2021-01-09 OurKarlPopper Knowledge and Reality - Meeting David Deutsch
Duration: 02:03:31
Transcript
David Deutsch
See people, I’ve seen people coming on tv and saying how they were inspired by Richard Dawkins and then they say well yes evolution is the survival of the fittest and so on and they just they haven’t got it and you know E.O. Wilson hasn’t got it. I mean from our point of view, maybe from his point of view we haven’t got it, from his point of view Dawkins hasn’t got it, so I don’t know what the magic thing is that makes progress. Yeah but if a lot of young people are interested in ideas then there’s going to be progress even if one doesn’t notice it from one’s own point of view.
Sadia Naeem
And I agree with you because one of the things I’ve realized is it’s almost like you have to even go into psychology of it too. It isn’t just enough for the ideas to be available if people are not willing. It seems like somehow people are either oblivious or I don’t know if they’re not interested in why they cling to certain things. Sometimes I wonder if they could even just look at themselves like almost like turn back on themselves and see why certain thoughts and ideas are coming. I don’t know, I really do struggle with that too but despite having said that I think that at least those of us who are willing who are constantly struggling it really does help to have those ideas. I mean we might have gotten there in a while but most of us, I mean we have limited lifespans unfortunately so it helps anything else.
Bruce Nielson
I think it takes a while right? I mean and there’s so many ways to phrase things like even survival of the fittest if you think of that as like survival of the replicator that replicates the best you can kind of see how it still fits right?
David Deutsch
Yes. And so it’s I think that part of it is just it’s hard to get away from the …
Bruce Nielson
Memes that exist in a culture. If evolution is about survival of the fittest you can kind of see how even if you understand Dawkins that’s still true so you still use that term even though it’s
David Deutsch
Misleading. Well Darwin used it but I don’t know you know you can’t see into people’s minds but I suspect that in many cases when people say survival of the fittest they are imagining animals fighting it out.
Bruce Nielson
Yes I think you’re right. I think we have this big mingling in our minds of different ideas and we don’t really differentiate them that well so I think you’re right.
David Deutsch
Yeah but ideas also have power and they illuminate people and you know there is progress, there really is.
Bruce Nielson
Yeah I agree.
Sadia Naeem
It’s kind of interesting too that when you look into the theory of evolution too I mean of course you know they would say that there isn’t any directionality in evolution. It’s not like things are going towards more complexity. Well first of all there isn’t a you know a definition of complexity that everybody agrees to but it’s kind of hard to turn away and not recognize that there is something there like we have seen organism becoming more complex and it kind of goes hand in hand with the whole thing of recognizing why some people somehow think that there is no progress in ideas. Yeah sorry sorry go ahead.
David Deutsch
Sorry sorry some people would like to deny that there’s progress for various reasons psychological, political and so on once you deny that there’s progress you have a sort of an automatic take on a number of things that you have to be ignorant about if you don’t take that view and so it’s kind of comforting it’s kind of pessimism there’s a certain comfort in pessimism.
Sadia Naeem
Right interestingly I feel the same thing in evolutionary biology too. I think sometimes some people have had such a reaction to the whole because so far many religions have recognized the significance of humans you know like my background I used to be a Muslim but we were always told that all the angels bowed down to the human you know so God made something and then Satan turned against God because you know why I have been worshiping you so it seems like a lot of reaction nowadays in a reaction to religion some ideas have been ditched which I think is …
David Deutsch
Such a shame. Yeah all like Popper says that all science begins with mysticism and I think philosophy you know began with religion and what began with religion means is that religion was groping towards some truth attained some truth some falsehood and usually try to suppress criticism when criticism happens
Sadia Naeem
There we go sorry sorry can’t hear oh can you hear me David
David Deutsch
Yeah I can now
Sadia Naeem
Yeah no I had to mute somebody else but they didn’t realize they were unmuted
David Deutsch
I see yeah so and I think you know maybe the atheist movement should should give a little ground here and realize that that doing better than religion is not synonymous with denying everything that every religion says because that’s like starting from year zero
Sadia Naeem
Yeah it almost kind of becomes the same sort of thing that you see in different religion where people to give themselves credence they sometimes feel credence they feel like they have to put somebody else down because otherwise how are they going to convince their kids to stick to their religion and not think about something else
David Deutsch
Yes you’re still allowed to deny some aspects or many aspects of the opposing view but if you try to deny all aspects of the opposing view you will definitely go wrong
Bruce Nielson
And interesting reminds me of the Brexit debate
Carlos de la Guardia
I was re-watching the video at Dominic Cummings explaining why leave won the vote and he said everyone in this room I guess predominantly leftist he was saying vastly over value the rightness of being on the opposite side of the racists like Nigel Farage and all and all these guys all these guys so being beyond the opposite side of someone who is wrong is not the right way to think about.
David Deutsch
Oh yeah
Bruce Nielson
All right just a time check the official starting of this is in about 10 minutes and we will do a short introduction as soon as it officially starts
Sadia Naeem
Oh and Bruce I wanted to let you know I asked Margaret so she was like that we can all record and I actually kind of started recording uh actually I’m not sure if you can record but you can if you’re more than …
Bruce Nielson
I just started recording too
Sadia Naeem
Yeah so I it sounded like she didn’t think that it was going to make that much of a difference but it’s up to you can go ahead and that no that’s …
Bruce Nielson
Fine we’re good we’re good I’ll keep an eye if somebody entered like unmuted then I can kind of …
Sadia Naeem
Yeah because we have no idea how many people are gonna turn up or …
Bruce Nielson
I have noticed that people are coming into the room unmuted which is unfortunate we may have to like mute people as they come in if we get
Cameo Duran
So much for my theory right
Bruce Nielson
Yeah and Sonia you’re the only one who can do it so you’re gonna have to probably mute people as they come in all right so …
Carlos de la Guardia
By the way uh David I have a uh somewhat random question for you as long as you’re here um what did you have any expectations about what would happen when you first published The Beginning of Infinity um
David Deutsch
Well I was hoping that people would buy it expectations um uh
Sadia Naeem
Sorry give me one second I’m trying to identify all right there we go so sorry to be able to …
Bruce Nielson
Control that open up the participants and like stretch it out so you can kind of see everybody at once and they’ll be near the top yeah talking and you’ll be able to mute them quicker as they come in so sorry go ahead um
David Deutsch
Yeah well um uh one thing I thought at the time uh I with beginning of infinity I ended up finishing it under a deadline and it wasn’t as polished as I was hoping it would be and I had to leave out an entire chapter that I had planned uh in order you know it took it took uh almost 10 years to write as did fabric of reality but with the fabric of reality I finished it in my own time and beginning of infinity it was it was uh a bit rushed and so I was thinking that it wasn’t as good and um uh although many people criticize it in many ways um few people said it wasn’t as good so you know go figure it actually
Bruce Nielson
Seems to beginning infinity seems to be the more popular of the two books from what I’ve from what I’ve seen yes personally I’m a fabric of reality fan I actually I read fabric reality two years before beginning infinity came out so I was anxious uh when it came out I’m curious what was the chapter that you didn’t get to do uh
David Deutsch
I don’t know what it would have been called but it was about scientism and related issues a few paragraphs of that chapter got into uh the chapter on choices um uh you know the working out how many people go go into the museum and come out and then you form the theory that people are being spontaneously created and destroyed and that idea that was from the other chapter but I had been planning a long chapter on scientism I now think that scientism deserves a whole book and I am not the person to write it so maybe that never would have been written
Sadia Naeem
It’s interesting you say that because my first experience when I broke away uh I don’t want to say broke away from religion for me was a very natural progression when I recognized one day that I was an atheist but um I felt kind of almost isolated uh in a little bit of an isolation in my own community uh because I was just so weird in that way but I started looking for other places and there were a lot of atheist groups and free thinkers and you know they call themselves those type of and when I joined them I kind of almost felt like I was going to some sort of a religious place uh like I really wanted to be with people where I could just literally talk we you know without saying oh you’re not allowed to ask this question but I didn’t find that and that kind of made me realize when I heard you talk about scientism where I read I’m like that flick right away that unfortunately either you have that or no other end where you’re just not allowed to ask certain questions.
