Molecules & Mirrors — Vanessa Seifert on The Philosophy of Chemistry

00:00:00.67
James Robinson
Hi Vanessa Seifert, welcome to Multiverses, thank you for being here.

00:00:04.72
Vanessa
Hi, James. Thank you for having me.

00:00:07.73
James Robinson
um So i’m really excited because you’re the first philosopher of chemistry that I’ve spoken to ever. So that’s a big deal for me.

00:00:13.09
Vanessa
Okay.

00:00:15.53
James Robinson
And it’s been really fascinating learning about the topic. I was curious, how did you how did you come into it? It’s quite a new field. Were you always interested in chemistry, always interested philosophy, and this was just a natural ah meld of the two?

00:00:31.88
Vanessa
um So it happened a little bit. um So my training was initially in chemical engineering. That was my undergraduate studies in Greece.

00:00:43.04
Vanessa
And um I wasn’t really happy with the prospects of ah working as a chemical engineer. ah So I wanted to do a switch ah to philosophy of science. And um you know it was natural to and Once I did you know my master’s degree and I saw how much I liked it and that I wanted to pursue a PhD, it was you know the natural way of going into philosophy of science because of my background training.

00:01:09.59
Vanessa
So my PhD proposal was about ah the relation of chemistry with physics, and I justified it. on the basis of my training, basically, because I didn’t have a lot of training in philosophy.

00:01:22.06
Vanessa
I only had studied one year philosophy of science. So I had to kind of incorporate my background um studies as well. So it’s a very romantic story of how I got into philosophy of chemistry.

00:01:35.30
Vanessa
it It happened just because I i was trained you know in that field more. ah you know It was one of the sciences I was most ah ah more acquainted with a compared with other sciences.

00:01:46.66
Vanessa
um So that’s how it happened. But it was very fortunate.

00:01:49.63
James Robinson
That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s there’s a general trend of philosophers of science starting with science or or having a very deep grounding in in science now as the questions that are getting asked are very specific, which I think is a good segue into um i’d love to talk about your your recent paper on chirality yeah and the measurement problem.

00:01:57.09
Vanessa
and Yeah.

00:02:13.40
James Robinson
So two pretty complicated.

00:02:14.32
Vanessa
The one with that. Yes.

00:02:15.86
James Robinson
Yeah. With Alexander Frangling. Yeah. and So, yeah, perhaps. maybe Maybe lead into this by telling us um there is a problem with chirality in in chemistry or a, I don’t know, as something a little bit of a mystery.

00:02:29.34
James Robinson
um

00:02:29.68
Vanessa
ah No.

00:02:29.91
James Robinson
Perhaps tell us what that is.

00:02:31.61
Vanessa
So i I’m going to start a little bit differently, actually. ah So in the philosophy of chemistry, and when you start reading into the literature, ah you find that you know one of the most ah important problems that they raise, ah philosophers of chemists ah chemistry, has to do with ah you know chemistry’s relation with quantum physics.

00:02:52.87
Vanessa
And, you know, the literature and the field is very young, I should say. If you don’t mind, I’d like to set a little bit the context so it makes sense.

00:02:59.69
James Robinson
absolutely.

00:03:00.02
Vanessa
they

00:03:00.48
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:03:00.82
Vanessa
So um and the field is quite young. It started in the 90s. ah the Its journal, its a big official journal, Foundations of Chemistry, was ah created, I think, in 95, 96, somewhere during that decade, right?

00:03:16.81
Vanessa
And the Society as well was created then. And, um you know, they started off… um by discussing chemistry’s relation to physics and explicitly rejecting a can ah chemistry’s reduction to physics.

00:03:32.77
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:03:34.22
Vanessa
um Because in philosophy of science, up until that point, it was fairly uncontroversial that chemistry is an easy example where reduction works.

00:03:46.12
Vanessa
right So if you go into and the general literature about reductionism and even go into and Ernest Nagel’s book about intertheoretic reduction, chemistry is mentioned you know in passing as one of the easy cases where you see reduction to reductionism to work.

00:04:04.93
Vanessa
So philosophers…

00:04:05.22
James Robinson
Yeah. maybe Maybe we should just say, so if anyone like reduction, how would you define it?

00:04:08.92
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:04:10.42
James Robinson
What’s a kind of…

00:04:11.94
Vanessa
So um reductionism initially was the idea that, you know, the the higher level theory. or at least one theory can be derived by another one.

00:04:23.92
Vanessa
In this case, chemistry or a theory in chemistry can be derivable by a theory ah in quantum in physicsy in quantum physics in such a way, and that’s at least the strong version, that renders the higher level theory, the chemical theory in that case, a little bit redundant in some sense.

00:04:24.33
James Robinson
yeah

00:04:42.03
James Robinson
yeah yeah

00:04:42.83
Vanessa
right Or secondary, at least. So what is fundamental is everything that we know from ah the physical theories. All the other higher-level theories that we have are just you know easy ways to describe different patches of the world.

00:04:57.94
Vanessa
And that’s it. But every everything true about the world is described by the you know the true theory is the underlying physical one. And so reductionism is the idea that you can show…

00:05:09.65
Vanessa
um I’m moving a little, okay, there. ah Reductionism is the idea that the more fundamental theory has a higher priority than the lower level one and kind of derive you can derive the chemical or the higher level theory from it.

00:05:27.47
James Robinson
Yeah, okay. So it’s it’s sort of like chemistry is like applied physics in the views of a reductionist, perhaps. ah very I mean, and there’s different forms of reduction, but yeah.

00:05:36.30
Vanessa
In some Yes, there are and now nowadays, this is a ah very simplistic… and explanation of reductionism, because reductionism has tried to accommodate ah the value that the special sciences have.

00:05:53.09
Vanessa
It also acknowledges that it’s not so easy to ah deduce you know the equations that you get, to ah you know the the equations or the descriptions that you get by the higher level theories to deduce them by the lower level ones.

00:06:06.90
Vanessa
So the idea that I initially give you gave you is the the naive dream, the reducive naive reductionist dream that was um at the beginning formulated.

00:06:12.29
James Robinson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:06:16.56
Vanessa
But now, of course, you you don’t need to be a reductionist. And you don’t have When you are a reductionist, you don’t have to be so um dismissive, I suppose, of the special sciences. Rather the opposite.

00:06:29.80
Vanessa
There are much more nuanced ah accounts of reductionism that take into account um the role of the special sciences. But in any case, that was not the case back in the 90s.

00:06:41.70
Vanessa
There was still this idea that you know chemistry is, in a sense, applied physics. and And so ah the community tried to resist that. and To some extent, it resisted it as well in order to reaffirm also the the field itself, the philosophy of chemistry.

00:06:59.32
Vanessa
and So it’s quite interesting. If you read the introductions or some of the papers that came out but back in the day, you would see some philosophers explicitly said that we need to defend the autonomy of chemistry from physics in order to also reinforce the autonomy of the philosophy of chemistry and why it’s worthwhile doing philosophy of chemistry.

00:07:16.06
James Robinson
okay

00:07:18.73
Vanessa
So I didn’t really like that when I started studying during my PhD the topic. ah But in any case, and i started working on this during my PhD in Bristol.

00:07:31.03
Vanessa
And i discovered that one of the case studies that they invoked as evidence for the non-reducibility of chemistry is molecular structure and chirality.

00:07:45.58
Vanessa
right So the idea is that there are some molecules, they’re called isomers, that and have, and there are sets of molecules rather that are called isomers. They have the same number and types of atoms, but the atoms are are connected to each other in different ways.

00:07:59.16
James Robinson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:08:03.34
Vanessa
right So isomers are sets of molecules that only differ in terms of you know how the atoms between them are connected. And even the connections can be very minimal. So there are different kinds of isomerism, ah chemistry, chemists call them like that, where, for example, the chiromolecules, it’s a subgroup of isomers, are sets of molecules that differ that differ only in terms of where one of the molecules, rather, the classic thing is you have a molecule, imagine it like a hand, and the other molecule differs the other hand, right? They are not they cannot super, the the structure cannot super be super superimposed.

