# 2011-08-29 - KERA Think - Explanations That Transform the World [Official](https://think.kera.org/2011/08/29/explanations-that-transform-the-world/) Duration: 00:48:30 ## Transcript ### Krys Boyd 00:00:00 - 00:01:05 Funding for Think comes from SMU's continuing and professional education. You're listening to Think on KERA 90.1. I'm Krys Boyd. Does understanding the universe give us the power to control the universe? Humans have sought to explain the workings of the natural world for millennia and have used the methods of modern science with ever greater effectiveness since the Enlightenment. We've learned to do things that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined from global telecommunications to life-saving medical treatments to tracing the history of the universe to within seconds of the Big Bang. And my guest today will argue that while there was a beginning to humankind's scientific achievement, there is no reason to believe our achievements will someday reach an end point. Given what we know about ourselves, he is hopeful that our acquisition and application of scientific knowledge could last as long as the universe itself. David Deutsch is a fellow of the Royal Society and professor of physics at Oxford University. His new book is called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. David, welcome to Think. ### David Deutsch 00:01:05 - 00:01:08 Hi, Krys. Thanks for inviting me. ### Krys Boyd 00:01:08 - 00:01:19 You write that all progress comes from the human quest for good explanations. How has our definition of a good explanation evolved over the centuries? ### David Deutsch 00:01:19 - 00:03:11 One of the most noticeable changes that happened in the history of our species was the scientific revolution, which made the difference between making progress that was either absent or so slow that no human ever noticed it in their lifetime and what has happened since then, which is that we've got used to change happening all the time and being just part of our lives. Because that was so noticeable, that change was so noticeable, people wondered what caused it and initially they got all sorts of wrong theories about what it was that made science successful and some truth as well. For example, it was realized almost immediately that rejecting authority was a necessary condition for making progress, authority in regard to knowledge, though this spread to political authority as well. But then in the positive sense, what actually caused science, people got really confused and thought that we absorb knowledge of nature by being open to experience and that experience somehow implanted true ideas about the world in our minds. Now, this is completely untrue. What I do in the book, one of the things I do in the book is trace how wrong that is and also how the right, the real explanation, which is that we seek hard to vary explanations, applies not only in science but in all sorts of other fields including art and morality and political philosophy and so on. ### Krys Boyd 00:03:11 - 00:03:25 It's so interesting, David, to reflect on the idea that before the Enlightenment, many people, learned people, assumed that everything worth knowing had already been revealed. Now, today that lack of curiosity strikes us as almost dangerous. ### David Deutsch 00:03:25 - 00:04:12 Yes, and it's basically very implausible today because we're all hoping and expecting that improvements will be made and the whole of politics is about who has the best idea for improvements and so on. If you try to imagine, it's difficult to imagine, try to imagine what it was like during most of human history when nobody ever experienced an improvement in anything, then it was in regard to knowledge, it was sort of common sense that there was this thing called knowledge, we knew that the sun would rise every day and so on, but there was nothing new to discover because all that was going to happen tomorrow was that the sun would rise again just like it did today. ### Krys Boyd 00:04:12 - 00:04:15 What's the relationship between curiosity and intelligence? ### David Deutsch 00:04:15 - 00:05:32 Ah, so curiosity, I think, is a way of referring to the desire for good explanations. It's a way of thinking that there's something here that we don't know or some problem, some puzzle and we would like to have the explanation, that is a statement about reality which explains why the thing we are curious about is as it is. Intelligence, well, I shy away from that word because it's laden with this wrong idea of where knowledge comes from, it's a sort of, the idea of intelligence is that we know that there is some ability that allows us to get good knowledge if only we have that ability, but in fact, knowledge comes from criticism, it comes from conjecture about what might be better than the ideas we have and conjecture is fallible. So I shy away, curiosity is great, intelligence I think is a misleading term and I'd rather refer to things like criticism and creativity. ### Krys Boyd 00:05:32 - 00:05:52 I find it