Bruce Nielson
The shutting down of criticism yes all right time check we’ve got six minutes before the official start we’ve got quite the crowd I think this might be one of the larger crowds
Carlos de la Guardia
I’m gonna say um David it’s been fun meeting some new people um I’m currently visiting Austin Texas right now so I know you’ve got a little bit of history there uh and um it’s funny to see how uh or maybe funny is the wrong word but uh it’s very interesting to note how the knowledge-based view of the world changes the discussion the whole shape of certain kind of discussions that otherwise would be maybe people from different countries that are not as well-known would be maybe people focused like classes of people and scientists up here and all these sorts of things or um just asking questions about where knowledge is created where conflicts are happening where disagreements are happening simplify so many things uh to the point where people will ask like my favorite recent thing is that somebody will ask me for relationship advice or something and I’ll give them the same caveat that you always do is I don’t know that much about relationships but what’s the problem and then you can kind of just ask a few questions and see okay well you know I can think a little bit about disagreements um so then you know kinds of questions you’ve asked and um I’m constantly surprised that there’s always something to be said it may not be incredibly relevant but what my friend told me and I didn’t really expect this would happen um as he said um whenever I talked to Carlos and you know I always tell him you’re effectively talking to David indirectly but uh and so and uh but run your David module yeah uh I said uh he says the problem is unchanged um and yet I feel so much better and the analogy that I gave him was that um he was like someone who had to build a spaceship uh and he was currently in the desert and he had just been transported to a beautiful high-tech facility with all sorts of tools around uh he hasn’t built the spaceship yet but suddenly the situation of surrounding the problem is now totally different whereas it might have been this person doesn’t like me that’s you know it’s it becomes just about what is uh what knowledge is lacking or you know what discussion do I need to have how can I uh take this person who I thought might disagree with me and that would be a problem and who I might try to lie to or otherwise try to get something and say oh well how can I just make the problem an objective thing we can both try to solve and double our efforts and the creative possibilities here and so he just seems to um have that view that things become so much easier once you have this view of knowledge even if you haven’t directly solved
David Deutsch
Maybe you’re describing the transition to optimism um if you think about what’s going wrong in terms of a lack of knowledge then in a certain although you still don’t know what that knowledge is in a certain sense you know that that what’s standing between you and uh the good outcome is a lack of knowledge and you want you need to create knowledge and that that puts a that already puts an optimistic spin on things even before you solve anything whereas if you think of things in terms of people then everything becomes who whom you know famous thing that lenin is supposed to have said just a very accurate description of a whole class of world views who whom and you’ve got to get rid of who whom um if you get rid of it in politics that’s that’s like getting rid of who should rule and so on and presumably what from what you’ve just said in relationship things uh you get away from who whom and you turn towards what actually is the problem.
Bruce Nielson
All right it is it is time so Sadia why don’t we go ahead and start the official meeting if you could do the introduction and then we will go on from there …
Sadia Naeem
All right first of all I want to welcome everybody um it’s kind of nice to see uh I think this has been our uh largest session kind of wanted to start by introducing I think most of us probably know uh david uh but I wanted to just give a little bit of an intro um uh to david um by pointing out uh that first of all the age of enlightenment uh saw the rise of what some of us recognize as Popperian tradition while Popper’s work may not be that well known the tradition he presented or talked about has been with us uh for a few centuries now I think that David Deutsch has done a wonderful job at bringing Popper’s work to people through his books and he’s also encouraged a culture of sharing uh and criticism of ideas and most of all by making himself accessible uh to social media I think he’s pretty accessible as some of us know uh through Twitter which uh is not such a common thing among people who are specialists in certain fields his work optimism and interactions have inspired a culture whereby people have come together to take Popper’s ideas to a new level this has led to groups such as the Four Strands um which bruce and others uh contribute this is a thing of where I have to be the moderator I mean I have to unmute everybody too but um but this has led to groups such as Four Strands run by um Bruce Nielson and others individuals have been inspired to create podcasts YouTube videos and websites to encourage an open-ended growth of knowledge david’s book opened me up to the ideas that impacted my life in more ways than I can mention in a few words my primary interest is in foundations of physics and I’m also an educator I find myself starting my physics class every year now for the last couple of years uh with the discussion um with the david’s ted talk on good explanations and it’s interesting how that leads to all sorts of interesting discussions throughout the school year as we look into physics and just overall the connection of physics and reality you know we talk about reality we even talk about multiverse sometimes and it really gets kids into it so um so I really want to thank uh david for making himself available um and um thanks a lot david for coming today and I’m going to hand it over to bruce now um and let him help introduce
Bruce Nielson
All right thank you Sadia I’m Bruce Nielson and I think I was asked to help host this session because my experience is fairly typical of probably a lot of yours so uh back in 2009 uh we know that I was a religious blogger and I had a fellow religious blogger suggest to me to read david’s book um fabric of reality and I was enthralled with it so I started actually blogging about it and things like that and um it I spent years actually trying to refute what was in his book and ended up reading a whole lot of different books that were related subjects and uh eventually became very convinced of all four of the strands he mentions in um uh fabric reality because of my inability to refute them and ability to find good criticism of them that he hadn’t already responded to and uh so eventually this even led to me going back to school I wanted to study this more deeply I wanted to go back to school and get a master’s degree in computer science study computational theory and related subjects and so this is something that really has ended up impacting my life quite a bit just in a lot of ways starting off as a hobby and then eventually now maybe even eventually turning into a career change so um I’m also the I started a podcast the theory of anything podcast which is loosely based on David Deutsch’s four strands and um Sadia mentioned the four strands blog four strands dot org um I am the one kind of behind that that runs that and hosts that and uh my co-host cameo is also here cammy do you want to do a quick introduction
Cameo Duran
Yes I do hi I’m cammy o’duran and I’m bruce’s co-host on the theory of anything podcast and everything I know about David Deutsch came from my um involvement with bruce I think one of the first times bruce and I had a conversation it really quickly veered into the Popper land and his passion around the four strands um and was the primary reason we started the podcast together just because we really enjoyed discussing knowledge and that’s that’s why I’m here hi
Bruce Nielson
Thank you so um what we’re going to do for this session I do have some questions if people run out of questions but I want to give people a chance to actually just talk to david and to ask him questions and to pick his brain and things like that so the way to do that so that we don’t get things out of control uh maybe put a question in the chat and Sadia will um you know unmute you and we will just let people have a chance to kind of talk with david and have fireside chat here so …
Sadia Naeem
To speak with him all right you could try that option of the raise hand if I see a raise hand I’m going to try my best to spot you and then this way nobody uh goes over each other yeah
Bruce Nielson
Raise your hand that’s a good idea
Sadia Naeem
Yeah it seems like we have one there uh please go ahead urns is it please I’m sorry if I’m mispronouncing
Bruce Nielson
And I should tell everybody this is being recorded and um I know for sure that we’re going to be releasing this on the theory of anything podcast probably will get replaced at least other places too so just be aware of that as you speak up here
Ernst
Thank you for hosting this wonderful thing I was here earlier also it’s been great so I was thinking a little bit something about the transition that you write about like your explanation of why humankind was stuck in static societies has to do with irrational memes but if that is because you need that the conception of anti-rational memes because you because that’s the explanation for why this exponential growth didn’t happen because you don’t need to assume so much for it to happen you just make people make small changes into their ideas and then that will lead to exponential growth but then that seems to why wasn’t the static society why didn’t it get stuck completely like what if this is the question before the enlightenment like that the argument is something like the enlightenment could have happened earlier but the enlightenment happened at in a particular culture and wasn’t that culture different than the static culture that preceded it something like this I don’t know if this question?
