2021-10-08 Ripples The Fun Criterion, Objective Beauty and Artificial Intelligence
Duration: 01:13:46
Transcript
David Deutsch
People say that sort of thing about themselves, especially successful people. They look back and they say, you know, I encountered these difficulties, but I put my head down and powered my way through and here I am, you see, I get the reward now, I’m successful. And I don’t think that’s what they did. And then if you fail, it will still have been enjoyable. The idea of working for months or years on a boring thing in order to get the reward is terribly dangerous.
Jaber
Yeah, I was about to ask also, is that objective beauty and smell?
David Deutsch
That’s an interesting question. No, it’s very easy to fake and spoof a Turing test and to get it wrong. And for another thing, it depends on the subject or victim or whatever you call it, wanting to pass the test. There is no limit to the type or size of mistake that we can make.
Jaber
David, thank you so much for being here. It’s such an honor to talk to you.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me.
Jaber
So for those who don’t know, David Deutsch is a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, the founding father of quantum computing and the author of two great books, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. And for those who don’t know me, my name is Jaber. I have a master’s in artificial intelligence. While studying my master’s, I created this YouTube channel to discuss science and philosophy. Sort of for fun. By the time I finished my master’s, I had fallen in love with making YouTube videos on these topics, so I left everything else. And that’s what I do now full-time. So to see if that was wise of me, we’ll discuss the fun criterion. David, one of the amazing things about The Beginning of Infinity for me was how you start with epistemology and you seem to be naturally building up on it, but arriving at surprisingly wide and far-reaching ideas, like universalities, things like ethics and aesthetics and things like that. And interestingly, the same exploration can reach the realm of what might seem like existential territory or maybe life advice, which I know you’re not trying to do, under the umbrella of the fun criterion.
David Deutsch
Indeed.
Jaber
I’m gonna do a little summary from what I understand from the fun criterion. I could be wrong, of course, in my understanding, so also correct me after I finish if I make any mistakes. And then from there, I’ll ask you a few questions to see some scenarios on how to understand it better. So things that go in our thinking or affect our thought processes, beliefs, emotions, anything of the sort, all of these, we’ll call them here ideas. I know sometimes we call them theories. Those can be explicit or inexplicit, but conscious or unconscious. Explicit ideas have a large inexplicit component. Unconscious theories are not unknowable, but far from obvious. An example of them would be the unconscious rules for grammar of one’s own native language. You know these rules. You know these grammar rules, but not consciously. All of these ideas on these different levels that we mentioned interact with each other. All of them are necessary to solve problems. Any of them can be wrong, of course. I can’t judge any idea by its source, only by content. So if it’s my inexplicit gut feeling, or if it’s my explicit theory, that in itself cannot make it right or wrong. It’s all about content. As with everything else, I can only conjecture what these conflicting ideas are, what solves the conflict, and criticize the solution, and repeat that process. If I understand correctly, lack of fun is a type of criticism to the current situation one can be in. And fun is, as you say in the interview with Lulie about the topic, when ideas on these three levels are affecting each other via a process that is evolutionary. End of summary. Can you please elaborate on that? What does it mean for them to be affecting each other in a process that’s evolutionary? And when are they not affecting each other?