fascinating that many of the scientists we speak to on this program have a similar philosophy about intelligence and they're the last people to say being a physicist is tantamount to being a genius necessarily and there are a lot of other people in other fields who don't have any problem at all feeling as if they are very intelligent. ### David Deutsch 00:05:52 - 00:06:34 Well I do think that it's a disservice to think, it's a disservice to humankind if you like to promote the view that success in anything, in anything intellectual, in any kind of intellectual that is, is due to something innate. It's not due to an innate ability because there is no such ability possible. It is only due to a critical attitude, an open attitude, a desire for truth, that sort of thing and abilities are knowledge themselves. They are things that we learn in the course of trying to discover the truth and so forth. ### Krys Boyd 00:06:34 - 00:06:41 Can we trust ourselves to use our newly gained abilities for good rather than evil? ### David Deutsch 00:06:42 - 00:08:00 This is part of the question of whether this spectacular growth of knowledge that has happened in science can happen in other fields as well and the one you're asking about is morality and I think that the answer must be yes. There is such a thing as an objective difference between right and wrong and although it's easy to be cynical and look around at all the evils there are in the world and also at all the disagreements about right and wrong that there are in the world, I think if you look more deeply and over a longer time scale you can easily see that there is progress and that it's not just a matter of cultural prejudice or just a matter of definition. For example, there was a time only a few hundred years ago when every reasonable person would have thought that slavery is a natural state of some people and that there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Whereas now you will hardly find any thinking person who doesn't agree that it is a great evil and that steps could and should be made to abolish it. ### Krys Boyd 00:08:00 - 00:08:13 Let's talk about some of the ways that we have just physically changed the world that we live in. For example, a lot of modern cities today are shaped as much by human intervention as by geologic forces. Will you talk about that a little bit? ### David Deutsch 00:08:13 - 00:10:02 Yes. A city is the obvious example of what I think is a general truth. Remember we're only at The Beginning of Infinity and always will be and on earth we're only at the beginning of shaping it. A city is an example of the fact that once knowledge is involved in physical processes, it is the determining factor of the landscape. That is, whereas other species, the ones that are incapable of generating knowledge, are shaped by and adapted to their own landscape, humans create their own landscape and shape it and adapt it. For humans there is no such thing as a resource until some human has developed the knowledge for making it a resource. I think that if we choose to do the right thing and continue to produce knowledge and to seek better things and progress, this will extend to anything and everything. We'll move off the planet and improve things as we go. No doubt many people will be thinking as I say this, but cities and other things that we've done haven't always improved things. There's pollution and so on. I think this is a myth of a rosy past. It's no good thinking of a rosy past in which the rivers were clean and the air was pure if people at that time actually were plagued by cholera. I want to talk about something like global warming. ### Krys Boyd 00:10:03 - 00:10:14 You are confident that we will be able to survive it given that in the past we have used our technologies and our intellect to survive inhospitable climates which occurred naturally all over the planet. ### David Deutsch 00:10:14 - 00:11:26 Yes. Global warming is one of the first challenges that face us as a result of technology really. I think that's a good point. I think that technology or improving things. We've improved a whole lot of things and as a result a slow worsening has happened in part of our environment. This has happened on a smaller scale thousands of times. I'm old enough to remember when many of the cities in England had smog and the London fog was deemed to be part of the London scene. It wasn't even thought of as a thing that humans could undo. Yet as technology improved, wealth increased and standards increased, so the London fog became a thing of the past. Just as the London fog can become a thing of the past, so can the problems of global warming. ### Krys Boyd 00:11:26 - 00:11:35 So we should strive not for sustainability of our current existence but of innovations to match our needs as they change? ### David Deutsch 00:11:35 - 00:12:48 Yes. The idea of sustainability I think is a terrible mistake. It is a hyper optimistic view ironically of what humans are and what humans can do. The idea is that we can find a way