2011-10-01 What Now with Ken Rose
Duration: 00:48:29
Transcript
Ken Rose
KOWS 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. The “What Now” show, Mondays 11am-2pm. Live on the telephone from the United Kingdom we have David Deutsch. Good afternoon, good evening.
David Deutsch
Good evening.
Ken Rose
What is it, 7:00, 8:00 where you are?
David Deutsch
It’s just past 7:00.
Ken Rose
All right, excellent. Have you had your supper?
David Deutsch
Not yet.
Ken Rose
All right, well, maybe we can stimulate your appetite just a little bit more.
David Deutsch
Yes, I’ve just been playing badminton, so I’m having a nice rest now.
Ken Rose
Yeah, how’s your game?
David Deutsch
Bad.
Ken Rose
Well, practice, practice. Thank you very much for joining us. Should I refer to you as “Dr. Deutsch” or “Professor” —
David Deutsch
“David”.
Ken Rose
David, absolutely. I’m getting a little bit of an echo, I don’t know if you’re hearing any, but it’s tolerable, it’s not bad at all.
David Deutsch
OK…
Ken Rose
Yeah, I don’t want to take the time to call back. I think we’re going to make do here.
David Deutsch
OK.
Ken Rose
Are you in Oxford?
David Deutsch
Yes.
Ken Rose
Ah, okeydokey. By way of introduction, David Deutsch, fellow of the Royal Society, is an Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford. I’m reading from Wikipedia. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation in the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. He is also a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I want to go through this, David. Hang on with me.
David Deutsch
OK.
Ken Rose
In the Royal Society of London’s announcement of Deutsch becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society a couple of years ago, the Society described Deutsch’s contributions thus: “David Deutsch laid the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, and has subsequently made or participated in many of the most important advances in the field, including the discovery of the first quantum algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum computational networks, the first quantum error-correction scheme, and several fundamental quantum universality results. He has set the agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new, interdisciplinary field, made progress in understanding its philosophical implications (via a variant of the many-universes interpretation) and made it comprehensible to the general public, notably in his book The Fabric of Reality.” And the Fabric of Reality is some 14, maybe 15 years old now, and the new book, which is causing quite a buzz, is called The Beginning of Infinity. So, we’re very privileged to have you on the show and welcome and thank you.
David Deutsch
Well, thanks for inviting me.
Ken Rose
I’m a New Yorker, and I’ve been reading the New York Times for 55 years. A couple of months ago, I suppose, let’s see, yeah, the New York Times Review gave The Beginning of Infinity — subtitled “Explanations that Transform the World” — a very rare double-page centerfold in the book reviews section, with the headline, “Explaining it All”. This is quite a feather in your cap to be so celebrated, yes?
David Deutsch
I was very pleased, especially since the reviewer, David Albert, is someone with whom I have some profound disagreements about with more or less all the issues in the book. What we have in common, though, is our sense of what is important, rather than what the answer is, and therefore each of us thinks that the other one is making really good contributions but isn’t actually right.
Ken Rose
What is important, David?
David Deutsch
The main issue in the book, through which all the other themes of the book flow, is, what is the difference between ideas and ways of thinking that work, that can make progress, that can make things improve and those that can’t. And this comes up in all sorts of different issues, starting with the fact that progress, from the point of view of the human species as a whole, is very recent and very rare. Through most of human history, people would live their entire lives without ever encountering an innovation, whereas now, we take it for granted that iPhone updates come more often than is comfortable.
Ken Rose
David, I’m going to backtrack and get off the phone and call you back. The echo is a nuisance and we’re going to try again.
David Deutsch
OK, I could give you another number to try, but try this one again and see what happens.
Ken Rose
It’ll take a couple of minutes I’ll be right back with you.
David Deutsch
Yeah.
Ken Rose
OK we’re going to try it again, here’s a little more music. David?
David Deutsch
Hi.
Ken Rose
We’ll see if we can pull this thing off. As I said a minute ago, I wanted to just take it from the top again. I hardly feel qualified to discuss quantum anything with you, let alone physics or the higher reaches of the kind of brilliance that’s attributed to you. If you don’t mind, there are a couple of things that I want to offer you. First of all, this is an opportunity for you to speak to our listeners. So I’m interested in primarily in what you might feel is important for us to know. So I invite you to address us in that manner.
David Deutsch
OK.