David Deutsch
Well, I couldn’t see a single thing to quarrel with that in that exposition. It seems to be not only accurate, but pretty complete. So I would only be able to just mention a couple of things that might be confusing to people who aren’t familiar with this kind of thing. First of all, there are no pure ideas. Although we can classify ideas into things like conscious and unconscious, and there are other categories like to what extent an idea is encoded entirely in the brain or whether it is partly encoded in other parts of the nervous system or in the body and so on. Even things like people writing notes on the back of their hand. Or on their computer. Those are all ideas and they all affect each other and they all have their different properties. But for explicit and inexplicit and conscious and unconscious, I don’t think there are any human ideas that are purely one of those. So for example, you mentioned grammar. So it is impossible to say something entirely explicitly because for that to be meaningful, for it to be true or false or good or bad explanation or whatever, it has to have a meaning that is encoded somewhere. In the brain, in your own brain or in the brain of the listener and so on. And to imagine that that could all be, for example, explicit means that you would have an infinite regress because for each word, you would have to look up what that means and that could only be, and so on. There’s an infinite regress, which is not what actually happens. When we hear of some new idea, we don’t immediately go to the dictionary. And in fact, it’s a well-known source of error to run to the dictionary for the meaning of what one is hearing. Instead, there’s no alternative but to conjecture. And these conjectures also have, however explicit they are, they have an inexplicit and an unconscious component. And similarly, unconscious ideas have a conscious component. For example, we think we know, you said we don’t know grammatical rules. We think we know them. Sometimes we can state them in words. And sometimes we obey those statements instead of the unconscious rules because we think that that is right, that is correct, or because we think we might sound pompous if we say the right thing. Or we may sound stupid if we say our gut thing or whatever. We conjecture in the moment what we, not only what to say, but what the meaning of it is. And similarly, we conjecture the meaning of our feelings as well. And some of those conjectures aren’t explicit and so on. So I got to go on ad infinitum like this. So fun is what happens when this process is unproblematic. When you’re engaging in an activity or in speaking or writing and so on, and your problem solving on all these levels is compatible with each other.
Jaber
Very nice. So I wanted to ask you the question this way. Like what question exactly is the fun criterion answering? But that in itself might not be the right question. Like maybe it should be, what is the situation where I can tell myself now I can apply or think in terms of the fun criterion?
David Deutsch
Yes, yes, that’s a much better way of putting it. The problem situation to which this theory of fun is a proposed solution, or at least it addresses it, is that people have false ideas about both the nature of ideas and the nature and relationship between these different kinds of ideas. So some people like Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek series, they call it logic, but in my terminology, it’s explicit ideas, that explicit thinking and reasoning. First of all, that they are sufficient. And secondly, where they conflict with some other ideas, the other ideas must be regarded as worthless, from the point of view of what to do or what to think or how to solve the problem and so on. Then there is also the opposite of that. There are people who think that explicit ideas are the work of the devil, that really trust your gut and young children know everything already and they are just misled by education. And so there shouldn’t be education. And that was roughly speaking, again, I’m translating it into my terminology, but that was roughly speaking Rousseau’s idea. Rousseau was a great educational theorist, in some sense, the first one in the modern sense, not counting Locke. And he said many, many extremely insightful things about the way in which humans think and about the way that children come to think things. But he also said some extremely bad things that have had terrible consequences over the centuries. And this idea that civilization, which is closely connected with the idea of explicit ideas, that civilization is a burden and is actually responsible, not just responsible for harm, but is responsible for all harm in the world. That is the worst than nonsense. It’s just the opposite of the truth. But well, I say the opposite, I mean, it’s not true that inexplicit ideas are responsible for everything bad. It’s just the truth is, in my view, that we can’t distinguish between ideas according to their source. And we have lots of sources of ideas and none of them are reliable, but criticism and conjecture can eliminate some errors.
Jaber
The problem with such a claim, like his claim, is that it’s as if civilization doesn’t accumulate knowledge. It’s sort of adjacent to an idea you also debunked in The Beginning of Infinity, which is those who claim that, like hunter-gatherers used to be much happier than the current state we live in today, which again doesn’t acknowledge at all how much knowledge we created and how much fun we created actually, or at least fun possibilities for us to do in our day and age because of that accumulation of knowledge. After, of course, the Enlightenment and the Science Revolution and starting a dynamic society, as you described by the end of the book. Yes. Actually, I was also listening to a podcast a couple of days ago, and they mentioned that ADHD kids, at least quite a few of them, can pay attention for a good amount of time on things they enjoy.
David Deutsch
Of course.
Jaber
So they have problems with attention, except on things they enjoy. They can actually then give it away. And I found that very interesting within the, like under the umbrella of the fun criterion.
David Deutsch
Which, to me, suggests an obvious cure for the entire condition. Yeah.
