2020-11-29 The Popperian Podcast Karl Popper and the Beginning of Infinity
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Duration: 01:31:46
Transcript
Jed Lea-Henry
Welcome to the first episode of the Popperian Podcast. This will be a monthly podcast where we look at the life and the work of Karl Popper. As always, I’m going to be your host, Jed Lea-Henry, but on today’s program, we have Professor of Physics at the Centre of Quantum Computation at Clarendon Laboratory, as well as an honorary fellow at Wolfson College. He is also the author of two books that I have on my shelf here that I’ve read more times than I care to admit, and this is The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. This is David Deutsch. David, welcome to the podcast.
David Deutsch
Hi, good evening.
Jed Lea-Henry
So for many people that have read your work or listened to your lectures, they will know that Popper has been influential to you over your life, but I might wind things back to your first chance meeting with the work of Popper. This is a story I’ve heard you say before. It’s when you were back in your university days, you’re a student. I believe you were at Cambridge, and it was almost a chance encounter with Popper. So take us back there.
David Deutsch
Yes, it was pure chance. I had literally just heard of Popper once before out of context. I’d heard that he’d written a book called Conjectures and Refutations, and I thought, oh, that seems quite interesting. I thought it was a book of Conjectures and Refutations, but I hadn’t read it, and I hadn’t read any Popper, and I only remembered the name because it’s an odd name. And I got to hear of him. This is the story you’ve probably heard. I was an undergraduate. I wanted to do research in physics, and I was very curious about finding out about the known and unknown things about physics, but I realized that I’d never really thought about what knowledge in physics is. And so I went to the bookshop and got a little bit of a look at it, and got a book by Bertrand Russell. I’ve actually forgotten which one it was, but it had a lot about induction in it. And so I wrote an essay about induction and how I hoped to make use of it in my future career. And I was quite pleased with the essay. So we were supposed to once a term meet with what they call in Cambridge a tutor. It’s what’s called in Oxford a moral tutor. It’s like, it’s not, a tutor doesn’t give you tutorials. A tutor is kind of in charge of your moral welfare, and like if you get into trouble or something, then he’s the one that you go to in the college and he helps you out and whatever. And my tutor was a historian called Charles Parkin. And I never knew what to say to him on these termly meetings, because it was all like, how are you doing? Have you had any problems? And I wasn’t like that kind of client for him. So I never knew what to say, and it was always slightly awkward. So I thought I’d send him, before I went to see him, I thought I’d send him this essay. And he said, oh, very interesting, but you know, you go on about induction here. Isn’t that a bit old hat? You know, hasn’t that been like refuted by this Popper chappy? And that was very rare in those days for anyone to have heard of Popper, especially someone in the humanities. And I said basically, no, I didn’t know he had anything to do with induction. And I’ve only once heard of him. And he said, well, yeah, I think that’s what they say nowadays, which also wasn’t true. Most philosophers of science thought that Popper was ridiculous and everybody else hadn’t heard of him. His books were quite hard to get. And so I went straight to the bookshop after this recommendation, I think it was Heffers in Cambridge. And the only book by Popper I could find was The Open Society and Its Enemies, volumes one and two. So volume one was about Plato, volume two was Hegel and Marx. And I didn’t see how this could be of any interest. But I thought Hegel and Marx would be nearer to the present day at least. So I bought that one. And I found it was a completely new way of looking at philosophy. And I was just bowled over by the sheer seriousness of the way Popper dealt with ideas.
David Deutsch
I’d been quite impressed with Bertrand Russell, but Popper just outclassed him in this feature. Both of them were quite clear in their writing, which I later found is very, very unusual in philosophers, both of them. So that’s how I got into Popper. And having read that, I then bought volume one and read that as well. And that kind of told me what volume two was really all about. And then I slowly picked up, whenever I passed the bookshop, I would go in and see if there are any Popper books in there. There was no Amazon in those days either. So yes, I slowly got to read it. But it took me about four years to actually really get anything. I thought Popper was all about falsificationism. I didn’t really get the connection between his political philosophy and his philosophy of science. I didn’t really get the philosophy of science either. But I saw that there was something there that was really, really important. And so I carried on thinking about it. And that’s how I became a Popperian.
Jed Lea-Henry
Well, that’s built up towards that thing that is so important. And I’m going to probably come back to your answer there a little bit later on. And there’s a lot of things that ping in my mind that I’m going to bring up later on. But let’s go back to one of the centralities of Popper here. And this, of course, is the question of knowledge or how we know. And you have this wonderful history. I believe it’s in The Beginning of Infinity, where you explain this deep course of human history. And you describe it as a history, I believe, of complete failure. But you describe the people alive at the time. And I think this has missed a lot of people that have read your book or listened to your lectures. You described them as people that all wanted to know. So what did you mean by that?
