M Wright, C McLarty / discussions: JL Bell, C McLarty & M Wright (contd.)

0:00 ...and still has some connection with the way that one interacts with the objective world and with the real world. And that's another important... I mean, I think that is finding the constraint on mathematics. The what? Well, the inner of the objective world. That's why mathematics... Why is that more of a constraint on mathematics than on biology or physics or chemistry? Well, because biology... Oh, we're having a... Oh, can you show us deep here, are we? Okay, right. Good suggestion. Yes, yes, exactly. It's almost a direct, what Galileo said that mathematics is a lot. We have no idea how the brain produces it. Well, you know, I mean, there are these really impossible questions if you really want to at some deep level. How that mass, oh, I don't know, the huge... These huge numbers of molecules interact to produce something simple in consciousness, let alone the question of what consciousness is, right, as given, you know, as opposed to the objective, and how this is, there's billions of them. It's just that mathematics offered a way of describing something that seemed to have been given. ...given in presentation. And philosophy, good philosophy, as you wrote about a guy at the, you know, phenomenologist, who did at least take that problem seriously. Well, there have been others who took that problem seriously, unfortunately. I don't. No, no, no. I mean the recent philosophers. I don't mean the present analytic philosophers. No, no, no. No, but there are people like... I'm concerned at that level that they're just bullshit. But there have been people, and I think their answers have been extremely... It's hasty and premature, but there have been people like, I'm thinking for instance of Boehm and Heineken, who did take that issue very seriously, who wanted to take, well no, no, no. No, no, no, no, what I mean is they're not mainstream philosophers. They're physicists who became philosophers. Oh, no, no, absolutely. But Bohm was a serious physicist, even though he was an Oppenheimer student who got fired, you know, in Princeton because... No, no, no, no, I didn't mean... I meant in terms of orthodox philosophy. No, no. Businesses who have become philosophers, were philosophers perhaps at the beginning, at the moment. And highly. Highly. He's a very close personal friend of mine. Jerry was a student of his. He was indeed, yeah. I'm going to see him in Paris. Ah, you've got a contact address for him! I've been trying to get hold of him for the last, yeah, because I lost, I contacted him when I was first here, but then completely lost trace of him.

2:30 Now I've got his address, yes. Oh, good. Is he still in Betty Claremont? I'll show you. Oh, you must, because I'd really want to get hold of him. I'd want to invite him here, because he'd love to meet Bill again. I mean, they got on like a house on fire in 1989, 1990, when they went to... Did you meet Jericho Chariot? No, you did, actually, without... Because he was at the 1989 Cambridge meeting, he was that little chubby Armenian guy who had published a couple of papers in Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, and a very lovely paper on how one really ought to do the orthomodular analysis. He gambled two flats away. Real Armenian. He was pitiful. He was a very good friend of mine. He published a couple of very nice papers. He did one very philosophical paper on simplicial sets. And he would really, Bill really took to him, he thought he was a good thing, and he was. But the problem was, he was classic, because I knew two people in my life like this. One who, compulsive gamblers, absolutely compulsive. I knew one guy who actually almost destroyed me because he was my business partner. And now I go off on a tangent on this. But he took me, well, he was just stopped in time, literally, but when he was back in the Czech for 28,000 pounds. Thank you for watching. Far more than even alcoholism, they become so adept at lying, at conceit, at concealing their motives, it's much worse, much worse than aeronautics, much worse. No, I know it too. I know, you've had experience, it's awful. Of all the addictions it's the most corrosive and terrible. I'm so sorry to hear it because I've had two people in my life and this Jerry was one and this other guy nearly destroyed me completely. But Jerry I don't... I don't see Jerry gaffling away his sister and you know... At the moment he's in... He was a very good, he was a card player and he played a lot in London clubs and was very good. I had him over because we knew each other very well when he was a student. Such a waste. It was. Such a waste. Anyway, I talked to him recently. We were going to see him. I hope we can talk for a couple of hours. Well, if you've got his number, I'd like to see him.

5:00 I do. In fact, while we're here, I'll give him a ring. I'd love to see him again. He's still around. Good. Good. And he's still just working as an accountant for... I don't know what he's doing. I think he lives in this system. I don't think he... When he lost those two classes... He gambled those away, didn't he? Now, if you really want to organize everything, the idea that you actually have ensembles that you can't distinguish the elements, and they're only distinguished by plurality, there is no other way of organizing it except combinatorially. You can't talk about all the kinds of dots, the key dots, and that's why... That's why category theory was the way of organizing that notion. Now Bill saw that, and he didn't articulate it, but I remember when I was... that's a brilliant insight, and it's one that isn't quite brought out, I believe, in his book. You have to understand about this, hang on, what you have to tell me is being hung up on grass.