2017-07-28 The Christian Transhumanist Podcast Humanity's Infinite Reach
Duration: 01:06:43
Transcript
Micah Redding
Hey folks, Micah here. We’re about to get started, but before we do, I just want to remind you that you can always get show notes for this and every other episode at ChristianTranshumanistPodcast.com. And while you’re there, be sure to sign up for email updates so we can let you know when new shows are released, when new things happen in the Christian Transhumanist community, and most importantly so that we can connect you with other people just like you, exploring questions just like this. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the show. I’m Micah Redding and I’m here with David Deutsch, who’s an Oxford physicist, a pioneer in the field of quantum computing, the founder of Constructor Theory, and the author of some of my favorite books, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. Thanks so much, David, for joining me today.
David Deutsch
You’re welcome. It’s nice to talk to you and that’s nice that you like the books.
Micah Redding
I love them and I’ve recommended them to so many people over the years. And yeah, so I was listening to your interview with Sam Harris and he started out with an apology and so I think it would be appropriate for me to apologize as well because some of the stuff you deal with is so deep and what I would say so profound that it’s just going to be impossible to do it justice. And so I know some of my listeners will be people who are big fans of your work and some will be new to it. So to both of those, we won’t be able to really do all of your thought, the justice it deserves. But I was thinking that maybe the place that would be best for us to start is the question of humanity’s place in the cosmos because there’s this idea that humanity used to kind of think of itself as the pinnacle of creation, the pinnacle of the universe. And then that science came along and kind of dethroned us and now showed us that we’re a mediocre, insignificant species on an insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy. What’s your take on that concept?
David Deutsch
Well, as you know, I comprehensively reject that. I should say I conclude comprehensively that it’s false. I don’t take that as an axiomatic principle. It’s just that it conflicts with what I think is our best knowledge today, both in the sense of physical effects and in the sense of theoretical significance. I suppose the physical effects aspect is the easier one to explain. It’s just that as we learn more and more about physics and engineering and other sciences, we become more and more able to escape from the bounds that nature has imposed. We first escape from the Great Rift Valley and then we escape from being obliged to stay on the ground. Then we escape from our planet and eventually we will escape from our solar system and from our galaxy and so on. And so although in our parochial perspective, we have only been able to affect a very tiny proportion of the physical universe, our potential effect extends over the whole physical universe and is very profound because the kind of things that happen in the physical world once we get at them are radically different and have no parallel in any effects that any other kind of physical object can have. So that’s the physical effect. Now, I think the theoretical effect, the philosophical significance of humans is even more profound. And this is best seen via Constructor Theory. That’s my idea that the laws of physics are best expressed in terms of what physical transformations are possible or impossible. Impossible meaning forbidden by laws of nature and possible meaning permitted by laws of nature. And so if you think of the set of all conceivable tasks, the ones that occur without the intervention of, let’s say, living things at all, are a very tiny subset of those that can happen with living things. For example, the chemical reactions that occur without living intervention in organic chemistry is a very tiny set of reactions compared with organic chemistry. And the same with construction of physical objects like nests and bodies of animals and so on. And but then when it comes to humans, the type of physical transformation that can be affected once there is explanatory knowledge, which is the signature type of knowledge that only humans create, that we know of, then that is again larger by an astronomical factor. The number of transformations that is possible to achieve given explanatory knowledge is enormously larger and is equal to the set of all transformations that can be achieved by the laws of physics. So in that way, in two different ways, humans are aligned with the physical universe as a physical object. And they are also aligned with the laws of the physical universe as laws.
Micah Redding
So there’s something counterintuitive about that because you’re saying that the number of things that can happen without life and without intelligence is in a sense smaller than the things that can happen with life or with intelligence.
David Deutsch
Yes, tiny.
Micah Redding
And but I think most people would think that’s backwards, that we are small beings, that, you know, we don’t we’re not, you know, running a sun in our basement or something like that, right? There are things happening out in the universe that we’re not doing specifically.
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, as I said, this is this is largely a matter of perspective. It’s because in our experience in the past, we haven’t had that much effect. We have we have only explored a tiny proportion of our potential in this regard. But as regards, you know, whether we have an artificial sun in our backyard, in a small way, we soon will when we have control of fusion. But the point is that there is a fundamental connection. Built into the laws of physics between understanding and affecting. So in principle, anything that we understand, we can affect to the largest extent that is permitted by the laws of physics. Because, you know, the laws of physics don’t permit us to make literally a star in our backyard because it won’t fit. And that’s because of various laws of nature. But to make a star out of interstellar hydrogen is a task that’s possible in principle. And there’s no if someone wants to claim that that’s not feasible to human beings, that’s not that that transformation is not accessible to human intentions should we want to do it. Then they’d have an uphill struggle because ultimately there’s no way that they can make that case without claiming that there’s a law of physics preventing it.