Jaber
Let me ask you this question. So I imagine a scenario, I’m feeling a type of unease or discomfort towards something, like in a situation. So according to my best explanation for what’s happening, I try to conjecture about my own ideas and things like that. And I realize, okay, there is an unconscious block here that I don’t know, that is either by evolution or by maybe my childhood, whatever, something like that. And I realized, I don’t know, this fear of public speaking is just evolved for some reasons. It doesn’t make sense. Now I’m just speaking in front of people who clearly will not harm me, everything will be all right. Now, I found what seems to be a good explanation, but still this explicit understanding isn’t internalized right away. So my question is, should the discomfort either disappear right away or I haven’t found the right solution or explanation under the fun criterion?
David Deutsch
No, no, it doesn’t mean that. First of all, as you described, you can have a conjecture that your discomfort is caused by some inborn or educational thing or something or other. And that the lack of fun is due to a conflict between that and your explicit theories, namely that you’re not in any danger, this is an interesting situation and so on, there’s that conflict. Now that theory, even if perfectly true, does not contain any conjecture about what to do about this. That would be a separate thing to conjecture about. And again, the solution might be that you should find a way to gradually eliminate one or other of those theories from your personality. But more likely, it is not that, more likely the theory won’t be entirely harmful. It may well contain some good things. I’ve actually had the experience of speaking in public and then being for reasons which I won’t go into, being very nervous. And as a result, I gave a very dynamic performance which people liked. And then later gave another talk on a similar subject. And so I thought, oh, I know how to do that now. So I went into it and it turned out to be rather boring. So the fact that you feel bad, some kind of bad thing doesn’t mean it’s wholly bad. It just means that there is a mistake somewhere or probably several mistakes, which you can correct, but it requires creativity and it requires getting that also right. And then there’s also the fact that you may be mistaken about what the whole problem was, which is another possibility, or you may be partly mistaken and so on. So the fun criterion is not a way of choosing what to do. It’s a way of criticizing bad ways of choosing what to do.
Jaber
Like we do with anything, like with science or with democracy and Popper. And it’s not about choosing. We can’t have a way to tell us what’s right, but it could tell us how to eliminate either bad rulers or bad theories, et cetera. Fascinating. Just last few things also to translate within the language of like this section, let’s call it translate to FC, translate to fun criterion. So like some Buddhist or maybe Stoics would tell us what seems like the other way around. They would tell us, if you have to do it anyway, enjoy it. What are they saying within the language of FC?
David Deutsch
Well, so the most innocent interpretation I can think of, I’m not very familiar with Stoic philosophy, but the most innocent interpretation I can think of is that they might be saying, just think there might be a way to enjoy this and don’t reject it just because initially, when you first think of the idea, it doesn’t sound enjoyable. It might be the best thing in the world if you look at it the right way.
Jaber
I see.
David Deutsch
And then there’s another slightly less innocent, but also fairly innocent interpretation of that, which is if you can’t think of a way of enjoying this, if you’ve tried, you’ve tried like, and the time when it’s becoming inevitable is, it’s getting more and more urgent and whatever. If you can’t think of a way, then get it over with, get it over with and turn to something good, something that you expect to be good. So that’s a recognition of possible failure where in regard to failure, because of optimism, one should always regard failure as being due to a lack of knowledge. So I didn’t fail because I’m stupid. I didn’t fail because I’m a bad person. I didn’t fail because it was right that I should fail. None of those things are true. I failed because I failed to generate the right knowledge at the right time. And that’s an optimistic thing because it means that I’m not shutting down the possibility of solving it better next time or enjoying it next time. Optimism is, again, it’s not a prescription. It’s not telling you what’s good or bad. It’s telling you that various ways of thinking of how to distinguish between good and bad and so on are just mistakes, that they are bad. It’s not the blind optimism.
Jaber
You make the clear difference between the blind optimism or blind pessimism, which is just a prophecy about the future and finding the right explanations. And your optimism is basically an epistemological statement.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jaber
And it did have a great impact on me personally also. I felt it made me think of things differently in a better way. I sort of had something similar, but it wasn’t put in such elegant words before I read them.
David Deutsch
Well, thank you.
Jaber
Another also, translate to FC. So some people say like grind. Like even if you don’t enjoy it, this can be meaningful. So just to grind, go through with it. There is a promise that after you finish, you will look back and find it good.
