# 2021-06-13 - ToKCast - David Deutsch comments on recent UFO sighting (Tic Tacs: A question for David 3)

[Official](https://brettroberthall.podbean.com/e/david-deutsch-comments-on-recent-ufo-sighting-the-tictac-issue-a-question-for-david-3/)
[YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T54ZbIp9McY)
[Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-72-david-deutsch-comments-on-recent-ufo-sighting/id1447087694?i=1000526438443)

Duration: 00:16:29

## Transcript
### Brett Hall

00:00:00 - 00:00:11

Science is not you just go out into the world and observe stuff. It's a heck of a lot more complicated than that. So too for everything else. Even the cameraman from Groundhog Day understood this.

### David Deutsch

00:00:11 - 00:00:24

No, people just don't understand what is involved in this. This is an art form. You know, I think that most people just think that I hold the camera and point it at stuff. There is a heck of a lot more to it than just that.

### Brett Hall

00:00:25 - 00:03:16

So even he knew. Even he knew observations are theory laden. And with more sophisticated equipment, the more theory laden again your observations become. This observations are theory laden quip is something that Popper wrote and popularised. I'm not sure how many people understand it, even if they have actually heard it before. Observations are theory laden means something kind of like you have to know what you're looking at. And maybe I should break that down still further. You have to know, to know what you're looking at. You need knowledge to know what you're looking at. You need to have some knowledge before you know what you're looking at. Now, if you lack knowledge and you look at something and it makes no sense, you will have a problem. To know further, you need to construct more knowledge. In the last episode, I talked about falsification and that is what Popper is known for. But actually, I think it's more Popperian to say observations are theory laden than scientific theories must be testable. I think observations are theory laden gets more deeply to the heart of the matter. The idea scientific theories must be testable is actually a special case of what observations you need to know to make to refute a theory. It's in a sense a special case. What has this to do with anything? Well, I think you can guess given the title of the video. This is the question I asked David towards the very end of our discussion. More as a fun, jokey kind of postscript than anything else. Because if you have a limited amount of time with someone whose opinion you really value on topics you might not know everything about, you generally don't waste your time asking the more frivolous things. But this was an indulgence. This was a slightly more frivolous thing that I asked him right at the end of our conversation. I was planning on leaving it for some weeks before I put this episode out. But because it's in the media again today, I thought, well, it's timely. So let me release it now. It's a little reminiscent of asking David Deutsch what his favourite pop stars are. I'm sure he'd have some sort of an answer, but I don't know how much value it's going to give to the rest of us. Nevertheless, let's persevere. To tic tacs, I think Neil Tyson, who just appeared on Sam Harris talking precisely about this and has been on Joe Rogan talking about this and well, he has talked about this a lot and makes what I would say philosophically, epistemologically, and scientifically sound remarks on this topic. And basically those remarks are to not say much at all, except I don't know. He says I don't know, and that's quite right. And he talks about how unreliable observations are and data taking is more generally. Now, in many moods, Neil Tyson is an empiricist. I've never heard Neil say much about philosophy that makes me think he has read much at all in the field.

