2019-02-12 The Innovation Show David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World
Official YouTube Apple Podcasts
Duration: 00:50:18
Transcript
Intro quote clip
Stay hungry stay foolish.
Aidan McCullen
Throughout history mankind has struggled to understand life’s mysteries. From the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. Our guest is a multiple award winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation and argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle, not only of science, but of all human endeavor, this stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach. We are subject only to the laws of physics and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control and achieve. He applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. We welcome fellow of the Royal society, a pioneer in quantum computing, visiting professor of physics at the center for quantum computation at Oxford university, multiple Ted talker, optimist, an author of the beginning of infinity explanations that transformed the world, David Deutsch, welcome to the show.
David Deutsch
Hi, thanks for having me.
Aidan McCullen
I love what you say wherever there’s been progress. There have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable or even that the concept was meaningful. You argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical has resulted from a single human activity, the quest for what you call good explanations.
David Deutsch
That is the basis of the book. And that’s why I wrote the book. It’s about good explanations, basically, and the many ramifications of that concept. This idea has been contradicted in many different ways, not just the ones you just mentioned. So an explanation is a statement about how the world is and how it behaves and why. And the why part always involves explaining what we see in terms of what we don’t see. Explaining what we know is there in terms of what we guess is there. And sometimes that changes our mind about what we know is there. So that’s an explanation, but most explanations are bad. And in the book, I argued that good explanation is one that is hard to vary while still explaining what it purports to explain and therefore the epitome of a bad explanation is one that could explain anything. If you say, for example, you know, conspiracy theory is an example of a bad explanation because whatever happens, if the events turn out bad, you can say, well, conspiracy made them bad. If events turn out good, you can say, well, the conspirators are just biding their time and lulling us into a false sense of security and so on. Historically, religions have been quite fertile sources of bad explanations. Also a few good ones, by the way, I’m not entirely opposed to religious traditions, though I am an atheist. So good explanations are in science. They are the alternative to just plain prediction. And I think plain prediction is not really science at all, because if you say that X happens whenever Y happens, you don’t know that Y caused X. It could be that X caused Y or that something else caused both of them. Or that since you don’t understand what X and Y really are, since you don’t have an explanation, it could be that you’re misinterpreting the whole thing. On the other hand, when you have an explanation, when you, when you say that not only is malaria caused by living near to swamps, but it’s caused by the mosquitoes that live in the swamp and put something into you when they draw your blood, then you have an explanation that is not only useful, but it can be tested and improved.
Aidan McCullen
What this book did to me was made me question the history of knowledge in a way, and one of the things you say brilliantly is there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. And that got me thinking that knowledge is built on a starting point. And if that starting point is wrong, then we go off on a totally different tangent.
David Deutsch
That’s, I think is a mistake already. You’ll have seen me quoting the philosopher Karl Popper. And one of his maxims is the starting point doesn’t matter. The reason that it doesn’t matter is quite profound. It’s that all rational thought is critical. It consists of conjecture and criticism. It does not consist of building up things. So if knowledge consisted of building up from a secure foundation, then if there was anything wrong with the foundation, the rest of the structure might fall down at any moment. That’s not how we should look at knowledge. We should look at knowledge as an edifice, which is giant, tottering edifice with some good stuff, some bad stuff, some contradictory stuff. Not only is it never perfect, every point is a possible failure point. And what we do is we don’t try to build it up more securely. We try to find places where it seems to be wrong. And we try to improve those. It could be near the top of the structure. It could be near the bottom of the structure. Could involve replacing some of the structure. What we replace it by is always guesses. We guess that this would be better. Then we try it, see if it’ll work. Sometimes that’s trying it experimentally or practically. And sometimes that’s trying it theoretically, just to see if it makes sense, see if it’s a good explanation, see if it works, see if it answers the problem that it was intended to solve. That sort of thing. So, I mean, sorry to jump on your initial statement, but this is, you know, perhaps it’s a bit ironic, but one can go far wrong by starting there.
