Perspectival Objectivity

0:00 take an ordinary lattice. An ordinary lattice, which is used in one-color simulation, is a relational space. Each point has, depending on the... The possibility would be a divergence in one-color. Yes, but when you look at the lattice from a large scale, then it looks like a continuous three-dimensional or four-dimensional, whatever you like, space. And there's localization, and there's symmetry, rotational symmetry, even though you start from a discrete symmetry on the lattice level. so that would be an example of symmetry enhancement and all this would come up but on a larger scale in the classical limit I think this touches an important point because you have some ideas effectively how your picture may deviate from what we presently know as quantum mechanics yes I mean I would say that with this relational approach we can think about what could quantum gravity possibly be from a different perspective. But that's, again, too much speculation. So I didn't want to answer it. What would be a possible quantum theory of creation? Alex. Can you say something about dimension? Is dimension of the universe space or a relational property? Dimension of the universe space? Not in this picture here. It's an absolute property. Well, if you put it that way, at the level here, I haven't even introduced the Hilbert space. Well, you say you start with quantum mechanics, so the systems have quantum mechanical relations. Well, in quantum mechanics, what we write down is a scalar product between two states, for instance, and then say this is a complex number. The states, yeah, right, but the states are in the numbers, yeah. Yeah, well, it's not even between states, you know, usually we write it down as a scalar

2:30 product between vectors, but we can take it as a trace of what the states are in the numbers. And then it's only, well, then we get some complex number. And this complex number, I would interpret not, I would prefer not to interpret it as a probability amplitude, but as a slightly more. In case we make measurements, we calculate the probability. I'm not talking about probabilities. I'm talking about, you have vectors. Vectors are from the Hilbert space. So what about the dimension of the Hilbert space? Is it a... Well, I would say it's the same as quantum mechanics. I don't see where a difference should be. So there's nothing relational dimensions. Final question, or comment, or whatever. Yes, so I'm pretty confused about the basic picture. So here's one question that might help me understand this a little bit better. So at some point you claim that in your picture becomes understandable how or less mysterious how a particle could be in two places at the same time. So now, if I took a classical substantivalist picture, what this claim would mean for a particle to be at two positions at the same time is that it would be at two different spatial locations at the same time. The spatial locations are individuated by these space-time points. Now, classical relationalists, so for Descartes, for example, the claim, I guess, would be translated into something like this. relations that the particle bears to all the other particles in the universe and at the same time I can have two different sets of spatial relations to all the object and other objects around now I'm I'm not so I'm not sure how this looks like your picture and as a related worry you introduce one of the relations you always speak about is relations to space-time points but a classical, sorry, that the relationalist doesn't have those, so I'm a little bit puzzled how your picture is actually relationalist. Why not? Because relationalist has only, I mean, there are no space-time points, they're just space-time points to the rest of objects. Okay, space-time points is, let's say, those elements which from a large scale for us look

5:00 like Eftispense. I mean, even Descartes says there can't be substances which we cannot see, and that is when we take all particles out. That is what's left. Even taking out the air, etc. What is left, in principle, were those elements which make up space. And they could be particles. I don't know. They could be knots. They could be a net of strings. I don't know. I didn't want to specify this. It's just some structure which allows to define, in principle, something like relations. OK, so how does this work with the two particles doing this, one particle being in two locations at the same time? Well, if you take, OK, let me put a different, maybe a different picture, which I don't know. Let's suppose when we talk about the position of a person, we say where it is. So I said, I'm standing here. This is my position. That would be the absolute property principle to usually address the position. now consider a completely different space. Consider the space of relations among people, community, space of community. It's made up of all people. So where's my position? My position is specified by the relations which I have to other people. These relations can even be of different nature. And in this community, I can have relations to people which among themselves do not have relations and which, if I take the relations among these people as a kind of distance measure are very far away from them apart from the fact that they have both relations to me Would that clarify a little bit the situation more? Well, it doesn't answer the puzzle we had originally. I mean, of course there can be yeah, in your sense of course there's no problem with having as far, but it doesn't remove if there is a sense of puzzlement originally, that if I'm puzzled that somehow the electron is supposed to go through both slits, you're telling me that the electron is... The electron is not embedded here in our three-dimensional space, so the electron has just relations to

7:30 space, and these relations propagate. And they can propagate through both slits at the same time. and they can come back together and they have interference like in ordinary quantum mechanics and they give a probability of the electron when it is measured being found in a certain place but the electron is not embedded it's not somehow that it has to go through the slit itself so the electron only has relations to the space and only these relations propagate and go through the slit okay, I think now in order to have enough space and time lunch we should close the session now but please there will be one announcement by If we do it, before we come to that, one big hand. Okay. Hello, everyone. That's all I want to applaud. So, thank you very much for the show. Thank you. Thank you. I'm delighted to be invited. I'm always delighted to be invited by the concert. They have a wonderful caucuses, a wonderful place that we are in Paris, a wonderful place if there were. Okay, so what my talk is going to be is a pretty open-ended set of variations on a theme, and it represents a pretty early stage of my thinking about this. So rather than trying to propose conclusions and then defend them to the depth, I want to just throw out some ideas to provoke reactions and in particular discussion. So what's the theme? My theme is going to be that objectivity is not just invariant undisimitries corresponding to the changes of admissible perspective. Why not? Well, because some perspectives may reasonably be judged more objective than others. So there's an element of objectivity that would not be captured by that simple formula. So, what I'm going to do first of all is to introduce that theme by relating it to work with some other people. It's really a shame that a lot of Debs couldn't be here because my first relationship, the relation I'm going to draw is to work by him and Michael Redhead in their recently published book. and since I expected him to disagree with some of the things I'm going to say

10:00 I feel very unfair for him saying them in the absence but it probably would be better not to miss two talks today even in Paris Okay, so then I'm going to propose a way of thinking about viewpoints and perspectives a general way of thinking about them In the rest of the talk I'll use that way of thinking to analyze a variety of different instances of perspectival objectivity that arise in physical theorizing. There are going to be some from space-time theory, some from quantum physics, and some from just the evolution of physical theorizing more generally. Okay, so I already gave you a brief account of the structure of what I'm going to talk about. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is new points and perspectives. Well, no, it's not. I'm going to have my introduction first. we go. In their recent book, Deft and Redhead defend a restricted version of Vile's famous idea that objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms, namely structure-preserving math things or symmetries. And the restriction they propose is to automorphism groups implicitly defined by a class of what they call perspective. And so they end up defending perspectival inventivariantism, and I think, although I think I got them wrong, that for them, what perspectives are included in the relevant class is ultimately a matter of conventional choice. The choice, they say, is informally influenced by the requirement of transformation amongst these symmetries correspond to generalizable and juristically powerful symmetries, but But it always involves, according to Debs and Redhead, an ineliminable element of convention. Here I quote, for the perspectival invariantist, invariance has at least as much to do with convention as it does with objectivity. So that's one group of ideas that I'm relating my work to. if you take that view we can't reasonably raise the issue of how objectivity depends on the objectivity of the perspectives themselves and that's precisely the issue that I will be concerned with today how objective are various perspectives so here's some more motivation consider the project undertaken by two deservedly influential recent authors Tom Nagle and Hugh Price

