- You have footprints
in all of the sciences,
so let's talk about the
universe a little bit.
Is the universe, at the
lowest level, deterministic
or stochastic, in your
amateur philosophy view?
Put another way, does God play dice?
- We know it is stochastic, right?
Because--
- Today, today we think it is stochastic.
- Yes, we think, because we have
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,
and we have some
experiments to confirm that.
- All we have is
experiments to confirm it.
We don't understand why.
- Why is already--
- You wrote a book about why. (laughs)
- Yeah, it's a puzzle.
It's a puzzle that you have
the dice-flipping machine, or God,
and the result of the flipping
propagated with a speed
faster than the speed of light. (laughs)
We can't explain it, okay.
So, but it only governs
microscopic phenomena.
- So you don't think of quantum mechanics
- as useful
- No.
- For understanding the nature of reality.
- No, it's diversionary.
- So, in your thinking,
the world might as well
be deterministic.
- The world is deterministic
and as far as the neuron
firing is concerned,
it's deterministic to first approximation.