David Deutsch
Yeah there is a thing which um maybe isn’t clear in my presentations um when we think about the enlightenment as distinct from what happened before there’s a selection effect that we tend to think that what happened before was like the enlightenment except with static societies but the thing is long-lived static societies are rare I not as rare as the enlightenment society but still quite rare most societies most cultures that have ever existed have not survived very long at all um they but because they haven’t so back in pre-history it may have happened um more often than a static culture evolving was simply a culture evolving which did change and then destroyed itself because its changes were not in the direction that would stabilize it for example they wouldn’t have had uh traditions of criticism for example so maybe they were changing and as a result they made many mistakes and as a result they were unable to correct them and so they were killed by the neighboring tribe or they ran out of food and didn’t know what to do or whatever so um the sort of natural state of nature if you can use that concept with humans you can’t really but the state that uh humans or pre-humans were in when creativity first evolved was maybe better described as just continual chaos and failure rather than staticity and then staticity sort of emerged out of that sometimes but because staticity made the cultures uh last longer and grow more um that those are the ones that we kind of see when we look back we see the ancient Egyptian empire and that that kind of thing uh and we don’t see the many failures that must have outnumbered that that culture right I don’t know if that answers your question maybe I’m missing I think
Ernst
Yeah that was not how I what I got from the book so far so it was a little bit different …
Sadia Naeem
Yeah first of all before I uh tell the person who’s next in line are there any comments to this or any further things somebody wants to uh ask or add to this particular question okay so I’m going to go to the next person and apologize ahead of time uh your name is puma I’m sorry it starts could you please tell us what your name is and please go ahead
Pavan
Uh hi hi david everyone uh my my name is uh Pavan and um uh thank you so much for coming uh I think the reason I was being recommended to your book is is that uh I was asking a person on how to do research and then he recommended this book to me and uh from his understanding the most important take from this book is um maybe just for me but uh it’s about self-error correction um and um I don’t know if you have so the first question is do you have any advice to how this kind of self-error correction can can take place is there uh a set of questions that a person can can question themselves uh in his everyday life uh for example or in his own research um the so this is my first question uh my my second question is uh um I think uh in the end uh we as human uh in all sciences we what we we’re trying to really understand is about causality um but uh the problem uh to me is that um I’m not a theoretical physicist and I um and I get a sense that um my understanding of causality can be very naive and um far from what actually is being considered as causality in physics like the space time causality for example in physics um so I uh but I think at times I can see why uh things are not causal um and are merely correlations but I kind of find it really hard to give a give a definition of what is causality and um and in this scenario how can I as a researcher trying to probe into this uh these causal relations um this is my second question uh my third question and this is the last question uh so I um right now I am a grad student uh working in statistics uh and uh it I think uh fundamentally it’s a it’s a problem of induction and uh that we’re trying to um combat every you know everyday life um so um my question to you is what do you think is the most important thing uh to do uh for statisticians or a statistics researcher to help in the process of scientific discovery um and this kind of uh what would you think would be the most important thing to do in uh for a statistician in the next uh 50 years or 30 to 50 …
David Deutsch
Well one can’t prophesy of course well to answer the last question first uh because I think that’s the easiest uh statistics is is uh the interesting and useful branch of mathematics and the way it enters into science is that it is it enters only in what I call in my book the perspiration phase um that is uh it is it is the last step in the last step in discovery it is the part that that is not creative but mechanical uh so if we if we have a mass of statistics and use statistical theory to get an answer out of that the answer was really created before the data were even collected and that part doesn’t involve statistics so uh you know doing statistics one has to understand that this is a branch of mathematics and that it has nothing to do with um creativity some people think that creativity is just extracting knowledge out of data but that is the opposite of what the truth is and as Popper has taught us right uh
Pavan
So yeah I can see from the book um that uh it can be kind of used as a tool to uh reject hypothesis but uh it seems that uh it is do you think it’s likely that it can be used to discover hypothesis as well or maybe like not?
David Deutsch
I think that’s fundamentally impossible um for the same reason that any piece of mathematics can’t lead to discovery it the piece of mathematics isn’t about the world unless you have a theory that first have a theory that connects it to the world um now as I say speaking of Popper that leads me to your first question um I there is a very nice um transcript on the internet somewhere of the lectures that or some of the lectures that Popper gave to his um uh scientific method class in the LSE when he first joined the LSE and the first lecture I think it’s the first lecture begins with him saying I think I’m the only professor of scientific method in the British Empire and the first thing I want to say about this is that there is no such thing as scientific method and I think this applies equally well to other aspects of Popper’s philosophy that there is no such thing as a philosophical method or a self-improvement method or a psychological method it it’s all opportunistic it’s opportunistic problem solving um however uh so when you said you know maybe the book the theme of my book is all problem solving and maybe the theme of all Popper’s books is also problem solving but the thing is there is no method for that if there is a method for there are various methods for avoiding doing that and it’s a good thing to try to escape from those methods if they are in one’s culture or in one’s psychology but that by itself doesn’t doesn’t do anything positive it merely frees one from uh the sabotage of those methods um so yeah there is it’s all about creativity yes uh and now uh what was your second question I remember the third and first but the second question is about causality oh yes well in uh what you would uh find if you looked at modern physics and modern philosophy uh was what they say about causality is that they basically deny that there is such a thing most studies of the foundations of physics uh conclude falsely I think that because of the determinism of the laws of physics and the block universe and the block multiverse and whatever, and because of the reversibility of the laws of motion in physics, that they equally well predict the past from the future as well as the future from the past or almost anything from almost anything else uh that there is no room for causation in that picture and I think that there is it’s just that um causation is a high level concept and there’s no mention of um difference between liquids and solids or backwards and forwards in time either in fundamental physics and yet there are well developed physical theories of both of those things and uh the causality hasn’t really been important in physics um for um maybe the last couple of hundred years but that’s not really very important um in constructor theory if I can plug that for a moment uh there it’s much easier to um frame a theory of or frame explanations in terms of causes than it is in uh the prevailing mode of explanation so I and in other fields than physics causation is important and attempts to eliminate causation and try to pretend that one can explain things like human behavior in a deterministic way are uh dead ends or worse so that’s my answer to the second question um thanks uh so um David do you mind um if I ask you …
Pavan
Uh just an additional question
Sadia Naeem
Actually could I pause because I’m sorry could I interject uh for a second because I’m actually seeing a few hand raises so if you so how about we do this because I want everybody to have an opportunity to ask so if you have more than one question then how about we ask it again and then I will put you in …
Bruce Nielson
Raise your hand again if you’ve got a second coming
Sadia Naeem
Back to you as long as it seems like now we have actually a list of people um so ella could I please let me go over to you next
Ella
Yeah sure can you guys hear me okay
Bruce Nielson
Yeah uh a little bit soft but I can hear you Ella oops now I can’t hear you now
Sadia Naeem
You’re for some reason we can’t hear you even though you’re not muted
Ella
Next person and get me afterwards I can we can hear you now you’re back now okay hopefully this will work okay so david I’m very interested in um artificial general intelligence um in which is to say I’m interested in trying to understand the mind and the way that the mind creates knowledge at a little at a level of detail that is sufficient that we can implement it on a computer and so my question is about the logic of how the how minds manage to create knowledge and um and the extent to which it’s similar or different to biological evolution and the way that knowledge is created there so my question is do you think that um replicators are involved in the way that the mind that minds manage to create knowledge I think in biological evolution we know from you know Darwin and Dawkins theory that the replicators are sort of the key explanation for why biological evolution manages to create knowledge and so I’m interested in whether you think that there’s something similar going on in the human mind some sort of pool of competing replicators or do you think that there’s some other process that’s responsible for creating knowledge in human minds
David Deutsch
But to some extent that’s a question of uh implementation um but I think well and I don’t know how creativity works in the human mind you know if I knew I’d be I’d be really working hard on that now if I had any kind of idea that I thought was halfway viable um in regard to replicators um my guess is that that’s not how the implementation works in the mind that there could be a logically equivalent implementation in terms of replicators but the thing is in the mind or in a computer you could save memory space just by rather than by having multiple copies you just have one copy with a number you know this there are 10 000 of these which is a bit like saying um you know this thing is worth 10 000 of this other thing which hasn’t done the equivalent of replication um uh I should say as I say in the book as well that I don’t think we understand biological evolution well enough either um we and maybe one route towards um AGI would be to uh do a biological the equivalent of biological artificial biological evolution first uh it may or may not be a good route you know the replicating a bird’s wing was not the best route to artificial flight and so although the underlying theory is the route towards it the underlying theory of how a bird’s wing works is the way to make an airplane um so I doubt that it’s replicators I doubt that there are replicators in the brain
Ella
Okay great thank you so much
Sadia Naeem
All right any comments on that uh all right okay uh Vaden could you can please go ahead um
Vaden
Hi I’m a phd student at UBC and machine learning um and I keep trying to get people to think about knowledge in my community and they keep confusing it with information um and I have a very difficult time uh explaining to them that I’m trying to refer to something else without just pointing them to your books and Popper’s books and so I guess I’m curious to know uh how you think about the difference between knowledge and information and then also if you have any communication strategies um that you could offer in terms of how to uh get people to realize that I’m trying to talk about something that’s not information when I say the word knowledge thanks
David Deutsch
Yeah the only communication strategy that works apart from spending many years writing a book is conversation and you just get together with someone and try to overlap your problem situation and then something happens um uh the I think of knowledge as a species of information um and I’ve at various times used several different uh characterizations of what uh makes it different from other um information and um my most recent choice is to say that knowledge is uh information with causal properties there’s causation arising again so um knowledge is that property of a computer program that makes it do something useful um and for example you know you have a word processor um and the word processor is useful because it knows it has the programmer of course is who generated the knowledge but the programmer has put into the program knowledge of things like there are such things as words there are such things as letters and sentences there is such a thing as correct spelling and incorrect spelling and so on and there are different aspects of the context which have to be taken into account and so on so um so knowledge is information with causal power um also an interesting thing about it both knowledge and information are very unusual they’re abstractions and many people don’t like to believe that abstractions even exist so that’s something you have to persuade them all but then uh further information and knowledge are extremely unusual abstractions because they only exist when they’re physically instantiated and that’s another confusing concept that I sometimes have to work hard to persuade people or rather to get people to see what I’m even talking about whether they agree or not what I’m even saying um so yeah I um I don’t know that I have anything better to say about how to persuade people of things I don’t know that it’s even a good idea to try to persuade people of things what’s more important is to have an interesting discussion
Vaden
I have to hear that you struggle with it too
Sadia Naeem
All right um Clovis uh would you like to go ahead please
Clovis
Yes, thank you. Thank you, David, for doing this. My question is about moral philosophy and moral truth. I’m concerned, and this is a topic you’ve touched before, about how the is-ought dichotomy is interpreted as often hopelessly nihilistic, that it condemns us to relativism and the idea that if moral values can’t be derived from facts, they can’t be true because they don’t refer to objective entities. So for many people who believe in moral truth the dichotomy is often perceived as a deep problem and a deep mystery, and to me that seems to be an error because the impossibility of deducing values from facts does not amount to a demonstration that they are false. It is not a refutation, and in a sense moral ideas can no more be refuted by mere facts than they can be derived from them. I find myself in the, I think, minority of people who believe the is-ought dichotomy is true but who also believe that it doesn’t keep us from creating moral knowledge, and the Popper-described position that they called critical dualism, I think that I interpret in this way. And so my question is this: I know that you’ve talked about the fact that morality is a form of knowledge, and I wanted to ask you how do you understand the is-ought dichotomy? How does it bear on your concept of moral truth, and does the concept of truth apply to moral propositions? Thank you.