12:30 and Nagle says his book Without a single problem, how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoints included. Nagel takes the personal standpoint as more subjective than any perspective offered by physics. And he takes physics to strive for ever more objective perspectives, and even an objectivity that transcends any perspective, The View From Nowhere, which is the title of his book. Hugh Price's Archimedean point in his book provides a perspective on the physical world from outside time, a point from which the asymmetry of time in the physical world could no longer be apparent. So, we can't readily assume that perspective. Nevertheless, Price advises physicists against assuming that this experience of a distinction, perhaps objective, between the past and future directions of time, is an experience of any objective feature of the world, given the assumed time reversal invariance of fundamental It seems to me that it doesn't mean that, or this doesn't mean that our temporarily asymmetric perspective is subjective or conventional, even though it is a perspective to which we are naturally restricted by our constitution because this restriction emerges as an inevitable consequence of the objectively, temporarily asymmetric features of our physical interactions with our environment. we find ourselves in, even though it is a temporal perspective, has a degree of objectivity to it, because, well, we'll go on to see why later. In any case, it seems to me that's another instance in which we want to grade perspectives according to their objectivity before applying any nice formula about objectivity's invariance under symmetries corresponding to changes of perspective. Some perspectives certainly seem more objective than others. And if that's right, then objectivity itself can't be, ultimately, just a matter of convention for the perspectival invariant system. First of all, it can't be a convention which perspective you choose relative to which invariance is assessed, and nor is it a convention whether a perspective is itself an objective perspective.

15:00 Okay. So, I already told you what I had to do. I won't read the rest of that. Let's start doing it. Okay, viewpoints and perspectives. So here's the framework for thinking about things that I'm proposing. If you have a better one, I'll take that instead, but this is my attempt. So for me, a viewpoint is a generalized location. It's a position in the world that may be occupied by an object, and in particular, by a generalized observer. Observer has scapegoats around it because we're going to have to look at that more closely later. So what's a perspective, then? Well, on this view, a perspective is a system of representation which is associated with a viewpoint. It's associated with it in the sense that we naturally adopt it by one of these observers that happen to occupy that viewpoint. So, if we have a structure and an observer in a viewpoint from the perspective offered by that viewpoint to that observer, So the structure itself will have a certain image, which will be its representation in that perspective, in that system of representation, and therefore from its associated viewpoint. So here's a thesis. It's not a thesis I'm proposing. It's just a thesis that somebody might come up with, which we would like to try to assess. The thesis is that a feature of a structure is objective just in case its image is the same in the perspective of association with every relevant viewpoint. worried about forecast, the relevant viewpoint and so on. So let's start off with a simple example of this. I don't know how many of you have tried this, but if you go outside and look at the Eiffel Tower, you'll see there's a radio antenna on top of it. And it's objectively above the position occupied by the base of the tower. Fine. Well, consider the viewpoint occupied by a party of nearby tourists. Not too near, otherwise the perspective won't work. At the end of the Chant de Mar, it could work pretty well. So suppose that one of those tourists carries a small souvenir replica of the tower, which are readily available, if you wish to purchase them. When held up in front of her, so its appearance duplicates that of the tower itself, that will constitute her image of the tower structure in the corresponding geometric perspective. So the perspective is a system of representation, The image is what that structure looks like when represented in that sort of representation.

17:30 The image is all agreed when represented in the radio antenna top of the Gagal Towers above the position occupied by the base of the tower. So we have invariance under transformation amongst the various perspectives associated with the viewpoints of the various tourists. So suppose that we make a map between the image of the J's tourist to that of the K-tourist. And the set of all maps like that will be a group that's isomorphic to a discrete subgroup, a group of rotations, translations, and scale transformations, at least some of the approximations I'm working on, but they're not too close to the tower. And the image, then, of the J's tourist represents the spatial location of the I called Tau by the isomorphism R-J. And we can use that map from images to induce a map on the Eiffel Tower itself. That's the isomorphisms of the structure that we're going to be talking about. That map, Phi-J-K, defined in that way, represents a hypothetical transformation of the tower itself, so that it would appear to the J-tourist the way it actually appears to the K-tourist. Instead of moving tourists around, you put the Eiffel Tower around, hypothetically speaking. The position of its top remains higher and it's based under all such mathematical transformations, and the up-down relation is objective under this set of ultimorphisms of the actual south spatial location. So that's sort of an illustration of perspective invariantism and the application of my notions of viewpoint and perspective and image. Okay. But now, of course, suppose we enlarge the set of viewpoints. Everybody gets a chance, not just the nearby tourists. We included viewpoints associated with people with things in the Opera House, for example. And many of their corresponding perspectives will now represent the top of the Eiffel Tower as well as a space. Their tiny little models, very, very tiny, will have to be turned upside down to represent the Eiffel Tower. The position of the corresponding parts and their tiny directions are the opposite space in relation to those of the tower itself. of the tower's orientation under changes amongst this enlarged cluster of viewpoints, you'd need to sometimes turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. Okay, so the point is that the up-down relation is not connected under its larger group of automorphisms

20:00 with the Eiffel Tower's spatial location. Incidentally, Weill himself used the example of the up-down relation as one of his examples we were discussing in his thesis of invariantism. So all this can be generalized, I think, and we can apply the terminology of viewpoints and perspectives and images much more widely. In general, you can't identify a viewpoint with a spatial location. That won't come too much of a surprise. And in general, especially when we're doing physics, the sort of thing that we call a perspective would be more likely to be a system representation through a model in a sub-physical of theory, not just one of those toy models you buy in the turist. So we have a theory that gives us a system of representation of situations in the world, and it gives us models to represent particular situations in the world. And a theory often includes more than one such model, all of which, all of a particular set of models, offer equivalent representations physical situation. And it's sometimes true, and always, and this is important, I think, it's sometimes true that each such model, from an equivalence class to model, can be associated with a generalized viewpoint on that situation, because the hypothetical observer who occupied that viewpoint wouldn't actually use that model to represent it. I say that's not always true, because if you think about models of general relativity, then one can choose any one of the diffeomorphism class of models to represent a particular situation in space-time. And I don't see any way of naturally associating particular diffeomorphism, a particular model of the theory, with the viewpoint of an observer. That's just, there's no natural connection between observers and models in that case, I think. In any case, I'm going to talk about other cases in space-time theories which you're all pretty familiar with, And then I'll start saying things that may be less familiar and more controversial. It's still about space-time theories. So, inertial reference frame provides a viewpoint on structures. An observer in that state of uniform motion will naturally adopt the perspective of an associated inertial coordinate system. Its, I'm being impersonal about observers now,

22:30 its image of a structure will be a representation in those coordinates. So if you look at the feature of a structure, it seems natural to say that it will be objective just in case it remains invariant under all transformations among inertial coordinate systems, but then it's admitted to a bit the same to every viewpoint. So in particular, according to social theory relativity, we have certain objective features such as length in an inertial frame and electric field strike in an inertial frame in a different direction, which are invariant in the suitable sense, but of course length and electric fields strengthen off. So we have some things end up being distant objective and other things not, just as we'd expect. Okay, so let's go a bit deeper now. We're all familiar with the idea of representing an observer in a space-time theory by a time like Walsh. But Why? Why is that an okay thing to do? What is an observer anyway? And why is that representation a logistical one? Well, I'm going to follow Galman Hartley in modeling an observer by a physical system to a certain degree of complexity. It's something they call an I-GOS, an information-gathering and utilizing system. And we're all I-GOSes, individually and collectively, but so are lots less sophisticated sorts of devices that we might build soon to be designed robots in any case these are all spatially localized systems where spatial localization may itself be a relative and their histories may therefore be idealized by time-like world classes that's the idea point so what about the viewpoint of such a an igus in this classical space-time framework Well, I think it's natural to take the viewpoint of a uniformly moving non-rotating ICUS as being a centered inertial frame. So we pick out the inertial frame by a time like he eats it parallel to its world line. And then we take it to be centered by putting the world line which coincides with Arana Gili's model of its uniformly moving history at the center for that inertial frame. So that's what's going to be the viewpoint point of one of these eye gusts. Well, how objective are those viewpoints? If the viewpoints aren't objective, then the perspectives associated with them presumably will lack that objectivity also.