Micah Redding
Yeah. So one way you’ve described this before, I think, is our special relationship with the laws of physics. And that’s a really interesting concept. I want to come back to that and kind of the concept of knowledge and so forth. But let’s step back. One thing that you’ve talked about in several different contexts is the idea that, you know, that we actually don’t live in kind of a normal spot in the universe, that our place in the universe is a little bit unusual and that the usual places in the universe, the average places, I suppose, are just completely dark and completely empty as we would normally perceive it. Is that is that an accurate statement?
David Deutsch
Yes, that’s accurate. An accurate statement about intergalactic space and even interstellar space within the galaxy, while not quite as dark as that, is still a very cold and dark place compared with what we’re used to. On the other hand, there is also the truth that even the best places on our planet for our evolution, which presumably the Great Rift Valley in Africa was one, is still extremely hostile to us by human standards. But by evolutionary standards, it’s favorable to us in that it allowed us to evolve and it didn’t make us extinct before we did evolve. But that’s a very low hurdle to jump by human standards. By human standards, people talk about Spaceship Earth when they try and draw, make a metaphor for how well suited the world is to us. But spaceships would fail every possible safety check if they were as dangerous as the Great Rift Valley where we evolved. It had vermin, it had disease, it had extremes of various kinds of weather which would kill us. And indeed, it did kill most of us before what we now regard as our natural lifespan.
Micah Redding
And so you’re saying, okay, that there is no environment that is particularly suitable for us.
David Deutsch
Quite so. That’s right. All the things that make it suitable for us, make it especially suitable for us, have been created by humans by way of first generating explanatory knowledge. And then using that to affect the physical world and thereby change our environment to make it more suitable.
Micah Redding
And so the argument that you make is that we’ve done this for ourselves in our history on this planet and that there’s nothing in principle that stops us from doing it in an environment even as extreme as intergalactic space.
David Deutsch
That’s right. We take for granted the kind of changes that we’ve made on Earth that, for example, make it possible for me to be warm and have a pleasant conversation here in Oxford, England, on an early spring day when the temperature outside would definitely kill me in a matter of hours if I didn’t have technology to protect me. So we take that for granted. We take for granted that we can thrive and be comfortable in environments which our ancestors would have regarded as deadly and which would have killed them, in fact. And similarly, when we look to the future and think what it will be like to live on the moon or Mars or on another solar system, we kind of view the environment there as intrinsically hostile compared with the Earth. But it isn’t. It’s only unfamiliar. The problem of living there is exactly the same as the problem of living on Earth. It’s a matter of using the opportunities that knowledge and the laws of physics provide to automate the task of making living comfortable. And we’ve done that many times on this planet. We will do it many more times on other planets.
Micah Redding
Yeah. And in your book, you talk about this, you know, what we would be able to do even in the kind of, you know, this ultimate blackest place in the universe that we would still have the resources we needed to, given the appropriate knowledge to create a habitable environment. And I guess that goes to what you’re saying about our special relationship with the laws of physics. You’re saying that there is no there is nothing in this universe. There is no place in this universe that is, in a sense, beyond our reach because of that relationship.
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s nothing. I did say that I’m not sure about the interiors of quasars. Whether we could live there. But yes, there’s almost nothing beyond our reach. And what’s more, looking at the other way around, there is no other animal and no other physical object in the universe of which that is true.
Micah Redding
And OK, so that that comes down to a lot of what you talk about. What is it that gives us that unique relationship? What is special about that relationship? How is it that human beings are special in this way when I think so many people in the scientific world would say that itself is just a kind of a biased anthropocentric viewpoint?
David Deutsch
Yes, well, one has to look at the facts and what gives us this ability is all of these different possibilities we’ve been discussing come through a single ability, which is the ability to generate explanatory knowledge. That that’s kind of analogous, if you want to think of an analogy to the fact that all the abilities of organisms, of living things on the earth, including us in our capacity as just animals, come through a single capacity, namely the capacity to evolve knowledge in genes, in DNA via a variation and selection. So all the different abilities of living things, of flying and of generating chemicals inside their cells and harnessing nature in the way that living things do, all those come through that one ability to generate dumb knowledge, if you like, and the kind of knowledge that is embodied in genes. And everything that is distinctively human, we have that as well, our species has that as well, but it’s not it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what explanatory knowledge makes possible that that makes possible everything that is possible, even in principle to anything. So it’s that single ability to generate explanatory knowledge that is responsible.