David Deutsch
Well my opinion is it definitely does and I agree with uh everything you said there so that that’s basically my my position as well um Popper uh it’s a bit hard to interpret on issues of objective morality because he doesn’t really discuss that point you can only infer Popper’s position as far as far as I know anyway I haven’t read everything he wrote um uh you can infer when he says for example that we can make moral progress then and also that that uh there is there is such a thing as making progress in philosophy generally that he certainly rejects the position that science is the only thing one can make progress in um I uh like to use the argument that that when people say that there’s a difference between the possibility of progress in morality and in science in that in science we have this method of experiment that can take us forward and in philosophy we don’t well uh I think that’s an un-Popperian point of view because because uh that that that’s more like the Duhem-Quine view the it’s a bit arbitrary to say that scientific knowledge is possible if at the same time you’re going to take that critique of moral knowledge seriously because the same critique that the deniers of moral knowledge take seriously has been used by many people to deny that scientific knowledge is possible and all knowledge is conjectural the fact that you can’t deduce it from anything is is irrelevant in all fields knowledge can never be deduced so the is-ought distinction merely says that you can’t deduce moral knowledge from scientific knowledge but so what uh you can’t deduce scientific knowledge from anything so you can’t deduce moral knowledge but we’re not after deducing knowledge and uh what we’re after is solving problems and there have to be moral problems as soon as you have a creative entity that is solving problems then um the moral issues arise because you’ve you’ve got to wonder what should I want what when you are when you’re wondering what should I do next um you can’t gaze into your navel and find what you want about everything you’ve got to think about what you want and criticize it and create knowledge about it so I think one can take a completely uniform view of all those fields um and uh and therefore the is-ought distinction as it is not epistemologically relevant it’s not relevant to what kind of knowledge we can create um
Sadia Naeem
Actually I had a question which was similar to that if you guys don’t mind me interjecting in there um my question was about uh you know usually when I talk to people about that um one of the question that’s raised is that when it comes to science uh we all uh you know the laws of nature constrain everything like we don’t have a choice in that but the moral uh moral seems to be different I guess one of the differences between morality is that even if we claim that we discover moral principles then we still have a choice we’re not bound it’s as if they feel like there is something more concrete in science um would you like to say something about perhaps maybe you have any ideas about roots of morality uh in the sense of uh do you tie it to anything to do with neuroscience I’ve listened to your discussion with Sam Harris it doesn’t seem like you tie it to anything to do with neuroscience but do you think about it is there something at the back of your mind uh as to what are the roots of morality
David Deutsch
I think in general it’s not very helpful to think about what the roots of something are um because when you find some roots there are always going to be roots beneath that and you’ll never get to the bottom of it so uh the foundations are sometimes useful but not because not because they’re underlying everything but because they reveal something of the structure of things um uh the when you know I’m a theoretical physicist I work on the foundations of physics when you make a terrible mistake at the foundations of physics you may get ridiculed and you may lose your income and uh and so on but when you make a mistake at the foundations of morality the physical world will come for you much worse so it’s not it’s not really and I’m not only talking about other people coming for you even if you were a person on a desert island who made moral mistakes it would cause physical trouble for you would you would um make mistakes in your life which might shorten it um just from making a mistake in morality so I don’t think this distinction that that morality is a matter of choice is true or at least it’s no more a matter of choice than any other idea is a matter of choice we choose and create our own ideas according to our values about what’s true but our values about what’s true even though they are completely changeable are not at all arbitrary it’s like it’s it may be the best example of this is pure mathematics some people are reduced to claiming that mathematics is arbitrary it’s just a really mathematics is just the study of math what mathematicians think it is um uh clever or glorious or whatever to think about which makes reduces mathematics to basically a study of human brains mathematicians brains or the brains of a community of mathematicians but it’s simply not true mathematics is the study of abstractions that are that actually exist and properties of them that exist and are independent of us we can choose which mathematical objects we think are interesting and worth trying to understand but we can be mistaken and we can we can follow dead ends I think in mathematics it’s also unusual to run into a brick wall like that and by the way I think that running into a dead end and making large mistakes unless they kill you it’s not all bad in fact it can be just as good as successfully discovering things which the latter can can can leave you feeling empty whereas as Popper says if you’re engaged with problems even if you never solve them then you’re still having fun I
Bruce Nielson
I have one quick question I hope is quick I enjoyed reading your constructor theory paper you made a very big deal in that paper though about it underpinning the rest of physics and I kept wondering why that was because it seemed like it would be a valid theory about constructors in the same way you know information theory is a valid theory about information or computational theory is a valid theory about computation without the claim that it underpins all of physics so what was the motivation there to say that and is that an absolutely necessary motivation or would it still be a good theory without that …
David Deutsch
Uh well I guess that that no particular motivation is ever essential but um the reason I think the constructor theory could stand on by itself but rather like philosophy if there were no applications to anything else then it would be useless it would just be a piece of mathematics the reason I think it’s important that it underlies many areas of physics is just that I think it does underlie them I think that there are several areas of physics where progress has been stalled because of the assumption that the prevailing mode of explanation namely initial conditions and laws of motion is the only legitimate form that it’s kind of without ever being stated explicitly it’s taken for granted that a valid explanation in physics has to be of that form and yet already in existing physics there are explanations which are of the constructor theoretic form instead and cannot be expressed in terms of initial conditions or laws of motion and that is kind of shrugged off because because people think it’s not legitimate so in thermodynamics that there are explanations that seem to directly conflict with explanations in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion and the usual the conventional response to that is say that basically to say oh well thermodynamics isn’t really true it’s just an approximation scheme and at root uh these quantities like work and heat and the laws of thermodynamics are are not actually true but uh that’s just a prejudice and my feeling is that in that area and in many other areas such as theory of computation and in areas of physics where initial conditions and laws of motion approach has been successful I think in all those areas there is scope for making progress via constructor theory if constructor theory is true and not and probably not if it isn’t and we’ll find out if it’s true but by only by trying to make such progress using it …
Bruce Nielson
Thank you um I wanted to give Dwarkesh a chance to ask a question he wasn’t able to on through his interface raise his hand and he did it about this point so are you still there and can you ask your question
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah I’m here thanks uh hey david I’m a big fan I just wanted to ask you um this is in my view but I just want to play devil’s advocate here and I because I don’t have a good rebuttal to this argument which is uh there’s a Bayesian critique of uh Popper which is that verification and disconfirmation both reveal information about a theory and that um while Popper can deal with disconfirmation there’s no way to integrate uh evidence that verifies a theory and that’s like Bayes is backwards compatible with Popper uh in that it can integrate verifying and disconfirming evidence it just weighs disconfirming evidence higher and updates heavier based on that so how would you deal with that criticism um
David Deutsch
There there I think the um the context in which that criticism arises I think contains mistakes uh first of all the context is that that there is some data uh or information which we receive and then we have to make sense of it either by refuting a theory or by confirming a theory or whatever but we start off with data that just isn’t true as we have learned from Popper um so in that respect the whole picture of science and of thinking generally that that underlies that critique is just wrong um secondly so that that’s you know like where science is coming from then there’s where science is going to so um this uh critique suggests that what we’re trying to do that the thing that where science is going to is getting justified beliefs that that that uh you know what we really want to do is to make is to make the probability that we assign or the credence that we have for true theories should go up we need some method that will make the credence of true theories go up and then they say well Popper first of all Popper seems to only have a method that makes credences go down so you know how can that possibly be a picture of science well the answer is that science from beginning to end doesn’t resemble that picture um so um science is problem-based and the way it proceeds is by conjecture and after it has problems and conjectures it has criticism criticisms and none of that appears in the Bayesian picture so of course they’re going to think that Popperian the Popperian view of science doesn’t adequately represent science but what has really happened is that their picture of science which is basically empiricism inductivism some kind of that is just wrong root and branch false
