Episoder
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What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Mark Balaguer is professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, and his research has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics.
Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714https://a.co/d/009UAUtC
2. Book Summary
Balaguerâs book sets out to develop and defend an original version of presentism â the view in the philosophy of time that only present objects exist, with no past or future objects in the inventory of reality. Crucially, Balaguer is not arguing that presentism is true; his project is the more modest one of showing that presentism is a live, defensible position and that, if there is a fact of the matter at all, the question of its truth is an open empirical one rather than something settleable by armchair metaphysics. The book is organized around three classical objections to presentism: the ontological-commitment objection (that true sentences like âObama admires Gandhiâ seem to require past objects to exist), the truthmaking objection (that truths about the past need something in reality to make them true), and the special-relativity objection (that physics rules out a privileged ânowâ).
The first part of the book lays metaphilosophical groundwork, arguing against trivialism, against necessitarianism about metaphysics, and in favor of an âanti-metaphysicalistâ stance on which presentism, if factual, is a contingent empirical hypothesis rather than something knowable a priori. Part II then mounts the defense proper. Against the ontological-commitment objection, Balaguer endorses a sweeping âFAPP-istâ error theory: the relevant ordinary and scientific sentences about past or future objects are, strictly speaking, false, but they function fine âfor all practical purposes.â Against the truthmaking objection, he develops a position he calls nothingism, on which past-tense sentences that presentists count as true donât have truthmakers because they arenât really making claims about reality at all. Against special relativity, he constructs a relativized presentism compatible with the relativity of simultaneity, avoiding any appeal to a privileged frame. He also takes on subsidiary worries about time travel and change.
The bookâs most distinctive move comes in Part III, where Balaguer pushes presentism toward what he calls metaphysically minimal or timeless presentism. Here he argues â surprisingly, given the near-universal assumption that presentists must endorse the A-theory â that presentists should reject the existence of time itself, of times (including the present time), of temporal passage, and of metaphysically substantive A-facts (facts about something being past, present, or future). On the resulting picture, talk of time is best treated as a useful fiction layered over a more fundamental notion of intrinsic change, yielding a presentism that is ontologically lean, empirically respectable, and stripped of the heavy metaphysical machinery usually thought to come with the view. The overall result is a defense of presentism that is at once more concessive (presentism is not proven, just shielded from refutation) and more radical (presentism without time) than standard treatments in the literature.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introductio
00:57 - Overview of book
02:47 - Substantive dispute
06:31 - Non-factualism
09:15 - Substantialese
13:58 - Understanding the difference
21:40 - Contingent thesis
28:35 - A posteriori identities
41:10 - Scientism
47:55 - Ontological commitment objection
53:39 - Relevance of physics
1:00:25 - FAPP truth
1:05:03 - Truthmakers objection
1:08:19 - Potential reply
1:17:45 - Present truthmakers?
1:19:43 - Abandon physicalism?
1:20:54 - Swamp world
1:22:17 - The actual world and modal realism
1:36:26 - Nothingism
1:38:40 - Claims about reality
1:42:27 - Understanding the claims
1:53:16 - Counterfactuals
2:04:09 - Understanding modality
2:16:53 - Special relativity
2:26:53 - Avoiding anti-realism and eternalism
2:39:43 - Lean view
2:45:19 - What is time?
2:49:43 - William Lane Craig
2:52:06 - Summary of view
2:54:24 - Future work
2:56:08 - Temporal phenomenology
3:01:11 - Value of philosophy
3:03:31 - Conclusion
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What if simply having something consciously present to mind already counts as a form of knowledge, and helps explain not just perception, but beauty, emotion, and moral life?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Matt Duncan is Professor of Philosophy at Rhode Island College, and his work has focused on metaphysics, epistemology, and mind, including the nature of experience and experiential knowledge.
Check out his book, "Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance"!
https://academic.oup.com/book/62315
https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC
2. Book Summary
In Present to the Mind, Matt Duncan develops and defends a Russellian-style notion of âacquaintanceâ: an especially direct form of conscious awareness we bear to things present in experience, such as colors, sounds, pains, smells, and other phenomenal features. The book begins from a striking question about when your âepistemic dayâ starts. Against the orthodox view that perceptual knowledge arrives only after experience gives rise to belief, Duncan argues that conscious awareness itself already puts us in touch with reality in a knowledge-involving way. The book is organized around three main claims: acquaintance exists, acquaintance is a form of knowledge, and acquaintance is deeply significant in human life.
The middle of the book argues first that several forms of acquaintance are real, and then that acquaintance is not just epistemically useful but itself a distinctive kind of knowledge. Duncanâs core idea is that some knowledge of things is constituted by conscious awareness rather than by belief: in perception, you do not first see, then believe, then know; rather, you can see and thereby know. From there he develops an account of âknowledge of thingsâ that is meant to work across different theories of experience, and he argues that acquaintance plays a foundational epistemic role by helping justify beliefs and underpinning much empirical knowledge, even if it is non-propositional.
The final chapters broaden the project beyond epistemology. Duncan argues that acquaintance is aesthetically significant because genuine aesthetic appreciation depends on conscious awareness of aesthetically relevant features; emotionally significant because acquaintance with affective experience helps us know and appreciate the value of people; and morally significant because what we are able to notice and know is intertwined with moral character, producing a reciprocal moral-epistemic relationship. So the bookâs overall message is not just that acquaintance is a defensible theoretical posit in philosophy of mind and epistemology, but that it is a basic feature of how we encounter beauty, respond to others, and live morally. Duncanâs concluding thought is that acquaintance matters every day, from ordinary perception all the way to our deepest forms of appreciation and care.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:36 - Overview of book
03:30 - Bertrand Russell
07:30 - Directness
08:57 - Objects of acquaintance
14:03 - Strong vs. weak acquaintance
17:24 - Naive realism
22:34 - Mind
24:14 - Argument for weak acquaintance
26:10 - Absolutely strong acquaintance
27:53 - Doubt test
30:05 - Fallibility
31:22 - Certainty
37:33 - Hallucination
43:06 - Modal acquaintance
44:56 - Coextensive?
