We're Simulated. AI Is Conscious. And We Can't Win.
The simulation, consciousness, free will, and AGI, with Roman Yampolskiy
Science
Curt Jaimungal.
Theories of Everything — deep dives into theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science.
Recent essays
30 of 50The Genius Who Invented Reverse Mathematics
Harvey Friedman's first and only podcast.
Janna Levin on the Shape of Reality
Klein Bottles, Gödel, and the Sentence the Universe Can't Prove
Juan Maldacena: Geometry as Entanglement, and the Emergence of Spacetime
I think you'll like this one
“Buddhism Can’t Explain This” and other musings with Zizek
The best NON-political conversation with Slavoj, ever. ;)
My lecture at the Mind at Large conference
The Reverse Elephant
A rare interview with the legendary George Ellis
On free will, causation, Penrose, Hawking, and wave functions...
“AI Is Physics Now” Says MIT’s Tegmark [Show Notes]
AI is taking over physics, consciousness may be next...
The Physicist Who Measured Negative Time
He also measured where photons go during a double slit...
Why you're likely smarter than you think
You're being judged on a frozen snapshot
“I See It, But I Don’t Believe It...”
What is Infinity, Actually?
Quantum Mechanics Contradicts Itself (and He Proved It)
Why this ETH Zurich professor abandoned every interpretation
The "Inverse Problem" Of Dark Matter Is Insane
Why this physicist says “we are now ready to move on...”
7 Signs You're Smarter Than You Think
The structure of intellectual life is set up to vaporize your confidence.
Why write on Substack?
People often ask me about what there would be left if LLMs take over any output we want.
Jennifer Nagel: Why Defining Knowledge Always Fails [Show Notes]
And how skepticism is a cognitive illusion generated by conversational pressure, not insight.
Time Travel in Physics: “We Still Don't Know”
JB Manchak on time travel, the self, and gravity…
General Relativity Is NOT Deterministic (Here's the Proof)
I’ve been wanting to make this video for a while.
The Physicist Who Made Consciousness Relative
Probably the most viral physics theory of consciousness: The Relativistic Theory of Consciousness.
The Philosopher Who Says Science Doesn't Aim for Truth [Show Notes]
Professor Bas van Fraassen’s 1980 book The Scientific Image detonated a bomb in philosophy of science that’s still reverberating.
Neil deGrasse Tyson Doesn’t Understand What “Belief” Means
The word that terrifies scientists (and gurus).
Language Without Meaning. Mind Without Memory. [Show Notes]
Abstract
You Don't Speak Language... It Speaks You [Show Notes]
Abstract
Stuart Kauffman: “There Is No Theory of Everything” [Transcript]
Why complexity theory and "Kantian wholes" makes reductionism flawed.
Local vs. Global: One of the Deepest Patterns in Physics
There’s a single idea running through gauge theory, general relativity, topology, and even quantum contextuality: local structure doesn’t determine global structure.
“My Brain Had Stopped Being Able to Do Math”
David Bessis—PhD from University Paris-Cité, former researcher at Yale, CNRS, and the École Normale Supérieure, author of Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity—quit a permanent, tenured, research-only position (the kind mathematicians would co…
What is Infinity, Exactly?
The different kinds of infinity explained simply...
This Physicist (Unexpectedly) Derived Gravity from Information
And why "spacetime" may not exist at more fundamental levels
When Spacetime Lets You Cheat at Logic
Something you may not have heard of is Malament‑Hogarth spacetimes. Besides sounding like a holographic Yu‑Gi‑Oh card, these spacetimes allow us to compute what we thought was uncomputable. To understand this, we have to talk about what we mean by computable
This Cosmologist Discovered Something Strange...
Reality may be a neural network...