Sadia Naeem
All right thank you um mike
Mike
Yes hi everyone uh hi david um so I was wanting to ask you about modes of explanation and knowing how important they are to um kind of structuring some of your um some of your work and bruce just brought up constructor theory which I think you might describe as its own mode of explanation and um I was trying to particularly link it to computation so um I have your shorthand if you can’t program it you haven’t understood it um I was wondering if you follow that um is inventing a new mode of explanation is that synonymous with um inventing like a new type of algorithm is the is the link to computation and explanation can it be kind of forged in that way or but um but not yet don’t you don’t have to speak specifically just to that so …
Sadia Naeem
I’m sorry david I think you’re muted I think you’re muted uh sometimes the space bar works and sometimes it doesn’t work um okay I’m pressing it down quite
David Deutsch
Hard can you hear me we can hear you now right um uh yeah yeah so uh I’m reluctant to reduce things to algorithms uh I think that usually sucks the creativity out of the picture and uh makes it wrong uh so um uh the I’m trying to think whether this maxim if you can’t program it you haven’t understood it which uh is really a bit of a paraphrase of Feynman uh whether this applies to everything or just theories about how information works in the world and in particular AGI and so on so if you can’t program an algorithm you haven’t understood it if you can’t program any kind of information process then you haven’t understood it um if you if you can’t say say you have a process of um how stars work a theory about how stars work then it’s also true I’m thinking out loud here then it’s also true that if you can’t program that you haven’t understood it but that doesn’t mean programming every the motion of every molecule in the star it means programming the things that the features of the theory of your explanatory theory that your theory says uh explain the star so it’s those that you have to be able to program but finding out what those are is not a matter of programming anything it’s a matter of creativity and problem solving so uh my tentative answer is that that that maxim doesn’t apply to everything it doesn’t apply to um to creating the knowledge to do that …
Sadia Naeem
And uh mark would you like to go next
Mark
You can hear me um so yeah thanks for doing this so much it’s really an honor on um to talk to you but uh I find that all the things that we have some that we can assign objectivity to in life I feel like the hardest one for me personally is aesthetics so for instance I like I find the cave paintings of like Altamira and Lascaux to be beautiful but that the reason I do is is because of how old they are and it’s humankind speaking to us from 30 000 years ago trying to survive the harsh the harsh ice ages and I feel like if someone painted the state rotunda the same way with the bicentennial things said it was a masterpiece I’d probably want to slap them in the face and say that I don’t find that very beautiful so I don’t know if me ascribing aesthetic value to the cave paintings of Lascaux because of the romantic notion of humankind painting them so many years ago and maybe the first and then what are they trying to say if they’re trying to say anything else at all is it fair to describe the aesthetic value to that for reasons like that or should we just judge it for just how it looks and it shouldn’t be the environment who did it and what they’re trying to say if that makes sense
David Deutsch
Yes I think to some extent this is just a matter of the fact that that language and terminology aren’t we don’t have an absolutely exact language to describe everything we want to talk about so often we use metaphors and often we use terminology that slides over from one area to an adjacent area and so on so mathematician can describe an equation as beautiful a person can describe someone’s mind as beautiful and they mean something by that they mean something objective by that but it is not the same thing as what we what we mean when we describe say a piece of music as beautiful or a sculpture as beautiful and even with those things we may describe a painting as beautiful because it is very apt in a certain situation like I don’t know how do you judge Goya’s painting of some partisans getting shot how do you separate the um the beauty of the fact that he’s captured by the way a very ugly situation so well how do you separate that from beauty in this in the sense that if the same skill and insight had been used to describe an orange harvesting festival it could also describe that as beautiful but there’d be a different kind of beauty being described there I think there is there is such a thing as artistic beauty which is often mixed with other values that we want to put into an object um and um maybe we shouldn’t get hung up on whether that is really beauty as kind of essentialism to ask that the thing is that there are many features of an object that are desirable and the cave paintings are desirable in one sense and are clearly rubbish in another sense and there’s nothing wrong with that if we some if somebody wanted to if somebody was interested in understanding the distinction there more deeply then they would probably find themselves inventing a more refined terminology for it they would rather than say is this really beautiful they would say there is a thing that we want it is this you know I’m going to explain it and the cave painting has that has heaps of that and there’s this other thing which we want in a different context which uh the people who did the cave painting also wanted but weren’t very good at achieving and you know if somebody was spending their life on teasing out that distinction very finely then they’d probably invent a more fine terminology
Sadia Naeem
All right uh Jesse Jesse you need to unmute yourself please
Jesse
There we go hey David uh I have a question that might be somewhat personal but have a lot of implications in a lot of people’s lives and I know Lulie’s talked about this uh and uh so it revolves around just uh romantic relationships personal relationships uh and the whole dichotomy of genes versus memes of we need society to procreate now we don’t have uh you know we don’t live an infinite life we know immortality is uh possible in some sense but I guess there is a sense of like we want to create these best the best memes that we can we want to create best the best explanations that we have in our lives but uh how do you think about that in terms of children and education whether or not to have a family or be in a relationship or just work on uh you know things like constructor theory and AGI and life extension or biotech or uh just really curious to see how you think about all those ideas
David Deutsch
Uh I don’t think it’s a good idea to uh try and save the world in the in the sense of uh subordinating one’s own uh values to what one thinks the world’s values are so maybe the world needs a larger population um I my guess is that it does that in other words that that would be a good thing um that that the world as a whole would thrive better if it had more people in it but to and other people of course think that that the world would thrive better if it had fewer people in it I think in both cases it’s a bad idea to subordinate one’s own life to that objective yeah I don’t think it’s even for example a good idea in my own life to try to publicize my own ideas I do it to some extent but I don’t subordinate it to the fun of actually um trying to solve problems and some of the problems are only of interest to me and some are interest to me and like half a dozen other people in the world and some are interested of interest to more people but the way I would choose what to do is uh try to meet my own values and to the extent that my own values include having preferences about how the world is then uh then the meeting my values would include trying to make the world better but trying to make the world better as an overarching principle for how to make personal decisions I think is a mistake I don’t know if that’s your question
Jesse
Yeah I guess that that answers a little bit of it and then it’s just like uh being young a big part of culture in general in society is just finding uh you know a significant other our partner and there’s the whole debate against uh polyamory and uh or to have a committed monogamous relationship and uh that is uh you know it drives a lot of culture
David Deutsch
Yeah well different people find answers in different ways and they have extremely different problem situations and I
Jesse
Guess it from the context of The Beginning of Infinity of uh like what was actually useful it was useful to make more people and to do that people create uh had families to do that kind of divide and conquer kind of sense whether they knew it or not right people kind of when they team up they can uh do they’re more than the sum of their parts
David Deutsch
Yes although there are many ways of teaming up and each of them has better and worse ways of doing it yeah so you know you form a society you form friends you form families and all of those can involve mistakes in how to do it and uh and we’ve we’ve got here um by people making progress with that but you know for most of history they didn’t make progress um yeah
Bruce Nielson
