# 2011-09-07 - Groks Science Show - Infinite Beginnings [Official](https://grokscience.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/1579/) [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/infinite-beginnings-groks-science-show-2011-09-07/id73329471?i=1000097113938) Duration: 00:27:03 ## Transcript ### Frank Ling 00:00:00 - 00:00:27 I'm Frank Ling. ### Charles Lee 00:00:27 - 00:00:29 And I'm Charles Lee. ### Frank Ling 00:00:29 - 00:00:31 And you're listening to the Groks Science Show. ### Charles Lee 00:00:31 - 00:00:40 That's right, it's a weekly look at the world of science, technology, and their effects on our daily lives. Coming up on today's program is Professor David Deutsch talking about The Beginning of Infinity. ### Frank Ling 00:00:40 - 00:00:42 So stay tuned for all of this. ### Charles Lee 00:00:42 - 00:00:44 Plus the Grok-a-Tron 5000. ### Frank Ling 00:00:44 - 00:01:22 And our world famous question of the week. Coming right up. Here. On the Groks Science Show. Welcome back to the Groks Science Show. ### Charles Lee 00:01:22 - 00:02:00 Well, science is constantly in search of explanations about the world around us. But our explanations of the world are incomplete. And the search for better ones is ongoing. What constitutes a good explanation? And how do these explanations evolve? Well, joining us today to discuss this issue is Professor David Deutsch. Professor Deutsch is a professor of physics at Oxford University and a fellow of the Royal Society. Author of numerous scientific and popular works including the Fabric of Reality. His latest work, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World, explores this topic for a general audience. And Professor Deutsch, we're very pleased to have you today on the Groks Science Show. ### David Deutsch 00:02:00 - 00:02:01 Well, thank you for having me. ### Charles Lee 00:02:01 - 00:02:17 Well, this is really a pleasure since this is like your previous book, a fascinating read. The Beginning of Infinity. When you talk about explanations as really being kind of the driver for human existence. I'm curious if you could tell us how explanations come about and how we decide among explanations that are good versus those that don't fit reality? ### David Deutsch 00:02:18 - 00:03:49 The idea of an explanation being good is my solution to what you might call the centuries old problem of how come things work. How come science works and all previous methods of trying to understand things like what makes the stars shine and so on just didn't work. They just didn't make any headway at all. And the standard answer for that in the case of science has been that we have testable theories now and previously theories were untestable. So you couldn't ever tell the difference between rival theories and so you could never make progress. But I think for various reasons that's inadequate because, for example, many myths are also testable, but they're still not capable of making progress. And my idea is that a good explanation is one that accounts for something in reality, purports to account for something in reality where it is hard to vary. That's the key thing. In other words, a slightly different account would not account for that thing as well. And so that's a good explanation. The nice thing about the idea of a good explanation is that within science, it explains why testability is the criterion for good science. But good explanation applies beyond science as well. It applies in philosophy and politics and morality and aesthetics and everything. And I try to cover all those things in the book. ### Charles Lee 00:03:49 - 00:03:56 So whereas testability is the criterion for deciding amongst explanations, what about in those fields where testability is not possible? ### David Deutsch 00:03:56 - 00:04:45 Well, there testability is just a special case of hard to vary. So, for example, if you had an idea that no one's allowed to steal except you, and that's the moral thing, then the thing is that theory is easy to vary because as a moral explanation, it's just as good as no one's allowed to steal except me or no one's allowed to steal except you and me and so on. And so countless variations of that idea, all with different exceptions. And none of those exceptions have a better moral explanation than any of the others. Whereas the idea that no one should steal doesn't make an exception, doesn't have to explain the exception. And therefore, it's a better moral explanation. ### Charles Lee 00:04:45 - 00:04:47 What about the idea that everyone should steal? ### David Deutsch 00:04:48 - 00:05:29 Yes. So one of the nice things about this critical worldview, which, by the way, isn't mine, it's due to the philosopher Karl Popper. Originally, I just applied it to this idea of good explanations is