00:08:41.69
Vanessa
one on the other, right? So the they are mirror images, but they are not identical.

00:08:42.94
James Robinson
So they’re mirror images of one another. Yeah.

00:08:48.12
Vanessa
These are called chiromolecules.

00:08:48.34
James Robinson
yeah

00:08:50.64
Vanessa
And so the argument ah made a by philosophers of chemistry is that with respect to these chiromolecules, quantum mechanics cannot tell the difference when they describe them.

00:09:05.15
Vanessa
The description that they offer for these two molecules is identical.

00:09:11.78
Vanessa
I

00:09:12.76
James Robinson
So so and ah why is that? So is it just that quantum mechanics is just saying, um okay, don’t give it away.

00:09:17.88
Vanessa
and don’t want to give it away yet.

00:09:20.14
James Robinson
Okay, okay, okay.

00:09:20.96
Vanessa
so

00:09:21.09
James Robinson
But but that’s that’s their argument.

00:09:23.34
Vanessa
so that’s it So they noticed that you know they cannot give you that. And then that’s where all the anti-reductionist positions started to and emerge in the literature because some said, okay, this is evidence that we don’t have epistemic reductionism because the description from quantum mechanics cannot give us a description of the chemical you know system.

00:09:49.43
Vanessa
Which, fair enough, some this kind of reading of reductionism doesn’t seem to work, indeed. And then you have also stronger readings that this is ah evidence of some form of metaphysical non-reductionism.

00:10:03.94
Vanessa
What, for example, Robin Hendry, a very famous ah philosopher of chemistry at the University of Durham, calls strong emergence. So he he claims that this is evidence of of molecular structure and emerging at a different level of ontology, at the chemical level.

00:10:22.44
Vanessa
which is distinct from what is happening at the lower quantum mechanical level. know

00:10:26.94
James Robinson
So that’s a very big claim. So that’s saying there is just genuinely, there is stuff in the world and this level, which you can’t you can’t explain any way from the lower quantum mechanical level. It just it just happens.

00:10:43.06
James Robinson
um And there is no account of quantum mechanics which is which is able to explain that.

00:10:48.33
Vanessa
oh Yes, okay, you make it…

00:10:50.34
James Robinson
I’m putting too strongly or…

00:10:51.53
Vanessa
yeah you make it a little bit Yes, you make it a bit too too strong.

00:10:51.46
James Robinson
Right.

00:10:54.57
Vanessa
But and I think the the gist is correct. that that There is something that quantum mechanics cannot it cannot track everything. so and That’s also the idea of um you know yet in general ah emergence ah brings forward this idea that you know ah physics is not complete or at least causally complete.

00:11:03.78
James Robinson
right

00:11:18.45
Vanessa
It denies that principle that we have that Everything that happens is the result of physical causal relations and nothing else. and emerge and And at least you know many readings of emergence say that this is not actually the case.

00:11:27.62
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:11:32.71
Vanessa
There are stuff happening, causal stuff, that are non-physical. They happen at the higher level. So yes, in that sense, physics is not complete according to emergence. And molecular structure is invoked as an example of that.

00:11:48.35
James Robinson
and and And maybe, and and just to sort of explain that claim a bit more, maybe we should say, why is it that a first reading of of quantum physics would suggest that you don’t get um chirality out?

00:12:03.56
James Robinson
I mean, is it just most simply put that there’s there’s no kind of asymmetry built into ah quantum physics?

00:12:09.68
Vanessa
So, okay. ah

00:12:11.26
James Robinson
Would that be one?

00:12:12.30
Vanessa
So, Robin Hendry explains the situation very nicely, I think. ah So, he says, um what happens is you have the Schrodinger equation.

00:12:24.62
Vanessa
for a chiro molecule.

00:12:27.12
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:12:27.42
Vanessa
And suppose you don’t use any prior assumptions about that molecule and you start writing that equation for for the system.

00:12:28.80
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:12:35.96
Vanessa
You take into account only the number and types of subatomic particles, right? And you try to you try to calculate how they interact each one interacts with all ah how each subatomic particle interacts with all the other subatomic particles that make up the molecule.

00:12:51.12
Vanessa
Now, he says, and the and and that’s accurate, that you know in practice, scientists cannot solve that equation because it’s too complicated. So they start making approximations, right?

00:13:03.18
Vanessa
They start disregarding some of the interactions that take place. ah But most importantly, what they do is they apply the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation.

00:13:14.97
Vanessa
which is like taking like taking the nuclei to be frozen in space relative to how the electrons move.

00:13:21.34
James Robinson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:13:22.63
Vanessa
And that makes them disregard some of the interactions between ah some of the particles. And that makes the equation much ah simpler to solve. Now, once you’ve made that approximation, you can’t differentiate between the chiral molecules.

00:13:39.72
Vanessa
Right. Because you’ve put or you’ve already imposed some form of structure to the molecule already by freezing out the nuclei because you freeze them out somewhere. I explained very crudely. I hope that umm I’m doing justice justice to it. But I think you get the point.

00:13:56.90
Vanessa
Right.

00:13:56.98
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:13:57.30
Vanessa
mr So you impose structure.

00:13:59.04
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:14:00.50
Vanessa
And then so the problem here is and. Either you say, okay, I’ve done that because computationally it’s very complicated to solve the equation just by first principles.

00:14:13.69
Vanessa
But if I could, then I would have been able to differentiate between the different chiromolecules. But you don’t really know that. Robin says, you don’t know that because actually what you do is you already impose part of the structure that you’re looking at.

00:14:30.75
Vanessa
And that’s why, you know, that this is evidence that maybe structure emerges from the physical level. So it’s how you read the situation, basically.

00:14:43.02
Vanessa
um Now, the paper that we wrote with Alex is a different way of interpreting what’s going on there. So what we say is that, you know, and… I should also say, by imposing the BO, you break the symmetry.

00:14:57.19
Vanessa
That’s for symmetry, yeah?

00:14:57.27
James Robinson
yeah yeah

00:14:58.91
Vanessa
And now, and and the claim is that before breaking the symmetry, ah the emergentists or the anti-reductionist claim is, well, actually, it’s not computational difficulty because if I hadn’t broken the symmetry by applying the BO, I would have a superposition of structures and I wouldn’t be able to differentiate them, right?

00:15:17.37
James Robinson
Right.

00:15:19.74
Vanessa
And then what we came to say with Alex is this, okay, then this is an instance of the measurement problem then.

00:15:19.64
James Robinson
Right, right.

00:15:26.68
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah. Let’s just pause that because I think that it’s really key that the application of the Born-Oppenheiner approximation, so you treat the the nucleus as kind of like a planet or something that’s in a fairly well-defined place.

00:15:27.82
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:15:43.81
Vanessa
Hmm.

00:15:46.23
James Robinson
um That’s not just, if you see that as just a way of you know approximating and and making it making the computation more tractable, then you might say, okay, well, there’s nothing there nothing strange here.

00:16:02.34
James Robinson
um

00:16:02.56
Vanessa
i

00:16:03.34
James Robinson
we’rere We’re quite, you know,

00:16:06.99
James Robinson
we’re cutting some corners, but we’re not and ignoring anything important about the, the the kind of fundamental physics.

00:16:08.68
Vanessa
yeah

00:16:12.22
Vanessa
um

00:16:14.19
James Robinson
But then the counter arguments that claim is no look in the, you know, we can, we can see for other reasons that the, the, the sort of the ground state. So the most basic state, the lowest energy state, which is, you know, what, what you,

00:16:35.14
James Robinson
I don’t the sort of the simplest state that physicists like to consider things being in um for a molecule will be symmetric.

00:16:47.02
James Robinson
So it won’t have any handedness.

00:16:47.93
Vanessa
Mm. Mm. Mm.

00:16:49.16
James Robinson
um And when you apply the Born-On-Penheim approximation, that handedness goes away. But it seems like you’ve lost something, you know, the at one level, you’re saying, okay, well, my physics tells me there’s there’s no handedness here, that it’s mirror symmetric.

