History of Science and Technology Q&A (February 14, 2024)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Q and A about history of science and technology. And I see a number of questions here. Gosh. Juni asks about the history of hearts. Why does the human heart not resemble the heart shapes seen most commonly in other forms? I don't know the. I don't know the history of the physiology of hearts. I think we're talking about history far beyond human history there. I mean, you know, we go from the insect and arthropods and so on who have. Who don't have kind of active. Who just sort of let. Let oxygen diffuse in. And that kind of limits their size to the invention. That must have been an invention. My gosh, where was it? Probably at the fish stage or something. The invention of being able to pump blood around to distribute oxygen to tissues. And I don't know in what sequence all the various sort of complicated apparatus that ends up in human hearts. I don't even know whether human hearts are, in a sense, the most sophisticated of. Of the animals out there. I know there are certainly exotic cases like, you know, the giraffe that has to, you know, pump blood all up, all the way up its neck and has all kinds of different kind of muscular structures in its heart to be able to do that. And things where, you know, if a human heart was that kind of sort of muscularized, people would say it was very diseased. But it's sort of good for a giraffe because it has a different set of constraints. But I don't know, I think something. A historical thing that's sort of interesting about hearts is that sort of, if you look at a human body and you say sort of what's going on inside there? The heart is sort of an obvious place where something's going on. The brain is not nearly as obvious a place where something is going on. And so that's why in antiquity, the heart was often viewed as the seat of the soul, so to speak, because it was a place where stuff was obviously going on. And by the way, in cases where it stopped, the, you know, the bearer of it was dead. And that was much less obvious that there was something significant going on in the brain. I think people say, I think it's a little bit unfair that in some ancient Greek kind of views of anatomy, the brain was some kind of cooling organ and so on, and that it didn't really have a significant function. It was just like, with all those folds and so on. It was like a giant radiator of heat. It is, in fact, the place that dissipates the most heat. So I guess the liver is another place. But I think the brain still dissipates the most heat in the body. Whatever it is, 50 watts or something of power. But this kind of idea that the heart was the seat of the soul was a pretty common one in antiquity because it was a thing where something was obviously sort of going on through when the organism was alive. I mean, much later people like Descartes, I think, thought the pituitary gland in the center of the brain might be the sort of the pivotal point of the soul. One kind of wonders in the future, when there's more and more kind of artificial organs and so on, what will count as being. Yes, it really is the human. It's a human. Even though most of the organs are, are artificial organs that have been replaced and so on, it's still a human because it has a pituitary gland or something like that won't be the pituitary gland. It will be some sort of brain related structure. Although one wonders kind of when sort of pieces of the brain related structure are replaced with technology, how that will play out in terms of kind of the definition of personhood. But I think in, I mean this whole question about is there sort of where's the place where thinking resides Is sort of an interesting one. That it, the idea that that was something where the brain is the only place that's relevant. That's certainly been the view for the last few couple of hundred years at least. Not sure how much longer than that that's been the view. But this idea of kind of the mechanicalization of thinking is one that I think has always been confusing. I mean Descartes in the 1600s was a big kind of thinker about those kinds of issues. I think that the question in today's world, for example, is, you know, is everything that we think of as thinking, so to speak, really fully sort of related to the neural net in the brain? To what extent does it depend on the endocrine system and sort of, you know, the, the way you think depends on whether, you know, you have this sort of, this, this hormone is, is in larger amounts, smaller amounts, whatever does it depend on? You know, people say, well, maybe there's some microbiome story that relates to kind of at least immune function, if not kind of the way we, at least the way we feel about things, even if not the way we quotes rationally think about things. So I think the increasingly one will probably see that the kind of the sort of whole body is important to thinking type thing, rather than just the disembodied brain being the thing that's critical. But certainly historically, the idea that the brain was the seat of thinking was not obvious at all. And I think there are all sorts of anecdotal cases in the 1800s and maybe before, but of people who had various kinds of damage to their brain and various kinds of failures that happened. A lot of mapping of the brain, I think, in the 1800s, particularly about, you know, the language area in the brain, which isn't necessarily in one fixed place, but. And questions about, you know, the. The two halves of the brain and so on. My impression is in the 1800s that that was the time when a lot of that stuff got. Got mapped partly through cases where people had damage to various parts of the brain and you could see what kind of deficits that led to. But I don't know to what extent. It will be interesting to see to what extent kind of the current view of what's going on in brains sort of survives the test of time. I mean, one of these typical kind of statements that was made up and through, certainly through the 1950s of, oh, there's lots of parts of the brain that don't really do anything. 90% of the brain is unused. Whenever you hear those kinds of statements in science, I always find that very suspicious. It's like 90% of the genome is unused or whatever. Well, maybe it probably, you know, maybe it is somehow less important for some purposes than the other part, but it's going to have some structural importance or something else. And similarly, with the brain, all sorts of kind of terrible things got done, particularly in the 1950s, with various kinds of brain surgery and so on, where it's like, oh, that part is not needed. You know, that. That turned out not to be really the right story. Let's see. Gosh, yeah. Jamie is asking, how did science discover the brain, its purpose? When did it happen? As I said, I don't. I don't know precisely. I think it was by the 1600s, it was getting. It was sort of fairly understood. But I don't think. I mean, the, the early theories of medicine, Hippocrates, Galen, things like that, there were, you know, some parts of that were completely sensible and some parts were, to our mind today, kind of nutty. And the, you know, this notion that existed through for a long time about different kinds of humors and you would have a melancholy humor or this humor or whatever. I think that was a kind of. I mean, another thing that tends to happen in these Medical theories is that they come back in a different, more science ified form much later often. I think it certainly didn't help that people didn't understand the idea of microorganisms, bacteria infection, how that worked. That wasn't understood. When was that understood? Maybe certainly by the 1800s that was understood, but I think it wasn't understood earlier than that. And there were all sorts of crazy things where people were just like, it's very mysterious why all these people are getting sick, why all these people are dying, etc. People didn't. I understand the idea that there could be a carrier of disease that was invisible. And they kind of assumed, oh, it's, you know, if it was something that you could see, like a rat or something, then that could be somehow a carrier of disease. But how that worked wasn't clear. It's also worth remembering that it was still by the. Certainly in the 1600s, maybe even later than that. This question of could you have life emerge from non life? There was kind of this idea, you have a bunch of mud and eventually maggots will start crawling out of the mud. And somehow the maggots were thought to be sort of spontaneously produced in the mud. And the idea there might be maggot eggs and so on that were in the mud was not really an idea. And this notion that life could arise from, that life could only arise from life was also a somewhat more modern notion. I think that in. So, you know, these things, I mean, I have to say I'm not as familiar with the history of medicine as I might be. It's always a, you know, some things, as I say, were quite well understood quite early. And some things just there were sort of scientific pieces missing, like the idea of microorganisms and so on, that made it pretty much impossible to have correct theories of things. All right, let's see, Let's see. Yes. Andre comments that this question of sort of where is the seat of consciousness? And you know, that's still a thing people are confused about with respect to the brain. It's like, what does it really take to have this feeling that we have of consciousness, of sort of this feeling of experience, so to speak. And there's certainly this idea that it's all sort of mechanistic in the brain versus something else remains kind of an area of dispute. I have to say. I think that the modern successes of neural nets and so on, artificial neural nets, kind of put another kind of piece of evidence in the idea that it really is just computational and that it's sort of representable by kind of the, kind of the most obvious features of neurons and doesn't require some, for example, new physics. I