# 2021-07-16 - ToKCast - David Deutsch answers a question about our environment. A question for David 5 [Official](https://brettroberthall.podbean.com/e/ep-79-david-deutsch-answers-a-question-about-our-environment-a-question-for-david-5/) [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3K659Nvc0I) [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-79-david-deutsch-answers-a-question-about-our/id1447087694?i=1000529061338) Duration: 00:18:51 ## Transcript ### Brett Hall 00:00:00 - 00:03:15 Welcome to ToKCast and question five, or rather a question for David number five. In my conversation that I had with David Deutsch, I'm going to release the entire thing eventually once I've got all the other questions put together. I like doing it an episode at a time because I've been, well let's face it, inspired by Neville to do so. Today I'm asking David about one of my favorite topics, which is optimism about human beings. The contrast between the way in which the David Deutsch worldview, the worldview presented in The Beginning of Infinity, contrasts with so much of what passes for serious intellectual discussion about the place of people on our planet and in our cosmos. Surprisingly perhaps, being pro-human isn't popular. I don't just mean in the sense that it's not common, it's certainly not the majority opinion, I also mean it isn't popular in the sense that people will get quite emotional, negatively emotional, if you make the case that people are special. It's a curious kind of spiritual as well as philosophical inversion. It used to be the case of course that human beings thought they were the center of the universe, not just physically but philosophically and theologically. The entirety of the cosmos was put there for us in a sense. We are the reason the universe exists. The three big monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach or at least taught to some extent some version of this. To a lesser extent other religions, to the extent they teach magical thinking just as monotheistic religions do, also teach some version of the you are special lesson. This is, it should be said, a good thing in the main. The underlying motivation is good. Religions are vast collections of ideas, of memes in fact, and while many of the ideas are false or what we might call poor explanations when there are good explanations actually on offer in many cases, some of the underlying motivations for religion exist to give people direction in their lives, especially when things might seem hopeless or without direction or without point. In other words, they provide some answer to nihilism, to the nameless void. Friedrich Nietzsche, it is known, wrote that famous quote, if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you, which is frightening taken seriously. In other words, if you take too long thinking about the pointlessness of life, the abyss, you will eventually find that pointless abyss, that void, and it might fill you up. What is often not quoted in that particular quip is the sentence that comes immediately prior. So I quote again from Nietzsche, quote, whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, end quote, which is to say, if one devotes their time to combating bad ideas, one should be careful not to become a vessel for them. ### Brett Hall 00:03:15 - 00:06:19 This is the purpose therefore of religion. It is not supposed to be solely a critical exercise of pointing out everything that's bad. It's supposed to give you positive content, something that is good to replace what might otherwise be the void in your life or the bad ideas that could fill up your mind. It is not supposed to be a purely critical condemning exercise. One is not supposed to go around condemning others for their sins. One is not supposed to be pointing out all the evils in the world constantly. Jesus Christ got there before Nietzsche, of course, with paraphrasing, whoever is without sin cast the first stone or remove the log from your own eye before being concerned with the speck in your brother's. The point there is criticism without creativity is a kind of cruelty. Creativity without criticism can lead to complete nonsense. We need both. Jettisoning, completely giving up on religious thinking wholesale is no guide to life. Like literally no guide to life. If you're just throwing away religion and not jumping to something better, that's not a guide to life. Religion purports to be a guide to life. So if you have nothing else to replace it, if you have literally nihilism or just atheism, that's no way to run your life. But is there something better? Well, this is the kind of thing that philosophy is supposed to do for you at its best. If you give up religion without having anywhere better to jump to, you'll be left with the nameless void. Criticism alone is like being worried about the specks in the eyes of everyone around you while not being concerned about the log blinding you yourself. And it's also like constantly and deliberately casting stones without primarily trying to create uplift and build. It's destruction versus construction. What on earth am I getting at? Why have I gone all new age preacher? Because I think that there has been a turn in the last few decades in particular in philosophy, in intellectual circles, towards the critical, leaving us with nothing but the nihilistic, with little thought for what might replace what has been refuted. The analogy to physics is appealing here. Whenever anyone says some observation does not fit with Einstein's relativity, which is the prevailing