2020-02-26 Dilemma Podcast S01E14 - Selecting for Deafness
Duration: 02:20:10
Transcript
Jay Shapiro
Coleman, this is the season finale episode 14 and it is the David Deutsch episode.
Coleman Hughes
This is better than season finale of Breaking Bad and Lost combined.
Jay Shapiro
Should I tell you what happened? I saw Breaking Bad.
Coleman Hughes
Oh my god, Jay, Jesus Christ.
Jay Shapiro
No one dragged me for Harry Potter yet.
Coleman Hughes
Really?
Jay Shapiro
I’ve seen a little bit of Breaking Bad. I watch a lot of TV.
Coleman Hughes
I feel like we have some British fans that could drag you for Harry because of Harry Potter in the accent.
Jay Shapiro
I escaped it so far.
Coleman Hughes
Interesting.
Jay Shapiro
So we’ve been hyping this episode like all year.
Coleman Hughes
Correction, you’ve been hyping.
Jay Shapiro
I’ve been hyping it. But I have a confession to make to start the episode. I keep putting it off and I’ve kept putting it off not because I think it’s so good, but I’m terrified of it. I’m actually terrified of this episode and not because of anything David Deutsch says. I think David Deutsch is an impenetrable thinker. And the responsibility that I have of trying to even present his ideas to you or the audience is way beyond what I’m capable of doing. So I’m going to fuck it up. And I just encourage everybody to read The Beginning of Infinity. I’ve read the book three times. I understand some of it. But every single line of this book could basically be a book on its own. It’s just like confounding, mind-blowing idea after another one. And they all make sense, which is why it should be easy to explain to you. But they’re all just so, I don’t know, there’s so much in that book. Just go read The Beginning of Infinity. I honestly think it’s like on the level of origin of species as far as influential thinking and books that should be read and change the way that we think about things.
Coleman Hughes
I think Sam Harris and Steve Pinker really like that book, right?
Jay Shapiro
I mean, everyone should. Yeah, he’s been on Sam’s podcast, I think, three times. And every time sort of like, I think he had the line to Sam of something like, the sentence you just said is wrong in three different ways. And it’s such a David Deutsch because he’s intimidating because he’s so clear. But then he’s also very humble, which I’ll get into about his philosophies. But he…
Coleman Hughes
I’m going to start using that sentence on you. Because I’m… You just said it’s wrong in five different ways.
Jay Shapiro
Yes. And then I’ll explain it and you’re like, oh, fuck. But it’s true. And honestly, some of Sam’s blind spots of thinking, David just like blows up if you actually understand. David has spent time on things like AI, where Sam is just mistaken and wrong. Why we don’t have AI. But you could start with David Deutsch in totally different paths. So I don’t know where to begin. Okay. And the other thing about this, I’ll say, since this is our finale and the show has sort of evolved and I’ve learned a little bit about what it should be or should be doing as the season has gone on. I sort of we’ve, as everyone has noticed, I think we’ve sort of gone away from the traditional like, here’s the dilemma. Here’s how it’s read. Here’s what we think about it. They’ve sort of drifted into like, here’s the topic we’re talking about. We’re going to we’re going to like break it down. There actually is a specific dilemma. I didn’t even notice that, but it did. We did. Like at the beginning, it was having people reading it, which I might go back to a little in season two. Some of those are really fun. If there’s like, here’s the trolley problem, do your thing. But some of the thinkers and people we’ve had on, I guess, let me defend why I think that’s useful. I’m really interested in the sort of foundations and how people are building their moral philosophies from the ground up. And like, if I get your base moral philosophy, I think I’ve said this before about consciousness. If I get somebody’s instinct or philosophy around something like the theory of mind, I can almost perfectly predict how you’re going to answer a moral dilemma about something like, should we eat meat or not, depending on what you think about consciousness. So with most of these topics, it’s almost like instead of just staying on the output of like, here’s the dilemma and here’s how you answer it. And then we’re going to argue about it. It’s almost I want to go deeper into how do you start building your moral foundations in the first place? But there is a specific dilemma to talk about on this one. Although in the conversation, it’s like we go everywhere. I think even in the last episode with Matthew Crawford, you expressed maybe some frustration because it wasn’t it wasn’t in the end sort of a policy discussion of should we have self-driving cars or not. It was much more of a psychological investigation and philosophical investigation into the transformations that society undergoes when we introduce something like self-driving cars. Even if we all admit if we had to be forced into a policy sort of decision that we would all be in favor of them, we would all move toward we would call it progress of introducing them. This episode would probably be similar because the specific dilemma I think is actually fucking good and fascinating.
Jay Shapiro
It’s something like I could read it exactly, but I don’t even have to. There’s a couple, a married couple named Andre and Leslie. I only say that because we reference their names. And Andre and Leslie, who are both deaf. And this is in a near future world where we have the ability to genetically sort of select traits for our unborn children from a whole menu. And in that world, Andre and Leslie want to select for the traits of their unborn baby to be deaf. So they intentionally want to have a deaf child. So and they argue for it saying, you know, like deaf culture is beautiful. They want to connect with their baby more. And that’s sort of their wish is to have a deaf child. And so I think on its face is just a fascinating question and goes in a lot of different directions. And David and I get there and we talk about it. But like, again, I’m terrified of this episode because in order to talk about David Deutsch’s philosophies and even hear them on his own, you have to sort of just understand the way David Deutsch thinks about the universe from step one. And I don’t even know where to begin with that. What do you do? You know anything about David Deutsch and his sort of like instinct about knowledge or as a theoretical physicist?
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, let me start. I know why Pinker likes him.
Jay Shapiro
Why does Pinker like him?
Coleman Hughes
Based on what I remember from Enlightenment now, Pinker quotes him in the context of solutions to problems, creating new problems. Yes, which is a Karl Popper idea, actually. OK. Yeah. And that seems like a banality to say it seems sort of like a platitude. But one gets the sense that there is some profundity behind it. That’s it’s like some kind of like axiom. And it seems like a lot of Deutsch isms are like that. Like, if you if you just see the one sentence description, you’re like, oh, that seems right. But like, why is that brilliant? But probably there’s some very deep like mathematical or physics based logic behind his platitudes.
Jay Shapiro
Yeah. More than more than platitudes. And sometimes that’s a great way of putting it. Sometimes you don’t need you don’t need the math or even the physics. They seem like obvious sentences that then have profound implications. Sometimes they’re so obvious that you missed it. Here’s one. A lot of his work is cleaning up the messes that we all are living with and making philosophically in the scientific world and in the moral world and every other world. Two of the really, really big ones that he takes down in a chapter called The Spark, it’s the third chapter of that book, are two things that we take for granted. One is this chemical scum notion to say that we’re just an animal on a typical star and a typical part of the universe and we’re just atoms and we’re just not important. He calls it the principle of mediocrity, which feels very intuitive. And you can almost get some moral sort of flavor to that of like, get over yourself. You’re not such a big deal. The other one is this spaceship Earth statement that has a lot of environmentalism in it of a realizing that we’re an evolved animal and we evolved in this environment and there must be the environment is here to take care of us. The Earth is a sort of life support system for us as an organism. And so if we push too far in either direction, the life support system breaks and then we will all die. And he starts with the principle of mediocrity. He destroys that and takes that down even though it is true from some level. But think of it this way. Knowledge and knowledge creation is the most significant phenomenon in the universe. So picture just like the atoms of a universe and you’re watching some planet from really far away and you just see the atoms moving around and it’s all sort of explainable by completely explainable by the laws of physics if you knew them all. And then suddenly some monumental thing happens like a little ship goes to the moon or the entire planet just transforms itself into a giant computer or something that seems to break the laws of physics like even on Earth oil. It’s like dinosaur blood basically buried deep in the earth suddenly comes up from the bottom and then ends up in all of our cars. The only thing to explain the phenomenon of that you can’t explain it using just physics. You explain it through there must be knowledge there of how to do that thing, which again sounds very plain and simple. Like, of course, there’s knowledge, but it places just on a physical level as a physicist the appearance of knowledge as the most significant phenomenon in the universe. Forget supernova, forget other things. The creation of knowledge and the arrival of knowledge transforms the universe like nothing else. And that immediately places humans or less than that instead of humans, persons, people that have the ability to create that knowledge at the center of a sort of moral universe. So, like, again, it seems like a very basic thing to say. But then the implications become huge and it all it’s I find his book empowering and all of his work very we’ll get to his thoughts on optimism, but just what’s what’s even the word for it.
Jay Shapiro
It’s energizing about our possibilities that corrects, I think what he calls a philosophical pessimism that is just an epidemic in our society of that word. We’re just another animal and we’re not special. In fact, no, we actually are. We have a huge responsibility for that. So I don’t know, like that to your instinct is right. But it’s like a basic statement about like, oh, knowledge is important, but it’s like, wait a minute, think about that and think about that hard and actually make it strange and then start there. So I don’t know. Cool. Yeah, I don’t know what to say about that. So we’ll jump into it because again, this is going to be I’m terrified of this episode. I think I’ve probably already fucked it up. David will probably already correct everything that I’ve said because he’s very precise with his language, which I appreciate. And even the way I was asking him how he would want me to introduce him. And he had a lot of things. But what he ended up saying is this. Let me just play it. Like Karl Popper.
David Deutsch
I don’t really believe in subjects. Right.
Jay Shapiro
So he says one shouldn’t speak in terms of subjects, but in terms of problems. So I can more easily say what I’m interested in rather than what subject that is. Right. So even that is is he’s what problems are you interested? What problems are you trying to solve? Very much. I think one of the reasons Sam Harris likes him a lot is that they agree on the unification of knowledge. And when you go on a college campus and see different departments, it’s sort of a bad habit that we have where knowledge is actually unified at some level. And that’s the real quest and knowledge from one department inevitably and should bleed into other departments. And he thinks that points to evidence of sort of an objective notion of progress and knowledge. Again, we could talk about all those ideas about the reach of explanations in those things. I just have to start playing it and we’ll just have to start talking, I guess. I don’t know. Before we get into this couple, I guess their names are Andre and Leslie in the hypothetical who want to have this deaf child engineered. We’re probably going to spend a lot of time talking about the foundations of morality and how you even approach some of those problems. I’m going to try to frame what I think I understand some of your arguments in your recent book, The Beginning of Infinity, about morality are, is that you guess. I’ll start with this and then clean it up for me. You guess that there are objective truths in the space of morality to be discovered that are maybe just as discoverable fundamentally as something like the atoms in this table between us.
David Deutsch
Yes. And my guess about that has the same status in my mind as my guess that you exist or that I exist. It’s just realism.
Jay Shapiro
Right. And so what is the grounding of that? So like in that book, you seem to try to bind everything through your very expansive definition of explanation. Is that still at the ground of that?
David Deutsch
Yes, it is. And I think the reason for realism that binds all the realisms together in your terms is that the arguments against it are all the same in every field and they are all fallacious in every field. So all of them are like, well, how can you possibly know? How can you possibly know that? In science, the skeptical argument is, well, your theories might seem to work, but how do you know that’s not an error? It’s always possible that you’re mistaken. You could be dreaming. The world could be misleading. There could be a demon out there. And that that works on the biggest level, like you could be completely mistaken about everything, like Descartes tried to try to reason from. Or it could be particular things. You know, how do you know the global warming is happening? And so from the smallest thing to the largest thing. Now, the same is true with philosophical ideas. You know, people say, how can you know what is right and wrong when you can’t see it? But, well, they forget that you can’t see physical facts either. You can you can only see your sense impressions and even those you don’t see for what they are so that they’re only crackles in the nerves. But you never experience those. So everything is behind a structure of explanation. And you can make the argument that explanation in itself is is a conceit is is worthless. And what you should really do is consult the holy book or your feelings or whatever. But those are all mistakes and they are all the same mistake in all these areas in morality, in mathematics as well. There are the intuitionists and so on. It’s all the same mistake. And I’m so I’m a realist in all these areas and all for the same reason.
