2020-02-25 Do Explain The Primacy of Ideas
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Duration: 01:13:27
Transcript
Christofer Lövgren
Alright everybody, this is Chris. So today I’m speaking with David Deutsch. David is a visiting professor of physics at the Center for Quantum Computation at Oxford University and also an honorary fellow of Wolfson College. He works on fundamental issues in physics, particularly the quantum theory of computation and information as well as constructor theory. He has also written two fantastic books aimed at the general reader, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. You can find out more about David at his personal website daviddeutsch.org.UK or you can go and find him on Twitter at DavidDeutschOxf. That’s O-X-F. Now as you’ll see by the end of the podcast, David talks about how it was to meet his own intellectual hero, Karl Popper. And as many of you already know, my intellectual hero, whose work is the basis and the inspiration for this podcast, is David himself. So it was a great honor and a great joy for me to speak with him and I proudly present our conversation. So hold on to your hat, wear your toupee, and let’s go. Alright, so I’m here with David Deutsch. David, welcome to DoExplain.
David Deutsch
Hi there.
Christofer Lövgren
When I visited you in Oxford a few months back, I brought you some Swedish chocolate bars, some Daim bars, and I was wondering if you’ve noticed any increases in creativity by eating them perhaps? I can’t remember which ones they were because there were also some Dutch ones.
David Deutsch
Oh yes, now I remember. The Swedish ones were delicious. The Dutch ones were different in kind. They were supposed to be put on something, like on pancakes, and there they were delicious too.
Christofer Lövgren
Right, right. Well, many people don’t know this, but similar to how Coca-Cola supposedly had cocaine in their early product, the Daim bars are completely laced with LSD. So I was hoping that that could spark some interesting conjectures for you there when you’re writing.
David Deutsch
Why should that produce any different state from my normal state?
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, exactly. I would actually be interested to have you do a study with that. I’ve always wondered how your mind works.
David Deutsch
Yeah, I’d rather not risk it. Yeah. I’ll leave that to others. I think that might be wise.
Christofer Lövgren
So yeah, I thought we could start by revisiting our prehistoric and pre-scientific pasts, which are times that people seem to look back on with very different sentiments. Many paint a somewhat romantic view where people were exempt from modern stressors, such as long days at the office and the increasing horrors of social media, and were instead free to forage and hunt, spend a large chunk of their days enjoying themselves in tribal societies, resting, playing, singing together, and so on. It was a much simpler time, or so they say. So I take you to be in the opposite camp here, advocating a much more grim description of the history of humanity. So I’d like you to just explain why you think it’s a mistake to look back on history with envy.
David Deutsch
Well, for prehistory, we don’t have, obviously, any records, and we hardly have any paleontological evidence either. But just the gross facts that we know make this picture of an idyllic prehistoric past really untenable. So one gross fact is that our species has existed in its current form for at least a hundred thousand years, maybe two or three times that, according to some people. So in that hundred thousand years, in this idyllic life, the human population didn’t ever grow very much. Whereas today, it does, and we have a population of billions. Now, what kept the population down and what kept the population constant in those days for most of our history? That’s one thing. And I think the answer is nothing good. And I think that whatever that was, whether it was famine, disease, war, getting a bite from an insect, which you then had a horrible death from, whatever that was, people would have been frightened of it. They would have not wanted this to happen. And yet it did. Right. So that’s one thing. Another thing we know, just from the little paleontological evidence that we have, is that nothing changed much. So when paleontologists dig up some fossils and they dig up the stone tools or remains of campfires and whatever that they find, they can’t date them typically to an accuracy of better than like a thousand years or even more. So that means that technology, which is these people’s way of avoiding famine and predator attacks and what have you, those means of escaping from their fears a little didn’t improve for thousands of years at a time. And again, today we’re used to our lifestyle being revolutionized within a lifetime. And I think these things are all connected. And the reason that no progress was made is connected, of course, with the reason why life was horrible. And these bits of evidence, I think, can’t be explained on the basis that they were living the lives they wanted to. They were living lives of desperation and fear. By the way, the very capacity for fear and pain and so on must have evolved and did not unevolve during this hundred thousand years when we were allegedly living an idyllic life. It had a use. The people that did not have those feelings preferentially died compared with people that had those feelings a bit more. And the level that we have them at is genetically determined, or at least the genetically determined level that we have them at is genetically determined and is, roughly speaking, optimum for replication. So anything horrible that we experience in our bodies was put there by evolution. And therefore, we can conclude that our ancestors felt those things a lot.
Christofer Lövgren
All right. Yeah, that’s a very interesting take on it. I never thought of it in those terms. But I’m curious if you have, if you’re aware of the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger.
David Deutsch
No, I’m not.
Christofer Lövgren
No, okay. So he argues in that book that humans have evolved to live in smaller, close-knit tribal communities where survival depended on working together and hence putting the group first, because without the group, you couldn’t survive. And this brought with it, or at least so he argues, a strong sense of community, a strong sense of belonging, where the individual felt needed and his life was imbued with a powerful meaning as a result. And so this tight bond between people, which I hear can be replicated in modern times through, for instance, military operations, where the individual once again has to rely on the group to fight for a common goal of survival. But he says that this is lacking in Western society today, where there’s no direct common threat to our lives in the same way. And this is how he wants to explain much of our modern suffering, like high levels of depression, suicides, anxiety disorders. And I’m not sure I agree with the idea that we need this hardship to feel a tight bond with other people. However, I do think he has a point when it comes to lack of social cohesion and maybe a sense of meaning in many people’s lives today. So is there something to be said for, I mean, in regard to what you just said there, do you think there can be something to be said for people being as happier, even happier in earlier times, because they had this much stronger sense of togetherness or of being needed than we have today?