David Deutsch
Yes, I think our species is distinguished from other species by this capacity to know in the human sense. That is to create explanations of the world. And I think this actually predates our species. But all the other species that had this ability went extinct. They’re all related to our species, Neanderthals and those species. We’re the only survivors. And that’s already a bit of a mystery. Because if you have this ability, then you’re constantly trying to explain the world. It was beneficial. We know that it evolved relatively fast as these things go. And therefore it must have been beneficial to the genes that the people with these genes tended to reproduce more, survive more, so as to propagate those genes. And therefore it must have been beneficial. And yet, if we look at the paleontology and archaeology and so on of those times, we find that for thousands of years at a time, the rhythm, the content of human life was unchanging. So for an individual, an individual would live and die using the same methods of getting food, of making tools, of organizing society or families and so on, making campfires or whatever. They were all the same at the time of their death as at the time of their birth. And in fact they were the same for hundreds of generations at a time. So what was going on? What was going on at that time for this unique ability, which had been so useful when it evolved, not to do anything useful anymore? Why didn’t it? And well, you know, now we’re used to creativity operating on a time scale of a year or two. You can already tell that the things are old-fashioned after a couple of years. In those days they weren’t old-fashioned over a period of 10,000 years. So why? And some people say, well, they already had a pleasant way of life, a way of life that suited them. They didn’t apply creativity to trying to make better campfires or better stone tools. They used it for something of which there is no trace, perhaps they used it for song or dance or having deeper relationships with their families and so on. But that’s obviously untenable because we know that they had very short lifespans, that they died of things that are very painful and unpleasant and for which the cures were very, very simple by our standards. For example, better shoes, cooking their food, and yet they didn’t improve. They didn’t improve these things over tens of thousands of years. So they wanted better, but they didn’t get it.
Jed Lea-Henry
That’s what I mean. So let’s step that forward then, another step here. What were these original sources of knowledge for? So if we wind back the clock to times, I suppose before the Enlightenment, what were the sources of knowledge? Is it only coming from authority at that time?
David Deutsch
Yes, well it came from tradition, which is still the case today. All our knowledge is based on tradition, but we change it faster, we improve it faster. In those days it also came from tradition, but the tradition included traditions of stasis. That is, the ways of dealing with ideas were fine-tuned to keep the ideas unchanged. The paradigmatic example of this is religions, which actually say explicitly that if you change it, then you will suffer eternally or whatever. But that’s actually rather unusual. It’s rather unusual for traditions and ideas to explicitly say that they want to remain in place. It’s more usual for them just to be evolved to have that property. So yes, the source of knowledge was tradition, and that was also a source of a great deal of error. That is the human condition, that our ideas are always full of errors. But nowadays it’s much less the case that they are entrenched errors. There still are many entrenched errors today, but our entire society and way of life is no longer built upon them.
Jed Lea-Henry
So I can see us building this forward to the problem situation that Popper found himself in. You mentioned the Enlightenment and this important moment where authorities are rejected, but you also go on to say that rejecting authorities is not quite as important as it always was. Of course, one of the things, one of the implements which people brought about to reject authority this time was what you mentioned earlier, empiricism. What was the change there and what was empiricism?
David Deutsch
Yes, as I said, authorities had been challenged many times. In fact, it’s quite common for authority to be challenged and overturned, but what had historically been the case is that authorities had been overturned and replaced by new authorities of the same kind. So there’s this poem by Yeats, the beggars had changed places but the lash goes on. That was the usual way. What happened in the Enlightenment was a new thing that may have also happened many times before, less often, but on all previous occasions it had been snuffed out within a generation or two. That was challenging authority for the purpose, not of setting up a new authority, but for the purpose of creating new knowledge. That is, the idea was that what we were rebelling to do was to have an open-ended increase in knowledge. So you began to get the idea that the whole of the Enlightenment was pervaded by the idea that humans are fallible, but that we can improve, and that the important thing is to set up conditions under which progress, improvement, is possible. Which contradicted almost all previous traditions. The very idea of a tradition is something that stays the same. But with the Enlightenment came this new kind of tradition, which Popper called tradition of criticism, which he traces back to the pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece. But it never took hold as a fundamental feature of society before, or at least not as a lasting feature of society, until the European Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Jed Lea-Henry
So from that, of course we’re walking through philosophies from Bacon and Hume. Of course, one of the solutions that philosophers came up through the years for the problem of empiricism was induction. An idea in short that the unseen in some way resembles the seen. And of course Popper has a deep challenge to this. So why is it that the unseen doesn’t resemble the seen? Because I know and I’ve encountered many people myself, this seems, it seems to feel instinctively true for many people. Even many scientists in the field that have been there for many years, they seem to have this instinctive feel that you can somehow gather knowledge simply by observing the world.
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s surprisingly tenacious this idea, since it is in fact refuted all the time by all our experiences. So it’s simply not true that the future resembles the past. What I guess, and by the way I should say in your quick history of philosophy, you left out the fact that empiricism when it was invented was an enormous improvement on what went before. Because even though it said that knowledge comes from the senses, which is not true, that it comes from observation, which is not true, that we can gain authority by observation, so on, which is also not true. None of those things are true, but it was contradicting the previous alleged sources of knowledge and authority, namely political authority from kings and so on, and the authority of ancient writings in philosophy and science and so on, and the authority of course of religion in morality and so on. It was challenging all those, and that was initially an enormous benefit, but it simply wasn’t true from beginning to end that we gain knowledge in that way. And with empiricism, as you said, came induction, the more specific idea that we get it from looking at repeated things in the past, and we see that repeated things in the past tend to be repeated in the future. Now, careful philosophers, notably David Hume, but it goes right back to antiquity, noticed that there is no such process, no such form of justification, that no sequence of propositions can possibly tell you anything about the next proposition. If you have some sequence of propositions that you know nothing about the next one, then you cannot deduce anything about the next one from the previous ones. It’s simply a simple logical fact, and that pulls the rug out from under empiricism, and people had known that therefore, that induction is invalid, but they thought that perhaps we still do it even though it is invalid, and there’s something beneficial about the universe that just makes it so that inductions turn out to be true quite often. And it isn’t the case that the vast majority of things that you see, from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you fall asleep at night, you have never seen before. There is something about them that you have seen before, like when you look out of the window in the morning and you see the sun and the clouds and so on, you have seen the sun and clouds before. If you were to take an image of those and look at the pixels, there would be many pixels that weren’t the same as yesterday’s pixels, and it would never be the case that most of the pixels are the same as what they were yesterday. You might not even look out of the window, you might not look out in the same way, and so on. So the reason why we subjectively tend to think that we’re seeing the same things is that we have a theory about what it is in the scene that is important, what it is that will have regularities that we can rely on, and that is because we have theories to that effect. And so this leads to Popper’s maxim that the theory comes first.
