#logical-positivism

#logical-positivism

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

In antiquity, many opined about "the elements" in combination. Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms. Perhaps everything, they opined, was composed of indivisible building blocks. In the late 1700s, hydrogen and oxygen were discovered. Circa 1804, John Dalton revived atomism to explain chemical behavior. Then in 1869, Mendeleev developed the periodic table: organizing the atoms.

A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'

This is a tough time for politics in America. But it's an extremely interesting time for those of us who wrestle with the nature of reality. As a psychiatrist who has treated people with psychosis for over 20 years, I have lived in the uncomfortable space between their experience of reality and mine and I have worked to change beliefs that are some of the most resistant to change: delusions.

Metaphors are linked to how we experience the world around us, according to seminal work by researchers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In English, we "move forward" with our lives and don't "retreat into" the past. We speak about people who are "cold as ice" and "heavy" matters we need to resolve. Some of these metaphorical expressions are more than just, well, expressions-they are actually based on our sensory experiences. This mind-body link is called "embodied cognition."

A drawn circle is at least something physical. You can see it, touch it, erase it. The skeptic can still say, "Circles are grounded in physical reality. Justice is different; it's just an idea in your head." So let's talk about the number two. Point to it. Not two apples, not two fingers, not a numeral on a page-that's just a symbol.

For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively-deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises-while bearing no vulnerability for what they say. Millions of people already rely on chatbots powered by large language models, and have integrated these synthetic interlocutors into their personal and professional lives. An LLM's words shape our beliefs, decisions, and actions, yet no speaker stands behind them.

For Plato, psyche meant something like what we'd now call mind -understood as a complex system requiring governance. The psyche had distinct parts: a reasoning part that deliberates, a spirited part that feels emotion and courage, and an appetitive part that desires. Each part has its own function and its own form of excellence. And crucially, these parts need to be governed-integrated under what Plato called constitutional self-rule.

All of us live in an age where we're bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence - when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the "authenticity" that we say we are pursuing.

For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fixed entity: This is me. These are my traits. This is who I am. I assumed I was essentially that same person who loved sugary cereal at age 8, fried chicken at 12, and tequila at 21, and who still loves those things now, even if my stomach disagrees. But this is an illusion. Neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism all agree: There is nothing fixed about us-not even close.

This story is about complexity, advanced math, cognition, and machine computation. But hold on. For this exercise, my task is to take this complex idea and reduce it-to simplify it into something less daunting and (I hope) a bit easier to understand. So, let's take a step back. My bet is that most of us learned our first piece of geometry with two letters: x and y.

What does it mean to say that you are restrained solely by your own morality, by your own mind? The conscience is often described as an inner voice telling us what to do when others may be opposed. A moral compass is that which distinguishes between right and wrong, good and bad. Our conscience, our moral compass, sets the groundwork for doing the right thing.