of life which will not be dangerous and will not be threatening and will not require any further creativity or progress in order to solve it. I take the opposite view to that. I think that problems are inevitable and that any kind of stasis is bound, I think, to end in catastrophe. The only thing that is sustainable is actual progress. What we need to do in regard to global warming but even more in regard to the things that are coming up that we don't yet know about, which might be far more dangerous for all we know, is to build up knowledge, scientific knowledge and also technological knowledge and also wealth to be able to deal with unforeseen problems when we discover them and, alas, also to recover from disasters that we fail to foresee. ### Krys Boyd 00:12:48 - 00:13:02 And I guess as challenging as it is to create new solutions and innovations technologically, that's still easier than changing the basic nature of human beings and what they want and how they act. ### David Deutsch 00:13:02 - 00:14:03 Well it's more than that. If we somehow could succeed in changing the nature of human beings so that they were not capable of creating new knowledge, then the same thing would happen to our species as happened to 99.9% of all species that have ever existed, namely we would go extinct. In fact, we would go extinct much faster because our ecological niche depends on creating new knowledge. All our sister species, our cousin species, whatever you want to call them, went extinct. And they went extinct not because they created too much knowledge and fell foul of the unintended consequences of their knowledge, but they went extinct precisely because they lived the sustainable lifestyle to which evolution had adapted them. And evolution played the same nasty trick on them as it usually plays on species. It wiped them out for doing so. ### Krys Boyd 00:14:03 - 00:15:18 David Deutsch is my guest. He's a fellow of the Royal Society and professor of physics at Oxford University. His new book is called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. We welcome your participation now. You can call 1-800-933-5372 or you can send email to think at kera.org. Funding for Think comes from SMU's continuing and professional education. You can enrich your career with new certificate programs in web design, graphic design and paralegal studies. Learn more at smu.edu slash CAPE. You're listening to Think on KERA 90.1. I'm Krys Boyd. My guest this hour is Oxford University physics professor David Deutsch. His new book is called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. Join our conversation by sending email to think at kera.org or by calling 1-800-933-5372. David, is it reasonable to imagine we could someday make ourselves immortal? ### David Deutsch 00:15:18 - 00:16:16 Oh, yes. It's obvious that the things that make humans die, I'm talking about natural causes as opposed to accidents and wars and so on, are all just technological matters and we have already solved them. We've increased human lifespan from its natural level of 20 something up to 80 something or whatever it is now. We know that death is caused by certain organic processes in the body which in principle can be engineered away. I talk in the book about things like travel into intergalactic space which will no doubt not happen for thousands of years yet but it would be very surprising if death in that sense were not conquered in the next few centuries. ### Krys Boyd 00:16:16 - 00:16:29 Well, if you think about it, ideas already have the potential to outlast the brains and bodies that conceive them. Do we need human bodies to be fully human or would preservation of the contents of our brains be close enough? ### David Deutsch 00:16:29 - 00:17:12 Yes. There are several different strands of technology that might eventually lead to the effective end of individual people's death such as uploading minds into computers and so on. I don't know which of those will come first. They're all of a similar level of technological difficulty so the chances are that pretty soon after one of them is invented they will all be invented and we will think it just as ridiculous not to back up our minds onto some backup medium as we do today not to back up our life's work from a computer. ### Krys Boyd 00:17:12 - 00:17:20 What an interesting series of challenges we would have then deciding who deserves to be backed up because surely there would be a financial cost to this. ### David Deutsch 00:17:20 - 00:18:35 Well there will no doubt be a transitional period during which the technology will be too expensive to apply to everybody. That is already the case. After all there are medical treatments now that can save some people's lives but cannot save the lives of everybody with that disease. So we have institutions in place that can take care of that situation but it will only be temporary because one of the things that I elaborate in some detail in my book is that the progress always consists of alternating phases. First a creative phase which