David Deutsch
Induction may seem to be true because we make the observations in the light of theories. My mobile phone thinks that when I say theory, I’m saying Siri. I cannot get it to rid itself of that preconception, and so it probably thinks that it’s heard the word Siri many, many times when it was theory many, many times. And so this is an additional case and we’ll make it even more sure of that in the future. This is, of course, paraphrasing an anecdote of Popper’s where he was chatting to the, was it Adler, the psychoanalyst? One of the psychoanalysts, I think it was Adler, where Adler had just interpreted something according to his theory and Popper said, how do you know? And he said, in the light of my thousand-fold experience. And so Popper replied, and I suppose with this case, your experience has become a thousand and one-fold, at which point, supposedly, Adler was very angry. But this just all goes to show that induction just isn’t true. It’s not just that induction is invalid, which is logically invalid, which is something that had been known since antiquity, but that Popper added to this that induction just doesn’t happen. It’s not that we do it, but it’s invalid, but it somehow works. We don’t do it. What we do is we have a theory first. And in the case where we’re creating new knowledge, this theory is a conjecture, which is not based on anything. It’s hoped for solution to some problem. So in Popper’s scheme of things, instead of starting with observation and inducing general theories, we start with a problem. Then we guess a solution. Then we test it. That’s the place where observation comes in, like at step three, not at step one.
Jed Lea-Henry
Well, I might actually dig into that question a little bit there, because, of course, we’ve just walked into the great problem that Popper found himself within. In fact, I believe it’s Objective Knowledge, the book. He starts it off with this. I’m going to paraphrase slightly here. He starts off the book with something like, I believe I solved the problem of induction many years ago, but no one paid any attention to it. And this is, he goes on and he does sound a little aggrieved that he’s not being listened to. And it’s hard to blame him if he’s repeating himself so often here, I imagine. But you said something really important there. It’s really an interesting way to look at the world, of course, this idea that the world, I think Popper’s quote, the world is theory-laden. But you said it starts with a problem. And Popper had a quote, I believe it says, if you want to understand someone’s philosophy or theory, you need to understand their problem, their problem situation. So why is it that knowledge starts from a problem?
David Deutsch
Yes, by the way, it’s observation that’s theory-laden. Oh, right, theory-laden. well, the reason it starts with a problem is this is the only possible way that knowledge could grow. Since there is no justified or reliable or probable source of knowledge, like observation was supposed to be, or like the holy books were supposed to be, since there is no such thing, we have to begin with some unjustified knowledge. And we have to have some reason for wanting to improve it. And that reason is called a problem. And in some sense, it always consists of a conflict, either a conflict between two ideas, that oasis seems to be out there, but we know that there’s just desert. So how can that be? So there’s a conflict between theories, which is a problem. Or it might be just that the problem might be that we would like to know how to prevent our food from spoiling so that we are in less danger of going hungry. And so there’s a case where some factual theories are conflicting with a moral theory about what we want or with a desire about what we want. And the only way we can make progress from having these existing theories which are in conflict to having theories which are in less conflict is by guessing, and that’s the conjecture. So we guess, and most of our guesses, what we do next is we criticise them. And we see whether, for example, whether they look as though they’re going to solve the problem or whether they are a bad explanation. So if somebody proposes as a conjecture, maybe if we put the food in the dark, maybe it won’t spoil. We know now that that’s kind of halfway to a solution. But if you have no explanation to go with that, then you can’t distinguish it from the explanation if we put the food in the light, it won’t spoil, or if we cover the food in grass, it won’t spoil, or if we let our animals eat half of it. So there’s an infinite number of possible conjectures. What we want is a conjecture that’s a purported explanation that will meet the problem. And we now know that a better answer would be, put it where it’s cool and dry. And very slowly, general theories come out of these conjectures. One of the conjectures that solves a particular problem has generality and turns out to solve a lot of other problems. That’s what I call reach. And it sometimes happens. And when it does, we sort of get a leg up so that we can see further than we saw before in the landscape of knowledge. So why does it have to start with problems? There is nothing else.
Jed Lea-Henry
Well, some people listening might instinctively say, why can’t it start with a foundation? Why can’t we wind back to something that we are certain to be true? I’m using that word in inverted commas here. Why can’t we wind it back as you know, so many other philosophers have done over years, wind it back to some first principles, some foundation, and then build up truth from there?
David Deutsch
Yes, a sort of bootstrap, pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. In a way, it’s a mistake for the same reason as that is. The foundation for this idea of deducing knowledge from a foundation depends on that foundation being secure and having in it basically all knowledge already implicit in it. And indeed, people did think there were such things in the past and as I said, holy books, but also traditions and the trouble is that they were false. All the things that have been used as purported foundations have been proved wrong. Even in pure mathematics, where it was thought that mathematical proof was the ultimate arbiter of whether mathematical propositions are true or false, was proved itself proved wrong in the 20th century by Kurt Gödel. So there are no foundations, there are no possible foundations because of the bootstrap problem. We’d have to justify the ultimate source of justification and there’s no justification for an ultimate source of justification. So that’s a problem and some people have concluded that therefore knowledge is impossible, which again is rather absurd if you consider that it’s not a coincidence that you and I are speaking at a distance of several thousand miles. It’s because a great deal of knowledge has gone into creating the means for us to do that. So there is knowledge but we didn’t get it from any foundation therefore it must be conjectural. How can that be since conjectures are not judged by where they came from? Well it is because they are judged by whether they solve the problem or not. So we’re not looking for theories that are going to be true forever, we’re looking for ways of correcting mistakes in our existing theories if they are problematic.
