Right.

He never asked them to do that.

He never thought you could do that.

In fact, he thought it was manifest in the examples he was talking about that you can't do it, and that's what so upset him, [laughs] right? He's like, um, okay.

So it wasn't an issue about superluminal signaling.

This also is just to emphasize, Einstein thought if you accept what Copenhagen says, that's a threat to relativity.

He did not think it implies superluminal signaling.

Mm-hmm.

Please.

Okay.

So this comes in various acts, historical acts.

I think there'll be some history here that almost nobody listening to this is aware of.

Historians of physics are aware of it, but it's not usually talked about.

So we're gonna start in 1905, the Annus Mirabilis, when Einstein developed, proved that there were atoms and developed the special theory of relativity and proved E equals MC squared, and on top of that, really began quantum theory with his paper on the photoelectric effect.

So let's just begin there.

Sure.

And I think one question that is often asked is, what is metaphysics? And given that metaphysics is closely related to physics, and this is a conversation about what philosophy is, and you have written extensively about what metaphysics is and the relationship to physics, maybe before we depart physics, I should ask you how metaphysics came to be and how it's related to physics.

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm, I've probably told you this story, but I'll tell it again.

Um, I've told it many times.

[chuckles] It, it astonishes me a bit that, 'cause it's so simple, that people haven't taken this to heart.

Um, the term metaphysics did not exist in antiquity.

It wasn't a thing.

Um, it, it just didn't convey, it wouldn't convey anything to Plato or Aristotle or so on.

And I'm wondering if we can look at that problem and think about maybe how you answer it, and then how somebody who doesn't agree with you answers it and see if, if it really is maybe like a, a problem or a, a different use of logic there or just intractable, an intractable disagreement about intuitions.

But unpack that thought

experiment because this is really interesting.

Good.

So let me just walk through that paper and so people can understand the nature of the argument there.

The point in that paper is that What it is to be a Turing machine running a certain program on a certain set of data is quite precisely defined.

And it's defined at a very, very, very, very, very abstract level.

And this is supposed to be, well, it's a good thing if you're doing pure theory of computation.

It's probably best to just get your definition.