2019-12-13 Lulie Tanett What Is the Fun Criterion
Duration: 00:19:25
Transcript
Lulie Tanett
What is the fun criterion? My question really is whenever you give this advice of oh what should I do, you should follow the fun it seems like you’re saying something epistemological instead of just like this is David’s life advice.
David Deutsch
Yes, well, far be it from me to give life advice that would be terrifying but the fun criterion is epistemological yes. We start out by recognizing that there are many more kinds of ideas in the mind than sort of are recognized in everyday speech or were recognized by traditional philosophy. We don’t just have for example beliefs and emotions we have a complex menagerie of ideas in our mind which interact with each other and which are all necessary well many of them are absolutely necessary for thinking and for solving problems creating knowledge. In particular there are three categories that are very important: the explicit ideas that is the ones that can be expressed in a language ordinary language like English and then there are the inexplicit ideas which can’t be expressed in language like for example when you’re playing tennis and the ball is heading towards you and you’re thinking oh it’s going to go out now no it isn’t I better run for it that kind of thing. The words it’s going to go out now do not appear anywhere in your mind while you’re doing that and yet it is knowledge that you’re creating you’re creating a theory about where the ball is going to strike then you’re correcting the theory and you’re doing all the things that error correcting thinking does without expressing it in sentences or words so that’s inexplicit thinking and you’re using inexplicit knowledge but it’s conscious you are conscious that something is happening there and if you were asked afterwards what were you thinking then you might say I thought it was going to land in this place but it actually landed in that place there’s also the unconscious where in no sense are you aware of thinking or knowledge there but it’s still going on and it’s necessary these categories are approximate and one important thing is that explicit ideas always have a large inexplicit component my favorite example is grammar so we speak according to the rules of grammar but if you asked what they are you either don’t know them or you think you know them but then somebody tells you a sentence which meets your stated criterion and you know that it’s wrong so we have inexplicit ideas regulating our speech our explicit speech if we want to recognize that all these different kinds of ideas and that’s just only three of the three major ones I mentioned if they all contribute to the growth of knowledge then we have to apply it if we’re Popperians we have to apply the same theory of knowledge to all of them for example none of them are ever justified all of them can be mistaken all of them we expect generically to be mistaken all of them are corrected by a process of problem-solving with conjecture and criticism all that that sort of thing applies to all the different kinds of knowledge and as I just said they are all needed they all participate actually in any significant kind of thinking when we have a problem when something goes wrong it may in general be and we try to identify what the ideas are that are conflicting with each other that constitute the problem it may be that the explicit theory that we recognize as part of the problem one of the explicit theories is actually false like we think you know how come it was so tiring to go to the post office well actually the post office you think the post office is nearby but that’s an illusion it’s actually quite a long way away so that would be an example a rare example maybe unrealistically rare of you having an explicit theory that conflicted with another explicit theory and one of them was false and the other one was true and you can realize that by criticism but more often there are more theories than that involved more ideas than that involved and some of them will be inexplicit and some of them will be unconscious now there are theories
Lulie Tanett
And then you corrected it to ideas is that because people don’t think of emotions as theory?
David Deutsch
Yes, there is no good terminology that expresses this unified concept of all the entities that are interacting in a mind maybe because of the history of how I came to these ideas I tend to call them theories in my own mind but I think ideas is perhaps a broader category for most people it’s more natural but there are also desires and feelings so these ideas include desires and feelings and all sorts of things that don’t have names and so on it’s just everything that can affect one’s thought processes whether you know about it or not and so on so it could be that the reason that you have this problem is not any of the explicit theories that you think are part of it even if you were perfectly accurate about what the explicit theories in conflict are the problem may well in general include actually inexplicit and unconscious theories and there the tactic of trying to criticize one of them is not really enough because you don’t know what it is you don’t know what the inexplicit theory is and if you do have an idea of what it is you can’t express it in language therefore it’s harder to criticize if it’s unconscious you definitely don’t know what it is so for example take the tennis example you’ve seen puzzle by that in where it’s a matter of where will the ball land you can kind of synthesize what your theory must have been you know if you then hit it wrong and you’re analyzing afterwards why did I hit it wrong well because I thought it wasn’t spinning and it was you know that so you’ve converted your inexplicit ideas into explicit ones then you can criticize them but you might not get you might be wrong about what it was you might be wrong about what your inexplicit theory was and even worse if it’s unconscious then you can’t even conjecture like that if it’s an unconscious theory about things like what it means to you to win and how important it is to look good and that kind of thing which you’re not consciously aware of but they might be affecting you they might be affecting your criteria then you don’t know what they are and then it’s absolutely impossible well no it’s not absolutely impossible you can always think about it and work out what it must have been just like with the inexplicit theories but it’s much harder shall we say and then supposing you’re in a situation where you are faced with the decision and you want to make a decision even if it’s only a temporary decision what shall I do until I’ve solved this or whatever then you have to find a way of a criterion for when there is a conflict when it’s two explicit theories it’s obvious or fairly obvious when there is a conflict when it’s an inexplicit theory it’s harder when there’s an unconscious theory in conflict with explicit theories or two unconscious theories or five of them all in conflict with each other then it affects you via I don’t think there’s a satisfactory word for it but it affects you via your feelings it affects you via your mood it affects you via things that can’t be easily stated in words but they can be felt so you think you want to go down to the to the post office and your unconscious theory knows very well it’s a long way away but your conscious theory thinks it’s just around the corner and you feel a reluctance to go and that reluctance is one of these things it’s a feeling it’s a mood it’s now so there’s a conflict how do you know there’s a conflict well
Lulie Tanett
You have a mood but then like so if you’ve got a bunch of different unconscious theories and inexplicit theories and they all said to do different things perhaps yes what determines which one wins?