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s interesting that when people try to sort of put down humans and denigrate our alleged desire to think of ourselves as good and great, and despite the fact that this denigration is extremely popular and seems to be taken up in all versions. So there’s the idea that we are inherently tribal, which is used to explain racism and violence. And the lack of it is used to explain, as you just said, is used to explain anxiety and social dislocation and so on. And I don’t believe any of that. I think this is just sheer argument by analogy with a fixed conclusion that people are bad, people are mechanical, people are explained by prehistory. I don’t think so. Although it may well be true, and I just said earlier that some, or at least some, of our range of feelings and states of mind are evolved. But what external conditions we attach to those that we attach those feelings to is very much determined by culture and by individual choice and individual creativity. You know, some people say that we are bad because we’re tribal. Other people say we’re bad because we’re selfish. OK, can you have that both ways? And now you’re telling me of people who are saying we’re good because we’re tribal. And I know that there are groups of philosophers who say that we’re good because we’re selfish. So there you have all four possibilities and all of them ignore the most important thing about humans, which is creative thought, which can and does allow us to transcend our genetic programming. So you do have people who are tribal and you do have cultures that are tribal, but you do have also people who are individualistic and cultures that are individualistic and so on. It takes all sorts to make the human world whereas it does not take all sorts to make, let’s say, the lion world. Lions in that respect are explainable by their genes, whereas humans are explainable by their ideas.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, this seems to be hand in hand with the idea of human nature. And just like you say there, I hear this concept being invoked often to excuse certain behaviors and observed tendencies among humans historically and to argue that some things just can’t be changed. Selfishness and violence comes to mind for me as well. I hear them quite frequently in arguments. But, OK, so this idea that parts of our psychology are just inescapable, that is trumped by creative thought.
David Deutsch
Yes. And even not just inescapable, some ideologies say, OK, we can escape it, but we have to try really hard. We have to discipline ourselves or discipline each other or discipline children to override this almost insuperable bad tendency, whatever, you know, people think it happens to be. And as I keep saying, the fact that people bring up opposite alleged tendencies and make a similar argument from them is in itself a sign that this is a bad explanation through and through.
Christofer Lövgren
Hmm. But so if we go back to Younger’s claim there about the strong need to feel needed or to you hear people say we’re a social animal, we’re inescapably social animal. I suppose you would argue the same way there, but do you think we suffer from the so-called lack of meaning today and that they could have had better social relationships that would contribute to happiness for a person?
David Deutsch
Well, I think we, our aspirations have definitely improved. I spoke about all the things that our ancestors feared and the fear of those in some sense is still there, but much, much less and doesn’t dominate our lives. So I think the things like alienation, I think Marx invented the term in this context and the theories that you mentioned, they are just theories and people can adopt a theory and then condition their feelings consciously or unconsciously by that theory. So for example, if you have a theory that you belong to a group that’s persecuted, then you may find yourself falling into a victim mentality. Hmm. Which means that you are interpreting yourself according to the theory, which is the opposite, is the very opposite of being driven by your genes. This is, though, what we really do. We interpret ourselves according to theories and attitudes and they come from, maybe some of them come from our genes, but that doesn’t make them immutable. But certainly many of them come from culture because we know that some attitudes are recent and did not exist even a few centuries ago. And some come from our own creativity. So that a person, like, I dunno, what was that ancient Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel, Diogenes, was it Diogenes or something?
Christofer Lövgren
I have to admit ignorance. Yeah.
David Deutsch
Yeah, me too. Sounds like a fun life. There was some guy, yeah, there was some guy who lived in a barrel and he had come up with the idea that this was the good life and maybe he was depriving himself of things in a rather masochistic way, like people sometimes do now as well. They, you know, no pain, no gain and various ways of life that are based on self deprivation, or maybe he was trying creatively to, for example, rid himself of interference from other people or rid himself of the obligations that interactions with other people would bring, or maybe he enjoyed being this eccentric guy that people would come and kneel before his barrel and ask for his wise advice and maybe that wouldn’t have happened if he’d lived in a house. Who knows? But none of those things were in his genes. And if you try to say that, yes, they were in his genes, that’s just his way of being social. Well, if your way of being social is never to interact with other people or, you know, if your way of being social can mean any actual behavior, then again, that is not a good explanation. It’s a very bad explanation.
Christofer Lövgren
OK, so when people reference studies done in certain animals, I think rats is common or monkeys, they’ve done studies where they deprive the monkey children of their mother or of social contact. The same for the rats and the rats that don’t get that social contact. They die very quickly. But this is not analogous for the reasons you’ve already stated to humans. You can’t draw that analogy to humans.
David Deutsch
It’s not analogous to humans who are creating ways of life for themselves and creating new ideas. So we don’t know yet when creativity in that sense sets in babies. It could be that babies are analogous to newborn babies or analogous to newborn monkeys and that they perhaps wouldn’t thrive without human contact. Right. In fact, another possibility, which I’ve sometimes conjectured, is that creativity is in fact partly cultural and that a newborn baby is kind of it only has part of the creativity program in the genes and the rest is provided by memes from culture. Now, you know, I have no evidence for that, but it’s one of the many possibilities that could be true. But explaining human choices by analogy with rats or monkeys is just ludicrous. It is, as I said, it is defining away the defining feature of humans.