Jed Lea-Henry
So let me again drill into that for a second because again I’ll get you to shoot me down a little bit here because I can imagine people listening thinking well if all we have is this error correction and we can only be certain of anything and we can never have a foundation for anything and if fallibilism is the way forward here then it might give some sort of succor to the postmodernists who say there is nothing then, there is no truth. If we can never be sure anything is true then what is to say that there is truth, that truth actually exists out there in the world? How do we know there is an objective truth even if we can never be sure that we have it?
David Deutsch
Yes, part of this is what post-modernists call truth and therefore conclude doesn’t exist, indeed doesn’t exist. So this is a token of how radical a change Popper wrought on philosophy. The notion of truth in Popper’s philosophy is different from that of post-modernism and of all traditional philosophy where basically knowledge was defined as justified true beliefs. So the critical attack on that, actually Popper attacks all three of those alleged properties of knowledge, but in particular the attack on justification which is not unique to Popper forces one to conclude that justified true belief doesn’t exist and if you call that truth then truth doesn’t exist but this is but this isn’t what we call truth in everyday life. What we mean by truth in everyday life is that if somebody tells me the shops are going to shut today because of lockdown then that is a statement that’s capable of being true and or false. I can go and see whether the shop is open and shut not with perfect reliability of course a shop may look open yet be shut or vice versa and there’s no limit to how misled we can be but nevertheless it is meaningful to say that the statement that the shop is open is true if and only if the shop is in fact open. This theory of truth is also not original to Popper it was it’s in a way the common sense theory of truth but it was made systematic by the mathematician Tarski who Popper recounts that he explained it to him while sitting on a park bench in Vienna. Interestingly, Popper says that he had built his philosophy of science initially without ever referring to truth because he was afraid that critics would say that there is no such thing or that that you can’t coherently talk about that sort of thing and it was only when Tarski explained his theory of truth as correspondence to the facts and explained to him that this could be made mathematically rigorous as well using the idea of meta theories that Popper with I think with a sense of relief rewrote his stuff so as to actually speak about theories being true. Of course, no theory that we can actually utter is going to be exactly true so that the notion of truth in Popper’s philosophy has a slightly different role. When he says we are seeking the truth he means we are seeking to correct errors but when we correct errors there are always other errors left that we haven’t noticed and also new errors introduced by our removing the old error. So we’re seeking the truth means we’re seeking to correct error but by that very fact truth is a fundamental sort of regulating principle in the theory of knowledge according to Popper. Not because we can obtain absolutely true propositions but because there is a meaning to something being true or false.
Jed Lea-Henry
So Popper has a very interesting quote and you touched on it in part a few answers ago when you said all claims to foundations or all claims to infallibilism proved to be wrong but Popper had a quote that went a little bit further than that. I’ve seen you use it and for many people listening they will think that doesn’t sound quite right when I first hear it but it does it sinks in and seems to have a lot of truth to it so I’m not going to explain it and Popper says that I believe it’s like this he says the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the source of all tyranny so not just infallibilism is wrong but it’s always going to lead to tyranny as well.
David Deutsch
Yes so let me first say that that is not an argument against infallibilism. Just because it leads to bad consequences that we don’t like doesn’t mean it’s false. So the actual argument for fallibilism doesn’t involve this fact that contradicting it leads to tyranny. However having knocked down all claims to infallibilism we can then turn to this other important fact which is also like everywhere in Popper that claims to well it goes both ways I suppose claims to have an infallible source of truth leads to tyranny because if you are obviously right then somebody who contradicts you is obviously wrong and that is an automatic justification for using force against them if they insist on pursuing this wrong thing. It also goes the other way around if you want to use force when you fail to persuade somebody you need to explain at least to yourself but in practice to your followers and to those who would otherwise stop you and perhaps even to your victims why it should be you imposing your will on them by force rather than vice versa. You might say that in some ideologies it’s just that the ideology just says that the stronger person has the right but it’s never really like that that that’s always just a paraphrase because it’s always in the form I have this quality like you know belonging to the master race or something or having the divine right of kings or whatever which arguably gives me the right because if you didn’t have that then and then such and such a disaster would occur and so authority about ideas leads inevitably to authority in the political sense and vice versa.
Jed Lea-Henry
I hope you’re enjoying the podcast so far and I apologize for this brief interruption but I will take this moment to briefly send out a plug for the podcast itself. The Popperian Podcast is something that I’ve been planning for quite a while and it’s something that I want to keep running month to month but to do so it’s going to need your help. If you’re willing or able or interested please go to the links below the podcast and support us however you can. It will be your help as listeners that keeps the podcast going and keeps the content coming out and I thank you in advance and with that said we will now return to the second half of the interview. Thanks for listening. So let’s step into that political sense then and to those first two books that you picked up The Open Society and Its Enemies and we touched on it a fair bit there but one of the things that Popper gets to when he starts to apply his theory of science across to social matters and politics is he looks at this history of philosophy and he looks at democracy and he says the big problem throughout the years is that people don’t really understand democracy even though they have it. They think it’s about choosing the right leader and how to get the best leader, how to get the best policy and so on and so forth and Popper famously says it’s got nothing to do with any of that so I might be able to take us to The Open Society and that first fundamental question that he begins to open up there.