Ken Rose
There are two ways to do that. One is to meet us more than halfway, and speak to us as the common women and men that we are here, and maybe later in the interview I would happily invite you to speak to those of us who may be familiar with the rarified intelligence that you represent. So would you do us a favor, would you do me a favor, and just make a general statement about the nature of our life here, the nature of the world we live in?
David Deutsch
Indeed.
Ken Rose
Thank you, sir.
David Deutsch
Yes. So, I guess the elephant in the room is that progress that we are so used to now that we’re used to reading about new technology, new political ideas, new moral ideas, and new ways of life all the time. You pick up the newspaper and you’re told that something that was very familiar is soon going to disappear. Or you’re told that something that was very familiar is actually wrong and you never knew this before and so on. This is what our way of life is about nowadays, rapid change. And although a lot of people are very cynical about it, if you take the longer-term view of decades at a time, this is definitely for the better. So we have to call it, not just rapid change, but rapid progress. And the elephant in the room is that rapid progress in that sense, in the history of our species, has been exceptionally rare. Our civilization is the first one ever on the planet to sustain rapid progress for more than two or three generations; we sustained it for two or three centuries.
Ken Rose
Is our progress actually accelerating?
David Deutsch
The signs are that it is indeed accelerating. If you look at the sort of rate of change — I’m talking about rate of change of the way of life of everybody, not just things like the volume of scientific literature and so on which is going up exponentially — just in terms of the number of things you can list on the fingers of one or two hands when you say, “I can’t imagine what life used to be like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever, before we had the World Wide Web, or before we had Google”, and so on, then yes, I think we are now used to a lot of things happening fast along those lines. Whereas for most of human history, even, say, a century ago, they also thought that progress was happening fast but it was nothing compared with the speed now.
Ken Rose
Right, and we’re thinking how fast it is now, and likely we literally cannot imagine what it’s going to be like in another 10 or 20 years.
David Deutsch
That’s exactly right. It’s going to be unimaginably different from today. And so one of the themes… I said that was the basic theme of my book, what the difference is between what can bring about progress and what cannot bring about progress. So one of the things that this tells us is that if there is going to be rapid progress continuing, we cannot predict the future. And that raises some very interesting and important questions about what is the rational way to think about an unknowable future?, how can we plan for an unknowable future?, and so on. And some of the commonsense ideas about what to do in that situation are just wrong in my opinion. Assuming that our best technology of today is still going to be the best 50 years from now, which is sort of assumed in a lot of planning, is just silly.
Ken Rose
It’s preposterous.
David Deutsch
Indeed. But then, the interesting question is, what can we do, since we don’t know the content of future technology, future ideas, even future conceptions of right and wrong? Things that we thought were fine 50 years ago are considered horrible crimes today. Things like beating children or racial discrimination and so on. And that is going to accelerate, too. So what can we do? I think the main thing to realize is that the same thing that causes this horizon of predictability is the very thing that is our only possible defense against it, and that is: rapid progress. We’re going to encounter problems that we cannot predict, and the only way to deal with that prospect is to make as much progress as we can in understanding the world in a fundamental way. Because if you have fundamental theories, then there is a chance that they will be able to cope with unfamiliar situations. If you merely have parochial rules of thumb that work for the moment in a certain situation, then you’re going to be in real trouble when the unexpected arises. And we’re already doing that, so I’m not calling for a radical change in society. I think our society is already like this. It’s more that people find it scary when it is actually the reverse.
Ken Rose
It’s an absolutely unprecedented opportunity.
David Deutsch
It is. And we change things for the better whenever we can see it’s for the better. So the unforeseen problems are going to be of the form, “something or other looked as though it was going to be better, but raised an unforeseen problem”. And that’s not too bad. A lot of times, in the past, people intentionally caused horrible things to happen. That’s not what we’re doing in our civilization.
Ken Rose
The title of the book, “The Beginning of Infinity”, is actually an optimistic… or “optimism” isn’t maybe the right word, it’s actually an intuition that we may well be on the verge of quite possibly a Golden Age.