Aidan McCullen
You’ve already rocked my belief system and my understanding of knowledge. So that’s fine. And I’m open to it. But what I find, even what you just said there is very empowering because you say the misconception is that knowledge needs an authority to be genuine. And I think that’s so empowering because I lecture and I meet a lot of people. I always encourage them to write. You’re not writing for anyone else, but you’re writing to understand your own thoughts and to critically think. And they often come back to me, David, and say, who am I to write here? Who am I to have opinion? I said, who is anybody to have an opinion? You’ve got to start somewhere. Yeah.
David Deutsch
Some of the most knowledgeable people have been very wrong. Conjecture can come from anywhere and a criticism. That’s the great thing about this theory of knowledge. It’s also called critical rationalism. The thing about it is it’s open. Not only does the knowledge not require a foundation, as you said, the people with the knowledge have no authority. The only reason to believe for somebody to accept what you say or to build further on what you say is that it seems true. It seems to solve the problem. And if it doesn’t, well, something is wrong somewhere and you need some more criticism and some more conjecture to fix that.
Aidan McCullen
This leads to the concept of fallibilism. And I love this because again, it opens us up as anybody to start criticizing. I’m actually, what if that wasn’t the way or what if that, what that theory was actually false and it empowers everybody to have a voice.
David Deutsch
Exactly. And the only admission card you need to this club of rationality is the willingness to expose your own ideas to other people’s criticisms. So, you know, you, you, you criticize things, no matter how authoritative the people were who proposed it, but then you’ve got to be ready to be criticized yourself because people will say, well, no, that can’t be right because sounds. And that is how knowledge grows. And say you have a true theory and somebody proposes a false criticism. You might think, well, no, you know, you’re not going to learn anything from that, but it’s not true. When they propose a false criticism, you will have to answer that criticism. And in doing so you will understand the truth better than you did. It’s no good just having a truth. That’s like rote learning. You know, you can learn Newton’s laws in a physics lesson, but if you don’t approach those laws in the spirit of problem solving criticism, then you’ll end up at best being able to answer the exam questions, but not to be able to take the theory further.
Aidan McCullen
This is what I got from your work, your effort to make it simple for people to understand, and also saw so many themes that we talk about in innovation all the time, for example, being open to fail in businesses and open to trying new business models and fail fast. That kind of mindset and you’re essentially saying this, and that science is built on this foundation.
David Deutsch
Yes. It’s no accident that the same theory of knowledge applies in fundamental physics, and as you just said, in economics, in business, and also in politics, it’s all the same thing. Everything has to revolve around conjecture and criticism. So like in politics, for example, there’s the maxim that the question, who should rule is a bad question because it’s begging for a tyrannical answer, it’s just begging to say, you know, oh, so-and-so should rule and he should tell us all what to do. And this is what the rational approach to politics is to judge all political institutions as ways of facilitating conjecture and criticism, or as Popper says, does it make it easier to remove bad policies and bad rulers? That’s the only criterion that one should judge a political institution by, not how well does it choose rulers? Is it going to choose the best rulers? Are they going to be right? Are they going to be probably right? And those are all terribly bad questions, which are based on authority, based on seeking authority from somewhere. We have to expect that our policies at any one time will be riddled with errors, most of which we’re not aware of. And our institutions, the institutions that we use to select politicians and so on, like voting systems and parliamentary rules and that kind of thing, will also be riddled with errors and the people running them. That is the politicians, the civil servants will also be riddled with errors. So what do we, what are we to do in this situation? Well, we have to, whenever possible, we have to adjust things so that attempts to locate and correct errors are as easy as possible.
Aidan McCullen
Which is a maxim of innovation or iteration in any case. This is what I really loved about your work is that you’re encouraging this, that in any facet of life, you have to be willing to, and people talk about children all the time, you have to be willing to let them skin their knees in order to learn, you touch the hot cooker, you get burnt, you stray beyond the fence. You’re going to get in trouble.