mean, people, the idea that it couldn't all be just the operation of neurons, the kind of electrical machine operation of neurons that leads to our consciousness, that's an idea that is still bubbling around. People say, oh, it might be molecular scale, it might be quantum mechanical, might be something else. I do tend to think that by the time you have the LLM that does a good job of generating language and so on, that's another piece of evidence that really this idea that it's a few hundred billion neurons or something that are all just doing this kind of electrical thing makes a lot more sense. And there isn't evidence for much beyond that. I mean, it's also worth saying that the idea of sort of how brains work and sort of the characteristics and what's important about brains is, you know, people have been very confused about this. For example, one thing, one area that's sort of an example of kind of. Well, is it there? Is it not? There is telepathy, extrasensory perception and so on. This was a big thing coming out of the Victorian period when there were all sorts of ideas about kind of, you know, auras around of humans sort of maybe it was electrical because kind of people were starting to talk about electrical kinds of things in the, in the late 1800s and so on. And maybe that was, you know, you were, you were experiencing some kind of electrical field around brains that was some kind of representation of, of human thought and so on. And then up certainly into the, well into the 1960s for sure, 1970s. And even the idea that there could be some sort of extra sensory perception, that there could be telepathy communication between brains that wasn't going through any kind of known medium like sound or like vision or something like this, that there could be direct brain to brain communication, kind of brain radio type thing, except not carried necessarily by electromagnetic fields. And people were regularly doing experiments on this of can you kind of guess the card that somebody's looking at in another room, all these kinds of things. I think that whole area which would have been taken completely scientifically seriously. I mean, I know Alan Turing, for example, when he's talking about intelligent machines, mentions telepathy, extrasensory perception in a completely sort of serious scientific way around 1950. And so that was kind of. But, but I think those things sort of degraded into kind of a. There was sort of a complicated kind of interplay between kind of Magicians doing kind of, oh, yes, I can, you know, figure out how the card is going to arrive here. And people who were doing sort of scientific studies of kind of could you sense what the card was without seeing it? Type thing. And there were a series of kind of scandals, in a sense, I suppose, about kind of measurements, about extrasensory perception. I know. I remember a couple that I saw at post quarters. There was one where there was sort of a journal of these things. And eventually some people I knew, physicists, kind of did a bunch of experiments and did not find positive results. And this journal basically says, well, we only publish positive results, which of course is a bit of a selection bias. If you have a journal of extrasensory perception and you're trying to assess whether extrasensory perception is possible and the journal only publishes positive results, well, then, you know, you're kind of cooking that particular story. There was another one, actually, a very kind of reputable engineer, engineering professor who had a bunch of experiments on things like extra sensory perception. And I happened to interact with these folks sometime in the early 1980s. And one of the things was a question of sort of could somebody influence some physical process just by thinking about it? And this still seemed, by the beginning of the 1980s, it seemed kind of fringe, but not totally implausible. But I suggested, well, what about a random number generator? And I think there was, at that time, people didn't really understand the idea of pseudorandom numbers as they do today. And so then there was sort of a question. Could you, if it was a pseudo random generator rather than a physical process, could somebody still influence the results? And the claim was, yes, they could based on an experiment. And that obviously had to be nonsense because the pseudo random generator was a deterministic thing that you knew would just come up with these numbers at this time. And so then one had to sort of talk about how, well, maybe one couldn't influence them, but the way the experiment was done, maybe the person had kind of sensed what would happen and so on, and it got very muddy. But it's sort of interesting that those aspects of the operation of brains were still not, definitely not nailed down by that time. I think it may very well be the case, as is so often true in science, that the whole extrasensory perception story became disreputable. But maybe in the end they'll turn out to be something to it. They'll turn out to be some sort of feature of, of something about sort of the operation of brains that allows there to be kind of you know, some, some, something that we don't know. For example, we could imagine, let's say that our brains are sensitive to magnetic fields, as we know that pigeon brains are. We don't think our brains are sensitive to magnetic fields, but maybe they are. And maybe there's some sort of thing that would be perceived by us right now as extrasensory, at least of the senses that we have, perception that in fact, it turns out we're sensitive to these things. And so that has an effect. I mean, another thing a bit like that is the circadian rhythm, where there's sort of a question of how do you know what time it is? Type thing. And there are mechanisms that are kind of large scale mechanisms of the brain. The pituitary gland actually is much involved in the secretion of melatonin and things which is something that is sort of aligned with time of day. But it's also become clear that there are much more localized clocks, even maybe at the level of individual cells. And that's another kind of thing where you could say, well, it's kind of extrasensory perception of things that, yes, you can know what time it is, even though you had no sort of external stimulus about that or other kinds of things one could imagine where again, this idea that sort of became disreputable might rear its head again in terms of brain to brain communication. That's an interesting one. I do kind of wonder whether there are things where, for example, oh, I don't know, things like the micro expressions that exist in faces and so on, where people are picking up on those even though they think, oh, the only thing I do is to hear the words that are said. But actually if you are sort of in the room with someone that there are sort of micro facial expressions or something that one picks up or some quite different thing. I mean, it's, you know, if we were insects or for that matter, all sorts of other organisms, we'd be picking up pheromones of various kinds. Those certainly exist for humans too. I don't think that's a big effect. We're not very olfactory kinds of creatures. But there are all kinds of things one could imagine that would go outside the box of what we currently imagine is our collection of sensory capabilities. So I kind of think that, as I say, it's a very typical thing in the history of science that people get to the point where, yes, this is the way it works and it's in a fixed box. And if there were other theories that existed before, perhaps theories that had Sort of bad things happen to them. It's like throw that theory out. We don't ever want to hear about that theory for another hundred years or 200 years. But sometimes those theories are not quite as wrong as you think they are. See, Let's see. Well, I'm seeing a comment here from Krista about Panini and linguistics and so on. This is a complicated story. This question about sort of when was the idea of structured grammars really developed? I mean one knows in modern times in 1956, these sort of two different things happened the same year. One was the invention of Backus Nauer form, this way of specifying kind of formal languages by giving a collection of kind of recursive production rules. That's a sort of standard way that today the A specification is given for typical computer languages and so on. That was one thing that happened in that year. The other thing was the generative grammar idea that Noam Chomsky introduced. That was a way of talking about human languages in the same kind of production rules, generative kind of way which says a sentence consists of a noun phrase, is a verb phrase a noun phrase, let's say a noun phrase consists of an adjective and a noun and so on. And you have these kind of recursive specifications of this consists of that. And you can kind of build up this sentences as trees from these different elements. Now what happened in the case of computer languages is that's pretty much how all languages are set up. And I know from my own experience in language design, whenever you don't have kind of context free grammar for a language, that's a place where people typically get confused. And there are good parser generators. YAC was an early one that go from the specifications to actual code that will take the string of characters or the string of tokens and will sort of parse that into this tree and allow one to extract what one thinks the meaning of these expressions was. On the human language side, there's been a history of bloodshed in kind of linguistics. What had existed in linguistics before the generative grammar sort of revolution in the 1950s and 1960s was the kind of philology tradition of let's just study languages for the sake of studying languages and write and write books of how the grammar is set up, which are kind of descriptive books about grammar. Not these kind of much more sort of formalized computeristic representations of grammar. But then this question of sort of how computeristic, how