I guess that I was just going to say we were coming up on the hour and I wanted to be cognizant of david’s time um we still have looks like quite a few questions but how much how much time do you feel you’ve got left here david we’ll we’ll kind of roll with that …
David Deutsch
I’m willing to go on for a while but I need to have another cup of tea make it so if I could make myself a cup of tea come back then I would I would uh be willing to answer a few more
Bruce Nielson
Questions let’s do that I think that’s a great idea okay tea break as it were break yes
Unidentified participant
I’m gonna go get tea as well I just had my tea so maybe I’ll have another one …
Jesse
All right well in the meantime for all the non-tea drinkers uh I guess we could just kind of shoot the shit yeah absolutely so um we’re trying to go in order of raised hands here by the way
Bruce Nielson
As we um so sadia is the one who’s the official moderator and he’s got controls so uh we’re trying
Sadia Naeem
To I’m getting tired by the way you’re welcome to take over I would rather just chill and relax and …
Bruce Nielson
Listen sorry the problem is is that you’re the only one who can do it so uh yeah well can you …
Sadia Naeem
Not see the hand raises I guess I can’t see the hand raises I can call on people you’ll have to …
Bruce Nielson
Control um maybe they can unmute themselves yeah I could do that I could take care of unmuting if …
Sadia Naeem
Somebody forgets okay I’ll do that I will call on people for some reason it’s uh I’ve always found that tiring like yeah okay all right I’ll start calling on people if you’ll take care of the …
Bruce Nielson
Muting they can probably unmute themselves but if they don’t then you’re gonna have to step in because I can’t do it all right
Unidentified participant
Holy hell there’s a lot of people in this room
Bruce Nielson
Yeah there is we’ve got we’ve got 50 I think we were at 59 at the top wow can everyone unmute themselves if they want to um we would prefer that people don’t um several people had background sound and we’re just trying to do things easy to um but you know at this point um while he’s gone for a second if anybody wants to shoot the breeze that’s fine just if you could just unmute yourself and remute yourself after you ask a question that you are still a christian who doesn’t swear I could tell
Jesse
I could tell some some lessons get burned in really deep
Sadia Naeem
Actually I was just wondering uh clovis I know you gave a comment on that question about morality um there’s I guess in a sense I sometimes find that I’m satisfied in physics we always in a way we do talk about metaphysics right and when it comes to ethics we’re talking about meta ethics uh kind of like when we’re thinking okay is it instrumentalism versus maybe you know some form of realism uh because the questions that pop up are very much dependent on our metaphysics and that’s why I was kind of wondering um you know that even with morality we may not address the question that what is what is the background uh meta ethical you know some sort of meta ethics that’s going on at the back of our mind um we could always just keep asking questions but I think at some point there is some value in addressing that oh any ideas any thoughts on that …
Audience questioner
I think one point to bring up is the concept of truth makers so traditionally if you have a correspondence theory of truth you think that there are true facts in reality and things correspond to them our theories can correspond to them in theory we’re always fallible of course so the questioning is are there true facts in reality about values and morality
Sadia Naeem
And I recently came across something interesting that Popper had said uh that values actually uh according to him the values uh originate with uh life just like with problems as the problems arise and he said that when he said life he said that he means even before consciousness existed uh you know so all problems originated with life I think he said and then values originated with problems which I thought was interesting um yeah and also the question is not just about whether
Audience questioner
Values exist but whether they can be objective or not so someone can have a value but you can say that’s just your opinion that’s just subjective no and that is of my interest otherwise yeah I mean
Sadia Naeem
We can come up with whatever you know so I forgot about it as well and um I’m trying to …
Clovis
Express myself in English and understand always I’m sorry this is tough but uh right now I am at war with fans of Sam Harris on this topic because it’s really something that that I think divides uh david david is back I’m gonna give it back to him all right tracy you want to go next
Sadia Naeem
Uh tracy
Tracy
Sure hi oh hi so I’m hoping this is just more of a fun white hearted question maybe but um on thursday I woke up uh I had a dream that I had gotten the opportunity to meet you david um in the very next day I find out that suddenly there’s this opportunity to meet you at the zoom meeting uh exciting for me um kind of strange so maybe the fun part could you maybe speak to the human brain regarding its potential for quantum prediction maybe or just the idea of quantum prediction in general
David Deutsch
So I’m not entirely sure what you mean by quantum prediction but predicting the growth of knowledge is inherently impossible and um there’s no reason to think that quantum effects might be implicated in the human brain and the idea that quantum theory has kind of mystical that it justifies various um traditional mystical ideas always comes from mistakes about quantum theory it doesn’t come the real world real world doesn’t implement those so um I think there wasn’t a connection in that you know I would I would guess that there wasn’t a connection in that respect um maybe that’s um maybe that’s a boring reply but I my guess is that’s the truth of it it’s very fine thank you …
Bruce Nielson
All right miss rob I don’t know if I pronounced that right
Mizrob
You can hear me yes hi hi everyone and nice to meet you david so I just wanted to ask about replication crisis especially in psychology and in general too like in like in life sciences so around 2010 like people started to realize that there are a lot of studies that can’t be replicated and so people started to implement many standards of like data sharing and open code code and stuff like that and there was also emphasis on importance of replication studies like studies that repeat the experiment as closely as possible to the original study so there is a sense that if a study is replicated then it must be true and less emphasis on mechanism like by mechanism I mean explanatory theory they establish a link and by experiment then afterwards give an explanation how this process might happen in the mind and but uh prioritizing replication seems to miss the point that we can replicate say newtonian laws infinite many times but they are not actual explanation of the how the world works around us I just wanted to know how you see this how what you can say about methodology of like psychological studies
David Deutsch
Yeah I entirely agree and I think the replication crisis in psychology and related fields um as you as you have just said I think it um it’s the wrong way to think about it the replication crisis is is um a small facet of what goes wrong when you um apply scientism to psychology and anything that involves knowledge anything that involves human knowledge if you try to study it um as if it were physics um you will be doing scientism you will get it wrong and um the fact that uh it’s not replicated is is almost uh it’s almost a positive feature of a theory because it’s at least saying that the explanatory part of the psychological theory which was kind of unstated and taken for granted and implicit and denied and so on that that thing existed that there was an explanation there and that’s why uh the explanation can be falsified by an experiment um if something can be replicated in psychology then it’s not really psychology uh for example people do wonderful work um creating optical illusions and explaining why um they work and they work in psychology departments many of these people but that’s not psychology that that is a study of the human visual system and how the information is processed but that information is not being processed by a creative process um there are other kinds of things that that stem from that that you might ask then after the after the built-in interpretations of sensory data there is also there is further interpretation happens which can be creative and which also affects how we perceive things and you can form theories about those but those theories um have to be explanatory and there have to has to be a model of those and there I would say that that replicating them on a computer would be it might be a useful thing to do with those explanatory theories so you know if you can’t program it you haven’t understood it might might be relevant there but as I think you hint I think the real trouble with psychology and related um fields is that uh is scientism um and a lack of and even a denigration and deliberate avoidance of explanatory theories uh this was explicit in the case of behaviorism but behaviorism has kind of been rejected but the aspect of behaviorism that that tries that says that one should not have explanatory theories but rather one should have massive data which is replicated that is still there and that’s what really needs to be reformed
Bruce Nielson
Right thank you dennis uh hold on I’m sorry bruce uh well actually there was somebody else ahead who …
Sadia Naeem
Dropped out could I just call him in again he sent me a message oh yes uh
John
Go ahead john sorry
Sadia Naeem
About that …
John