Jay Shapiro
Right. And that mistake is is usually tied towards some sort of empiricism, instrumentalism mistake.
David Deutsch
If you don’t mind sort of just extract the mistake, the specific mistake in the case of science is empiricism. The mistake in term in, say, morality is it could also be called empiricism. It’s not usually called that, but you might call it scientism or you might call it physics envy. But really, it’s the same thing. I suppose Karl Popper would say they are all striving for foundations for authority that can’t possibly exist. And they assume that without authority, ideas are worthless. Without foundations, they’re worthless. So I reject all authority in regard to ideas and all foundations.
Jay Shapiro
The reason I think this dilemma in particular, if it is a dilemma, I’m really interested in your take in particular, as we started to dance around some of the reasons. This is going to get real messy, I’m sure. Yeah, like all things probably in morality are. So when I when I am thinking about this couple that wants to intentionally select for deafness and bring a bring about a deaf consciousness, whatever that that means. And I think about your arguments in your book. I’m thinking about specifically how you view evidence. And if you don’t mind giving me your sort of description and definition of evidence in the view of sort of your explanation, because it’s going to get messy. It feels to me that I would guess that you would be you would guess that this is a immoral action to take because it would be denying someone access to a certain kind of evidence in the universe by denying them the sensory experience of hearing. But that that might be too simplistic of a reading of your view of evidence.
David Deutsch
Well, I’m personally revolted by the idea, but I wouldn’t jump to saying that it’s absolutely immoral, let alone advocating that it be illegal. But, well, you’ll see when we get into it more that I think this is a complicated issue involving more than just theories of morality.
Jay Shapiro
As far as I understand it, this is what I try to do a lot on the show is I misunderstand it and then you the expert tells me that I’ve misunderstood it. As far as I understand your view of conjecture, this is it’s something like we notice a phenomenon in the universe and we conjecture an explanation that would well, yes, we notice a problem, a problem.
David Deutsch
And the problem is in our minds now it may relate to the universe. Okay. A problem is a conflict between ideas. So, for example, we notice something and we can’t think why it happens and it and it seems weird. And so that’s a conflict between what we think we saw and what we think ought to have been there. So that’s a conflict. Now, if we also think that that’s interesting or important or fruitful or whatever, we’ll pursue it further by making conjectures and conjectures are always of the form that one or other of the conflicting ideas is either false or inadequate. So it could be or they could both they could both be false and inadequate. So and what we’re trying to do and that would be an error then in our conception of the world and what we’re trying to do always is correct errors by making conjectures that don’t have the problem if they replace or augment our ideas. They the resulting structure won’t have the problem. Right. That we thought we saw. Sometimes we think we see a problem, but the answer is that it wasn’t a problem and so on. Right.
Jay Shapiro
And so you bring up things like the problem of seasons happening.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jay Shapiro
In your local environment. And then the act of conjecturing a explanation that would solve this problem.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jay Shapiro
In that instance, is an act of what you would call just pure creativity.
David Deutsch
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Jay Shapiro
And then is where this notion of evidence comes in. Because if I have a conjecture, you bring up something like the gods did it with some elaborate story versus let’s say you have a conjecture being like, yes, I think the earth has an axial tilt.
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, there’s the conjecture and then there’s criticism usually even before the evidence. OK. So some some conjectures can be rejected just for example, just because they don’t solve the problem. You think they will solve the problem. They say, oh, well, but even if the conjecture is true, the problem is unchanged. So that didn’t address the problem. But then the conjectures that survive this criticism, then there is evidence. If it’s if it’s a scientific matter, if it’s a matter of what the physical world is like, then we can look for evidence in the hope that it will refute one of the competing ideas that that still doesn’t solve the problem. Because we’ve still got to conjecture replacement for it. But if we if we if we have two ideas and it refutes one of them, then we’re home.
Jay Shapiro
Right. So like so to use the seasons example, because I think that was probably a good one to extrapolate what can you talk about? What would constitute evidence then if to decide in your in your definition, which conjecture or explanation is a good one versus a bad one?
David Deutsch
First, there’s a problem, which is ancient people. The seasons and the weather were very important to them, but they didn’t have anything in their worldview that indicated why one season morphed into another. So they wanted to understand it as many ways as possible for the purpose of preparing for seasons and crops and whatever. And they realized that there’s nothing in the phenomenon of winter that seems to foreshadow that spring will come. So, you know, sometimes it was late and so it was a bit terrifying. It’s something they wanted to understand. Also, by the time they got philosophical, it’s a very interesting problem. So what is it that’s different at the end of the winter from the beginning? What has happened there? As I say in my book, obvious solutions are that what’s different is that there is someone causing the winter and they’ve changed their mind or that they’ve achieved their purpose for the winter. And then they go on to another purpose, just like humans do. The trouble with that, as I say in my book, is that it doesn’t really explain anything. People often say it’s not testable, but that theory is testable because it implies that seasons are the same all over the world. And so it could be refuted by making an expedition to somewhere else in the world and seeing that the seasons are not in sync. What’s really wrong with that explanation is nothing to do with evidence. It’s due with the fact that it could easily be replaced by a completely different causality, different gods or not gods or whatever. And therefore, if you did have evidence, even if you did have evidence against it, you could easily dismiss it by just changing the details of the theory. The details aren’t implicated in the explanation. So the true explanation, on the other hand, which is the tilt of the axis of the earth, tells you exactly what’s different about the end of the winter from the beginning. And namely that the earth has moved around in its orbit around the sun, but the axis hasn’t changed its orientation. That theory is not only testable, but even before you conceive of any test, it’s hard to change. There’s only one way that a theory like that could explain the seasons. And if it made the wrong prediction, it couldn’t be fixable.
Jay Shapiro
You know, you know, I think would be I’m trying to take this to your definition of person or people. Yes, because I think that’s what I’m trying to like dance around to get to is this notion. If I’m getting if I’m remembering it correctly, it’s as a universal constructor.
David Deutsch
If that’s correct, a universal explainer is more relevant to the morality problem.
Jay Shapiro
Right. And this child that Andre and Leslie are requesting to be brought into the world, I’m wondering at what sense would you answer it some sense? If you remove all of the sensory input organs of a organism, at what point would it cease to be able to be a person in that definition? Does that question even?
David Deutsch
Yes, yes, yes, it does. So I don’t think that the issue of what is a person and what has rights should be decided by the kind of legalistic argument of what we shall deem to be a person. What is a person is a matter of fact. It’s an entity that is capable of constructing explanations to solve problems. And whether a thing can do that or not is a fact. It’s not always possible to determine that fact, but that’s a different issue. That’s an issue of like what you would frame the law to say, because laws have to be framed in terms of determinable things. But the morality, the metaphysics, the morality of the situation is about what the entity can do. Or to be exact, a person is not a body. A person is a mind. It’s a program. It’s a configuration of a brain that is the person. If I if I lose an arm in an accident, I may become a different person. As a result, I may become a resentful person or whatever. But I don’t become any less a person if I lose an arm. And if I grafted on another arm, I wouldn’t become any more of a person if I had three or four arms or no matter how many I had. So a person is a mind, which is a bit of software, not a body, which is a bit of hardware.
Jay Shapiro
And so to play the amputation game that you started with yourself, if I start amputating senses, at what point would that in your definition of person remove your?
David Deutsch
None. Even if I’m even if I’m totally in a sensory deprivation tank, you would still be able to create explanations.
Jay Shapiro
Yes. Can you explain that?
David Deutsch
How that would be? Well, the simplest case is if I’m just thinking about things that have happened to me. But even all that I hope will happen to me like being let out. But even if I’ve never seen the outside and grew up, as it were, in a sensory deprivation tank, I could still think, for example, I might be a pure mathematician and I might think about purely mathematical concepts. Now, there is it’s I think it’s unknown whether a newborn baby actually does this or whether culture has any input into the creative ability. Now, I think it’s plausible that the creative ability starts before birth. And I also think it’s plausible that it starts sometime after birth. We just don’t know. And doing any experiments on this would be horrendously immoral. Right. So we won’t know until we have a comprehensive theory of how creativity works, which we don’t.
Jay Shapiro
One of the challenges with Deutsch, I pointed this out before, is that you read a David Deutsch book and you suddenly can’t talk to anybody because your definition of these seemingly mundane words like knowledge, explanation, person becomes so precise. And I think accurately defined by him that you just become paralyzed of like starting at square one of like this is what person means and should mean. This is what explanation means. So I realize I’m going to probably have to do that here because I’m lost even listening to it.
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, it seems like his definitions are really his. Is he is he prescriptive in the sense of saying you ought to adopt my definitions because they’re either getting at some objective truth or is he just doing what good philosophers do and defining his terms so that we cannot have semantic debates?
Jay Shapiro
Well, he’s certainly defining his terms so we could get around the semantic debates. But I think he’s even more precisely pointing out that the terms being used. Here’s an example empiricism. Empiricism sounds like a good word, but he takes it literally, meaning empiricism. Like he puts these at the end of all of his chapters, his like summaries and definitions. I’m sort of looking at some of them here and I don’t quite have the empiricism one open in front of me at the moment. But it’s he calls it a mistake. It’s a mistaken philosophy that basically says all knowledge is derived from direct experience of your senses. And you could you could almost say like, well, he’s just being too literal here. Like, of course, you can’t get that from your senses. That one I understand because that’s commonly used to describe David Hume’s attitude and some others. You know, so that’s an empiricist.
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, that definition I think is more widely used. And I think he’s hewing to the typical way of understanding that word. But with like person, person. Yeah. Let’s see what other words did you use here?
Jay Shapiro
I mean, even so explanation. Let me give you some of his like what a good explanation versus a bad explanation is. And we use the seasons example there, though there’s other ones. Good explanation is an explanation that is difficult to vary and still explains the thing that it purports to explain. A bad explanation is one that, of course, is easy to vary while still explaining the thing it purports to explain. So he has a thing about watching like a magician do a conjuring trick and like watching the cup and balls or whatever. And let’s say you’re watching it and based on your theory of the universe and physics and whatever else, he’s about to remove a cup and you expect a ball to be there. And then it’s not. This is what he calls a problem. Right. So he defines that to a problem very literally is like conflict and ideas. Something must be wrong here about your theory. So then you need to conjecture an explanation for it. And let’s say you conjecture. Well, it’s magic. It’s actual magic. That actually does explain why the ball is not there. But it’s so easy to vary because if the ball was there, you could also say it’s magic still. And then I or even more sort of fair conjecture that he brings up rather than magic is something like you could say the magician did something. That’s true. That actually explains it. But it’s so easy to vary that you can use it to explain, again, the opposite of itself. And then if I explain or I conjecture like I think what’s happening is he’s palming the ball at the moment that he switches it. And it’s so fast that we can’t see it. I have a whole explanation that’s very specific. So it’s hard to vary. If I vary anything, then you can it’s going to not explain what it’s going to explain. And it might be a good one or a bad one. And then we have this thing called evidence. And as he says, even before I’ve been in sometimes a culture of criticism of even just logically talking through and different modes of criticism to figure out which conjecture may be a good theory. So even that is like a long way to say something that might seem obvious about good explanations versus bad explanations. But he grounds the jewel of the universe and we’ll get there later. But I should start with it now so people don’t get too lost. The jewel of the universe is the quest for good explanations. And a person really is borrowing the person definition there for more of the Aristotle thing. Think less human and think more the mind and almost a phenomenological thinker. I find him to be of the capabilities of a person is what defines a person and the capabilities is an entity or in his version of software, whatever it is that has the ability to create new explanations.