Micah Redding
So you’re saying that there is a there is a kind of knowledge that exists in genes and that there is a kind of a higher order knowledge in some sense that that exists uniquely in humans.
David Deutsch
That’s right.
Micah Redding
So that’s that’s interesting. And this is something that, you know, I think maybe is is the hardest kind of bit to grasp. You know, in your books, you talk a lot about knowledge as kind of the most essential, you know, feature of our universe, the most essential thing that we could know about our universe. So how do you how do you explain what knowledge is? Because you’ve talked about it as kind of a physical thing.
David Deutsch
It’s physical. Yes. Although it has properties that transcend any particular physical instantiation. So the kind of knowledge that is passing back and forth between you and me at the moment is being translated through lots of different physical objects which obey rather different laws. You know, it’s part of it’s going in is encoded in moving electrical and magnetic fields as it passes from one continent to another. And but it’s also in sound waves. And it’s also in electrochemical, neuronic signals. So information is a physical thing. But you have to understand that it obeys its own laws, just like electricity and magnetism do. I mean, all physical things are kind of unified. Now, knowledge is a special kind of information. It’s information which can be used to achieve physical transformations and which is necessary to achieve most physical transformations that are possible. And it is, in a sense, the most important of physical phenomena, because to understand. You know how stars work, you need you need to understand nuclear physics and gravity and hydrodynamics and so on. And to understand how fish work, you need you need to understand biochemistry and so on. But the overwhelming majority of things that are possible and that will happen eventually to understand those things, to understand why those things happen. You have to understand knowledge. So knowledge is the most needed. An understanding of knowledge is the most needed understanding to understand what happens in the physical world.
Micah Redding
Yeah, I think I think you use the example of looking at a star or something like that. And that the most important thing to know about that star is whether there are intelligent beings in the vicinity of it.
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, if that is for most things, you might want to ask. Yes. So if you want to ask, will it go out soon? You can answer, well, it won’t go out soon unless there are intelligent beings there. If there are intelligent beings, you have to understand a lot more about it because you have to understand a lot more about them. To ask, will they want to switch off their star or to interrupt its light traveling to us or not? And that requires completely different kind of knowledge from the knowledge that we currently expect to encompass everything that we know about stars.
Micah Redding
Yeah. Yeah. So life and intelligence and knowledge are really the most important factors in the universe. In the development of how star systems evolve, of how even galaxies evolve. Yes. Yeah. So that is that is both a huge concept and as I’ve already said, you know, very counterintuitive to a lot of people. Can you talk about the concept of universal reach in The Beginning of Infinity? You kind of lay out this idea that there is there is a difference between things that have finite reach and there are things that have infinite reach. And I think that’s a pretty unusual concept for most people because, you know, it comes up in things like artificial intelligence. You know, will we be forever kind of behind intelligences and all kinds of different things? But you kind of used an example of Roman numerals versus place notation as a way to describe that. Can you unpack that a little bit?
David Deutsch
Yes. So as you said, when we solve problems and create explanatory knowledge, usually the knowledge extends as far as the problem did. If we’re lucky, I mean, we may not solve the problem, but usually the good outcome is that the knowledge extends as far as the problem. And then new problems will arise. We have to generate new knowledge, but occasionally it and this was the case with number systems. First, they had tallies where the number of marks on a stick was equal to the number of sheep. And you could do certain operations about counting sheep, whether you have lost or gained some and so on. And then better systems were invented like Roman numerals where you didn’t have to mark the rod a hundred times to indicate a hundred sheep. And eventually that evolved into a number system, which is as good as you can get in that respect. It’s as efficient a way of representing sheep and any other thing that numbers can be used for. It’s as efficient as can be achieved using the laws of physics. So that’s an example of universality in a number system. I think you’re really asking about the particular kind of universality that human thought has. Is that because there are many kinds of universality. One important one is the universality of computation. The fact that one computer can compute basically the same things as any other limited only by its speed and memory capacity, but not in its repertoire of computations. But you’re interested in human universality.
Micah Redding
Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Let’s let’s talk about that, because that’s that’s something you’ve you’ve described in several different contexts. This idea of human universality and applied it to all kinds of different questions. And yeah, I think what you’re suggesting is that not just that, OK, humans are this amazing thing, but in some sense that humans have reached a point. Beyond which there is, in a sense, no further ontological change, I guess.
