Episode 313: The Spontaneous Eruption of Now

Very Bad Wizards

Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David and Tamler try to wrap their heads around the metaphysics of past and future via the Borges essay(s) “A New Refutation of Time.” What does it mean to be a time skeptic or a time realist for that matter? If you’re a Berkeleyan idealist and Humean skeptic about the self, do you have to deny succession and simultaneity? The world, unfortunately, is real; and we, unfortunately, are Very Bad Wizards.

Plus for centuries philosophers insisted that you couldn’t measure qualia, but then scientists just went ahead and… measured it!

Scientists Measure Qualia for First Time-It Was Thought To Be Impossible [youtube.com]

Kawakita, G., Zeleznikow-Johnston, A., Takeda, K., Tsuchiya, N., & Oizumi, M. (2025). Is my “red” your “red”?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment. iScience, 28(3).

A New Refutation of Time [wikipedia.org]

A New Refutation of Time by Jorge Luis Borges [pdf from gwern.net]

Transcript

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0:00.0	Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Vizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.
0:09.4	Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.
0:16.8	They say time is the fire in which we burn.
0:24.6	Right now, Captain, my time is running out.
0:28.6	The great end boss has spoken.
0:35.6	Play no attention to that man behind the curtain.
0:44.3	Who are you?
0:46.3	Who are you?
0:48.3	A very bad man.
0:50.3	I'm a very good man.
0:52.3	Good man. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have.
1:00.0	Pay no attention tonight, man.
1:03.0	Anybody can have a brain?
1:09.0	You're a very bad man.
1:13.5	I'm a very good man.
1:15.1	Just a very bad wizard.
1:17.9	Welcome to Very Bad Wizards.
1:19.4	I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston.
1:22.1	Dave, Porwin out for the late show with Stephen Colbert, which was canceled yesterday or two days ago or whatever.
1:30.0	It's all an illusion anyway.
1:33.1	Did you watch a single second of Colbert's show while it was on the air?
1:37.8	I don't think so.
	...

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