solves the fundamental problems and then what Thomas Edison called the perspiration phase where we optimize things. The thing about the perspiration phase is that it can always be automated and once something is automated its cost goes down to zero because the only thing that ultimately costs anything is human attention and creativity. So soon after the technology is available it will become cheaper and eventually will become just as much taken for granted as a supply of fresh drinking water. ### Krys Boyd 00:18:35 - 00:18:52 Let's talk about the evolution of human knowledge and culture. Rather than genes in this case we talk about memes and you explain that some survive because they are good and rational, others survive and reproduce specifically because they crowd out people's appetite for seeking new ideas and new explanations. ### David Deutsch 00:18:52 - 00:20:39 Yes, the theory of memes which was first thought of by Richard Dawkins and then elaborated by Susan Blackmore and many others, I think it's fundamentally true but what I say in the book is that all the existing treatments of memes miss the most important thing about them which is this distinction that you just mentioned between what I call rational and anti-rational memes. The rational memes you characterized just about correctly that they are the memes that are transmitted from person to person because the recipient finds that having that knowledge or that behavior benefits them. But then the anti-rational memes it's not that they remove interest it's that they disable people from criticizing them. So there are ideas that disable criticism of themselves and of course Richard Dawkins' favorite example of this are certain religions. I don't think it's at all true of all religions but still the archetypal example that he cites is once you start believing that there's a god who will punish you if you stop believing in him then thoughts about that get suppressed in your mind and therefore that meme gets hard to abandon. But I think that this kind of meme which has an overt content of saying don't stop believing in me is actually a rare kind and the more insidious kinds are the ones that we don't really know why we're doing them such as ... ### Krys Boyd 00:20:39 - 00:20:42 Well you mentioned immortality a while ago. ### David Deutsch 00:20:42 - 00:21:25 I think that there is an irrational meme that makes people suspicious of the idea of immortality. They don't mind lengthening life span but once you talk about lengthening life span without any limit they start imagining purely imaginary objections to this and I don't think that is rational. It is funny that we have many many religious traditions that look forward to an afterlife but it's something completely separate and apart from what we have here. But if you look even at literature ### Krys Boyd 00:21:25 - 00:21:31 The stories of human beings who somehow become immortal they're always miserable and desperate to end this thing. ### David Deutsch 00:21:31 - 00:22:15 Yes this is an example of the irrationality I was speaking of and it is very ironic about religions that religions too take this view. It's somehow perhaps they think that it having real immortality would cheat people of the imaginary immortality that religions offer or something like that. It's by the way also interesting that the first mathematical theories of infinity and I talk about those too in the book were bitterly opposed by the church and religious people on the grounds that it was inherently wrong for humans to try to usurp the functionality of God in trying to understand the infinite. ### Krys Boyd 00:22:15 - 00:22:29 1-800-933-5372 is our telephone number. We're speaking this hour with David Deutsch about his new book The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. Let's speak with Ken on the phone in Fort Worth. Hi Ken. ### Ken 00:22:29 - 00:22:59 Hello, thank you for taking my call ma'am. I love the show and I appreciate what the gentleman has been saying but my question is if we allow companies to use all the resources, the finite resources on the earth and not go a sustainable way, how can we rely on technology to sustain us? ### David Deutsch 00:22:59 - 00:24:23 Yes, the idea that the resources of the earth are, well the resources available to humans are finite is a mistake. First of all it's only knowledge that converts something into a resource in the first place. Nobody knew that pitchblende uranium ore was a resource until Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity and so on. Soon we will be mining the asteroids for minerals that are extremely rare on earth. The universe is to all intents and purposes unlimited and it is our home. To regard just the resources that you know about today as being the resources will always lead you into the error of thinking that they are finite and then once we have used them up what will we do then? Unfortunately we have no choice because even if we remained at a present level of technology and sustained it forever, all that would