Congratulations on excellent episode Curt and Fay. Thank you!
I loved her no-nonsense and precise way of answering the questions.
I have two points:
Fay talked about Plank scale being a physical limit on the atoms of reality. And Plank scale is very precise. How does that affect Roger Penrose's idea of Conformal cyclic cosmology. He seems to say that once the final thermal equilibrium in very very far distant future is reached, the universe looses the sense of scale. And that huge volume may become the big bang point of the next generation. SO then what happens to Plank scale? Or does the next generation universe gets it's own Plank scale for itself? This has been the reason which causes me to question Conformal cyclic cosmology.
About consciousness Fay made distinction between the event and it's occurrence. I was surprised why Frank Jackson's Mary's black and white only room experiment was not brought up. In that it is said that Mary "knows" everything that is to know about all the theory about full color spectrum and color perception, but when she comes out of the B&W room into the colored world she first time "knows" what it is like to see Red rose. And somehow this is supposed to show that consciousness is not physical. Huh? Really? That is a fallacy. You see, the word "knows" is being used in two different senses - first "knows'" is used as in "understand" and second "knows" is as in "experience". To me that is equivalent to what Fay said about - event (description) and it's occurrence as two different things. And that the occurrence is what we call consciousness and and it is only accessible to the experiencer to whom that specific event it occurred. In fact for the same conscious person, seeing red at 10 am and at 11am are two different experiences. If they were not different we would not be able to tell them apart. Again duh. Thus Frank's experiment is not a way to disprove the physical basis of consciousness. It is just the distinction between event and it's occurrence. No big deal at all. Thus consciousness is by definition a singleton, experiencer-only phenomenon. Duh.
BTW this also connects to Stephen Wolfram's notion of computational irreducibility. You have to compute the computation yourself to "experience" it. An outside system cannot do it externally.
BTW this video captures Mary's level knowledge of color perception. I highly recomment it:
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