formal, how structured is the grammar of actual languages. Well, the answer is languages are just full of exceptions. And one can get very wound up on. Well, it almost works with this way, with a functional head and an adverb and a this and that and the other, that all kind of operate in a particular structured way. And then you find, oh, whoops, there's this exception either within one language or of a new language that was the language of some sort of obscure language somewhere that not very many people knew. Oh, no, it doesn't have. You know, it doesn't. Let's say. I think all languages have something that's analogous to nouns and verbs. But maybe there's a language that doesn't. Certainly, when you say a preposition, well, it doesn't necessarily go before the word, so it's not necessarily a preposition. So in modern linguistics, it's usually called an adposition because it can go either before the word or after. But these different mechanisms that exist in languages, whether it's with case endings or whether it's with modifier words and so on, there are sort of a catalog of possibilities and sort of an attempt to structure these things, and they keep on being exceptions. And that's led to a pretty sort of bloody history, I think, of modern linguistics of, oh, there's a global theory. Oh, no, no, it's got these exceptions. Oh, and, you know, in the end, I think we're learning a certain amount from the LLMs and so on about sort of the general way in which one can think about sort of what's generatable from a neural net kind of setup. But there's sort of an ancient history to this whole idea of structured ways to represent grammars. This chap called Panini in. Oh, gosh, where was he? It's always very hard with Indian sort of writings to know when they were dated, because a lot of the ones from the kind of Greek Roman tradition, for whatever reason, it was well known what the dates were. Not quite sure why, but maybe it's because of inscriptions and things where it said in the seventh year of the reign of such and such an emperor, this happened. But for whatever reason, most of the Asian kinds of sort of learned works just don't have dates. Of course, when one is looking at some. Some work from, you know, 500 B.C. or something, one is not seeing the original documents, one is seeing the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy. And those things are, you know. But for whatever reason, in the Greek Roman tradition, the dates tended to be carried along. In Indian tradition, for example, they did not. So that makes it hard to know in what century certain kinds of things happened. I gather there's this lovely thing going on in Herculaneum, which is a city that was overrun when Vesuvius erupted in, gosh, 1st century A.D. i guess there was a library there and a bunch of scrolls got. Got kind of carbonized. And now there is a competition and a technology for doing CT scanning of those things and being able to figure out what they said without trying to unroll them, which doesn't work because they've been carbonized. And maybe this is one of the remarkable things about archaeology and so on, that new discoveries get made and things where one thought that, oh, all the works of so and so have been lost. Maybe they haven't. Maybe it will turn out that this excavation will finally bring back the original works of Democritus or something, or the lost books of Euclid's works and so on. I mean, it was for a long time, for example, Cicero was somebody where it was thought that none of his original work had survived. I think there was maybe 200 years ago or something, maybe a little bit more than that. A bunch of his works were just sort of found somewhere in the Vatican library where they'd been sitting for a thousand years in some corner or something. And that was the thing that was found. Now, there are all kinds of strange ways things get found. I mean, these palip cests where somebody has taken some sort of piece of papyrus or whatever paper and they've used it for some other purpose. But, oh, there's the work of Archimedes is underneath there. And even though this thing has been reused and you can kind of reconstruct it, so I think these things that were sort of lost might yet be found, which is a big surprise. I mean, you might have thought that whatever was known from antiquity, that's what's known and that's all there is to it. I mean, I think it's worth realizing that at different times in history, people have more or less interest in history. I mean, I think that in the time of, for example, beginning of the 1800s was a time when things like Egyptology and I think in general, kind of the history of the kind of Middle Eastern civilizations and so on, people were very excited about, and a lot of stuff got collected, maybe got, you know, taken by whatever invading army it was to wherever. But it was a thing where, you know, these, these buildings and inscriptions and so just been hanging out there for a couple of thousand years without anybody really paying much attention to them. I mean, the bad case is when people decided, well, let's just use the stones from this building to go and build our house or whatever else. And then the thing was destroyed. Better that the thing was in the desert somewhere and just nobody cared. And it was just hanging out there for a very long time. I mean, it's worth realizing that there are lots of things that do get preserved very easily. I mean, stone just sits there for millions of years. Even pieces of pottery that have been fired and so on sit there for really long time. And it's also remarkable that you think, well, from a couple of thousand years ago that it could be the case that though there'd just be these tiny amount of stuff that was left over. It isn't true. I mean, when you go to various, you know, archaeological digs, they're just full of stuff. I remember when I was a kid, this must have been 1967, 68, something like that. I remember visiting Cyprus and visiting some place where there were just being dug up archaeological digs. And you go and, you know, this was a different time of tourism, so to speak. You could just go and, and sort of check out what was happening. And it was really notable that like on the beach there, you would literally crunch pottery that was from presumably about 2,000 years ago. And then, you know, there'd be these pits and you could look in the pit and I found a bunch of little pieces of, you know, painted pots and so on that had non trivial pictures on them. No great, you know, works of literature or anything like that. But it's still remarkable that one can find these things that are as sort of compelling and non trivial and they were easy to find. And I'm sure there is plenty more that will be found over the course of time. And maybe this particular project in Herculaneum we'll find a bunch of authors whose works we thought were lost. But coming back to Panini and the history of grammar and so on, I've tried to look at this and when you look at what Panini wrote, at least in the translations, it was written about Sanskrit. In Sanskrit, when you look at what he wrote, it's a bunch of aphorisms and how those, you know, you could say, well, those aphorisms are kind of like the production rules of a generative grammar kind of maybe, but they're also things like here are five examples of how a verb works. So it's. I have not been able to kind of decode what was going on there. And you know, to what extent you can really map that onto kind of modern structured generative grammars. I mean, it's worth realizing this is a general problem with history of science, that what we know now and the understanding we have now, sometimes it is very clarifying of something that was sort of looked at long in the past. And sometimes you're basically taking what you know now and you're back projecting onto very little something which you now understand. And you know, I noticed this. I've been interested in studying kind of the history of philosophy and trying to understand to what extent ideas that now come up with our physics project and thinking about the ruliad and thinking about observer theory and so on the extent to which those ideas mesh with or anticipated by things in philosophy from very long ago. And I think I understand some amount about the history of Western philosophy. I understand much less about the history of Eastern philosophy. But as I look at these kinds of things, whether it's the Indian philosophy, Chinese, Islamic, all these different traditions, they have things that sound a lot like the ruliad. And even though actually they more so than you see in Western philosophy, are they really that were those. Yes, they're sort of ideas where people are saying what is the nature of reality? What is our nature relative to reality? And so on. These are obvious questions to ask. And they're questions which kind of got sort of pushed aside in the period when kind of modern Western science developed because modern Western science and mathematical science didn't have much to say about those kinds of things. But it's sort of a. I don't really know the extent to which one is sort of back projecting from what we now know onto something where there wasn't a lot there versus it really was understood. And if one only understood it, it would be helpful in thinking about things now. I'm trying to understand that. Let's see. Gosh, so many questions here. Let's see. Paula asks how has technology influenced the development and preservation of languages? You know, there have been different periods where people have tried to sort of preserve the languages of the earth. I mean, I think There are about 7,000 languages that are in use somewhere. Unfortunately, languages go extinct at some rate, which is a shame. And insofar as languages represent patterns of thinking about things, it's really a shame if some of them go extinct because those are things where one would, you know, one's taking a different point of view about thinking and that will be a nice thing to preserve. The challenge