Coleman Hughes
All of that makes sense to me. Yeah, I think I did it right. I like the way that he frames it. And you summarize it. The one thing I’m looking out for as we as we hear the you know, the rest of his thoughts is where the concept of suffering, well-being comes in to his picture of morality.
Jay Shapiro
Yeah, I think I’ll have to sort of drag his ideas into the realm of sort of more traditional moral philosophy and see if they stand. He might be even opposed to me doing it. We’ll try and we’ll get there later. I agree with you. One thing that is also maybe a bit frustrating about which not only is the language sort of like you need a primer of like learning basic words again, but it also the applicability of it is profound at the same time as it’s very messy and complicated. And so I don’t even know if in the end we’re going to get there. I think we’ll get a specific framework of how we could answer this question. But given the knowledge of the question or the hypothetical posed about the deaf child, which we didn’t even talk about really at all in that segment is almost unknowable. So we’ll get there with it. I wanted to also with like the another thing to keep in mind that’s so profound about him about the philosophies and philosophies of science that he calls all mistakes and making all the same mistake. The anti realism one is he would he calls himself a fallibilist and fallibilism, which is really just an attitude and a commitment to always knowing that you could be wrong and your theories are incomplete, which you’re always in the state of and rather than empiricism, which would have sort of a different kind of skepticism. But a it’s a quest for certainty rather than a quest for knowledge. So something like empiricism and almost all these mistakes are a quest for certainty. And when you reject certainty that you will certainly have the right theory of the universe, whether it’s gravity or morality or aesthetics or anything else, is is not to deny some people make this mistake not to deny that there is no such thing as progress. There’s something I think you talk about a lot like just because you don’t know the right answer doesn’t mean you don’t have objective progress along the way. And you can’t know the right answer. But just to even pause that the name of his book is Beginning of Infinity. And he discovers, I think, through thinking these things out a lot of different kinds of beginnings of infinity. But that’s one of my favorite ones of and he uses this analogy, which isn’t original to him of the Infinity Hotel, which gets very crazy and mathematical and above my head. But there’s a way to there’s a way to just start with it. So think again of any question where you cannot be certain and which is everything in this attitude of fallibilism. So even if you have a great theory in hand that’s doing a great explanatory job of whatever it purports to explain, but it might have problems and you are open to that at all times. That that’s a kind of infinity. And so imagine picture you’re in to grok the notion of infinity, which is just fun to do.
Jay Shapiro
Picture yourself in a hotel that has an infinite number of rooms. So a corridor that that is just infinitely long. And you wake up and you’re in a room and you and you’re going to go out and open the door in this hotel and look at the number on the room. They’re just numbered sequentially. Let’s say whole numbers from zero to infinity. And you look at the number on your door, no matter what that number is, if you look to your right, let’s say that’s the direction of infinity. It’s infinitely far to the highest numbered room, which doesn’t exist. And you can see the other way. And theoretically, you could see room number one at the start. So no matter where you are in whatever room you wake up in, you will be infinitely closer to room. The first room, the beginning of the hotel than the end of the hotel. So no matter where you are and how much progress you’ve made on any question, you are literally always at The Beginning of Infinity. And he discovers this sort of truth of The Beginning of Infinity and progress and knowledge everywhere. But this is not today, which is actually rather a lovely and liberating truth to discover because there’s always work to do, literally always work to do. I think this is from Karl Popper of the definition of progress is replacing old problems with new ones or better problems, as it were. So again, I’m terrified still of this episode. I feel like I’m trying to weave through Deutsch’s definitions. And I still and I’ll struggle you’ll hear the entire time of bringing it back to the deaf child. And at some point, I sort of just abandoned it and I’m like, just tell me what you think. But I don’t know. I don’t know. Ask me a question. I can’t I can’t like play the part of David Deutsch as well as he does, but I’m very protective of him.
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I mean, his ideas are very compelling. I think nothing has struck me as wrong so far. Yeah. And at the same time, I’m struggling to see how he applies his idea, how his idea should make me think differently or in any particular way about morality.
Jay Shapiro
Yeah. I think they will with optimism. Let me see if this makes sense to put here. I’m going to have to at least I’m going to have a couple of weeks to edit this one because I’m going to be in Peru trying to edit it with me. Let me put it this way. Yeah. To be honest, Coleman, it’s like his idea. I’ve been reading it all day. His ideas of morality are so fucking tricky. And as a moral realist, because he’s just an everything realist, he’s just guessing. So he doesn’t know the answers here. And he even calls himself out at some point in his life. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I think I’m a foundationalist and the other days I’m not like he doesn’t he hasn’t solved the answer of morality here. But he, I’ll put it this way, his definition of optimism. Another thing to really keep on board in the David Deutsch vernacular is his definition of optimism is all evil is due to lack of knowledge. Which, as he says, is not even really a definition of optimism, but an explanation for failure. So why something is failing is just you don’t know how you don’t have the knowledge yet of how to make it succeed. Again, it sounds very banal. Like, what is he really saying there? But think about it harder. And it’s profound. So the distance between you doing something, anything on any scale that doesn’t break the laws of physics, which we’re trying to figure out, is doable. The only thing is the knowledge of how to do it. So acquiring that knowledge is all you need, whether that’s turning the entire solar system into a space station that nothing about that breaks the laws of physics. Nothing. But obviously there’s a lot of knowledge that you need to do in order to get there. And calling it evil to not be able to do it is again has a moral flavor to it. But I think one that he feels comfortable using because maybe the obviousness of it. But also a little bit lost.
Coleman Hughes
Where does evil come into that?
Jay Shapiro
Yeah. So like, let me an example of the Black Plague killed a whole like a third of the population of Europe when it happened. Right. Or let’s even let’s imagine a civilization that got wiped out by a by a plague, which happened.
Jay Shapiro / Coleman Hughes
And may yet happen. And what’s that one? Coronavirus. Oh, it may yet happen. Oh, yeah.
Jay Shapiro
Well, let’s hope not. But so let’s say it does. If the coronavirus wipes us out, you could tell a lot of explanations of why it happened. But this but the truest one or a very true one, I would say that that would say is we didn’t have the knowledge of how to stop it. Again, sounds very banal. But we didn’t have the knowledge of how to stop it.
Coleman Hughes
And if we did, the only thing I’m confused about there is where does the role of intention come in? So what if someone wants to wipe out the human race, has the knowledge to stop coronavirus, but doesn’t stop it because they enjoy seeing. They enjoy. Yeah, yeah.
Jay Shapiro
And he does point to that there are enemies of civilization. I think at some point I will say David Deutsch hasn’t solved the foundational problem of morality. And he’ll admit that later in this interview. So I think I think you have the bootstraps that he finds are let’s call it scientific and mathematical proofs of progress. What he would call progress. And guessing really guessing that there are I mean he would I don’t know if he would call them guesses but aesthetic and moral objective progress as well. I don’t know if he solved that he’ll call that a bootstrap at some point that you know what is to say that we ought to continue progressing versus we ought to just intentionally stop progressing. If a person is something that can create explanatory knowledge and explanatory knowledge is the only thing that can create let’s call it physical progress. Stopping the asteroid that comes to hit if there’s if there’s an asteroid that comes to hit us tomorrow and it wipes us out. The only thing that stopped it from happening or allowed it to happen is that we didn’t have the knowledge to prevent it from happening. And you might say well what about the intention? What if someone says intentionally I want that thing to hit us. Would they be immoral? The conjecture there is that there is such a thing as moral knowledge or even political will knowledge that that would also that would also explain it might be a bit of a cop out but buy it for now that there is a kind of moral knowledge that we didn’t have or the person who intentionally wanted it to happen that didn’t yet have that then caused that evil to happen. So yeah the word evil has a maybe it’s a bit of a cheat. I don’t know. But it does have a moral quality that I think holds up there that you don’t have to take too much on board that an asteroid hitting us and wiping us out and ending the only instance that we know of in the universe of explanatory knowledge creation to be erased would be a kind of evil. Yeah. I don’t know if that got us there. That helps. Yeah. I’m curious to see where he goes. Me too. Because I don’t really remember. In the hypothetical and we haven’t even really concretely talked about it directly that much yet. What’s lurking around it for me is you know we’re talking about Andre and Leslie deciding to remove a sensory sort of experience from their child. What’s lurking around this is what if we flipped it in a way of imagine a near future where we could you know easily raise the IQ or intelligence or something of every you know unborn child with a simple pill or something in that world would it be immoral to not to not do that something as I guess what I’m getting at is like is there a right and inherent birthright as a person to have as much qualia as you possibly can.
David Deutsch
So this is where I think the answer to that sort of question. It can’t be found entirely in morality. Okay. Let’s just step back a bit. Rights theory of rights is an approximation to morality and so long as you’re thinking in terms of rights it’s only persons that can have rights and rights depend on choices. They depend on the choices that a person makes so I may have a right to emigrate. That doesn’t mean I have to emigrate. I have a right to free speech. That doesn’t mean I have to say things. So all rights properly conceived in my view are rights to choose something to choose between something. So any rights that this deaf or hearing child may have are to do with that child’s choices. You might say okay but since I’ve said the fetus the embryo can’t make choices so it doesn’t have any rights so it doesn’t matter what you do to it. That’s that’s not the case. That’s not the case. You can easily harm someone deprive them of rights before they are born not because the entity before they are born has the rights but because they will have them. So for example if you put poison into a hospital crib that you know a baby will be put into once it is born but the baby hasn’t even been conceived yet. And you know this crib isn’t going to be used except for this one baby has maybe a rather contrived example but you can imagine that kind of example. If you do something is going to harm a person doesn’t matter whether the person’s been born yet. If you reasonably reasonably believe or should believe that the person that there will be a person who is harmed by that and who doesn’t want to be. Because the harm is always about whether they want it or not. Then it’s immoral to do that harm and then you run into the problem that different people want different things. So and that’s why I said it’s not it’s not that there isn’t a moral answer to be to be found for this question that is purely within morality. So with the deafness it depends what this child would want now not even when he when the child is a baby. It’s when the child expresses an opinion. So suppose that this was a common practice and suppose that that it always happened let’s take a simple case. It always happened that when children of this kind grow up they deeply resent it. Suppose all of them do suppose 99 percent of them do they deeply resent it. Then I think it wouldn’t make sense to say that they couldn’t sue their parents for having done this to them just as if they had done it on the on the previous day. It makes no difference if the parents are in this situation where most people deeply resent this having been done to them. The parents should reasonably expect this to happen and therefore they shouldn’t do something that they reasonably expect the person won’t consent to.
David Deutsch
Similarly if only one percent of the people who this is done to resent it then it’s very hard to say that this should be wrong unless something else has been done to that person that deprives them of something else not just hearing but reason. The ability to choose. So and that is again a matter of fact whether they have been not always easy to detect from the outside. If you look at if the social worker comes around and is asked the question are these parents brainwashing the child to say later that he consents are they brainwashing him or are they merely bringing him up in their culture. And if they’re bringing him up in that culture is it an evil culture. Right. Or is it a reasonable culture even though it is now because morality is objective. All these questions have answers and because. Facts are objective all the factual issues also have answers. They may not be easy to find but. They have answers by the way. When I said until the child is grown up I don’t mean that younger children don’t have rights that they do have rights. The issue is what they want not what they have the maturity to know or whatever. Right.
Jay Shapiro
So you know just to go even deeper under it when you brought up reasoning I think that’s probably where there’s like a big nugget here. Reason. That’s probably like access to reason.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jay Shapiro
Maybe the most fundamental person right.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jay Shapiro
Of the universe. And I mean is that like a fair statement to assess. I guess I’m trying to get at it so much of your if I’m extracting it seems in your work you rest sort of the jewel of the universe on systems of error detection and correction.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jay Shapiro
Which I guess is an approximation of something like reason.
David Deutsch
Yes reason is the is the ultimate in that. Yes.