do is postpone our extinction. If we want to avoid our extinction there is nothing sustainable except the growth of knowledge. ### Krys Boyd 00:24:23 - 00:24:29 You're not arguing of course that we should wantonly go out and waste physical resources. That's not the point that you're making. ### David Deutsch 00:24:29 - 00:24:36 No, the question is whether there is an inherent limit on our progress or not. ### Krys Boyd 00:24:36 - 00:24:46 You disagree with the notion made popular by Stephen Hawking and others that free will is in fact a sort of illusion. Can you talk about that? ### David Deutsch 00:24:46 - 00:27:01 Yes, this is the idea that because we are made of atoms and atoms are subject to laws of motion that don't allow any wiggle room, therefore everything we do also doesn't allow any wiggle room and therefore our free will must be an illusion. Now I think that's called reductionism and it is simply a mistake. It's sort of assuming that the laws of physics are a kind of a person, they're a kind of supernatural being that makes us do things. But it's not true. The laws of physics are simply a description of what we do. So it's not the laws of physics that make atoms move around. The laws of physics are simply a description of what they do. The thing that we see about the world is that there are levels of description. There are descriptions at the atomic level and descriptions at the molecular level and the biological level. And then there are descriptions and explanations at the level of human thought. And there's no reason to expect that just because there's a low level description there isn't also a high level explanation and description. And in the book I give some arguments both due to me and due to people like Douglas Hofstadter that the high level description is sometimes the only reasonable explanation of what is happening. So for example, if you play a game of chess against a computer, then it's not the silicon that has beaten you. It's the program, the program in the computer. And that program is an abstraction. The program doesn't consist of atoms. The program is an abstraction over the atoms just like human thought is an abstraction over our atoms. And it is the program that has beaten you. And when I make a decision, it's I who have made it, not my atoms and not the laws of physics. ### Krys Boyd 00:27:01 - 00:27:09 So we get really unnecessarily and detrimentally hung up on this sense that we can get to the absolute foundation of anything. ### David Deutsch 00:27:09 - 00:27:37 That's true as well. The idea that there's an absolute foundation is a formula for stagnation in science and for tyranny in politics and so on. There will never be an absolute foundation for knowledge because there will always be the question once we have got a particular fundamental theory of why it is that way and not some other way. ### Krys Boyd 00:27:37 - 00:27:58 1-800-933-5372 is our telephone number. We have an email here from Paul in Farmers Branch who says, It seems to me we will have many opportunities to go extinct regardless of how creative we are. Nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions, solar mass ejection, uncontrollable disease. We may simply not have enough time to prepare to survive. ### David Deutsch 00:27:58 - 00:29:11 Well, I agree with everything in that except for the regardless. The thing is that in all those cases there is a possible, there is a way that we could make the wrong decisions and be wiped out as a result, including refusing to make decisions or shutting our eyes to problems and so on. But there is also a thing we could do to prevent that. And in all those cases, I mean, I've forgotten what they all were now, but I was noting as you read them out that in every case, sufficient knowledge would solve that problem. So if we were at a place where we could handle it, then we could handle it. But the question is whether... Of course, there is the possibility that it would happen before we have that knowledge. And the lesson of that fact, for example, an asteroid strike by something going too fast and too big for us to stop it right now, the lesson of that is that not only do we need to make progress, we need to make rapid progress or we will be wiped out. ### Krys Boyd 00:29:12 - 00:29:20 Will knowledge continue to grow even if our brains and bodies don't evolve in quite the same way they did when we were simply trying to survive? ### David Deutsch 00:29:20 - 00:30:36 Yes, we have become universal explanation machines, universal computers, universal explanation machines. And that means that the limits of our ability are fixed only by the laws of physics and not by our own constitution. For example, again, I give this example in the book, humans without technology couldn't possibly live in Oxford where I live, because the winters in Oxford would kill any human that wasn't protected by technology such as clothes and weapons to hunt with and so on. And even in the great rift valley in Africa where our species evolved, by the time we had