David Deutsch
You should warn them if there’s a fence that something dangerous is behind, but it should be up to them what they do. And if they go out there and there’s the rabid dog out there, well, then something’s going to give somewhere for a start. You should go with them. I’m not glorifying error as such. I’m saying that error is inevitable, even with our best efforts. And therefore trying to create an error free system never does so. And it actually just entrenches existing errors. So yeah, but you know, by all means, warn children about the mad dog outside the gate or the fact that the stove is hot. Don’t try to make a system in which no bad thing will ever happen because that will entrench all the bad things.
Aidan McCullen
There’s a line I pulled from the book, which is the better we come to understand phenomena remote from our everyday experience, the longer those chains of interpretation become and every additional link necessitates more theory. That really spoke to me that piece.
David Deutsch
Yes. So this is another refutation of the traditional idea that science is about just seeing, just being open to seeing what’s out there and to just induce the regularities from what we see. In fact, everything we see is interpreted through a massive chain of interpretation. Some of them inborn in our senses, some of them in our brains, some of them we’ve added ourselves, and there’s no such thing as direct experience. There’s only ever interpreted experience. And what we’ve done to gain our best access to reality is we have not brought ourselves closer to experience. We’ve put better and better theories in between us and the experience. That’s how we know by getting some output traces from a radio telescope, that there are black holes and quasars and dark energy and dark matter and so on. We can tell all that even though the thing we’re actually looking at is a piece of metal and plastic that’s here on earth. But because of our theories, we know that the behavior of that particular metal and plastic is intimately related to the behavior of things billions of light years away and utterly alien to all our experience. Yet we know about it via the theories.
Aidan McCullen
So the theories, the starting point on that encourages the building of the tools in order to be able to get closer to the proving or disproving of the theory. Exactly.
David Deutsch
It has to be that way around. It’s always disproving. Theories are never going to be proved. They will always be riddled with errors. But we’re trying to move to better errors, better problems, not an unproblematic state.
Aidan McCullen
This is a perfect segue for then the future of humanity in the world of artificial intelligence, because in some ways we look at artificial intelligence and go, that’s going to replace us and we’re all going to be jobless. And you actually flipped that on its head. And that’s why I said in the introduction that you’re an optimist in this respect for humanity, that actually we can almost outsource the rote tasks of experimentation or theory proving to artificial intelligence and then actually work on the important part, which is the thinking. Yes.
David Deutsch
It’s important to distinguish between two very different things, almost opposite things, which are both called artificial intelligence. One of them is the things we have today, like Siri and the pattern recognition and Google algorithms and all those things. They’re called artificial intelligence for historical reasons, because they do things that at one time human intelligence was the only way to do. But they are not what would be required to replace a human in the task of human level thinking. That is creative thinking, the creation of new explanations, the growth of knowledge. That is a completely different task, which unfortunately I don’t see it on the horizon at the moment. I think the theory is not yet good enough by long chalk for us to make an artificial general intelligence, AGI. They will be made one day, but we don’t know how to do it. So one has to think of those things in two different categories because they are almost opposites of each other. A better AI is one that better meets your specification. So for example, it recognizes faces better according to some criteria, or it plays chess better. It wins more. That kind of thing. Now for an AGI, that’s the last thing you want. A human who can only play chess and can only play to win is not really human at all and can never make any progress. An AGI will be able to play chess perhaps if it wants to, if it wants to, may or may or may not want to. It may not play to win. I think by the way, insisting on playing to win all the time is crazy. There’s only like a handful of people who can even expect to win much of the time. You know, the top 10 players in the world or something like that. Everybody else is going to lose a lot. And if you cry when you lose, then the game is not worth the candle. For most people, to play a game like chess or whatever is about creating something interesting, something beautiful, something that you will learn from. Yeah, it could be learn how to win next time, but it might not be that. It might be learn how to understand opening theory better. It might be learn how to construct a beautiful chess puzzle. It might be learn how to explain the real meaning of chess position, that sort of thing. There’s a million different ways a human or an AGI might use the opportunity to play chess. But an AI chess player can only do one thing. It can only use one opportunity. It can only give one result and it can never improve on that. It never turned around and say, I don’t like chess. I’d rather play tennis or go or something.