David Deutsch
Yes, as in many of Popper’s advances it starts with the problem and it changes the question that has traditionally been asked about that problem to a different question. So in regard to science it changes the question from how do we extract theories from observation and says instead no actually we don’t and the real problem is how can we improve our existing theories and in political philosophy he expresses the traditional view as the who should rule view that he says all traditional political philosophies have just assumed that the problem is we need to find who should rule and how to ensure that that person or people get to rule and that they are ruling and he says that that is a bad question because every answer was his phrase something like cries out for authoritarianism because if you had an answer to who should rule which was the right answer then it would justify you in using force against anyone who challenges the ruler. Here’s again the authority in regard to politics creates a spurious authority in regard to knowledge as well. So he says let’s replace that by a better question which you know he kind of says which should have been the real question all the time namely given that the rulers will make mistakes how can we set things up so that their mistakes can be corrected and the rulers themselves can be replaced without violence so the problem within politics being the discipline of how force should be used basically how laws should be made and enforced how do we improve policies and replace rulers without violence and he says that democracy is the various forms of democracy are jointly the best ways of solving that problem. I would like to phrase that in terms of legitimacy they are a way of legitimizing obeying the law when you disagree with it that it has gone through the democratic process is a very powerful way of legitimizing that because otherwise you have to say that you would prefer that you impose your theories and therefore democratic systems have to be judged not as ways of implementing the rule of the people with the people being a sort of imaginary thing that is imagined to rule under democracy but it is instead the solution to the problem of how do we best remove ideas from being policies and the answer is through various systems of voting.
Jed Lea-Henry
Now there’s an interesting side point to this and I believe I heard you saying it a few years ago and I believe it comes from Popper you were saying around the question when Brexit was still very much being debated in the public square and I think it does apply a lot today when people have the strange tendency to look at our democracies and lament how messy they all look and how conflicted we all feel and seem and often have this strange adoration for authoritarian regimes and think perhaps I could be like that because it seems to work with a bit more harmony and a lot less mess and open infighting and you said this and of course I think it’s from Popper he says of course if democracy is all about the best error correcting system to correct bad leaders and bad policies it is also the case that systems that are good at error correction are going to make more mistakes.
David Deutsch
Yes they’re going to make more mistakes more small mistakes. The authoritarian systems of course always collapse eventually because they are less able to solve problems that’s the whole point and so you can have by the way it’s so it’s we tend to look at long-lived authoritarian systems like long-lived monarchies or the Egyptian pharaohs and so on but most authoritarian systems don’t last longer than the dictator or even shorter than that. The practice of entrenching particular ideas and particular leaders is not itself a source of knowledge it’s going to entrench mistakes and it’s only a matter of time until a problem comes along that the knowledge in that system can’t solve and where the ideas that would solve it don’t come into existence because proposing rival ideas has been suppressed in that system. So the mirage is that we see some long-lived authoritarian system and we imagine that it’s going to last forever because it says it will and we compare it with the messiness and working at cross purposes that happens in democratic systems and we say look here people are working against each other they’re in that system they’re all working towards one end. Okay so the end might be slightly wrong but at least they’re making progress you know and then it collapses. I remember that, by the way, this reminds me that in the 1980s early 80s or something some guy wrote a book called Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984 so it must have been before 1984 this book was written and I remember how people ridiculed this the idea that the Soviet Union is going to collapse was you know by induction they had seen it lasting for decades unchanged in its system the idea that it would collapse was absurd. Science fiction stories I remember science fiction stories about the distant future you know two or three hundred years ahead had stories about the Soviet Union and the United States as they will be in the three or four hundred years time as if neither of them was going to change and so this idea that the authoritarian system was unstable seemed ridiculous but it was perfectly true and they always are even the ones that last for thousands of years which are the remote exceptions cannot deal with problems for example the Egyptian one was repeatedly overthrown and made very little progress in the thousands of years that it existed for.
Jed Lea-Henry
So on the other side of this again focusing on a lot of the feeling that some people seem to have about democracy today and you touched on it a little bit there this idea of consensus people have this idea that it’s very important to have consensus inside democracy and of course part of Popper’s philosophy of political systems not just involves not selecting the best leader but being able to remove bad leaders quickly but it also has an implication that once we do elect leaders that they actually get a chance to govern and implement their policy and that runs against this common notion today that we should all be compromising and there should be consensus on everything.
David Deutsch
Yes well a compromise by definition is something that nobody believes is a good idea or at least nobody believes it’s the best available idea and so it starts out with that inherent disadvantage. Consensus pleases no one but there’s a worse thing about consensus which is that it violates Popper’s criterion that is when consensus policies that nobody advocated are put into effect then whenever there’s a problem nobody has been proved wrong in particular the leaders haven’t been proved wrong they have what they did was they negotiated a compromise and then enacted a thing they didn’t believe in so it impedes the removal of bad policies and bad leaders so violates Popper’s criterion. Politicians tend to love it because politicians are always trying to evade responsibility for when their ideas go wrong and they often do because politicians are fallible like everybody. What a politician would ideally like is a way of staying in power without ever being held responsible when things go wrong so they’re looking for ways of not being responsible and systems of government that have consensus like proportional representation at their heart also have irresponsibility at their heart the ability to say not only does the buck not stop here but it doesn’t stop anywhere because there was nobody who advocated that in the first place.
