2011-10-01 What Now with Ken Rose
Duration: 00:48:29
Transcript
Ken Rose
KOWS 107.3 FM Occidental California the what now show Mondays 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. live on the telephone from the United Kingdom we have David Deutsch good afternoon good evening what is it seven o’clock eight o’clock where you are it’s just past seven o’clock yeah all right excellent have you had your supper not yet all right well maybe we can stimulate your appetite of just a little bit more yes I’ve just been playing badminton so I’m having a nice rest now yeah how’s your game bad well practice practice mm-hmm um thank you very much for joining us should I refer to you as dr. Deutsch or professor 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 okay yeah I don’t want to take the time to call back I think we’re gonna make do here okay are you in Oxford yes okay so by way of introduction David Deutsch fellow of the Royal Society is a 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 Center for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford he pioneered the field this is going to take a moment 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’s also a proponent of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics I want to go through this David hang on with me okay in the Royal Society of London’s announcement of Deutsch becoming a fellow of the Royal Society a couple years ago the society described Deutsch’s contributions thus quote 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 maybe 14 15 years old now and the new book which is causing quite 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 longtime New Yorker and I’ve been reading the New York Times for 55 years and a couple of months ago I suppose let’s see yeah in the book review the New York Times book review gave The Beginning of Infinity subtitled explanations that transform the world a very rare a double page centerfold in the book review section with the headline explaining it all this is quite quite a feather in your cap to …
David Deutsch
Be so celebrated yes I was very pleased especially since the reviewer was David Albert with whom I have some profound disagreements about more or less all the issues in the book but what we have in common though is 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
Ken Rose
Actually right what is important David the main issue in the book which from which all the other …
David Deutsch
Themes of the book flow is what is the difference between ideas and ways of thinking that work that can make progress that can gain truth and those that can’t and this comes up in all sorts of different issues starting with the fact that the progress from the point of view of the human species as a whole progress is very recent and very rare for most of human history people would live their entire lives without ever encountering an innovation whereas now we take it for granted that you know iPhone updates come more often than is comfortable mm-hmm
Ken Rose
David I’m gonna backtrack and get off the phone and call you back the echo is a nuisance and we’re gonna try again okay
David Deutsch
I could give you another number to try
Ken Rose
Well let me let me try this one again and see what happens I will it’ll take a couple of minutes I’ll be right back with you yep okay we’re gonna try it again here’s a little more music David hi hi we’ll see if we can pull this thing off as I said a minute ago I wanted to 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’s 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 primarily in what you might feel is important for us to know so I invite you to address us in that manner okay there are two there are two ways to do that one is to speak to us to meet us more than halfway and speak to us as the common women and men that we are here and then maybe later in the interview I would happily invite you to speak to those of us who may be familiar with the rarefied 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 indeed thank you sir yes so I
David Deutsch
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 and new political ideas and new moral ideas 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 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 and our civilization is the first one ever the first one ever on the planet to sustain rapid progress for more than two or …
Ken Rose
Three generations we’ve sustained it for two or three centuries is our progress actually accelerating uh the …
David Deutsch
The signs are that it is indeed accelerating if you if you look at the sort of rate of change I’m talking about the rate of change of the way of life of um uh of everybody not just things like the volume of scientific literature and so on which is going up exponentially but just in terms of um the number of things you can list on the fingers of one or two hands when you say you know 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 um and so on um 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 a century ago they also thought that progress
Ken Rose
Was happening fast but it was nothing compared with the speed now right and likely uh we’re thinking how fast it is now and likely we uh literally cannot imagine what it’s going to be like in another 10 or 20 years that’s exactly right so uh it’s going to be …
David Deutsch
Unimaginably different from today and so one of the themes so I said that that was the basic theme of my book the difference 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 um how can we plan for an unknowable future and so on and some of the common sense ideas about what to do in that situation are just wrong in my opinion uh for example yeah assume that our best technology of today is still going to be there 50 years from now it’s still going to be the best 50 years from now um which is sort of assumed in a lot of planning it’s just silly right it’s preposterous indeed 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 you know things that we think are things that we thought were fine 50 years ago are considered uh horrible crimes today things like uh I don’t know beating children or racial discrimination and so on um 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 um horizon of predictability is the very thing 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 that um prospect is to make as much progress as we can as 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 and in a certain situation then you’re going to be in real trouble when the unexpected arises right and we’re already doing that so it’s not I’m you know I’m not calling for a radical change in the whole society I think our society is already like this it’s more that uh people find it scary when it is actually the reverse well it’s an absolutely unprecedented opportunity it is it is and we don’t you see 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 good but raised an unforeseen problem and that’s you know that’s not too bad a lot of times in the past people intentionally cause horrible things to happen that’s that’s not what we’re doing in our civilization um so the title of the book The Beginning of Infinity is is actually uh an optimistic or optimism maybe isn’t the right word it’s actually a um an intuition that we may well be on the verge of uh of quite possibly a golden age uh I yes um I think it’s more than an intuition I think that this follows from the best knowledge we have about how knowledge works um what the relationship is between theoretical knowledge on the one hand and technology on the other the ability to change the world and that 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 um the best outcome is possible that is that there are no there are no fundamental barriers to progress that’s the that’s optimism in my sense in other words to achieve things that we want to achieve it’s just a matter of knowing how provided we don’t want to violate the laws of physics um by going faster than light or something 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 and we already know fortunately how knowledge is created basically through the methods of science