Jay Shapiro
How does one detect an error in morality and you’re saying the answers may not necessarily be in morality itself. What if what if we did stumble upon an island where they did this to every child.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jay Shapiro
This culture was I don’t know producing beautiful progress in all of these other fields would that somehow answer the question that this must then be a moral practice to make all the children deaf.
David Deutsch
Well yes it would provided that the culture there was not keeping the knowledge of hearing from their members. If they were a thriving culture in other ways and were open to the knowledge of other cultures then it’s hard to see how that would be immoral. After all there are many decisions that parents make have permanent effects or long lasting effects on their children. If you if you decide to bring up your child in Albania with Albanian as the child’s mother tongue then the child will be will have to learn another language before they have access to most of the world’s culture. In fact to be exact English now it is not reasonable to conclude that bringing up a child not speaking English is immoral. However bringing up a child unable to learn English for some reason certainly is immoral.
Jay Shapiro
Because this would deny them.
David Deutsch
This inability would be some irrational thing installed in their in their thinking.
Jay Shapiro
Right. And this again to sort of use your language would be if you’re cutting off potential access to streams of knowledge or treasure chests of knowledge you’re just as parents or as a society you’re cutting it off you’re making it just forbidden. Is this.
David Deutsch
I think it’s more access to criticism. There’s an infinite amount of knowledge so we always whatever we do we only have access to a to a infinitesimal portion of it. But if you’re deprived of the means of criticism then that is the irrational thing and therefore the immoral thing.
Jay Shapiro
And so if you were to bring back one of your earlier thought experiments if you were just in a sensory deprivation tank forever and you had an idea or a conjecture just in the magic of your own mind that could be criticized or refuted or confirmed by the evidence of hearing something but you were unable to hear anything in there. Yes. This is an immoral situation from some or maybe in your view evil. I was sort of saving that word but in your definition of optimism this is an evil from the view from nowhere.
David Deutsch
Yes I think I would need a bit more knowledge about how I got in this time.
Jay Shapiro
It’s not me. But if it was your parents I mean let’s say as Andre and Leslie are saying in their argument of like we love our deaf culture and we want our child to be.
David Deutsch
Yes. So are they depriving me of the knowledge that there is an outside or similarly have they imbued me with an ideology that makes me irrationally unable to consent to contact with the outside. Then in either of those cases they’re doing something immoral. And it’s hard to imagine that somebody who was literally growing up in a sensory deprivation tank could thrive in the way that you imagine that those people on the island could thrive because they wouldn’t have access to empirical evidence and they wouldn’t have access to for example language. Some people say that that you’re not fully human unless you have some language. I think that can’t be quite right because children learning language are evidently doing something highly creative. Probably one of the most creative things that people ever do is learning their first language. So they must have been I think I mean we don’t have a theory of creativity but I suppose that children must be fully people long before they actually have language so that that theory about language can’t be literally right. But it might be that being deprived of language eventually deprives you of all means of being productive being happy.
Coleman Hughes
When he said irrational and therefore immoral that that was interesting because it’s not an association that I have in my brain. Yeah. Straightforwardly at least.
Jay Shapiro
Yeah, let me try to I’ll tell you a story from his book. The other thing about David Deutsch is that he’s a he’s actually an incredibly beautiful writer like he might sound overly academic or sort of pedantic in some ways in these interviews. His writing is actually like gorgeous like brings me to tears at certain points and a story from his book about irrational versus rational memes. He will skip this over for now but he goes from the gene to the meme and he has these things called irrational memes versus rational memes and he sort of splits societies into static societies versus open societies. This is where he’s getting this idea in that conversation where he would say a static society probably is an immoral society. This is a utopian society, a society that feels like it has certainty. It stops a culture of criticism. It hasn’t adopted fallibilism where it thinks it might always be wrong. And he talks about Easter Island. And he compares David Attenborough going to Easter Island and Jacob Bronowski going to Easter Island who was sort of a precursor to David Attenborough as a naturalist. And they describe it in almost opposite ways where Easter Island we all know from the big heads right and I don’t know. Oh it’s the one with the really big heads the big stone heads you know. Do you not know the big stone heads on Easter Island? No. This is worse than the Harry Potter thing. Yeah you must know this. Hold on. It’s like look I just Googled Easter Island. Those things?
Coleman Hughes
No. Nothing. Searching my memory.
Jay Shapiro
Oh my god. Well Easter Island is famous. It’s like in the middle of sort of nowhere. It’s a very very isolated island and it’s famous really only for this for having these giant.
Coleman Hughes
Who built those?
Jay Shapiro
Well this is the thing. So a tribe that was there and I don’t know all the history of it that no longer exists. And so we come across the civilization with these huge heads and everyone has these theories for it. And for a long time it was a mystery of how these heads even got to the place. They’re all like sort of I think they’re on the coast looking out. And we assume this is like a religious tradition. A lot of anthropologists have sort of tried to get into it and they needed to use timber and wood to get the heads sort of roll them to where they were going to need to go. They actually have bodies too which go deep into the ground which is weird. That was like recently discovered. It’s awesome. So Jacob Bronowski goes there in The Ascent of Man which was a really cool documentary series. Very like cosmos and precursor to all the awesome nature documentaries happening now. And describes it as sort of the evidence of a static society which died we think died of like rapid geological change. Their environment changed very quickly from different forces and they died off. And apparently while they’re dying off they’re like cutting down trees which apparently they also needed to live. Cutting down trees and putting these heads up and repeating the same thing over and over and then they die. Rather than so it’s almost a caution. He describes it as a cautionary tale of a society which stopped trying to find new knowledge and new answers and clearly had the wrong answer versus a society, an open society that would be continually trying to discover new knowledge of how to solve the problem. So David Attenborough goes there and has sort of a romanticizing of their culture and as sort of a victim of global climate change and a cautionary tale of what might happen to us. And the lesson seems to be that he’s delivering is almost totally opposite of Jacob which like Bronowski is telling you like this is a culture. He literally calls it like these heads as like the film strips winding down of the same thing over and over again of a society that has hit a static society and is suicidal versus a society that would continue like us. We would not do this. Hopefully we would continue to try to find new knowledge to solve the problem and hopefully acquire it. And they almost had sort of the exact opposite description or prescription of the lessons from Easter Island. That’s in a chapter I think it was called Unsustainable and it has it’s a surprising punchline of the book where it gets to almost the view of sustainability. There’s a conception of the idea of sustainability. It works very well in the environmental realm of this perfect balance where we sort of get all the resources that we should be getting out of the earth and sort of stay there like level sort of forever.
Jay Shapiro
Like we’re in some perfect balance with this ecosystem that apparently has given us just enough and we sort of stay there. And if we take too much, we’ll break the life support system. Of course, it’s totally wrong. And then it’s also just suicidal because we would just literally be sitting there forever, not creating new knowledge, waiting for the next asteroid to come and wipe us out or the next epidemic that we don’t know how to solve or whatever it is. And he counters it with almost the exact opposite definition of sustainability, which is sustainable growth, which he calls infinite growth. So it’s almost like the sustainability means growing forever. That’s sustainable or is sustainable sort of reaching some balance and never growing ever. So the Easter Island story in his view is the wrong description of sustainability. They had reached some sort of sustainability level plateau and sort of a utopia and died because their environment changed because we do not live in a life support system. The earth is constantly trying to kill us. So I don’t know if that explains any of his irrational versus rational. And then he plugs in the word. Maybe he uses it as a synonym there for moral, that the open societies are moral versus the static societies, which are not.
Coleman Hughes
I buy that. So, I mean, I think bringing it back to the dilemma. I think his analogy to learning English was a good one. Like, you know, there’s nothing immoral about bringing up your kid in Albania by choice. But there is something immoral about pushing the button that prevents them from ever learning English or Chinese or another language that would open up much of the world’s knowledge to him. That’s about the only line that he’ll draw for morality, I think, is this mode of unplugging the ability. He calls Albanian a disability later. So if we have any Albanian listeners, we’ve lost them. Yeah. Sorry. Whoops. Yeah. I mean, I don’t think you even need that analogy, though, to see the argument for making your child deaf being wrong. I mean, you could just observe the fact that I don’t know anyone born with all five senses working who chooses to voluntarily make themselves deaf. Right. Or walks around with noise canceling headphones on 24 hours a day or, you know, gets like their I don’t even know what part of the ear would be. Yeah. Like a cochlear or something, whatever, like just gets the part of their ears that hear removed voluntarily. I’ve never heard it happen once. Right. On the other hand, you know, I’ve seen people who are deaf or partly deaf go to great length to restore any amount of hearing. Yeah. And that’s the arrow of, you know, attempting to make oneself not deaf. It only goes in that direction. It doesn’t go in the opposite, which suggests that there is something desirable from the point of view of human nature about having that sense. Yeah. And that’s probably enough to get you to the place where, you know, this should not be. This is an immoral act. And no doubt from the parents point of view. I mean, there’s also the fact that if you can’t hear, you can still learn many aspects of deaf culture. Sorry, if you can hear, you can still learn sign language. You can still learn to read lips and whatnot. But you’ll also have access to the rest of the world. And when your parents die, which will presumably happen, you know, towards the middle of your life, you will still be able to have access to the rest of the world. And, you know, if you’re deaf, then once your parents die, the whole rationale for them having made you deaf basically disappears. Yeah. Which is like their connection with you and being all being deaf. Now they’re gone and you’re just deaf and alone in the world. Yeah. Not literally, but, you know.
Jay Shapiro
I try to push even a little bit in the next section about sort of the rights of the parents over the child. I can’t get him to budge almost like at all on that. And you heard he’s stringent about the autonomy of choice of the individual, even to the point of parents and the choices they make for their kids. Yeah. And you heard he always just grounds it all as far as he can in just access to criticism, which is, again, another one of those like simple ideas, but is almost, if you think about hard rather profound where in his mind the sort of mortal sin of the universe would be you come up with a theory, you conjecture an idea for a problem that you’ve encountered in the world. And you are unable to you are you are cut off from the access to criticism of it, which is actually sort of amazing. It’s like it’s like, again, sort of a beautiful again picture of The Beginning of Infinity idea. You are you have an idea and you’re in that hotel and you walk out and you you’re at the end. There’s no there’s no one who can improve it. And because you’re cut off from it, it’s almost like you cannot escape the hotel. You don’t know what room you’re in. That’s sort of the trap that he’s trying to avoid. He doesn’t quite find it, even though, again, we all find this repulsive moral idea. He doesn’t as long as those conditions are met, he doesn’t even really kind of want to use the word immoral. And this idea I brought up of imagining an island or a society where there’s like all kinds of other progress happening and they’re doing this to every kid. He latches on to because he doubts that it can exist. But if it did, it kind of would win the argument because he’s he’s again guessing and noticing the links between moral progress and all kinds of other progress. That if all the other things were progressing in aesthetic progress and scientific progress and all kinds of explanations and they were intentionally making themselves deaf, he would be forced to kind of carry that link with him. But maybe that is also a moral version of progress. And so, yeah, he doubts it can exist. And as you pointed out, it almost certainly isn’t the case. But if those conditions were met, he would he would revise. So it is it is a bit of a you know, he sticks to his first principle of openness to criticism and fallibilism. As long as you have that, then what’s also obvious here and I think I’ll call it out is totalitarian religious regimes are static societies because they cut off criticism. I would call any actually conception of a moral God a totalitarian philosophy because it cuts off criticism. If you know the mind of God, if you think you found the answer, this is no longer beginning of infinity. You are you are you are cut off. So it is a static philosophy. And I think irrational one and suicidal one. But maybe that’s a bit of a different conversation. But it’s all it’s all related.
