Philosophical Trials

Professor Robert Sapolsky is a Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Surgery at Stanford University. He is the author of multiple books, including A Primate’s Memoir, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Behave, and Determined. Professor Kevin Mitchell is a Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, whose research concerns the relationship between the wiring of the brain and the human faculties. His books include Innate and Free Agents. Today’s debate was about whether the empirical literature in the biological sciences allows us to make progress on the free will debate.

Conversation Outline:

00:00 Introduction
02:28 Opening Statement: Kevin Mitchell
16:26 Opening Statement: Robert Sapolsky
27:32 First Round of Questioning
45:56 Second Round of Questioning
1:04:56 How can we make evolutionary sense of illusory agency?
1:06:13 How can we make sense of our accomplishments if we have no free will?
1:08:21 Comparisons with Dennett and Hofstadter
1:12:28 Closing thoughts

Enjoy!

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Noam Chomsky has been described as "the father of modern linguistics". He is one of the leading public intellectuals of the world, having authored over 100 books. Chomsky has made seminal contributions to multiple fields, including Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. At the moment, he is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Conversation Outline: 

00:00 Intro 
00:37 How did you manage to be so productive? 
01:07 What got you introduced to Linguistics and Philosophy? 
02:47 What were courses like Syntax back in the day before you revolutionised the field? 
04:42 What makes human languages different than other animal communication systems? 
08:12 The difference between your view on the evolution of language and Steven Pinker’s view
15:50 The human language faculty
20:18 Truth-Conditional Semantics
30:49 Semantic Internalism versus Externalism
36:08 Truth, Public Languages, and I-Languages
38:55 What is truth? 
40:18 Paradoxes of truth and vagueness
41:44 Zeno’s Paradox
45:31 Vagueness and The Sorites Paradox
50:47 The cognitive relationships between mathematical and linguistic abilities

Enjoy! 

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Professor A.C. Grayling is one of the most prolific philosophers and public intellectuals. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Master of the New College of the Humanities and a Supernumerary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. He made important contributions to Analytic Philosophy, primarily in Epistemology, Metaphysics and Philosophical Logic. Prof. Grayling wrote more than 40 books, including The God Argument, The History of Philosophy and The Frontiers of Knowledge. 

Conversation Outline: 

00:00 Introduction
00:46 How did you get into Philosophy?
03:23 What was your PhD Thesis on? Thoughts on Skepticism and Knowledge
08:11 What are the interesting epistemological advancements (and problems) of our time? 
12:27 On interdisciplinarity and higher education
15:10 Different models of education and advice for high-school students that want to go to university
19:04 STEM, Arts and public perception
21:45 Traditional epistemology and why certainty and absolute truth are not essential
27:44 Is the situation different for Mathematics? What about Theology? 
35:02 Why do people take Religion to be a source of certain truths? 
41:00 New Atheism
46:50 Discussing some of the main theistic arguments 
59:30 God and Morality

Enjoy! 

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Professor William Lane Craig is a world-renowned theologian and philosopher of religion. He authored dozens of books on these topics, including The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), God Over All (2016), The Atonement (2018), In Quest of the Historical Adam (2021) and many others. Besides his academic scholarship, Professor Craig is internationally known for his debates with various academic and popular atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Peter Millican, Arif Ahmed and many others.

You can find more details about Prof. Craig’s works on his public website: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/ 

Conversation Outline: 

00:00 Guest Introduction
01:19 William Lane Craig’s Debating Career
03:03 Best opponent
05:26 How is the winner usually determined? 
06:15 Having a PhD in both Theology and Philosophy
07:56 Who has the burden of proof: theists or atheists? 
10:30 Species of atheism
15:50 Theology versus Philosophy of Religion
20:14 Why is theism not so popular amongst mainstream philosophers? 
22:40 What is the view that you defend? 
24:26 Do arguments for the existence of God distract attention from God? 
26:40 What about divine hiddenness? 
30:48 The Kalam Cosmological Argument
32:58 Why does the Cosmological Argument prove that a personal creator?
34:38 Why does the Cosmological Argument point towards an unembodied mind? 
42:42 The universe began to exist: an argument based on Infinity
45:55 Hilbert’s Hotel
51:23 Proving that the Christian God exists after proving that the God of the Philosophers exists

Enjoy! 