Christofer Lövgren
So if anything, our human nature would be that capacity itself if we have to save that concept.
David Deutsch
Yes, yes. Yeah, I don’t know why we want to save that concept. But yes, there is a sense in which not having a fixed nature is the fixed and immutable nature of humans.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, exactly, because it wouldn’t it wouldn’t strictly be human nature since the way you define a person is that it can be instantiated on a computer. It just happens to be in a biological vehicle at this point, which we call humans. Yes, but that’s an interesting conjecture about the baby not having the creative program or the creative capacity fully to begin with. But I would suppose it would have to learn those memes fairly early to be able to acquire language.
David Deutsch
Oh, yes. So by the time babies are learning language, they’re definitely creative, because that’s that’s a task that I mean, we can’t even program a computer to this day to match the baby’s ability to learn language. So that’s definitely a hugely creative task.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, but I’m still hearing you say, as you said in the beginning there, we still have the capacity for strong emotions, like negative emotions like fear and pain and anxiety, which served an evolutionary purpose. But then I’m thinking a very current debate is about the idea of gender differences. And we have on the one hand, people like Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker, who argue fairly strongly that biological differences between the sexes best explains the differences in personality and behavior that we tend to observe in men and women. And on the other hand, we have the social constructionists who claim that biology is completely irrelevant and a social construct as well. And that reality is entirely created by the social norms we have. And so culture is the only relevant factor. I think you reject both of these conclusions based on what you said, but you lean more towards the latter, that ideas are the best explanation there. But I’m curious then, what role does the difference in biology play here? Because surely it has to have some, if only in creating different sensations. I find it strange that most cultures have adopted the same type of stereotypical gender roles. Yeah. Well, how do you think about that?
David Deutsch
I think that both those theories are not only false. They have completely the wrong end of the stick because how much of human behavior is explained by something or other is itself entirely determined by human choices. Or I should say, how much of human choices are explained by genetics or culture or inborn creativity. All of those, how much of human choices are explained by those is itself determined by human creativity.
Christofer Lövgren
How do you mean? Can you explicate that a little?
David Deutsch
Yes. So genes are just a thing in our environment, like snow for Inuit and like particular language for people living in a particular country. Now you might do a study to say, you know, how much is mathematical ability affected by latitude? And you could make graphs and correlations between the latitude at which a person was born. And then you’d find a correlation and you would say, aha, mathematical ability is explained by latitude. But that’s not how I would use the word explain. That just means correlated. The real explanation comes elsewhere. Now you could also say in regard to mathematical ability, that it was determined by the number of the century in which you were born. So in century 20, a certain proportion of people become mathematicians. In century zero, it was century one, actually there is no century zero. Century one, it was far fewer. In the century minus the thousand, it was essentially nil. And again, why were there no mathematicians? Well, because of the harsh life people led and because of the culture that made them not interested. But perhaps there was a mathematician somewhere. How do we know? Perhaps there was one in the year minus 10,000 BC. We don’t have any record of that because they had no writing in that time. If there was one, and I don’t see why there wouldn’t have been one, it was because they managed to violate the norms of their culture and transcend the values and preoccupations of their culture and develop an interest that we would now identify as mathematics. And some people might say, well, that’s very unlikely for a primitive person to have done that. But today, when we are allegedly all the victims of the same genes, plenty of people violate the norms of their culture and the preoccupations of their culture and so on, and by the way, plenty of people violate their own so-called survival instinct, not just for the benefit of the culture, but for all sorts of reasons, including very silly ones. Yeah.
Christofer Lövgren
But so how, I’m not sure I see the connection to the fact that we see the same gender roles throughout all cultures or the majority of cultures in previous times and even now, because it seems to me if it was purely a matter of ideas and the genes didn’t influence at all, why would we see that pattern?
David Deutsch
When I mentioned correlations, I was trying to say that those are cases where most people’s attitude to mathematics was indeed explained by their environment, by their genes, by their culture and so on, because very few people were using their creativity. And we don’t have that many creativity-based cultures to go on. Basically the West is it. I mean, you know, we have maybe ancient Athens or whatever. And the fact is that there are enormous differences between the roles of women in say ancient Athens and present day Sweden, and there are even differences between present day Sweden and present day USA, and there are differences between present day Sweden and 50 years ago Sweden. So come on. The mechanical explanations of gender roles just fall flat on their faces.
Christofer Lövgren
Right. And I mean, you could also perhaps argue that since if we go back to prehistoric times again in the tribal societies, it was just a fact of physiology that if you were going to hunt for food and you couldn’t just go to the grocery store, the people with the most muscle mass who were faster and stronger could just naturally, you know, it’s not that it’s in their genes, it’s just, it’s the natural interpretation or the natural idea to create.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Yes, absolutely. That is actually, I wouldn’t call those gender roles because that is just a practical consideration, just like the person with a broken leg also wouldn’t have gone on a hunt.
Christofer Lövgren
Exactly.
David Deutsch
And on the contrary, a woman who was unusually strong or was unusually good at throwing spears would have gone on a hunt. What we call gender roles is enforced gender roles, either culturally or legally or, you know, by ridicule or whatever. And they are irrational. But differences in behaviour that have a practical purpose that the person benefits from or identifies with are in a different category from gender roles in the other sense.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, no, definitely. So I hadn’t planned on asking you about this, but it seems to be related and it’s so interesting. So just to try to push back a little bit when it comes to things like twin studies then, not specifically about gender roles, but about genes causing behaviour. Now, I haven’t looked into the twin studies myself carefully, but the claims seem to be that they’ve done studies where, and supposedly a lot of them, where people, is it called identical twins? Yes, yes. Yeah, I don’t know the different types, but the most identical one where they separate them at birth and they get completely different environments to grow up in. And then when they’re adults, they seem to share things that seem unlikely to just be coincidence, things like sexual preferences or political leanings or musical taste. So how would one explain that then? Because it seems too haphazard to just say that they just happen to develop the same interest in music, for instance.