All right david uh thanks for doing this you had mentioned earlier I’m speaking from jerusalem israel you had mentioned earlier uh the Popper lecture and later paper on the nonexistence of uh scientific method so I just thought you might get a kick out of this volume that I found literally lying next to a dumpster from 1958 which would is apparently the first Popper piece of writing that was translated into uh hebrew I know you’re from Haifa so I thought you might get a kick out of that anyway my question uh is um in your in your first chapter in your book in your theory on explanation um I’ve always wondered I always got the feeling as you step through the phases uh leading up to uh um the breakthrough method that we that we have today which is of course one step in the long chain I’ve always wondered how you see the relationship between that theory and Popper’s theory I would normally uh bring this up but I know this is a Popper-oriented group so I was just wondering if you saw that theory as a corrective as completely 100 compatible with and just another way of looking at it or how do you see it relating to uh Popper’s theories and the theory of explanation thanks
David Deutsch
So I privately and personally think that it is Popper’s theory I’m not a historian of science and I’m not really interested in who had what idea but I see for example the first chapter of the beginning of infinity uh is just a small explanatory footnote to Popper’s epistemology um and if somebody comes along and says um no it’s not you know Popper thought something completely different I don’t care I’m only interested in what the truth is and on the other hand at the other extreme if someone comes along and says that’s exactly what Popper said and even your footnote is in a footnote of Popper on page 483 well again I don’t care. I’m trying to understand the world and I’m interested in what’s true and that’s attributing it to Popper is merely a matter of kind of academic courtesy um so uh I think that Popper had an entirely explanatory conception of science um I can’t prove that from his writings and I know that for example David Miller thinks that that’s not entirely true um again I’m sorry if it sounds dismissive to keep saying I don’t care but that I wish it’s not what I’m interested in thanks
Bruce Nielson
Thank you Dennis
Dennis
Hey guys can you hear me yes great hey david it’s denis I have you earlier you mentioned um in response to ella ella was asking about self-replicating ideas in the mind and um your response was that it wouldn’t be really if I understood you correctly it wouldn’t really be efficient in terms of memory because instead one could have a quantity field of sorts on ideas that would encode how many instances of an idea and exist and then that way one could save a lot of memory and but I want to take a moment to defend the theory if I may as it happens ella has thought of the same thing when we when we first started discussing this theory now I suppose the quantity field would be denotational equivalent to having replicators on the surface but the structure of the implementation would be wholly different and I think one would lose a lot of explanatory power by removing replicators because one would need to come up with separate explanations for everything that the replicator based explanation currently explained for example memories how people evolve with some ideas survive in the mind not others and so I’m not sure just because a programmer would prefer to use quantities instead of replicators that that means that biological evolution would have chosen I say chosen and scare quotes to do so as well um most of the criticism of this neo darwinian theory the mind if you want to call it that but I’ve heard so far is along those lines that we don’t need replicators and that we could replace them with something else and if I understood you correctly your criticism is along the same lines but the epistemological problem that I see with that is we could say that for any theory right I mean even hard to vary ones we could think of ways to replace key components of them even if usually that means that they become easier to vary as a result and I think that’s what happens when we drop replicators the problem reminds me a little bit of the fossil thing which I believe you’ve brought up before in defense of the multiverse so like people might claim that we don’t need dinosaur we don’t need to claim that dinosaurs really existed to explain fossils even though that is already a hard to vary explanation we could simply come up with other ways fossils may have come about that don’t involve the existence of dinosaurs and then denotationally I suppose those theories are the same or at least similar because the output of the theories the dinosaur fossils are the same or going a bit off the rails like we could we could claim that many instead of claiming that many dinosaurs existed we could claim that there was a single dinosaur that had a quantity value that determined how many fossils left behind or something like that right so I guess the problem is that this won’t convince the advocates of the past existence of dinosaurs rightly I think because they would want to know why dinosaurs couldn’t have existed not why they need not have existed so in a way I agree that dinosaurs need not have existed for the same reason that no theory need necessarily be true and so that applies to self-replicating ideas of the mind as well but what I’d really be interested in is a refutation like what an argument right why replicators can’t play a role and how the mind works can you think of such an argument
David Deutsch
Uh no and I did say that I don’t know how any of that works and uh and maybe you’re right that that maybe it’s the fact that I learned programming a long time ago and my formative programming years were in an era where memory was expensive and what it was worth spending time um you know thinking of more efficient ways of storing the data and now memory is extremely cheap and it’s usually not worth doing that and as you say one of the things you gain when you have a redundant representation of something is uh you get much more flexibility in uh explanatory power right so uh having said that I think your comparison with the dinosaur theory is is a bit unfair uh the um uh if your problem is that you want to make an artificial fossil it would not be a good idea to start by making dinosaurs uh you need to take the shortcut that’s available and making artificial fossils that way uh and again it if you want to explain how the fossil got there that would be a terrible way of approaching that problem but if you want to make an artificial fossil then going via dinosaurs is far too inefficient but you know since I don’t know how it works I can’t really pontificate about how to do it uh I you know let a thousand flowers bloom
Dennis
Got it okay thanks
Bruce Nielson
Thank you Podge Gleeson
Podge
Hi guys how’s it going um thanks to uh sadia and bruce for putting this event on and for david for answering questions um so my question was about well you know the explanation of how creativity works or just what creativity is and just critical rationalism in general seems to contradict certain commonly held assumptions which are effectively just statements that people are mechanical and um you know for example operant conditioning which is that uh learning and just alterations to human thought or the thought of people more generally and their behavior is best achieved using like a framework of uh rewards and punishments uh so that uh when dealing with problems in psychology like maybe addiction um and other you know it seems to get a lot of uses within psychology and then in behavioral economics as well in the form of incentives and disincentives to do certain things um I think the original question actually I had about specifically about addiction and making choices was sort of answered already when you were speaking about you know just uh creating the best moral theories and so on but I was maybe uh wondering if you could say something about incentives and disincentives and how valuable the work done on in behavioral economics is and whether it’s just fundamentally based on uh faulty assumptions and there is not much use to it or it’s just maybe contingently useful based on uh the cultural ideas at a given time or uh something like that uh yeah uh so I have to recognize that lots of things in the world
David Deutsch
Do not involve creativity and such things can be analyzed in terms that would be dehumanizing if applied to things that do involve creativity and economics for example is is a field where it’s sort of the important issues are dominated by creativity but not in not totally exhaustively described by uh creative processes there are other processes as well and in uh if you’re looking at an area of the economy where uh not much creativity is being used because people find the setup basically satisfactory and what they want is a mechanical way of getting through to various things then you can find an algorithm that sets the prices in those situations you know like when there’s when there’s a shortage of some raw material then you can work out uh how at least the first idea of how you can set the price although someone else might think of a better idea and already you haven’t modeled that uh and similarly if there are things that happen in the human mind in the human brain I should say that aren’t creative uh like we have optical illusions and that kind of thing and if they feed into the problem that you have which is partly about creativity and partly not then that might be helpful I’m not going to say that isn’t helpful but I say that it’s whenever creativity touches on something it changes it profoundly and it really becomes the most important thing to try to understand in regard to that field rewards and punishments are are an abomination really in anything to do with humans because they are trying to forcibly change a human situation which had involved some creativity to one that doesn’t and that is just bad um I wonder you know it’s like it’s like um these purported cures for gayness and so on uh by giving gay people electric shocks and uh if people want to be treated like that they are making a mistake uh I don’t care if it works or not works in quotes you know I’m wondering how would you cure if you thought that an s&m fetish was bad for you and you had one you thought it was bad for you what kind of conditioning would you would would you expect to cure that like you know being given electric shocks when being given electric shock
Bruce Nielson
All right please continue
David Deutsch
Sorry I was just making an extended analogy that I thought was quite amusing but it may not be interesting uh sorry yes
Bruce Nielson
Thank you. Karl.