David Deutsch
There’s no further change in capacity to understand and control the world. Yes, again, we are at any particular time like a computer. We’re limited by the amount of hardware that we happen to have, but there’s no limit to the amount we can make. If we want to. So the this human universality, well, that’s the universality in the distinctively human ability that we were talking about just a moment ago about the ability to generate explanatory knowledge, explanatory theories. Now, there are various ways I argue in the book against all the possible ways that one might think that there might be a fundamental limitation on that. And I argue that they none of them make sense. All of them are equivalent to just arbitrarily limiting our knowledge with a supernatural edict. The so one of the arguments, for example, is suppose there were a limit to how much we can understand, like Martin Rees suggested that there might be aliens out there in space somewhere who are as far above us in their capacity to think. Not in their technology, of course, but in that that could be arbitrarily far ahead of ours, but in their capacity to think as we are ahead of chimpanzees. And he seems to think that there’s no reason to think there aren’t such beings. Whereas I think that the point is because of the universality of computation, which is which is a lesser thing, but which our brains certainly have because they are computers and can perform ordinary computations as well. Because of that and because computation is itself universal in that everything physical can be described by computations. We know that from the laws of physics. So all these things come together because of those two forms of universality. Anything that the aliens can think can understand could be represented as a computer program, and if it can be represented as a computer program, then it can be represented as a thought as well. A human thought, if necessary, by augmenting human brains with additional memory, which will no doubt be done for many other reasons very soon. And in fact, to all intents and purposes, it has already been done and has been done for millennia already because when the first person invented writing, they were already augmenting the hardware of the human brain, its memory capacity and also its computational capacity. And so when people throw up their hands at the idea of augmenting human brain with computers, they are simply and saying that such a thing wouldn’t be human anymore. They are simply making the same mistake as thinking that you’re not really human if you use a pencil and paper to do your calculations.
Micah Redding
Yeah, so you’re saying you’re saying that, you know, the fundamental limits that we might face, which are kind of memory and computational capacity are already things that we have. We have worked to overcome and that’s that’s ultimately, you know, that that’s what technology, at least information technology does for us. Yes, it extends our brains in that way or the ability of our brains. And you’re saying that because we know we know that our brains are at least what a computer is that we then know that everything that’s possible in the universe, every concept that’s that’s possible in the universe can be modeled in our own brains. That is correct. So that is yeah, that that I think is a lot to swallow for a lot of people. But how do we you know, how do we know something like this? How do we know that our brains are computers or that they have those kinds of functionality?
David Deutsch
So, as I said, that that is a conclusion, not an axiom, not a premise, and it’s a conclusion from our best knowledge. So in that particular case, it’s because of the universality of computation in the sense that we know that any physical process can be modeled with arbitrary accuracy by a computer. The reason we know that is because we know what the fundamental language in which the laws of physics are expressed is namely the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity. They underlie all the other laws of nature that we know now from relativity doesn’t really enter into it. But quantum mechanics imposes constraints on what can be computed, and they are really responsible for the laws of computation. And I proved back in 1980s that that a universal quantum computer would be able to compute anything that any other physical object can compute. And that includes aliens. Yeah. So, of course, we don’t know. No one can prove that the laws of physics are quantum mechanics. That’s just our best theory as unrivaled at present. There’s no rival theory. But then we’re not in the business of proving things. Science proceeds by trying to explain things. And that is the best explanation that we have.
Micah Redding
Yeah. So I think maybe this is I want to jump into your kind of analysis of history a little bit because like you’ve already said, you think that we emerged in a environment that was essentially hostile to us. Yeah, that’s that we were able to kind of leave that environment due to gaining knowledge.
David Deutsch
To improve it and then to leave it and then to improve the environments we found and so on.
Micah Redding
But you at the same time, you would say that for the vast majority of human history, we were making almost no progress until until something changed.
David Deutsch
Yes, well, we were making almost no progress in two senses. One is that it was sporadic and it was sort of two steps forward, two steps back quite a lot of the time. And the other way is that it was extremely slow. The rate at which knowledge was being generated was was very slow compared with a human lifetime. And therefore, a typical human would never see any increase in knowledge in their lifetime for most of human history. And that only stopped being true a few hundred years ago. It’s somewhat with the scientific revolution. But I think the real key change was was a bigger thing, namely the enlightenment.
Micah Redding
So, yeah. So what is it about the enlightenment or the scientific revolution? Like what changed then that that allowed all this stuff to start happening?