Aidan McCullen
In education, for example, this is one of the things we don’t teach people how to learn. We teach them rote information and rote information can be done by artificial intelligence. I’d love to get your thoughts on that. The future of education or education as it should be.
David Deutsch
You’re absolutely right that the existing assumptions behind educational systems are that the purpose of education is to transmit valuable knowledge faithfully from one generation to the next, basically, from people who already have that knowledge to people who don’t. So the knowledge is conceived of as a kind of valuable fluid, which you pour from one generation to the next. You pour it into their brains. And if it doesn’t work, it can only be because either you haven’t poured it carefully enough or because they’ve rejected it. And notice that this is entirely authoritarian in the epistemological sense. It assumes that there’s an authority for knowledge, namely the previous holders. And that the only role of the learner is to receive that knowledge. Yeah, you know, that can make exceptions that, you know, once you understand, once you’ve understood everything, then you’re allowed to form your own new theories or something or attack the problems at the edge of the subject. But as I said before, there is no edge of subject. My old boss, John Wheeler, used to say about physics, but it’s true of everything that every point is a growth point. Every point is a potential source of problems, whether it’s near the edge of what is known or in the interior, which is known for centuries, anything can be a source of problems and maybe subject to replacement.
Aidan McCullen
That point you made about any point can be a growth point, but also the previous generation passing on its knowledge to the next and expecting the next generation to carry that knowledge where I was getting at the start when I mentioned about the starting point, where I was coming from with that is that the previous holder of the knowledge does not want to be attacked by the next generation. And this is what I mean in business. So once an order is established, the next incarnation who may go actually, you know what, this may not be the best way for the current environment because the environment has changed so much that the establishment is no longer fit for the environment, but the previous establishment or those that are the authorities in that establishment don’t want the next generation to attack it. Yes.
David Deutsch
Well, certainly that can happen. There are authoritative type people who seek authority rather than progress or seek to exercise authority. They are not open. They’re not open to improvement. And similarly, there are companies and institutions of all kinds that are trying to stay the same. But there are other, I don’t think that’s at all true of all companies or all participants in the economy. I think many companies are there for a purpose to fulfill a vision of how things might be better and making money is just the means to do that. If a company is founded by a person with that kind of thing in mind, and you say to them, look, you could make more money if you do it this way. And so why are you doing that way? So then they will say, well, because that way leads to what I want to do. I’m not here to make money. You know, I’ve got enough gold plated bathroom taps. That’s not why I’m in this. I’m in this because I had a vision of how to make a better computer or how to make a better transport system, or, you know, how to make a better space rocket, how to distribute books better and so on. Just like in science also, there are, there are scientists who stand on their authority and enjoy their position of telling other people how it is. And, you know, the other people have to listen, the students have to listen. But there are other scientists who don’t care about that, who only care about the problem that they’re involved in. And again, my old boss, John Wheeler, whom I also often quote, one of his, um, maxims was, which he attributed to Einstein, but I can’t find the reference to Einstein, I think it was his. A physicist, he said, is a ruthless opportunist. You’re not there to do a predefined thing. You’re not there to reach a predefined goal. What you’re there for is to try to understand things better and to find a problem that’s interesting and beautiful and so on, and try to solve it. If you don’t solve it, you’ll still have had a fun time. If it’s that kind of problem, the problem should come first and the problem should be worthwhile. It should be beautiful in its own right. Nevermind the economics and the money and even the techniques and the technology and so on, there should be something that would be worth existing if you could make it exist. And then if making it exist requires first making something else exist, then you know, getting the money from that and setting up a particular kind of institution, then all that is conditioned by the original problem. Of course, the original problem can also change. You, you might find that that’s a better problem. You may find a better problem in which case you change to that.