David Deutsch
So I take it that none of these twin studies are double blind studies. That is, none of them have these twins wrapped up in an opaque container, unable to communicate other than by typing in and out. So that in fact, these identical twins who are placed in allegedly different environments, they are seen and their behaviours are noted by people, by people who are genetically, culturally, subculturally and so on, inclined to interpret behaviours in a particular way. So if someone’s very good looking, they might have a different experience of high school from someone who is less good looking. And those different experiences in high school might affect their interests, their sexual preferences, you know, you name it, it might influence it. And even if they then go to two different schools, the fact that they are equally good looking will have the same bias, biased effect on them, which people in the study will later pick up and say, oh, this is coded for by genes, but it’s not coded for by genes any more than the country you live in is coded for by genes, even though that too has a strong genetic correlation.
Christofer Lövgren
Right. I think, okay, so it’s similar. I think you write a similar example in The Beginning of Infinity, your book, your second book, where, yeah, being attractive, you’re talking in the context of happiness research, which does a similar thing here. 50% of happiness is encoded in genes and is immutable. And so maybe people just treat attractive people better. And so that is what causes you to be more happy and you share those genes, but it’s not the genes that cause the happiness.
David Deutsch
Yes, I doubt it’s, I doubt it’s as simple as that because treatment of somebody which is intended to cause a certain effect rarely does, but it might cause a coherent effect, even if a different one from the intended one. So yeah, it, that, that it would be very surprising if identical twins reared separately, did not have a lot of traits in common. Even if there was no genetic coding of those. And as I said before, the whole concept of genetic coding is a mistake because how much of the genetic coding gets translated into actual behavior and personality is itself determined by creativity. The person can decide not to behave as their genes are telling them. Like the people who take up ascetic lifestyles and deprive themselves of this or that food, which they really enjoy because they have adopted an idea, either they invented it or they adopted it from someone else, that this is better than what the genes are telling them.
Christofer Lövgren
Right. So, okay. So we, I mean, we have genes, we have starting ideas as it were. And then we quickly start using our creativity to improve upon that. So we’re, it is a starting point and that, but that’s all it is.
David Deutsch
Yes. So this is Stephen Pinker has this idea that his opponents believe in a blank slate at birth and that that’s, that’s, uh, I think that metaphor comes more or less from Locke. So I would say we have a slate. We’re born with a slate that’s, that’s got tons of stuff on it. Some useful, some not useful, some nonsense and so on, but it’s a slate. It has chalk on it. It can be wiped off easily. And it is very common for people to act in ways where, for any animal, that would be the one of the deepest things in their genetic makeup, like, like, um, eating, uh, having sex, avoiding pain. All these things are commonly overridden by humans for the most trivial of reasons.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, exactly. I choose to fast, uh, intermittent fast every day because it’s in fashion to do so and I get more likes on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, um, no, I think, I think the word people would have trouble with there is easily that we can easily change the slate, but, uh, I would agree with you on that.
David Deutsch
Well, let me say commonly, and that is already enough to refute the theory. I mean, it is common for teenage girls to become anorexic. You know, it’s, it’s common for people to go on diets or to binge eat or both. And all those things are supposedly explained by genes. Well, you know, bad explanation again.
Christofer Lövgren
All right, folks time for the fun stuff. So if you really enjoy what I’m doing here, there is a way to support the podcast. You can go over to ko-fi.com slash do explain that is K O dash F I.com slash do explain, and you can make a one-time donation or even a monthly donation. If that’s the kind of person you feel like being this year, maybe you should ask yourself, what would Jesus do? And then surely Jesus would donate to do explain. Another way you can help me out is to go over to iTunes and write me a five star review that would also be very helpful. All right. Thank you very much. Let’s get back to enjoying the show. All right, man. So I want to switch gears a little bit and, uh, go over to the philosophy of mind. And you, you argue that the brain must be a computer and you make use of the functionalist distinction between brain and mind, uh, hardware and software respectively, and a lot of people would, uh, take issue with that. For instance, I remember there was an Aeon article called the empty brain. Circulating a while back. The summary of the article was your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge, or store memories. In short, your brain is not a computer. Now, I’m not convinced after reading that, but it went on to say, uh, that speaking of the brain as a computer is no more true than how we’ve historically described it as consisting of hydraulic pumps, wheel works powered by springs and gears, being a telegraph, it’s just a convenient metaphor that continually changes with our current technology and that the computer metaphor will meet the same fate as the other soon enough. But I mean, clearly a laptop and a brain are different at one level. Our brain doesn’t have the von Neumann architecture and it’s made up of neurons and blood vessels rather than metal and silicon, and it’s constantly rewiring itself, the neuroplasticity. But I take your claim to be much more fundamental than that. So how do we know first of all, that the brain is a computer and then also why is it crucial to make this hardware software distinction between the brain and the mind and not just talk in terms of the brain?
David Deutsch
Okay. Well, um, you, you ran through a lot of ideas there. I’m not sure I can remember them all, but the basic thing is that, first of all, the basic thing is that, uh, the brain is a physical object and obeys the laws of physics. Now, some people would deny that. Some people would say that the brain is in part a supernatural object, uh, controlled by a supernatural entity, the soul, which doesn’t obey laws of physics.