Jed Lea-Henry
So to wind some of Popper to the current moment for a brief interlude here it is very common these days to hear a lot of people speaking in you know looking at the American system but also the British system back on Brexit it seems to run across countries at different moments this and it’s this it’s a fear that democracy is failing in some ways people say they speak in terms like democracy is at risk our very system is about to face an existential threat to our society and our system and I follow you on Twitter and you’re one of the calming voices telling people that you’re not so worried about this at all and I believe you see a lot of this as a crisis of hyperbole and not a crisis of democracy so in this world where people talk about fake news and disinformation campaigns and people seem to worry about the whole system of democracy breaking down why are you so calm about this why do you think this is not the threat and that they’re overreacting a little bit
David Deutsch
Well so many things where do I begin first of all the well there’s this hyperbole fad where there’s sort of competitive hyperbole on all sides where people accuse each other of being Nazis and fascists and enemies of democracy and enemies of the human race and so on over issues that even 50 years ago would have been regarded as laughably trivial um the uh you know at the time of the Great Depression when millions of people were literally going hungry in the most advanced societies in the world and where totalitarian ideologies were making inroads and actually getting supporters uh you know ideologies which were literally um uh threatening the end of civilization and did, in spite of all that danger and all that suffering coming at the same time um the uh institutions were never seriously at risk uh that is the institutions in the anglosphere let’s say um uh where the enlightenment traditions in politics are the strongest um although there were millions of people who were who were fascist sympathizers and communist sympathizers and anarchists and people who blew things up and uh people who staged general strikes and so on nevertheless um such people did not win elections there are very very few um adherents of extremist policies um won elections in um in say the 1920s and 30s um the so that level of assault on institutions of consent um it seems to me it is like an order of magnitude greater than anything we see today and yet people somehow because of this hyperbole or perhaps it’s the other way around, this is what causes the hyperbole people I don’t know which way around it is people seem to like the idea that they are living in a time of momentous challenge where the stakes are exactly like or analogous to what the stakes were in the Second World War you know where it was good against evil where if evil wins it’s the end of civilization and therefore fighting against that is glorious and is worthwhile and gives meaning to life and so the more you can um talk in terms of these hyperboles um the more life seems worthwhile it’s as if making rapid quiet peaceful progress which is what’s actually going on all the time now isn’t exciting enough for people when they are in political mode
Jed Lea-Henry
Um well let’s um open up another aspect of that just from that answer of yours um of course another aspect of the open society here is not just democratic systems but also the society itself and I’m going to I might introduce this question with a quote of yours I believe you gave it in a talk recently when you were talking about AGI which you spent a fair bit of time focused on recently and uh the quote runs like this I’m going to cut it into two here but it says the knowledge of how to prevent people being dangerous is counterintuitive it took our species millennia to create it but now that we do have the knowledge okay the only way to prevent people from being dangerous is to make them free and that um is a wonderful way when I first heard it to summarize what Popper was trying to say here but many people listening will of course think how is it that you make people free and then that’s the way to make them non-dangerous is it not the case that if people are free then they are free to be dangerous so to speak um
David Deutsch
Why are people law-abiding uh so the traditional answer was because they’re afraid of retribution um that’s not true um if that were true the forces of law and order would be totally overwhelmed as they are in societies where uh people do lose respect for the legitimacy of law in those societies the um political order of things gets overturned and then you know the beggar on horseback is replaced by the beggar on foot but the lash goes on um the enlightenment created a radically new kind of society a society where there is legitimacy that is not based on fear and obedience but is based on uh reason on identification with the process um a process that one considers fair one can tolerate when it makes a mistake um you uh so there is a kind of miracle um I think uh Roger Scruton of all people um pointed this out that that we don’t recognize enough how much of a miracle it is that when a party loses power in a democratic country and especially in the anglosphere um they just leave they leave um not only do they leave uh like the reins of power the army control of the police not only do they leave all that behind but they would actually fight and die to enable their opponents who they believe will ruin the country with their economic policies or whatever um to enable them to get into power now this is amazing and it uh it is counterintuitive if you think of um if you think of human interaction as being mechanical as if you omit the element of creativity so if no new ideas could be created then the only way that existing ideas could could um confront each other would be ultimately by violence and um uh the enlightenment created a different kind of society where creativity is harnessed to create not consensus but consent the thing about progress is that in the short run it involves a lot of confrontation and bickering and um disagreement about what should be done next and a lot of fuss being made but in the long run it causes unanimous agreement so my favorite example being slavery where a couple of hundred years ago almost everybody in the world took for granted that slavery was a fact of life now almost everybody in the world thinks that um slavery is one of the great abominations and uh this change happened through the political process um largely in the anglosphere it’s true that many societies had regulated or even abolished the slave trade or slavery itself in the past but this was this was uh this was different this was not because of an idea that human rights transcend other considerations it was just sort of in the way that uh governments often free prisoners as well criminals uh to create some goodwill and you know whatever um the west and especially the anglosphere adopted a view about slavery that grew out of their view of themselves um they wanted slaves to be freed for the same reason that they wanted themselves to obey the law if laws made by a party different from their own um so they identified with the tradition of criticism in preference to their own particular views and there’s this nice quote from Popper as …
Jed Lea-Henry
Well uh see if I can get this right some something like um a rationalist is someone who would rather not get his way because he has failed to convince you than to get his way by force
David Deutsch
Yes exactly
Jed Lea-Henry
