason that it is contained in its point of departure. We cannot even isolate it in a precise region. __Primum vivere, deinde philosophari__ seems to be a precept dictated by wisdom. It is really a chimerical rule almost as inapplicable as if we were advised to rid ourselves of the forces of gravitation. __Vivere est philophari__.” [377-8]
Pretty catchy.
Loved the show.
Discussion about Borges ‘Library of Babel’, and the paradoxes it creates, brings to mind another famous paradox, ‘Hilbert’s Paradox of the Grand Hotel’:
“If there’s a hotel with infinite rooms, could it ever be completely full? Could you run out of space to put everyone? The surprising answer is yes”, as explained in the video posted below:
‘How An Infinite Hotel Ran Out of Room’.
This is important to know if you’re the manager of Hilbert Hotel, or if you’re trying to get some sort of intuitive understanding not only of infinity, but how some infinities can be bigger than other infinities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxGsU8oIWjY&t=1s
Very much enjoyed this episode (as a former physicist with a philosophy degree, who also now works at Johns Hopkins). Another Argentine writer of interest in this vein is Benjamin Labatut, who just this month released a new book that includes as characters Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, and Lee Sedol. His previous collection of short stories, entitled When We Cease To Understand the World, is also top notch. Kudos, Dr. Carroll, for bringing us such an interesting episode.
This episode was remarkable (as are so many of them). I immediately bought the book and recommended it to a number of my friends. It is easy to read, well written, keeps you focused, it’s inspiring! Thank you so much to the both of you. I’m a huge fan.