25:00 We can talk about the invariance of those viewpoints. The centered inertial frame will be invariant in the temporal translations and uniform rotations, but it won't be invariant in the spatial translations or in the uniform velocity boosts. Now, we could get lots of these localized diversities with occupying non-centered industrial framework, of course, and that might widen the viewpoints into subjectivity, the collectives into subjectivity, as well as the automorphisms of the relevant structure. But I want to warn against the idea that simply enlarging automorphism group is going to increase to increase objectivity. I mean, some crystals are more symmetric than others, but you'll get it. They're all perfectly objective in that sensory character. So, it is an important idea, so if you're going to sleep, wake up. Objectivity, I think, objectivity of viewpoint has more to do with invariance of optical than it does with invariance under space-time symmetries. And the idea here is that a particular viewpoint it may be very hard for an iGUS to occupy your function. Try setting up an iGUS at the center of the sun. I wouldn't want to try it. I don't think you'd have much success in doing so. Or consider the interior of a black hole for the first 10th and minus 11th seconds of the Big Bang. There aren't going to be viewpoints accessible to iGUSs in those locations. And of course, the first example, provides me with a unique viewpoint and associated perspective. And so does yours. Okay. So we can, it seems, worry about the objectivity and viewpoints in this way. So let's get on to some more interesting applications. The first one is maybe not too interesting, given all that Hugh and others have said about this one. But I'll run through it quickly anyhow. And that's the objectivity of the earlier-later distinction. So, if... Sorry. Yeah. What do you mean by invariance of occupancy? Here is a viewpoint which may be occupied by IGAS number one, IGAS number two, IGAS number three. The more IGASs we can get into that viewpoint, the more invariant the occupancy of the viewpoint is. And that doesn't just mean lots and lots of replicas of the robots coming off the assembly line,

27:30 which makes supposedly identical robots. of construction that still have the right kind of organization to function as information going to be in the time of the system. So they're going to be like a family of inertial observers. Is that the idea that they occupy a non-centered frame? Yeah, right. Well, no. I mean, going back to the original case, we can hypothetically remove a particular that happens to have that viewpoint of that centered inertial frame and put the different in the same viewpoint. one replacement, rather than sprinkling lots of differently constituted IGUS's over the same non-centred initial frame. We can play out of this game. And they give different senses of increased objectivity. Yeah. Sorry, just on this, how do you know that an IGUS got himself to a viewpoint? We put it there. Is there another IGUS who's looking at that? Oh, no. No, we're conceptual and visual... Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, okay. So let's look at the objectivity early-later distinction. So if the temporal orientation were a basic feature of our space-time theories, or if I take it to still somewhat controversial, then we would have reason to believe in an objectivity early-later distinction because that will be invariant in all the viewpoints committed by those theories. But I don't think that is our situation. The earlier-later distinction may, however, even in the absence of any temporal orientation built into our basic, our most fundamental space-time theories, that still might be objective in a sense if it's drawn the same way from every viewpoint accessible to an IGUS. Now, you might initially think that that's a trivial truth because an IGUS is an information gathering and utilizing system which has a temporal orientation built into its very definition. But don't get hung up on that idea. What really matters is whether the internal early-related distinction is built into the definition of an eyegust all line up with one another. That's a crucial issue. And that is not a trivial truth that that is the case. I think that in our universe as far as we understand it today the barriers to a time reverse diverse which are provided by thermodynamic asymmetries that we do observe everywhere we look

30:00 throughout its history are actually much higher than those known to Balsam so it does seem like there's a lot of objectivity built into the early-lated-then distinction just because it is in fact extraordinarily difficult in our universe the way it's constituted construct, even conceptually, an i-gust that will function in time-reversed direction relative to the function of all other i-gusts. Okay. So you've got a kind of objectivity coming out of that. Now this is a much more challenging one, and I expect lots of disagreement on this one. So let's have some fun. Okay. Does time objectively pass? Well, Gödel famously argued that it doesn't, and indeed that time is unreal. because in the relativistic space-time there would be no success in nows to mark its collapse, no poliation, global poliation by space-like hypersurfaces. And what people have often done, at least in the philosophy and physics literature, is say, well, you know, you don't really need that to have a real time. We don't require any such space-time structure. And moreover, nothing objectively corresponds to time's passage. So, we enact time, nothing objectively corresponds to the passage of time, no problem. But I'm going to argue that the passage of time still may be objective to the extent that it's invariant under changes of viewpoints accessible to a wide variety of iguses. So how's that going to work? Well, initially and so far we've been looking at representations of iguses by time-wide worldwide. enough to give us the relevant viewpoints in this case. And I think that Jim Hartle had a better suggestion in his next little paper, The Physics of Now, where he presents an idealized model of an IGUS, which I think is capable of occupying a relevant kind of viewpoint. Not just a time-like world-like, but something different, something less, in a sense. So here's his model. Some of you may be familiar with this. This is a very crude eye gust, as he discusses in that type of panel. And this stuff over here is the external environment. And this is its metaphorical eye, which it scans the environment. What goes into P0? That's its experience register. Every proper time tour star, we're assuming we can idealize history by time-life.

32:30 It updates the contents of its experience register. And the contents of the experience rate is to go into this little processing of device labeled C, metaphorically, that's conscious processing. But this is just a robot, so that's just a metaphorical mistake. Just as P0 has new content at a ring total zero, the previous contents of P0 are P1, P1 is P2, P2 is P3, P3 don't. what goes into you, the unconscious processing, is a representation of what the environment is like now, one unit ago, two units ago, and three units ago. So the device now has the capacity to track changes in its experienced environment over time. It uses them to update and potentially revise its schematic model of its environment. And what its schematic model of its environment does also influences the conscious process in which issues and behavior. So it's a really prude, we're much more sophisticated than this. But the idea is that even with this much structure in a purely physical object, one has enough to make sense of an experience now and indeed the passage of time. So how's that going to work? Well, I've already told you this first bit. So how does it represent now? Well, the IGUS is now at proper time tour and its worldwide is represented by the context of the experience register at tour, at least as a first approximation. That's not going to be its final best representation, but that's the start. And how does the experience register, represent its contents as the IGUS is now? Well, by tokening throughout an interval from a time Torstar, the nonverbal tends to believe it is now Torstar. That's how it does it. The IGUS's viewpoint throughout that interval is just a segment of its world line during that interval. So the viewpoint's not the whole world line. It's that segment of its world line. And it changes, of course, as its history gets strung out along its world line. and it's perspective from that viewpoint it is image of the state of its environment that is now

