2011-09-19 KPCC AirTalk Fear Not, Problem-Solving Children of the Enlightenment
Duration: 00:17:31
Transcript
David Lazarus
You’re listening to Air Talk on 89.3 KPCC. I’m David Lazarus from the LA Times sitting in for Larry Mantle. In just a little bit, I’ll be joined by my colleague Mary McNamara, who’s the TV critic for the paper. We’ll be doing a little Emmy recap for you. Right now, I want you all to be good doobies and put on your thinking caps because we’re going to be talking about a new book called The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World. This is by David Deutsch, who’s also the author of The Fabric of Reality, in which he detailed his theory of everything. Yes, this is a man who covers a lot of ground. David Deutsch, thank you very much for joining us. Hi, David.
David Deutsch
Thanks for inviting me.
David Lazarus
Now, it’s interesting when you look at the title of this book, The Beginning of Infinity, you might think it has some sort of spatial or chronological meaning, but you’re describing more a journey. Tell us about that journey.
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s primarily the beginning of an infinity of knowledge, and that is to say that we’re only just scratching the surface of what is possible for thinking beings like ourselves to understand, and there’s an intimate link then between understanding nature and controlling it. So in fact, among other things, there is a spatial implication. We are going to spread out across space and throughout time, but the main thing is that we’re going to spread out across the space of ideas, and the message of the book is that there’s no fundamental limit to what we can understand and explain.
David Lazarus
One thing that’s very interesting here is you make a very sharp distinction about saying that it is not so much that we are pursuing truth or knowledge, but rather that we are pursuing explanations, good explanations for what’s around us. What’s the difference?
David Deutsch
The only reason that one might avoid the words truth and knowledge, which I don’t, is that they have traditionally been given very irrational meanings. Knowledge has been defined as that which you know for certain and that sort of thing, and that’s not available. I like the philosopher Karl Popper, whom I sort of follow in these matters. If you define knowledge as just being true and useful information, then we certainly can gain knowledge. But an explanation to me is a statement about reality, and a good explanation is a statement about reality that accounts for something and is hard to vary while still accounting for it. That, I think, is the key difference between, let’s say, science and pre-scientific ways of trying to understand the world, such as faith or myth.
David Lazarus
I notice how artfully you just phrased that, of the non-scientific ways, and in your book it’s much the same. You do address creationism briefly, you do address intelligent design briefly, but you don’t really get into the tension between faith and science, and yet the undercurrent of your work seems to be a very cunning broadside against religion, because that would seem to qualify as what you call in your book a bad explanation or a bad philosophy. Bad only insofar as that it doesn’t provide a good, rational, substantial explanation for things.
David Deutsch
Yes, well, religion, I’m only interested in criticizing religion and such like things as explanations of, for example, the adaptations in living things. Religion may have other uses, such as cultural ones, which I have no real objection to. And as for broadside, I think that’s not quite the right word, because I made a decision even before I wrote my first book, that it’s just going to take too much time to address all the reasons why all the wrong theories are wrong. And I’d rather make progress, because it’s making progress that is really convincing to people. You never really convince people of anything by proving to them that their current ideas are wrong. They have to have somewhere to jump to, somewhere which is better by their own lights than their existing place. And therefore, I want to show what I consider the true situation of the universe and our place in it and all that kind of thing is, and let people decide for themselves how they will change from mistaken views which have held us back.
David Lazarus
We’re speaking with David Deutsch. He’s the author of The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. We’ll open up the phone lines, interested in getting your questions from Mr. Deutsch and also your comments on, well, the rightness and wrongness of the explanations for the world around us, 866-893-5722 or 866-893-KPCC. You can join us online at kpcc.org. Click through to the Air Talk page. Mr. Deutsch, I want to read a little excerpt from the New York Times review of your book in which David Albert writes, it hardly seems worth saying to begin with that the chutzpah of this guy is almost beyond belief and that any book with these sorts of ambitions is necessarily in some overall sense a failure or a fraud or a joke or madness. But Deutsch, who is famous among other reasons for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum computation is so smart and so strange and so creative and so inexhaustibly curious and so vividly intellectually alive that it is a distinct privilege notwithstanding everything to spend time in his head. And yet that notwithstanding everything is a key phrase here because he goes on to shoot down some of the things you say.