Ken Rose
And reason right and uh we also need the right heart don’t we …
David Deutsch
Yes well the uh another of the themes of the book that comes out from this is uh is precisely that that moral ideas and also aesthetic ideas that I have a whole chapter on why flowers are beautiful objectively beautiful and uh also moral ideas are objective must be there must be objectively such a thing as right and wrong we 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 uh what we have to do in the case of the higgs boson of scientific um controversies is conjecture testable theories and then do experiments to distinguish between them with moral theories we can’t do tests that 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 you can apply rational criticism you can see whether that theory meets the um criteria that it is intended to meet whether it’s consistent with other things whether it’s consistent with facts which we can test uh and so on and in that way this is how the moral progress that we’ve made already has happened uh 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
Yeah you’ve written uh in that chapter that uh 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 um knowledge in different fields um so that 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 um that there’s a link between um 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 are we starting to get some clarity about human identity the uh
David Deutsch
The short answer is yes but this is one of the least understood things um 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 and there are lots of ideas which claim to uh know you know that 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 and I again as I say in the book um 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 and no one at the moment can and therefore I don’t take any such claims seriously at the moment I of course I it’s um definitely the case that such computer programs can be written but we just don’t know how to do it yet
Ken Rose
Um 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 um what we’re trying to do even though many people try to deny this they deny that they are seeking 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 that what our task is is to live up to that to enact it um my view is the other way around that that the meaning of life is something that we are using creativity to discover to build uh there isn’t a perfectly accurate word for what we’re doing but that we can’t find the meaning of life in the world out there nor just by pure thought or by um uh reference to an authority what we have to do is form explanations about what is right and wrong what is better and worse what’s 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 being and seeking the truth we can eliminate the errors in what we had previously thought and thereby make progress and that is you know 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 yes both moral aesthetic as well as abstract and physical reality
David Deutsch
Yes exactly um
Ken Rose
Is the idea of a single universe uh quaint is it uh already anachronistic um
David Deutsch
In my opinion yes but I have to give a warning with this to go along with this theory that the overwhelming majority of my colleagues among fundamental physicists who work on fundamental physics would disagree with me the clinging to a single universe world view and trying to explain away the 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 um my view is the only one about this quite the contrary I think perhaps fewer than 10 percent of my colleagues would agree with this but I think this is just a sociological phenomenon something went badly wrong with the physics community around about the 1930s and uh we haven’t yet got over it and it’s a bit of a scandal I have to say it it’s it is as it is exactly as if um paleontology 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 okay 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 um uh okay so the 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 the 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 uh try to avoid the many universes uh conclusions is the same as that of creationists but I am saying I’m afraid that the logic of their argument um is identical to that of creationists who say
Ken Rose
That there are fossils but no dinosaurs are you satisfied with the precision of language um
David Deutsch
No but that’s only because um new ideas if they’re fundamental they often make existing language misleading and imprecise so this certainly happens in parallel universe theory and in some of the other fields that I’ve worked in but I don’t I think the idea of having a perfectly precise language in order perhaps to get rid of all uh human disputes and so on I think that’s a chimera there’s no way to do that um what uh we have to do is be as precise as is necessary to express the explanations that we want to express the perfect precision is impossible and also terminology language always contains also built-in assumptions some of which will be wrong and therefore language contains built-in false theories um one of the ones that I described in my first book was that language contains uh this false 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 and um so 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 uh and that’s a general thing that language contains um assumptions and theories which may be false
Ken Rose
Do you find existence uh fascinating and more than that do you find it worthy of uh and of ecstasy um
David Deutsch
Yes now here we come immediately to a place where language is perhaps not precise enough um I think that because of this unity of these many different kinds of truth that I mentioned physics morality aesthetics and so on um the pursuit of joy I would say rather than ecstasy is um it’s really the only on the largest 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 a hedonistic um uh advocacy of a hedonistic world view uh you have to remember that that again if we want to 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 or so on but that 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 um this is by the way what’s one of the things that’s wrong with utilitarianism the idea that uh that morality consists of maximizing one’s preferences or maximizing the greatest good of the greatest number it um it assumes that our preferences are fixed or biological or 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 can improve all our other ideas preferences are just ideas so um you know the um the stereotype refutation of utilitarianism is that your friend asks you um what um uh which job which of these two job offers should I take uh which of these two jobs should I want is is really the question and you say well choose the one that you prefer and he says yes well don’t 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 and this is 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 there are things that for each animal there are things that it is impossible to train it to do which seem perfectly