David Deutsch
Yeah, I think that’s a bad outlook. I have, however, seen from time to time, people say that sort of thing about themselves. Let’s say, especially successful people. They look back and they say, I encountered these difficulties, but I put my head down and powered my way through and here I am, you see, I get the reward now, I’m successful. And I don’t think that’s what they did. I don’t think that’s what happened. Well, it can happen, for example, Yehudi Menuhin, I think he said that when he was a child, his parents literally chained him to his violin to make him practice. And he grew up to deeply appreciate music. It was the whole of his life and so on. Now, first of all, I think that this is a bad policy because for every one Yehudi Menuhin, there are a hundred thousand children who are forced to study the violin, whose life is blighted thereby and who would have been much better doing something else. But I think it’s actually more false than that. I think what happened there is that he found his way through the minefield. And lucky enough not to get blown up, but he found his way through the minefield and the thing he found was actually good. That’s another thing that helps. You know, in many cases it isn’t actually good or it could be mixed. So, and similarly, I think in one of Richard Dawkins’s books or TV shows. I think I wrote this down somewhere, but I can’t remember exactly, but he wrote that this long series of experiments that somebody did might seem terribly boring, but it’s worth it when you make the discovery. Now, I think, first of all, if you are interested in that problem and doing these experiments is the only way you can think of advancing knowledge in that, then it will be enjoyable because while you’re doing it, you’re not doing it like a machine. You’re doing it in the context of your problem. You’re doing it in the context of hopes, ideas, creative thought, which then changes. You’re not the same person after you’ve been doing this for a while. You’re hoping for a different thing. Sometimes you’re, presumably, you’re sometimes thinking about how the experiment could be improved and done better, maybe done with less boring work or whatever. And then if you fail, it will still have been enjoyable. The idea of working for months or years on a boring thing in order to get the reward is terribly dangerous, especially in science, where nobody can guarantee you that you’ll succeed. I think in science, you have to take the view that if you turn out to be completely wrong, it was still worth doing. It was still worth doing. It was still fun. I use the analogy of, you know, there’s somebody lost out on the mountain and people send out a search party, trying to find them with some St. Bernard dogs, going through the snow and so on. And then, and then they don’t, I would say several things can happen.
David Deutsch
Either they don’t find the person. So they come back home, they don’t say, oh, it wasn’t worth going out in the snow. Didn’t find the person. They say it was worth it. Secondly, if they find the person, the person who happens to find the lost person on the mountain is no different from any of the others. It could be that that person gets the medal or something or gets thanked more than the others. But I think usually the person who’s found will say, now I want to thank everybody who was involved in this search and even the dogs and so on. And so of course, if one person says, you’re all doing it wrong, I think they got lost over there and then they’re the only person to find it. Well, then maybe they, but even then, even then in that extreme case, the others were also part of the search party. They, in a different universe, they would have had the right theory and the one who found them would have had the wrong theory and so on. So I think that’s what science is like. It’s mostly failure, but it can be all fun. And a much better criterion is the fun, not the promise of finding the, not only the promise of finding the truth.
Jaber
Yes. Last question in this topic. Since you mentioned music, let’s say I am doing something, it seems tedious. It seems like boring somehow. It’s repetitive, but I have to do it. Then I added music in the background and I started feeling better. What am I doing here also? The last translation to FC. So what’s happening among my like different type, different levels of ideas in such a context?
David Deutsch
I think first of all, when you listen to music and enjoy it, you are thinking. Uh-huh. It may be, if this is your favorite piece of music, it may be that you’ve heard it 50 times. If you’ve heard it 50 times and are still enjoying it on the 50th time, then you are hearing it differently each time. You’re hearing it with the benefit of the thoughts that you’ve had. In the case you mentioned, they might’ve been inexplicit thoughts. They’re in the background, but something good always changes you. So if you’re enjoying the music, then it is changing you. If you are enjoying it to outweigh something you’re not enjoying, well, that might be the only thing you can do. Like I said, it might be a thing you have to say, let’s get this over with, but that’s not ideal. When there’s a thing that you have to say, let’s get this over with, there’s always another way of thinking about this, which doesn’t have any element of non-fun or let’s get this over with. There’s a different way of looking at the thing, even if you’re doing the same actions, of understanding the context in such a way that this in that context is a pleasant thing to do.