47:30 - Essence acquaintance
50:49 - Properties
55:02 - Knowledge
57:00 - Varieties of knowledge
58:51 - Argument for acquaintance knowledge
1:00:47 - Semantics
1:05:24 - Knowledge without belief
1:11:40 - Other animals
1:13:09 - Vagueness
1:18:11 - Theory of knowledge
1:23:01 - Subconscious acquaintance
1:27:05 - Foundationalism
1:34:59 - Moral significance
1:40:03 - Rationality of perception
1:42:50 - Summary
1:44:22 - Value of philosophy
1:45:31 - Conclusion
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Mangler du episoder?
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If life as a whole has no ultimate point, what kind of meaning can still make it worth living?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. Her work has focused on metaphysics and ethics, especially on meaning/purpose and bioethics.
Check out her book, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time"!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meaning-of-it-all-9780197758021
https://a.co/d/0gsQDkWN
2. Book Summary
In The Meaning of It All, Rivka Weinberg argues that many disputes about lifeâs meaning stay confused because they fail to distinguish different senses of âmeaningâ. She separates three kinds: âUltimate Meaningâ, âEveryday Meaningâ, and âCosmic Meaningâ, and also distinguishes several aspects of meaning, such as value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, and point. Her boldest claim is that âUltimate Meaningââthe point of living a life as a wholeâis impossible for beings like us. A point, she argues, is a valued end external to the activity it justifies; but since a human life contains all of oneâs projects, values, and aims, there is nothing outside the enterprise of living oneâs life that could serve as its final point. So life as a whole is, in that specific sense, pointless, even though many things within life are not.
That bleak conclusion does not, however, lead Weinberg to nihilism. The second major part of the book argues that âEveryday Meaningâ is real, abundant, and objective rather than merely subjective: love, truth, beauty, morality, achievement, and worthwhile engagement can genuinely make a life meaningful, and people can be mistaken both about what matters and about whether their lives are well spent. She also argues that âCosmic Meaningâ is often overrated. Even if there were God, miracles, an afterlife, or some grand cosmic purpose, that would not solve the problem of âUltimate Meaningâ, and it might not add nearly as much significance as people hope. Cosmic purpose, eternal bliss, or communion with the divine may sound impressive, but Weinberg thinks they do less philosophical work than many assume.
The final movement of the book shifts from meaning in general to death and time. Weinberg argues, against a common view, that death is not the main thing that either gives life meaning or takes it away. Rather, time is the real double-edged condition of meaningful life: it is what makes narrative shape, risk, effort, achievement, and change possible, but it is also what erodes all of these things. Hence her âtime-meaning conundrumâ: we need time for meaning, yet time steadily wears meaning down. Her concluding outlook is tragic but not hopeless. We cannot escape this condition, and âliving in the momentâ is not a real solution; instead, the best response is to engage deeply in everyday goods, attend properly to past, present, and future, and accept suffering and loss as part of what a meaningful human life inevitably involves.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - Overview of book
03:52 - Meaning of âmeaningâ
05:59 - Ultimate meaning
10:14 - God
13:24 - Skeptical worries
16:47 - Religious practice
20:14 - Everyday meaning
22:38 - Sources of meaning
27:18 - Subjective response
28:29 - Cosmic meaning
34:04 - Scale
39:49 - Transience
45:54 - Death
51:09 - Eternity
55:28 - Practical significance
59:00 - Value of philosophy
1:01:28 - Conclusion
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Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Jay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more.
Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768
https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP
2. Book Summary
In Norms and Nature, Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from âaboveâ in the form of principles or from âbelowâ in patterns of human practice. Garfieldâs overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures.
The bookâs middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hypersociality, trust, language, and inherited practices generate the normative space they inhabit. In that sense, normativity is neither an illusion nor a mysterious extra ingredient added to nature; it is a natural, emergent feature of human life.
In the final part, Garfield applies this framework to particular domainsâespecially language, knowledge, ethics, and politicsâand then turns to personhood itself. His picture is that to be a person is to be formed within a web of shared meanings, customs, and mutually reinforcing social practices that both shape us and are sustained by us. The result is a conception of human beings as thoroughly natural creatures whose normative lives are nonetheless fully real and binding. So the book is not just an argument about Hume versus Kant; it is a broader attempt to explain what it is to be human as a socially constituted, norm-governed being without collapsing into nihilism or crude relativism.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:49 - Overview of book
04:51 - Unity of norms
09:08 - Further source?
14:11 - Transcendent views
19:38 - Why listen to God?
22:28 - Religious communities
25:58 - David Hume
33:23 - Language and norms
34:33 - Other animals
37:16 - Authority of norms
43:04 - Worry
44:53 - Moral intuitions
50:52 - Moderate relativism
54:37 - Open question argument
57:41 - Political norms
1:03:53 - Normative skepticism
1:09:30 - Cross-cultural work
1:10:46 - Trust
1:14:16 - What is a norm?
1:15:04 - Value of philosophy
1:15:59 - Conclusion
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What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Marc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.
Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2
https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1
2. Book Summary
Marc A. Moffettâs The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called âmoderate dogmatism,â Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori.
A central part of Moffettâs argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other âseemingsâ) relies on a specific âpresentational phenomenologyâ or conscious âfeelâ. Through thought experiments involving âCartesian zombies,â he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive postureâspecifically, an involuntary âapprehending-as-actualâ of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamsonâs âAbsent Intuition Challenge,â by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology.
Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the widespread payoff of his theory by linking intuitions directly to concept application. He explains that philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous Gettier cases, rely on these concept-application intuitions to guide our judgments. Furthermore, Moffett expands his scope to argue that acts of explicit inference, as well as the higher-level presentational contents of normal perceptual experiences, fundamentally rely on the application of concepts, and therefore on intuitions. Consequently, intuitions are not just tools for abstract philosophy, but are intimately integrated into nearly all of our everyday cognitive functioning.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - What are intuitions?
03:06 - Absent intuition worry
06:55 - John Bengson
08:22 - Terminological dispute
12:20 - Methodological worry
14:53 - Moderate dogmatism
18:38 - Foundationalism
23:10 - Internalism
26:39 - Blindsight
30:10 - Zombie argument
36:52 - Rejoinder
43:09 - Non-phenomenal presentational dogmatism
45:48 - Upshot
47:47 - Another rejoinder
51:48 - Indispensability
55:46 - Are intuitions needed?
59:47 - Intuitions as content-determining
1:02:07 - Animal concepts
1:06:10 - Inferences1:08:39 - Inference without reckoning
1:10:59 - Philosophy without intuitions?