Ken Rose
Obvious and natural to a human to do I’m curious why you chose to turn away from the word ecstasy uh
David Deutsch
Because ecstasy to me has a connotation of um a renunciation of criticism it’s when one falls into an ecstasy one is uh 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 um
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 they among other things they produced a book called the universe story about 20 years ago and it’s kind of like the family album it kind of uh gives us uh a beautifully um articulated sketch of the history of our universe this particular universe um I just thought you might uh you might be familiar with it um uh david uh these days we’re witnessing uh a tremendous social phenomenon around so-called spiritual uh ideas and practices does the word spirit have any real meaning
David Deutsch
Uh rather than ask about the word I would prefer to concentrate on the phenomenon I think um this progress that I refer 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 um so that um uh some of them are very overt and I think the spiritual trend that you’re referring to if I understand correctly what you’re referring to is one of the rebellions the sort of rebellion against reason it is saying that there is something more to the world than true and false that um perhaps if we feel that something is true that can make it true perhaps if we want something to be true that can make it true
Ken Rose
Or hope it to be true
David Deutsch
Or hope that it’s true of course there is a grain of truth in that uh as I said earlier the uh only the laws of physics stand between us and knowledge stand between us and achieving 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 now that’s 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 uh the ancient spiritualism and religiousness and so on was not a rebellion against reason the reason as we know it hadn’t really been invented um but the modern one is and just for completeness let me say that 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 uh 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 and including the killing of the most prominent scientists in france and the imposition of uh bloodthirsty dictatorship followed by um napoleon and war and so on and all this was done by people who believed that they were overthrowing ancient unreason in favor of reason but actually and they called this the enlightenment um and to me this is just another rebellion this is the um the enlightenment rebellion against reason but the enlightenment also had another strand which was um uh initially followed more in the English-speaking countries um which was in favor not of um 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 start to try to improve things so that institutions were able to correct their own errors so this was a very uh gradualist and evolutionary approach to unlimited progress um one of the paradoxes of the bad kind of um application of reason is that even if you were to succeed in doing that it would mean that you had in 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 and well so but in practice it just led to violence whereas the um the good side of the enlightenment is the thing that is now the basis of our 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 …
Ken Rose
Every previous attempt at progress in human history do you sense any obligation uh that we have to uh to succeed um
David Deutsch
I suppose we do um if you recognize that you have an obligation to future generations then um really I don’t see any alternative but to say that we need progress because progress is simply on that time scale helping future generations um not to suffer not to um be thwarted in their attempts to improve their lives um 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 are better so everything can improve the only alternative which is sometimes called sustainability is to assume that um we should never do anything today that isn’t going to work indefinitely and that means if we take that seriously that means uh 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 um a contradiction in fact 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 if we try 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 um our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible and 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 um our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible and 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 it’s um this is just another application of the same idea that um uh in the broader sense um 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 around about the time of the renaissance and 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 um the same preventing change and um 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 um when we think of what for example what makes a good school a good university a good educational system it’s high standards well high standards means everybody 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 and um as a result the values that are embodied in the educational system like do as you’re told um 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 the freedom of thought and so on the other hand and um we need to um I would say I was just going to say emancipate children from compulsory education but emancipate is the wrong word because it has a connotation of politics um just having freedom for children is not the same thing as um it is in freeing slaves or making women equal and so on because what really counts um 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 for a young person and at the moment the idea is that youth is a time during which one um 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 uh youth childhood uh is a time of creativity and creativity is unpredictable and that the real thing we need to try to do is to make the whole of life like that rather than to shoehorn children
Ken Rose
And young people into an existing pattern all of us all of us yes amen to that uh we have to wrap it up in a minute sir um I have one question and uh and it’s this is at least for now is the universe or the multiverse anything other than blazing intelligence itself of …
David Deutsch
We can make it so well I don’t know about anything other but uh it is it is implied by the idea that progress is 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 uh both in the physical sense that is by uh 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 and if there are any extraterrestrials out there then we and they will be doing this together um so there’s only one kind of person possible in the universe so but not only in that physical sense but also in the moral sense in the aesthetic sense that we will be the thing that is deciding what should happen and what is beautiful so um yes I don’t think it’s quite right to say that uh 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
Um 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 um the values that will come up so we’re 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 and many many thank yous
David Deutsch
Very interesting questions thanks for having me on the show I hope to speak to you again
Ken Rose
All the best okay bye bye then David Deutsch in Oxford, Great Britain the author of The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World also author of a …
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