35:00 so how does this eyeglass represent the passage of time I think it represents the lapse of time by process not by any particular representation in one of its registers but rather by the process of continually updating all the registers by moving their content sequentially down the line that's how it represents of the lapse of time. It does so because the lapse of the state of the environment at the moment towards zero is represented as being its state at an earlier and earlier moment than the now momentarily represented by the experience of it. Just parenthetically, it's a very poor representation of the passage of time. And when we think about the passage of time, we can represent to ourselves the future as well as the past. This thing can't do that, at least that's so far described. So, just to repeat, the IGUS's viewpoint throughout an interval of Robert-Time-Torstar is just a segment of its worldwide during an interval, and its momentary perspective then gives its representation of the state of its environment during Torstar, its image of its environment, of its present environment. Okay, so I'm trying to work towards the idea that maybe, by suitably gussying this up, we can give a defense of the idea that time objectively passes. controversial, I expect, for people to start to disagree. So far, we haven't got very well. Different diagrams are not going to find similar viewpoints, but they're very different changing bounds. Their images at times passage were different considerably. Even if they're sort of in the same place at the same time, they're looking at different directions, they have totally different sorts of ways of representing their environment, and so on. But, even with what Carter's given us so far, and cognitive disruptions are played with. The schematic model of the environment contained in the schema and the unconscious processing by which this is continually updating and updated. So in order for this thing to survive in a hostile environment, it better have a better model which includes more to its world than it is currently experiencing. And the contents of the experience rates can be affected by interaction with this continually updated schematic model of the environment. will be an occasion in which its unconscious calculation actually feeds back into its conscious

37:30 representation of its present state. That's not built into Hartle's model. You could easily do it, at least ideally. But even if that doesn't happen, even if it doesn't have, in its context, its present experience, something which is important from its sketchimatic model, thereby by revising what he otherwise would have experienced. Still, he's going to steer by a momentary schematic model of its extended environment. It's S now. Not just it's now, it's S now. It's schematic now, or another way of reading that S. It's subjective now, because we're going to have something more objective than this. So what he's doing now is building an internal model, constantly updating it. And for each little portion of its world line, there will be something which counts as its representation of the extended environment, not just what it has to be seeing at that time, or for that period. Okay. That's what it's got to do. It's not going to cease to exist very quickly. Oh, we already had that. Sorry. It went wrong. Okay. So now let's go a bit further towards the objective passage. Sorry. We get a bunch of these things shared in a common environment. They could gain predictive power by pooling information and resources and drawing all these pools up, making each of their personal schemata. If, and this is crucial, they remain close enough together to permit continued rapid communication, they can extend their individual S-NOWs to a shared representation. That's going to be an E-NOW. Well, I have E there for it. Extended now. Extended throughout the community. So what Hartle's IGAS has done is to update its schema and retort stuff. So all the members of this community need to do is to include a representation of this external or extended now in their individual schema with the same temporal tag as the contents of their experience register at that moment. Then each of the IGAS has continually updated the model, not just of the environment they of the whole community, because provided we've got this rapid communication, we can ensure a widespread continuum of accordance among the schemata. So now, we're getting closer to objective passage of time. Are we there yet? No, but we're getting there. Okay.

40:00 The extended or external or whatever, now, of such a spatio-temporary localized community, is a representation of the future of their environment. It's intersubjective, since it's shared by all methods. It would have no effect on this thing if viewpoints of eyeglasses within the community were exchanged, or if some or all of them were replaced in those viewpoints by any of a wide variety of very differently constituted eyeglasses. And all that makes objective representation by the E now. But, and this is crucial, same as the image does not guarantee objectivity of structure represented, if the image systematically misrepresents that structure. But this is where verbalists can say, oh, you've got nowhere. Because what is being represented by this email is being systematically misrepresented. That's not the way the world is in one of these general statistics. So I think that verbal, perhaps you, would remain completely unmoved by these considerations. I've given you an objective image, but there's nothing it objectively represents because it misrepresents Okay. Well, is that right? Maybe, maybe not. Whether the e-mail misrepresents the central structure depends on what and how one takes it to represent. So here we have to think carefully. I think it's a common place among cognitive scientists. The content of representation may be less than clear. You know, what does the frog's eye represent that thing whizzing past it as being? And here I think when Newton imposed his absolute He was just, you know, making explicit what we all believed anyway. I think that's kind of an interesting move on his part. I don't think that's true. He wasn't really reporting the common content of our vague temporal representation. He was explicating them, if you like, moving them in a certain direction. The content of the E now shipped by a community of titles like us at the time in any frame in which they were moving slowly is even vaguer. than the content of our representations of the changing present prior to new. I think it's so open that there's a huge number of equally acceptable ways of mapping that representation onto the fortune of our altavistic space occupied by that community of iguses. And under many of these, it correctly,

42:30 but imprecisely, represents its structure. So we don't have misrepresentation if we're sufficiently flexible about what the contents of the representation are. The objective now is what these all have in common. And times objective passages are those changes. So that's the best I can do to give you an objective passage of time under this approach. Now, you might ask, well, why do we need it? Who cares? And indeed, since I understand, we humans have discovered a different model for sharing out individual values. extending, not by extending a Newtonian email across all the space. That turned out to be a bad move when we started doing serious physics. Instead, we represent our changing environment and ourselves in a relativistic space-time that possesses no unique foliation by a space-like hypersurface, one of which could be considered the uniquely appropriate target for a shared external-bound representation. And certainly, for many purposes, that's a much better schematic model, but, and here, I'm going to stick my heels in a little bit, it doesn't distract significantly from the objectivity of the lapse of time in our world, if we elect to use this model rather than the other one. So I hope you'll disagree with that, and we can talk about it. How am I doing? Uh, I've just spoken at all. I'm using all the part now. Okay. I may need to speed up and miss things out. Let's get on to quantum theory, which is maybe more interesting. and of course quantum theory appears to threaten objectivity by the very language of all and measurements in which it's formulated and in response to that it's interpreters of objectuals and perspectival considerations so what I'm going to be interested in as you can tell from the line I'm taking is how objective are the perspectives which are in folk when we go perspectival in trying to understand quantum mechanics So here's two inadequate responses. Bignett's is pretty inadequate, as you all know. But I'll tell you why, from my perspective. He took the measurement problem with both the dilemma on each of his forms, quantum theory, and impaled unconsciousness. Did his unobserved friend observe the results of the quantum measurement? Or did Bignett's unconsciousness register the results only after observing his friend? What Bignett did, rather than opting for solipsism, to choose the first one might generously allow any consciousness to fulfill the observes

45:00 by the vital physics of all registering the results of the quantum measure by collapsing the wave packets. But, even choosing that form of the dilemma doesn't significantly enhance the objectivity of quantum phenomena. Since occupation of accessible viewpoints on these phenomena remains restricted to conscious beings. We can't have non-conscious eyeguses collapsing wave packets. That's just not an option here. So we've got a very available to us in trying to understand problem mechanics perspectivally this way. There's one more recent and more highly favored response that I think suffers the same fate, and that's David Merman's ethical interpretation, which I think is inadequate for basically the same reason. Again, I might be treading on toes here, so that would be fun to see people three. Okay. I won't read all that stuff. I take it that people are by and large familiar enough with moments in the interpretation that you could read that for yourself or know where it comes from or you can memorize it. Okay. So, if we're going to understand quantum mechanics as offering objective description of the non-conscious world, that description must provide expected for a viewpoint accessible to any eikos, conscious or not. And central to the Ithaca interpretation, the properties of correlata cannot be objectively described by quantum mechanics, which represents only that correlation to one another. Moreover, that representation is taken by Mermin to be available only to a conscious angus. But what is required of such an eikos is the ability directly to perceive its own underlying something that no unconscious I guess could do and it seems to me that Nerman's proposal recalls Bennett's discussion the Cartesian theater in which a conscious self becomes aware of the content represented by its material going by directly observing it from inside so I think the Ithaca interpretation fails to secure the objectivity of quantum mechanical description basically basically, because the only perspectives which are accessible on the Ithaca and separation are the perspectives accessible to conscious IGUSs, and that's not enough. Okay, more controversial, Everett and objectivity.