that no criterion of criticism is excluded a priori. So you can exclude something, but all of them have to contribute to this good explanation feature. So the idea that everyone should steal also has this property that it's hard to vary, but it doesn't account for the thing it's supposed to account for. Because if everyone could steal, that would have obvious practical disadvantages like running out of things to steal. ### Charles Lee 00:05:29 - 00:05:31 I'm sure everyone just shifts things around ad infinitum. ### David Deutsch 00:05:31 - 00:05:41 Yes, this too is discussed in the book, by the way, in a little cameo appearance by a generic Socrates, who suggests this very idea. ### Charles Lee 00:05:41 - 00:05:50 So regarding how explanations come about, you argue against the notion that ideas come through experience, from evidence to theory. ### David Deutsch 00:05:50 - 00:07:23 Yes, I argue that that is wrong. And that really what happens is that the validation via being a good explanation comes first. And only in the rare and fortunate case where we have more than one good explanation, do we then apply. Well, in the case of science, do we then apply experimental testing? So the overwhelming majority of theories, even testable theories that you could think of, are never tested because they are bad explanations. And the example I gave in my first book was what about the theory that eating a kilogram of grass will cure the common cold? Well, the thing is, that's a perfectly testable theory, but no one will ever test it because it is a bad explanation. There's nothing that goes with it that would distinguish between that and the theory that 1.1 kilograms of grass will cure the common cold or 0.9 or whatever. And therefore you could never know when you had tested it. In general, by the way, it's impossible to test any theory that doesn't come with an explanation. And one of the things I criticize in the book is theories in the less hard sciences, shall we say, in sciences like psychology and so on, where one just makes a hypothesis about how humans are without an underlying explanation for why they are like that. And those theories, I think, can't truly be tested, even though in their form they may resemble testable theories. ### Charles Lee 00:07:23 - 00:07:30 So given that some theories are untested, is it possible that there is a limit to what we can know? ### David Deutsch 00:07:30 - 00:08:20 I argue that there isn't, or rather there are limits imposed by things like mathematics and the laws of physics themselves. So it's possible that we shall never be able to know, in the case of physics, we shall never be able to know what Julius Caesar ate for his last meal before he was assassinated. But what we shall always be able to do is solve problems. So the issue of what Julius Caesar ate for his last meal will never be something that keeps anyone awake at night. Conversely, any of the things that are capable of keeping a person awake at night, worrying about them, are soluble. And they are soluble by creating knowledge, and knowledge is created by trying to create better explanations by criticizing and varying existing explanations. ### Charles Lee 00:08:21 - 00:08:28 So these explanations allow us then to transform the world, and that's really what gives humans power over reality, in a sense. ### David Deutsch 00:08:28 - 00:09:38 Yes, there's a deep connection built into nature, and in the book I try to argue why this must be so. A connection between understanding the world and controlling it. On the face of it, those are two very different things. You know, you may understand why an asteroid is heading towards the earth and going to obliterate us. You may be able to work it out down to the last decimal place. But that in itself doesn't enable you to prevent it. But this deep connection says that with enough knowledge, understanding always is connected with the corresponding control. And that's why science is linked with technology. And that's why the unlimited nature of science, which to deny that is essentially to believe in the supernatural, that the unlimited scope of science leads to an unlimited scope of technology, which means that things which are problematic to us are always going to be soluble with sufficient technological knowledge, such as disease and death and the ability to travel in space and so on. ### Charles Lee 00:09:38 - 00:09:47 Oftentimes it seems that technology precedes the scientist's explanation, such that something is engineered and then the reason why it works is discovered later. ### David Deutsch 00:09:47 - 00:11:08 This used to be much more true than it is today. And it is becoming ever less true that as both science and technology become more sophisticated, it's becoming more and more a case of working out