theory of space and time and motion and gravity, that kind of thing, people jump to, especially in the popular media, so Einstein has been proved wrong or shown wrong or something like that. The problem with this is that if indeed some experimental result did not agree with Einstein's relativity, then what? Then what? Is it true that the beautiful theory would be slain by an ugly fact? Or as Feynman said, if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong and that's all there is to it. Sadly, even in the case of Feynman there, taken very narrowly, that's wrong. ### Brett Hall 00:06:19 - 00:09:24 The fact is that the only way to replace an idea or to show an idea is wrong is to have another idea there waiting in the wings to replace it. You need at least two ideas. The purpose of the observation or the experiment is to rule out one of them, leaving you with another. You can't have the single only idea that you have guiding yourself, whether it's in science or anywhere else, being refuted and leaving you with nothing, leaving you with nihilism in that area. Avoid the abyss. We always need to be improving, making progress, and progress does not only come by criticism. It comes by creativity as well, via a positive vision about how we improve our ideas. And this is true in science. We know how it works in science via experimental refutation. But more broadly, when we think about something grand like the place of people in the cosmos, we can't simply say people are no longer the centre of the universe and are just inhabiting the outer suburbs of a very typical galaxy, and therefore we are irrelevant to the rest of the universe, making us feel as though we don't have a particular place in the universe. We need somewhere better to jump to. So if we find, for example, that the entire content of our religious corpus of knowledge, our traditions and our culture that has been handed down, don't agree in some sense because of what the holy books contain with what we understand about physical reality, for example, everything in cosmology, geology and biology disagree with the literal content of the holy scriptures, therefore the holy scriptures are wrong in their entirety, then what? What do we do to guide our actions? Do we just make it up as we go along? Can we then create without criticism? Over the last few decades, as I was saying, there has been an especially vociferous turn in intellectual circles of rejecting God and then rejecting all of religion, and that includes the notion that people are at the centre of anything in particular, that we are not special and that the earth is not, but is it true that just because physical cosmology tells us that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, thus refuting the claim that it wasn't all created in seven days or 5,340 years, pick your religious cosmological theory, or that we know that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that therefore people are not important or special, or as I like to say, cosmically significant. People today will praise and hold sacred almost anything but people. They will devote their lives to movements, regard the inert environment as something worth dying for, all the while complaining that people are evil or condemned or that life is pointless ultimately. Nietzsche might say they've been staring into the abyss and the abyss has stared back. They fight monsters only to become a kind of monster themselves. Of course, the truth is that it's all just ideas. ### Brett Hall 00:09:24 - 00:10:25 People are not monsters, they are people. People have ideas. They are not filled with a void or filled with the abyss, but they are filled with ideas, and some of those ideas can be bad ideas. Ideas, for example, that regard people as bad, that people are scum, for example. I asked David about this, broadly speaking, in an especially redundant way, as you'll hear, and which I'll have just a little bit more to say about afterwards. That would bring me to my next question. Describing people, for example, as chemical scum might be a very loose way of understanding what people are, but Hawking did it, and you have an excellent refutation of this claim that Stephen Hawking did make, which seems to be the reasonably scientific way of understanding our place in the universe. He said that we are just chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet orbiting a typical star and so on. But you say this place is not typical. In what sense isn't it typical? ### David Deutsch 00:10:25 - 00:11:41 I think the description of humans as chemical scum on Earth is not accurate in the problem situation in which Hawking used that term. We are certainly made of chemicals, but so is the rest of the Earth, and so is all other matter in the universe. So to single us out as scum, if you're going to take these terms in the context of trying to describe something purely in terms, in reductionist terms of their constituents, then it is simply false to add a pejorative term. That pejorative term comes from a different problem situation and a different vocabulary is needed. It would be enough to say we are chemicals like everything else in the universe. And then you see that it would be silly to call the Earth chemical scum or the Sun or the solar system or the Milky Way galaxy chemical scum, though in the sense in which we are, it is too. ### Brett Hall 00:11:41 - 00:12:16 So we are a special, a very special kind of chemical, but then would that entail that the Earth is special by virtue of the fact that it is uniquely suited to