Jay Shapiro
I don’t know. Also, you should know Easter Island. I’m actually I’m like flabbergasted that you don’t. There was there was a cartoon called The Critic before your time as well. Jon Lovitz played the voice of the critic. OK, you don’t know any of these references. This entire show has been like us missing each other’s references of pop culture. Generational tension. Yeah. Anyway, there was a kid with an Easter Island head in that cartoon and it was very funny. If anyone knows the critic or remembers the critic, go look it up on YouTube. Probably all the jokes are like totally not PC now. Anyway, continue it. Is there an argument to be made that depriving someone or a person of a sense that is likely to confuse them can actually help them in a way? I mean, I’m trying to give the parents of this. I also find what they’re trying to do rather revolting, but I have trouble actually coming up with a coherent argument against it. If their argument is is saying like, you know, hearing will only bring you trouble in this world by not hearing you actually are, you know, welcomed into this magical community where the qualia of not hearing and just speaking in sign or communicating in sign language is somehow better than that. So you can have the knowledge that other people out there might hear, but it will only bring you bring you harm by doing it. Is there any like rational argument for cutting off some sources of senses?
David Deutsch
Well, as soon as you say, as soon as you express this in the form of cutting off, that implies that there’s some obstacle being put there rather than the assent to the truth of the proposition. I mean, if it’s true, if it’s true that the deaf people culture is superior, then why should one have to cut anything off? Suppose there were a reversible way of doing this. I understand that in real life, many forms of deafness are reversible and some parents object to using those. So that’s a kind of converse of the question you asked. And there again, there’s a difference between not availing yourself of a possibility, which is what all of us do all the time, and being prevented from doing so. Now, if you’re prevented from doing so, and the argument is, well, that person wouldn’t have availed themselves of it anyway. That’s a matter of fact, whether they would or not. Again, might be hard to ascertain that fact. So you’d use tangential evidence.
Jay Shapiro
Is it fair to I’m trying to summarize this in unfair sentences, I guess. But is it fair to say something like there is a mandatory right to make mistakes?
David Deutsch
Well, that’s certainly true. I mean, it’s impossible not to make mistakes. But it shall we say it is forcibly preventing someone from making a mistake is a wrong. Right. Right.
Jay Shapiro
Which sounds almost counterintuitive, like especially as parents. If you have a child who you know is making a mistake, let’s say Andre and Leslie are right in some in some way. And but preventing their child from coming to the truth that being deaf is somehow better than hearing is this.
David Deutsch
So, yes. So turn it around. Even if they’re right, it’s still wrong for them to do it against the child’s will. Right. I mean, you know, I think a lot of things that are conventionally done in our society, like making children go to school are wrong for exactly this reason.
Jay Shapiro
Hmm. Can you say more about that one? I mean, people might like the alarm bells. I mean, there’s something amazing about that sentence that even if they’re right, they’re wrong. And if we could.
David Deutsch
Well, this is the paradox of democracy, the paradox of liberty. We came to understand really, really late in the history of the human species after several hundred thousand years of getting it wrong, that that there is no authority in regard to truth. If you’re going to impose a prohibition on making mistakes, you need an authority for what is is or isn’t a mistake. And there is no such thing. All systems that that purport to have authority, the purport to have authority in regard to ideas also need to be authoritarian in regard in politically, socially, and so on. And therefore, that idea is inherently tyrannical. And in fact, all tyrannies arise that way. So it’s not just a small thing or a marginal issue. This is this is what reason and progress are all about.
Jay Shapiro
So the parents in this case are little mini tyrants in their own in their own way.
David Deutsch
As Thomas says, it is a tyranny. But like all tyrannies, it satisfies a genuine human need. And I would add perversely. So these people, if I say that these deaf parents are doing wrong in a particular case, I don’t mean to contradict the idea that they are well meaning, that they think they’re doing good. But because that morality is objective, it’s a matter of moral fact, whether they are actually doing good or not. And one can argue about this and apply criticism.
Jay Shapiro
And to bring that again, like in your how are you measuring again that objective? Good. Is it I guess we’ve been dancing around that of like access to criticism.
David Deutsch
So destroying the means of correcting errors. Right. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I think that that is the only moral law. Then the rest of the time, I think that that’s foundationalism. That’s that’s trying to set up a foundation for morality, which can’t exist either. There are there are only ways of criticizing existing moral theories. But certainly it is a very big deal to destroy the means of correcting errors. Right.
Jay Shapiro
And so I was I was actually looking for this morning in your book and couldn’t find the passage. It was actually annoying me. So cut this part out. But if I’m remembering correctly, somewhere in The Beginning of Infinity, you in one of your very many deep dives, sort of trying to get to the foundation of moral truths of the universe, it was something like. So I’ve always tried to bridge the is ought problem and we’ll try to do it here. I’ve always tried to do it even I know logically it’s impossible. But in order to do anything, I think we have to try to start building a bridge. I’ve always been attracted to the way to do it using Carl Sagan, my my one of my favorite thinkers and his one of his famous observations of we are a way for the universe to know itself, which was one of these poetic expressions, which when you really think about it deeply is actually just a lovely scientific observation. There’s no there’s no more poetry in there. It just is actually a pure sort of scientific observation. You seemed in your book to get somewhere close to it. If I if I remember correctly, where I use that sort of Carl Sagan is ought bridge. If you build the is ought bridge with that sentence, there’s nothing in it that says, well, we ought to then the universe ought to know itself. But it seems to me that there’s no other bridge to build because there’s nothing else to do but for the universe to know itself.
David Deutsch
And I think one can one can make a stronger bridge than that.
Jay Shapiro
Do it. Help me.
David Deutsch
So the traditional is-ought distinction as raised by Hume, but also as kind of taken for granted by philosophers for millennia is all justification is it’s all about you can’t derive an ought from an is, which itself rests on a sort of empiricist dogma that that nothing is worthwhile unless it can be built on experiment or science or whatever. But we’re not in the business of deriving knowledge. We can’t derive any knowledge from anything. That’s not what knowledge is. It’s conjectural and it tries to solve problems. And what’s more, it’s explanatory. So whereas you can’t deduce or derive an ought from an is, there are many explanatory connections between ought and is. So you will find, as I think I said in my Edge article on 9-11, that if somebody is deeply immersed in an immoral ideology, they will be mistaken about certain facts as well, inextricably and vice versa. And how come if you can’t get an ought from an is, how come you can be sure that a person who believes a certain evil ideology will also believe a certain conspiracy theory about the facts? It’s because of explanation. Although it is logically possible to believe any kind of ideology independently of the facts, human minds want to explain why. And if they try to explain why it is justified to kill so-and-so, they need to have a factual theory about how so-and-so differs from the person they do not want to kill. And so in an explanatory sense, oughts and ises are intimately linked and you can’t have one without the other.
Jay Shapiro
Can you derive ises from oughts? They’re just linked in a mysterious way or can we say more simply?
David Deutsch
As I said, you can’t derive anything from anything. But certainly oughts lead to conjectures and conjectures can be true or false.
Jay Shapiro
I mean, the is-ought there’s so many different ways to approach that, so many different lenses through which you can look at that problem where it seems like a genuine problem or a false problem. I would like to hear him talk to, you know, Sean Carroll or someone who really thinks that distinction just to see. Both physicists. Yeah, like, are they just going to talk past each other or, you know, or Sam Harris or Dan Dennett or someone. I feel like you can’t derive anything from anything. It’s such a such a good knockdown. Like, wait, like, what? Right. But, you know, the response to that would be, yeah, sure, you can. Because I’m also skeptical of the is-ought argument that you can’t derive one from the other. But what someone like Sean Carroll is going to say or anyone who believes in is-ought could say, oh, yeah, you can derive. You can derive ises from other is statements. Right. Like some is statements imply others just logically. And the whole point of the argument is that as a matter of strict logic, the ought can’t just be derived from the is. So I want to hear him. I’m sure I’m sure he has an argument to that. But what does he mean when he says you can’t derive anything from anything?
Coleman Hughes
I think you know what he means by that.
Jay Shapiro
I think I do. So I think, you know, he goes back. Jay here. I told you I was terrified of this episode because I was tasked with the responsibility of interpreting David Deutsch for Coleman and you. Here’s a point where I sent the rough cut of this episode to David and he listened to it and helped me understand a few things that he was trying to say a little better. This particular line of you can’t derive anything from anything that Coleman just asked me to explain. He helped me sort of understand a little bit better of what he meant there, which what he really meant. I’ll play you what I actually responded to with Coleman, which was very close. But what he really meant and was careful about here is that there’s no foundation to knowledge. There’s no ultimate foundation for it because, of course, you can derive certain things from certain kinds of conjecture and kinds of knowledge. The example he gave to me in an email while we were discussing this was you can derive predictions from conjectures or the explanations, proposed explanations for problems that you encounter in the world, such as the seasons ones that we brought up a few times in the episode. If your conjecture is that the explanation of why the seasons are changing is that you live on a round object that has an axial tilt. And in certain times of the year, it tilts towards the heat source and other times away. Whatever your conjecture is there, you can derive a prediction from that conjecture, which, of course, would be a prediction of something like that the seasons are out of phase on different parts of the Earth and out of sync at a specific time, which, of course, turned out to be confirmed. So you can derive certain things from certain things, but his point there is really that there is no ultimate foundation for that knowledge. It’s just you can derive predictions and then call something a good explanation versus a bad explanation, but he was trying to push back on me suggesting that his view was somehow a foundationalist point of view. So there you go. That’s me trying to explain it better to you here now. And now I’ll go back into how I answered it to Coleman, which was also quite true and pushed more on David’s literal interpretation of philosophical standpoints and frameworks like empiricism and the mistakes that are made by thinking that you are deriving things directly from the thing itself. So you’ll hear that I use dinosaur bones, which actually you’re going to hear I call fossils dinosaur bones. They’re not even dinosaur bones, but David Deutsch also pointed out to me in an email. In fact, they’re just rocks that were around dinosaur bones that made the impressions of them. So anyway, keep that in mind as I answer this to Coleman. Side note, I’m also recording this little edit section that I’m pasting in while I’m sitting at a cafe in Peru, which is lovely.
Jay Shapiro
Anyway, enjoy the rest of the episode. I think I do. So I think, you know, he goes back to this empiricism mistake all the time and justificationism, which is which is a similar kind of thing. He tries to, as he calls himself out about foundationalism, he’s trying to say there is no foundation. On that respect, I think he and Sean would agree. Like there is there is he pulls in the famous cave analogy of shadows on a cave. So like empiricism again, so empiricism is this idea of that the only knowledge that you could possibly have you get through our senses. This is sort of a Descartes idea. And it’s wrong. At the time, it seemed kind of right. You take your senses for granted that you are engaged in experiencing the world. But as he points out very early on, like that’s not even true. You’re just getting crackles in the nerves somewhere. And those are representations of the real world. But this doesn’t mean there is no knowledge. So, for example, sometimes he talks about like dinosaur bones. Empiricists. The creationists always point out, of course, like you’ve never empirically witnessed or experienced a dinosaur. You only see its bones. So you can only talk about the dinosaur bones. And a strict empiricist would say that you only know about dinosaur bones. You don’t know about dinosaurs. But the power of knowledge and explanation, which you’re not deriving from the bones itself, is you need to explain these bones that are in some certain level of strata of the ground or wherever it is. And you need an explanation for how they got there and what they are. And that that’s what the power of knowledge and explanation is, which is not false. Those are real things, even though you’ve never directly experienced a dinosaur. Another example, so like the cave on the wall analogy, which I guess is one of those philosophical nuggets we really haven’t even talked a lot about. But it’s like you’re looking at the shadows on a cave wall. I think this was this Plato or Socrates? I don’t know. And so you never actually directly see the people, but you see their shadows on this cave wall. You’re just staring at a cave wall the whole time as the slave. And then you are guessing that there is a person who’s casting the shadow or you have you need to explain the shadow and then a light source somewhere behind it. You never directly access this person, but you could predict every time the shadow appears in a certain way, then food appears. So this person might be bringing food. You’ve never directly accessed the person or the light source. And that is our condition. That’s the condition of our minds, which are trapped in black boxes called our skulls, which never directly access the universe that we’re in. But we get evidence of it. So this I know that sounds almost like I mean, he’s a philosopher, so he’s a stickler.