David Deutsch
Well, there are a number of different ways of expressing what changed. Karl Popper says that what is needed for the progress is a tradition of criticism, which is kind of sounds like a contradiction at first, because because a tradition means a way of keeping things the same and criticism means a way of changing things. But if you think of it as being a tradition of criticism, then that’s a thing which if you can achieve it, it stabilizes the changes. And then you can have the growth of knowledge. Now, I have said what specifically happened there to if you like at the psychological level or at the level of individual minds to create to implement a tradition of criticism, to make the conditions for a condition for a tradition of criticism to happen is that people started looking for what I call good explanations, where by good, I mean that they are hard to change while still accounting for the things they purport to explain. So the people have always looked for explanations. And they’ve sometimes found them and often they’ve been false. But what they haven’t been able to do is systematically improve them. And once you look for good explanations, which is explanations that are hard to vary while still accounting for what they purport to account for. And that means that they are they engage with the conditions of the problem that they’re trying to solve. Once once they once you’re looking for that, then you can you can make progress that builds on previous progress. So is there is there anything so this idea that explanations that are hard to vary?
Micah Redding
You know, I think that I resonate with that and maybe have instinctively I’ve had a kind of motto that that for myself that that truth is the thing that you can’t shake once you once you grasp it, grasp it or something. And so that seems to be similar to what you’re saying, right? That this is a very particular like it’s an explanation that’s very particular. Yes. So, yeah, any kind of variation breaks it.
David Deutsch
Although there are other ways of stabilizing ideas, irrational ways. So but yes, if the if your ideas are stabilized by their engagement with the problem, then that’s a good explanation. By the way, even being a good explanation doesn’t guarantee truth. We can be mistaken with good explanations. But if we continue seeking them, we will encounter problems with even our best explanations and can then improve on them.
Micah Redding
So you’re saying that that for whatever reason, something happened in during the Enlightenment or during the Scientific Revolution, which kicked off this culture of looking for good explanations. And yes, and then a tradition of criticism around those good explanations. Yes. And that that itself, that process itself is then the thing that that means, you know, we can we can just keep going from here to infinity, basically.
David Deutsch
That’s right. I think we’ve passed the threshold with we’ve we’ve passed the jump to universality.
Micah Redding
And that’s a I mean, that’s a pretty big idea that that, you know, some year in the last, you know, few hundred years was essentially like the first year in the history of the universe, perhaps, in which this stuff became possible. But now it is.
David Deutsch
That’s that’s that’s not quite right, I think. Because there’s no guarantee that we will just because we can.
Micah Redding
OK, there’s no guarantee that we will. There’s no limit.
David Deutsch
There’s also no limit to the size of the error that humans can make. And it’s conceivable that we will we will end the Enlightenment or even that we’ll wipe ourselves out like like most species have done. We unlike any other species, we are capable of not wiping ourselves out. But that’s only capable. And I speculate in my second book, The Beginning of Infinity, that that many attempts to form a tradition of criticism occurred during history. I suggest ancient Athens and Renaissance Florence as two examples. And but I think there may have been many more and all of them were wiped out within a couple of generations. Ours, the thing we call the Enlightenment or the thing that we call Western civilization or whatever you call it, has definitely been the longest lived of those and the most widespread. So but that’s I think all we can say that there’s no there’s no although there is a fundamental feature of the laws of physics that says we can continue doing this forever. There’s no law that says that we will. Right. Right.
Micah Redding
So that gets to the question. So we’ve we talked about history. Let’s talk about the future. What is what is what is the way for us to do this? And so the way for us to kind of ensure our future, how do we move into the future, deal with some of the big things that we’re dealing with, you know, from climate change to artificial intelligence to, you know, whatever might come up. How do we kind of best guarantee and if there’s no guarantees, but how do we best kind of ensure that we that we keep moving, that we keep progressing? Yes.