### Brett Hall

00:03:16 - 00:06:17

I understand these kind of people, especially these kind of scientists. Sometimes they denigrate the entire field because, well, if you go to my chapter 12 breakdown of a physicist's history of bad philosophy from The Beginning of Infinity, I explain why this phenomena is completely understandable, namely the phenomena of scientists having an aversion to academic philosophy, because academic philosophy in the main is completely silly and pointless, and it's navel gazing and so on. So that's all fine. The problem is it also contains the error that therefore all philosophy must be like this. And of course, it isn't as we've been at pains in this podcast to point out. But whatever the case, Neil deGrasse Tyson, when he's on the topic of pseudoscience, like what those grainy images of stuff we can't explain might be, when he's concentrating on that, he's an absolutely brilliant critical thinker, a natural Popperian of a kind. Of course, ask him to explain how science works in detail and he'll get it all wrong because he'll then go into academic mode and start talking about accumulating more and more evidence to become more and more confident about how data taken from instruments is more reliable, even though we humans are unreliable. So he'll start to make certain errors. That claim, by the way, that scientific instrumentation is necessarily more reliable than humans, as if that's some sort of law of nature, is false because of something called the Duhem-Quine thesis. You never know if it's your instrument that's going wrong because maybe you don't know about the instrument and how it works. A human can be correct and an instrument can be incorrect because the instrument needs calibration and it needs to have a good theoretical underpinning of how it works behind it. And Neil kind of actually appreciates that perfectly well when he's explaining stuff like grainy images of, apparently, things defying laws of physics as people have been saying about these things. Instruments can malfunction. Basically, it takes a lot of knowledge to know what the instrument is saying. There are many, many, many cases where a human has been correct, Einstein and the community of physicists say, while at the same time there have been systematic errors. For an example of this, consider the faster than light neutrinos that were apparently measured at the Large Hadron Collider. That was a case of instrumentation error and people making an error about how the instrument works. One of my more favourite ones here in Australia was the apparent variation of something called the value of the fine structure constant. It was very exciting some years ago. People thought this constant of nature was changing over time. Turns out, systematic experimental error again. So even scientists working right at the envelope of what is known with the most precise instruments in the world can make terrible blunders. So much the worse for everyone else trying to understand sophisticated instrument readings. And that includes things like the output of certain cameras and radars and military equipment. So anyway, unlike Neil deGrasse Tyson, who would say something like, instruments get the data right and don't care if they haven't had their morning coffee.

### Brett Hall

00:06:17 - 00:09:10

It sort of misses the point. The point is the bit about how those observations are theory laden all the time. All that aside, again, when he's on the question of these images of apparently alien spacecraft, let's just put it out there, people claiming that this is evidence of intelligent creatures visiting us from the other side of the galaxy. We don't need to consult every physicist on the planet and take a straw poll about whether this is evidence of life from another galaxy. The short answer is we don't know. No one seems to know unless there's a cover up. But none of us outside the cover up know that either. And as a working hypothesis, it's a cover up, explains nothing. Cover up of what? Cover up of government technology? Aliens, travelers from the future, cover up of just prosaic human error. The US government might want to cover up how hapless their navy is. Ah, easily confused by enemy military technology, perhaps. And all of that is just general purpose to any set of anomalous observations made by anyone can be claimed to be a cover up of some kind by a powerful entity, the shadow government or whatever. And so too, of course, can the alien spacecraft be a general purpose, non-explanation. So with all of that in mind, I was a little reluctant to ask David about this because I kind of knew the answer to some extent. I left it to the end as a bit of a joke. But in his style, he gave a deeply Popperian answer. And here he talks about just how hard it is to make observations, specifically to see what is right in front of your eyes. The evidence is here right now for you and for me in the room, wherever we happen to be. If only you know how to look for it, you could win a Nobel Prize in some field of science. The evidence is here right now if you know how to collect it and how to interpret it. In his answer that he's about to give, David mentions the Stern-Gerlach experiment. This is an experiment that requires highly precise measurements of particles. It's very difficult to do, relies on complex equipment. And what goes on happens right in front of their eyes, the eyes of the experimenter or anyone who repeats the experiment. Yet interpreting, trying to figure out exactly what it all means, that's the hard part. Transpose that whole scenario onto something purportedly even more complex. Images on a radar or an infrared camera or a regular camera or the human eyes. And then add to that, those instruments are making observations of something we've got no clue about, but which some people claim are alien spacecraft from another galaxy or something or other. How much more difficult then is it to interpret what's really going on in those observations in order to rule out all other theories in favor of it must be aliens from another galaxy theory? How is that the best theory?

### Brett Hall

00:09:10 - 00:10:19

When Eddington in 1919 helped perform the experiment that ruled out Newtonian gravity in favor of Einstein's relativity, he was in the lucky position of having two viable theories. The experiment was precise, but only an expert physicist would be able to properly interpret the results and then conclude all the other theories have been refuted. The only one left standing is Einstein's general relativity. And that's the experts with actual explanations on offer. Here with these so-called tic-tacs, what we have are non-experts with no theories or at least no explanatory theories. They have some wild guesses, making observations. And the observations happened sometime long ago in another place and apparently cannot be repeated. So we're doing history as much as we're doing science and philosophy. Making observations is very, very difficult. And that is David's point here when I ask him. Okay, this question is just purely for fun. Do you have any opinion on tic-tacs? That's a big thing going on at the moment. And do you know what I'm talking about?