Karl
Yeah hey david thanks for doing this it’s been really fun so I remember you saying in an interview that whether animals suffer or not is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one and I definitely agree so I’m just curious to hear if you found any convincing arguments for either side of that issue and if you haven’t how do you think we morally should treat the issue of like whether animals suffer or not um
David Deutsch
Yes I think not much is known about this uh I think there are some tiny clues in various places um uh um and I think that maybe the main thing is I think there is since we know so little about this I think there is room for a range of um views that that can all be considered reasonable depending on where one is coming from um the one can rule out I think uh the extremes like like um thinking that on the one hand thinking that um that we should respect the wishes of trees um is is very close to being uh being untenable philosophically because of what we know factually and at the other extreme I think that it is is um wrong to adopt a position of um principled callousness and trying to abolish for example all laws about animal cruelty and whatever on the grounds that there’s no evidence that anyone is suffering when there’s animal cruelty there is no evidence but I think that is different from saying that there is a uh a good reason for adopting that view uh but in between those extremes there’s a huge range of positions that that I think are reasonable but would you …
Karl
Say that this is a mild form of the precautionary principle that in the absence of knowledge we should like no well I know to the bit that one should use the precautionary principle I think
David Deutsch
It’s more that what we should do in the face of ignorance in the face of ignorance we should be a first thing is to be tolerant of multiple views and the precautionary principle precisely isn’t so uh you know I would say be be tolerant of multiple views about this um you said about evidence that a tiny piece of evidence in regard to dogs um dogs um look like they have feelings um more than uh similar other animals do um and um we know that this is because they have been um subjected to artificial selection for precisely the attribute of looking as though they have feelings now I’m not sure that looking as though you have feelings can be done without having them uh this is a very weak argument I can easily think of ways that that might not be right but uh you know beggars can’t be choosers I think we have touches of evidence that maybe some animals have some element of um qualia but if this counts as anecdotal evidence or something that there is strong anecdotal evidence the other way as well that if you look at animals like chimpanzees that that look as though they have feelings that that in other experiments um it’s fairly clear that they do not uh they do not have an idea of what’s going on that they’re just behaving mechanically like experiments where uh
Karl
But you tentatively reject the notion of uh like philosophical zombie dogs then I guess
David Deutsch
Yes that that I would uh yes because that that’s um that’s one of these all-purpose explanations that could be used about anything uh I can imagine a theory with a physical zombie jupiter where jupiter doesn’t exist but I mean it looks as though it does so that’s a whole class of explanations that have to be rejected
Bruce Nielson
On principle all right thank you carl cameron
Cameron
Uh hi david can you hear me yes thanks uh my question concerned is sort of around my trouble reconciling sort of Popperianism, Deutschianism with um behavioral genetics and namely that it seems to conflict with universal computation um so I think you’ve noted that your position is that the mind is not a blank slate you know so we have inborn genetic knowledge and but importantly that can be overwritten um examples such as fasting, celibacy and skydiving and suicide um but so and my understanding of the behavioral genetics literature is that um genes seem to predict many behaviors I think a lot of people in that field might say explain which I think you have issue with but um and over the last 50 years the main evidence of that is around identical twins versus fraternal twins identical twins being more similar uh siblings being more similar than adopted siblings and adopted children being similar to their biological parents and not similar to their adopted parents I think Robert Plomin describes um uh genes influencing behavior as it describes uh what is rather than what can be which I think aligns with one of your comments around the amount of the amount that genes influence our behavior is itself a product or function of culture um uh but I think you’ve also noted that I think your position is that uh genetic knowledge or genetic influences uh is probably easy to be overwritten and probably happens early on um so I have trouble reconciling that with I suppose the fact of the adopted children being sort of systematically similar to their biological parents their particular biological parents and it seems to me that genetic influences do have a very um large influence over what currently is so yeah if you just want to react to that …
David Deutsch
Uh yes I think that the um uh experiments on twin studies and sibling studies and so on correlations between behaviors of uh genetically similar and environmentally similar none of those experiments addresses the issue uh what I could say is addresses the issue of putting in computer terms where is the code located that is responsible for those similarities and differences and where did that code come from um given that that as you just mentioned given given that the um degree of genetic influence on behavior is itself determined by culture that alone means that you can’t do an experiment to uh distinguish cultural from you can’t do a behavioral experiment to distinguish cultural from genetic behaviors oh sorry you’ve got to be very careful in talking about these things you can’t do a behavioral experiment to distinguish between differences between different people’s genetic or cultural uh knowledge uh and so I in regard to this issue I would um just reject the relevance of all those experiments um the I think there is a very strong argument as you just said also that um genetic behaviors that again the differences between genetic behaviors of different humans are relatively easy to override I don’t mean that one can override them oneself just by waking up one morning and deciding and deciding to um on the contrary that might be very hard but um uh for example memes either rational or anti-rational memes uh can just not override but just replace um genetic behaviors systematically because they have evolved the knowledge of how to do so and uh there are cultures where um people are more or less uh careful about dying and um it’s not to say that that someone in that culture or someone in a different culture could change that setting at will but on the other hand it is I think it provides a very strong argument for saying that if that is a problem that one has it is soluble one can one can alter one’s inborn tendencies in the same way that one can alter any other idea that one has that it affects one’s behavior one can have a habit of writing with one’s right hand and then if one’s right hand becomes paralyzed but from some illness one can learn to use the left hand and one can’t do that overnight but one can one can do it and one can do it arbitrarily arbitrarily well and there are ways of doing it faster or slower and there are always ways of improving those ways and so on all right I think that the genetic explanations or one can always form genetic explanations I think they are in regard to um behaviors that are changeable they are those explanations are are dehumanizing and false
Bruce Nielson
Yes thank you um david we’re past um got another 40 minutes since the last time you took a tea break how are we doing on how are you doing and oops we maybe
David Deutsch
Maybe we should uh draw things to a close soon I don’t know uh
Bruce Nielson
Okay how about we do um two more questions. Is that okay? Okay, yes. All right, Bart.
Bart
Hi uh thank you david thank you uh bruce and Sadia actually tomorrow is my birthday so I guess this must be one of the most original birthday presents uh to get to ask you a question um my question is the following um is our society open enough for us to at one point refute justificationism in favor of critical rationalism collectively enough and what do we have to imagine as kind of acceleration effects on the growth of knowledge when that happens
David Deutsch
Well uh happy birthday and uh I think uh you know if we’re if we’re to be um rigorous doctrinaire Popperians that’s a joke um then uh we shouldn’t ask is society rational enough to accept critical rationalism it’s we should ask is society uh capable of making progress because we don’t know that critical rationalism is true we don’t know that what we think of as critical rationalism really is critical rationalism as perhaps there’s a better view of it that is different from our view and so on so the question should be is society capable of making progress and I think it obviously is it is making enormous progress the things that worry us about uh when we notice that some things are going backwards uh it’s um natural and good that we should uh focus a bit on those uh rather than go on you know go on about how well things are going we should be focused on problems and things going backwards in some respects is a problem and deserves having creativity devoted to it but overall the big picture is that there’s enormous progress being made at uh a rate that’s unprecedented in history so um yes I think there is such progress I think that that uh society can although it may not you know people on the whole may make the wrong decisions and everything may go wrong um but it is possible for things to go right and I think at present they still are going right on the whole um so I’m optimistic
Bruce Nielson
All right thank you and then final question erin
Aaron
Oh wow um thanks so much you I’ve read an interview where you described being messy and untidy in your kind of um your home but being very rigorously organized on your laptop and I couldn’t follow what the distinction was why is it orderly in one domain and not in the other …
David Deutsch
I think I was going through a phase of experimenting with the macOS and noticing how what um how prescient and sophisticated the model was because it is nothing compared with today’s and also it’s not just the mac that nowadays it has those things I think there isn’t I think there isn’t and I think nowadays I’m pretty sloppy in my management of my computer as well so I’m sloppy in all ways and what’s more I think uh if I can make a personal self-criticism I think I’m too sloppy in most ways um there’s some kind of irrationality there but being very sloppy compared with the norm uh on a computer or in one’s mind or in one’s home or in one’s office and all those things is useful for most people most of the time um uh for the reasons that I said in that interview long ago um uh the um the reason is that they that um imposing a structure is a theory and uh one and it includes inexplicit theories and if one takes a view on that that’s too rigid then one is uh putting a strain on uh the possible new ways of thinking about that that one can explore
Bruce Nielson
All right thank you uh David Deutsch thank you very much for joining us I know I really enjoyed this I can tell this has just been a fun chat for most of us so thank you for showing up for um the Karl Popper meet and greet thank you very much uh thank you david
Sadia Naeem
Uh just wondering by the way did you had anything to do with writing the script for uh pickle rick for rick and morty by nature
David Deutsch
No I wish I had …
Sadia Naeem
Someday not today but someday I wouldn’t mind asking you that what if pickle rick found himself on earth which suddenly transformed into a planet made of cheese you think you’d be able to survive
Bruce Nielson
The consistency of cheese
Sadia Naeem
Other time just wanted to leave you with that …
David Deutsch
Yeah maybe if you do this again next year you can invite the author of that episode because uh whoever the author authors were uh they got that amazingly right it’s like a it’s like a manifesto for human creativity
Various
All right, thank you everybody. Thank you, Bruce and Sadia, for running this too. Yes, thank you. Thanks guys. All right.
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