#24 - Popper's Three Worlds

This episode begins with a big announcement! Ben has officially become a cat person, and is now Taking Cats Seriously. Vaden follows up with some news of his own, before diving into the main subject for today's episode - Popper's Three Worlds. In this episode we discuss:The TCS parenting movement Chesto's tweet to DeutschHow Popper's Three Worlds differs from Deutsch's Things/Qualia/Abstractions classificationWould prime numbers exist if humans didn't exist?What constitutes reality?The existence of non-physical entities and the reality of abstractions  Having a quick glance at the following wikipedia pages will help ground the conversation:Formal systems Formal languagesModular ArithmeticRules of inferenceAlternative LogicsErrata:Somewhere Vaden says English is a formal language. Nope definitely not - English is natural language, which is distinct from a formal language.  Send us your best guess for whether or not we're real at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.  Support Increments

Om Podcasten

Vaden Masrani, a senior research scientist in machine learning, and Ben Chugg, a PhD student in statistics at CMU, get into trouble arguing about everything except machine learning and statistics. Coherence is somewhere on the horizon. Bribes, suggestions, love-mail and hate-mail all welcome at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.