1:14:14 - Ethics
1:17:29 - Perceptual experience
1:23:54 - Value of philosophy
1:27:32 - Conclusion
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If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of âprivate experienceâ doesnât point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is.
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Michael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language.
Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176
https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I
2. Book Summary
Michael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgensteinâs discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243â315 is best read not as âtheâ Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgensteinâs treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private âphenomenal space,â and to model sensation-words on an âobject-and-nameâ scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgensteinâs earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgensteinâs therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our âgrammar,â rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations.
A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the âprivate object in phenomenal spaceâ picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea of a private sensation-language look deceptively natural. Hymers traces Wittgensteinâs doubts to the earlier critique of sense-data and of treating visual or tactile âspaceâ as if it worked like physical spaceâwhere measurement, re-identification, and objecthood behave very differently. He then distinguishes âordinaryâ privacy (e.g., the mundane fact that pains are my pains in the sense that Iâm the one who manifests them) from stronger âsuperprivacy,â and separates epistemic privacy (who can know) from ontological privacy (what sort of thing a pain is). Against the idea that first-person authority rests on privileged inner access to private objects, Hymers highlights Wittgensteinâs alternative: first-person present-tense psychological utterances (âI am in pain,â etc.) function paradigmatically as expressions or avowals rather than as reports based on observation, so their asymmetry with third-person claims is grammatical, not a deliverance of a private epistemic channel.
In the latter half, Hymers organizes the interpretive landscape around several âwavesâ of reading Wittgensteinâs antiâprivate-language materialsâmoving from verification/memory worries, to problems about private ostensive definition, to rule-following, and finally to broader âstage-settingâ concerns (what has to be in place for something to count as naming, attending, or grasping a rule at all). Key thought experiments are used to pry us away from the object-and-name model: the âhuman manometerâ shows that even if a diary-sign âSâ correlates with a bodily measure, it can become pointless to insist on a hidden inner act of correctly identifying the sensationâsuggesting that the âmisidentificationâ knob is ornamental if sensations are treated as detached inner objects. And the âbeetle in a boxâ at PI §293 is presented as the most explicit pressure against thinking that sensation-words get their meaning by privately baptizing inner items: if the term belongs to a shared practice, the private âthing in the boxâ is not what gives it its role, and treating sensations as if they were objects is precisely the misleading picture doing the damage. The epilogueâs upshot is not behaviorism or the denial of experience, but a diagnostic: the philosophical âproblemâ is generated by a grammatical fiction that holds us captive, and Wittgensteinâs aim is to restore clarity about how our sensation- and perception-talk actually works.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:06 - Overview of element
03:39 - Methodology
09:31 - Interpreting Wittgenstein
13:57 - Private language
18:01 - First wave: skepticism
22:17 - Second wave: definition
27:22 - Third wave: social
34:10 - Wittgenstein on Kripke
37:22 - Fourth wave: stage-setting
49:23 - Pains and sensations
52:52 - Problem for private languages
54:23 - Difference from second wave
56:46 - Objections
1:01:31 - Avoiding behaviorism
1:07:00 - Inverted spectrum
1:14:17 - Infallibility
1:17:07 - Objection
1:21:55 - Upshots
1:25:15 - Value of philosophy
1:26:33 - Conclusion
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Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Kevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality.
Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"!
https://academic.oup.com/book/61709
https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf
2. Book Summary
Kevin Richardsonâs The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid âbinaryâ pictureâone that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this pictureâhow the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by âgender criticalâ feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like âwhere you liveâ in a spaceâsomething that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose.
The core metaphysical proposal is the âspatial theory.â On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories: gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man, woman, and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain âin-betweenâ and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variation is fundamentalâone can be a man (or gay/straight) to a greater or lesser degree, rather than only âall-or-nothing.â The book also uses this framework to explain why crisp definitions of gender/orientation categories are so elusive: categories are structured around prototypes (central examples) rather than necessary-and-sufficient conditions, and our difficulty in defining them is compared to the difficulty of verbally specifying an exact geometric shape.
Building on the same model, Richardson argues that sexual orientation categories are constructed by communities organizing social life around certain regions of sexual-orientation space and âconferringâ category-status by resemblance to prototypes; the result is that our standard labels can be much coarser than the underlying reality theyâre trying to track. He also connects the metaphysics to language and politics: disputes like âTrans women are womenâ are treated as negotiations over which gender âperspectivesâ (bundles of norms) a community will coordinate on, so meaning-talk and social-world-making are tightly linked. In the concluding âBinary Abolitionâ discussion, the book rejects both (i) simply eliminating all categories and (ii) replacing binaries with hyper-granular âmicro-categories,â recommending instead a positive project of spatial abolition: learning to think and talk in ways that reflect the underlying spaces, with more context-sensitive and purpose-sensitive ways of âlocatingâ ourselves sociallyâjust as we do when describing physical location.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:42 - Overview of book
05:01 - Semantics vs. ontology
10:18 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive
14:50 - Gender binaries
20:47 - Biological binaries
25:07 - Gender norms
32:47 - Linguistic constraints
37:15 - Social accounts
47:07 - Haggling usage
53:07 - Spatial theory of gender
59:38 - Simplicity vs. informativeness
1:07:12 - Gender kinds
1:12:53 - Vagueness
1:23:14 - Abolitionism
1:27:15 - Social issues
1:34:47 - Making progress
1:41:01 - Value of philosophy
1:44:50 - Conclusion
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe -
1. Guest
Daniel Nicholson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, and his work has focused on the philosophy of science, and in particular biology and life sciences.
Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "What is Life? Revisited"!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4
https://a.co/d/5aBcmau
2. Book Summary
Daniel Nicholsonâs What Is Life? Revisited reassesses Erwin Schrödingerâs famous 1944 book What Is Life?âa work thatâs widely cited but, Nicholson argues, rarely engaged with carefullyâand asks how well Schrödingerâs core ideas have held up. Nicholson reconstructs Schrödingerâs main argument, then evaluates it via two extended critiques (of the âorder-from-orderâ and âorder-from-disorderâ principles), before turning to the bookâs historical influence on molecular biology and (using archival sources) Schrödingerâs deeper motivations for writing it.