Aidan McCullen
One of the core ingredients for all this is creativity. And I love to hear you talk about that because imagination and creativity are the core ingredients to the future of humanity, but also business or innovation in any sense. I agree.
David Deutsch
So creativity is human level. Creativity is the difference between an AI and an AGI. An AI does not have human type creativity. It may have a sort of mechanical kind of creativity, which optimizes some function. You could call that creative, but it’s not creative in the same sense that humans are creative. It’s not creative in the sense that one can make progress with. Nobody knows how this works. We know that it’s some kind of computation going on in the brain. We don’t know what kind. We know a lot about it indirectly. For example, as I said, we know that it consists of conjecture and criticism. So we create new conjectures. We create new criticism, but it’s not known exactly how that’s done. We don’t know how to do it well enough to program it. We will one day, but we don’t yet. And that is the thing on which everything depends. And because of the way the world is, the way to make progress is to create better explanations. In other words, to root anything that’s unsatisfactory about the world, any problem, any evil and so on in terms of the existing explanations and why they seem to be inadequate and then think of ways of changing them to improve them. In physics, this happens all the time. Einstein found that he couldn’t understand what would happen if you rode on a photon, which was traveling at the speed of light, because Newton’s laws said one thing and Maxwell’s electrodynamics said another thing. And so he tried to unify those and he succeeded with a different theory, not at the first attempt, but you know, probably something like the 500th attempt and not just wild guesses, but successive improvements. That’s what it must have been like. I mean, I haven’t read a biography of Einstein, but it must have been like that. And then he found that that theory, which is called special theory of relativity, conflicted with the law of gravity. So he had to make further changes and that he worked on that for years and years. And there, I know that he went through several theories. So did some other people working at the time. Until he came up with general relativity. And by the way, the story that I have heard about this, I don’t know whether this is just one of these apocryphal physics stories that are like physicist’s history rather than actual history. But the story I heard was that when Einstein was trying to discover the general theory of relativity, that is to unify special relativity with gravity, he found certain problems, mathematical problems, and he gave a lecture. And the great German mathematician David Hilbert was in the audience and he heard these problems and he went back home and he wrote down what we later called Einstein’s equations. But the lesson of this, but they’re not called Hilbert’s equations. And the reason is that Hilbert did not know what he was doing.
David Deutsch
He only knew the mathematics of what Einstein had asked for, but he didn’t understand why or what the symbols meant. And why that criterion rather than some other criterion. So as the way I heard the story that happened in 1913, Einstein didn’t actually come up with it himself until 1915. I don’t know why Hilbert didn’t send him the answer. Whether or not that story is true, it is extremely representative. It is really impossible to make progress in fundamental physics without an explanatory understanding of the problem that you’re trying to solve and of the thing you’re proposing reality is like. If you just work with the mathematics, you never get anywhere. And I fear that many theoretical physicists don’t follow that maxim.
Aidan McCullen
David building on this, you say, for example, if we were to live on the moon, so that the one percent inspiration theory, 99% perspiration, the Edison quote is a misleading description of how progress actually happens because the perspiration phase can actually be automated. And that’s where we can use AI.
David Deutsch
Yes, exactly right. And in fact, we have been doing exactly that for tens of thousands of years. We walk around in clothes so that we can spend our time doing the stuff we want to do when a cold wind is blowing. And at some point, somebody invented shirts and somebody invented shoes. And from the moment somebody invented shoes, the shoes were doing a lot of the perspiration work that the person would have had to do if he didn’t have shoes, like, you know, being very careful where you step, tending to your feet when they get injured and so on, and not being able to do certain things at all, because one can’t do the relevant perspiration work unless one has shoes. That’s the same. You know, if we come up to the 19th century, then we were beginning to have sewage installed so people didn’t have to do the chamber pot thing, which itself had been an innovation at some time. The sewage system does a tremendous amount of perspiration work, which we utterly take for granted. We don’t even notice that it’s there. We don’t even notice what it’s doing for us. But it is, and there’s that marvelous documentary by Mark Williams called pants for all about the transition to wearing cotton underpants and what that did for the human race. If you don’t know it, I recommend it.