ensuring that this set of chemicals called us is able to survive off into some future, that we are only sustained by the existence of this planet and will only continue to be sustained by this planet, so therefore we'd better look after the environment or else we're going to go extinct. ### David Deutsch 00:12:16 - 00:15:02 Yeah, so you're putting that in a deliberately exaggerated way that makes it much more wrong. You could have said that with one-tenth the emphasis and it would still be wrong. Now it's true that the Earth is that living things can exist on Earth only by virtue of the fact that the Earth provides by astronomical standards a very unusual set of circumstances which if they were to vary by astronomical standards by only a few percent, then without a lot of technology we would die and living things in general would die without technological help, but that doesn't at all mean that the Earth is adapted to human existence or even to life, but especially to human existence very accurately. It would be more true to say that the Earth is barely suitable for life. It provides a relatively stable temperature and sunlight and living things manage to use that even though it's not very conveniently provided and that took it hundreds of millions of years to work out and the rest was provided by life itself and most of the rest as far as humans go was provided by humans. There are very very few places on Earth that humans can live comfortably without technology, that is without ideas provided by them and not provided by the Earth. So I don't know maybe some South Sea islands with suitable coconuts or whatever they have there and even that would be a trap because we are so constituted that if we did live in such an environment for some generations our numbers would increase to the point where we were living in misery again. So the Earth is we're living on Earth, what has been provided is really just the bare necessities for us to live somewhere, originally the great rift valley or something and the rest has to be provided by us. Yes so the Earth is not adapted to life. ### Brett Hall 00:15:02 - 00:18:14 But life can adapt itself to the Earth but the only thing that is going to survive in the long run in terms of regular life not intelligent life like ourselves are the genes. The genes are going to want to try and make themselves survive and the animals won't care or the other species don't have this concept of caring into the infinite future about their own survival. However we do so we want to adapt ourselves to the Earth in some way or if not the Earth then something far larger. We want to adapt ourselves to the universe in which we find ourselves and the one thing that enables us to do that is of course solving our problems continually to create the knowledge in order to enable us to do so. So there we have it you heard David there say that one of my questions could have been said with one-tenth of the emphasis and it would still be wrong. This is all because it is wrong to think that the Earth is especially suited to us. This can be shocking for people to hear but David likes to use the example of Oxford for example where he lives is not suitable for human existence. Remove the technology the stuff that's there only because of the knowledge of people and that includes everything from shoes and underwear and clothing all the way through to reverse cycle air conditioning and refrigeration and a person there in the winter wouldn't last 10 minutes in the freezing cold. People are fragile and the only way we can get by is in an environment that we construct around ourselves. He mentions there maybe there are some islands somewhere where you know there's constantly fruit being produced and there's animals there and it'd be very comfortable for us to live night and day wandering around without clothes and without reverse cycle air conditioning and without perhaps refrigeration. Maybe we could get by there for a few generations until the storm comes until something goes wrong. The only reason we're able to survive ongoing on this planet is because of our knowledge our technology. We make places here on Earth that are otherwise completely inhospitable. In Australia the nation is essentially a desert well not entirely but largely a desert and if we didn't have dams for example collecting the rainwater we'd quickly die of thirst. There's no way we could support the almost 25 million or 30 million people that we have here on this extremely dry continent. Repeat for every other continent around the world as well either it's too cold, too dry, too wet, too frozen, just too dangerous. The Earth is barely suitable, barely suitable and because we are able to make it increasingly more and more suitable more and more friendly to humans, human friendly we can do likewise with the rest of the cosmos. We've already done it in outer space. We've already made the vacuum of space where the International Space Station is hospitable to some extent. ### Brett Hall 00:18:14 - 00:18:51 We can continue to do that. We could do that on the moon, we could do that on Mars and eventually we spread out throughout the solar system, the galaxy, the local group of galaxies and the universe but it takes lots more knowledge to create the technology in order for us to do that. We've done it here. Let's keep doing it off into the infinite future. People are unique. We are special. We are the thing that makes the world worth living in and possible to keep on living in. Until my next question with David or my next episode. Bye bye.