evolved, we were already absolutely dependent on technology to survive, technology like fire and clothing. And so we are not dependent on our physical constitution because we can always adapt nature by using knowledge to compensate for any physical defects that we have or as we like to think of it, any physical defects that our environment may have. ### Krys Boyd 00:30:36 - 00:30:41 Let's go back to the phones now. Our next caller is Adam in Dallas. Hello, Adam. ### Adam 00:30:42 - 00:31:12 Hi, I'm Adam. I'm from Dallas. And my question is this. If doctors really are able to offer, or scientists or those types are really able to offer you immortality, will that come with infinite youth, like you'll never age, or will that be just the constant state of kind of like living on a life-support machine? You know those machines that hook people up to keep them alive even after the body is gone? ### David Deutsch 00:31:12 - 00:31:38 It'll be the former. The same argument that tells us that death is merely a technological problem tells us that youth is also merely a technological problem. The task of transforming an older body into a younger body is ultimately just a task of engineering the self to be in a slightly different way. And that requires only knowledge. ### Krys Boyd 00:31:38 - 00:33:32 David Deutsch is my guest. He's a fellow of the Royal Society and professor of physics at Oxford University. His newest book is called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. Join the conversation by calling in now to 1-800-933-5372. You can also send an email to think at kera.org. Thank you. The funding for Think comes from SMU's continuing and professional education. You can enrich your career with new certificate programs in web design, graphic design, and paralegal studies. Learn more at smu.edu slash CAPE. You're listening to Think on KERA 90.1. I'm Krys Boyd. I'm Krys Boyd with Oxford University physics professor David Deutsch, whose newest book is called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. Our telephone number is 1-800-933-5372. The email address is think at kera.org. It would be impossible to argue that faith in an ultimate solution, say a cure for cancer, has driven a great deal of progress and spurred the acquisition of a great deal of knowledge over time. You say, though, that absolute faith in an ultimate solution can hinder progress after a certain point. Will you explain that? ### David Deutsch 00:33:32 - 00:34:46 Yes, certainly. This is in philosophy the debate about two different meanings of the phrase that humans are perfectible. So in one meaning of that, it means that there is a perfect state that we can reach if we only do the right thing, like chant the right syllables or whatever, or a utopia, a perfect society that we can reach if only we kill the right people and so on. And that notion of perfectibility leads to stagnation and tyranny. But the other notion of perfectibility, which is that improvement is always possible, which in some ways is equally optimistic, but in other ways is much more rational, is also true. And that's the sense of perfectibility that I argue for, that problems are always soluble. Problems are also inevitable. And that's why we really have no choice but to embark on an open-ended pursuit of knowledge and good explanations. So there's always room for improvement. ### Krys Boyd 00:34:46 - 00:35:16 Yes. You know, it's interesting. Just this morning on the radio there was a story about the long philosophy of thinking that people are either auditory or visual learners has been disproven, at least in one large study. And it's funny because it's one of those things that for a long time we based our education systems around this idea that we understood how people learn one way or another and we could cater to that. Had we not continued to question that, we wouldn't have gotten to the place where maybe we can teach even better. ### David Deutsch 00:35:16 - 00:35:52 Yes. I hadn't heard of that study, but it sounds extremely plausible to me and I would have expected that to be so. I would even go further and I would say that even if it had been true that some people are auditory and some people are visual, this is itself merely a problem that people could overcome if they wanted to. So an auditory person could become visual if they were interested in doing so. The reason I think that would have been true is that we are general purpose knowledge creating machines. ### Krys Boyd 00:35:52 - 00:36:00 Let's go back to the phones now at 1-800-933-5372. We have Sal on the line in Richardson. Hello, Sal. ### Sal 00:36:00 - 00:36:53 Hi, this is Sal. David, this is a really pleasant surprise. I just finished reading your work last night and, lo and behold, you're on the radio. My question is in regards to your work appeals to a lot of telematic people like me. It has a strange symphony effect on myself and people like me, I guess. My question is maybe your advocacy of Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics, for