David Deutsch
Yes. I think it’s more than an intuition. I think that this follows from the best knowledge we have about how knowledge works, what the relationship is between theoretical knowledge on the one hand and technology on the other — the ability to change the world. And I do call that optimism, even though it’s slightly different from the conventional meaning of the word, something like, “expecting the best outcome.” I don’t necessarily expect the best outcome; it’s just that the best outcome is possible. That is, there are no fundamental barriers to progress. That’s optimism in my sense. In other words, to achieve things that we want to achieve is just a matter of knowing how, provided we don’t want to violate the laws of physics by going faster than light or something, or by making a perpetual motion machine. Provided we don’t want to do that kind of thing, we can do anything if we have the right knowledge. Fortunately, we already know how knowledge is created: basically, through the methods of science and reason.
Ken Rose
And we also need the right heart, don’t we?
David Deutsch
Yes, well, another of the themes of the book that comes out from this is precisely that. Moral ideas, and also aesthetic ideas — I have a whole chapter on why flowers are beautiful, objectively beautiful — are objective. There must be objectively such a thing as right and wrong. There is no automatic way of knowing what it is, any more than there’s an automatic way of knowing whether the Higgs boson exists. What we have to do in the case of the Higgs boson or scientific controversies is conjecture testable theories and then do experiments to distinguish between them. With moral theories, we can’t do tests. You can’t test experimentally whether a given goal that you have is morally right or morally wrong. But what you can do, and what is perfectly analogous, is apply rational criticism. You can see whether that theory meets the criteria that it is intended to meet, whether it’s consistent with other things, whether it’s consistent with facts which we can test, and so on. This is how the moral progress that we’ve made already has happened. So, there is such a thing objectively as right and wrong, objectively beautiful and ugly, just as much as objectively true and false in science and mathematics.
Ken Rose
You’ve written in that chapter that deep truth is often beautiful and that mathematicians and theoretical scientists call this form of beauty “elegance”, which you say is the beauty in explanations.
David Deutsch
Yes, explanations are the theme that links knowledge in different fields. So what you just said is an example of aesthetic knowledge being linked — in a way that we don’t yet understand but which is perfectly obvious when you’re participating in it — that there’s a link between aesthetic knowledge about beauty and mathematical knowledge which is about abstractions, and also knowledge in science which is about the laws of physics. So explanations are the link. Explanations are statements of what is there in reality and why and how it works.
Ken Rose
Are we coming to understand who we are? Are we starting to get some clarity about human identity?
David Deutsch
The short answer is yes, but this is one of the least understood things. We know who we are, what we are, as animals, that is, we know quite a lot about our evolution and we also know quite a lot about how evolution in general takes place. But how our minds work, which is the distinctive thing about humans that makes us qualitatively different from every other currently existing animal on Earth, is our minds. And we don’t know how those work. There are lots of ideas that claim to know. The field of artificial intelligence for the last 50 years has believed that it was on the verge of creating an artificial one of these things, an artificial mind, and it hasn’t yet. And in my opinion that is because there is a very important outstanding problem about how creativity works. As I say in the book, I have learned to apply a single criterion to all claims by people who claim that they understand the human mind, namely: can you program it? Can you make an artificial one by programming what you think is the explanation of how it works into a computer? No one at the moment can, and therefore I don’t take any such claims seriously at the moment. It’s definitely the case that such computer programs can be written, but we just don’t know how to do it yet.
Ken Rose
Do you have some sense of what we’re living for other than just participating in the unknown phenomenon of being here and developing and evolving?
David Deutsch
Yes. Again, this has to do with both moral and aesthetic values. What we’re trying to do, even though many people try to deny this, they deny that they are trying to do what is right, or trying to create what is actually beautiful and so on, but that is what we’re trying to do. And that is the meaning. Religions traditionally thought that the meaning was already known or had been revealed to humans, and our task is to live up to that, to enact it. My view is the other way around, that the meaning of life is something that we are using creativity to discover, to build. There isn’t a perfectly accurate word for what we’re doing. But we can’t find the meaning of life in the world out there, nor just by pure thought or by reference to an authority. What we have to do is form explanations about what is right and wrong, what is better and worse, what is beautiful and ugly, and hone those theories while also trying to meet them. At any one moment, we will meet them imperfectly, just like scientific theories at any one moment are only an imperfect explanation of what the physical world is like. But through criticism and conjecture and seeking the truth we can eliminate the errors in what we have previously thought and thereby make progress. And that is trying to find the meaning of life. Trying to create the meaning of life is the meaning of life.
Ken Rose
So we want to model and articulate reality.
David Deutsch
Yes. Both moral, aesthetic as well as abstract and physical reality. Yes, exactly.