00:17:08.39
James Robinson
um And then as soon as you start cranking through the equations, you have to do this thing which gets rid of that. And that makes you think, well, actually, maybe just you know this assumption that I’ve brought in is is is is not just an assumption that makes things more tractable, but um you know maybe to Henry’s point is actually you know there’s something new that’s emerged here.

00:17:27.67
James Robinson
There is a handedness that just happens to emerge at the same point that we we need to make these, um you know for instrumental reasons, we need to to to make some assumptions.

00:17:29.96
Vanessa
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

00:17:38.33
James Robinson
um So i think, yeah, that’s quite you know that that seems quite mysterious.

00:17:38.68
Vanessa
yeah

00:17:43.45
Vanessa
um

00:17:43.38
James Robinson
um

00:17:44.38
Vanessa
To an extent, yes, but yeah you know we have to be also mindful of of the details and of what actually quantum mechanics describes. So um and the equation, in theory, is attempting to describe a single molecule.

00:18:01.58
James Robinson
Hmm.

00:18:01.81
Vanessa
Right? And um in in chemistry, though, all the properties, including including chirality and handedness, are properties they observe when molecules are in non-isolation.

00:18:13.81
Vanessa
So I’ve written about this separately in other papers, ah which is a crucial difference because there is evidence that if you were to look at molecules by themselves, which is a very hard thing to do. And actually now they’re trying to develop what they call single molecule chemistry.

00:18:31.14
Vanessa
So the chemists are trying to detect the or observe properties of just one single molecule. But even that, you know the act of measurement renders the molecule in non-isolation in a way that detaches itself from the target system that quantum mechanics is set to describe.

00:18:43.53
James Robinson
yeah

00:18:48.72
Vanessa
So already there, there is a gap of whether what quantum mechanics describes is the same as chemistry describes or even observes.

00:18:49.05
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

00:18:57.33
James Robinson
yeah yeah

00:18:58.00
Vanessa
yeah And whether the properties we’re expecting by chemistry should be detectable or identifiable by quantum mechanics is not evident. Maybe it shouldn’t be because we know that yeah you know ah certain molecules, when they are ah in isolation, they have done some experiments, they exhibit quantum behaviors.

00:19:19.04
Vanessa
The exhibits, said that there’s there’s also evidence of quantum tunneling and stuff like that. So there might, this actually might be correct. Quantum mechanics might be correct, that there is no chirality when you look at single molecules in isolation.

00:19:34.49
James Robinson
Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah.

00:19:37.19
Vanessa
So it’s not necessary that you have to impose, you know, you have to impose the expectations that you have because of one description.

00:19:38.21
James Robinson
yeah yeah

00:19:45.71
Vanessa
You have to impose those expectations on the other description. Because technically speaking, they might be describing different systems that have different properties.

00:19:55.08
James Robinson
so So one is just designed and works for the the system of a single molecule and the other, you know as soon as you step into the the multiple molecule realm, it it’s a different kind of physics that supplies.

00:20:06.98
Vanessa
Yes, so, well, not a different, you know, you are at the classical realm now. That’s why we talk about it in terms of the mole of the measurement problem with Alex.

00:20:15.23
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:20:19.20
Vanessa
Because ah for us, this is a a case study that kind of shows, it’s just another case study where you see the classical quantum divide.

00:20:30.12
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah.

00:20:31.90
Vanessa
um

00:20:32.32
James Robinson
So yeah, maybe, maybe run us very quickly through.

00:20:32.78
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:20:34.24
James Robinson
I think many people will be familiar with the measurement problem, um ah particularly.

00:20:39.24
Vanessa
Oh, don’t make me explain. I’m not very good at stuff.

00:20:41.50
James Robinson
Okay. Well, we can just say, can just say it’s when you have something in, I mean, the classic one is, you know, Schrodinger’s cat. It’s in two states here.

00:20:49.23
Vanessa
ah

00:20:49.74
James Robinson
We sort of have Schrodinger’s molecule or something. It’s like, it’s got two handednesses.

00:20:52.64
Vanessa
yes is a bed and a low Yes, dead and alive at the same time.

00:20:55.33
James Robinson
Yeah. It’s like, Yeah. and And in this case, you it’s it’s like you have a single hand and it’s both a right hand and a left hand and the same at the same time. And we never see that.

00:21:05.96
James Robinson
Like, we’re quite familiar with people having both kinds of hands, but not having one hand and it being both.

00:21:10.64
Vanessa
or or Or neither. but You know, it’s difficult how you read what what what superpositions mean exactly.

00:21:16.26
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah.

00:21:18.82
Vanessa
It’s such a mess. That’s why I’m very reluctant to to talk about these things, because I still cannot get my head around them. It’s so difficult to to understand.

00:21:28.50
James Robinson
Well, I think you’re right. I don’t think we have the language for it. right in In and di direct notation or something, you can just write down like ah you know two things and you have a plus between them.

00:21:41.83
James Robinson
But what does that plus mean? It doesn’t mean that you have a hand and another hand.

00:21:47.29
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:21:47.66
James Robinson
And it’s not clear that you have a hand that’s in two distinct states.

00:21:50.77
Vanessa
um Yeah.

00:21:53.51
James Robinson
It’s in ah single state, but that state is somehow… Just very, very hard for us to understand.

00:22:02.67
Vanessa
So yes, that is basically… ah the the weird situation of the measurement problem, I suppose. And this is also how it applies for the chiral molecules in particular. that you know the the um The ground state of such molecules, a ground state is supposed to be the most stable state of the molecule, the one with the lowest energy, the one that you expect it to to be, right?

00:22:25.99
Vanessa
um Is the one where there is no structure or there’s a superposition of structures, whatever that means. Either it has one… i don’t know I don’t know how to say that. It’s in a superposition of structures.

00:22:38.29
Vanessa
That’s it. so I don’t know how to further explain that.

00:22:43.59
James Robinson
That’s fine. That’s fine.

00:22:45.96
Vanessa
I’m sorry about that.

00:22:50.05
James Robinson
No, i think I think that’s good. um

00:22:53.94
James Robinson
Can you… wait. Can you hear me okay? I think my connection…

00:22:55.98
Vanessa
Yeah, I can.

00:22:56.90
James Robinson
I hear you. Okay, good. Yeah, sorry. my your Your image is frozen, but I’m still hearing you fine.

00:23:03.59
Vanessa
Okay.

00:23:03.62
James Robinson
um Okay, so we have we have these we have these um molecules which in, you know, at at a level of description are in you know right-handed.

00:23:13.62
Vanessa
Or neither. Yeah.

00:23:14.83
James Robinson
We don’t know quite how to say it, but they seem to be right-handed and left-handed at the same at the same time. And this seems like ah an instance of measurement problem or neither.

00:23:20.58
Vanessa
or neither

00:23:23.75
James Robinson
Yes. ah Because we never we never experienced that sort of thing at the macroscopic scale. we never we And this is like manifest in a

00:23:31.87
Vanessa
yeah

00:23:35.89
James Robinson
mere inability to to speak about this correctly or to know how to talk about it, because we just don’t see that sort of thing. um So we’ve just not developed the the tools for ah conceptualizing it really um outside of quantum mechanics.

00:23:47.07
Vanessa
um

00:23:49.72
James Robinson
um So, yeah, how you know how how did different i guess how how did how the different approaches the measurement problem come to bear on this topic in particular?

00:24:06.66
Vanessa
So um the the measurement problem… and is closely connected to, so, brot different interpretations to quantum mechanics offer different solutions or interpretations to the measurement problem, what the measurement problem is and how we can explain it, right?

00:24:25.72
Vanessa
And the in the paper with Alex, we um we sketched, you know, three main interpretations of quantum mechanics, ah the Everettian interpretation, the spontaneous collapse theories, and then the Bohmian theory.

00:24:39.83
Vanessa
And each one gives you a different version of what happens.