47:30 Well, the notion of IGUS, I think, was first introduced in Dalman's pursuing Everett's project of modeling measurement as the physical process within the quantum mechanics. and that at least promises to do better than Möhmann or Wigner by widening the class of viewpoints beyond those accessible only to conscious I-Gusses and the idea I think is to legitimate loose quantum mechanical talk of observers by constructing or finding I-Gusses as something like real patterns within a coarse-grained quantum mechanical family of decoherent history so that's the idea and I want you to think about how objective the viewpoint of such an igus would be, and thereby how objective would its perspective be. And here, I'm not quite sure what to say. I'll give you a few grounds for worrying, and then you can figure it out for yourself, whether this is a serious problem or not. Okay, what is a family of decoherent histories anyway? We know how to define it exactly, but we don't expect the interactions in the world to precisely single out one precisely defined of decoherent history. So we expect things to be a bit fuzzy. Do you think something exactly succeed in any finite time? And if you have to say, well, once we get close enough, go count it as being decoherent, then there's arbitrariness as to how close enough is and what the family's going to be. So there's imprecision and arbitrariness associated with the idea that an IGUS could be located within a particular histories. But I'm not sure how bad that is, because the same sort of issue comes up with representing eyeguses by time-wide worldlines in classical space-time theories, because there, you know, I'm bigger than I would have to be to be represented exactly by a time-wide worldline, and then which time-wide worldline you can choose to represent me by. So this might not be a serious problem. Similarly, even if we do pick a particular element of a family of eco-period histories and look for eyeglasses within it, how do we separate the eyeglasses from their environment? How do we make that distinction? Maybe that's going to involve arbitrariness. But again, I'm not sure how serious that worry is. And

50:00 presumably, if you had a really sophisticated model of a classical eyegash, you'd have the same problem. Where does the iBus stop and the environment begin? This last problem is a bit more worrying, though, I think. It seems that the iBus' viewpoints on this approach to understanding quantum theory will be very insular. It would be very hard for any particular iBus, stuck in its own element of family of decoherent history, to have a perspective, at least to use a perspective, on any of the other elements of that family. And if we don't have a unique decomposition into decoherent histories, it gets worse. Again, I'm not sure how worrying that is, but what is worrying to me is this. Objectivity requires interchangeability of viewpoints. So can you lift an igus from one element of one family of decoherent histories and plunk it down in an element of perhaps that same family, perhaps a different family. It's not that you can do that. Insofar as the viewpoint is not interchangeable, you're losing objectivity, as they've made to do that. Yeah. This is something you said, but I just don't understand what that means. Which bit? I mean, just even classically, what you get by taking one I guess So what is that that it's unproblematic classically, but in the whole part of the community? If we make enough idealizations classically, we can, for example, represent an igus just by a time like world line. So then we just say, OK, igus number one is represented just by a time like world line A. igus number two is represented by a time like world line B. Then we just switch one and two to A and B. We can do that. Not the physical world, but the conceptually we can do that. The worry about, in case of quantum mechanics, is that what makes a family of decoherent histories? Decoherent depends on rather subtle considerations, concerning the form of interactions. And I'm worried that those considerations are so subtle that the idea of interchanging like this is going to collapse pretty soon. This is a worry. Maybe it can be addressed. You know, it's no question in my mind.

52:30 Is there another way of saying the same thing, or maybe something close, is that the identity of an igus is tied up with which branch is it? When an igus sort of splits, and then one igus has gone one way, another one has gone the other way, you can't switch them because that's part of their original idea. That's the unknown work. But now I do, thank you. I'm not sure, in the end, how worried I should be about that. But I'm not sure where it should be by any of these things. So I'm just throwing them out there for people to worry about and seeing whether they can get over their worries. OK, so let's switch over. What about information-directed approaches? OK, so you're probably all familiar with Chris Brooks' idea. I won't read the quote there. Those of you who are not familiar might want to read it. So what becomes of objectivity on information-geretic approaches? And the obvious questions that people already asked are information about what, and more importantly, information for whom. And it's going to be the for whom part that I'm particularly worried about. How are we doing? Ah, 42 minutes. OK, so I'll just forget about the information about what, and go on to the information for whom. OK, who are Alice and Bob? them. If trapping in information requires consciousness, we're in the same subject as both as Wigner and Merman. Okay. A quantum information interpreted can't provide a physical characterization of an eyeglass using quantum mechanics, having rejected its ability to give an informative representation of the structure of any quantum system. And that inability, I think, puts severe pressure on a quantum information theory to take one of the well-traveled powers of more traditional interpretations of quantum information as he began by rejecting. And Rettians, for example, will no doubt eagerly offer their services as guides to escape their clutches, quantum information theorists may retreat towards the quantum theory. So welcome, as well. If the quantum information theorist is happy maybe use a classical terminology, then he's taking Ford's line. But that opens him up to problems, including Bell's well-known problem.

55:00 Now, I think that Rob Svekian's talk this morning was one instance of the kind of thing one can say to try to dissolve Bell's problem. And I found that particularly interesting for that reason. But the problem that Bell noted was this. Without observations, it necessarily divides the law into two parts, the part which is observed and the part which does the observing. The result depends in detail on just how this division is made. That's where what you would think is getting real interesting. But no definite prescription for it is given. All that we have is a recipe which is a practical visualization to sufficiently unambiguous practical purposes. Okay, so I think that the information theorist is in trouble here. In order to say who Alice and Bohr are, he seems forced to give classical descriptions of their viewpoints, but any such choice among the possible ways of doing that is both arbitrarily or defined within the very theory whose objectivity is the state, and the image from such a viewpoint mystic content that seems that it just consists of dispositions of quantum systems to elicit various responses in classical operators. There's not much to that image. Okay, so there's a challenge to quantum information theories. This stuff is perhaps not terribly interesting. I'll just give you the sketch of what I would time here. A theory itself offers perspectives on the world. When our theories change, we change our perspectives. Entertaining a theory is adopting a perspective. So what becomes of objectivity? Well, the obvious thing to say is objectivity is invariant on the changes of theoretical perspective. If some feature of representation of one theory gets preserved when you make the move to the next theory, and that keeps on happening, then you seem to have a certain invariance associated with change of perspective provided by changes from one theory to another. The worry there is going to be, well, how objective are any of those perspectives? How objective is the perspective offered to you by any physical theory? And you can see how social constructivists and people like that are going to say, well,

