A couple of years ago at the Setting Time Aright conference, I sat down for an interview with Robert Kuhn, who has a program called Closer to Truth. Time passed, as it will, and I never knew what happened to the interview. But apparently it’s up on the web now, freely available to anyone wishing to click (although apparently not embeddable).
So go here if you want to see some short clips of me sitting in a dark, atmospheric setting, declaiming earnestly about various profound topics, from atheism to infinity.
Oh, and I suppose it’s possible you might want to hear other people as well. They’re all here — there are some great people, from Nima Arkani-Hamed to Marvin Minsky. (More than a few clunkers, as well, but you get what you pay for.)
I quit
Sean,
“There’s no meaning out there … it must come from within us.” and ‘no ought from is’.
If neuroscience (or its successor sciences) tell us precisely how humans work, how they concoct and attribute meaning to a world in which there is none, then there may come a point when it becomes meaningless to even want or hope for meaning. The problem simply melts away. Similarly the ‘ought from is’ problem exists not simply because you can’t get and ought from an is, but because the ‘oughts’ are meaningless.
There’s a distinct possibility that morality will fade into pragmatic decision making based on what amounts to voting for chocolate or vanilla. Eventually the real problem will come in deciding who decides and how we collectively decide, when we see that all our preferences are no more than products of natural biological diversity.
It seems conceivable, though no doubt repugnant to parochial minds of our time, that humans or their successors could be self-engineered to be pragmatists that are genetically predisposed to agree on matters of equality and all the other issues we currently attribute to moral decisions, so that the ought problems go away. But of course Utopias have been notoriously difficult to fulfil, so I guess this remains an open ended possibility for the foreseeable future. Perhaps we need to change biologically in order to see what the outcome of that change is.
@meh
Sure I understand time is precious.
By the way, you don’t need relativity to tell you that time started at the big bang. Time is an abstract, and it refers to events. No events = no time. Hence the first event gives purpose to the word time. And similarly time will cease to have any purpose at the last event.
Relatively simple
I know you mistrust ‘word play’…I mistrust ‘physics play’
So long…