Jay Shapiro
Empiricism just can’t be true because we don’t directly access actually anything. It’s all just there’s a layer between us and everything we experience. What you experience itself is the layer between us and what’s really out there. And just to throw one more beautiful thing, he writes about that to picture it even more profoundly as he tells this story. I think when he was in college, working with the bunch of astronomers who were studying distant galaxies at the time, the way that they were studying them, it’s probably similar now. Is they would take photographs from telescopes and print them out on like glass slides and then look at the glass slides through a microscope in order to locate galaxies and do measurements or whatever. And so just like pause and picture that. So he writes about how he is looking through looking down, like literally thinking about things billions of light years away in a different direction from the earth. And you’re looking down through this metal thing that we’ve created with like warped glass that we have the knowledge of how to do and somehow in this other little glass with his little specs. But in your mind, you’re seeing because of knowledge only because of the knowledge of it. You’re seeing distances that are immense and powers that are huge and stars exploding only because of the knowledge. And he tells this incredibly funny story to like hit it home where he was helping these people sort of identify the galaxies in these slides. And he saw something kind of weird and one of them and he asked like, Oh, what’s this one? And then one of the other like experts looked through it and he’s like, Oh, that’s just a speck of dust on the glass slide. And the monumental shift in his mind of scope and scale from a from galaxies billions of light years away or whatever it is to a speck of dust on a piece of glass underneath it was huge. But the only difference there again is the knowledge. So he calls that closer to reality. You’re actually we’re getting between you, your mind and that distant quasar that you’re studying the way to get closer to it is to put things in between you and it that are our knowledge. In that case, a telescope and a microscope and a glass slide and all of these things that are actually physically between you and that thing now, but got you closer to it somehow, which is beautiful and sort of blows up the empiricism argument as it were. That our knowledge is the thing that comes between us and the world. So we have to create more of it. Yeah, I don’t know. I still don’t know how this relates to morality actually is the problem.
Coleman Hughes
Well, I think yeah, I mean, the move the move he’s making is I think a good one, which is. People take the distance between our beliefs about morality and the ideal of certainty. Yeah, and they say, look how far we are from certainty about this. Therefore, there are no objective moral truths. Right. And he’s pointing out that certainty is never on the table, even in domains where it’s, you know, everyone accepts that there are facts. No one wants to say climate change being real is a subjective fact. Right. Or even more basic stuff like, you know, just the laws of physics, the least controversial laws of physics. He’s saying even there from the empiricist perspective, that’s not certain. And he’s right. And I think he’s right to draw that analogy. The only difference between, you know, I mean, the classic example from David Hume of the empiricist thing is like, yeah, you’ve seen the sunrise every day of your life.
Jay Shapiro
And you quote know that it’s going to rise tomorrow, but on the basis of what? Yeah. But even that even even that is incomplete because the theory of sunrises needs an explanation. And if you explain it that it’s risen every day, and then it’s going to rise tomorrow, that’s actually not a full explanation. Because what if you’re on the International Space Station? What if you’re on the sun? What if you’re in Mars? That’s actually an incomplete explanation. It’s a pretty good one that will continue to succeed. But once there’s a problem with it, you need a new explanation for it. And so the theory of the theory of sunrises is is actually, you know, also might be wrong, even though it’s happened every day. This is a it’s almost there’s a lot of I mean, you talk a lot about progress and looking at graphs. And one of the really annoying things and habits that we have as humanity is like the straight line bias of you look at a graph and you can and you just sort of extend it infinitely as if nothing will change. And the major problem with that is that forecasting graphs, it’s impossible, impossible, sometimes maybe probable to a degree, but impossible to predict future knowledge creation. And that’s because we don’t have a theory for it. And it’s sort of mysterious where it comes from. That will drastically change the graph. And once you have the right explanation for it, a complete explanation for it, you have knowledge that will drastically change the graph. Imagine going back like three, like even 5000 years and looking at the graph of population. What would explain the huge difference? Like if you just extended that line, you’d be way wrong. Yeah, so what changed and it was knowledge creation, a lot of different kinds of knowledge being created, actually, as it were. So we don’t the future is unpredictable in a lot of those ways. And the problems that it produces are also unpredictable. One more thing is to throw into this again, I don’t even know particularly how it relates to the dilemma or even morality. But he also writes about the reach of explanations. And when he talks about humans being universal explainers and some some conjectures that we have in theories that we have universal reach. And we talked about the seasons earlier, the seasons is a good one, because if you could locally be trying to solve the problem of why seasons are happening, and conjecture this thing about a heliocentric universe and around Earth and an axial tilt, which makes predictions in that one in particular predicts that the seasons will be out of phase. So you may have never even seen or know for certain empirically that there’s another side of the earth with land on it. But you’re predicting that if there is and you go there, it will be winter when it’s summer here when we’re in the north part of it.
Jay Shapiro
That’s testable turned out to be true a good explanation. But that also think about the reach of that explanation actually then informs the entire universe. You’re talking about seasons and different planets you’ve never even been to shapes of universe because the explanation also would apply to any spherical object rotating around any star. Yeah, like it needs a lot of other things to be true. And then it makes predictions about them. One of the other examples I think he even writes about is like the amazing thing about Darwin and his theory was that he had never seen a gene. He had never empirically experienced a gene. He didn’t know they existed. But his theory demanded and predicted that something like a gene must exist. And then we found it, which is kind of amazing that the explanation that explains the problem in the world makes predictions and then you look for them. That’s sort of how science works. That’s what he calls evidence. And then if you find them, it confirms it or denies it. We know there were problems with his theory and it’s still being being predicted. Einstein’s theory of gravity. So it’s like the conjecture part of it is pure creativity. And then as he’s saying the moral sin would be to deny access to criticism or to create a society that prevents criticism to then decipher and decide which explanations are good and which explanations are bad. And that’s, I think, where he grounds his morality, whether it’s foundationalism or not, trying to map it onto just this one child, hearing something I think is interesting. Again, we’re like sort of off off that tangent. But that’s David Deutsch. So in some ways, the oughts are all we actually have then.
David Deutsch
And we just check that. We can be mistaken about the oughts as, again, the very fact that it’s objective, the fact that morality is objective implies in my way of looking at things that we can be mistaken about it. It also implies that by conjecture, criticism and so on, we are capable of correcting the errors, that there’s never any guarantee of that. And we never know whether we’ve corrected an error or have made things worse. Again, if a problem arises, we can make a conjecture about what we’ve done wrong. That’s all we can and how we might fix it. That’s all we can do. We never have firm ground to rest on. Like in politics, if you have a bad policy, that may cause harm, people may die, and so on. But so long as the harm it does isn’t of the form removing one’s ability to change policies, then it’s not as bad as it could be. And on the other hand, if it does have that property, then it’s worse than anything that the actual policy could do. We never have institutions that do this perfectly, the error correction. So we always should be looking for better, more efficient ways of correcting errors. But they are more important than getting it right in the first place.
Jay Shapiro
So I’m thinking of like the anti-vax movement, which has some direct analogies to the case we’re talking about here of a parent saying like, oh, you know, so I mean, I guess I’m curious, it’s the way your mind works of I feel like that’s a mistake. And usually, as you said, the people who are anti-vaxxers are clearly making mistakes about the is’s as well. They usually are rife with conspiracy theories. How would you lay out the argument that an anti-vax parent is is how would you even phrase it committing? Is it an immoral act?
David Deutsch
More generally, it would be an immoral act. But the actual case with vaccines is more complicated, because in some cases, the benefit of the vaccine is more for other people than for that child. So then there’s a question of, do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Well, not if it involves violating someone’s rights. So it depends on the facts of the vaccine thing. Now, if the factual issue is that it is that there is simply an ideology, which believes the conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory. Which is false, then that is one kind of issue, then obviously, it’s a moral wrong. Whether that should be illegal is a separate question, because you can’t necessarily distinguish that case in a court of law from someone who reasonably believes something that the scientific consensus doesn’t believe. And there would be no scientific progress if you made such ideas illegal, or if you made acting on them illegal. The first person to vaccinate children was facing a religious consensus or whatever that said that he was actually harming them. And even in modern times, some of the vaccines did have serious side effects on some of the children. If a vaccine saves a million children, but cripples 10,000 children. And those 10,000 didn’t want to be vaccinated. I think you’ve done a wrong. Now, again, even that is a highly idealized case.
Jay Shapiro
Right. But you’ve also done a right in some sense as well, no?
David Deutsch
No, no, I mean, you’ve helped some people, but that is not necessarily, you know, if you’re Robin Hood and steal things and then give them to give them to worthy people. You’ve helped people, but you’ve done something immoral.
Jay Shapiro
I guess this brings up, are you are you taken in by any of the, let’s say, traditional or codified moral frameworks like utilitarianism or consequentialism? Do any of these sort of start to get at things?
David Deutsch
I think that all those so they’re all wrong because they are foundationalism. They’re all trying to set up a thing from which you can deduce all morality, perhaps only in principle, though it’s too hard to do the calculation. But they’re wrong because there is no foundation for knowledge. Are they good approximations? Well, some of them are good approximations in some situations, but I think they’re better regarded not as approximate foundations, but as modes of criticism. So, for example, utilitarianism, I think it’s silly to say that the foundation of morality is the greatest good of the greatest number. For a start, it’s circular. What is the good? What is that? What we what we think of is good for us is partly dependent on what we think is moral. So we have to we have to have an opinion about what is moral before we can decide what is good and so on. But on the other hand, if you propose to do something and your friend says to you, in what way does this benefit you? And you can’t think of anything. They have made a valid criticism. That is a problem that you should be you should want to consider because it might be that that idea that you should do the thing has lodged in your mind and is is affecting you to your detriment. And similarly with the with the social case, if you’re planning to do something which is going to benefit you but harm many other people, then and if someone says to you, is do you really want to benefit at those people’s expense? Then that is a mode of criticism. The answer the right answer might be yes, but it needs an argument. It needs some something to solve that prima facie problem. So and the same with deontology, which says that you sometimes you have a duty to do things. I think all these things, all these proposed foundations work quite well as modes of criticism, but are terrible as foundations.
Jay Shapiro
Right. And so in conjecturing towards again, I’m thinking of the is there an ultimate sort of purpose of the universe in this way that that you’re ultimately building towards not in the utopian way. I’m totally sold on The Beginning of Infinity that there will always be problems. But it’s the ability the ability to always attempt to solve problems is the is the ultimate goal is to solve a problem so you can solve another one.
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s I think it’s a bit weird to call that a goal because because it’s not something that lies in the distant future. The problem is something we have now. And we will always have problems that to can’t be can’t be thought of as a goal because we’re not ever going to reach the end. We’re not going to reach the beginning of the end. We’re never going to even scratch the surface. So calling that a goal.
Jay Shapiro
But maybe is the I’m almost thinking of like a Buddhist way of like the path is the goal kind of thing. It’s like the goal is to always know that you’re never done. Well, this would you be satisfied if I called that the human condition?
David Deutsch
Yes. Or the healthy human condition or the proper human condition? I would be satisfied with it.
Jay Shapiro
And then I’m thinking is that I mean, I don’t know if that argument wins for the parents to try to I’m imagining you as a therapist trying to talk them out of this thing they want to do to this their unborn child of in some ways are they denying the human condition? Maybe this is that’s complicating the matter too much with the unborn child and the deafness. But yeah, I’m satisfied with that as the human condition and elevating that to the status of a moral good in and of itself. Is that fair to do in and of itself?