why something must work and then building it. A very good example of this is in the science of medicine, where, let's say, a hundred years ago, the mode of action of medicines was basically unknown. We were lucky if we were right about the idea that a particular medicine does work, but we certainly didn't know much about how it works. Now today, it's increasingly becoming the other way around. That is, there's a whole science developing of a designer pharmacology, where we first understand the mechanism of a disease, then we conjecture what kind of chemical would interrupt the progress of that disease, then we design a chemical, and only then do we ever try it. In other words, after we have the explanation. And the more sophisticated science and technology get, the more it is the case that these rules of thumb type knowledge, which are really uncreatively generated, are being superseded by creatively generated good explanations. ### Charles Lee 00:11:09 - 00:11:15 It's sort of difficult then to see how the general model then fits into the humanities and economics. ### David Deutsch 00:11:15 - 00:13:26 Yes, economics is a difficult case because it is sort of half science and half philosophy. And in science, we must have testable theories. And in philosophy, it's a terrible mistake to require testable theories. And so economics has sort of got itself into a tangle by confusing the two. But a more extreme case than that, and so I don't actually discuss economics in the book, though I do discuss political philosophy, is the matter of aesthetics, where almost everybody would say that what is beautiful or ugly is just a matter of personal taste and calling it a matter of taste, it has been taken to be synonymous with saying that there is no objective truth of the matter. But I have an argument in the book that there must be an objective truth of the matter. And the argument is drawn from the coevolution of flowers and insects. Basically, the notion of beauty on which or attractiveness on which flowers and insects have co-evolved and converged. We can understand from the theory of evolution why the flowers have evolved to generate particular patterns to meet a particular criterion and insects to use that same criterion to decide what flowers to visit. It's easy to understand that via the ordinary theory of evolution. But the mystery then is why do humans also reliably find that same thing attractive when we didn't have that coevolution? And I go through various possibilities and eventually conclude that the only reasonable explanation of this is that the easiest way to do this signaling between different species was to hit upon an objective criterion of beauty and implement that. And that's why humans also find flowers beautiful. And so it's the flowers and the insects and the humans and no one else. I think you can only explain this via the theory that this beauty is objective. ### Charles Lee 00:13:26 - 00:13:30 So that the universe actually has a criterion for what is beautiful. ### David Deutsch 00:13:31 - 00:14:50 Exactly. Strangely, the idea that that should be so runs counter to the prevailing, what can I call it, the prevailing rational worldview. But I think that there's no escaping it. And this all ties, once you realize that this is so, it ties together a lot of things that have been known or suspected in any case, but people haven't known how to fit them in to the worldview. For example, we know that elegance is an excellent guide to true theories in science. That is the ones before we test them. Now, it has been remarked often, many a beautiful theory has been slain by an ugly fact. But nevertheless, beauty in theory is a much better guide than just random chance would dictate. And why is that? Well, that's hard to explain if beauty is simply a matter of arbitrary human or cultural taste. But it's easy to explain if beauty is objective, because then it's a matter of objective truth, what an elegant theory is. And objective truths are all related to each other, just like scientific truths all are. That's a special case of it. ### Charles Lee 00:14:50 - 00:15:04 Determining what is the objective truth is not always an easy process. Thomas Kuhn pointed this out in the structure of scientific revolutions. Whereas you might think that if it really is the truth, it would just become intuitively obvious that it is the truth. ### David Deutsch 00:15:04 - 00:16:22 Yes, not only sometimes or often, but it's always a messy process. And what's more, we never achieve the final truth. What we discover is various truths or ideas that contain truth and solve problems thereby. But the result of solving a problem is not the absence of problems, it's a new problem. And Kuhn has seized on this feature as if it was a bad thing. This is part of the