That is that that sums it up nicely so to also sum it up nicely on that thought yeah I believe this is you that said this and I’m not sure if you got it from Popper or not but um as you were speaking there I can imagine some people thinking uh but is it always possible to convince people perhaps some people are just beyond convincing and you have a quote you say all failure is due to lack of knowledge so yeah I imagine you have a theory that um if you fail to convince someone for whatever reason um if in fact what you’re saying is true then the failure is yours yeah
David Deutsch
Well it might be that they are so irrational that they didn’t want to listen to you um you know you may be right in that, but nevertheless the failure is yours in a bigger sense because if they are irrational and not listening their very existence is a problem which will be solved one day and people will then uh realize who was being unreasonable um this uh again it happens again and again um in the history of our culture
Jed Lea-Henry
And a step towards the future because some of the really interesting work that you did, that step beyond Popper, was to look towards the future in some ways and um you write that um our very survival out the niche that we’ve carved out for ourselves is one where you have to create knowledge that’s not in your genes and of course this comes to wrap back to Popper in some ways the idea he has this famous quote of uh we get to let our ideas die in our place so I’m here to introduce the difference between um evolutionary knowledge and explanatory knowledge and why when we look towards the future it is so important that we continue to create explanatory knowledge and continue to create it uh as fast as possible uh
David Deutsch
Yes, well first of all non-explanatory knowledge um goes extinct always um so that there are no species today left over from a billion years ago most species um uh go extinct within a few million years or less um so the particular knowledge in our genes that defines our species um will not stay in existence automatically in fact what will happen unless it is saved by other kinds of knowledge the kind of knowledge in our minds uh is that it will necessarily um be destroyed uh and I think it should be a rather scary and salutary thing to bear in mind that every other species who had this ability to create knowledge in their minds is indeed extinct um some people think they’re made extinct by competition with our species but uh whether or not that’s true um uh we don’t have a guarantee from the almighty that we shall survive um everything points in the other direction except the thing that makes us different from all other existing species the reason so that’s the reason why we have to change we have to change our way of life so that and in the course of um solving problems that arise um there will always be problems and if we are to survive the problem if there isn’t going to be a problem that will destroy us as happens with other species then we must create the knowledge to face it the reason why it has to be fast is I think this is something you mentioned uh at the beginning of our conversation that that um individuals have the power to create very large problems and the more knowledge there is in society um the more uh the fewer the smaller the proportion of people who are capable of destroying society because that to some extent this has always been true I don’t want to exaggerate this too much and become you know one of these hyperbole people and Genghis Khan did a very good job of destroying civilizations and he was just one man and civilizations have been destroyed before we don’t need nuclear weapons to destroy civilizations in fact almost all civilizations that have ever existed have been destroyed either from the outside with fire and the sword or from the inside with just decay and failing to um have a way of coping with the next drought or famine or disease um so now we have the problem that weapons of mass destruction and so on again give individuals give the bad guys the enemies of civilization the means of destroying civilization unless the knowledge of how to thwart them is created and um well uh so long as the organizations are few in number we have that going for us but because small numbers of people can create a large amount of harm that’s not enough so the other thing we have going for us is that the enemies of civilization are mistaken they believe things that aren’t true and they base their enmity to civilization on trying to entrench these untrue things and so long as they’re doing that they are um impairing disabling their own ability to solve problems that come up um that inevitably come up um but also the problem they’re trying to solve of how to destroy civilization uh civilization’s advantage therefore is speed that is civilization a good civilization has the advantage that it can solve problems including the problem of how to defend itself against evildoers um
Jed Lea-Henry
So before we get to a last couple of questions here this as you’re speaking there what echoed in my ear was something really interesting I’ve heard you say so uh this um rapid need to make progress and the enemies of civilization um of course many people out there are worried that the AIs when they come or the aliens will be enemies of civilization but again you are not you’re one of the calm voices saying it won’t happen and I imagine correct me if I’m wrong that some of this comes from the ideas of Popper that these people uh these aliens or these AIs just like us and they will have to create knowledge the same way we have um so yeah let’s go there why is it that you are not so worried about uh this looming AI or alien apocalypse
David Deutsch
Well uh it it’s not that I am saying it won’t happen any more than I’m saying that humans won’t destroy civilization um as I said there’s never any guarantee it’s possible that evildoers will destroy civilization and it’s possible that civilization will um make progress too slowly and will be destroyed by some unexpected problem so it’s that’s always possible uh but you’re right to say that my view is that it’s all about the knowledge all these considerations about destroying or not destroying civilization defending it are all about knowledge creation and not about the vehicle that happens to contain the knowledge it makes no more sense to regard um uh silicon-based intelligence as uh being more dangerous uh than it makes sense to regard people with a certain skin color as being more dangerous it is only the knowledge or the lack of it which is dangerous and uh AGIs artificial general intelligences when they are eventually developed will be developed to be members of a certain culture um and um uh exactly as humans are and there will be members of good cultures and bad cultures the ones that are members of bad cultures will be worse at solving problems than the ones that are members of good cultures and there’ll be no difference to what I just outlined just now that the we can hope that the good ones are in the majority and we can also hope uh that for structural reasons the good ones will create knowledge faster and that that applies to AGIs just as much as humans now you might say that the whole problem though will be located in the AGIs because they might be faster at thinking than us but uh that’s not true either because um that is confusing hardware with software um fast hardware is available to us too we already use supercomputers to increase the rate at which we solve problems and um AGIs as it were just have supercomputers built in but we can have that too uh once we have um brain add-ons and so on if that’s the way it goes there are many ways that that we can use technology in addition to our built-in technology and as I’ve often said um pen and pencil or slide rules are already using add-ons to our brains to make our problem solving faster we take that for granted um doing it with computers we also take for granted doing it with AGI type hardware um we will take for granted you know once we’ve had it for five minutes