On Nicholsonâs reconstruction, Schrödingerâs central move is to contrast the statistical âorder-from-disorderâ explanations common in physics and chemistry with a distinctively biological âorder-from-orderâ picture: biological regularities, he thinks, depend on microscopic structural order in hereditary material being amplified into macroscopic organismic order. He proposes that genes must be extraordinarily stable because they are solid-state structuresâan âaperiodic crystalâ whose nonrepetitive organization can encode a âmeaningful designâ rather than a simple periodic pattern. On this basis, Schrödinger treats the organism as a kind of âclockworkâ mechanism and even suggests that biology may involve âother laws of physicsâ (not a rejection of physics, but new non-statistical principles suited to living matter). He also offers his influential thermodynamics discussion: organisms avoid equilibrium by importing free energyâhis famous (if controversial) talk of feeding on ânegative entropy.â
Nicholsonâs bottom line is that Schrödingerâs emphasis on rigidity, specificity, and a gene-centered âorder-from-orderâ program powerfully shaped molecular biologyâs self-imageâhelping to normalize an engineering-style, deterministic picture of the cell (e.g., âmolecular machines,â wiring-diagram thinking, and circuit-like pathway depictions). But Nicholson argues that much of this inherited picture is increasingly in tension with experimental work that foregrounds stochasticity, dynamical flexibility, and non-classical self-organizing processesâpushing researchers toward more statistical (rather than purely mechanical) explanatory strategies. Finally, Nicholson contends that to understand Why Schrödinger framed biology this way, we should see What Is Life? as part of Schrödingerâs broader fight against the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics: his biological proposals were, in effect, entangled with an attempt to defend a more deterministic worldview and to oppose Bohr-inspired extensions of quantum indeterminacy into biology. The payoff of rereading Schrödinger now, Nicholson suggests, isnât that the book is straightforwardly right, but that it clarifies how we arrived at our current image of the cellâand how that image may be due for revision.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:32 - Background
03:26 - Why did he write it?
08:19 - Biological order
14:08 - Order from disorder
17:37 - Not applicable to life
20:27 - Hereditary substance
22:58 - Gene-centric view
31:35 - Entropy
39:12 - Negative entropy
41:24 - New laws
48:51 - Modern developments
51:26 - Determinism and free will
1:03:09 - Helpful aspects
1:04:42 - Lessons to learn
1:13:11 - Value of philosophy
1:20:20 - Conclusion
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What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them.
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Author
Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science.
Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/toward-a-philosophy-of-error-in-science-9780197827673
https://a.co/d/iobiDIc
2. Book Summary
Douglas Allchinâs Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldnât be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to ârealâ science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic âphilosophy of errorâ that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustifiedâi.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable.
The book develops an âinventoryâ of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretationâovergeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls âepistemic hubrisâ (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even thoughâideallyâorganized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes.
Finally, Allchin focuses on how errors are actually found and remedied: they donât âannounce themselves,â and thereâs no single âerror-correction methodââcorrection can be slow, uneven, and sometimes driven by contingencies rather than a tidy mechanism. Against the comforting slogan that science is simply âself-correcting,â he argues we should be more explicit about when and how peer review and replication succeed or fail, and then manage error more deliberately. A key payoff is rethinking what counts as epistemic progress: ânegative knowledgeâ (learning whatâs not the case, and why) is still genuine knowledge, and improving reliability often means actively probing for hidden sources of error rather than only accumulating confirming evidence.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:56 - Overview of book
02:12 - Error09:08 - Uncertainty
11:42 - Epistemology
13:33 - Vagueness
17:38 - First layer of error: raw data
29:30 - Second layer of error: conceptual
50:25 - Third layer of error: social
1:10:46 - Recognizing error
1:22:34 - Resolving error
1:26:10 - Humans and history
1:29:18 - Useful biases
1:36:03 - Negative knowledge
1:41:49 - Pessimistic meta-induction
1:47:42 - Value of philosophy
1:50:23 - Conclusion
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What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Author
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, âWrongful Discriminationâ!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6E0371A0B8D60E14E657153706F6F3EChttps://a.co/d/fjqivMb
2. Book Summary
Lippert-Rasmussenâs Wrongful Discrimination asks what âdiscriminationâ is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discriminationâjust differentiatingâfrom âgroup discrimination,â where people are treated differently because theyâre seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that âwrongfulâ and âmorally impermissibleâ can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa.
The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a âsocial equalityâ/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard casesâe.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but donât seem to generate a complaint in the right way.
He then uses three especially important ânon-paradigmaticâ domainsâindirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discriminationâto test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often donât fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:43 - What is âdiscriminationâ?
07:17 - Irrelevant features
10:48 - Framing the project
18:43 - Socially salient groups
23:44 - Connection with the law
26:49 - Empirical research
28:04 - Vagueness
33:12 - Political beliefs
35:07 - Direct and indirect discrimination
38:14 - Worry about indirect discrimination
43:35 - Statistical discrimination
46:24 - Different category?
48:41 - Structural discrimination
52:40 - Wrongful discrimination
55:09 - Rejoinder
1:03:02 - Harm-based accounts
1:06:53 - Respect-based accounts
1:11:11 - Intent 1:13:19 - Equality-based accounts
1:19:16 - Monistic accounts
1:23:05 - Value of philosophy
1:27:10 - Conclusion
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What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Joseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind.
Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!"
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz
2. Book Summary
Joseph Mendolaâs The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the âhard problemâ by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experienceâe.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusionâcan be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that âspace of possibilitiesâ is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a âMOUDDâ approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the âpropertiesâ experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors âout thereâ on objects) as in significant respects illusory.
A core commitment of the book is a version of the âwhole nervous systemâ model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct âmodal filamentâ that links stimulation to action within a fixed background, where the filament is individuated modally (by how it can vary and what alternatives it rules in/out), not necessarily by a single spatial pathway or by representational âinformation content.â This framework is then used to make sense of introspection and the feel of experience without leaning on standard representationalist machinery, by stressing how actual neural states and their âreal possibilitiesâ can be dynamically relevant to what we do and say.