David Deutsch
That’s where the fun criterion comes in because you can imagine several different kinds of criteria that one might use and several very widespread criteria are in common use and they are irrational or anti-rational in the sense respectively so a common criterion is to try to disregard everything but your explicit theories you say for example this is beginning to feel bad but I have worked out or my self-help book says or my exercise guide says or my trainer says no pain no gain and so ignore the pain of course I’m referring to psychological pain ignore the psychological pain just do the thing do that which thing which always the thing designated by your explicit theory according to that and that’s just a mechanical criterion for choosing between theories and therefore is irrational theories have to be judged by content not by where they came from or any attributes of theirs that aren’t content so another theory kind of opposite of that theory is what you might call the romantic stance which is to say explicit ideas are just conventional decoration they’re not really human they don’t really mean anything what’s really important is feelings and so what you do if you adopt that idea is you try to reach into your feelings and follow them. Now of course it’s impossible I mean so first of all it’s irrational because again it’s just like the other theory of following your explicit theories it’s just choosing between theories according to an irrelevant criterion compulsively because it doesn’t look at the content it only looks at the type of theory or the origin.
Lulie Tanett
Choosing feelings?
David Deutsch
Yes, yes, something else just says oh feelings are good and then it doesn’t ask what the feelings actually say so that is irrational for I mean it’s overtly irrational but there’s also the problem just like with explicit theories but more intense that you cannot actually act on your feelings unless you have an idea of what they are and you may be mistaken.
Lulie Tanett
So you don’t need an explicit idea about what they are?
David Deutsch
You do because you might have a feeling that something is going wrong but that doesn’t tell you what to do.
Lulie Tanett
You don’t need an explicit theory of what to do you can just kind of do without thinking in an explicit way you just kind of follow your intuitions you might need a conscious theory but you don’t need an explicit one.
David Deutsch
Well you need a conscious theory but so supposing you’re doing a thing you’re going to the post office and suddenly a nameless dread comes over you so you might say okay well in that case do whatever doesn’t cause the nameless dread well you don’t know you might turn around and start going back home and the dread gets worse you need a theory as soon as you are instructing your legs to move in one direction rather than another you have well yes as soon as you’ve deliberated and caused your legs to do one thing rather than another you have an explicit theory.
Lulie Tanett
You can do deliberation by intuition.
David Deutsch
Okay, well, at the very least it’s very close to the borderline of explicit because if someone asks you what have you decided to do you’ll say I’ve decided to turn around the point is you need some knowledge it’s not enough to see that there’s a problem because there’s an infinite number of things you might do when you feel the nameless dread going to the post office so that means that you’ve got to create new knowledge in an area where inexplicit or unconscious theories are conflicting with explicit ones you have all sorts of theories all sorts of ideas which are in conflict in your mind to solve this you need conjecture criticism error correction in order to solve the problem and in general you need to create new knowledge and how do you do that if you can’t translate the theories into the same language into either the explicit the inexplicit or the unconscious language how do you do that and how do you know when you’ve done it well you know when you’ve solved it because you no longer feel nameless dread I mean you might not have solved it completely but at least you’ve solved the immediate problem so you would have to do some unconscious conjecture and some inexplicit conjecture as well as some explicit conjecture and the same for criticism all of them so how do you cross this boundary line between these areas of knowledge that it is difficult or perhaps in practice impossible at least in the time to translate between well I think the answer is and this is going to be true even in purely explicit problems because they never are purely explicit the answer is that at some level all these processes are evolution they’re all a bunch of ideas evolving in some environment and like in biology the environment consists largely of other ideas but in genes there is only one kind of idea which is the gene but within the human mind there are lots of different kinds of ideas and they’re not inter-translatable but they are all evolving in the environment of the others and therefore what is happening when things are going well is that there’s conjecture and criticism but the conjecture and criticism in each of these areas is taking account of what the others are doing or at least what the others are so just a simple example I’m not sure if I can think of all six possibilities but if you make explicit criticisms of your explicit ideas you will have not only the usual explicit criteria of does this make sense does it seem to solve the problem is it logically consistent is it consistent with my other theories and so on you’ll have all those things but you also have do I still feel the nameless dread and so that’s making explicit whether you think there’s a problem you may be wrong as always the nameless dread may not be any of the things you’re thinking but and the same is true at the inexplicit and the unconscious level that they can all take each other into account even if they can’t be directly criticized by each other or translated into each other or directly brought into confrontation the explicit ideas can be directly brought into confrontation by things like logic and by experiment but in general ideas affect each other by evolution so you want to get ideally you want to get into a state of mind where they’re all affecting each other and when they’re all affecting each other you are having fun.
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