Ken Rose
Is the idea of a single universe quaint? Is it already anachronistic?
David Deutsch
In my opinion, yes. But I have to give a warning to go along with this theory, that the overwhelming majority of my colleagues who work on fundamental physics would disagree with me. Clinging to a single-universe worldview and trying to explain away both the theory and the experiments of quantum mechanics is the majority view. Now I think this is deplorable, but I don’t want to go around giving the impression that my view is the only one about this. Quite the contrary. I think perhaps fewer than 10% of my colleagues would agree with this, but I think this is just a sociological phenomenon. Something went badly wrong with the physics community ‘round about the 1930s, and we haven’t yet got over it. And it’s a bit of a scandal, I have to say. The denial that quantum mechanics describes parallel universes is exactly the same logic as denying that fossils represent dinosaurs, that fossils are evidence of dinosaurs. So what people say is, OK, the quantum mechanics experiments come out as if the photon in our universe was being affected by photons in other universes and so on, but that doesn’t mean that there are other universes, because no one’s ever seen one. And that’s the same logic as saying, OK, so dinosaurs are the only known explanation of fossils as we see them, but no one’s ever seen a dinosaur and no one ever will, and therefore it’s optional whether you say those dinosaurs are real or not. And so just as people say that quantum mechanics is only the study of what we will see when we do an experiment, it’s exactly the same as saying paleontology is only the study of fossils, not the study of what animals brought about those particular patterns in rocks. I’m not saying that the state of mind of physicists when they try to avoid the many universes conclusions is the same as that of creationists, but I am saying, I’m afraid, that the logic of their argument is identical to that of creationists who say that there are fossils but no dinosaurs.
Ken Rose
Are you satisfied with the precision of language?
David Deutsch
No, but that’s only because new ideas, if they’re fundamental, often make existing language misleading and imprecise. This certainly happens in parallel universe theory and in some of the other fields that I’ve worked in. But I think the idea of having a perfectly precise language in order perhaps to get rid of all human disputes and so on, I think that’s a chimera. There’s no way to do that. What we have to do is be as precise as is necessary to express the explanations that we want to express, but perfect precision is impossible. Also, terminology, language always contains also built-in assumptions, some of which will be wrong. And therefore, language contains built-in false theories. One of the ones that I described in my first book was: language contains this whole theory that time flows, that the present moment moves from yesterday to today to tomorrow. But of course, nothing moves from yesterday to today to tomorrow. Yesterday always remains where it always was, behind today. This idea of the flow of time, which is built into our very language, is just a mistake, and it’s one of the things that one has to unlearn when one deals with time in physics. That’s a general thing, that language contains assumptions and theories which may be false.
Ken Rose
Do you find existence fascinating, and more than that, do you find it worthy of ecstasy?
David Deutsch
Yes, now here we come immediately to a place where language is perhaps not precise enough. Because of this unity of these many different kinds of truth that I mentioned, physics, morality, aesthetics, and so on, the pursuit of joy, I would say, rather than ecstasy, on the larger scale, it’s really the only token that we have that we’re doing the right thing. And yet, I’ve immediately got to contradict what that sounds like. It sounds like advocacy of a hedonistic worldview. You have to remember that if we try to fit this into the general scheme of being at the beginning of infinity, of expecting unlimited improvement in the future, that means that we have to be critical of the criteria that we use to be joyful about something. So while using it as a criterion, as a guide, we must not use it as an authority. So it’s not that we subordinate everything to joy or pleasure and so on, but we use it as a guide while being open to changing it. So we should be ready to change what we enjoy to something better. This is, by the way, one of the things that’s wrong with utilitarianism. The idea that morality consists of maximizing one’s preferences or maximizing the greatest good of the greatest number. It’s assumed that our preferences are fixed or biological and so on, and in fact that denies the most important thing about human beings: namely, that we alter our preferences. We can improve them just as we improve all our other ideas. Preferences are just ideas. So the stereotypical refutation of utilitarianism is that your friend asks you, “Which of these two job offers should I take?” “Which of these two jobs should I want?” is really the question. And you say, “Well, choose the one that you prefer.” And he says, “Yes, well, don’t be silly, that’s what I’m asking you, I’m asking you which one I should prefer.” And utilitarianism cannot describe the meaning of that exchange, but I think it’s perfectly obvious what it means. It is possible to be undecided about what to prefer. This is something that only humans, again, can do. Because animals do have fixed preferences. They can be trained to do one thing or another, but if one animal can be trained to do it, then so can another, and for each animal, there are things that it is impossible to train it to do, which seem perfectly obvious and natural to a human to do.