is, unless people are actively speaking a language, why do people, you know, maybe scholars learn the language at some point, but it's really a different Thing from when there are actual speakers of the language and so on. I think there'd been, in the 1700s, 1800s, there was quite a tradition of kind of cataloging the languages of different places, particularly colonies. I mean, the British, for example, with people in the British Foreign Service and so on, who were sent off to different corners of India or lots of other places in Africa and so on. You know, it was a very common hobby for the educated person who was off as a sort of expat hanging out in some sort of place in wherever India to, you know, catalog the local language and write scholarly books about it. That was a tradition, a British tradition. I think it was also a French tradition. But, you know, the British Empire was pretty big at the time when. When this was really popular. And so a lot of that work got done by the sort of British expat crowd. I think maybe I'm. Maybe I'm a prejudiced observer because I saw a bunch of the output from that when I was a kid and so on. But in any case, that was a sort of writing the grammar books, writing down the information about the local language was a thing particularly, I would say, in 1800s and so on. The tradition. There was this whole field of philology, which was kind of a very common kind of academic pursuit in the 1800s into the early 1900s, for some reason. Philology, I think, was more of a continental European activity. It found a little bit of place in the U.S. i don't think it found so much of a place in the uk, at least under that name. And people like the Brothers Grimm, I think, were philologists who went around and sort of collected information on local languages and understood things about the patterns of pronunciation and, by the way, also collected fairy tales for which they remain quite famous. They were German philologists, as I recall. But in any case, the later on there was kind of the. Yes, we can make tape recordings of languages and people started doing that. I mean, a particular crowd that's been very into kind of language work are missionaries, particularly Christian missionaries. And there's been a whole tradition of that. And I think it's partly communicate with the quotes natives, so to speak, and sometimes translate the Bible into some language or another. But in any case, that's been a place where there's kind of quite a tradition of that. And I think that at some moment people start using tape recorders and recording kind of native speakers of languages. I always think it's kind of amusing when you see these kinds of things which say, wanted linguists interested in, you know, Obscure languages, you know, ability to fly a seaplane, preferred type thing because it's, you know, you're going to go up the Amazon river and it's useful to, if you can fly the plane as well as use the tape recorder and learn the language and so on. I think in. I don't know, there have been various initiatives to preserve endangered languages, including ones that. Things like scanning all the books of a language, if there is a written record there. I know several people I know have been involved in those. I don't think those have achieved quite the level of prominence that one might hope for. Gosh. Ruby asks, why did the Latin language die? Do you think it will be widely used if it had survived? You know, I don't know the full history of this, but I think it didn't. You know, part of the point was it had to do a lot with things like the Catholic Church and the kind of fragmentation of. Into, you know, the beginning of processes, Protestantism and things like this. And the idea that for, you know, it had been the case that there was a sort of preservation of Latin as a language that because it was the language of learning and the language of the Church and those things were very integrated together and come 1400s and so on. I think kind of this idea that it should be less kind of the sort of distribution of power, so to speak, and that there should be a local version, that it shouldn't be the case that all sort of serious theological church, whatever things were conducted in Latin and there should be a kind of local translation of all of these works and so on. I suspect that was the thing that prevented there being, you know, it kind of broke the stranglehold, so to speak, of Latin on the kind of. On sort of things about learning and things about. Which, as I say, was at that time very much tied into the story of the Church and so on. I think it was, you know, it's worth remembering that the, the somewhat bizarre phenomenon that the, you know, the courts, the, the monarchies of lots of countries, the, the language spoken at court might not be the same as the language spoken by kind of the common people, so to speak. So, you know, it was not uncommon to find, you know, people would be speaking French in Russia or something. And that wasn't the language, you know, in the court, that was the language being spoken. And so, you know, Latin was a language that was. And there was also a lot of kind of interplay of people who were, oh, you know, the, this, you know, person, you know, this Austrian princess is being Married off to this French king. And obviously they spoke different languages intrinsically, but yet sort of, there was enough mixing of royal families in Europe and so on, that there was sort of a need to have standardized languages at court and so on, because there was going to be this kind of international set that existed at that time. I think in the 1600s was really a time when Latin was in decay as far as the sort of the key language of learning. And it's worth noting that Newton, for example, when he wrote his Principia Mathematica in 1687, that was written in Latin. By the time he wrote his optics in beginning of the 1700s, I think he wrote that in English. And so that was the moment at which kind of the transition was happening from Latin to the local languages as languages to write learned things in. Leibniz, for example, was very concerned about this. Leibniz being sort of his day job, being sort of a diplomat, scholar, type, person. And that's part of the reason he got so interested in mathematical notation was he thought, gosh, all these things are fragmenting into the local languages. At least let's try and have math be centralized. And that was successful in a sense, in the sense that there really is only one mathematical notation for the world. Numbers in some sort of consumer applications are presented differently in different countries. And certainly things like commas for decimal points, things like that, those are different. But the general notation of plus signs and integral signs, things like that, that's international. So that was a success in a sense, and Leibniz was much involved in making that happen. I think the question. Well, it's. Yeah, it's. Yeah. So there's all kinds of. Let's see, the question was, would Latin still be used if it had survived? You know, one of the things I found interesting, you know, I learned Latin when I was a kid and, yeah, you really. The test should be, can I still do the. I can. Can I do the Greek and Latin irregular verbs and conjugations of verbs and all these kinds of things. I think most layers will remember that stuff. So that's a good sign that the. The neurons are still hanging in there, or at least other ones have taken over from those. But any case, the thing that is really notable to me about Latin is it feels like a much more structured language than English. You know, the grammar books of Latin are thin. The grammar books of English are big, thick books, because there are many exceptions. It's a much more complicated language. Now, there's also a question of are there things you can't say in Latin, are there things that. Clearly Latin doesn't really have a word for computer. Clearly Latin doesn't really have a word for, I don't know, some mathematical concept that didn't exist at that time. You know, I have a good friend who has the curious role. He's a classics professor in Oxford, has the curious role. I think he's still doing this, that when there are honorary degrees given out in Oxford, they always sort of describe the wonderful work done by the person with a speech in Latin. And so my friend has the task of translating kind of a description about sort of success in modern molecular biology or something into Latin. And he seems to manage it. I don't know exactly how faithful the translation of, I don't know, sort of protein synthesis is into Latin. But it's one of these things where it's one of the interesting questions actually about human languages, the universality of expression in human languages sort of relates to universality and computation. This question of if you have a thought, can you express it in any language? Which is again the question of given a thing in language A, can you translate it into language B? And the answer is not perfectly. There are things where there's sort of a cultural understanding of some particular kind of word. There are puns that exist in one language and not in another there that caused trouble in translation. To tell one story, my mother was mostly a philosophy professor, but her PhD was about anthropology and she got the task of translating when she was a graduate student, I guess she got the task of translating a book, an anthropology book written by a guy called Claude Levy Strauss, who was a fairly well known anthropologist. She was translating it from French into English. And in French, the title of the book was La Penser Sauvage, which in French is a pun that could either mean a wild pansy or a savage mind. And so there's a lovely piece of correspondence between my mother and Levi Strauss where he's kind of not admitting that you couldn't make a kind of parallel translation into English that preserved that pun, which it works in French, it just doesn't work in English. And the book, he wanted to call it the