00:24:40.76
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:24:43.16
Vanessa
but what It kind of gives you a different narrative of the measurement problem, why it happens and why you end up actually with one chiromolecule and not the other, ah basically.

00:24:55.57
Vanessa
So… What it does essentially is, you know, we take the situation that we know from philosophy of chemistry that, you know, the ground state corresponds to a superposition of chiromolecules and then the different solutions to the measurement problem.

00:25:08.75
Vanessa
By giving you an interpretation of what it means to be in a superposition and then, you know, for that as for for the wave function to collapse and for you to observe one of the two chiromolecules, it automatically gives you also a solution of of the chemical problem.

00:25:24.23
Vanessa
That’s basically it.

00:25:26.72
James Robinson
Okay. ah maybe so maybe if we say Yeah, that makes sense.

00:25:27.89
Vanessa
Yeah. Exactly.

00:25:30.70
James Robinson
I mean, I think you sort of you you you almost um phrased it in terms of, say, the Copenhagen interpretation. and said, okay, there’s a collapse here. And um you know that’s one way of thinking about it.

00:25:41.64
Vanessa
yeah

00:25:42.87
James Robinson
And so would it be right, for example, with the the many worlds interpretation, we would say, well, actually,

00:25:43.07
Vanessa
um

00:25:47.03
Vanessa
um

00:25:50.03
James Robinson
there’s you know There’s no collapse.

00:25:51.90
Vanessa
yeah

00:25:51.95
James Robinson
You have both of these chiral molecules.

00:25:54.86
Vanessa
exactly

00:25:55.12
James Robinson
um But as soon as they sort of start to interact with your um measuring equipment and everything, um all that measuring equipment goes into a superposition as well.

00:26:01.70
Vanessa
Yeah. Yeah.

00:26:06.18
James Robinson
A superposition of seeing a left-handed and a right-handed molecule and I go into supposition of ah being in a world where there is, ah you know, a left-handed molecule being seen by my apparatus and a world where there is a right-handed molecule being seen.

00:26:25.47
Vanessa
yeah

00:26:25.45
James Robinson
And these two worlds are a kind of… um They’re unaware of each other. They’re unable to interact with each other in any way um because they’ve reached a scale where the you know the wave functions are just two too noisy, too different.

00:26:40.26
James Robinson
um Whereas at the the quantum level, there’s still some chance that there’s interesting stuff that can happen at the where the superposition can sort of be um played with, manipulated.

00:26:49.37
Vanessa
Yeah. um

00:26:51.21
James Robinson
um

00:26:52.08
Vanessa
Exactly. So that’s funny the watch’s one one way to to think of this situation.

00:26:57.22
James Robinson
Yeah, that’s that’s my, do you have a preferred way? Do you have a kind of ah dog in this fight of quantum mechanical interpretations?

00:27:02.72
Vanessa
No. No, not at all.

00:27:04.36
James Robinson
No? Okay, very good.

00:27:06.22
Vanessa
and

00:27:06.11
James Robinson
That’s wise.

00:27:07.61
Vanessa
i No, not at all. I’m going to let physicists and philosophers of physics to to to work it out. And, then you know, they there I have no dog in the fight.

00:27:19.46
James Robinson
but But what you’ve done here is is really interesting because this problem of, you know, this this issue of chirality was seen as an instance where, oh, chemistry is ah sort of evidence for…

00:27:36.21
James Robinson
the independence of chemistry from from physics, um for it um being hard to ah to get to chemistry from physics.

00:27:40.61
Vanessa
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

00:27:46.49
James Robinson
And you’ve almost reversed that and said, actually, here it’s a very clear instance of something that people are thinking about within physics, mainly philosophers of physics, but it is a, and it should I think it is a

00:27:53.01
Vanessa
yeah yeah

00:27:57.65
James Robinson
problem within physics itself. um And so actually, you know there there’s greater unity here. um you know This is an argument for the unity of these these two things. um

00:28:07.63
Vanessa
definitely

00:28:08.19
James Robinson
So

00:28:10.37
Vanessa
definite So yes, um I should say ah but both Alex and I are not um um Well, maybe I should only talk for myself, but I think Alex would agree as well. we um We wanted to resist this antireduction this strong anti-reductionism that you know took ah took the lead with ah with respect to molecular structure.

00:28:33.86
Vanessa
And ah you know i don’t believe that the paper shows some strong form of reductionism, but it does definitely show that there is strong unity between the two fields in sciences.

00:28:46.26
Vanessa
um Though I think it is still possible to maintain some form of emergence, not with respect to the fields, but with respect to what hu how large things or observable things and relate to very small things that make them up.

00:29:07.29
Vanessa
You know, you can you can ah you you can be an emergent because, and this is something that philosophers of physics physics talk as well, that

00:29:07.41
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah.

00:29:15.70
Vanessa
ah some forms of at least weak emergence that has to do with the relation between different scales of ontology. It’s not about how chemical biological stuff relates physical stuff, but how even large physical stuff relates to smaller physical stuff.

00:29:35.67
Vanessa
Which I think, and and and at least with respect to some interpretations, it seems that some some form of some different form of emergence could work.

00:29:35.62
James Robinson
yeah

00:29:46.21
Vanessa
under some interpretations of quantum mechanics, if I’m not wrong. But this is not this goes a bit beyond my own my expertise, to be honest. But that’s the impression that I have.

00:29:56.35
James Robinson
But I mean, I think it’d be good to talk about, yeah, just the status, your your other work on the possibility of reducing or reductionism um between chemistry and and and physics.

00:30:13.22
James Robinson
I mean, one thing that just struck me when talking about the, you know, trying to solve the Schrodinger creation for a molecule,

00:30:22.77
Vanessa
It is.

00:30:23.25
James Robinson
is just how difficult it is, even at that scale.

00:30:25.55
Vanessa
it is

00:30:27.45
James Robinson
right we’re We’re talking about individual atoms here, and we we can’t even figure out precisely. like We have no precise solution.

00:30:38.09
James Robinson
um that That’s incredible. like Even at the scale, we’re already starting to bring in approximations. um so um you know it Durack’s famous claim that, okay, now we have quantum physics, we can just, we’re going to, chemistry becomes applied physics.

00:30:55.69
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:31:01.53
Vanessa
yeah

00:31:02.65
James Robinson
I paraphrased him there. um Yeah, it doesn’t, certainly in practice, it’s it’s it’s not um it’s not possible.

00:31:14.42
James Robinson
um But i mean, i there’s a sense in which those

00:31:19.86
James Robinson
calculations may be so difficult that even in principle, they’re not possible, at least not within the sort of universe that we we live in.

00:31:27.27
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:31:27.66
James Robinson
I mean, we we get into a sort of strange territory here.

00:31:31.39
Vanessa
See, that’s where speculation starts now.

00:31:31.34
James Robinson
Mm-hmm. but

00:31:34.81
Vanessa
This is where all the speculation starts, whether this is an in-principle or a practical problem.

00:31:41.80
Vanessa
And, you know, we cannot really tell for sure, I suppose. um On the other hand, we have indirect evidence and that you know most of the stuff that happened in the world are are the result of physical goings on on the lower level.

00:32:00.75
Vanessa
We have indirect evidence of that. And for chemistry, even more so.

00:32:03.68
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:32:06.02
Vanessa
If you go through the history of chemistry, um you know um ah physics has illuminated um but but by shedding light into atomic structure and what happens ah at the atomic level.

00:32:19.28
Vanessa
It has helped chemists explain ah in um and understand in a much more nuanced way how chemical reactions happen the way they do. um and the chemical properties of matter.

00:32:32.09
Vanessa
So there’s so much and epistemic success by being informed by physics that it would seem weird that the two signs that you know there is such a strong detachment from physics, I suppose.

00:32:49.43
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:52.92
Vanessa
So, yeah.

00:32:53.62
James Robinson
But on the on the other hand, of yeah, the there’s there’s no detachment, but… it’s clear that there’s many kind of concepts in and chemistry. Perhaps we can talk about um maybe bonds or reactions, whatever you whatever you whatever you prefer, um where there’s kind of a level of… These these concepts are ah really useful.