Christofer Lövgren
Okay.
David Deutsch
That is a different argument from everything else you said. And, um, I mean, if you want me to go into why I think that’s a bad idea, I guess I could, but I think it’s more important. To address the points that take for granted that the brain is a physical object and the question is what kind of a physical object is it like a steam engine, is it like a computer? Um, is it like a blank slate? Uh, you know, whatever. And it’s rather sad that, uh, it’s getting on for a century now that, uh, Alan Turing solved this entire problem. Or if you’d like, it might’ve been solved even earlier in the, in the 1820s by Babbage and Lovelace or perhaps Lovelace and Babbage. Um, not sure nowadays. Uh, I think it may have, may well have been Lovelace who had the idea of computational universality as I now understand it rather than Babbage. But anyway, Turing certainly did have it. And he understood that if the brain obeys laws of physics, then no matter what kind of soul or whatever, or what kind of juices may be powering it, its functionality is information processing. That is nerve impulses or chemical, uh, impulses in and nerve impulses and chemical impulses out, which then cause our actions and our speech. And, uh, they also cause our memory and therefore our introspection and our explanations of why we do what we do and of what we are. This is all the processing of information. Now, nowadays we take like since Turing really, we, we, we have taken information processing to be the same thing as computation, but that’s only the case if computation is indeed universal as Turing conjectured and- …
Christofer Lövgren
Why is that you mean?
David Deutsch
Because then if compute, if computation is universal, that means that there is only one kind of information, the kind that can be processed by a Turing machine, that there isn’t another kind that could be processed by a different kind of machine, which the brain might be, there, there cannot be such a thing if universality is true.
Christofer Lövgren
Right. Okay.
David Deutsch
Yeah. And, uh, Turing conjectured that he also argued for it quite powerfully. Um, but if quantum theory is true, then, uh, we can do better than that. We can, because I actually proved that physical systems that obey quantum theory, uh, support universal computation. So the universal computer, not quite Turing’s, but what we call quantum computer nowadays is a universal computer and can perform any computation that any other physical object can perform, including a brain. So when we say that a brain is a computer, we are saying an amalgam of two things. We’re saying that a brain is an information processor. All the functions of the brain are information processing functions just because it is a physical object. That’s one thing. And then we’re saying it’s a computer because actually there is only one kind of general information processing device and, uh, and it has the same, they all have the same repertoire. And that’s why we say the brain is a computer. This isn’t an analogy. This is just a way of saying some substantive things that we know basically from physics.
Christofer Lövgren
Right. So could you say that the, uh, information processing, that process of input, uh, processing and output is analogous to initial states, uh, laws of motion and final state.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Yeah. Kind of, although it’s, it’s rather awkwardly phrased in that sense because human thought doesn’t necessarily have an output in the sense of limb movements and statements made by the mouth. Some of the output just stays in the brain and, but it’s subject to the same laws, we can think things that we never tell anybody, like, you know, I might be thinking something of you now and I’ll never tell anybody what it is. Uh, but nevertheless, by the same argument that I made earlier, that thinking was a computation in that it processed information, it had an input, it had an output, even though the output will, you know, will never pass my lips. Therefore the input output model of computation is a bit awkward when applied to the brain, but from the point of view of whether a brain is a computer, that doesn’t matter.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah. Because if there wasn’t such a thing as universal computation, then different system might process information in different ways. And then we couldn’t talk about everything, uh, using computation, everything being a computer.
David Deutsch
That’s right. And so if physics were different, if the universe were different that way, then, uh, animals and people could, could have been built differently. There could have been two kinds of information that are not interoperable and two kinds of computation or maybe 10 kinds and you know, but that’s not how our world is made.
Christofer Lövgren
Wow. Okay. Now I get it. That’s fascinating. So, but, um, okay, if we go back to the distinction then between, uh, brain and mind, why is that necessary?
David Deutsch
Yes. Ah, well, that’s necessary to understand certain things, not others, but the point about the information, the reason why it even made sense to guess that, that there might be universal computation is that the properties of information are independent of the substrate that it is instantiated in. So lots of different kinds of physical object can store the same information. DNA strand can store a Mozart symphony and people have done things like this. And of course, computer memories store our words and our ideas in a completely different form from the way that our brain stores them. And we take for granted that you can make hardware like microphones and, um, loudspeakers and so on, which translate from one way of storing to another. Uh, so the information in the brain, that is the mind and other information in the brain is the substrate independent part. Uh, and in fact, when we use it, even, you know, even without technology, uh, we’re constantly changing information from one form into another, even in our cells. Information in DNA gets transcribed to RNA, which then gets transcribed to proteins and, uh, we can, we can see that the, even though these are different types of physical object, the information is the same and the functionality of, let’s say, uh, protein synthesis depends on how good the system is at preserving the information as it, as it is transferred from one form into another, and also at interpreting it, seeing what is the meaning of the information in a given context. So when it comes to the brain, the brain has, contains information in memory and in, uh, neuron firings and quite likely also in states of various chemical concentrations and so on, and those are independent of the substrate in the, in the, you know, you, you can be given an injection of something that, that makes you elated and then you can say, Hey, I’m elated. And you’ve suddenly, you’ve suddenly translated that information from chemical form into the form of sound waves. Whereas the hardware, the only thing that’s important about the hardware is that it’s capable of universal computation. So the hardware is constant in a particular brain, although in the future we, we will be able to make information processing devices that are functionally the same as the brain, but, uh, are built of different things. Just like billions of years ago, evolution had the idea of using DNA as its information storage device instead of RNA. Right. I just in case I’m misunderstood here, I don’t mean anything anthropomorphic by this.