The later chapters broaden the application: from color to other senses, then to the layered structure of visual space (including the way experience can attribute properties both to a âvisual fieldâ and to robust external objects), and finally to temporal experience, causal experience, and the sense of robust particularity. In discussing time, Mendola engages Husserl-style retentional structure (retention/primal impression/protention) and argues that any adequate view must respect the phenomenology of motion and temporal content in experience. The concluding material confronts familiar anti-physicalist challenges (the âexplanatory gap,â bats, zombies, inverted spectra, and Mary) and responds in part by emphasizing differences in concepts and cognitive access: e.g., Maryâs ânew knowledgeâ is cast as acquiring an experience-based concept and learning a coreference claim rather than learning an extra nonphysical fact.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - The hard problem
06:51 - Dualism
10:06 - Panpsychism
12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders
15:28 - Modal structure
24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology
27:22 - Description-sensitivity
32:00 - Identity
34:52 - Type identity theory
36:27 - Boltzmann brains
39:17 - Correlations vs. identity
43:54 - Phenomenal concepts
45:56 - Zombies and inverts
50:07 - A priori reasoning
51:47 - Color experience
57:38 - Are colors real?
1:02:39 - Other senses
1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness
1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states
1:12:29 - Animal consciousness
1:15:48 - Vagueness
1:16:55 - Functionalism
1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence
1:21:28 - Paul Thagard's approach
1:25:51 - Progress
1:27:11 - Value of philosophy
1:28:32 - Conclusion
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What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy
1. Guest
Vladimir KrstiÄ is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception.
Check out his book with Cambridge Elements!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A
2. Book Summary
Vladimir KrstiÄ argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional âintentionalistâ accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: youâd have to knowingly trick yourself).
His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to misleadâso deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it neednât be, and crucially itâs never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis.
On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar âmotivatedâ cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from oneâs normal standardsâbeing ânot oneself.â He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 â Introduction
00:50 â Overview of the book
11:09 â Intention
17:58 â Is deception always wrong?
29:25 â Functional account
36:29 â Function
43:08 â Sci-fi case
48:13 â Vagueness
53:45 â Objections
57:51 â Self-deception
1:02:15 â Function and self-deception
1:09:12 â Semantics
1:17:27 â Value of philosophy
1:24:33 â Conclusion
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If quantum mechanics forces us to rethink what a âmeasurement outcomeâ even is, can experiments still count as genuine evidence for any scientific theory?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Emily Adlam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University and her work focuses on physics, especially quantum physics, and the philosophy of physics.Check out her book, "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics: The Epistemology of the Measurement Problem"!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-science-from-quantum-mechanics-9780197808856
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197808859/
2. Book Summary
Emily Adlamâs Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics argues that the quantum âmeasurement problemâ isnât just a puzzle about what exists (wavefunctions, worlds, collapses, etc.), but a threat to the epistemology of scienceâour right to treat experimental outcomes as evidence. She frames the central demand as a kind of âclosing the circleâ: a viable physical story of measurement should be coherent with the idea that measurement outcomes genuinely provide information about whatâs measured. Against the background of ordinary assumptions about measurement (value-definiteness, veracity, unique outcomes, shareable records, reliable memory), quantum mechanics and results like contextuality make it hard to keep the whole intuitive package, which means some âsolutionsâ risk making scientific knowledge fragile or even impossible.
The book then evaluates leading families of responses to the measurement problem by asking whether they preserve empirical confirmation. For Everettian (many-worlds) approaches, Adlam emphasizes the âprobability problemâ as an epistemic problem: if we canât explain why observed relative frequencies should confirm the theory, Everettian QM risks empirical incoherenceâundermining the very evidence that would support it. She also examines âobserver-relativeâ approaches (including perspectival/neo-Copenhagen, relational QM, and possibly QBism), characterized by universal unitary dynamics plus unique outcomes that are nevertheless relativized to observers; a key worry is that this picture strains the expectation that different observers can straightforwardly share and align records of outcomes.
Stepping back, Adlamâs through-line is that you donât get to quarantine these issues inside âinterpretationâ: changing our conception of measurement reshapes what counts as evidence for any scientific theory, since no theory is empirically confirmed without observation and measurement. She uses this lens to assess Bayesian/decision-theoretic moves and their limits for âscepticalâ hypotheses like multiverses, where even the relevant priors may be ill-defined without a broader belief-revision story. And she presses that some stancesâe.g. âintersubjective QBismâ that severs the link between quantum states/probabilities and observed frequenciesâwould drain quantum mechanics of empirical content and thus of confirmation.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - The measurement problem
05:14 - Shut up and calculate
07:00 - Different senses of "measurement"
09:11 - Bootstrapping
10:18 - Relevance to scientific practice
13:18 - Quantum bayesianism
17:46 - Many worlds
20:05 - Recovering the Born rule
32:21 - Bohmian mechanics
36:09 - Probability
37:58 - All-at-once laws
42:54 - Anti-Humeanism
45:12 - Superdeterminism
48:56 - Naturalness
50:15 - Retrocausality
54:33 - Primitive ontology
57:51 - Fundamentality
1:01:41 - Consistent histories
1:04:38 - Saving quantum mechanics
1:07:25 - Making progress
1:08:38 - Value of philosophy
1:10:20 - Conclusion
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What if the deepest question about âyouâ isnât whether youâre the same person over time, but which future life itâs actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity".
2. Book Summary
In Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about âpersonal identityâ mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what itâs appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern aboutâwhere âappropriateâ is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldnât conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival.
The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricksâs headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survivalâi.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on oneâs metaphysics of persistence) Parfitâs argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matters in survival).
Chapters 4â6 then stress-test rival âpsychologicalâ answers to the Why Questionâviews that tie survival to having the same self (values/desires/projects), the same self-narrative, or forms of agential / narrative continuityâand Merricks argues these proposals mishandle cases of deep transformation (including being âturnedâ into someone evil in a way that seems bad for you without being merely like ceasing to exist). Finally, Chapter 7 applies the framework to personal immortality (âthe hope of gloryâ): immortality is framed as there always being someone who will have what matters in survival for you, and Merricks uses his earlier claims to respond to familiar worriesâe.g., that survival comes in degrees, or that immortality would inevitably be tedious.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - Self and Identity
04:25 - What and why questions
07:25 - Semantics
12:29 - Normative issues
13:29 - What matters in survival
18:36 - Numerical identity
21:04 - More conditions?