57:30 you know, what you end up saying when you construct a physical theory is so conditioned cognitive nature and the structure of your society and all that, it doesn't constitute a very objective perspective in the first place. So a mere invariance on the change of not very objective perspective is not going to give you much value in the way of genuine or full-bodied objectivity. Okay, so I'll give you a lot to think about. Simon Rudd less. And so I'll leave it there and see what happens. Thank you. Okay, so I think it's Paul, Matthias, Harry, Ron, him, and Steve, and Hugh. So I've got a pair of problems which I suspect really come to the same thing. You characterize the perspective as a viewpoint and associated system of representation. The perspective is the system of representation. It is the system of representation. The viewpoint is the viewpoint from which that system of representation is particularly natural. The worry is that systems of representation have to be interpreted. That's the first worry. comes the same is the way if I got it right you're putting this is that systems of these systems of representations provide images and we get objectivity you know relative to a range of IGOS's or whatever if we get the same images but we need a standard for what counts as the same image and I think these two come to the come to the same thing. Well, let's see. Any system of representation needs to interpret it. Well, you could say that for it to be a system of representation, you already have to come to you to interpret it. Otherwise, it's just a, let's see, some sort of formal mapping. And if you build in enough to make it a representation rather than just some sort of isomorphism. They've already done each other. Well, but then we're dependent on a prior notion

1:00:00 of what constitutes a representation. And you've got two EIGOSs, and boy, they sure look like they're built the same, but I read one one way, and you read one the other way, and we have them, we interpret them as representing things very differently. I think that's a good point. I'm not sure it's a criticism. No, I'm not sure it's a criticism either, but I see this as something that still needs to be worked in. Yeah, I agree. What were they the same? Does that come to the same thing? Well, if we have understood what it is to give a representation in a full-fledged sense, then I think that would have answered the questions. I don't mean to offer this in the spirit of, you've got to take anything back. It's offered in the spirit story with respect to these questions. I agree, and this is only a very shallow level of analysis, and that's a good way to do it. Let's go on to the next one. Yeah, I wanted to push a little on the first part, the objectivity of passage. So, I mean, here's the first stab of trying to respond to this. Somebody might say, well, so much of particular igases, so it's not objective, because, you know, I mean, this might very well be how schematically somewhat, how certain systems get the idea, but I mean, it depends on the specific structure of these igases that you get, so it's not objective enough, because you could imagine a different igase that does things differently, either lacks these multiples, or, I mean, or, I wonder if this were possible, you have some crazy apparatus that is really good at predicting on present surveillable circumstances and subconsciously gets these predictions for multiple times, but they are fed into its consciousness in the wrong order. And then the conscious represents, so consciously, such an aegis could get the sense of passage of the opposite direction. And so this might not be physically possible, the prediction you might, I don't know what they're going to say. Well, let's see. Hartley himself does consider a different way of organizing experience in the same article.

1:02:30 And I guess what I would expect to say, or I would expect to think Hartley before saying anything, is that which way of organizing experience is going to be available to eyeglasses is going to depend rather critically on the contingent circumstances in which they So that, even though perhaps one could describe some possible world, even if there's an area in which there could be eyeglasses to function very differently. The ones that are going to get by most easily, function most easily, in a wider set of circumstances in our world, are going to be ones pretty much like this, although more sophisticated. So that's what I would expect to say, but I'd have to think before saying it. So now I'm starting to lose my grip on one degree, because now it's the question of which iguses get by the best, and before it seemed to be sometimes just a conceptual exercise, I get to plug in whatever igus I want to. Remember what I said, interchangeability of octopuses, or invariance of octopuses, it doesn't just mean plonking it down wherever you like, it means plonking it down wherever like and have any function when you've looked it down there. So function is part of the exchangeability of all the places. I have, I think, a fairly serious worry about the whole approach to this. Why do you need to use iguses? I mean, here's why. I mean, I think I can conceive of a possible world in which there's no iguses, but plenty of objective physical facts. So if your idea is we wanted to find out what objectivity is, why, you know, kind of chain yourself to this notion of an agonist if you wouldn't have to? That's a really good question. In a sense, the sort of objectivity I'm giving you is maybe less than the kind of objectivity you tell yourself to in describing that scenario. I think that's right. So to the extent that the notion of objectivity you're always interested is the one that you've helped yourself to, then perhaps you will not find whatever you're very terribly interested. An alternative answer would be to say, look, you're talking about objectivity at sort of the end of the scale.

1:05:00 but there's a spectrum of objectivity here and we can get degrees of objectivity further from the end of the scale where all this talk about IGAS comes in I think that's all I want to say at the moment but I obviously have to think more about it because I do understand why you said what you did one thing I've heard to me that you might say is that I'm interested in modeling something like possible scientific objectivity in our world and that I'm much easier to swallow. Perhaps I could say in defense of this approach, your ideal of objectivity seems to be getting almost conscientious, it's inaccessible to us. I hope not. And given that whenever we theorize about our world, we're doing so from the perspective of that theory. Any theory's attempt to say what the world is really like that extent, perspectival, and so on. So to genuine objectivity in an ideal, but we may not reach it. But I find that a strange thing to say. Yes. I mean, suppose quantum theory is true, you know, ever-ending theory is true or something like this, but the world doesn't have any kinases in it. I mean, see, I don't get where the lack of objectivity is or why that would be a Kantian world that I'm describing or anything like that. of the metaphysical world where one of our particular theories was true. And it doesn't seem to be a kind of highly idealistic, you know, never to get to objectivity. So it seems to me, on the first side, that the world you're describing has to be sufficiently different from ours, that what we say about it might not be so interesting. don't we know that the few fluctuations in the initial parameters of the universe wouldn't be possible it doesn't strike me that these worlds are far off from lives in a reasonable sense well anyway I'm going to let the matter drop I think well you can have a think about it which is what I wanted to get out of the way I have three fingers on this I won't allow any more so it's cold

1:07:30 Very, very briefly, would either of you be willing to address this problem by introducing the eidosis counterfactually? I don't see why that would change anything off the top of my head. Well, if you counterfactually then, you've turned this universe without eidosis into it, into one which counterfactually does have them into it. You have to introduce them as non-perturbing Ideal points, but we need that kind of idealization in physics all the time Yeah, but you don't have to I mean for the motion to come back. I'm sorry. You know, I don't look, this has got to be short. I've got my answer. The answer is no. Let's go on to the next one. I think I could be able to say one second. Thank you. So you have a . Richard, I too was worried about your use of the term objectivity. For what you're getting out of the kind of invariance we have as a result of the way the world is normal. You know, the only kind of ideas you can have is, say, one which, you know, point in one particular temple direction. It seems to me that using the term objectivity there is for people that I think we've both forgot as being on the dark side, as being people who want objectivity of a simple passage or direction of time in some much stronger metaphysical sense. And so I think there's room to change in our terminology. And you could easily illustrate it, for example, involving up and down, in the constructive world, in which, for the 21 times, we're becoming capital at one end None of us want to think the fact restores the viewpoint of the surface. I think there was some deep metaphysical communication between us. So whatever it is, you may have given us something interesting, an interesting kind of physically imposing meaning, but it hasn't given us objectivity in our own metaphysical system. Okay. Well, how about a new name for this one? Yeah, well, that's what the new system is. It's a workshop of it. Okay, okay. That's really what we're thinking about. Thank you. This is great. Yossi? Yeah, let me give you some comments here. It seems to me that maybe I'm on the dark side, but...