Wild Pansy in English, I think my mother was pushing for the Savage Mind, which is what it became known as, what it was named in English. There were all sorts of other terrible things that happened in the process of that translation. And there is an interesting collection of letters which I know exists and I have all these archive boxes and slowly over the years they're getting scanned and eventually we'll find those letters again. And I get asked about them by anthropologists, people interested in the history of anthropology every so often. And yes, eventually I'll find them again and put them out on the web. But in any case, this whole question about sort of. Could you express. Could we be expressing things in Latin today? Well, you know, languages do accumulate new words, and no doubt we would have accumulated a word for computer in Latin. And there are. And, you know, I think. But it is interesting. It's much more structured language than English. And I have no reason to think that there's anything fundamentally good about having an unstructured language with a lot of exceptions and so on. It's, I think, just a pure matter of history that English has become such a widespread language in the world. And, you know, if Latin had survived longer, maybe it would have become sort of the, you know, we would have had. I don't know what the, you know, en obviously is the. Is the abbreviation for English in kind of web speak. I'm not sure what it is for Latin. You know, maybe. Maybe all these websites would have had a la or something or ln or whatever it would have been. Instead, Let's see. The. Yes, there's a. There's a thing that comes up. Nuno is mentioning the tribe in Brazil that has. That apparently doesn't have a way of talking about numbers and so on. And people are always very shocked by that. And I have to say, I've asked people about this who study these particular folk, and here's what they say. They say, look, the idea of numbers, the number 17 or something is something you need in a society where things are organized so that you're really counting things and doing trade and so on, where you're counting 17s and 15s and so on, are living in the jungle somewhere, and you have a collection of dogs. Every dog has a name. Why would you need to know I have five dogs. It's like, I have a dog called Fred and I have a dog called Jim, and I have a dog called Jane. And there's no reason to aggregate that and to abstract from it and say, so I have five dogs in total. And so I think in those languages, the typical thing is there's one of something, there's a pair of something, and there's many of something. That's kind of enough. It's what's relevant for that way of talking about things. I have heard that the slightly sort of cynical statement that these tribes know nothing, you know, don't talk about numbers until money is involved. And when it's a question of how much they're going to get paid, they understand numbers perfectly well. So I don't know if that's a claim that I've heard. You know, it is interesting that I see a bunch with computational language and so on, concepts that people just, they don't need those concepts. They don't have words for them. As soon as they. When they need the concepts, there are words that get produced for them. When you have those words, they become an anchor point that let people kind of start thinking in terms of those concepts. And that's a big thing in computational language. This question about, I don't know so much about the descriptions of time in different languages around the world. I know there are indigenous people in various places who are said to have very different views of ways of expressing time. My guess is it's the same thing as what we're talking about with numbers. For example, when I was a kid, not everybody had a watch. It wasn't. Not everybody had a way of telling time, even. And so, you know, you would have, I don't know, you know, a school, you'd have a bell that would go at a certain time and so on. And that was how people knew what the time was. And this idea that, you know, you can say, well, let's do that at 3:15 and so on was. Was not really. Was not nearly such a. A common thing. I mean, it was this idea that we're going to get precise about time. Even in the 1960s, for example, was not really such a thing. And then eventually everybody has a watch and then a smartphone or whatever else, and everybody has a way of seeing or they have time on their computer and so on. Everybody knows the precise time. And so it becomes a thing where we can start talking about those kinds of things, and that becomes a thing that really matters. Whereas it's like, oh, I'll come over sometime in the afternoon was a common thing. I mean, it probably also helps that there are cell phones these days and you can kind of expect people to be at a particular time and so on. I mean, I'm thinking there were times when things were at specified times, like train timetables, for example. Those were, you know, yes, the train came at a definite time, and I think that was a thing. When did train timetables, I think that was a mid-1800s story. I know the gosh, I'm trying to remember, looked up at some point when the first train timetables were issued, so to speak. I'm Kind of thinking it was mid-1800s. Again, that was a. You know, when precise times got defined, rather than just like, oh, I'll come over sometime in the afternoon, let's see. Ruby asks, how do linguists reconstruct ancient languages they have little direct evidence of. It's complicated. I mean, and there have been sort of times when hieroglyphics, for example, from ancient Egypt weren't known. And then there were. The most common thing that happens is there's a piece of parallel text, for example, the Rosetta Stone, that contains three languages saying the same thing in three languages. I think it was not uncommon in that part of the world in those days that some king would explain their great achievements. And in order to make sure that as many people as possible knew those great achievements, they would translate them into a bunch of different languages. And that's really useful because it means that one has parallel texts and one can kind of see what different. You know, how something would get translated. That's the most common thing. Now, when there's only sort of one version of it. Let's see, in linear B, I guess it was from Crete. There was just sort of one version of that. And it was a big effort, I think, finished in the 1950s, to decode that. And eventually it turned out to be some form of Greek, but it was unclear what it was. And a guy called Michael Ventris figured it out, and that was sort of an achievement. I mean, the same thing was true, gosh, in the late 1800s with hieroglyphics. There are a series of these things. There are still things where. Places where it's not known what that language meant. Now, if you go to things which aren't as obviously language, and you go to. Oh, a typical example would be the handprints that you find in. In caves from the Stone Age. It's like, what do these random handprints mean? The fact that they're sort of hands in black and red in different places. Is that a very significant thing, where these handprints are placed in some way that corresponds to giving thanks to the Goddess of Rain or something like this? And this is the particular sort of pattern of. This is the ritual that you should follow to give thanks to the Goddess of Rain or whatever else? Or is it just a bunch of random kids just put paint on their hands and splattered it on the cave wall? And now we're 20,000 years later and we're trying to figure out what on earth that was about. It's very hard to tell and this is a thing which you see in this whole question about when you look at things, archaeological artifacts, do you know what they were for? How do you translate them into modern times? Something like Stonehenge. What was it really for? Well, people have ideas. What was really lined up with the winter solstice? And it's often kind of a weird thing because you can say, oh, the pyramids were lined up in this way relative to this astronomical phenomenon. But by the time you got 50 astronomical phenomena, they could be lined up with, and you have some error in the lining up. It's sort of inevitable that you'd say, oh, it's lined up with this and that. But it's, you know, because you picked one out of the 50, and it would have been lined up whatever angle it had been at, with something. And so this question of kind of, what. What are things from ancient times? What were they for? It's often really hard to tell. I know one time I was visiting some archaeological site in Peru, and a favorite story of mine is we're going around this place, and it's like, there are all these different structures and so on. I'm asking, what was that for? And the person who was showing us around was saying, well, that was for ceremonial purposes, which means, you know, a few thousand years later, we don't have the slightest idea what it was for. And if we had watched people using it, I mean, you know, you could say in modern times, if you go to, I don't know what some. Oh, what could we ask? We could say, let's say a bank. People go to a bank and they show up and they talk to somebody or whatever, and they're. Maybe they're trying to get a loan at the bank and they're talking to somebody and they go away from the bank. Again, you're looking at it from a distance. It's like, what was this for? What is this? Is this some religious observance? Is this some. What is it? What is it? Well, if you know that people have been borrowing money forever, then you might be able to guess what that was. But there are many functions that we might do that we just don't have. It's not clear. I mean, there are many functions we have today, like live streaming, for example, which was not a function until very recently. And kind of, you know, the. Why is this person sitting, looking at a camera and yakking about all kinds of things? You know, unless you kind of know more of the