22:42 - The past
24:35 - Permanent comatose
30:49 - Memory wipe
36:05 - Psychological continuity
37:25 - Puzzles of identity
40:47 - Persistence and eternalism
46:43 - Relative identity
53:42 - Sci-fi cases
58:17 - Other views
1:00:24 - Non-reductionism
1:05:51 - Examples
1:10:55 - Vagueness
1:14:37 - Narrative accounts
1:18:32 - Christian theology
1:25:03 - A puzzle
1:27:32 - Value of philosophy
1:29:25 - Conclusion
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Can brains build consciousness? In this interview, Paul Thagard argues that they can, and explains his approach.
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Paul Thagard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. His work focuses on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine.
Check out his book, "Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness"!
https://academic.oup.com/book/60618https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHQJ3KCS/
2. Book Summary
Paul Thagardâs Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness develops a neuroscientifically grounded, mechanism-based theory meant to explain not just âordinaryâ perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, but also the especially puzzling, highly structured forms of experience that show up in dreaming, humour, and music. The core proposal is the âNBCâ theory: conscious experience arises from interactions among Neural representation, Binding, Coherence, and Competitionâwhere coherence is understood as constraint satisfaction and competition governs which representations win out for attention and interpretation.
After laying out NBC and illustrating it with simpler cases (e.g., how brains build perceptual and bodily experiences and integrate them into unified âcompoundâ consciousness), Thagard uses it to explain three marquee domains. Dreaming is treated as a product of the same mechanisms, aiming to explain why dreams are common, emotionally charged, continuous with daily life yet sometimes bizarre, and still feel intensely âwhat-itâs-likeâ (his term âzingâ) even when they donât make ordinary sense. Humour is explained via a characteristic dual shift: incoming words/images trigger an initial interpretation and emotional response, then a change prompts a second interpretation and response, and recognizing that shift yields surprise and laughter. Musical experience is explained as the brain binding basic note-representations into higher-order structures like melody, rhythm, and harmony, then binding these with other modalities (movement, words, visuals, emotion), with competition helping music âbreak throughâ into conscious attention.
The later chapters broaden the same framework to other conscious domains (e.g., religion, morality, sports performance, romance, and the effects of drugs), and argue that any full theory must handle time consciousness: the brain represents time using âtime cells,â binds these into larger âmemory units,â and uses coherence and competition to produce an experienced sense of duration and temporal flow. Thagard also evaluates animal consciousness and asks about machine consciousness, arguing that current large language models (including ChatGPT) can be impressive without having felt perceptions, sensations, or emotions, partly because they lack the kind of world- and body-involving understanding central to his story. Finally, he connects the theory to a broader mindâbody view he calls âcoherent materialismâ (or âcohmaterialismâ), on which genuinely minded systems are rare because they require tightly coupled hardware/software that coherently satisfies constraints of time, space, energy, and history.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:51 - Overview of book
04:57 - Qualia
08:12 - Illusionism
11:53 - Neural representation
14:58 - Representation
18:14 - Binding
22:40 - Coherence
26:58 - Emotions
28:49 - Competition
31:18 - Getting consciousness
38:13 - Emergence
40:27 - Additional mechanisms
42:50 - Correlates vs. identity
48:00 - Explanatory breadth
50:53 - Dreams
55:59 - Global workspace theory
58:27 - Other approaches
1:01:46 - Animal consciousness
1:05:41 - Vagueness
1:08:37 - Functionalism and AI
1:16:14 - Coherent materialism
1:18:37 - Thought experiments
1:22:30 - Mary's room
1:25:22 - Future research
1:27:57 - Value of philosophy
1:30:01 - Conclusion
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If we ever make first contact, the hard part might not be sending a message across space, but working out whether aliens do science in anything like our sense, share concepts like number and explanation, and could actually understand what we mean by âphysics.â
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Daniel Whiteson is an experimental particle physicist and professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on the analysis of high-energy particle collisions. He co-hosts a podcast about the Universe (Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe).
Check out his new book with Andy Warner, "Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality"!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324064641/
2. Book Summary
In Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whiteson (with Andy Warner) asks what it would takeânot just to find intelligent aliens, but to have a meaningful scientific exchange with them. The organizing idea is an âextended Drake equationâ: beyond the usual probabilities of life and intelligence, we have to ask what fraction of alien civilizations do something like experiment-driven science (fscience), what fraction of those we could communicate with at all (fcommunication), and then whether weâd even share enough conceptual overlap to ask and answer the âsameâ scientific questions.
The middle of the book is a tour of the ways those terms might collapse. Even if aliens are curious, their âscienceâ might not look like ours; even if we can exchange signals, translating meanings could be brutally hard; and even mathâoften treated as the obvious shared languageâmight not function as a universal bridge if aliens donât carve the world into countable objects the way we do. The authors use vivid hypotheticals to press the point that what feels âobviousâ to us can hide deep assumptions (about counting, representation, and what matters), and those assumptions can reshape what we notice and what questions we even think to ask.
In the later chapters, they argue thatâeven granting shared questionsâthereâs no guarantee of the kind of grand, final alien âanswerâ we fantasize about. Human physics already looks like a patchwork of domain-specific approximations that donât neatly sew into one overarching quilt, and there can be multiple incompatible âstoriesâ that fit the same observed data, suggesting a Rashomon-style underdetermination that aliens might resolve differently (or not at all). The upbeat conclusion is that this isnât just a downer about SETI: thinking through alien science is a way of spotting our own hidden commitments and keeping alternative conceptual paths aliveâso the exercise teaches us about our science and our minds, even if no perfectly compatible alien colleagues ever show up.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:55 - Overview of book
04:29 - Illustrations
05:31 - Extended Drake equation
08:31 - Navigators
11:44 - Different physics
14:28 - Communication
21:25 - First contact
24:50 - Mathematics
29:33 - Vagueness
33:12 - Indispensability
35:57 - Ontology plus dynamics
39:21 - Arbitrary conventions
41:20 - Varieties of life
48:06 - Friendly?
49:16 - Common concepts
52:51 - Learning about ourselves
54:11 - Progress
1:00:03 - Value of philosophy
1:02:39 - Conclusion
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Can a Bayesian look at fine-tuning make âdesignâ less compelling, and do Grim Reaper-style infinity puzzles really show that an infinite past is impossible?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.
