Two interesting talks
So there are two interesting talks (or good sounding talks, anyway!) coming in Brisbane in the next week. The first is on Friday this week, and is as much a philosophy talk as anything else:
The Matrix as Metaphysics
Are we living in a Matrix? And if so, is our perception of the external world illusory? Many people, including philosophers from Descartes to Morpheus, say yes: if we’re in a Matrix, then the ordinary objects that we seem to see don’t exist, and we’re radically deluded. I say no: even if we’re in a Matrix, ordinary objects still exist, and most of our beliefs about the external world are correct. Instead, we can see the Matrix hypothesis as a metaphysical hypothesis about the underlying nature of our world: one according to which the physics of our world is computational.
The speaker is Prof. David Chalmers from ANU, and the one hour talk starts at 4pm, after which there’s going to be a discussion for an hour, followed by food! It sounds ever so slightly wacky, but it will probably spark lots of interesting discussion, so great! I don’t know exactly what will be discussed, or on what level - guess we’ll just have to wait and see! There was an article some time back that purported to prove that either the Universe was finite (or was it infinite?) or we live in a (the) Matrix - I can’t find the reference now and never read it at the time, so that’s all I’ve got.
The other talk is the BrisScience series on Monday featuring Brian Schmidt, also from ANU, about the past, present and future of our Universe. Unfortunately, I’m not able to make it, but it should be an excellent talk for anyone interested in astronomy and cosmology! It starts at 6:30pm and features wine and nibblies afterwards! (Not that, as a grad student, free food is my only thought!)
A good week for expanding your physics brain!
Update: BrettW has pointed out a summary of the talk on Prof. Chalmers’ website. Well worth a bit of prereading, I think! I have thoughts already, but I’ll hold off until the talk and discussion 
illuminating science » Stars to Brains conference Says:
[…] The second day, however, started to delve more into the philosophy side of things. The first talk was a fascinating discussion about what drives our personalities and what role emotion plays in the brain (I’ll summarise this one later). The next talk was from David Chalmers, who gave the fabulous “Matrix as metaphysics” talk here at UQ recently. He gave quite a good talk about what steps we need to take in order to develop a science of consciousness - in particular, developing some quantitative way of recording our internal thoughts. No easy feat, but it was good to see a philosopher applying something concrete to their ideas and research. […]
illuminating science » Philosophy Time Says:
[…] I went in the hope of an interesting lecture on the nature of time, implications for the universe, and so on. I have to confess, however, I was quite disappointed. In contrast to David Chalmers talk on The Matrix, which was rigorous and very logical, I found that the philosophy presented here was more of semantics and language than of real substance. What does it mean for the past to “exist”? How do you define “now”? If you say “only the present exists”, what are you implicitly assuming doesn’t exist? I confess I really couldn’t follow much of the talk - I just wasn’t up on the jargon - but I really didn’t see how any of this contributes to our understanding of the universe, or consciousness, or our minds. […]
I’ve seen David Chalmers give that talk a couple of times. It’s a great discussion and Chalmers is pretty cool. He has a writeup on his website that also appeared on the official Matrix website. I definitely recommend going.
Cheers! I’ll let you know what I think on Monday