### David Deutsch

00:10:19 - 00:10:20

No, I don't know what it is.

### Brett Hall

00:10:20 - 00:10:55

Oh, okay. So this is the American military, specifically, I think the Navy, who've released these videos of what they say are unidentified objects of some kind. And I know this is ridiculous. They say things like they're violating laws of physics, or at least they are evidence of technology, which is not explicable given the current state of technology. You haven't heard about these things, seen anything about these things, nor have any opinion on these things.

### David Deutsch

00:10:55 - 00:12:26

Well, now that you mention it, I've seen things on Twitter, which are now explicable in the light of the American military or something. Having said something about UFOs, is that what happened? Yes. I see. Okay. Well, the opportunities for error are enormous. And to perform a scientific experiment that is a crucial test of sophisticated scientific theories is very, very difficult and universally, almost universally underestimated. It's sort of taken for granted that Einstein did a very difficult thing, but it's not so much understood that Stern and Gerlach, who did experiments on quantum superpositions of particles in different positions, they did an amazing thing as well. Good experiments are rare and they require usually a great deal of skill and creativity. It's not the kind of thing that military pilots or policemen are typically cognizant of. Yes. So I think when people like that report a thing that, quote, violates the laws of physics, I would consider it unreasonable to go for any explanation of that other than human error.

### Brett Hall

00:12:27 - 00:15:18

Yes. And of course, when you do look at the footage, there is no apparent violation of laws of physics, even if you grant that this thing is moving at a high velocity beyond anything that we might be capable of. That's still sub light speed. So it hasn't violated relativity on the one hand. And by the way, even if you don't have an answer for what's going on there, well, that's kind of where you might have to stop. You don't immediately leap to it's aliens from the other side of the galaxy. So like I say, originally I planned on leaving this question for David for many weeks once all the more serious stuff had been talked about, all the stuff that I actually find more fun, to be honest, but strike while the iron is hot. So they say, I think that this answer from David is an excellent supplement to what Neil Tyson has said on the topic in various places. And it's easy to find, especially in that last Sam Harris podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don't personally think, and I agree with Neil here, that physicists and others need to speak out often about this kind of thing. It's rather like a James Randi is needed, but not every magician or skeptic needs to concentrate on doing precisely that job. There's more important things to do. There's more important problems to solve and outreach to make and so on. But there we have it. David Deutsch explaining that observations are difficult to make, very, very difficult. Seeing is not believing. Expert knowledge can be required to interpret even simple observations in experimental physics. How much more is that true when we have military equipment few people understand, making observations, apparently, if it's not all doctored or the equivalent of systematic instrument error, being interpreted by people who are pilots and not experts on how sophisticated observations are typically made outside of their narrow field of expertise, which is flying jets and shooting at stuff. That's hard enough in itself. They can't be expected to know precisely how the radar works and what might go on with the radar and the cameras and everything else. It's not to denigrate anyone to say that they've made a mistake. Error is the normal state of things. People make mistakes. We have no clue what these things are. But to leap to that, therefore, it's aliens visiting from another galaxy is just plain wrong. It's a non sequitur. Apparently, the "it's aliens from the other side of the galaxy" is indeed one theory we cannot rule out. But there are an infinite number of theories we cannot rule out with these observations, including that they're not really observations at all. They're just errors, human, systematic, instrumental, so on. If you want to hear me talking more about aliens and alien life, you can see this episode here, which is up. And I've written a whole bunch of stuff on my website as well.

### Brett Hall

00:15:18 - 00:16:17

If you just search Brett Hall, alien intelligence, you will find me writing about alien intelligence, this issue of alien intelligence, and in fact, criticising some of Neil deGrasse Tyson's reasoning. I tend to disagree with his vision of what humans are, for example, fundamentally have a deep disagreement that we are, as Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to say, just on the intelligence continuum with everything from bacteria through to insects through to dogs and chimpanzees. And we're just the next step on the intelligence continuum. I think that is completely misconceived. It's not a continuum. There is a qualitative difference between what our minds can do and what other animals' minds can do. And in fact, our minds have this universal capacity for understanding the rest of physical reality. But I've talked about that more than enough elsewhere and at other times. And that too can be found out there on the internet. Okay, until next time. Bye bye.