1:10:00 Objective, I mean, it's very simple. It's something that belongs to the object. Property, whether relational, going crazy. And it seems to me that the perspective is more the epistemology. you want to learn about what is objective and I think a lot of the problem that you raise would be much easier to deal with if you think about it this is the epistemology maybe there are some system that you want to take or some notion of relevance or some representation that are more constructive in finding out what belongs to the object whether it's a relational property or intrinsic property, but that's not the definition of object because, I mean, you can have objective things even if there are no perspective or only one perspective, I mean, that you can see from. I mean, it seems to me that that's related to some of the comments. And you don't have to be a Kantian. It doesn't have to be something that's unachievable. I mean, I think we may agree that Kant perspective are good in learning about the properties of the object. Okay, I don't respond to that. I don't think about it. Well, we've got more. I mean, the main queue continues with Ron. And then we have Steve and Q, and I'd like to say, uh okay uh so whether in very urgent and quick fingers on this or shall we continue just one that i mean i thought you could simply say that you're not sharply distinguishing between an epistemological and an ontological aspect in your notion of perspective because in your opening remarks you wanted to link of the perspective to something in the world, I mean, to sew it into the sort of objective structure of the world. So what could you simply say that there is no sharp dichotomy between the epistemological, I mean, the perspective as purely epistemology and, you know, the ontological?

1:12:30 I'm not sure I like that idea. I think that is a bit worrying to take that word. It's a bit what? Worrying to take that word. my physiology and my ontology separate until I see how the work is together. Okay, Raul. Yeah, back to you. Now it's catching up with what I want to say, but I think one thing in your talk is that you left the notion of objectivity pretty open. I mean, you said things about, you know, there may be degrees or not full-blooded enough, but you didn't pin it down that's right and I think what one notion that people have objective is in fact that it transcends all project all perspectives right okay and what you've given us is a attempt I would say a new or not going to do but a different concept of objectivity which basically boils down to a kind of inner subject or a coordination of different perspectives. The point is that putting a number of perspectives together doesn't transcend perspectives. So that's why people are worried that you're giving an account of objectivity, but it's not the one that people want, which is the transcendent one. I think I'm really right. This set of reactions was very interesting. was a suggestion by Denton Redhead that we can understand objectivity in terms of invariance. And then, but that's not even going to work if we take the symmetries involved in invariance to be associated with perspectives. And they were very free about what we can as a perspective. I wouldn't have timed up on that. But I think you're right. If you start off thinking that you can understand objectivity in terms of invariance, downgrading your standards. Invariance doesn't do it because there's no such thing as invariance. There's only invariance with respect to. Then you've got a perspective. Yeah, I mean, you could say trivially, invariance with respect to everything, but that's not going to be wrong. No, that's not what they find out. Yeah, no. I think I'm from Alexei. Yeah, just a comment on this. This actually, to me, resembles the second of Paul's on the identity on the identification principle which means back to your eiffel tower example

1:15:00 this was my question but no it's a finger uh when you have the two observers measuring their little towers against the big tower the only way you can say there is a symmetry group which actually connects all these things is that because you identify the i the big eiffel tower seen by one with the big eiffel tower seen with it by another there is only one real eiffel tower in there is there is this identification procedure which allows you to to connect to connect the perspectives uh without the identification and this is this is a pure postulation you're saying they are observing the same object here uh so so without this identification by postulation there's there's no way to do to construct the whole building okay so in a sense the whole idea of trying to uh say what objectivity is in terms of variance is presupposing objects such that one can you imagine you know this in a way is what to ron has just called transcendental It transcends the collection of different perspectives, something which is more than just a collection of observers, you know, it's identical across the observers. So, let's have Steve as a finger. Yeah, I guess my question is really kind of tagged it up in this recent set of figures, particularly Dossi's. I'm trying to understand, I am a little bothered by the sort of technological, ontological divide, and it seems to pose a special problem with respect to the reality of the objectivity of space-time and then a passage, let me qualify this by saying I'm not quite sure what you were getting after that when you brought up the girl example, whether you thought it was supposed to be some sort of local notion of passage or global notion of passage. But, you know, more simply, Well, you just didn't make out of the space time to keep considering just an idealized, uniformly

1:17:30 accelerated, I guess, OK, the natural portion of the space time associated with that, I guess, is going to be only one of the Midler wedges. So it's not going to be the entire space time. But yet, you wouldn't want to say that space time is not objective, or you wouldn't want to. I wouldn't think you'd want to just. Right. So I don't quite understand that. There is an epistemic limit, conceivably, although I would know if I would associate it with that a particular bunch. In other words, there are things that can't reach a uniformly accelerated observer for certain portions of space-time. Right. The space-time is nonetheless real. Sure. I mean, I wasn't... I don't know if I was saying those conclusions that time is not real. No, I know. I thought you were going to the other direction, but I don't quite see how you get that from you. I was trying to come up with a limited defense of the view that time objectively passes. And its limitations were certainly limitations to a community of eyeglasses moving throughout some interval, throughout some region of space time in such a way that they were able throughout that, for that whole region to communicate extremely fast. So, for example, just having people strung out across our galaxy is already violating that because it's too far away. And then if you start having people uniformly accelerating from very late in time relative to other members of the community, then that's already violated the conditions under which this notion of objective action should be applicable. So I think you're taking it to extremes in which this approach would clearly fail, but that's what you'd expect in these limitations. So objectivity is highly relativized, then it's highly relativized as a way it's going Well, that's one way to think about it. But another way to think about it would be to say that each community of iguses which satisfy the conditions that I've outlined would have a relevant motion. And they'll get to the back of time,

1:20:00 but they wouldn't agree on instance. Right. But you're going to run into trouble with the overlap, I can guess. It wasn't trouble. I mean, if the two communities tried to pour as well, then they would have trouble. Yeah. The idea is just that one, I guess, can be considered as a number of two different local communities, so there's one guy on the edge Oh, especially, yeah. Yeah, okay, that's a good one. Right, and again, that's sort of what you'd expect. There's an interesting breakdown of what some principles of transitivity of our communities. That's right. Yeah, that's a good question. So maybe objectivity is somewhat less than you might have thought when I first had my idea. Okay. I see a danger with saying, okay, here's this group of iguses, and we know this is an object of good group because it fits with these theories that we have. like you referred to the second off-road dynamic. But we know that one of the reasons that big conceptual steps haven't been taken in the past is because people weren't considering other iguses. So to say, well, we have these theories, so they support this group of iguses, so therefore they support our theories, is going to actually keep you from moving on to a new perspective. So I sort of see a sort of dangerous circular logic there. I'm not sure about circular. I mean, it's for reinforcing the iguses. It's conservative. I think that's right. I mean, there's something retrospective about it. Oh, well, you might justify them sort of thinking that way up all along. And you don't want to be too justified, because otherwise you won't change the way you think and make progress. That's true. perhaps it's one of those pieces that even if it's correct, should not be widely known. Just on the issue of time, forgive me for answering asking a question as a talk I didn't attend I can just claim I gave the answer in about 15 minutes I'm running on British time you see an hour later but what was wrong say with a threefold distinction here