instance, seems to be not amenable to the kind of scientific inquiry dynamics that you talk about in your book, which is conjecture, criticize, and testable. Would you care to comment on that, whether that is so dogmatic that it is almost bearing a religious belief? ### David Deutsch 00:36:53 - 00:38:30 Yes, it's a line of criticism that is often heard that the idea that quantum mechanics forces upon us the theory of parallel universes is a sort of religious theory because all that quantum mechanics can actually tell us is the outcomes of experiments. It can't actually prove that the mechanism by which these outcomes are brought about is as the theory says. So maybe it isn't and maybe there aren't these parallel universes. The trouble is that that is exactly the line which would let you say that the observations of the planets don't necessarily tell us that the sun is at the center of the solar system. It could still be the earth and that all that happens is that the light reaching the earth is as if there were planets out there orbiting the sun. This is exactly the argument that the results of quantum mechanics are just as if there were parallel universes producing them. Or to give a rather notorious topical example, it's like the people who say that fossils were put there exactly as if there had been dinosaurs that gave rise to them. But nobody has ever seen a dinosaur nor will anybody ever see the dinosaurs that produce the fossils and therefore it's a matter of religion to believe in them. But that is to misconstrue what science is about. Science is not about just predicting the outcomes of experiments. It is about understanding the world. ### Krys Boyd 00:38:30 - 00:38:38 What's the value of the mistakes we have made and continue to make over time in our pursuit of science? ### David Deutsch 00:38:38 - 00:40:02 The pursuit of science is, as my old boss John Wheeler used to say, who was in Austin, Texas at the time when I worked with him, our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. And in the book I say that it might help people to understand better the nature of the scientific process if we called scientific theories misconceptions right from the outset rather than only after we have discovered what's wrong with them. If we are going to expect continual improvement, we must expect that all our existing theories at least contain, although they contain a lot of truth, they also contain misconceptions and therefore in the final analysis are misconceptions. So we could talk about Einstein's misconception of gravity being a better misconception than Newton's misconception of gravity. Error is the natural and ubiquitous state of human minds. The only difference is whether we improve upon our errors or don't or refuse to. And if we want to improve upon them, we have to do these specific things involving criticism, seeking better explanations, seeking the truth, openness, tolerance and so on. ### Krys Boyd 00:40:02 - 00:40:12 Your way of thinking really appeals to me because there are people who would find our consistent and predictable fallibility as time goes by really depressing, but it's a source of delight for you. ### David Deutsch 00:40:12 - 00:40:44 It is. It is. It is the means of progress. And to regard error as you talked about education just now, one of the things that another thing that has held back education is the idea that education is about finding ways of not making errors. But in fact, progress only ever comes through making errors and errors are to be encouraged. And as I said, our whole problem is to make them as fast as possible. ### Krys Boyd 00:40:44 - 00:40:48 Let's go next on the phone to Colleen in Dallas. Hello, Colleen. ### Colleen 00:40:48 - 00:40:51 Hi, thanks for having me. ### Krys Boyd 00:40:51 - 00:40:52 Sure. ### Colleen 00:40:52 - 00:41:24 What I was wondering was I've heard arguments, I think from Descartes, that if you can imagine infinity or if you can imagine an infinite being that that is a proof of the existence of God. But from what I understand, like the idea of infinity is more of a scientific idea and that that idea itself merely refers to like a physical reality to apply that to something that's rather alternate or completely nonphysical is kind of a fallacy. So I was just wondering what your take on that was. ### David Deutsch 00:41:24 - 00:42:14 I almost agree. It was certainly that proof, that purported proof called the ontological proof, I think, of the existence of God is a fallacy. And we can't blame the early philosophers for making that statement because infinity wasn't properly understood until about the 19th century. But infinity is not only a thing about physics, like, for example, that there's an infinite number of points in a one inch distance, which we now know how to make sense of statements like that. But it's also meaningful in mathematics. And it has been found that we can reason validly about infinity and deeply understand infinity in mathematics, too. ### Krys Boyd 00:42:14 - 00:42:29 Is it possible that