00:33:18.56
James Robinson
ah There’s no clear way of ah defining them in terms of Certainly, fundamental quantum physics, it becomes very, very difficult to do that. And it’s not even clear if there’s like a kind of one-to-one mapping between these concepts and things at the quantum level.

00:33:34.69
James Robinson
um Nevertheless, there’s an argument to be made that these are… real things. And so this is kind of another, I suppose, route or path to arguing that, you chemistry deserves its status as kind of an independent science.

00:33:52.62
James Robinson
Like there’s genuine concepts and stuff here, which are, um while not in contradiction to quantum physics, ah they’re kind of, they that they’re somewhat independent or they’re they’re not completely

00:34:09.92
James Robinson
there nope There’s no simple mapping between between them and the things that we have um from quantum physics.

00:34:15.94
Vanessa
ah See, okay, um I have two points on this. So first, I think with respect to the chemical bond, I think that there is a, and there there are, it is, they you can identify what the chemical bond is in quantum terms.

00:34:30.66
Vanessa
um I’ve written a paper about this in a philosophy of science about the chemical bond being ah patterns of subatomic interactions that you can get even by just quantum models. You don’t need to have, you know, a,

00:34:43.83
Vanessa
the non-approximative, the Abinitio kind of calculations of the Schrodinger equation. And Heitler and London’s work back in the beginning of the 20th century, um you know, even if it was for a very small, for for hydrogen molecules, they they that they managed to describe quantum mechanically the co-radient bond.

00:35:03.07
Vanessa
um But apart from that, you know, and that ah What I want to resist a little bit is ah you said that um you know we cannot reduce one to another, so there is a reason to believe that chemistry is independent.

00:35:18.71
Vanessa
No one is trying to steal chemistry’s independence by um defending some form of reductionism. I think that’s one of the…

00:35:30.76
Vanessa
This is a mistake we’re doing in this discussion a lot, from the very beginning, actually, of discussing chemistry’s reductionism. We’ve connected it so strongly with the idea that, you know, if chemistry is reduced, then it will disappear.

00:35:45.18
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:35:45.32
Vanessa
It will be ah put into shackles and being, ah you know, it would have to obey physics in everything, which is a very strange thing to…

00:35:58.22
Vanessa
it’s It’s like creating a monster that we’re afraid of, but this is is this is not real. This is not how things happen. And chemistry by no means is going to disappear as a discipline, even if reductionism were to happen.

00:36:11.63
Vanessa
Even if we were able to solve the Schrodinger equation and describe everything quantum mechanically, all chemical phenomena, chemistry would continue and um pretty sure but still continue. still continue as it does now.

00:36:26.83
Vanessa
because it doesn’t hinge on that, right? It’s it’s not because physicists are unable to describe chemical phenomena that we have chemistry. We have chemistry because it has developed a language that is very, very successful in in doing the job.

00:36:42.28
Vanessa
you know and the And the job is not only explaining chemical phenomena.

00:36:42.93
James Robinson
Hmm.

00:36:46.32
Vanessa
A big part of chemistry is making stuff.

00:36:51.11
Vanessa
So it also has a, chemistry as a discipline has ah a bit of a different character than, you know, we we have in mind theoretical physics only. But chemistry is not only about theory and understanding chemical phenomena, it’s about ah producing things and making drugs and designing food and tackling climate change.

00:37:15.23
Vanessa
and making materials that would absorb CO2, you know? um None of this is going to disappear

00:37:26.02
Vanessa
if reductionism were to work.

00:37:30.14
James Robinson
But where would it leave philosophers of chemistry? Does it make it sort of more or less interesting? Or is it kind of neutral?

00:37:37.87
Vanessa
No, I don’t think so.

00:37:38.78
James Robinson
Like, suppose,

00:37:41.86
Vanessa
No, because this is not the only topic that is interesting philosophically with respect to chemistry. um Surely this is an interesting topic. I’m not denying that. But ah chemistry such a rich… um ah discipline in terms of, you know, even the language that it uses, the symbols that it has created with the periodic table, it’s so worth examining and from the perspective of philosophy of language, for example, or what the symbols mean and how they’ve been developed.

00:38:15.11
Vanessa
And the periodic table alone

00:38:15.74
James Robinson
yeah

00:38:18.98
Vanessa
has a huge literature behind it, how it was created, the importance the importance of values when picking different classes between different classifications of the periodic table, um models in chemistry, ah whether chemical reactions correspond to causal relations. I’m just referring to stuff I’m working on now, but like different things.

00:38:42.43
Vanessa
But the field is very rich.

00:38:46.23
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:38:46.55
Vanessa
And you can raise many different questions with respect to chemistry.

00:38:47.19
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:38:50.13
Vanessa
So I don’t think we we should have any worry about you know reductionism,

00:38:56.56
Vanessa
destroying ah philosophical thoughts around chemistry.

00:39:00.92
James Robinson
Yeah. yeah I think in many ways, chemistry is a really interesting area where precisely because it’s not at the, for want of a better phrase, foundational level of reality, right?

00:39:17.42
James Robinson
it’s it but it’s also not at the level of biology or economics or society or whatever, um that

00:39:22.50
Vanessa
Yeah,

00:39:25.92
James Robinson
you can get some handle on these questions of, you know, what is a i don’t know what is a natural kind? you know what what What sort of a law, you know, if if yeah what what what so what sort of causation, if any, is involved in in in chemical reactions?

00:39:31.57
Vanessa
yeah exactly

00:39:41.74
James Robinson
are they Are they themselves, you know, we we can sort of test some of the philosophy under a different set of conditions to to physics, maybe slightly less idealized, um a bit richer, um without getting lost in the fog of you know really, really abstract or, well, maybe not i abstract, mate much, much higher level things.

00:40:07.10
Vanessa
Yeah. Or it it can also inform, you know, ah discussion of those more higher level issues. case studies by looking at this one and seeing how you can refine your idea of reductionism for this case, then you can see whether it can apply to other cases as well.

00:40:29.20
Vanessa
um It’s like a test field for me, chemistry. Exactly, because it’s the closest one to physics, but it’s not as complicated or burdened with these other worries that we have with biology.

00:40:40.65
Vanessa
um it’s ah It’s a good testing ground for different philosophical accounts to see whether they work. um But also, I want to say something else. I forgot to say it before, if you don’t mind.

00:40:53.67
Vanessa
um Even if we settle, say we settle all that you know chemistry is reduced to physics, that itself would and create or prompt new philosophical questions about chemistry.

00:41:09.76
Vanessa
So it wouldn’t end the discussion per se. It would create new questions about, for example, the reality of chemical stuff in the context of reductionism. which I think is very interesting. And there is a lot of talk and now about how you can accommodate the reality of special science entities if you admit the special science entities are strongly reduced to their physical constituents.

00:41:34.17
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:41:35.42
Vanessa
So just put the discussion a bit forward, I suppose.

00:41:35.57
James Robinson
So… so

00:41:38.91
James Robinson
Yeah, no, ah please, yeah, i talk about that. So, I mean, is this the question of, know, sometimes… People knowing that know or interested in philosophy say, well, you know, what is real?

00:41:50.46
James Robinson
Is it just atoms and molecules or, you know, quantum fields?

00:41:51.94
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:41:54.74
James Robinson
um And, you know, you want to say, well, no, like all this other stuff, like all the things that we can see around us, that they’re also real.

00:42:02.15
Vanessa
yeah

00:42:02.59
James Robinson
and And, you know, at at the mid-level, even things that we can’t see or maybe quite abstract concepts like, you I don’t know, you know, gold, gold, not just a particular instance of gold, but gold is a and an element or an actual kind. That’s that’s a real thing as well.

00:42:22.47
James Robinson
um and And and then we get. Yeah. So I think you’re right. This is really interesting ground. Maybe talk us through some of the work that you’ve done here.