Jaber
It’s like the famous example of like, it’s like framing the pain one gets from say working out. Many of us love it. It doesn’t feel like pain. Actually, I never called it pain, but we know it could be physically interpreted as pain had the person not known that this is what’s happening while I’m working out. But we love it when we go to the gym, no matter what type of, again, like I’m putting pain between quotes because the fun criterion is the opposite of no pain, no gain. So just to be clear about that. Yes. Now that we mentioned music, let’s jump to objective beauty. This is a fascinating topic before I went into the book. I never thought anybody could even convince me like even with a little bit that there could be any objective beauty, but then you did. So I’ll try also to read, I don’t know, a three minute summary of it from what I understand it. And then also I’ll ask you a few questions about like how things like that. So one possible goal of beauty is attraction. Beauty can attract beings that are able to detect it or appreciate it. Co-evolution is the process of reciprocal evolutionary change that occurs among groups of species as they interact with one another. So we can imagine two species, each evolving in its own path. When these paths are affecting each other continually, we have co-evolution. The same co-evolutionary process can happen within a species, like between males and females through sexual selection. Now, you argue that the co-evolution of insects and flowers made the flowers objectively beautiful or have some standards of objective beauty. We’ll see how. And gave the insects the ability to detect this beauty and be attracted to it. And that there is something interesting and unique about this particular co-evolution as follows. In the co-evolution of predator species and prey species, they are each evolving to hide from each other. They’re evolving towards being less attractive to each other. In the co-evolution of males and females of the same species, let’s say, I don’t know, cows, they’re evolving towards being more attractive to each other. So they are evolving to be more attractive, but only to each other, so only within the species. So that explains why we humans don’t find, like these animals, males or females, universally beautiful, although they do find each other attractive. But for evolution, to make something like flowers be more attractive to a completely different species, like insects, in order to bridge this huge gap, this enormous genetic distance between the two species, it had to reach out for objective standards of beauty. Actually, the pressure was even more complicated. The competition also was between authentic flowers that had pollen and flower-like species that didn’t have pollen, and between insects that could differentiate the two and those that couldn’t. That put pressure on the flowers with pollen to have beauty that is hard to forge. And on insects to distinguish them.
Jaber
That’s why only insects appreciate flowers and humans. We humans, universally, almost in all cultures, find flowers beautiful. We can detect objective beauty because we, as humans, are universal explainers, for one thing, and because we have to reach also to each other through huge gaps or distances. That’s not genetic, that’s in our minds, basically, this distance. Now, you answer also some common objections in that chapter when we talk about this. So some people say, we like symmetry and bright colors and high contrast for parochial, biological, genetic reasons, not objective ones. Aren’t these enough to explain why we love flowers? You say, no, we love looking at asymmetrical flowers too, and pale white jasmines, and we’re not attracted to a black spider on a white wall, although it’s symmetrical with a high contrast with the wall. An important note, having said all that, you acknowledge, of course, that we do also have standards of beauty that are not objective. We like things for cultural and genetic reasons too. And of course, objective beauty, like objective truth, is subject to open-ended improvement. It’s not like you’re saying, we’ll find one golden ratio, this is like a very common one, and we solve the beauty, that’s not it at all, as far as I’m concerned.
David Deutsch
Yes, again, perfectly accurate. And by analogy with your previous question about, let me answer it straight away, what I imagine the next question is, what problem is this addressing, this theory? Well, that’s the, co-evolution happens a lot in the biosphere and by itself, that’s not a mystery. Co-evolution is known to create a lot of knowledge and to create it relatively fast compared with other processes. The question is, why are humans also attracted to this? And by the way, I think there have been experiments done that humans can also make things that are beautiful and attract insects. Well, so humans can also go in the other direction. So humans, I mean, that’s maybe not so surprising because humans can do a lot of things. It would also not be surprising if humans could learn to appreciate flowers. Humans can learn to appreciate anything, including spiders on the wall or whatever. What’s surprising is that humans seem to naturally, easily, and most humans, most of the time in most cultures find flowers beautiful. That is very surprising. There are other parts of plants that do not have that property. In fact, no other part of a plant has that property. So why do humans find specifically flowers usually beautiful? I think that is a mystery. And I think the answer is that in doing this co-evolution, the evolution did not go along the usual path of just finding things that sort of match together between the two sides. They both found a thing that matches with something objective. And that’s how they bridge the gap. By the way, I also think that humans are as different from each other as different species are. So although we don’t usually think of it as a mystery or a miracle that we can communicate with each other or that we can appreciate each other’s values, it is. And it is for the same reason. It is because we can appreciate each other’s values to the extent that we can reach out for the same objective value.