backstory, it's hard to tell what's going on. And so it is with a lot of archaeological kinds of things. I think the, you know, I have to say it's one artifact I picked up when I was a kid on a beach in Sicily. And it's a kind of a sandstone thing. And I have no idea what it is. Back when I was a kid, I took it to an archaeological museum and they said, not an artifact. It must be just some kind of natural object. Take it to a natural history museum. So I did, and they said, nah, it's not really a natural. We don't know what it is, but it's not a natural object. You should take it to an archaeology museum. I still don't know what it is. I've been meaning. I mentioned it in a piece that I wrote a number of years ago, and I think I had some pictures of it there. And I've sort of been intending to. To really do the analysis today because there are all kinds of new techniques that are more kind of, you know, nuclear chemistry techniques and so on that one could use to try and analyze what this thing actually, actually was. I. I really don't know to this. And I. And I certainly don't know what it was for. So those are things where, when there's sort of. When there isn't an unbroken chain of purposes and chain of understanding, it's really hard to tell what something was for. You know, there's a thing that happened. I live in Massachusetts, and one of the things that sort of happened around here quite a bit is this question of were there Native American kinds of things done on land around here which should be preserved and where you could say, don't build there. There was this earthwork that was built by Native Americans in such and such a time in the past. And it becomes this complicated story of was this particular earthwork constructed at this time or that time? It's just a pile of earth. And you don't know whether it was constructed because it was a particular form that was used for some particular thing at some time. I have to say, when I was a kid in England, I used to go and walk through various woods and things, little forest type areas, and there were these pits. And I still don't know what these pits actually were. I don't know if they were from Paleolithic times, Roman times or World War II. I don't know whether those pits were when bombs were falling in those places, because there were a lot of. In the particular part of England and southeast England, I guess, was a place where there were a bunch of things like aircraft factories that were in these forested areas as a way to camouflage them. And so some number of bombs will have gotten dropped there maybe also by mistake and things. And so I don't know whether these pits were from that or from Roman times or from earlier times. And I'm sure in today's world one could find that out. But it's sort of interesting. It's just a pit. You don't really know what it was. And no doubt there are details of it that would tell you whether it was a pit that came from an explosion or something like this. So let's see. Gosh, there are questions here about. From David, would the Greek spoken at the time of Aristotle be intelligible to speakers of modern Greek? I think the pronounced. Well, nobody knows how ancient Greek was pronounced. There are theories, but I don't know how good they are. I remember when I was a kid, I seem to be talking a lot about things that I learned when I was a kid here. But learning ancient Greek, there was, this time was the question is, how do you pronounce an eta? You know, it's a long E of some kind. And is it, you know, if you have like beta eta, is that B or is that bear? And one of the pieces of evidence that loomed large when I was a kid, sort of a newly discovered piece of evidence was, gosh, somebody had said the sound made by a sheep was beta eta. So it's like. So that means that eta must be pronounced eh, because a sheep goes bear. Well, not totally convincing because, you know, you go between different human languages and, you know, does a rooster really say cock a doodle doo? Well, not in French, for example. And you know, these kinds of things said the way that they're these, I don't think it's a good anchoring, so to speak. But that was some evidence for how ancient Greek was spoken. If that's with the kind of traditional ways that people pronounce ancient Greek, they're very different from the way modern Greek is pronounced. I think, and I have to say, experientially knowing ancient Greek times, I've been in Greece trying to read road signs and things based on knowledge of ancient Greek. It has not been particularly successful. I mean, yes, you can transliterate it and that gets you some distance, but the words have definitely changed. You know, different languages have had different levels of permanence. I mean, I think some languages, oh, you know, there are languages like Hebrew and Sanskrit and so on, which are very ancient languages which kind of were reborn at various times in history. And so I think have some continuity with their original form, partly because they were sort of reborn. I think there are languages. I don't know as much about this, but I think Arabic was so wound up with kind of the religious significance of Arabic in the Quran that I think there's been some degree of permanence for that because of the sort of desire to keep that continuity there. And I think that's been less true. I mean, even though, like the New Testament in. In Christianity was written in Greek, I don't think people have, you know, I don't really know why that didn't happen, but I think that was, you know, enough. Maybe it was translated to Latin and then kind of preserved in that form. But there wasn't really a drive to keep that language consistent, so to speak, across that period of time. And languages do tend to evolve. I mean, there are these definite laws of evolution of languages, like these various laws for vowel sounds changing, things like this for the. For just the. The way that the languages were spoken. And there are languages that are sort of very easy to understand. Changes in languages, like one of the ones that I notice over the course of my life is the smooshing of words. Like, you know, you knew when website was two words that that was going to smoosh into website as one word. And it's something I notice when I write things and people are like, no, no, that isn't a word. I say it's not a word yet that word, you know, those words will smoosh over time. Things get simpler over time. And, you know, dilatation turns into dilation, things like this. And, you know, there are definite trends like that in languages. And of course then there are new words that end up getting introduced to describe new things that people start to care about. Let's see. So I think the answer to the question is the Greek of the time of Aristotle is not comprehensible. I think people in modern. In modern Greece, somebody could probably comment on that. You know, learning ancient Greek is a thing you learn. It's not something where like, oh, yeah, I understand that. Similarly with Italian and Latin, it helps, but it's not. At least I know going the other way from knowledge of Latin does not give you a free pass on knowing Italian. And let's see, there's a question here from Katie. How did accents and dialects evolve, like UK English versus US English? I think it's kind of like speciation in. I mean, languages are very much like biological speciation when there's sort of separation of groups of people. They can develop different languages, they can develop different accents and so on. I have to say, when I was growing up in England, one of the things that England was, let's say 1960s England still was looking, at least in the rear view mirror at the time when it had a great empire and so on, and was still a little bit kind of peeved about the fact that the US had kind of taken over as the top dog in defining, in sort of leadership in the world. And I remember people saying, oh, yes, American accents, they're very coarse accents. You know, it's only that the people with a refined British accent, they're the only people who don't have an accent, so to speak. And of course, people always say the people who are in the community that they're in don't have an accent and everybody else does have an accent. But I have to pass on this kind of scurrilous claim that, oh, the American accent came from the farmers in Cornwall who were kind of out in the boonies and they were the people who kind of went off to the US and that's where American accents came from. I suspect that's a completely nonsense story told in the kind of peeved at America becoming sort of a leading country. But that was, you know, the way accents work in different countries are very different. I mean, in England, for example, accent is a bizarre marker of all kinds of things. I mean, it, it's a. It is, for better or worse, a social class marker. It's a very detailed marker of. Of place of origin. And, you know, for somebody like me who hasn't lived there for a long time, I, I can't do it as well as I once could. But you can really nail down, you know, it's this person is from this place and this, you know, whatever. It's strange. It's also something where, you know, of course, in modern times, insofar as, you know, accent is a marker of social class, people play with that and will kind of have a different accent than you might expect based on whatever else. It's a strange thing. I think it is a, you know, one can have kind of social commentary on that and the fact that markers like that aren't such a good thing. But nevertheless, it is a, you know, it's a feature of the way that the accents work. And I don't know, you know, a lot of these things, like the difference in spelling between British English and American English. You know, there are. Spelling wasn't quite standardized at the time when British and American, when the British and American communities kind of diverged. There were also attempts in, in the US to, particularly in the us to have sort of this kind of different kinds of spelling that was simplified in