David Deutsch
Yes, so David Albert and I have had many a debate on these issues and I could almost use the same words about him. He’s a great iconoclast. One of the themes that he particularly disputes was the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics of which I’m a proponent.
David Lazarus
And just for everyone playing at home that means there’s an infinite number of parallel universes out there and things are happening all the time.
David Deutsch
That’s right and there are many instances of ourselves having this conversation and slightly different conversations and our idea is that this follows inexorably from our deepest theory of physics, namely quantum theory, but only a minority of physicists believe this. But the thing about David Albert is that he is the only physicist I know who was once a proponent of this and has then changed his mind.
David Lazarus
But what I don’t understand is you write in the book about the importance of developing a good explanation for things and that when we talk about the multiverse and these parallel worlds and whatnot, I have no way of challenging you nor do I have any way of challenging a person of faith when they say that God created the world in seven days.
David Deutsch
Oh, the difference is quite profound. The thing is that the parallel universes interpretation is really just the statement that quantum theory is a description of reality and isn’t to be argued away as some kind of illusion or just a way of a description of how we perceive the world. It’s not a description of humans, human minds, human experiences, but the equations literally describe the world. And so in that sense, it is purely a scientific theory and the objection to it is purely a bit of bad philosophy. It’s the same bad philosophy that says that fossils are not evidence of dinosaurs because no one has ever seen dinosaurs. You might as well say that you couldn’t challenge a paleontologist because he cannot prove that there ever were dinosaurs and you can’t prove that there weren’t. The logic of the denial that quantum theory is true is the same as the logic of the denial that evolution is true. The psychological motivations may be different, let me hasten to add, but the logic is the same.
David Lazarus
But do we have the same record of proof that a paleontologist would be able to offer up for the theory of evolution moreover that there were brachiosaurus and whatnot tromping all over the place at one time because he can hold up big bones, he can hold up fossils and he can say, there, in your face, dude.
David Deutsch
Yes, well, we can hold, you see, the thing he’s holding up isn’t dinosaurs. And the thing that I’m holding up, namely interference phenomena, isn’t parallel universes. But in both cases, the dinosaurs and the parallel universes respectively are the only known explanations of those bits of evidence. When I say explanations, I mean accounts of reality. So that’s the sense in which I mean that the logic is the same.
David Lazarus
866-893-5722 is the number. Questions or comments for David Deutsch, author of The Beginning of Infinity, are very welcome. Don, calling from Costa Mesa, welcome to the program.
Caller Don
Hi, good morning. I’m curious what your guest thinks about, I’ve always wondered about the, what’s the, what does he think the ontological, what is the ontological status of ideas?
David Lazarus
Are you talking about creativity, Don?
Caller Don
No.
David Deutsch
What, in what sense do ideas exist? Yes, I argue in the book that all sorts of abstract entities, like numbers and indeed ideas, do exist objectively. And the argument for that is that the causal effects of an idea are independent of the physical substrate in which they’re instantiated. For example, the ideas that I’m telling you now begin as sort of electrical charges in neurons in my brain and then get translated into vibrations in air and then vibrations in electrical vibrations in copper wires and so on. And the effect that it has nothing to do with copper or air. You couldn’t deduce them from any amount of study of copper or air. The thing that is having the causal effect and will make you now do one thing rather than another, you know, perhaps buy my book or whatever, is contained in the information, in the knowledge, which is an abstraction. It isn’t the atoms that are making you do it. It’s not the atoms that are now hitting your ear that are having that effect. It’s the information that is embodied in them.
David Lazarus
Now, back in college, we used to get high and talk like this. You’re making a living out of it. Yes.
David Deutsch
Well, it’s a matter of whether one is critical. The ideas are always, always come by an undirected variation of existing ideas. And it could be that that’s what getting high is. But the difference, what makes the difference between making progress with it and not making progress is the criticism afterwards.