some other civilization somewhere in the universe could arrive and explain all this to us? Or will it only have meaning if we as human beings find the answers we seek on our own? ### David Deutsch 00:42:29 - 00:43:19 Here's another education theory point. Whenever you understand something, it is you who have created the idea in your mind. It may feel as though somebody has poured it into you like wine into a glass. But that is an illusion. All knowledge arises by conjecture and criticism. And what we do when we listen to somebody speaking, we don't download that theory into our brain. If we did, we wouldn't understand it. It would be like learning it in a foreign language. What we do is conjecture what it means and then use what that person is saying as a means of criticizing and improving our conjecture. And with luck, we then find a way of understanding what that person is saying. And with even more luck, we find a way of improving on it. ### Krys Boyd 00:43:20 - 00:43:36 You have a fascinating chapter in the book which might surprise people devoted to the question of why flowers are beautiful. And you demonstrate that at least some things of beauty are in fact objectively beautiful or appear to be. Why do flowers fit that description? ### David Deutsch 00:43:36 - 00:45:29 The conventional view of beauty is that it is purely subjective or else purely cultural, that it has no objective basis. So when we say it's a matter of taste, that's just another way in everyday language of saying there isn't any objective truth in it. But the thing about flowers is that the evolution of flowers had to solve a problem of how to make a signal of attractiveness that would be difficult to forge, but also easy to recognize by someone else who knew, in this case, insects, who knew the code. And so the insect flower coevolution produced a standard, which was an artistic standard, for what flowers should look like. Now, my argument for why it hit on an objective standard is if that was so, and there are plenty of examples of signaling in nature, but most of them don't look beautiful to humans. So the question is why do flowers, which evolved to look attractive to insects, also look attractive to humans? And I make the argument in detail in the book that the only explanation for this is that to solve this problem of an interspecies signaling, the most efficient way of solving that problem was for both the insects and the flowers to evolve towards a criterion of objective beauty, which then appealed to humans as well because humans are capable of understanding objective things. ### Krys Boyd 00:45:29 - 00:45:40 What is the best way to guard against our tendency to lose sight of our own fallibility or embrace of mistakes in service of progress? ### David Deutsch 00:45:43 - 00:46:37 I think we have to look at whether the things we are saying and the things we are doing meet the problems that they are purported to meet. So if you say, why am I in this job? And if the best explanation that you can come up with for why you are in that job is one that you would think was silly if someone else said it about their job, then that's prima facie evidence that you're in an irrational pattern of thinking. By the way, like anything else, this is not a conclusive evidence because it may be that you are in fact in the right job but don't actually know the reason. But in that case, it would do you good to know the reason. ### Krys Boyd 00:46:37 - 00:46:52 Do you find it challenging to have these conversations with people like me or people in a general audience? Or do you find that discussing these ideas with regular people who have not studied them in depth actually helps to clarify your own thinking? ### David Deutsch 00:46:52 - 00:47:18 Oh, definitely the latter. And if anything, the professionals are more likely to be stuck in their ways than people who, if I can put it this way, have real lives and whose philosophical problems grow out of real life problems. There's also the fact that, as you will have noticed, I really like pontificating. ### Krys Boyd 00:47:18 - 00:47:21 Which makes you an excellent radio guest. ### David Deutsch 00:47:21 - 00:47:22 Well, thank you. ### Krys Boyd 00:47:22 - 00:47:35 David Deutsch is a fellow of the Royal Society and professor of physics at Oxford University. His new book is called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. David, it's been quite a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending this hour with us. ### David Deutsch 00:47:35 - 00:47:37 Thank you for having me on the program. ### Krys Boyd 00:47:37 - 00:48:26 My name is Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening and have a great day. The THiNK Production Team includes engineer Nilufar Arsala. Our senior producer is Jeff Whittington. Learn more about today's show, find out about upcoming programs, and download our free daily podcasts at kera.org slash think. And we'd like to hear what you think about THiNK. Email your comments, questions, and suggestions at think at kera.org.