Christofer Lövgren
So the important part here is the mind is the universal information processor, so to speak, that runs on the brain, the program.
David Deutsch
Um, yes, it’s, it’s a program. That’s right. It’s a, well, no, uh, I would say the mind is, yeah, the brain is the universal processor and the mind is a program running on it, which is universal in a different sense. It is capable of supporting any kind of explanation.
Christofer Lövgren
Right. And that, that’s interesting because I ended up in an argument with one of my teachers the other day, my classmate and I had held a presentation on, uh, how do we know it was an explanation of knowledge and why people should care about it? And, uh, afterwards we were discussing this and I brought up the universality of human minds. And even if you agree that computation is universal, how do we know that minds, that our minds are universal?
David Deutsch
Ah, that is indeed a different argument. Yeah. Cause you wouldn’t buy that. Yeah. Well, explanatory universality is, uh, well, I do cover this in the beginning of infinity, uh, as well, but I cover it separately from the issue of computation and computational universality, uh, in short, the reason why I think it doesn’t make sense to deny that we are capable of explanatory universality is that the theory that we aren’t capable of it is, how can I put it? It’s functionally the same as a belief in the supernatural because it is a belief that there is some aspect of the world whose explanation is not even in principle accessible to human minds. Uh, that, that, for example, it might be accessible to, uh, super human minds, uh, gods or aliens or dolphins or something. Uh, and that they might understand it or perhaps no one can understand it. Perhaps it’s just inexplicable. Well, if we have an inexplicable world or a world that we can’t understand that is affecting us logically, you can’t disprove that it’s, it’s also not disproved by the universality of computation or anything like that. But it is the very archetype of a bad explanation because by the same token that the world might be inexplicable, um, the explanation might be anything. So, uh, there might be inexplicable gods out there. There, there, there might be inexplicable laws of nature, which are just toying with us, or perhaps the laws of nature will come to an end next year and different laws of nature will come and torture us or else put us into Nirvana. And all these different possibilities are just, you know, small subsets of the overarching idea that we are in a, in a bubble of explicability, but the universe as a whole is not explicable. All those things I’ve just mentioned fit into that. Yeah. Yeah.
Christofer Lövgren
And it’s also non-parsimonious. You’re adding an extra assumption there that is unexplained.
David Deutsch
Uh, that is true. Yes.
Christofer Lövgren
So, okay. So is there, because there’s a lot of emphasis today on, or at least it has been, I still think it is, but an emphasis on neuroscience and the, how essential it is to understanding the mind and AI and all these things, but is there anything important to be learned about our minds by studying the architecture of the brain directly? For instance, what function seems to be specific for certain hemispheres or that the default mode network is central for self-reference and daydreaming and so on, or are we going about that all wrong?
David Deutsch
Uh, of course, neuroscience is, is very important. If something goes wrong with your brain, you, you want medical science to know as much as possible about it. But you asked whether it was, it was relevant basically to our ideas.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Understand our minds. Yeah.
David Deutsch
Um, uh, I think only in a very marginal way. Uh, so I said that we, we are, we are born not as blank slates, but as slates covered with, um, information. Yeah. I can envisage circumstances under which it might be useful to know what that is. So that, uh, for example, if there, if there is a piece of inborn propensity, which humans typically abandon, let’s say, uh, you know, during, during the first 10 years of their life, they, they typically abandon it or perhaps they always abandon that’s that’s an easier case. Yeah. Suppose that they always abandon it. Then if you tell somebody when they’re nine years old, you show them some neuroscience that says that, that, um, all this struggle that they’re having is just to erase, uh, the part of their genetic inheritance and it doesn’t actually make sense, then they might say, Oh, I always thought it didn’t make sense, but it’s, you know, it, uh, I’m just working my way through that and it might be helpful to such a person, maybe it wouldn’t be helpful. Maybe, uh, you know, it’s something that you have to work out for yourself. I don’t know. I’m trying to explain why I think such knowledge is bound to be marginal at best. That is knowledge of our inborn theories, our inborn, uh, wants and values and criteria and expectations and so on.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah. So basically if I’ve understood you correctly here, you’re saying that since the brain is a universal computer, but since it instantiates a universal program, it can create explanatory knowledge, uh, which in turn obeys its own. It’s, it’s independent of its physical instantiation. Once you have that program. So then the brain, as you said right now, it gives us a starting point of the chalk board with some scribbles on it, but we can always erase all of that. So it’s, it’s, it’s not primary to our understanding in any sense.
David Deutsch
Yes. And I guess not important, either not very important or not at all important.
Christofer Lövgren
You’re going to get a lot of flak for that, David.
David Deutsch
Well, the people who give me a hard time for this, I can’t blame them, right? It’s, it’s, it’s written in their genes.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, that’s great. That’s true. So, um, yes. Okay. So that was the distinction between, uh, the mind and the brain, but there’s another distinction here then between the unconscious and the conscious mind. And are you aware of the social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt?
David Deutsch
No, afraid not.