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Dr Vicky Neale is the Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford. She is also a Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol and the author of two great books aimed at general audiences, namely ‘Closing the Gap’ and ‘Why Study Mathematics?’. 

Vicky Neale is a great communicator of Mathematics. She was given an MPLS Teaching Award in 2016 and she also won an award for being the Most Acclaimed Lecturer in MPLS in the student-led Oxford University Student Union Teaching Awards 2015.

Follow her on Twitter: @VickyMaths1729 

For some clear proofs of a selection of mathematical theorems, check out her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBGhXXBCAzbzQV65JZoGhjw and her blog https://theoremoftheweek.wordpress.com/ 

Conversation Outline: 

00:00 Guest Introduction
01:05 Vicky’s mathematical background
04:13 Motivations for writing a book on reasons to study mathematics
07:11 Are good reasons for studying Mathematics timeless? Would this book have more or less the same contents, had it been written many years ago? 
10:10 Is the job of pure mathematicians safe from AI developments?
12:13 What are the benefits (for the non-mathematician) of knowing about mathematical notions such as integrals, derivatives, matrices and so on? 
15:39 Are some people more mathematically talented than others? 
18:45 Does the discussion of talent change when we are talking about research-level Mathematics? Douglas Hofstadter’s experience.
22:45 Aesthetics of Mathematics
25:00 Is Number Theory more beautiful than other mathematical subfields? 
25:52 A mathematician’s view of the metaphysics of numbers
27:58 Fermat’s Last Theorem, Andrew Wiles and finding meaning in Mathematics
29:26 FLT and the Twin Prime Conjecture
32:27 Should graduate students tackle famous open problems?
33:41 Closing the Gap: significant progress towards solving the Twin Prime Conjecture
35:10 Polymath: an example of collaborative Mathematics
39:40 Do we have reasons to believe that the Twin Prime Conjecture is actually true?

Enjoy!

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Professor Peter Koellner is a leading Logician and Philosopher based at Harvard University. He has made very important contributions to areas surrounding Mathematical Logic and today he was kind enough to join me for a discussion on Penrose's arguments against the prospects of mechanizing the mind (given Kurt Gödel's work on Incompleteness). 

Note: I am sorry for the occasional internet connection problems. I hope the relevant parts can still be understood! 

Conversation Outline: 

00:00 What are the Incompleteness Theorems?
01:59 Why are Gödel’s results relevant for discussions concerning the mind?
03:28 Connections between Turing Machines and Formal Systems
04:20 When we talk about whether the mind can be mechanized or not, what do we mean? 
06:56 Should Cognitive Scientists (or Philosophers of Mind) be interested in this discussion?
09:45 The First Generation of Arguments against The Prospects of Mechanizing the Mind
19:52 Three Versions of The Mechanistic Thesis
21:55 What makes Penrose’s New Argument harder to evaluate in theory EA+T?
22:56 Penrose’s Formulation of The Argument (Quote from his Book)
27:49 What are the explicit assumptions behind Penrose’s New Argument?
32:14 What are the indeterminate statements that Penrose uses in the argument? 
36:10 Do you think we’ll ever have an adequate formal theory of type-free truth which settles Gödel’s First Disjunct (the one targeted by Penrose)? 
37:18 Do you think your opponent would accept bringing the key notions of relative provability, absolute provability and truth in the setting of effectively formalized theories? 
42:25 Why do you think Penrose does not abandon his New Argument, despite resistance from mathematical logicians?
44:35 Unlike Lucas or Penrose, some authors such as Hofstadter use Gödel’s results to illuminate the workings of the mind. Do you think the Incompleteness Theorems have anything worthwhile to say here?

Enjoy!