newspapers and things like this. I don't know how much effect that had on what. What really got adopted. Let's see. Ah, somebody is commenting. Job is commenting. Reconstructed London, 1700s. Accent sounds somewhat American, they thought. Interesting, interesting claim. So, so that would, you know, it reminds one of. Of, for example, there are turns of speech and things in Indian English that are sort of. That will read to one strangely Victorian and, you know, letters that start, you know, my esteemed SIR in 2024. And that seems very odd from a British American point of view. And. But I think that's partly a consequence of the fact that that was, you know, English was imposed in India at a certain time and then kind of disconnected from the flow of developments in English and developed in its own way. And I think that's why you end up with these things that sort of sound sort of faintly Victorian in typical usage in Indian English. And I think it's. It's kind of the places where sort of there are things, sort of language, you know, groups of people disconnected, and sometimes the language didn't evolve. Sometimes the language evolved, but in a different way. FNW asks, are there still undiscovered writing systems to be discovered? I don't think one knows. I mean, I think writing was independently invented maybe five times or something, maybe more. And we know of those examples and, for example, the alphabetic languages, the ideographic languages, independently invented in those cases, presumably because they have very different structure. I mean, the shocking thing would be if there is a writing system that doesn't look like writing at all and it's handprints put in different places, and it's like, oh, my gosh, it's writing. I think there are these things on Easter island where it's not really clear quite what they are. They're sort of hieroglyphic kinds of things. And I think that that's a sort of, you know, is it a writing system? What does it mean, a writing system? You know, I think one of the key ideas of language is this sort of compositionality idea that you can take modular pieces and fit them together in lots of different ways. And that might be sort of a defining feature of a writing system that you've got sort of modular blocks that you can repeat in different forms and so on, but maybe that's not necessary. Maybe that's just our current way of thinking about writing systems. Let's see a comment here about. Do I have comments on the relationship scientists have had with the philosophy of science? Lazaro comments. I find it worrying that the philosophy of science has been left behind in academia. Oh, gosh, you know, academia is a complicated story and all the different sort of things that have happened in academia and so on. But it's worth remembering that there was a time when all science was philosophy. Now, of course, the demarcation of fields into sort of this is philosophy, this is science, this is physics, this is physiology and so on. Those demarcations happen when the fields get big and when things get organized. And it's kind of like, do you need a way of talking of counting up to 300? If you are sort of hanging out with your dogs in the Amazon jungle, you might not need that. Similarly, you don't really need to distinguish the faculty of the Department of Physics from the Department of Physiology when it's all the same people who do it anyway, which was the case back in the Middle Ages and late Middle Ages and so on. So I think that it's worth realizing that in ancient Greek times, for example, if you'd said, oh, there are the philosophers here and the physicists here, that wasn't really a thing. They were sort of all mixed together and they were kind of people who were learned folk. And that persisted for a long time. And I think the question of, oh, plenty of people, you could look at the people in the 1600s, people like Descartes were involved both in the science and the mathematics and the philosophy. People like, I don't know, Newton was much more on the science side, had a few things to say about theology that weren't particularly sensible. But people liked, well, Leibniz was another one from the 1600s who kind of spanned the sort of hard science and philosophy kind of divide. I think my impression is people like Spinoza were much more on the philosophy, theology side and not so much on the science side, although he was by profession a lens grinder. So presumably he had some scientific knowledge there. You know, Galileo much more on the science side, not so much on the philosophy side and so on. I think, you know, that was. That was still a time when those sort of things were mixed. By the time mathematical science really developed, people sort of zoomed off in that direction. And that wasn't very philosophical. You didn't need to understand kind of philosophical ideas to work through the technicalities of mathematical science. And then this kind of question of sort of the re emergence of philosophy and science. I mean, there were definitely scientists who got involved in philosophy. For example, Ludwig Boltzmann, late 1800s, got very involved in philosophy. I think he'd been interested in that anyway. But his kind of idea of atomism, which he sort of gave up on, he said, nobody's going to believe in these atoms. Everybody thinks the world is continuous. We're playing that same story again in the discussion of space and the continuity or discreteness of space now. But any case, Boltzmann in his later years became sort of a philosopher of science, but partly leveraging this question of could atoms exist even though you couldn't actually see one? And that was sort of a thing that led him to all sorts of philosophical considerations. Now from Boltzmann, who was sort of a philosophical scientist, Einstein kind of in, in some of his kind of his, what he was doing was in some sense applied philosophy, you know, taking philosophical type ideas and applying them in relativity and things like this, but then really mostly talking about the science side of it. The kind of the time when philosophy sort of reemerged as a thing in science was in quantum mechanics, where again people, it was all very confused. And so people said, let's appeal to philosophy. And Niels Bohr and people like that sort of started that trend. And that kind of led to both that and things from relativity led to kind of a, oh, we should pay attention to philosophy. But that was sort of a corner story to science. And it's kind of almost, if you have to revert to philosophy, you're not really doing science. I think that in modern times, with particularly the stuff we've done with physics project and Wooliad and all these kinds of things, it's kind of neat because a lot of things that really were things that were thought about at the time when the learned stuff was philosophy or maybe theology, now we can actually have things to say about those things that are said in sort of scientific type terms. And the thing that. And that's a place where we sort of, I think, see a recombination of ideas from philosophy, where that really matters, and ideas in science. Now when one talks about philosophy, academia, these kinds of things, philosophy has had the good or bad fortune of enmeshing with the world. And not every field, mathematics, most of the time it just goes on its merry way and people study mathematics and they study pure mathematics and occasionally it gets applied. But it is not, for example, something which enmeshes with the political structure of a country or something like this philosophy is not of that kind. Philosophy has things to say about ethics and politics and so on. And so there is a tremendous tendency for political sort of, for the ambient politics of a country to affect academic philosophy and to affect what academic philosophy can be done, what's outlawed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's one feature. Perhaps you could say it's a feature which makes the philosophy more important. Perhaps you could say it's a feature that kind of disrupts what would otherwise be the kind of natural flow of kind of intellectual development. But I think if you look at the history of academic philosophy and in its relationship to kind of philosophy of science in the, you know, by. Well, I think a lot of thinking about philosophy. There's sort of two major schools of philosophy in the mid 20th century, the kind of continental school and the Anglo American school. Continental school was, well, gosh, much more. I think I'm prejudiced because I, I grew up in Oxford and I knew a bunch of philosophers in the Oxford tradition and that was very much the Anglo American tradition of linguistic analytic philosophy where it's really a question of doing things like talking about how does language relate to thought and how do we kind of, how do we sort of structure thinking about thinking? Whereas the continental tradition is much less of that kind of pseudo scientific form. Now it's sort of interesting because, you know, in the time of kind of the heyday of analytic philosophy and linguistic philosophy, a lot of kind of the, well, you know, some of it sort of tried to have the precision of science. But I would say, and I can say from firsthand experience talking to lots of these, as I now learn, well known philosophers from the time they didn't know much about science. I mean the 10 year old me would typically know more about physics, let's say, than the sort of working philosopher who was talking about things about the world which could have been informed by physics, but they didn't know about physics. And I'm not sure if that's still the case, but at that time there was sort of the, you know, science was a technical thing and philosophy was sort of the thinking about thinking thing which wasn't really, didn't really need to be informed by the technicalities of things like physics. And I think the, and that's, you know, the idea of sort of philosophy of science. There were philosophers of science but they were fewer number and it wasn't the case