33 | James Ladyman on Reality, Metaphysics, and Complexity

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2019

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Reality is a tricky thing. Is love real? What about the number 5? This is clearly a job for a philosopher, and James Ladyman is one of the world's acknowledged experts. He and his collaborators have been championing a view known as "structural realism," in which real things are those that reflect true, useful patterns in the underlying reality. We talk about that, but also about a couple of other subjects in the broad area of philosophy of science: the history and current status of materialism/physicalism, and the nature of complex systems. This is a deep one. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. James Ladyman obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, and is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has worked broadly within the philosophy of science, including issues of realism, empiricism, physicalism, complexity, and information. His book Everything Must Go (co-authored with Don Ross) has become an influential work on the relationship between metaphysics and science. Web page Everything Must Go Academia.edu page PhilPeople profile Conversation with Raymond Tallis Structural Realism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.4	I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and today we're going to talk about reality.
0:08.0	We like to think that almost all episodes of Mindscape talk about reality in one way or
0:12.2	another, but today we're going to dig a little bit more deeply into what it means for
0:16.6	something to be real.
0:18.0	You know what that means.
0:19.0	We're going to be talking philosophy as well as science.
0:22.5	Some things you just know are real.
0:24.0	Tables and chairs being classic examples of things you know are real, but we could even
0:27.6	question them.
0:28.9	But there's other categories where the issue is less clear.
0:31.7	Our morals real is the ability to make free choices and to have free will, real in the
0:37.5	world.
0:38.5	What about numbers?
0:39.5	What about a perfect sphere and other mathematical structures?
0:42.5	Are they real in the same way?
0:44.9	So today's guest is James Ladiesman, who is a philosopher whose work is distinguished
0:49.2	by insisting that philosophy, metaphysics, ontology and so forth, had better be informed
0:54.9	by our best current scientific knowledge.
0:58.1	Everyone agrees with this as a sort of cliche, but James really tries to make it real in
1:04.3	his philosophy.
1:05.3	And one of the issues that comes up when you try to do that as a metaphysicist, metaphysician
	...

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