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Dr Sara L. Uckelman is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham. She earned her PhD in Logic at the University of Amsterdam and her research interests cover many interesting areas including Medieval Logic, Onomastics, Philosophy of Fiction (among others). Today she kindly joined me for a fun discussion on many logic-related topics: I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Conversation Outline:

00:00 Introduction
01:43 University teaching during the pandemic
04:15 “What is Logic?” YouTube series
06:00 So, what is Logic?
09:18 Should all University undergraduates have some logical training?
13:50 Some History of Logic
16:35 What was missing from Aristotle’s Logic?
20:32 How was Logic being taught back then?
24:16 Research in Medieval Logic
27:10 Women in the History of Logic
32:03 Onomastics
37:34 Does studying Logic improve one’s life?
45:35 Book recommendations

Enjoy!

Professor Timothy Williamson is one of the most important philosophers alive. He is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, a position that he has been holding since 2000. His groundbreaking work in the areas of philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics has shaped many of the contemporary debates. Today I’m joined by him to discuss Relativism about Truth and the Epistemic account of Vagueness. Enjoy!

Conversation outline: 

00:00 Introduction: What is Philosophy? 
03:11 Can Philosophy help you have a better life?
06:47 What’s the story behind your book “Tetralogue”? A discussion on relativism about truth
12:44 Relativism about matters of taste
20:21 Moral relativism
29:47 Tips for finding out the truth about various issues
35:34 Vagueness and Classical Logic
48:20 Sharp cut-offs
52:40 Epistemicism says that you cannot know these cut-offs: why is that? 
56:59 Baldness is not really a function of the number of hairs. Does your account apply to situations which are “non-discrete” situations?
01:01:47 How can a colour predicate (e.g. “_ is red”) latch on to an objective property out there in the world when people may have different perceptions?
01:05:37 If the properties expressed by predicates are person independent, wouldn’t this change the ramifications and implications of the epistemic view?

Enjoy!

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Thomas Cormen is a world-renowned Computer Scientist, famous for co-writing the indispensable 'Introduction to Algorithms' textbook. He is currently a professor at Dartmouth College and former Chairman of the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science. In 2013 he wrote a wonderful algorithmic book aimed at nonexperts which is entitled 'Algorithms Unlocked'. Professor Cormen also is well-known online for being Top Writer on Quora on numerous years, most recently in 2018. He is a great communicator of Computer Science and I hope you will enjoy the following conversation!

00:00 Intro

00:16 The story of CLRS plus remarks on the 4th edition

11:39 Relationships between Competitive Programming, Software Engineering and academic Computer Science

13:16 What makes an algorithm beautiful? 

16:33 Thoughts on P=NP

19:32 Algorithmic efficiency and Artificial General Intelligence

24:12 Will progress in fields such as Deep Learning make the study of classical algorithms obsolete? 

27:37 Algorithms Unlocked 

33:07 What should the average lay person know about algorithms?

37:46 Advice for students, both graduates and undergraduates

Enjoy!

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Scott Aaronson is a world-renowned expert in the fields of Quantum Computing and Computational Complexity Theory. He is a David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. Every Computer Science enthusiast knows who Prof. Aaronson is because of his extremely clear and engaging way of communicating difficult theoretical ideas. His book Quantum Computing since Democritus is a wonderful resource of dipping into the topics that we are discussing today. 

Conversation outline: 

00:00 Introduction

01:04 What draws you to Philosophy?

04:36 The importance of focusing of subproblems of the big questions: insights into space, time and thinking machines

09:19 The Turing Test and the chinese room argument

15:37 What other philosophical areas would benefit from looking at Complexity Theory?

21:35 What is Computational Complexity after all?

30:03 NP, complexity classes and the P=NP problem

45:27 Complexity Theory in light of time and memory limitations

52:24 Why do we believe in Quantum Theory?

55:36 What is Quantum Computing?

01:05:45 How are qubits physically implemented?

01:11:14 Quantum Supremacy

01:13:26 Would the construction of a quantum computer which could run Shor’s algorithm confirm the many-worlds interpretation? Remarks on David Deutsch’s quantum views. 

Enjoy!

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