2. Interview Summary
In this interview, Friction speaks with Graham Oppy about two big clusters of issues: a Bayesian way of framing fine-tuning arguments, and how (if at all) Benardete/âGrim Reaperâ style paradoxes support causal or temporal finitism. On fine-tuning, Friction sketches a strategy that starts from probabilistic constraintsâroughly, that âdesignâ shouldnât get a higher prior than non-design, and that life-permittingness/fine-tuning isnât (or neednât be) more expected on design than on non-designâso that updating on a life-permitting universe wonât, by itself, drive you toward design. Oppy presses on how the hypothesis space is being carved up and what background assumptions are doing the work, noting that fine-tuning defenders often treat âdesignâ as a family of more specific hypothesesâsome of which might assign high likelihood to fine-tuning (the âmore batter on the design sideâ idea). A related thread Oppy raises is an âinscrutabilityâ worry: given a designerâs vast option space, it may be hard to say what fine-tuning should even be likely on design, which complicates the likelihood comparisons that fine-tuning arguments rely on. The conversation also touches on how conditioning on extremely specific facts about âthese exact parametersâ can generate counterintuitive results about what should have been expected a priori, and Oppy connects this to âmany-godsâ style worries familiar from Pascalâs Wager debates.
In the second half, Friction and Oppy turn to Benardete-style setups: infinite sequences of would-be interveners arranged at times approaching a limit, which can make it seem like an outcome must occur even though no particular intervener is ever the one who triggers it. Friction outlines a common finitist dialectic: if an infinite past/regress would allow a Grim Reaper scenario (often via a âpatchworkâ recombination principle), and if Grim Reaper scenarios are impossible, then infinite pasts/regresses are impossible too. Oppy focuses much of his skepticism on the linking stepâespecially the idea that you can âpiece togetherâ regions from different possible worlds to build the paradoxâbecause the relevant dispositions and actions donât obviously survive that kind of cut-and-paste. He also emphasizes that there are plenty of coherent infinite-sequence stories that donât generate contradiction (he offers simple toggle-style examples), which undercuts the claim that infinity as such forces paradox. And a recurring diagnosis is that many paradox presentations under-specify what happens at the crucial infinite-limit caseâso the sense of impossibility may come from an incomplete story rather than a genuine contradiction.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:18 - Bayesian fine-tuning argument
02:30 - Design vs. non-design hypotheses
03:52 - Two probability constraints
05:17 - Oppyâs first reaction
07:24 - Conditional probabilities questioned
10:11 - Does design predict life?
11:16 - Purely a priori reasoning
15:16 - Causation vs. design
16:36 - Probability
19:54 - Background
22:33 - Simplicity
27:41 - Skeptical theism and fine-tuning
28:22 - Life-permitting vs. fine-tuned
31:39 - Comparing specific hypotheses
37:55 - Simplicity and divine complexity
39:28 - Necessary beings and the universe
43:30 - Intuitions and priors
46:52 - Stalking-horse objection
49:52 - Background knowledge and updating
51:34 - Double-dipping concern
55:44 - Grim reapers
1:01:41 - Patchwork principle
1:10:54 - Thomsonâs lamp analogy
1:14:33 - Toe-regrowing variant
1:22:12 - Lewis and patchwork
1:23:41 - Intrinsic powers
1:26:27 - Conclusion
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What if Kant is right that real freedom is not doing whatever you feel like, but choosing principles you can rationally endorse and then living by them?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Karen Stohr is Ryan Family Chair Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University, where she is also a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her work focuses on ethics. In this interview, we focus on her book, "Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life".
2. Book Summary
Karen Stohrâs Choosing Freedom is a practical guide to living âfreelyâ in a Kantian sense: not doing whatever you feel like, but governing yourself by principles you can rationally stand behind. She emphasizes that the book is not about becoming more like Kant or constantly asking âWhat would Kant say?â; itâs about using Kantâs insights to illuminate hard-to-notice features of our moral lives and help you live by your own standards. Stohr also frames the book as a short tour of Kantâs systematic ethics followed by lots of attention to the everyday âtreesâ Kant actually wrote aboutâthings like gossip, friendship, and dinner partiesâbecause Kant meant ethics to guide real life. Kantian freedom, on this telling, often requires self-constraint: exercising autonomy means âgetting a grip on ourselvesâ so we can live according to rationally defensible principles rather than being yanked around by impulse and procrastination.
The early chapters lay out the Kantian basics: morality is grounded in reason rather than shifting feelings, and the categorical imperative is presented through three connected idealsâequality, dignity, and community. Stohr stresses that Kant isnât only about isolated individual choice: the âkingdom of endsâ picture highlights how our communities shape our moral lives and how morality asks us to build social relations on the equal value of persons. In the âmoral assessmentâ sections, she connects this framework to knowing and judging ourselves (and others), urging forms of charitable interpretation that keep us from using other peopleâs flaws as a way to feel superior, and redirecting attention back to our own moral work. Along the way, she squarely acknowledges Kantâs moral failuresâespecially racist and sexist viewsâwhile arguing that Kantâs own framework contains powerful resources against dehumanization, beginning with a strict duty to treat every human being with dignity.
Most of the book applies the theory to character, goals, and social life, organized into parts on vices, life goals, socializing, and looking forward. Stohr explains Kantian vices as âmonstersâ that live inside us and âenslave us from the inside,â warping our reasoning and making it harder to recognize and follow our dutiesâhence chapters on servility, arrogance, contempt, gossip/defamation, mockery, deceitfulness, and drunkenness. She then turns to constructive practices (self-improvement, resilience, reserve, beneficence, gratitude) and to the moral texture of friendship, love, manners, and even hosting: for Kant, good social rituals can cultivate both understanding and âfellow-feeling,â helping us practice respect in community. The final chapters emphasize hope as a duty-like orientation toward moral progress: weâre to work toward better ethical community (and even peace) by sustained effort, grounding optimism in the idea that people can keep trying to be better than they were yesterday.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:43 - Overview of Choosing Freedom
03:03 - Making Kant accessible
06:08 - Everyday Kantian ethics
06:56 - Freedom and rationality
10:16 - Acting irrationally
12:39 - Human nature and evil
16:36 - Can evil be rational?