Ken Rose
I’m curious why you chose to turn away from the word ecstasy.
David Deutsch
Because ecstasy to me has a connotation of renunciation of criticism. One “falls into” an ecstasy. One is “dominated” by ecstasy. And it is something supposed to be primal and beneath the level of critical thought. Whereas the thing that I’m aiming for is entirely subject to critical thought.
Ken Rose
Do you have regard for the work of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme?
David Deutsch
I don’t know them, I’m afraid.
Ken Rose
I see. Well, among other things, they produced a book called “The Universe Story” about 20 years ago. It’s kind of like the family album. It kind of gives us a beautifully articulated sketch of the history of our universe, this particular universe. I just thought you might be familiar with it. David, these days we’re witnessing a tremendous social phenomenon around so-called spiritual ideas and practices. Does the word “spirit” have any real meaning?
David Deutsch
Rather than ask about the word, I would prefer to concentrate on the phenomenon. I think the progress that I referred to at the beginning which was caused by the pursuit of truth and good explanations and so on has been accompanied from the outset by various forms of rebellion against it. Some of them are very overt and I think the spiritual trend that you were referring to, if I understand correctly what you were referring to, is sort of rebellion against reason. It is saying that there is something more to the world than true and false. That perhaps if we feel that something is true, that can make it true. That if we want something to be true, that can make it true.
Ken Rose
Right, or hope it to be true.
David Deutsch
Or hope that it’s true. Of course, there is a grain of truth, as I said earlier, that only the laws of physics and knowledge stand between us and what we want. But that’s not what we mean here. The spiritual angle that I was criticizing is that we can make things be true just by believing them to be true, or hoping, or wishing, as you said. That rebellion, I think, is wholly false. It’s a sort of hangover from pre-rational times, but it also has an entirely modern aspect which is that it is a rebellion. The ancient spiritualism and religiousness was not a rebellion against reason. Reason, as we know it, hadn’t really been invented. But the modern one is. And just for completeness, let me say that I think a more dangerous enemy to reason is not this overt rejection of it in spiritualism, but the apparent acceptance or even worship of it. The best way I can describe this is that the French Revolution described itself as the triumph of reason. And the result was mass slaughter, including the killing of the most prominent scientists in France, and the imposition of bloodthirsty dictatorship followed by Napoleon and war and so on. All this was done by people who believed that they were overthrowing ancient unreason in favor of reason, and they called this the Enlightenment. To me, this is just another rebellion. This is the Enlightenment rebellion against reason. But the Enlightenment also had another strand, which was initially followed more in the English-speaking countries, which was in favor not of establishing immediately a state called “reason”, which would be the ideal state, and which would then not need any further improvement, but on the contrary, to try to improve things so that institutions were able to correct their own errors. This was a very gradualist and evolutionary approach to unlimited progress. One of the paradoxes of the bad kind of application of “reason” is that even if you were to succeed in doing that and achieving your utopia, it would mean that no further progress was possible. And if no further progress is possible, then what we were saying earlier is the essence of humanity would no longer be possible either. Humans would just be functionaries in this idealized utopia, and there’d be no point in being one. But, in practice it just led to violence. Whereas the good side of the Enlightenment is the thing that is now the basis of Western civilization and has the potential for unlimited further progress in the future if we make the right choices. If we make the wrong choices, we could just destroy it and go back to stasis or worse, just as happened with every previous attempt at progress in human history.
Ken Rose
Do you sense any obligation that we have to succeed?