campaign of himself and many 20th century philosophers to badmouth the very concept of objective truth, even in science, let alone elsewhere. But this thing that he thinks is an indictment of science is actually the very means by which science is capable of making infinite progress. Because think about it, if we could achieve the final answer in everything, then science would have to come to an end and progress would be finite necessarily. But the only way that progress can be infinite, as I argue it is, is if we never reach the final truth. All we ever do is move from a problem to a better problem, from a theory to a better theory, and so on. ### Charles Lee 00:16:23 - 00:16:25 Searching for explanations to problems that arise. ### David Deutsch 00:16:27 - 00:16:43 Yes, and never to expect the answer to be the final answer, but for it to solve the problem as we see it now. And the result is always a better, more beautiful, more intriguing, more useful set of problems. ### Charles Lee 00:16:44 - 00:16:51 So philosophically then, outside of what we can know, is there final, say, ontological truth about nature that... ### David Deutsch 00:16:52 - 00:17:36 Yes, that's the other half of the story. There is an objective truth, a final objective truth that, as you say, ontologically, as it were, exists. But what we do, we don't have access to final truth. All we can do is improve. And we can improve objectively. Sometimes when we think we've improved, we haven't in fact improved. And just that very concept, the idea that we can think we have improved but haven't in fact improved, you can't even realize that properly. You can't grok that properly, if I may say so, without realizing that there is an objective truth that is independent of what anyone may think. ### Charles Lee 00:17:37 - 00:17:39 So the final grok is unattainable. ### David Deutsch 00:17:39 - 00:17:40 That's right. ### Charles Lee 00:17:41 - 00:17:47 Well, that's one of the intriguing aspects of the book, is that you argue that the earth might be fundamentally unsustainable. ### David Deutsch 00:17:47 - 00:19:29 Yes, the world just is unsustainable. The 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have been wiped out by the very earth on which they evolved. And all of our sister species were wiped out by the same environment that they grew up in. And the great rift valley in Africa, where our species evolved, could hardly support any people by present day standards. And those that it did support, it supported only in tremendous misery, like it does with nearly all species. Nature is not only red in tooth and claw, it's cruel, it's full of starvation and slavery and sickness and conflict and so on. It's only humans that can improve things. And that's what we do. But improving them only gives us ever a temporary respite from this normal state of affairs in nature of being cruel and involving suffering. So what we do is we improve things, we reach a new level of problems thereby. We improve those and we reach a new level of problems there. If that couldn't go on forever, then we'd be headed for a brick wall. And we would go extinct like all of our predecessor species. But if it's unlimited, which I argue it is, then we can keep surviving and making our lives better, but only by a continual exercise of creativity. ### Charles Lee 00:19:30 - 00:19:34 And so then the unlimited source then might be the stars, which we then expand into the universe. ### David Deutsch 00:19:35 - 00:21:03 Yes, we're going to have to, coming to a consensus nowadays, we're going to have to, how shall I put it, not leave all our eggs in one basket and colonize first other planets and then other star systems and thereby cross the galaxy. But we will also be exploring downwards into nanotechnology and deeper and deeper understanding of atoms and physical processes at the fundamental level. And in fact, the two will go together as they always have. The question is whether the distinctively human way of existing, namely to improve things and thereby change them and thereby encounter new problems and have things get better, whether that is inherently finite or whether it's unlimited. And if it's inherently finite, then we are doomed no matter what we do. But if it's unlimited, which I argue it is, then we may not be doomed. In that case, whether we are doomed or not depends on what decisions we make, whether we make decisions in the rational way of trying to find better explanations or whether we try irrational ways of, for example, seeking stasis, such as sustainability, which I think is a very poor aim for a guiding principle for human decisions. ### Charles Lee 00:21:04 - 00:21:06 Well, here's to unlimited progress then. ### David Deutsch 00:21:08 - 00:21:09 I couldn't agree more. ### Charles Lee 00:21:10 - 00:21:19 Well, the new book then is The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. And Professor Deutsch, I want to thank you very much for joining us today on the Groks Science Show. ### David Deutsch 00:21:19 - 00:21:21 Well, thank you for having me. It's very interesting. ### Charles Lee 00:21:21 - 00:21:27 All right. Well, it was our pleasure. And if you do have a few minutes, we would quickly like to play our game, the Grok-a-Tron 5000. ### David Deutsch 00:21:27 - 00:21:28 Okay. ### Charles Lee 00:21:28 - 00:21:50 All right. It's time to play the game, the Grok-a-Tron 5000. It is our supercomputer formerly known as Deep Blue. And today, the Grok-a-Tron 5000 has chosen the topic. Do they have a good explanation for the world? So for the following five individuals, the Grok-a-Tron 5000 would like to know if they hold a good explanation for the world or not and maybe a little reason why. Professor Deutsch, ready to play the game? ### David Deutsch 00:21:50 - 00:21:51 Certainly. ### Charles Lee 00:21:51 - 00:21:56 Okay. Here we go. Person number one, does he have a good explanation? It's variety show host Simon Cowell. ### David Deutsch 00:21:56 - 00:22:02 I haven't heard Simon Cowell give any explanation of anything. So I'd have to say no. ### Frank Ling 00:22:03 - 00:22:04 Okay. All right. ### Charles Lee 00:22:04 - 00:22:07 Well, number two, it's the soccer great David Beckham. ### David Deutsch 00:22:08 - 00:22:45 Now he definitely has good explanations, but they might be inexplicit. That is, they may not be expressed in words. What a great sportsman has is knowledge that is not necessarily expressible in words. If it were, then they could pass it on much more easily to other people. It may be only partially expressed in words. And I think, but on the other hand, if somebody is consistently better at something than other people, this is due to knowledge. And so I would have to say yes to David Beckham, but almost certainly it's inexplicit knowledge. ### Charles Lee 00:22:46 - 00:22:48 All right. Number three, it's Richard Branson. ### David Deutsch 00:22:49 - 00:23:30 Anyone who's a self-made billionaire knows stuff. I think, and it might be again, inexplicit or it might be explicit. I think that Richard Branson certainly has a large amount of inexplicit knowledge about how to run organizations and also about how to tune products to the market. I haven't actually heard explicit theories from him, so I can't judge his explicit theories, I'm afraid. And again, if somebody does anything a lot better than other people who are trying to do it, it's because they know something and that has got to be explanations at some level. ### Charles Lee 00:23:30 - 00:23:36 Well, I'm curious about number four then, it's Sharon Osbourne, the wife of Ozzy Osbourne. ### David Deutsch 00:23:37 - 00:23:44 Okay. Well, I know who that is, but I'm afraid that I have never seen any evidence. I haven't seen her in action. ### Frank Ling 00:23:44 - 00:23:47 Okay. Well, okay. ### Charles Lee 00:23:47 - 00:23:50 Finally, number five then, it's your Prime Minister, David Cameron. ### David Deutsch 00:23:51 - 00:24:26 The jury's out there. Cameron occasionally says things that clearly are explanatory theories. And they have got him to the top first of his party and now of the country. So he's obviously got some kind of knowledge to that extent. But I think with the Prime Minister, one has to ask primarily about their explicit knowledge, whether the assertions they make in their speeches are good explanations or not. And I have certainly seen some that are, but again, with the Prime Minister, one can't tell whether he wrote them. ### Frank Ling 00:24:26 - 00:24:27 Whether he wrote them. ### David Deutsch 00:24:27 - 00:24:40 So what one has to do with the Prime Minister is wait and see what the outcome is. Only a Prime Minister with good explanations can achieve success for the country. So we'll wait and see. ### Charles Lee 00:24:41 - 00:24:53 All right. Well, Professor Deutsch, I want to thank you very much for sticking around playing our game. And again, talking about your book, which is again called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World. Thank you so much for your time. ### David Deutsch 00:24:53 - 00:24:54 Thank you. ### Frank Ling 00:24:54 - 00:24:59 And that's all for this week's edition of the Groks Science Show. ### Charles Lee 00:24:59 - 00:25:02 Make sure you tune in next week for more from the world of science and technology. ### Frank Ling 00:25:02 - 00:25:09 If you'd like to contact us here, you can email us at science@groks.net. For Groks Science, I'm Frank Ling. ### Charles Lee 00:25:09 - 00:25:16 And I'm Charles Lee. Make sure you also see us on the web at www.groks.net. Have a great afternoon and keep on grokkin'.