David Lazarus
You’re also defining an almost organic process, this generation of ideas, this perpetuation of progress. And you are indeed a very optimistic person in your book. You do write that problems are inevitable, but you also write that problems are soluble. And yet, you focus on the European enlightenment as one of those signal moments in mankind’s history where things sort of kickstarted to a whole other level. Why did we see that one moment? Why aren’t we seeing a steady progression of ideas as opposed to this one sudden flurry of ideas?
David Deutsch
Oh, perhaps I understated what the enlightenment was. I think the reason why the enlightenment is a sort of a one-off idea is that it is the beginning of infinity. It’s not that everything happened at that time. In fact, scientific progress is happening much, much faster now than it did at the height of what is called the enlightenment in the 18th century. But what changed between the 18th century and the whole of human history before that, apart from a few attempted enlightenments that very tragically failed, is that they found a way of making sustained progress. And that was of having a tradition of criticism. For most of human history, those are two opposing concepts. Criticism is usually about preventing change and preventing criticism. But this magical thing, a tradition of criticism, if it can be stabilized, and it only has been stabilized once in history at the thing we call the enlightenment, is the beginning of an open-ended creation of knowledge, exponentially growing indefinitely.
David Lazarus
Prior to the enlightenment in the so-called dark ages, was it a matter of us not having this criticism around us, or was it a matter of something holding it back, that something more than likely the Church?
David Deutsch
I think the external manifestations of repression, which hold back the growth of knowledge, are only ever a secondary effect, a sort of tidying up effect, tidying up the few ideas that manage to get through the primary effect, which is cultural. It’s not that there were all sorts of ideas bristling up like they are today, but that they were then being suppressed. For the most part, it’s that people were not having ideas. They did not think that problems were soluble. They thought that the situation of the world as they saw it was inevitable and unchangeable. And they thought that the only route to betterment was a supernatural one, and couldn’t happen on earth anyway. So that’s the difference.
David Lazarus
866-893-5722 is the number Dave calling from Costa Mesa. Welcome to the program.
Caller Dave
Back in the ancient times, Indians thought, or some civilizations thought, that eclipses was caused by God, that that was the best information they had. So your theories don’t necessarily mean that they are true, because obviously you’re working with the information you have. So do you agree that you may be way off if new information comes up?
David Deutsch
Not only do I agree, I insist on that. The whole point of The Beginning of Infinity, in other words, that unlimited improvement is possible, is that even things that we consider incontrovertibly true today are eventually going to be improved upon. Not all of them, I mean we don’t know which ones they are and which ones aren’t, but there will be things that we consider incontrovertible today that will be improved upon tomorrow. In science we have examples of this all the time. Cosmology has recently discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. And only a few years ago, the debate was whether the universe was going to re-collapse or expand forever without accelerating. That it might accelerate was simply not on the cards. So a whole new kind of explanation was needed and that gives us a whole new conception of cosmology.
David Lazarus
We’ve only got about one minute left, but based on your thinking that all problems are soluble even if we don’t see the solution readily, does that mean that we will save the environment, that we will save the planet, that we will harness alternative energies, that we will fly to other planets?
David Deutsch
Yes, it means that we can do this if we choose to, if we want to, and if we do it the right way, which is to understand that such things, improvements, are caused by the growth of knowledge. We need to maximize that at the expense of parochial details that might obsess us in the moment.
David Lazarus
Gosh, you make it sound so easy.
David Deutsch
Very hard.
David Lazarus
And in the multiverse I assume there’s a conversation just like this going on in which I am actually showing my deep fluency in quantum mechanics right now.
David Deutsch
There is.
David Lazarus
Fantastic. I knew I could do that somewhere. David Deutsch is the author of The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. He’s also the author of The Fabric of Reality. Mr. Deutsch, thank you so much for joining us.
David Deutsch
Well thank you. It’s been fun.
David Lazarus
And if you have any theories of your own or explanations about how things are the way they are, please share them with us online at kpcc.org. Click on through to the Air Talk page. We will segue in just a moment from quantum mechanics to, well, television. There you go. A natural segue as we’re joined by Mary McNamara of the LA Times to give us a recap of what happened at the Emmys. I’m David Lazarus in for Larry Mantle. This is Air Talk on 89.3 KPCC. Let’s head straight into the newsroom now and check in with Hetty Lynn Hurdy.
Markdown