Christofer Lövgren
Okay. He, he, uh, he has an analogy, a rider on the elephant analogy where he says the rational side is like the rider on the elephant and the emotional side is the elephant, the elephant, uh, or sorry, the rider looks in charge, but when there’s a disagreement between these two sides, the elephant usually wins. And so this is a similar version to, uh, Daniel Kahneman’s system one and two system one being fast, emotional system, two slower, more logical. How do you currently think about the connection between the unconscious and the conscious mind? I guess this, I had a question here. Are we essentially ruled by our unconscious, so to speak? I suppose we’ve touched on some of this already, but.
David Deutsch
Yes. I don’t think that the, uh, distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind is a matter of hardware. First of all, I don’t think there’s an unconscious thought module and a conscious thought module and, uh, sort of lots of neurons connecting them. And sometimes those connections crackle and get hot. And, uh, then one side wins. I don’t think it’s like that. I think the conscious and unconscious is just a rough way of describing, uh, the fact that, uh, the content of different ideas is sometimes structurally different is often structurally different. It’s like, um, I don’t know if I can think of a good analogy, but, um, uh, if you go on a motorway and you see, uh, police cars and normal cars, you, you may, you, you may form a theory that police cars obey one law of motion and ordinary cars obey another law of motion. And you’d be wrong to think that police cars and ordinary cars are made in different factories or operate by different principles, uh, or are fundamentally different in any way. What makes them different is just software. It’s, uh, you know, you, the difference between a policeman and a non-policeman is just software and the same with the police car and the non-police car. So it’s not that there are strictly speaking conscious ideas, unconscious ideas, and they have to interact with each other. That that’s just a way of summarizing the fact that some processes are aware of other processes, but not aware of a third kind of process and so on. It’s a matter of what’s aware of, aware of what, and I certainly don’t think that there is any kind of rule enforced by the brain or whatever, that one kind of idea always wins over another kind. I, surely it’s a matter of everyday experience that people often do things, uh, that they have a strong desire not to do. And, uh, on the contrary, that people also often do things that they have a strong desire to do, but consciously think is wrong, uh, and in that sense, don’t want to do. Another thing that’s slightly wrong with that picture, the whole picture is that it assumes that the conscious mind by itself is consistent and therefore can be said to have a desire and a preference like, like the rider on an elephant. But what if the rider on the elephant is in two minds or in a hundred minds? That’s more like it. The mind is full of ideas which are full of various kinds of conflict with each other. So you couldn’t therefore have a rule that says that one kind of idea always wins over the other, by the way, if there was such a rule, then if Popperian epistemology is true, uh, this thing wouldn’t be universal. That’d be, um, it would be unable to understand certain things, specifically the things which the part of the mind that is supposedly dominant is wrong about, but, uh, again, everyday life it’s full of examples of people, uh, not doing what their emotions say or not doing what their reason says, uh, and having conflicting emotions and having conflicting ideas, you know, it all happens all the time.
Christofer Lövgren
Right. So you mean if there was a rule there, uh, instantiated as a, it would basically be justificationism or foundationalism. You would have, uh, yeah, it wouldn’t all be conjectural, which it seems to be. Yeah. Okay. But so on this view then, if, because I often hear studies reference like, oh, the smell of garbage makes people express more socially conservative views. Or if you’re, you get a person to hold something warm or cold, if it will influence how they judge a person they’re talking to as warm or cold. Yeah. But that’s not a matter of unconscious ideas overriding or the emotional, the elephant overriding the rider. It’s, it’s just, uh, creating sensations that you then conjecture ideas around. And they just happen to be.
David Deutsch
Uh, yes. And they might be, they might be, uh, like you said about the archaic people, the men more likely to go hunting or whatever in a particular culture. It might be the case that smelling garbage makes, makes you more likely to dwell on one kind of idea and not another. Um, these studies, even if they were done in every culture, there are false ideas in every culture and there are ideas which like, you know, slavery, which was once considered normal in every culture and now is considered abnormal in every culture, in almost every culture. So it’s not surprising that there are correlations between unrelated things. Uh, it would be very surprising if they weren’t, it would mean that our ideas are in some high level sense, randomized in every way, except ways that we know of. So it’s not surprising, but I don’t think this explains anything useful about how minds work or how people make decisions. And by the way, these ideas always, I think always, but perhaps it’s only almost always the conclusion is always the same. Humans aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Humans aren’t, uh, what they pretend to be. They aren’t what they want to be. Instead, they’re just mechanical. They’re machines. They need to be controlled, put down, you know, and so on. It’s funny that the conclusion is always the same.
Christofer Lövgren
And yeah, I don’t know why we’re so self-deprecating in that regard. And as humans, it’s weird to want to look at humans that way. Yeah. I mean, we’re very, we’re very upset if you just choose one group of people, uh, and claim they are bad. Yeah. That’s a no-no. But if you include all of humanity, which is, I guess, as racist as you can become, um, I don’t know why that’s all right. Yeah. But so, okay, so this is, yeah, this is an, um, interesting point here. So I want to hone in on that a little bit because yeah, speaking about humans as irrational, or at least having, we’re not as rational as we like to believe. As you said, one way, a well-known way of framing such irrational tendencies, quote unquote, in humans is in terms of cognitive biases, which I believe was popularized by Kahneman and Tversky. And basically it’s presented as systematic errors in thinking, ways we tend to fail in our reasoning in particular situations. And one explanation that one often hears is that these biases are side effects of evolved mental shortcuts, heuristics, that has been very useful and effective in the past for making decisions because we don’t want to waste, we don’t have time to waste too many mental resources, but these shortcuts can end up misfiring as it were. And as a result, our capacity for rational thinking is limited by these biases. Yes. Um, and perhaps in a fundamental way from this perspective.