David Deutsch
I mean, I think I would have if I were in the rather unlikely situation of trying to persuade parents not to do a thing. I would use that kind of consideration. But I think there are more there are more pressing ways of coming from there. For example, I think probably the first thing I would ask is, what are you trying to do here? Are you really trying to benefit the child? Or are you trying to benefit you? Or even worse, the culture that you think is so valuable? The culture doesn’t have any rights to do things to people. A culture is a thing that should emerge from people choosing to adopt it rather than some other culture. And if the reason that your child is going to be adopting this culture is that he doesn’t have the opposite choice, then you’ve got a case to answer here. How are you different from Pete from parents who do things to their children that you don’t approve of?
Jay Shapiro
And I mean, that is that another way of saying you’re denying the child the human the human condition is to make choices?
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s to solve problems to make explanations. The only way to solve problems is is to have choices. This is one of the one of the things that is a consequence of solving problems, because we choose to drop one theory and accept another. If we’re physically prevented from dropping a theory, then and that has been done intentionally by somebody, then they have a case to answer. And I’m entirely happy with calling that a case to answer. I think like with your island, with your hypothetical island, which I kind of doubt could exist, but suppose it could exist, then there would be an answer. The answer would be, look, we’re not going to tear down all the beautiful things we do here just because you don’t like the way we look or, you know, with the way our inner ear looks. That in that situation, there would be an answer. But that doesn’t mean that the answer applies in general to other situations. And I think that the more realistic case is that there aren’t good reasons. There isn’t a good answer to that criticism.
Jay Shapiro
And is there I mean, I guess we haven’t played with all the variables of potential things that we do to children. In the case as written, you know, the parents try to put up an argument of like, well, people in poverty have children all the time and these are all kinds of obstacles. Do these arguments are these arguments unique to something as seemingly profound as hearing? Or I mean, I guess you brought up a case of a kid who was born in Albania and learns Albanian and this is a disability.
David Deutsch
Well, it obviously is. OK. And I think bringing up a child in poverty or in a war zone or in a tiny community is also a case to answer. I think in particular cases, there might be an answer. But it is prima facie. If other things being equal, if the parents could bring up the child in a way that did not have those attributes, then they should do it unless there’s a reason to the contrary. So but as you say, I agree with you that the as a matter of degree, the deafness disability is much greater than the Albanian speaking disability. But ultimately, they’re the same kind of thing. And as I said, in an extreme situation like your hypothetical island, there could be a perfectly good answer for why they should carry on doing it. By the way, technology will eventually solve this. Right. Eventually, there will be no such thing as irreversible hearing loss.
Jay Shapiro
Yeah. And can you talk a little bit more about that? As in, I mean, I’m always maybe that’s why I’m so interested in your books, but fascinated in the relationship between let’s call it traditional scientific progress or technological progress and moral progress. I always think, for example, of OK, we there’s a lot of stories we could tell of why civilization sort of dropped slavery. And we could tell a sort of a nice moral story of like, oh, we had just an epiphany one day of how terrible this is. And then we’re like, oh, we should all decide to stop doing that. And maybe that might be a true story. But there’s also other stories that you could say of, well, it was really helpful that we had the cotton gin and it was economical to not use human labor anymore. So the argument became a lot more convincing to southern slave owners.
David Deutsch
So there are a number of true stories you can tell about a gigantic phenomenon like like the rejection of slavery by the by the Western world. You can also tell false stories about it. And I think the economically based stories are fundamentally false. This idea of King Cotton and that kind of thing and the cotton gin that it’s all not true. That’s not how it happened. It couldn’t have happened that way. So but I think it’s not an accident that scientific progress, economic progress and moral progress go together. Right. Jacob Bronowski makes some some very powerful arguments along these lines. He says, for example, you cannot really do science at all. You can’t make progress in science unless you have certain values like respect for truth, respect for freedom to express ideas and more subtly certain properties of a scientific community are necessary for scientific progress to continue beyond one generation. Now, historically, there were many examples of individual scientists who made progress, but they were immersed in an outside society that that did not believe in progress. And therefore it didn’t continue. They couldn’t set up the kind of relationships with their students and the kind of institutional framework that would be needed for the scientific values to continue. And therefore it was impossible for scientific progress to continue. So it’s not an accident that those three things and other things all went together in the case of the European Enlightenment.
Jay Shapiro
And so it’s a bit of a is it a chicken and egg question or there is a common link of this?
David Deutsch
Oh, yes, there is language. Our language doesn’t have a single word for the thing that was needed. But I’ve expressed it in the form the quest for good explanations. Right. Applies in morality. It applies in science. It applies in engineering and it applies in politics with a vengeance. Right. And all those things were really part of the same impulse. And it was that impulse that caused both the revulsion against slavery and the technology that made slavery less valuable. By the way, Thomas Sowell points out that slavery was never economically valuable. It was only valuable to a certain group of people in society at the expense of the other non-slave owning people.
Jay Shapiro
But if I throw a story out of something like meat eating, if we decide it’s used a lot, but if we went into the future hundreds of years, it’s I think not an unlikely story that they would be like not eating animals anymore and look back on horror at us in some ways. With the story of perhaps in our lifetime, lab grown meat becomes cheap and economical and tasty and nutritious and all that. They’ll suddenly be a lot more the next day. There will be a lot of moral vegans out there suddenly being like, oh, this is great. I never wanted to eat meat in the first place. Is that is that relationship am I making that up or are we are we already craving that explanation now? We just don’t have the technology.
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, just as there were people violently opposed to slavery long before the technology was and even despite believing that slavery was economically valuable mistakenly, there were already people who were violently opposed to slavery. And so there are people who are vegans today, even though there’s no artificial meat. Now, I don’t happen to think that eating meat is in any way wrong. However, I’m sure that with the development of technology and not very far in the future, we’ll all be eating artificial meat simply because, as you say, it’ll be cheaper, tastier. It’ll be better in every way than using animals. And then, although I don’t think it’s immoral, therefore, I don’t think people will look back with moral revulsion. They will look back with actual revulsion because the process of creating meat is actually revolting, though, in my opinion, not at all immoral.
Jay Shapiro
And you’re leaning on the that animals are not universal explainers.
David Deutsch
Yes, that’s right. In that regard to that line. That’s right. So if you kill an animal, you’re not extinguishing anything because the other animals have everything. The other instances of that species have all the things that that animal did. There’s an issue of whether the animals can suffer. Again, we don’t know. We don’t know how consciousness works. We don’t know how creativity works. So we should perhaps err on the on the side of assuming they can. But like with the with the deafness case and so on, it doesn’t really entirely depend on whether animals can suffer. It depends on what people think. So that as long as most people think that animals can suffer, then we have to frame our laws and social institutions to err on the on the side of caution in that respect. There was a time when people didn’t think slavery was immoral. It’s not that they thought that slaves weren’t human. It’s just that they thought that slavery was a natural condition of some people, just like some people are young. Some people are old. Some people are ill. So some people are slaves. And so, for example, they would have thought that enslaving somebody was highly immoral unless there was an excuse like they were bad or something. But in general, enslaving something is highly immoral. But actually buying a slave was not at all immoral. It’s just you know, you’re buying the person who is a slave and that’s his condition. Just like it’s not your fault any more than the condition of someone being ill is your fault or someone being short or tall or whatever. Now, part of the reason that that changed is that philosophically we came to understand that there is a unity among all people, which it isn’t derived from a moral commandment to deem all people equal when they’re obviously not equal. But there is a factual way in which that we are all equal, namely, as I would put it, we are all capable of creating new explanations. And it’s the creating new explanations that makes it immoral to keep a human slave, but not immoral to keep a dog as a pet.
Jay Shapiro
So to finish this up by trying to pin it back a little bit because we’ve wandered into a lot of different areas. But of the parents and this decision that they want to make, I guess the question is what is the most you’ve said a few times you found it. You find it revolting and maybe an immoral act, but you’re uncomfortable making it an illegal act in some way. Or what’s like the most concrete thing that you could say that …
David Deutsch
I think that whether it is immoral depends on the conditions in society. Like you mentioned some hypothetical conditions under which it would not be immoral. This island you imagined. OK. And if it’s not immoral, then it shouldn’t be illegal either. For example, male circumcision is kind of in this situation. The vast majority of men who have been circumcised as babies don’t object and think it’s fine and so on. But if we got into the situation where a high proportion of them eventually said that this was wrongly done to them, then ipso facto, it would be a wrong.
Jay Shapiro
And so to distinguish this, I guess I’m getting confused about the notion of moral realism versus cultural sort of norms.
David Deutsch
So the morality is about things like the conditions that do or don’t thwart the correction of errors, the things that do or don’t in some approximation, infringe human rights and so on. They’re not about things like inner ears. Morality doesn’t speak about inner ears or foreskins or and so on. It doesn’t have an opinion about that. Its opinion about that is via the opinions of people who are able to make choices, who haven’t been deprived of the ability to make choices as well as their inner ear or whatever. I think that that probably puts the bow on it. And my lack of my foreskin is not preventing me from trying to make errors here.
Jay Shapiro
Although I think I resented a little bit. I mean, there’s so much in there. I don’t even know what to pick out. The slavery thing is interesting. So he in the book, he also sort of tries to pull the rug out from under someone like Jared Diamond and his guns, germs and steel analysis. I think in general, he is pretty hostile to explanations of progress, moral progress or anything that downplay the notion of ideas. Obviously, it’s all about knowledge and knowledge creation and the thesis sort of laid over the entire history of the universe. I think is is really good. And he is resistant to other theses because he sees their flaws. Something like actually another thing to point out, you didn’t express it in exactly these terms. But why did we walk away from slavery? And he sort of rejects my economic story, which may have been a sort of like Jared Diamond type story. And he’s like, no, it was an idea story and it was a knowledge story. And maybe in particular, a Darwin knowledge story where the idea that it is just your condition to be a slave. And so this isn’t a moral wrong was wrong. Turned out to be an inadequate description of the universe as almost shown and displayed by something like Darwin being like, no, that you know, that clashes. That’s a problem. That idea existing along with evolution and us being an animal and evolving is a problem because it’s not a divine condition of that person to be a slave. It actually makes no sense where absent of Darwinism or that explanation of nature, it would it may have made sense. It would have been like it would have been like you having an explanation of the magician of just saying like, well, it’s just magic or it’s just this. But yeah, with slavery, the truth is that, you know, it’s been practiced in almost every society for the past 10,000 years. And it was only really in America and the West where slaveholders felt any burden to come up with an argument in defense of slavery. And that’s where white supremacy came in. Or, you know, most people who had slaves throughout history, it was they felt as much burden to defend the practice of slavery as the average meat eater right now feels to defend the practice of eating meat. It would just never occur to you to come up with an argument in defense of something that’s taken for granted. Right. And I think he’s right to observe the importance of the war of ideas in ending slavery. At the same time, I’m definitely open to arguments about, you know, economics being important too. It’s you know you cannot reduce it to one or the other. But I also agree with him. I don’t buy the argument that it was just in people’s self-interest to no longer hold slaves and they all started observing their self-interest. Right. And that’s I don’t think that’s historically accurate. And with the economic point, like also it’s like he would say, yeah, like it’s not pick or choose any of them.