that your average philosopher would be, sort of would use science as a kind of a reference point now that wasn't true in the earlier years, in the 1600s, for example. Absolutely. Philosophers, whether it was Locke or Descartes or whatever else, was Absolutely using science as a kind of the modern science of the day, as kind of a thing to bring into philosophy the modern science of the day. That wasn't happening in the kind of 20th century philosophy traditions now I think in this strange idea that sort of came into the humanities as part of the modernism of the early 20th century, that there should be sort of a science ification of everything, that the sort of the humanistic tradition wasn't really the thing and we could just invent from sort of pure science. We could invent everything. I mean, that came into areas like architecture with this kind of. Let's just use geometry to define architecture. Forget all those detailed sort of traditional classical forms of architecture. Let's just invent from scratch what we need. And that was a thing that came into a lot of areas of sort of the humanities and so on. And I think that in a sense, whether you could say that that was, I mean, that in some ways came out of philosophy, in some ways came out of areas like literary criticism and so on. In some ways came out of sort of general ideas about communism and so on and general ideas or more Marxism, I suppose that, you know, general ideas about sort of the role of the modern versus the historical, those kinds of things. And I think that probably that led to this idea that the humanities could be science ified, but it didn't particularly lead to the idea that the humanities or philosophy, I think, would engage with science. It was that they would become sciences themselves rather than that they would be commenting on the science of, on the things that were happening in science. I mean, I know that in one of the sort of stranger pieces of history, perhaps in an area like logic that was, you know, logic, you would think was not a political whatever. It was not a thing that would enmesh too much with kind of the kind of political, societal kinds of ideas. I know in, gosh, in early Islam, a bunch of philosophical kind of people who were kind of bringing back the logic of Aristotle sort of ran into trouble because logic was sort of a different way of expressing things. And kind of, you know, the Arabic of the Quran or something was kind of viewed as being sort of the ultimate way of expressing things. And it seemed wrong to bring in this logic thing as sort of the way of expressing things that was different from this natural language that had been anchored from this kind of religious text and so on. And I think in this. So this kind of. Then much later in, for example, the 1930s, I think the big issue in the Soviet Union was sort of how did logic relate to kind of, I don't know, this stuff. Well, dialectical materialism and so on. The kind of the sort of philosophical underpinning tradition of kind of the Soviet story. And I know that at the universities there, there was a lot of, kind of. There's a lot of kind of logic's got to be done this way. I think a particular point of contention was the law of excluded middle. The thing that says that not, not P is the same as P. And so that was sort of a strange case where there was sort of this, this, this cons, this sort of enmeshing of logic, which seems like one of these things that wouldn't get sort of pulled into kind of the societal commentary type thing. But in any case, I think I don't really know the modern story of philosophy of science. I only know interactions that we have about our physics project and so on with philosophers. And I have to say I've been rather pleased with those interactions because one of the things I found is that philosophers, maybe it's a selection effect, but philosophers tend to have an easier time dealing with kind of major conceptual change than probably the scientists do. Because in science you expect technical change, you expect new things to be discovered that are technically different and so on. But somehow the idea that there's a very different paradigm for thinking about things, that doesn't happen very often in science. People. In science, it's usually like we can just go on thinking in terms of calculus and so on. We can go on thinking in terms of. Of kind of these structured ways of doing, making models and so on. And we don't have to kind of rethink that in a big way. Let's see, we should probably wrap up soon here, but let's see. Gosh. ROV comments. If one views religion as a function whose input is belief and its output is explanation of the unknown, then could science with many universes and quantum mechanics be construed as such? Gosh, interesting. You know, I'm not sure that I would at all characterize the function of religion as being. I mean, I don't think that's about, you know, it's often about things about the way one should lead one's life and so on with a kind of a. Kind of a grounding in the way the world is. More so than, you know, it's very unfair, I think, to go back and look at you know, I don't know, some creation story in some religious text and say, gosh, it's all wrong. It's very unfair to do that because the description of things in those times is so different from our description today. It's like, nobody's going to write down the equations for the expansion of the universe in 500 B.C. 1000 B.C. whatever else, just not a thing you could ever imagine writing down. But you can still ask questions like, was there a beginning to everything? That's a perfectly reasonable question that can be asked independent of whether you're doing that with mathematical equations or whether you're doing that as a matter of kind of just thinking about things. It's interesting to ask questions like, how did things get their names? And in Genesis, and then this was called that. And it's a good question, how did this thing get that name? And that's a particular story for how it got the name. But in the end, it gets the name through this kind of societal process we now know. But it's still an interesting question, sort of an interesting thing to consider. How does it get its name? And it's, you know, at the level of description that existed at that time, you know, it's quite unfair to kind of take a modern sort of descriptive framework and expect it to apply to those kinds of works. I mean, it's, you know, one could say, gosh, of lots of kinds of things that we now understand computationally. You could point at something in mathematics, for example, even in something like calculus. It's like, why are you talking about it that way? That's a crazy way to talk about it. If you understand it computationally, there's a very direct way to talk about it. You don't have to be talking about these unseen, unknown, obscure kinds of abstract concepts that you can never wrap your arms around. This is something where, when we can actually represent it symbolically computationally, we can just say it works like this. Boom, boom, boom. And it's a thing. I think I may have mentioned this before. This, you know, the concept of a soul, which is something you find in, you know, ubiquitously in kind of in antiquity and thinking, religious, philosophical thinking and so on from those times. The concept of a soul, the concept that there is this kind of permanence to the some kind of thing that's associated with the pattern of thinking, is a thing which you might have said, oh, that's. That's all silly because, you know, where is the soul? Show me the soul. Does it live in the pituitary gland? Does it live in the heart? Where is it? You've got to be able to point at it. You've got to be able to pick it up and weigh it and so on, if it's a real thing. But now we understand when we think about computation that there is this notion of kind of the computational essence, the computational representation of what's going on in brains, how memory works, things like this, where the question of where it is localized, is there a particular ion channel that represents my memory of some Greek irregular verb, is not really that relevant. This question of the sort of abstract concept, the abstract computational concept is the thing that is a more relevant level of description. And that's the thing you find described as the eternal soul or whatever. And that's a very reasonable description of what we now understand sort of computationally, but couched in terms that made sense in a thousand BC or something. So in any case, I think to me there's a very interesting opportunity right now as a lot of things that we now understand in science with the ruliad and observer theory, all those kinds of things, things you can now sort of read back from that onto these philosophical and theological traditions. And I don't know what the consequences of that will be. I think that it may very well be the case that there are ideas that one can get from well developed systems of thought that existed 2,000 years ago or something that we can now realize, oh, gosh, that means we can see this and this and this go together. I mean, I was. So far I haven't been successful at that. I can only say it's really cool that this thing that we now understand about colonizing the ruliad or something has a resonance with things that existed in some Eastern philosophical tradition from 2,500 years ago. That, that's cool. What consequence it has, I don't really know. Perhaps it means that there are, you know, if one is used to those traditions, that it may be easier to have intuition about things than otherwise, I don't really know. All right, well, we should probably wrap up here just looking at some, Oh, gosh, many, many questions here, Some that I don't know the answer to, but. All right, I think we should, should probably wrap up for now because these are questions about very different topics. So we'll, we'll tackle them another time. So thanks for asking lots of interesting questions and look forward to more another time. Bye for now.