00:42:31.91
Vanessa
So, I’ve only worked, well, I worked on that a little bit with respect to the chemical bond. um There is… um this idea of, um um you know, that special science or higher level things can correspond to patterns, ah to real patterns. it’s real It’s based on Daniel Dennett’s work on real patterns, actually.

00:42:59.19
Vanessa
and And then later on, it was also this idea of real patterns was adopted and used by Leidman and Ross, their Everything Must Go book, to a

00:43:11.10
James Robinson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:43:13.37
Vanessa
Rainforest realism and also a version of, I suppose, non-reductive physicalism. So I was trying to apply these accounts to ah the chemical bond, whether the chemical bond can be thought of as a real patterns of subatomic interaction. So in that sense, you maintain a ah form of reductionism or of unity.

00:43:36.03
Vanessa
Maybe reductionism now is a little bit of a misleading term. um At least of very strong unity and connection to the lower level stuff. But on the other hand, you know, still maintain that the bond is is a real thing.

00:43:51.00
Vanessa
Just like the table or a ball is a real thing, separate from the physical particles that make them up. um

00:43:58.77
James Robinson
and and and maybe lead us through the argument like what makes it you know what is the real patterns and um structural realism argument for for

00:44:06.43
Vanessa
Structure… ah Yes, so that’s a difficult one. and um So um to be is to be a real pattern. I think that’s a quote by Daniel Dennett.

00:44:18.77
Vanessa
Just by being a pattern, automatically you are real. right But and structural realism also adds this nomological criterion that you know you have once you have causal powers, to be is to cause in a sense.

00:44:36.58
Vanessa
And so once you the thing is able to do stuff, this also reinforces its existence. I’m just taking a very small nugget now from structural realism. I’m not making justice to it at all, I have to say here. So for people who don’t know structural realism, they should go and read it because now I’m just taking a small part of it to explain how I think at least, you know, chemical bonds. So…

00:45:01.14
Vanessa
In this particular instance, the chemical bond is is a pattern of subatomic interactions because we know that because of the quantum mechanical description of chemical bonds. And then Dennett is very useful because he gives us an ah epistemic criterion of how to detect patterns. So he uses this classic example of bitmaps.

00:45:20.86
Vanessa
do you Do you know that?

00:45:21.21
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:45:21.78
Vanessa
So he has this table in the paper um where there is there are different bitmap, but well, there there are different boxes right There are dots rather.

00:45:32.72
Vanessa
No, I should explain it better. So i imagine a series of black and white dots. And he says there are at least there’s one way you can describe the black and white dots, the so-called but bitmap description, where you identify the position of each and every black and white dot.

00:45:50.95
Vanessa
Right? Then a different way to describe that system is by grouping together the dots.

00:45:52.22
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:45:57.76
Vanessa
Say, you know, we’ve got 10 dots here and 10 dots there. Or if they form, you know, if you look at them from afar, if they form some sort of box, different black boxes, you say there are five black boxes made up of 100 black dots, say, right?

00:46:07.22
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:46:14.88
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:46:15.05
Vanessa
So then it says, as long as you can give a more efficient description than the bitmap,

00:46:15.08
James Robinson
yeah

00:46:22.81
Vanessa
which requires identifying every a black dot, then that means you have a pattern there. And once you have a pattern, automatically that pattern is real.

00:46:34.35
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:46:35.21
Vanessa
So that’s the idea with chemical bonds as well. You have the Schrodinger equation, which just by first principles identifies the interaction of each and every subatomic particle of the molecule.

00:46:47.49
Vanessa
right That’s the bitmap.

00:46:48.79
James Robinson
That’s your bitmap. Yeah.

00:46:49.72
Vanessa
yeah

00:46:50.10
James Robinson
yeah

00:46:50.75
Vanessa
Then you have the quantum models that after the BO approximation and doing also further approximations perhaps, identify some box and describe the system in terms of boxes.

00:47:02.82
Vanessa
right And then you have the chemical description, which describes the system in terms of bonds.

00:47:04.36
James Robinson
ye Yeah.

00:47:12.74
Vanessa
So these are more efficient descriptions. And the concepts that they invoke, in this case, the chemical bonds, correspond to patterns. And that’s why they exist. That’s how the argument goes.

00:47:24.14
Vanessa
Hmm.

00:47:28.10
James Robinson
I think one of the one of the kind of objections that that typically gets brought up against um

00:47:31.97
Vanessa
mon

00:47:33.96
James Robinson
dennetts at least Dennett’s real pens is, well, there’s loads of different ways that you could come up with more efficient description than the bitmap description.

00:47:41.07
Vanessa
Yes. and Yeah.

00:47:43.03
James Robinson
But we don’t want to say that there’s loads of different ways that reality is. We sort of think of it being and i kind of a singular thing. um ah I guess, I mean, I think maybe structural realism goes some way to responding to that by saying, well, actually, you’ve got to fit it.

00:47:58.85
Vanessa
Yes.

00:48:00.76
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:48:01.26
Vanessa
So, what structural realism says is that…

00:48:01.62
James Robinson
Go ahead, please.

00:48:05.92
Vanessa
um Actually, you can filter away some of those descriptions because science science invokes those ones that are ah you know counterfactually and and and empirically more successful.

00:48:18.31
Vanessa
right So those descriptions that are used in science and have real ah you know empirical bearing are the ones that should be ah taken into account. It’s not like you have an endless plurality of possible descriptions, all of which identify different patterns.

00:48:35.62
Vanessa
and

00:48:36.04
James Robinson
very good.

00:48:36.85
Vanessa
So at least, and that’s, but you know, the this is a um this is a delicate balance that you should keep because on the one, there is some um truth to that, that you cannot dismiss, that there are more than one descriptions that are more efficient than the bitmap.

00:48:54.93
Vanessa
And you cannot dismiss all of them. You can clean them up and say, you know, only those that are invoked or tested by science, they have survived scientifically in a sense, we should admit.

00:49:05.48
Vanessa
But still, you have some plurality, and you should be akin with that.

00:49:08.00
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah.

00:49:09.14
Vanessa
Because even if you look in the case of the chemical bond, this would all explains also nicely the different types of bonds that chemists invoke. And not all of them match perfectly every case. Sometimes they overlap.

00:49:23.87
Vanessa
Sometimes, you know, they miss out some of the things that they would call bonds, but sometimes they wouldn’t call them bonds, you know.

00:49:30.92
James Robinson
yeah

00:49:31.12
Vanessa
And the so in practice, even in scientific practice, you see that you have different, more efficient descriptions that are being involved. And that’s okay.

00:49:40.51
James Robinson
Yeah. And you might also have descriptions working out at different levels as as well um that, again, are sort of…

00:49:52.04
James Robinson
ah Yeah, maybe maybe covering the same ground. I’m trying to think of an example. But um so, again, this kind of…

00:49:57.70
Vanessa
Different levels… of abstraction maybe James, not at different levels of reality. This is also something that maybe sometimes confuses the discussion because ah scientists also invoke classes that are ah that abstract away of other classes, scientific classes, but these are not different levels of reality.

00:50:08.59
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:50:15.07
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah.

00:50:20.01
Vanessa
right It’s not that we talk about larger things.

00:50:21.13
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah.

00:50:23.94
Vanessa
We just disregard some of the aspects of that thing and talk about it in terms of but slightly more fuzzy or abstract category.

00:50:33.72
James Robinson
So might say you you have a sort of bunch of atoms Oh, it’s a bird. And then you have a a bunch of birds. It’s a flock of birds. And you’ve got these kind of different levels at which you can describe things.

00:50:47.43
James Robinson
um

00:50:47.55
Vanessa
Hmm.

00:50:48.32
James Robinson
and And they’re all, you know, we’re we’re abstracting away or we’re we’re summarizing um

00:50:56.46
Vanessa
like

00:50:56.39
James Robinson
at various steps.

00:50:57.81
Vanessa
Or you could, I would put it as, you know, you have a bunch of atoms and you you identify the color in terms of the wavelengths or whatever, but then you identify it in terms of the color red of all of the atoms, but then you can identify it in terms of crimson.