Jed Lea-Henry
So as uh as we begin to round this up I might at first take you back to that moment as when you’re a student and you first encountered Popper and you said it was luck and chance that you bumped into him now I’m wondering as a question of why you think that is the case I mean this is one of those questions that when students start philosophy they say this is um of how do we know anything it seems to be the most important question in philosophy for many people and after all these centuries of people are struggling with the question Popper seems to have come along and given a very good answer for it and as I think I quoted him earlier Popper himself lamented that no one was listening to him very much and I’ve heard you have discussions I’m sure you must have interacted with it at times when people say things like oh I’m definitely a fallibilist and I believe and I and I sorry I don’t believe but I understand or yes there there can’t be a foundation I get that and then the language switches back and they start talking about well we must know something for certain or if we start from this foundation here and I’m wondering why you think that the method or if you think it is the case that the message of Popper is difficult for some people to internalize when it also seems counter to a counter intuitively very simple
David Deutsch
Uh basically I don’t know and I don’t know even um counterfactually what would have happened if Charles Parkin hadn’t told me about Popper the thing is I wasn’t aware of being interested in philosophy I was and am a physicist. I’m interested in understanding the natural world um I’ve got interested in philosophical ideas because it is necessary to understand them to do the kind of physics that I do um the ideas have reach and uh that’s taken me into other areas as well um and it is a mystery to me why Popper isn’t understood as having revolutionized as having made substantial progress in philosophy he’s systematically misunderstood by professional philosophers even more than by laypeople I don’t know why that is but it’s not unique um in The Fabric of Reality I have these four strands of all our existing knowledge where I try and fit all our existing knowledge into these four fundamental strands and it is true of Alan Turing with this idea of universality people don’t get it many of the misconceptions about AGI are due to misunderstanding Alan Turing’s basic idea of um of computational universality and it’s the same with um uh with the neo-Darwinism, the modern synthesis, that in some sense every educated person pays lip service to Darwinism and yet they often express this in terms of the survival of the fittest in terms that show that they don’t actually get it and then you have people like uh you know Wilson and so on who suddenly turn around and try to uh explain um the history of evolution in terms of species selection and that kind of thing so it’s not it’s uh not an unusual thing for um progress at the foundations which has happened um over the past century or so to be not exactly ignored because its presence isn’t ignored but its status as changing how we ought to look at the world has not been taken on board I don’t understand why in any of those cases the fourth case is um is Everett’s uh many-universe interpretation of quantum theory which is within physics where I’m kind of rooted and there I don’t understand it either I don’t I think it’s a scandal that the physics community uh it seems that there’s an equilibrium of 10 to 15 percent of physicists who work on quantum theory think in terms of the Everett’s many universes uh so-called interpretation basically that just is quantum theory um and the rest just want to use it instrumentally I don’t understand why um but as I said it’s uh it’s a phenomenon of the 20th century perhaps it’s because 20th century is the century in which philosophy itself both professional philosophy and philosophy among uh where it has corrupted common sense um has taken a nosedive
Jed Lea-Henry
So as a final question from that note there um you met Popper we must end on this question you met Karl Popper uh of course many years ago so I must ask you how was that meeting how did it come about and uh yeah what happened there uh
David Deutsch
Well it was amazing um I have told this story before as you as you uh indicate uh I went to meet him with um my boss at the time Bryce DeWitt who was a physicist um and uh supporter of many-universe interpretation Popper had written some very bad stuff criticizing the many-universe interpretation he just didn’t get it from beginning to end he thought he just completely misplaced what the fuss was about what the controversy was about uh so I had exchanged a couple of letters with Popper and he had replied very politely um uh and um when Bryce DeWitt came to Oxford on sabbatical um I suggested that we try and we were talking about these foundational issues and I suggested that we try and go and uh go and try to um speak to Popper and persuade him that he was mistaken so um uh so I wrote to him and uh then phoned him we arranged to meet uh we drove there in my car and um he lived in High Wycombe and uh and he met us and talked to us very graciously I had heard from several people that that Popper in person was very unlike what he advocated in regard to ideas that he was dogmatic that he got angry when contradicted and so on so I sort of was prepared to roll up my sleeves and have a good old uh fight um there uh metaphorically um but uh the very opposite happened uh we sat down we were served a nice tea I can’t remember whether it was by his wife or not but um uh and he listened extremely attentively to what we were telling him um he asked questions uh he asked the right questions um and he said that therefore he was going to have to uh make some changes in a book that he’d just written and that he was going to have to change a lot of things and you know it seemed to go perfectly uh and then we got to talking about something else uh other things that the conversation moved on to lots of interesting topics both in physics and outside and I was, this again I’ve told this story before but I kept having this strange sensation that every time he said something uh and I was thinking oh my god I unbidden the thought came to me how weird that this old guy is so accurate and so good at expressing Popperian ideas and then like and an instant later I thought oh yeah it’s Popper so and this happened again and again during the conversation uh very strange psychological effect anyway so we were glowing with this and we drove back to Oxford and so on and a few months later this book came out I forget which one it was actually uh this book that he’d been writing came out and we eagerly looked at it and it didn’t have any of the things he simply remained uh with all his um misconceptions so uh there you are I don’t know what to make of that but uh personally he was not in the least uh harsh off-putting or dogmatic or any of those things he seemed to be exactly as he should be according to his philosophy
Jed Lea-Henry
And that is also a wonderful note to end the podcast on of course I’m going to link below the podcast um I’ll link David’s personal website you can find a link to uh his two books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity but also to other lectures and his ongoing work on things like constructor theory so I can’t recommend people go there enough you will enjoy it and it’s always fascinating and uh David thanks for the time you’ve been so generous and also so interesting as always uh thanks for coming on the podcast
David Deutsch
Well thanks for having me and thanks for the plug so …
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