1:22:30 ordinary common sense understanding which isn't very metaphysically heavy nor physically significant significance and then metaphysical significance. Now on the physical significance, objective quay physical significance, it seems to me that a foliation with respect to which, say, the microwave background is isotropic defines a perfectly cosmos-wide standard of foliation of the universe. Why not set your clocks to that? Why are you using Einsteinian subalternity is really the question. It's perfectly objective to do it the way I just said. No problems with from large relative velocities and so forth. That's true, but one can imagine, that's not obvious how this would come with that, one could imagine that a community like that that was moving with relative, small relative velocities within the community, but some enormous velocity could respect that could be better found in the nation, and they might adopt a different notion of the objective advantage of that. Well, they might, but it remains a standard available to all, I guess, regardless. Sure, yes, yes. subjective. What's wrong with it is only it doesn't carry any great metaphysical weight. It can't even be seen as physically fundamental in doing with the small scale. Okay, so in this case that will be relatively easy to extend our notion of the objective passage of time in that way, given, well, I don't know. There's nothing subjective about it. I mean, you say allot. It's not allot. It's the cosmos wide. I'm starting from pre-Newtonian time, assuming that people before Newton had never worried about whether there was such a thing as a spatial and universal instant, but had some working conception of a common time which passed, and they all thought it was passing in the same way, and they all thought that when they were referring to now, referring to the same instinct, but they weren't too clear about how far that went spatially because they never thought of that. So starting from that, we could extend that notion to your cosmic climax. So we could say that's just a further extension of this pre-Newtonian notion. And I agree about that in no metaphysical way, but then perhaps there shouldn't be no physical way in the first place. Right. I just don't quite understand. What is the issue

1:25:00 Well, I guess I've never understood why people wanted to think that time objectivity passed. So I'm trying to do my best to see what one could say that would justify one in drawing that conclusion. What motion of objectivity would give you that? So I find that sort of interesting point here. I guess my conclusion, I'm not sure if you heard this part, was that we don't have to that. We don't want to. I mean, we've now got a richer stock of space-time theories within which we can talk about local time and match up local times in many more different ways, so we don't need to proceed that way anymore. I mean, we do not do it. So, I just wanted to comment that Berth and Roscoe, after he introduced numbers, like number three is the performance class of all triples, and then totally, I think in our knowledge of the external world, the chair, he took the example of the chair, is that The whole observer's perspective is on the chair. That was for him the chair. Of course. Thank you. Maybe we both wrote for the same reason. He wasn't talking about ISIS. You know, it's very well formed. I guess I started going back to basics. I'm wondering whether you mentioned the perspective in a sort of well-defined variety of cognitive perception. I mean, it's sort of rooted in the spatial case, where I take it, a perspectival really modifies the notion of representation. A perspectival representation in the space is a representation that's relativized to a location orientation instead of axis in the space. And that generalizes in a relatively restrictive way to a temporal perspective, a temporal perspective. There's, you know, again, just a perspective on time, relativized to a particular point in time. So notions like past and future will turn out to be a straightforward perspective. I think in my, you know, conceptual anthropology,

1:27:30 I think it gets tied up with the idea of observer-independent. because we had this idea, partly from talking to other people, that certain features of the way we perceive the world depend on us rather than on features intrinsic to the common space. So the notion of observer independence then becomes something like a representation of the same space by population now because that's purportedly the common object of cognition there is one that's, you know, relativized to a sort of user interface. And I think, you know, I think probably one way to try to kind of build up the notion of perspective from its facial application is to try to come to some, you know, better understanding of what a user interface is that allows, you know, differently situated, Even, you know, a relatively thick notion of observatory, differently situated, but having as a common object, cognition, something that they can both get information about. By, you know, kind of enriching this notion of the user interface and seeing whether we can get something going there. But the idea that there's some kind of, you know, notion of objectivity that has to do with reality in some kind of positive or perspective-independence sense, I don't think you can get to from what I take to be the root notion of perspective, I guess I'm sort of, I think it should be an epistemological notion or explicitly representation of objectivity. Okay, I'm not sure I understand how thinking about her about user inspection could help. Could you try and explain that to me so I can understand it better? No, not necessarily. I'm ready to end up with any other advice. Okay, but what are you suggesting, though, that the notion of perspective struggles to go far away from its spatial roots? No, I don't think it struggles. In fact, Paulson's recent book makes a pretty good attempt, I think, at talking about measurement of a certain sort of perspectival representation. And that would be one way to do it. I've tried to do it in a different way, but I keep asking if I didn't make it a little faster. One last question from Robert C. Coffee.

1:30:00 So I just wanted to point out a family resemblance between your musings on objectivity and a particular approach to getting objectivity in quantum theory. And this approach goes by the slogan of It From Bit, which was John Wheeler's slogan. So its proponents would be people in the deep learning program, Wojciech Zurek, and in particular I'm thinking of one of his students, Robin Bloom. And so I'm most familiar with his work. So Luke Cahote tries to define objectivity and quantum theory as things that are redundantly encoded in the environment. So the idea is that if one particular subsystem of the environment has information about the system you're interested in, if measuring that system in the environment would tell me what the state of the system I'm interested in. So that's what it is to have information. And if I could do that for lots of different pieces of the environment, state of that system is objective. it strikes me that the difference between your approach and this approach is that here they just have information gathering systems rather than gathering and utilizing. So I would ask you what's so important about utilizing the definition of objectivity? And secondly, there's no requirement that the systems that have information be in any way conscious. You can talk completely meaningfully about a system having information about another just by virtue of its internal state being correlated with that or the other. And you don't need it to be conscious. So I guess I would just put that out there as, you know, why consciousness and why utilizing? Not consciousness, for me. I don't think that's really important. It should be removed from the relevant working notion that I've done. So utilizing is deeper, I think. I think that when we get to worries about what is it to represent something, whether you know whether something does represent something, we don't use the information. It's going to be largely intended for representation if it would be deployed. So I can do anything with the using class. So what's wrong with the definition that if there's a measurement I can do on this system that would tell me everything I could come to know about this system, then this system contains information about that? So what's wrong with that notion of this system having information about the others? You can use it the right way.

1:32:30 But I'm not sure that you want to go on from saying that this information ain't so vulcan saying you'll have information about that one, to saying that this system represents or represents the content of that system. I don't think I want to go to representation, even though I might be happy to have information, at least in a pretty shallow sense of information which doesn't require very sophisticated cognitive Well, we've got two fingers, from Janann and from Ron. I'm sorry, I mean I think one of the things to say here is that the state of our body contains lots of information, that in no sense, you know, makes a bunch of people, or these slides will fly out. You know, add to your goals, and so on. I think you can't, that won't help. question is what's wrong with just making your definition of objectivity encoded somehow as opposed to something that you can use I mean that that's the question I agree there's a distinction to be made I just wonder why objectivity is defined in terms of there are many systems out there that could all utilize that information, that's the question. Well the notion of information doesn't do it either because there is no such thing as just information. It's information that's coded in a certain way which comes right out of the shaman. So the idea is to get information you're always creating a perspective in which you can measure what you're doing. So that doesn't get you Okay, so we're actually on a row, but maybe we should have a quick break. Do you want a general discussion? Well, we've had a discussion specifically on a row on the topic of Richard's talk, and maybe you would want to widen the theme of the discussion a bit. We could just continue widening the discussion to everything, or we could have a quick coffee break and then do that. Well, there's a real coffee.

1:35:00 Does anyone need some coffee now? Do we want to make your own discussion off of this? Because there have been, there is a bunch of discussion. I mean, we... Shall we continue maybe another 15 minutes to see if there are other things, and then we'll call it today. I still have to do this. No, no, no, no. Oh, happy. Happy, happy. Happy, happy. Thank you.