Aidan McCullen
So we’d all be going commando if it wasn’t for the… Worse than that. Yeah.
David Deutsch
Watch it and you’ll see how disgusting it used to be. Things used to be pretty disgusting. Um, yeah.
Aidan McCullen
I love what you say based on this. So once enough knowledge, for example, we’re, we’re now we’re living on lunar colonies and once enough knowledge has been embodied in the lunar colony, our natural inclination to want to devote our thoughts and energies to creating even more knowledge and therefore going beyond the colony we’ve made home. And like you say, things like sewage, things like underpants that we take for granted, we will have taken for granted at some stage living on the moon. Yes. Yes.
David Deutsch
And so a lot of things that today we think of as a huge amount of effort, like going to the moon, uh, will one day be just automated and we won’t think about it. We’ll just think, you know, where am I going to spend my holiday? Where am I going to meet my friends? Where am I going to have lunch? And perhaps on the moon, perhaps, you know, we, we, we don’t think when I think where am I going to have lunch? I do not think about the vast amount of sophisticated effort that went into making the road between here and there, even in Oxford. And one day there was this guy called, uh, McAdam and he invented, uh, tar McAdam and now it’s on all the roads. And I, no doubt it has many advantages over the previous surfaces, but we use it to this day and it makes everyday life less perspiration. And so we can, we can devote our efforts to the inspiration.
Aidan McCullen
So David, I’d like to come back a little bit because if we were to live on the moon, there’s a basis of this, which is the idea of Spaceship Earth. And it’s something I talk about on the show, but I talk about it in the respect that if we’re all living on Spaceship Earth, there’s no such thing as passengers. We’re all crew. So we have to actually respect the ship we live on, but you talk about it in a different sense. You talk about Spaceship Earth meets and overlaps with the principle of mediocrity. I’d love if you shared that with our audience.
David Deutsch
The Spaceship Earth idea and the principle of mediocrity so-called are both very widespread ideas and they form an integral part of many people’s moral stance in the world. And I think they’re both very false, even though they kind of contradict each other. They’re both false and very popular. So the Spaceship Earth, that’s the idea that the Earth is a spaceship and it has this miraculous life support system, like the water cycle and the carbon cycle and an ecosphere with its countless checks and balances and so on. And this is the thing that keeps us alive. That’s according to the Spaceship Earth theory. But what we’re doing is we’re messing it up. We’re polluting it. We’re overstraining the resources, the recycling system and so on. And what’s going to happen, according to this theory, is that when we’ve strained it past a certain point, it’ll stop working as a life support system and then we will die. That’s the theory. Now, I think this is wrong from beginning to end. It’s not at all true that the Earth is a life support system for humans. The Earth is a death trap for humans. And most people who have ever lived have been killed by very nasty things that the Earth has done to them. And the same is true of every other animal, by the way. All animals are constantly living on the very edge of disease, overpopulation, resource exhaustion and so on, because if they weren’t, they would just multiply until they were. And this is a truth about the ecosystem. And it was true of humans when humans first evolved from non-humans. But as soon as humans evolved the capacity to create new explanations, humans were decoupled from this death trap because we could make changes in it that made it more of a life support system and less of a death trap. And so that’s why billions of humans are now alive. That’s why not only are billions of humans alive now, but billions of humans are better fed, better taken care of, longer lived, more comfortable, better in every way than they have ever been historically and incomparably better than they were when they first evolved.
