Thank you. Eric, can I bring you back in on this?

How should we fight? Should we talk about it? Make it interesting? Yes. It's ridiculous Hillary. I just absolutely think this is not true.

I can now sit back. I think, yeah, carry on.

So both of you seem to be in the ethos of our time. So I'm gonna try to lose this debate in the ethos of our time only to have the two of you tell me years later, you know Eric, you were right.

Is that a potentially metaphysical theory of the future?

Well, I come from there, so I'll tell you how it ends later.

The

real issue is that this is not true. It flatters our current sense that we need to be more modest. We've created these hydrogen bombs. We may have created the COVID virus. We're very frightened that we're tinkering like mad people. And so we like this idea that it's always about the journey, never about the destination. And this sort of set of new-age beliefs Flatter us in 1913. We found the last major landmass on earth, which turned out to be Severnia zemlya north of Siberia and it was mapped by 1932. It's 90 years in our past Nobody is searching for land matter major land masses on earth. Why? Because that game is over. It closed, right? So in a sense what's going on is we have a belief that there are an infinite number of problems all the way down. Now, do I agree with you that there will always be problems that we can't solve? We always know that there will be diophantine equations for number theorists to work on. We've proven that. We've proven that there are things that are true that are not true for any good reason, so Goedel will not allow us to reach them from inside of an axiomatic system. But the idea that the rules of chess can never be known, right, which is really what a theory of everything is. It's just a search for rules where at some point the scientists put down their pen and the philosophers are the only one interested because of this mythical equation, which really should be a Lagrangian, not an equation. That sense, it flatters our current sense of ourselves, but it's obviously not true. We're not looking for an extension of the genetic code. We're sort of curious that maybe something doesn't follow 64 codons and 20 amino acids, and there's some stuff around the edges. But in fact, there are things that close, there are things that extend infinitely, and we need the wisdom to know the difference. We can't just sit back and have a sense of flattery. So I'm going to stand up for reality and say, what we don't know is whether or not, let's say the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is really something mystical, in your case the issue of locality, because if you take for example the Atiyah-Singer theorem and you break open a manifold on the boundary you get a spectral term which is non-local. So maybe when you say non-local you just mean spectral. We can understand these things in the case of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The modern interpretation which somehow nobody ever talks about is that it comes from viewing Hamiltonian mechanics as having a curvature tensor on a bundle whose sections give us the wave functions of the universe. It's not so mysterious. In fact, you should expect that there would be a Heisenberg uncertainty principle, simply from classical reasons in Hamiltonian mechanics. So I think that the question that really befalls us is, which games close and sit there so that nobody wants to work on them anymore? And which of them beckon like an open road infinitely knowing that we'll always have something to work on? And I think that the question of the theory of everything is just the rules of chess. It's not whether you become a great chess player because you know the last rule.

Thanks for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. Part two of this talk will be published later this week, so don't forget to tune in on Saturday.