I want to begin with something of a personal anecdote.

I'm here speaking as a physicist, but also something of a philosopher, perhaps a slightly amateurish one.

But although I'm here to give this talk on physics and philosophy, my first foray into philosophy didn't really go so well.

It was freshman year, this freshman humanities class at Caltech, and it was bad.

It was just bad.

It was a historical survey class, and it started with Descartes.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Descartes now.

I love reading Descartes, but at the time, it just seemed odd.

Without any context, Descartes sounds kind of pretentious and whining.

Let's just throw out everything that came before, just start over. Trust me, it's all crap.

We'll just, we'll figure this out. I mean, there's two millennia philosophy before Descartes.

And in fact, there's methodology behind what he's doing and he's arguing. But in the context of, oh, I'm intentionally.

That was me.

In the context of that, he, you know, in the context of that class, it just sort of hits

you as like, yeah, let's just doubt everything and start over.

And my strongest memory from that class is this philosophy oppressor, trying to get the class to take seriously the question of,

what if we're all just brains and boxes?

Dating myself, what if we're all living in the matrix?

This is Caltech, right?

So physicists, biologists, engineers.

I mean, there's some math majors.

There's what they're thinking. But most of us were there to study the real world, to study

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