Aidan McCullen
We hear a lot about curing death and elongating life and curing disease. And that’s the concern I have is like, where do we fit all these new people that live longer and there’s no…
David Deutsch
I don’t think that’s the problem. The longer people live, the later in life they have children. You can just arrange those numbers so that the total number doesn’t increase exponentially, but actually our immediate problem, like in the next century or two, it’s going to be the exact opposite. People are not having, in the West anyway, people are not having children at the replacement level. So to replace the population, every couple has to have two point something children. If everybody bred with perfect efficiency, it would be exactly two that they would have to have. But in fact, some people are infertile, some people die, some people don’t reproduce for all sorts of reasons. And so what you need is two point something. And it turns out, despite all the prognostications of population doom, turns out that when people get prosperous above a certain level, they don’t want to have two point something children. Two is the most that they really want. And a lot of people are satisfied with having one. So having one or some people having two and very rarely people having three is less than replacement value. The spaceship Earth idea, the central core of that idea is that the Earth is extremely special in the universe. It is the only thing in the universe. Not only does it support life allegedly, but it is the only thing in the universe that even could support life because of evolution and because of lucky accidents and all those things. So the idea is that the Earth is an extremely special place in the universe, which is why, allegedly, if we mess it up, we’ve got nowhere else to go. Now, the kind of opposite of that idea, from which people derive much the same conclusion, people are rather weird in this way, is the so-called principle of mediocrity, which says that there is nothing special about humans. There is nothing special about the Earth. We are, as Stephen Hawking said, we are on a nondescript planet orbiting a nondescript star on the outskirts of a nondescript galaxy and so on. So there’s nothing special about us. This is trying to contradict the old religious idea that we are either physically at the centre of the universe or at least morally at the centre. I think, by the way, morally at the centre of the universe is exactly what we are. But never mind that for the moment. The principle of mediocrity, therefore… Chemical scum. Yeah, we’re a chemical scum. Which means that our values don’t have any special place. Our knowledge, our explanations, our concept of what an improvement is, is all just what happened to turn up in this chemical scum. There’s no reason to believe it can succeed any further. And as Richard Dawkins once said, we evolved in order to understand hunting game on the savanna and that kind of thing. And if we can understand quasars and black holes and computers and moon rockets, there’s going to be a limit to that because our brains evolved for this other purpose and we can’t expect this extension to go on forever. So sooner or later we’ll run into a limit because of the principle of mediocrity. And so therefore we can’t expect endless improvement. And if we can’t expect endless improvement, then the priority is not error correction anymore.
David Deutsch
The priority is not criticism and conjecture. The priority then becomes the orderly management of stasis. Rather like I think in the 1970s, the Foreign Office in Britain saw its task as the orderly management of decline. The orderly management of stasis is not much better than that. Stasis really means death by another name. Amen. So those things are both false. They both lead to this kind of anti-human attitude and they contradict each other. So go figure.
Aidan McCullen
What dawned on me when I was reading the book was I was looking at the stars one night. Actually, I was thinking of your work and I was going to go and imagine there’s a star in the distance. All I know about that star is what I’ve read. So my interpretation of it is based on everything I’ve read, everything I know. Imagine it was totally different. I imagined I’m actually formulating what I see based on what I know. And imagine it, it’s actually totally different because I’m really working on this part of my own world is to go what’s there that I don’t know. It’s there. What veil is over reality? And I’d love to remove the veil. I’d love to be able to remove the veil naturally. And that’s what I love about the idea of the multiverse is that you can, or at least you can be aware that there is a veil over reality.