00:51:15.07
James Robinson
Okay, yeah, yeah.

00:51:16.07
Vanessa
Okay, so it’s red and crimson. They do not identify a different level.

00:51:21.25
James Robinson
Right, right. So they’re working at the same level, they’re just different precision, maybe.

00:51:23.14
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:51:26.25
Vanessa
Exactly.

00:51:27.34
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:51:29.34
Vanessa
So that often happens in chemistry, that you have different, especially with elements, if you think about that, you you talk about, um a you talk about, i cannot think, you talk about gold, but you also talk about it as member of the kind metals, or a member of the kind, I don’t remember, which group does it belong to? it it’s It’s the,

00:51:55.72
Vanessa
Oh my God. Anyway, yeah you get what I mean.

00:51:57.34
James Robinson
Well, don’t ask me.

00:51:58.91
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:51:59.17
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:52:01.35
Vanessa
so But yeah.

00:52:03.49
James Robinson
I can only say there’s alkaloid metals, but it’s not one of those. is that So I don’t know what it is

00:52:07.63
Vanessa
Hopefully a chemist doesn’t hear me now because they would be banging their head with with my…

00:52:12.01
James Robinson
maybe Maybe we can edit this and just…

00:52:14.42
Vanessa
Wait, let me check. Let me check. um And call this…

00:52:19.39
James Robinson
It’s gonna bug… Yeah.

00:52:24.91
Vanessa
it’s It’s a group 11 element.

00:52:28.92
James Robinson
Oh, it’s not a very memorable name for the group.

00:52:29.59
Vanessa
and its It’s a noble metal. That’s what I tried to remember.

00:52:33.68
James Robinson
A noble metal.

00:52:34.31
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:52:34.39
James Robinson
Okay, so you’ve got noble metals. I just remember the noble gases, but yeah, it doesn’t react with anything. So I guess that’s…

00:52:38.53
Vanessa
Yeah, it doesn’t react with it. Yes, that’s why.

00:52:39.99
James Robinson
Okay, that’s the noble thing.

00:52:41.09
Vanessa
So it’s a part of group 11. It’s also part of noble metals. It’s also a metal. And it’s also member of gold, you know, an instant.

00:52:50.15
James Robinson
Yeah, and all those things are sort of real in a sense, right? It is it is ah group of level thing.

00:52:57.65
Vanessa
no Yeah.

00:52:57.92
James Robinson
It is gold. It is like it’s got this atomic number. um But there’s not any there not any contradiction there. um There’s just different just different levels of precision, right?

00:53:10.56
Vanessa
I suppose so.

00:53:10.45
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:53:12.07
Vanessa
Or you want to bring out different aspects, different properties ah of that chunk of matter.

00:53:21.10
James Robinson
did I mean, where does this, um do do you have,

00:53:27.78
James Robinson
what is your position as a, do you have a sort of very defined position for yourself as a, as a realist? and Or you sort of,

00:53:36.50
Vanessa
um

00:53:39.42
Vanessa
Look, I consider myself a realist. I also consider myself as someone who’s against strong anti-reductionism.

00:53:50.44
Vanessa
So i’m not I’m not into pluralism of the strong form. I’m not into emergence

00:53:59.75
Vanessa
you know in its strong form again.

00:54:01.79
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:54:02.99
Vanessa
It’s easier to say what I’m not rather than what I yeah what what i believe.

00:54:06.55
James Robinson
That’s not the case.

00:54:07.67
Vanessa
But um I’m still in the process of figuring out how I can accommodate my realist beliefs with my reductionist beliefs.

00:54:16.43
James Robinson
Right.

00:54:16.55
Vanessa
um I think it can be done, but there are so many fine details in the literature that you have to respond to, which I haven’t gotten gotten around yet, I suppose. Getting a position about everything.

00:54:32.48
Vanessa
You know, because you have to figure out how you’re going to tackle the a overdetermination problem. What is going to be your position about the causal completeness principle? ah What are you going to say about, um I don’t know, possible… Well, these are some… of the these What other problems could there be?

00:54:55.68
Vanessa
um What form of unity, epistemic unity, you would require? What kind of epistemic requirements you need to set up to to to support the form of unity you want to defend? These are, you know…

00:55:10.70
Vanessa
things you need to specify I suppose.

00:55:15.00
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:55:15.79
Vanessa
But yeah.

00:55:18.55
James Robinson
Very good. um Yeah, maybe ah I if you want to sort of finally talk about what you’re working on next or what you’re really excited about or any any kind of big questions that we haven’t covered and and and you think are important for anyone who’s, don’t know, interested in philosophy of chemistry.

00:55:38.61
Vanessa
So um Currently I’m working on a chemical reactions. This is the the theme of the of the project i I’m working at the at the University of Athens.

00:55:49.58
Vanessa
So thinking about chemical reactions as as as causal relations, um which is interesting. um I’ve been thinking a little bit about and how you can maintain um a strong idea of causal relations you know in a productive way, non-Humian way, ah in a way that also matches with a naturalistic kind of attitude towards your metaphysics.

00:56:25.36
Vanessa
Does it…

00:56:25.46
James Robinson
so So what’s the the the the kind of issue here is ah chemical reaction, you…

00:56:26.29
Vanessa
Yeah.

00:56:31.77
James Robinson
you

00:56:32.30
Vanessa
Okay, so, okay, let me start.

00:56:33.45
James Robinson
it might It might seem simple because you might i say, well, what what’s it what like?

00:56:35.60
Vanessa
No, yes, you’re right, I’m trying

00:56:36.53
James Robinson
well I take some hydrogen, I take some oxygen, i get some, there’s water, I get some energy out and I get some water out. ah So yeah, just putting the stuff together, there’s a cause.

00:56:46.85
Vanessa
So, okay, let me just yeah let let me just put the context because i’ve been I’m just throwing around ah terms, I suppose.

00:56:48.97
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:56:54.27
Vanessa
So you have a chemical reaction, say hydrogen and oxygen. Usually chemists say hydrogen and oxygen produce H2O. So if you think about it philosophically, even the word produce kind of hints towards a causal relation.

00:57:01.77
James Robinson
yeah

00:57:05.07
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:57:07.80
Vanessa
And so that’s essentially what the…

00:57:07.74
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:11.76
Vanessa
theyre the The aim of the project is is to study seriously whether there is a causal relation behind such statements or whether we just throw away these terms, you know but shouldn’t take them very seriously.

00:57:24.63
Vanessa
and um You know, there’s further evidence that maybe these correspond to causal relations because reaction mechanisms have been invoked as examples of mechanistic explanations in philosophy of chemistry.

00:57:36.91
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

00:57:38.27
Vanessa
And so perhaps, you know, maybe indeed chemical reactions are ah relations between causes and effects. But then, and that’s where the project starts, you have to think, ah you know, if you think of it as a causal relation, what are the relata?

00:57:55.69
Vanessa
What are the genuine causes? Because this is not evident when you look at the details of a chemical reaction. what you You have hydrogen and oxygen, but it has to also be in a particular temperature.

00:58:06.94
Vanessa
It has to there has to be, sometimes there has to be a catalyst, right?

00:58:07.46
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:58:12.01
Vanessa
um Other factors have to figure in. And then this brings you, it’s interesting because it connects to classical problems around causation. So how you differentiate ah genuine causes from background conditions.

00:58:21.95
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:58:27.73
Vanessa
That’s why I really, so that is what is very fun in general with philosophy of chemistry.

00:58:27.64
James Robinson
yeah

00:58:33.65
Vanessa
You have so many underexplored and examples from chemistry that you can use in order to address classic problems in philosophy.

00:58:44.08
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:44.84
Vanessa
and And you can inform them in ways that you haven’t thought of before. So this is one part of the project, figuring out ah you know the problem of background conditions in light of chemical reactions.

00:58:56.06
Vanessa
And then the second part, the presence of oxygen.

00:58:56.63
James Robinson
So background condition would be, for example, um

00:59:00.13
Vanessa
If you light a fire, a match.