David Deutsch
I suppose we do. If you recognize that you have an obligation to future generations, then really I don’t see any alternative but to say that we need progress. Because progress is simply, on that timescale, helping future generations not to suffer, not to be thwarted in their attempts to improve their lives, and helping them to be better in whatever ways they turn out to want to be better, which we hope will be better ways than we currently think better, so everything can improve. The only alternative, which is sometimes called “sustainability”, is to assume that everything that works today… we should never do anything today that isn’t going to work indefinitely. And if we take that seriously, that means that we’re aiming for stasis. I know that people who are in favor of sustainability don’t think of it that way. They think of sustainability as “sustainable progress”. But that is a contradiction. If you analyze that in the light of what progress actually consists of, and what is required to make progress, unfortunately, it is impossible because progress requires conjecture and criticism, and therefore it requires errors. And conversely, if we try to achieve an error-free state, we will also have a progress-free state. As my old boss John Wheeler used to say, “Our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible.” He was speaking about within physics, trying to improve our knowledge of the laws of physics. But the same thing is true of all knowledge. Our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. Conversely, arranging things so that we don’t make any mistakes, so that we can’t make any mistakes or that we’re trying to make a way of life that doesn’t have mistakes is also necessarily a way of life that can’t make progress.
Ken Rose
You were at one time - maybe you still are - involved in a project called Taking Children Seriously. Is that still something that’s alive?
David Deutsch
Yes. This is just another application of the same idea. A lot of ideas that are prevalent today are hangovers of a time of stasis, the time of a static society that preceded what we call Western civilization. There was a gradual change beginning ‘round about the time of Renaissance. Those ideas were all about trying to keep existing knowledge the same, because they thought that all things worth knowing had already been said, perhaps in holy books and whatever. And the whole of society was just a gigantic machine for keeping the existing ideas, morality, knowledge, technology, ways of life, and of course religion, the same, preventing change. If you think about how we think about education today, it’s one of the things that hasn’t really caught up with the Enlightenment. When we think, for example, of what makes a good school, a good university, a good educational system, it’s high standards. Well, “high standards” means as many people as possible should meet the standard. In other words, they should be as alike as possible. And what’s more, they should be alike in the way that was defined by the previous generation. And really, that is the exact opposite of what we need to make progress. As a result, the values that are embodied in educational systems, like “do as you’re told” and “become standardized” and so on are actually in conflict with the values of our society in the broader sense. So constantly, issues arise about a conflict between one of the things that people take for granted should be normal in a school or in a family between parents and children on the one hand, and things like freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of thought and so on on the other hand. We need to… I was just going to say, “emancipate children from compulsory education”, but “emancipate” is the wrong word because it has a connotation of politics. Just having freedom for children is not the same thing as it is in freeing slaves or making women equal and so on, because what really counts with children is not so much what they’re allowed to do or not do as how their thinking is supposed to go, what one expects a good life to be, or a young person to be. And at the moment, the idea is that youth is a time during which one becomes assimilated to the standards by which one is going to be judged when one is older. And a freer concept which is closer to the values of the Enlightenment is to say that, youth/childhood is a time of creativity, and creativity is unpredictable. The real thing we need to try to do is to make the whole of life like that, rather than to shoehorn children and young people into an existing path.
Ken Rose
All of us, yes. Amen to that. We have to wrap it up in a minute, sir. I have one question and it’s this, at least for now: is the universe or the multiverse anything other than blazing intelligence itself?
David Deutsch
We can make it so. Well, I don’t know about “anything other”. But it is implied by the idea that there are no bounds on progress, that if we play our cards right, if we want to, we can become the major thing that is happening in the universe. Both in the physical sense, that is, by leaving the planet on spaceships and going to other planets, and then to other star systems, and eventually other galaxies, and spreading across the universe, and making all the matter and energy there increasingly do what we want it to, what gives us joy, what we think is right for it. (And when I say “we”, I don’t just mean humans; if there are any extra-terrestrials out there, then we and they will be doing this together. There’s only one kind of person possible in the universe.) Not only in that physical sense, but also in the moral sense, in the aesthetic sense, we will be the thing that is deciding what should happen next and what is beautiful. So, yes, I don’t think it’s quite right to say that mind will be everything, but mind can, if we play our cards right, if it plays its cards right, can dominate everything, can be the most significant thing about the universe.
Ken Rose
And we have every reason to trust it.
David Deutsch
It’s not really a matter of trust, because trust again suggests that there is something immutable about the values that will come up. Trusting them would mean that we’re not going to change them. But we are in fact going to change our values. We are doing it very fast already, and we will be doing it faster.
Ken Rose
I’m very grateful that you came and spoke to us today. Many, many “thank you”s.
David Deutsch
Well, very interesting questions. Thanks for having me on the show.
Ken Rose
Hope to speak to you again. All the best.
David Deutsch
OK, bye-bye then.
Ken Rose
David Deutsch in Oxford, Great Britain. The author of The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World.
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