David Deutsch
So I don’t think that biases in that sense exist. What exists are errors and people, people make errors and sometimes people make the same error again and again, and that’s because there’s an error. There’s an error somewhere in either in their thinking or in their ideas or in their fixed ideas. Sometimes different people make the same error and that might be due to culture or it might be due to just the logic of the situation that the certain errors are easy to make and the truth is hard to come by and so on. So that’s, that’s biases in general. That’s why I don’t think anything is explained by biases that isn’t just a natural consequence of the fact that humans are absolutely jam packed with errors of every kind.
Christofer Lövgren
So when you say errors, you mean we just have the wrong ideas about something?
David Deutsch
Yes. Yes. False theories.
Christofer Lövgren
It could be our slate that we start with and then we just never conjecture a better idea or.
David Deutsch
Yeah. My guess is that the slate gets completely overwritten quite fast, but you know, it might be, it could be that there are bits of the slate that, that in a certain culture or in maybe in all existing cultures tend to survive and then form an error that almost everybody makes. But when that was pointed out, it would, if that was pointed out by somebody, then it would no longer be the error that everybody makes. But there’s a worse thing. Once you go beyond the idea of just biases, which I say they’re just errors. So as long as you know that they can be erased and argued against, then it’s not so bad to think of them as somehow different from other errors, though they aren’t. But if you think that they are inborn and have to be overcome, then you’re in, there’s a much more dangerous territory there because inborn biases can only possibly be finite in number. And therefore there is an implicit project here to overcome. Let’s say there are 23 of them. Yeah. The project is to identify these one by one. Very clever people have to identify them by somehow getting around them and then seeing them for what they are and analysing them with Bayesian statistics and then telling everybody else and everybody else has to introspect and find those errors and get into the habit and practice of not having those errors. And once you have, once you have found five or six of these errors of these 23 errors, you are a better person. And that means that there are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who have overcome their biases and ones who have not yet overcome their biases. And those are the best and the rest. And that kind of way of thinking about people is terrible. It’s, first of all, it’s false for the reasons that I’ve given, but it’s also dangerous. It’s authoritarian. It contradicts all the, not all, it contradicts some of the best traditions of Western rational society. It sort of tends towards justifying government by these best people or that government should consult these best people or that government should test to see how many biases you have to, and you only get the vote if you have fewer than a certain number of biases. And heaven forbid that somebody decides that they have eliminated all 23. They will then become a psychopath.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it in moral terms. That’s an interesting argument. Yeah. So I remember listening to Daniel Kahneman on Sam Harris’s podcast, and he asked Kahneman and by the end, okay, so you’ve worked in this field almost the entirety of your life and with these biases. And so has that helped you at all in your thinking? And he laughed and just said that, no, I’m just as biased as anyone else. Like there’s no way to get around it pretty much. What’s the implication there?
David Deutsch
Oh, okay. So he has resisted that conclusion.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, exactly.
David Deutsch
Did he give a reason for, did he give a rationale for resisting it?
Christofer Lövgren
I mean, he seems to think that some of them, because this is an argument they often make that even if you’re aware of certain biases, it doesn’t seem like people still seem to do the same mistake. They tell you about the bias and then they test you and you do the same thing in a week or two. But I’ve always thought if you follow your argument here, it’s just errors. It might just mean that we haven’t actually found what the error is. And so we haven’t guessed it. We’re going about it the wrong way.
David Deutsch
Right. Exactly. Yeah. That’s what it must be.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s that’s fascinating. So, David, I appreciate your time. I thought I might just ask you quickly as a last question here. I’ve heard rumors that you got to meet Karl Popper once in your life. I just want to know what that was like for you.
David Deutsch
Yes, it was amazing. I went there with Bryce DeWitt and seeing those two people, you know, just being a fly on the wall when those people were having a conversation was an exceptional honor.
Christofer Lövgren
I can imagine.
David Deutsch
And it was a very fun conversation. He was very Popperian. And as I tweeted recently, I kept feeling it kept, you know, I kept sort of mentally slapping myself down because I kept thinking, wait a minute, how come this old guy knows so much Popperian philosophy? How come he expresses it so clearly? And yeah, you know, somehow cognitive dissonance or something, you know, it’s not often that one meets people with those attributes and especially an old philosopher. You know, I would expect an old philosopher to have the opposite of those attributes. Yeah. I hope I’m not being too rude here.
Christofer Lövgren
No, absolutely not.
David Deutsch
So it was amazing. And Bryce DeWitt also was amazing during that time. I mean, he always was amazing as well. But as we were leaving, DeWitt asked Popper, what do you think is the most important problem in physics? And Popper said the problem of why all electrons have the same mass. And DeWitt said, and this is a really brilliant answer. That’s interesting. That perhaps shows the difference between a physicist and a philosopher, because for me, it’s like this. If some electrons had different masses from others, I would assume that there must be some kind of field that accounts for the different mass. And I would expect that field to have equations of motion and to obey quantum theory. And I would want to find out what that was. And so them all having the same mass is a non-problem for me. So I thought that was a very nice answer.
Christofer Lövgren
Yeah, that is. And not to I mean, it’s not a perfect analogy, because obviously you’re still a very young man, David. But I mean, I have the same feeling speaking to you. How can you know everything about Deutsch philosophy? It doesn’t make any sense. But I very much appreciate your time, David. And this has been a lot of fun for me.
David Deutsch
And fun for me, too.
Christofer Lövgren
Oh, I’m glad to hear that. Have a great night. Until next time.
David Deutsch
OK, thank you.
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