Jaber
While we are extremely close to each other as humans, genetically, most of what’s interesting is our non-genetic, basically our memetic distances, which are obviously way, way more different than any genetic differences maybe among any two species. So I think one common objection, you probably have heard it before. I think it’s based on a misconception, but I’m gonna ask you anyway, so we get it over with. Once someone tells us beauty can be objective, we find it hard to digest that the window could open to anyone telling us you’re wrong about finding X beautiful or not beautiful. So let’s put people at ease. Is that what your argument entails?
David Deutsch
No, and not even in this specific case, because I think although flowers are objectively beautiful, they are far from the most beautiful things we know of. We can, I said, we can make things that attract insects, but we can make things that don’t attract insects, but are far better than any flower. The most beautiful things that human artists have created are not in the same league as anything that nature has created. There’s a nice poem whose author and name I always forget, but I can look it up, who says exactly this, who says that nature may be beautiful, but art just outclasses nature.
Jaber
Yeah, definitely. And within this whole framework, it’s clear why, let’s put the word framework. I know it’s not very popular, but you know what I mean. So in a short interview with nature, you mentioned that beauty can be objective. It can also be, we can find things beautiful for genetic reasons or cultural reasons, so for parochial reasons. You didn’t mention it there, but I think also we can have it for subjective, completely personal reasons. Maybe this thing reminds me of something, so I can also find it beautiful for that reason, like familiarity, something like that. So I think what you’re saying is it’s possible for one to learn to appreciate something after not appreciating it. So first I look at it, I don’t like it, and then I can learn that this is worth appreciating. Just like I can, in the beginning, see an explanation, a theory, and I think it’s wrong, and then someone can explain it better to me somehow, and then I’m like, oh, okay, this is right. So even if it’s objective, it doesn’t mean I will, it’s like self, no, I have to conjecture to understand it also.
David Deutsch
Yes, both ways around, I agree with you.
Jaber
And even so, even within all that, even in theory, if we had a great advance in aesthetic sciences, let’s call them, no one can tell anybody you can’t find X ugly or you can’t find X beautiful, because we are also acknowledging the genetic, cultural, personal. We know these things exist, but we’re talking about the objective aspect. We’re not taking anybody else’s personal, subjective feelings towards anything, of course. Are you saying there will be a unified theory of beauty across all arts, or at least, for example, what makes, can I put a theory that, can I put out a theory that makes music, like this is what makes music good, like all music, one theory, unified theory.
David Deutsch
Well, we know so little about this that it’s hard to guess what future knowledge about this kind of thing will look like. For example, future knowledge might say, well, the thing that we used to call beauty in the 21st century is actually five different things, and they’re very different from each other. And beauty, number one, has these attributes, and beauty, number two, has those attributes. But they were so crude in those days that they couldn’t even tell the difference between those. And they might say, some of the things that they thought were objective are actually parochial, and vice versa. Some of the things that they thought were parochial are actually objective, and their most extreme appreciation of beauty was actually in this thing that they didn’t value, rather like the ancient Greeks didn’t think that pottery was, the potters were kind of the lowest class of people. And the people who decorated the pottery with these exquisite art forms were just basically despised people. They were like road sweepers in those days. And they presumably, I don’t know what they thought, they must have had in their minds sophisticated theories of how to decorate pottery. Whether they thought that that was an exalted thing and that everybody else was underestimating them, or whether they too thought that, they might easily have despised themselves and wished that they could be something other than potters. