2021-10-07 ToKCast David Deutsch answers a question about the nature of mind. A question for David number 9
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Duration: 00:10:03
Transcript
Brett Hall
Hello and welcome to ToKCast and my next in the series of questions for David. This is number nine about the nature of mind and personhood to some extent and what makes people unique. This is a real interest of mine. I made a video called The Nexus, which was an exploration of what I think we know from various angles about what the nature of personhood is. Certainly it’s the case that we are these creative entities and because of computational universality it must be the case that we can program computers to be creative but whatever this program is is going to be very different to any existing program and David’s going to touch on that in his answer today. But this program remains utterly elusive. We do not know how it is that we generate explanations or in shorthand how it is that we’re creative. In my Nexus video I hypothesized that personal identity might come into this in some way because there is this some not entirely a mystery in that to the same degree but certainly it is a spectacular insight into the nature of reality that particles and indeed all large complex objects including ourselves have fungible instances in other universes which differentiate over time and so this has a real effect on how we should view the nature of personhood given the truth of the Everett interpretation, the multiverse vision of quantum theory. And so because we know that we have these fungible instances that interfere, that differentiate sometimes, can differentiate sometimes, that perhaps there’s something to be said here for the interaction between physics at that level and whatever the computation is that’s going on in our minds. I don’t know, pure speculation. But see my Nexus video for that. What I really loved about this question to David or rather the answer from David I should say is that he talks about consistency and whether or not and to what extent people can be consistent. Should we strive for consistency? I suppose so. But can we? Could this inconsistency that exists in our minds, this constant state of problems, these contradictions that we live with, could this just be part of the reason why we are special, unique, different to everything else that exists that we know of? We are the thing that brings other things into being that otherwise would not have come into being if it was just laws of physics mandating everything in a deterministic way. Those laws do mandate things in a deterministic way but they’re not the only things that determine stuff and what happens. Nor, of course, most importantly, are the laws of physics the best explanation for everything that happens at all moments in time. There is something absolutely unique about human beings. We continue to explore this. We’re not just on the continuum with other animals, just a slightly smarter example of the chimpanzee.
Brett Hall
I keep on hearing this. We are qualitatively different. Without further ado, let’s get into the next question. This all raises the fact that there is this creativity going on, this creation of concepts in order to try and come to better understand the world. That is the uniquely creative capacity of the human mind. Mind itself, how do you understand the nature of mind? I sometimes think of it as this abstraction. I think you’ve said this to me. It’s a funny kind of abstraction. It’s an abstraction that itself needs to be instantiated in matter but also needs to be running. It can’t just be like any other piece of knowledge which you can transmit from one place to another in different physical forms. That’s one way of understanding what knowledge is. It allows itself to continue to persist over time and to get itself copied, to get itself replicated. But a mind, a human mind, this thing that is enabling the creation of this knowledge, it itself is an unusual kind of abstraction. How do you think of it at the moment?
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s an unusual kind of knowledge. We have yet another classification. A mind is a kind of knowledge, you might say, but it’s a kind of knowledge that doesn’t only have to be instantiated, but as you have just said, it has to be running. Now what does that mean? Running how fast? Running in what? Because running in the wrong kind of computer would make it gibberish or in a kind of computer that has the wrong mapping to reality. We don’t know how it works. We don’t know how the mind… So the mind is characterized by creativity. I think we can go that far. At least the human mind is characterized by creativity, but we don’t know what creativity is. We don’t know what the distinction is between a computer program that is running creatively and one that is not running creatively. One day we will know, but we don’t know yet. I think also there are… And again, minds, that minds exist is common sense, even though we don’t know how they work or what specifically they are. So more recent ideas that maybe minds don’t exist, that had to be invented too. It is not at all common sense and it doesn’t at all follow from any good philosophy, but we don’t know. And one of the things I think that is a misconception that dates from a very long time ago is that a mind is mostly consistent, that it consists of… The ideas in a mind are mostly consistent and when they’re inconsistent, that’s a kind of emergency and we have to fix that because that means that it’s not a proper mind really. It contains inconsistencies and therefore that’s no different from a load of propositions written down on a piece of paper. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think a better way to think of the mind is as a set of problems and a problem consists of conflicting theories. Or rather a problem is more like some conflicting theories that we have noticed because we don’t really think of something as a problem unless it’s giving rise to some thought. But there must be ideas that are conflicting with each other before we have noticed it. So the mind, I think of it as sort of a massive tangle of ideas which are largely inconsistent. The parts of it which we have sorted out into a kind of consistency are a minority that are currently not giving rise to any thought. They might be invoked in some thought that’s about some other inconsistency, but the part of the mind that is thinking is full of inconsistency. And so therefore a model of the mind that thinks of the mind as a set of consistent propositions with occasional inconsistencies that we then fix is I think very far from the truth. It’s not a set of consistent ideas and it’s not a set of propositions because propositions have a definite truth value. Each proposition is either true or false and it has a perfectly definite meaning if it has a meaning.
David Deutsch
Whereas the ideas in minds don’t have a definite meaning and they’re not precisely true or false. We can make them have as sharp a meaning as our current problem situation requires. That’s what we should be aiming for and we can make them as consistent as the current problem situation requires. And we’re striving, you talked earlier about truth, we’re striving to make them as true as the current problem situation requires.
Brett Hall
Yes, so it sounds that whatever the nature of the mind is in a computational sense has to be radically different to any other kind of program that we’ve hitherto encountered because all those other programs are written in such a way that it’s proposition after proposition, perhaps one following from another. It’s an algorithm of a kind. And these statements need to be consistent or the computer program itself isn’t going to run. You’re saying that it’s possibly the case that underlying this uniquely creative capacity of the human mind is something that is quite the mirror image of that in at least some respects. And maybe this is what is needed in order to go some way to explaining what’s going on here with creativity. Or another way that you’ve put that in The Beginning of Infinity is, of course, explanatory universality, this idea that even if there were other kinds of creativity prior to us, what we have is a kind of creativity which allows us to create knowledge which is going to be able to solve problems in principle about anything that exists in the physical universe.
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