Jay Shapiro
It’s that they’re all linked by some explanatory knowledge and that there is objective progress. And so, of course, all of these progress sort of at the same time. So, yeah, like I did sort of the chicken and egg question doesn’t I think the very big picture there might be true. Yeah, probably is true. At the same time, there are, you know, historical counter examples. Nazi science actually, you know, big moral step back, but actually some scientific steps forward. China today, one of the worst human rights abusers on the planet, one of the highest growth rates. Right. Lots of technological progress. Yeah, but I think you would argue that those all all of those cultures, well we’ll see with China, but those cultures do. They’re unsustainable. Right. Because of the static society thing. Could be true. I mean, we’ll see. I think China is the probably the biggest challenge to that. Yeah. Right now, even if in the grand scheme of history, it’s an exception that proves the rule. It’s such a populous exception that I would wonder what he would say to you. We’ll see if it’s sustainable. Yeah. I mean, the argument that like they don’t innovate, they just steal all the ideas for now is is a pretty good one. That might go on for quite a while. So then, you know, but if it took over the whole world, then it would become unsustainable because it has this culture of suppressing criticism. And so therefore will just be waiting its own suicide either from within or without because of the errors that it’s making that everybody makes are uncorrectable because they’re suppressing that correction. So for now, yeah, the experiment could run for quite a while of just stealing people’s innovations, which yeah. I don’t even know if that’s a that’s a fair thing to say. But one more thing on the slavery thing and Darwinism and maybe the theory of natural selection, which pulls the rug out from under the explanation that this is just people’s condition in life is to be a slave. There’s something there also harkening back to that notion of reach of explanations where it is trying Darwin trying to solve the problem of why there’s different differences in species and the origin of species and those problems. He never set out to solve the problem of slavery when he did it. But the reach of his explanation actually did wash over those shores into moral problems like slavery and pointed out problems of slavery, which I think is is fascinating. So he talks even about something like the in one of these wonderful talks he did about optimism. He talks about in the fifties. I’m getting this right. Well, yeah, in the forties and fifties, like the esoteric properties of uranium of some random thing on the periodic table, like the entire civilization hinged on knowledge of that thing, which at the time of studying it hundreds of years before would have been totally unknowable or even now the properties of CO2 are a thing and it’s unknowable.
Jay Shapiro
The knowledge and the reach of the thing that you’re discovering of what it will affect or change when you’re discovering it. It’s a really great it’s a great point to make in favor of pure knowledge for the sake of knowledge and pure scientific research in any field right now. The entire world could hinge on it and kind of does hinge on it and knowledge for the sake of knowledge and finding knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Again, the reach of it. You might find something that has universal reach. Darwin solving slavery in some ways or delivering a better explanation of humans did a tremendous work, tremendous amount of work in something like slavery. But he didn’t set out to solve the problem of slavery, but he may have. And again, like the one to one ratio is probably unfair, but he would say, of course, they’re all linked in some explanatory grand principle way. I don’t know if you look historically like the countries that have had the highest rates of economic growth have also had the highest rates of scientific discovery have also been the most popular destinations for the migrants around the world. Which might point more to have a moral you want to be treated well. Right. And have also tended to not have truly morally backwards cultures or have tended to be on the vanguard of moral progress. You know, but those are yeah, those are correlations. And I agree with him. They’re not just accidents of history. There there’s some explanation you can find for why they’re correlated, however imperfectly. Yeah. And, you know, in certain cases, you might find examples like China that were the imperfectness of the correlation is especially visible. Yeah. Let’s just let’s end it there. And let’s end season one there. It was 14 episodes. Yeah, I had a couple of guests who did it was going to be 16. But we’ll take a break. I don’t know when we’ll come back sometime later in the year. It’s going to be an awful year, I think 2020 politically. So I’m just going to like put on my headphones. And yeah, you have your if people want more Coleman, you’re out there conversations. The Coleman is out there. I’ve been writing on what Jay thinks. I’ve got essays coming out and stuff. So you’ll find us. But I’m going to go out there and collect a bunch of dilemmas with interviews with people again for season two. And we’ll see. I might get back more to the roots that we started with of like here is sort of just like a trolley problem type thing. And let’s solve it. I’m also interested in taking on people in sort of the political and religious realms as well, not just philosophers and psychologists. So we’ll see who I can I can throw questions at. And for anybody listening, like this is super fun. And thank you. We’ve garnered a really nice audience that’s very participatory and engages with it.
Jay Shapiro
If you have any dilemmas that you want to throw, I think you can find me on Twitter or on what Jay thinks. There’s a contact page and you can send stuff there. Send me dilemmas. Send me people you want to have on the show. I love being challenged with that kind of new stuff. And maybe one episode in season two, we’ll just do a user submitted dilemma and just take it on ourselves. So I don’t know. What can I say? Thank you for listening. And until next time, until next time. Thanks. Hey, Jay here. Actually, not quite the end of season one. You’re probably noticing there’s a little time left on your playhead. I don’t do a ton of editing and haven’t done a ton of editing of cutting things out in these interviews. If you’ve seen it, sort of just let them go long. And I love these in-depth conversations. And with Professor Deutsch, who I’m clearly a big fan of, I continued talking for a bit after the end as we were wrapping up. And we get into some pretty fun conversations about what he worries about and Trump and other little things. So I’m just going to include it here, sort of bonus material. So enjoy. And you’re going to hear a little laughing from in the background of my girlfriend, who I have to thank for coming along on a few of these interviews and helping me by taking notes and helping me when I forget things. You’ll hear that. And then just to preface this thing that we talked about briefly here again, I encourage everybody to go read the book. Beginning of Infinity. It’s just incredible. There is a chapter in the middle of it where he breaks into just this amazing kind of play with Socrates in conversation. And we reference that chapter about Socrates in the middle. So anyway, that puts into context the next little bit. I’m going to just play it to the end. This is me and David Deutsch. The end of season one. Enjoy. I love you all. See you in season two. Bye. Gosh, I think I kind of failed to remember it. There was some sentence I was looking for this morning about I could have sworn that you came to some like if there is one commandment in the universe, it’s something like that.
David Deutsch
That’s that’s in the Socrates dialogue. It’s in the Socrates dialogue. I couldn’t find it this morning.
Jay Shapiro
I mean, what was the line there that you came to?
David Deutsch
Well, he was sort of if I wanted to put it in his mouth, so I wouldn’t have to say it. If there is an ultimate basis, morality, it must be not to destroy the means of correcting errors.
Jay Shapiro
Yeah. And you bet you are you passing the buck off to Socrates just to give yourself an answer.
David Deutsch
I’m still passing the buck because it’s if you take that too literally, it purports to be a foundation for morality, whether or not it’s a foundation, whether or not there’s something to morality other than epistemology. That’s another way of putting this. Is there something to morality other than epistemology? And if there isn’t, then you don’t you don’t need a foundation. I mean, the issue of foundation doesn’t come up because it just you know, there’s no foundation to epistemology. So if morality is just a matter of epistemology, which doesn’t have a foundation, then that’s fine. Problems exist in one person in one mind. So you have problems. The implications for other people come from the nature of knowledge. For example, you need institutions to grow knowledge and institutions have to involve other people and they have to survive the deaths of those people. So that already puts heavy constraints on what you should think about institutions. And that has implications for law and morality and politics and interpersonal relationships and society and so on. So but it all comes down to conditions for solving problems and problems are in individual minds. I don’t have any truck with the benefit of the universe, you know, the universe doesn’t have opinions. It doesn’t. And if it did have that, that wouldn’t. It’s like saying you should do what God says. You know, it’s not a superhuman thing that can tell us what to do. It doesn’t even have opinions. But even if it did, it wouldn’t have the right to tell us what to do. And nor do I believe that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, except when they do that, except when that is the right thing.
Jay Shapiro
And you’re only gauging that right thing again by like, let’s say, promoting conditions where errors can be detected and corrected.
David Deutsch
If our society collapses, if civilization is going to come to an end, it will not be by reverting to a static society. It will instead disintegrate. It will just be progress will cease, but it won’t be replaced by orthodoxies. That mode has been destroyed by the West, by the existence of the West. Even present day static societies pretend not to be, and they don’t entirely suppress progress. They only suppress progress away from their obedience to the rulers. But that’s not how static societies worked in static societies. The rulers were as much slaves to the memes as anyone else. So I don’t think that will happen. And I also don’t think that our society shows any sign of being doomed. They’ve always been fads and they’ve they’ve always been retrograde motion in various ways. You know, in the 1920s and 30s, there was the Ku Klux Klan. And in my memory, children were being beaten in school with canes. And today that’s illegal. So we went from something being compulsory to something being illegal within one lifetime. That’s amazing. And there are dozens of cases like that. It’s not only that there are dozens of ways in which society has improved both in its laws and in its opinions, in its morality and everything. Now, some things have gone backwards. But I think that on the whole, things have still been improving. Unlike Steven Pinker, I don’t say things have been improving in the same breath as saying I think they will continue to improve. That’s a fallacy. When if things ever get worse, it will be from a moment when they shall have been at their best ever. So by definition, so just because things are improving doesn’t say anything about what’s going to happen. But I think that the signs are not there. I think people are unnecessarily panicking about things like Trump and global warming and political correctness and so on. All those things are retrograde steps, but they are on a smaller scale than ones that we’ve had before. They’re not really something to worry about.
Jay Shapiro
So do what do you worry about? The asteroid. I mean, I read that. Yeah.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists. That’s that’s a thing to worry about. Yeah. And I think I fear that a catastrophe is going to happen before we do anything. But this is a catastrophe. You know, a few million people killed is kind of small compared with the stuff that happened all the time in the 20th century. So it’s still we’re still better off. If we are scared of terrorists nuking New York, that’s still a fear of an order of magnitude less than the fear that the Nazis would invade Britain.
Jay Shapiro
Right. Yeah. Well, OK. Good. It’s a rosy picture anyway. Yeah. Well, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I can talk to you all day, but I should probably let you go. We’ve been going about an hour and a half. It was very pleasant. Yeah. No, it was really fun. Yeah. And I don’t know how much again we helped. What were the names? Andre and Leslie, the parents. We disapprove of their action, but that’s about the best we can do is conjecturing that it’s probably a moral mistake.
David Deutsch
I think maybe we can we can do some opinion polls among the children who this has been done to and see whether the children as well to see whether they answer like a person who is enjoying an opportunity or like a person who can’t bring themselves to think of anything different. We should be doing this with also with much more numerous kinds of children who are being brought up in religious ideologies and madrasas and things like that.
Jay Shapiro
Yeah. So if you had like a future qualia machine for the let’s say this child that happens to them and they’re reporting to you like that they’re pretty happy, but they don’t they’ve never had the qualia of hearing. And then you somehow delivered it to them in a in a meaningful way and you were somehow sure set aside the problem of other minds for a second. You’re somehow sure that they’re experiencing it. And then they still say, yeah, I don’t want that. I’m good.
David Deutsch
Then you’ve gotten your yes. Well, actually, yes, I don’t think we have to wait for that futuristic case. There will always be children who were deaf were brought up deaf, not because their parents did it to them, but because they actually were and who then regain their hearing. And there will be then and the parents may have had a moral dilemma about whether to approve. Some of them will have approved it with trepidation, thinking that their child will then lose his moorings and so on. You could ask that child. You could ask those parents for that matter. And this will so this will either change the debate and that subculture will change its mind. Or it will make obvious what a future law should say.
Jay Shapiro
It seems I mean, if you’ve seen videos of people like getting cochlear implants for the first time, it’s emotional. I mean, they’re beautiful videos. Yeah, it seems like an obvious one. The only thing to throw sort of a little poison in that well is that Andre and Leslie worry that their child will connect with them less if they can hear.
David Deutsch
Oh, well, that’s not their call. Lots of parents worry that their children don’t connect with them enough.
Jay Shapiro
That that is not their business. Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s the last thing that I could I could give them is saying like, so is there any sort of special privilege as a parent you have over the autonomy of your child?
David Deutsch
You have any special obligations, not special privileges.
Jay Shapiro
And that might be the kicker for them to just be like too bad. You should try the cochlear implant too. So I guess what we say to the parents being like, it’s probably great. Cool. Thanks, Professor Deutsch. This was awesome and a huge huge honor. Again, I’m a huge fan.
David Deutsch
Well, thank you. It was fun. Thanks.
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