David Deutsch
So I think that the key thing is to carry on generating knowledge as fast as possible. Winston Churchill said, If you’re going through hell, keep going. We are bound to encounter problems. We are bound to encounter large problems and we are bound to encounter unforeseeable problems. So that’s that’s all going to happen for sure. The temptation for some people is to rein in research, progress of all kinds, technological, scientific, even moral knowledge to rein it in for fear of the unintended consequences of making mistakes. But this is this is a terrible idea because there is no way of avoiding mistakes. There is the universe doesn’t provide that the universe only provides a means of solving problems, not preventing them from happening and especially unforeseen problems. And in the case of the problems that are caused by mistakes in general, human mistakes, some will be caused by nature, some will be caused by human mistakes and especially those that are caused by human moral mistakes, i.e. malevolence. We have to take into account the fact that malevolent humans have creativity at their disposal as well. They too can generate explanatory knowledge. And so how do we make sure that the good guys continue to defeat the bad guys forever? Well, I think that the good guys, although we are we are the same good guys are the same as the bad guys in regard to capacity. Inherent capacity. There is one advantage that good has over evil, which is that, as I said at a debate recently, the bad guys are wrong and the enemies of civilization are wrong. And therefore they, unlike the good guys, have an inherent interest in preventing their ideas from changing. And that’s why they are always worse at generating knowledge than the good guys. If we try to rein in our knowledge creation because of fear of the effects of technology or whatever, then we are destroying our only advantage. Quite apart from it being useless anyway, because because problems are inevitable. But for those specific kind of problems, it’s exceptionally perverse to try to limit the growth of knowledge. So this is this is and therefore also. We must get used to jarring changes. They will happen faster and faster. So long as we keep the tradition of criticism alive, we don’t we don’t know what even that will look like in the distant future. At the moment, we have various traditions of criticism, like liberal democracy in politics and capitalism in economics and peer review in science. And we have those institutions. The particular institutions are not going to survive forever. But the property of being a tradition of criticism has to survive or we’re doomed.
Micah Redding
Yes. So you apply this the same thinking to the democratic process, which is interesting. So explain that a little bit. How does how does that make sense? You know, how is democracy like this process of knowledge generation that occurs in science or rationality?
David Deutsch
Yes. So this idea, I’m more or less repeating directly from Karl Popper. His theory of politics is essentially the same as his theory of the growth of knowledge in science. The idea is that political policies are theories. They are ideas which there is no guarantee that they’ll be right and that they’ll be true. And we must assume that they are not true and will cause problems which unless they are solved will end the political culture in question. So we in politics, just like in science, we need a tradition of criticism and it has the same. It has the same paradoxical and yet possible feature that it does in science that that for most of human history, those two things never went together. The tradition and criticism never went together. But after the Enlightenment, they did. We have traditions which stabilize change again. Seems like a contradiction in terms. But these, our political institutions, stabilize change. Now, this has some implications for how actual institutions like like voting systems and legislatures and so on. Are arranged because people still haven’t learned the lesson of Karl Popper in that they still they still want to judge political systems by the same criterion that they would judge a particular policy. That’s obviously fatal for the possibility of change. So improvements so that they want to make a system that is most likely to make the right choice, for example, to make the right policy to elect the right leader and so on. In Popper’s scheme of things, you simply take for granted that no system can do that. You take for granted that there will always be bad policies, bad institutions, bad policies. And the real problem is how to how to make a society that can change those things easily as easily as possible without the society itself being destroyed. And so he would judge a political institution, a voting system that’s always by a single criterion. Does it make it more or less easy to remove bad leaders and bad policies without violence or the threat of violence? So that’s the and we again, we kind of take for granted that in our system in the Western political systems, all of them, a politician, a leader, you may have been in power for several years, has been used to everyone doing what he says and is sure that the rival leaders with their bad policies will ruin the country or even the world. And then they lose an election. And despite still thinking that the rival policy is bad, they quietly leave office. Not only do they quietly leave office and shake hands with the new leader, they would fight and die to make sure that that leader and not themselves stays in power.
David Deutsch
That’s that’s an amazing thing that we have achieved. It’s been achieved very, very rarely in history. And when it has been achieved, it’s been soon destroyed. But it’s very precious.
Micah Redding
Huh? Yeah, that’s that’s that’s really interesting. Yeah, that is true, where the handoff of power is in a sense more important than the power itself.
David Deutsch
Yes, much more.
Micah Redding
Let’s let’s talk about one one thing that that kind of connects to our earlier discussions. You wrote an article a while back in which you argued that A.I. is a philosophical problem. I don’t know if I’m characterizing that correctly. But we’re talking about, you know, of course, the world is full of artificial intelligence of various kinds. But you’re talking about artificial general intelligence and intelligence like our own. Yes. And you’re suggesting that contrary to what some people might think, we’re not going to get there just by kind of cranking up the clock speed over time.
