Carlo Rovelli: Nothing Exists Alone

Today on the James Alteger show. I think we make a mistake when we try to jump out from my perspective, your perspective, somebody else's perspective, and somehow try to access something absolute final, definitive, like if we were looking at the world from the outside instead of from the inside, as we actually look at the world. And this view of the world from the outside. side sort of more than all the perspectives it does not work it does not work in physics is that I don't think it's even worked in philosophy it's just an illusion that only grounds our sense of oh where do I put my feet but it's not really useful this isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host this is the James Alteger show So Carlo Rivelli is one of the smartest people I know.

And he's a theoretical physicist. He's written a ton of great books. His new book is On the Equality of All Things, Lessons on Physics and Philosophy. He's been on the show before. And look, at the end of this one, I told him I felt like he was just

tolerating my questions and he was nice about that but the very first question I asked was do I in fact exist because in his new book on the equality of all things I'll try to summarize it a little bit nothing actually exists on its own not a person not a particle not you everything is only exists in relation to other things and we talk about this on the podcast and i spent an hour trying to understand this and what what are the consequences of this what does it mean you know i asked him if free will is fake he said the illusion isn't that you're a machine the illusion is thinking you're something other than your brain like as he referred to it a a ghost And then I wondered, like, well, okay, is it a tr an absolute truth that everything decays? Like, you know, an apple goes rotten, a stone eventually turns into stand. He said no and he gave me some examples to show how that wasn't an absolute truth either.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (58 minutes, 10,078 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.