The Spontaneous Eruption of Now

The Spontaneous Eruption of Now is the 313th episode of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, released on July 29, 2025.

Opening Quote

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Show Notes

David and Tamler try to wrap their heads around the metaphysics of past and future via the Borges essay(s) "A New Refutation of Time." What does it mean to be a time skeptic or a time realist for that matter? If you're a Berkeleyan idealist and Humean skeptic about the self, do you have to deny succession and simultaneity? The world, unfortunately, is real; and we, unfortunately, are Very Bad Wizards.  Plus for centuries philosophers insisted that you couldn't measure qualia, but then scientists just went ahead and… measured it!   Scientists Measure Qualia for First Time-It Was Thought To Be Impossible [youtube.com] Kawakita, G., Zeleznikow-Johnston, A., Takeda, K., Tsuchiya, N., & Oizumi, M. (2025). Is my "red" your "red"?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment. iScience, 28(3). A New Refutation of Time [wikipedia.org] A New Refutation of Time by Jorge Luis Borges [pdf from gwern.net] 

• Scientists Measure Qualia for First Time-It Was Thought To Be Impossible
  
• Is my "red" your "red"?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment
  
• A New Refutation of Time
  
• A New Refutation of Time by Jorge Luis Borges