20:58 - The categorical imperative
21:44 - Universal law formulation
25:55 - Exceptions and universalization
30:48 - Humanity formulation
34:30 - Ends and dignity
37:44 - Kingdom of ends
41:38 - Perfect vs imperfect duties
46:29 - Conscience and moral assessment
51:55 - Reflecting on conscience
52:24 - Vices and virtues
53:06 - Duty not to lie
57:53 - Lies and omissions
1:00:14 - Civility and manners
1:02:59 - Moral improvement
1:06:39 - Teaching ethics
1:09:54 - Philosophy as practice
1:13:09 - Value of philosophy
1:16:34 - Conclusion
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If causation is not fundamental, what keeps reality from turning into chaos with things randomly popping into existence, and does the kalÄmâs claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause really explain the order we see?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Dan Linford is lecturer at Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. His work focuses on physics and the philosophy of physics, philosophy of religion.
2. Interview Summary
In this interview, Dan Linford discusses his paper âWithout microphysical causation, just anything cannot begin to exist just anywhere,â motivated in part by debates around the causal principle often associated with the kalÄm cosmological argument. He frames the core question as whether the order we observe in the universe really requires causationâspecifically, whether âwhatever begins to exist must have a causeââor whether there are non-causal ways to explain why we donât see arbitrary âraging tigersâ popping into existence out of nowhere.
A major focus is a traditional line of support for the causal principle that Linford labels the HobbesâHumeâEdwardsâPryor principle (HPP): roughly, if the causal principle were false, weâd lack a good explanation for why things donât begin to exist at arbitrary times, places, in arbitrary numbers, and of arbitrary kinds. Linford and the host also pause on how strong the causal principle is supposed to be (mere accident vs physical/metaphysical necessity), and note that once you add extra metaphysical commitments (the interview uses the A-theory of time as an example), the principle can become either harder to justify or even vacuously true in a way that wonât do the work causal-principle defenders want.
Linford then develops an alternative pictureâdrawing on âneo-Russellianâ themesâon which causation isnât fundamental to microphysics (for Russell-style reasons like time-symmetry), but causal talk remains useful in the special sciences for identifying âeffective strategiesâ (a Cartwright-inspired point about intervention vs mere correlation). The upshot is that even if microphysical causation fails, it doesnât follow that âanything goesâ: what can begin to exist is still constrained by nomic (law-based), metaphysical, and logical principles, and those constraints can underwrite explanations of why tigers (etc.) donât pop into existence. He also addresses a familiar objection to Humean-style viewsâwhy expect an âordered continuationâ of the mosaic rather than chaosâby appealing to Lewis-style similarity/âclosenessâ considerations (and related constraints on probability talk), arguing that the standard HPP-based worry doesnât straightforwardly land.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:30 - Overview
04:40 - How strong is the causal principle?
10:15 - The Hobbes-Edwards-Prior (HEP) principle
16:20 - Expecting chaos vs. no explanation
20:35 - What if explanation just runs out?
23:37 - Neo-Russellianism
32:30 - Fundamental physics
36:13 - Time asymmetries in fundamental physics?
40:49 - The main challenge to Neo-Russellianism
44:23 - Do microphysical things "begin to exist"?
51:33 - Law-based explanations without causation
57:22 - Are laws more mysterious than causes?
1:03:41 - The Neo-Humean response
1:14:35 - Where does metaphysical explanation end?
1:17:37 - Theological connections and brute facts
1:21:45 - Final thoughts
1:22:14 - Value of philosophy
1:24:30 - Conclusion
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What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, which origin story is right, and what future observations could finally decide between them?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guests
Phil is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socieity, science popularizer, and runs the excellent YouTube channel "Phil Halper", aka Skydivephil. Niayesh Afshordi is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He is also a founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics and an Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
2. Book Summary
Battle of the Big Bang argues that what most people call âthe Big Bangâ is really two things: a well-tested story about a very hot early universe, and a much less secure story about an initial âbangâ or singular beginning. The authors frame the hot early universe as âscienceâs earliest memory,â while emphasizing that cosmologists are now trying to recover an even earlier âlost memory,â using new physics rather than just extrapolating familiar laws backwards forever. They set the stage with a brisk history of cosmological thinking and with the central puzzle: the standard picture explains a lot about how the universe evolves, but it does not straightforwardly tell us what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, or what replaces the would-be singularity.
The middle of the book is a guided tour through todayâs rival âorigin stories,â presented as a genuine competition with strengths, weaknesses, and lots of unfinished business. Using inflation and its offshoots as one major contender, the authors then explore a sequence of alternatives: multiverse ideas, Hawking-style âno boundaryâ beginnings, string-theoretic scenarios like colliding branes and string-gas phases, loop-quantum-gravity-inspired âbig bounceâ pictures, cyclic models, âborn from a black holeâ proposals, varying-speed-of-light approaches, holographic cosmology, and even self-creation/time-loop possibilities. A recurring theme is that the singularity is widely treated as a sign that our two great frameworks, quantum mechanics and general relativity, cannot both be straightforwardly applied at the earliest times, so any serious account has to confront quantum gravity head-on, even though there is no consensus (and sometimes âtoo many answersâ) about what that looks like in detail.
In the final stretch, the book turns from âwhat might have happenedâ to âhow could we ever know,â stressing the limits of what current headline instruments can actually tell us about the beginning. The authors note that even spectacular observatories like JWST are not designed to see back to the origin itself, and that the cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can directly observe, so ordinary telescopes hit a hard wall; to probe earlier than that, we likely need new âmessengers,â especially primordial gravitational waves, and better ways of squeezing evidence out of subtle imprints on the sky. They also reflect on the sociology of foundational disputes, warning that scientific consensus is not the same thing as popularity, and that the âbattleâ can sometimes resemble factional conflict more than dispassionate evaluation. The upshot is deliberately modest: nobody yet knows what happened at the Big Bang, but the path forward is clearer than it used to be, because future observations could rule whole classes of models in or out.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - Impetus for the book
07:12 - Historical background
09:01 - The Big Bang
15:22 - The meaning of ânothingâ
15:43 - Quantifier vs. noun sense of nothing
18:22 - Almost nothing scenarios
23:37 - How theories bear on cosmic origins
28:47 - Concerns about multiverse theories
29:10 - Testability of multiverse models
34:05 - String theory and brane theory
39:25 - Could there be time before time?
39:59 - Limits of temporal concepts
43:43 - Two-direction time models
50:05 - Other models
54:01 - Are we on the cusp of a new cosmic revolution?
1:01:31 - Favorite cosmological models
1:04:36 - Connections to theology and the Kalam
1:09:30 - Conclusion
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe - Se mer