00:59:02.01
James Robinson
yeah.

00:59:02.80
Vanessa
Right? And you have the two reactants that are involved in lightning match, but you also need oxygen.

00:59:06.41
James Robinson
Yeah.

00:59:08.86
Vanessa
Oxygen in the background.

00:59:09.24
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:10.50
Vanessa
Is oxygen part of ah of of the cause or not? Or is it just the reactants?

00:59:17.48
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:17.85
Vanessa
In this case, oxygen.

00:59:18.55
James Robinson
And people would say, you know, you might say, okay, well, this guy, it’s his fault. He lit the match. And then someone else would come along and say, no, it was it was all the oxygen in the room.

00:59:24.96
Vanessa
Exactly.

00:59:28.15
James Robinson
And well, actually, sometimes it could be, sometimes that background condition is the relevant thing.

00:59:29.13
Vanessa
Exactly.

00:59:32.82
James Robinson
If you’re like in some spaceship or something and you’re just testing, you know, there shouldn’t be any oxygen in a room, you know, that that actually it was the cause, but to yeah.

00:59:38.57
Vanessa
but and it

00:59:42.27
Vanessa
So this then takes you to think about what you mean by cause and causation. And it takes you to the literature about what is the causal relation. Because if you think about it counterfactually, if there weren’t any oxygen, then there wouldn’t be any…

00:59:57.32
Vanessa
ah light, then the background condition does become part of the cause under this reading of the causal relation. But if you think of it productively, and this is not a good example because oxygen is part of of the chemical reaction, but in any case, if you think about it productively, it is only the things, the reactants that transform chemically

01:00:10.99
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah.

01:00:19.38
Vanessa
that should be considered under the productive reading of causation as being part of the cause.

01:00:23.40
James Robinson
yeah

01:00:24.78
Vanessa
And so the background conditions wouldn’t be, that what happens, the the thermodynamic conditions, temperature wouldn’t figure out as part of the cause.

01:00:32.37
James Robinson
Yeah.

01:00:33.93
Vanessa
ah So again, this is interesting because you would, say you this is what what I’m doing in the project. They take up each account of of causation and see what but kind of image it gives you of causal relations.

01:00:43.76
James Robinson
yeah

01:00:47.18
Vanessa
And it gives you a little bit of a different image every time.

01:00:51.50
James Robinson
and And do you think there is there one, it seems maybe the productive and ah or the productive conception of causation is a little bit works a little bit better. Do you think there is one

01:01:01.41
Vanessa
Yeah.

01:01:02.46
James Robinson
Yeah.

01:01:03.19
Vanessa
Surprisingly, yes.

01:01:03.27
James Robinson
it

01:01:05.86
Vanessa
For me, surprisingly, because it seems that there is more empirical… that there If you look into how chemists describe chemical reactions, they use certain notions that are closer to the productive spirit of causation.

01:01:20.26
Vanessa
So even chemical affinity, the idea, it is defined as you know the propensity of elements to react with some elements but not others. Propensity.

01:01:32.78
Vanessa
You immediately go to a more metaphysically heavier you know account of causation.

01:01:33.21
James Robinson
Yeah.

01:01:38.02
James Robinson
Yeah, the kind of dispositional…

01:01:39.61
Vanessa
Dispositional, exactly.

01:01:39.72
James Robinson
Mm-hmm.

01:01:40.89
Vanessa
Dispositional, propensity, a power-based account of causation, right? um Which is surprising because you would think that science or a human understanding of causation, a lighter view of causation in a sense, is more in line with what um with science, I suppose.

01:02:01.58
James Robinson
Yeah, yeah. Which, and the human view is just stuff happens and it always happens like this and we don’t really know.

01:02:05.42
Vanessa
Stuff happens, yeah.

01:02:08.46
Vanessa
Exactly.

01:02:08.40
James Robinson
like That’s it.

01:02:10.57
Vanessa
Exactly. So this is one thing I’m working on. um I’ve been also reading a lot of history of chemistry lately, which is very exciting.

01:02:21.69
Vanessa
I’m very much into alchemy. Have you read about alchemy?

01:02:26.04
James Robinson
Okay.

01:02:27.77
Vanessa
Very exciting story.

01:02:27.95
James Robinson
i know i I mean, i’ve no I’ve never tried it, at least not with any success.

01:02:31.54
Vanessa
ah i I highly recommend it

01:02:33.84
James Robinson
But…

01:02:36.21
Vanessa
It’s a very exciting part of chemistry, i would say. um because there are a lot, alchemists discovered so many things that are chemical, have value for chemistry.

01:02:49.62
Vanessa
And it’s very interesting to see how important a part they played in the development of chemistry and then how they faded away or were even disregarded ah by chemists later on because of the kind of mystery seriousness that was involved in their practice.

01:03:02.06
James Robinson
Yeah.

01:03:06.56
Vanessa
So yeah, these are the stuff I’m thinking about.

01:03:08.55
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s interesting. It’s probably

01:03:14.85
James Robinson
ah maybe you can tell me, but it it only seems like more recently that alchemy’s been seen as kind of like What I want to say is people like Newton who are doing alchemy, I’m not sure that they would have seen it as a unscientific.

01:03:31.20
James Robinson
um you know

01:03:31.32
Vanessa
um

01:03:32.20
James Robinson
For them, like of course, the religious and the scientific aspects were completely indistinguishable. And alchemy was you mystical, but that’s just legitimate because everything was.

01:03:45.04
James Robinson
Yeah.

01:03:45.56
Vanessa
Yeah, but even if you think this, ah ah the aim they had to find, you know, the the elixir of life, philosopher’s stone, how to translude everything into gold,

01:03:57.04
Vanessa
It was a sensible thing to to to question. Because if you think about it, they saw stuff transforming from one thing into another. They had evidence of chemical reactions.

01:04:11.98
Vanessa
wouldn’t it why Why is it insensible to think that you could transform stuff into gold? It wasn’t. it it It was a legitimate question based on what they knew, which they didn’t know a lot at the beginning.

01:04:18.60
James Robinson
yeah yeah

01:04:25.16
James Robinson
yeah

01:04:26.03
Vanessa
So, um you know, we we we put too much blame into the fact that, you know, they were looking into the philosopher’s stone and this elixir thing and and they put too much weight into it. And they also gave, you know, they tried to give a ah theory that would be a worldview.

01:04:42.23
Vanessa
It would be something that explained the movement for our planets, how um diseases come about, ah the nature of man and whatever.

01:04:43.48
James Robinson
Yeah. Yeah.

01:04:51.63
Vanessa
But this is not only what, it’s not only alchemists who did that. Aristotle gave a worldview.

01:04:56.09
James Robinson
yeah

01:04:58.40
Vanessa
ah the The Catholic Church gave a worldview that tried to accommodate every aspect of life. No. um And, you know, prior to the scientific revolution, it was normal to build a theory that would attempt to accommodate and explain everything.

01:05:17.12
James Robinson
Yeah. Very good.

01:05:19.27
Vanessa
Anyway, I took you to places you didn’t expect, I’m sure.

01:05:22.83
James Robinson
No, I wasn’t expecting that. No, I think that’s a great place. Yeah, that’s right. i mean, well, ah so yeah, I think that’s a great place to to to finish. Thank you, Vanessa.

01:05:32.97
James Robinson
This has been really, yeah, very interesting. I think a great introduction to the philosophy of chemistry and I hope there’s philosophers.

01:05:38.56
Vanessa
I hope so.

01:05:40.47
James Robinson
Yeah, i I mean, for me, it’s been brilliant. And I, yeah, so many,

01:05:45.29
Vanessa
um’m sorry if i took I’m sorry if I took you away ah from you know talking about the measurement problem. If you want to talk about again a little bit, I don’t mind.

01:05:54.67
James Robinson
No, i’m very happy. i um i need to be challenged and get away from territory of physics. But this is great. Yeah.

01:06:02.53
Vanessa
Cool. Well, it was lovely. I really enjoyed it.

01:06:06.39
James Robinson
Thanks so much.