David Deutsch
That’s right. Or even by making better algorithms of the kind that search engines have and game playing programs have. The thing is that intelligence that’s as I think you said, like ours, intelligence that’s like ours. According to me, that means that it has the property of being able to create new explanations. That’s that’s our distinctive feature. I think I called it a distinctively human feature, but even that’s not general enough because it might it might exist in aliens as well. And eventually it will exist in artificial intelligence as well. And my general term for the things that have this ability is people. So the only people we know of at the moment are humans. But one day we will make artificial people who will have this ability as well and they will be fully human in every sense automatically as well just by having that ability because it’s universal. And the same with aliens. If they have that you either do or don’t have that ability, more or less. We can talk about the dividing line if you like. So I think the all the existing programs that are called AI are not capable of generating any new explanations. They are the way the easiest way to see that is by seeing that you can you can write a program to determine whether a particular other program has the ability in question. For example, if somebody purports to have a program that plays good chess, then you can have a criterion in another computer program for whether it plays good chess. But you can’t have a it’s intrinsically impossible to have a criterion to implement in a computer program a criterion for whether somebody has generated a new scientific explanation. Because to have that criterion, you’d first have to have the explanation and therefore it wouldn’t be new.
Micah Redding
So why is it? What’s the difficulty? I mean, just to put this kind of simplistically, what’s the difficulty in just sitting down and writing the algorithm that’s going to create that new knowledge or whatever?
David Deutsch
For the same reason, every other computer program that we write before we write the algorithm, we know what property the algorithm is going to have, like what the desired output is for a given input for an explanation generator. We precisely can’t do that because we don’t know what the new explanation is before we have it. So the task is different.
Micah Redding
What is needed to achieve that?
David Deutsch
I don’t know. We only know from the very nature of universality that there exists such a computer program. But we don’t know how to write it. And unfortunately, because of the prevalence of wrong theories of the mind and of humans and of explanation and of theory of knowledge and so on, all existing projects to try to solve this problem are, in my view, doomed because just because they’re using it’s not because they’re not using the right philosophy, it’s because they’re using the wrong philosophy. We have to stop using the wrong philosophy and then use the right philosophy, which I don’t know what it is. That’s the difficulty.
Micah Redding
So you’re saying as well that that there is, you know, that this process that exists in our brains and that makes us persons is something we completely don’t understand. We don’t understand how it works. We know it’s there. We know it. It can be implemented in a computer, but we don’t know what it actually is.
David Deutsch
Yes, we know some things about it. Like you said, we know that it can be implemented in the computer. We know some of the laws of epistemology. But yes, we don’t know how specifically human type person type creativity works.
Micah Redding
Yeah. And so I’m just curious. You kind of mentioned that dividing line. Does that does that change your notion of personhood from maybe a more traditional notion as to who?
David Deutsch
Yes. So personhood is a property of a program. It’s a property of a computer program or a brain program or whatever. Therefore, it slightly misses the point to ask things like. Are chimpanzees human or are they almost human or do they have human type? Do they have person type characteristics? Because it’s not the chimpanzee that would have them, just like it’s not the human body, the human brain that has them. It’s the program in the brain. So it’s not inconceivable that a chimpanzee brain could in principle be programmed with a person program. It’s just that the standard interface, as it were, for a chimpanzee brain doesn’t make that easy. In fact, apparently it makes it very difficult. People have tried to instill human culture into apes by doing the same thing that we do to humans to give them human culture, and it hasn’t worked. So it hasn’t created anything capable of creating any explanation, any new explanation. That’s not to say it’s impossible. And if it’s not possible by the conventional methods of bringing up children and so on, then it may be and presumably is possible by nanosurgery, by actually changing the computer program in a chimpanzee’s brain. It has a smaller capacity than the human brain, but I don’t think that would make the difference because the capacity of the human brain has to last for a hundred years or so, and there are people who reach the age of a hundred without being intellectually impaired. And so chimpanzee’s brain is a reasonable fraction of ours. So maybe it would reach its physical limits sooner than ours. Maybe it would reach them in 10 years or in five years, in which case it would probably be immoral to insert this program into a chimpanzee’s brain. So these speculations, though, don’t really matter from the point of view of the question that people want to ask, namely, is it really true that chimpanzees and other animals, all other animals, are qualitatively different from us? They are in that the program that they currently have or that is currently feasible to put in them by reasonable means definitely has no such ability.
Micah Redding
And if I’m not extrapolating too far, some people, you know, at different kind of points in history, try to make claims about qualitative differences between the brains of people of different races. But you would say that that’s actually that kind of difference, whatever there might be, is irrelevant, because the real question is this essentially the software, this cultural software that we have.