David Deutsch
This is what physics does. And this is generally more generally what science does and even more generally what human thought does. It looks at an impression of reality and then it guesses what that’s due to. Like Plato in his famous metaphor of the people sitting in the cave with the shadows. You see the shadows, but you guess that they are caused by people outside the cave. You can’t see those people, but your best explanation of like why the shadows look like people, why they move like people, why they, why they always happen just before they deliver food to you. You can think it’s you’re going to form an explanation that the shadows are the shadows of people. And then that will lead you to say, well, what is casting the shadows? There’s something out there that’s making light that isn’t in here. And so on. This is, this is the epitome of human thinking. It’s explaining the scene in terms of the unseen and sometimes even in terms of the unseeable, because the link is not the link between the unseen and the scene is not that we made a mistake in what we saw. The link is that there is an explanatory theory. The thing can’t be explained otherwise. And this is exactly how Hugh Everett was the first to systematize the theory of multiple universes. Actually, the first person that we know of who had this idea was, was Erwin Schrödinger a few years earlier, but Everett’s the one we credited with the name called the Everett Interpretation is the Many Universes Interpretation. He was trying to find an explanation for quantum phenomena. Unusually, we knew a lot about quantum phenomena by the 1950s when he did this stuff in terms of being able to calculate the answer. But the theories about how the answer came about were completely crazy. When I say crazy, I don’t mean counterintuitive. You know, there are no conservative options when it comes to quantum theory. I mean, they were crazy in the sense that they didn’t make sense. They, for example, that there was this theory that when you become consciously aware of something, all the universes except one disappear. And that one is the one that you then observe. And okay, that’s from the point of view of physics, that’s a very ugly theory. You can’t make, can’t make a good model of it that way, but it’s even worse than that when you start thinking about what happens when one observer observes another observer, because then you get two different answers depending on which observer you think is going to destroy the universes. If one of the observers obeys quantum theory and the other one observes him, then you’ll get a different answer from where if you say that the first observer observes something. And this is, this is called the paradox of Wigner’s friend, because he imagined Wigner, that he was another physicist.
David Deutsch
He imagined his friend making an observation and he imagined that the friend was himself described by quantum theory, this being our most fundamental theory of nature. And so he came to this paradox and that was one of many paradoxes with, or, you know, better to say many ways in which attempted explanations made no sense. And Everett produced an explanation that made sense. So that’s how the parallel universe theory began. And now we could use it to explain all sorts of other things like quantum computers, why quantum computers are so powerful. I mean, quantum computers don’t exist yet, but when they do exist, why they will be so powerful, it’s because they share the work of computation between many universes, vast numbers of universes. And so that’s, that’s an explanation of how it works.
Aidan McCullen
David, of all your work. And I hope we get to do another show together because as I was saying to you off air, it’s not even like each chapter could be a book of this book. It’s each paragraph could be a book in its own right. The amount of research and the amount of knowledge you give utmost respect to the reader to help the reader understand these complex concepts, but I loved the line and I pulled this line out of the book that it was just such a positive one for me. It is like an explosive waiting to spark. Unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there. And we humans could be that spark. If we choose to, I think it goes on to say.
David Deutsch
Yeah, yeah, we could, we could be that spark. And this is, this is how I envisage. Not just the human species, but individual humans too, like all theories involving infinity, mathematical, physical, economic, human, psychological, and so on. It’s counterintuitive, but inevitable that there is, there are only two possibilities, something is either infinite or it’s finite. And if progress is finite, that is very bad. That would be that we are destined to run into a brick wall after which nothing ever improves, which means that no human thought is ever effective again. In the book, I don’t just argue that that would be bad. Therefore it can’t be true. I argue from very fundamental reasons that it can’t possibly be true. As you’ll see, if you read those sections, thinking there’s a boundary to potential human knowledge is the same as blind belief in the supernatural. It doesn’t sound like it at first, but I think the argument is inescapable. Therefore, if you don’t want to be completely irrational, you have to accept the idea that unlimited progress is possible. It’s not inevitable. Of course we could choose wrongly. So we should try and choose rightly, right? We’ve, we’ve lots of conjectures and criticism.
Aidan McCullen
That’s what this book gives us. It gives us all the options. It gives us many ways to question our thinking and give us the best possible options for the future and the best possible ways to think. And David, if people want to find out more about your work, where can they find you?
David Deutsch
There’s my books. Beginning of Infinity and Fabric of Reality. Then there’s my website, which has got lots of links to my various interests. The website is daviddeutsch.org.UK. And then there’s the constructor theory website. We haven’t spoken about constructor theory, but that is actually what I’m mostly working on at the moment. A kind of a new, new theory of physics. So that also has its own website. So people follow all those things. There’s a lot to chew on.
Aidan McCullen
Author of The Beginning of Infinity explanations that transformed the world, David Deutsch. Thank you for joining us.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me.
Markdown