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s strictly irrelevant. It’s the universality trumps any such differences. It’s rather like imagining that a game playing laptop couldn’t run a word processor or even more. It’s like imagining that somebody could write a word processor on which you could only type right wing articles and not left wing. It’s that much of a misconception.
Micah Redding
Yeah. Well, there was one other thing that I wanted to I mean, there’s so much so much that I want to explore. I would like to ask you and I don’t know how deep of a kind of well this would be. So we can we can pass this by if you if you like. But we’ve talked we’ve talked on this program about the Omega point theory. And you have a kind of a complicated relationship with that. But I guess that’s you talked about that in your book. I think the fabric of reality.
David Deutsch
Yes, but things have got more complicated. Yeah, they have.
Micah Redding
And but at the time you made a kind of defense of it as a as a kind of plausibility from the from the physical standpoint, I would hasten to say not the theological standpoint, but the physical standpoint. Can you just describe for me kind of what you’re feeling about that now or how your thought process is.
David Deutsch
The question that this is addressing really is this open-endedness, this universality of the human condition. Can it be extended to a literal infinity, so that it literally will never come to an end and will always continue to improve or is there some finite limit imposed by the nature of cosmology. And it used to be thought that that cosmology must come to an end essentially either because the universe will recollapse in a Big Crunch or because it will continue to expand until the matter is so sparse that that computations can’t be performed anymore. Tipler showed that in a particular cosmology called the omega point cosmology, which recollapses, an infinite amount of computation, a literal infinite amount, will eventually be performed before the end of the collapse. Objectively, people will be objectively thinking faster and faster. Without limits and subjectively they can continue thinking forever. Now that particular cosmology although at the time it was quite plausible is now believed by most cosmologists to be contrary to experiment, and it is now the best theory that the universe will in fact expand forever and that this is caused by a thing called dark energy which we completely do not understand. So we’ve gone from cosmology that was understood well enough to be able to say that the omega point cosmology of Tipler is possible and in my view was very plausible to saying that our best guess is that that cosmology isn’t possible but also that we don’t understand we understand it much less now than we did before. It’s wonderful thing about science that we can make progress by realizing that we don’t understand something as well as by realizing that we do. So there have been suggestions that that in the dark energy cosmology if it really is true. That that we could achieve an infinite amount of computation anyway by going slower and slower and using the very dark energy that’s expanding the universe to drive computation. So again things would go slower and slower but only at such a rate that the total amount is still infinite. So that that’s a possibility but I think anyone who pontificates about whether that’s really true or not it isn’t really up to date with the controversy. So we don’t know about cosmology at the moment I don’t think it matters for practical purposes because the amount of knowledge we’re talking about is way way past the limit of being comprehensible to us at present. We. Words fail me I mean it’s so far beyond any conceivable planning horizon. Yeah. That it doesn’t make any difference whether you think that that the growth of knowledge will never end or whether you think that it will only end in 10 to the 10 to the 10 years.
David Deutsch
Right.
Micah Redding
Right we can we can still plan our plan our vacation and so forth we don’t have to.
David Deutsch
Without expecting to run up against any limits. Yeah.
Micah Redding
What do you know I think Tipler has more recently suggested that that persons could engineer the collapse of the universe if we so desired.
David Deutsch
Yes that’s that’s that’s also a possibility in some cosmologies yes.
Micah Redding
So OK so that might be that might be possible we just don’t know and at any rate those kinds of even potential limits are so far removed from our potential as knowledge generating beings.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Micah Redding
As to be just for all for all intents and purposes we have infinite reach that extends across the entire entirety of existence as we know it in a sense.
David Deutsch
Yes correct.
Micah Redding
All right well that’s a that’s a great place to stop I would love to talk you know I would love to go into you know your take on morality and so many you know so many other things here but I think that’s that’s probably enough blown minds for today so. But is there a good place where people can kind of keep up with you know your most recent publications or your most recent work I’ll put links to books in the show notes but anything else you’d like to link to or.
David Deutsch
Oh yeah that’s my website I suppose because everything else that’s connected with me is linked from there. So. daviddeutsch.org.UK I think it is.
Micah Redding
OK.
David Deutsch
And yeah there’s also the constructor theory website but that my website links to everything including my Twitter
Micah Redding
OK OK well I’ll yeah I’ll put links to that definitely and links to the books which I definitely will recommend to everyone. But thanks David so much for having this conversation and hopefully we can reconnect sometime in the future.
David Deutsch
Very nice and very interesting talking to you.
Micah Redding
All right we’ll see you later. Bye bye then. Bye.
Markdown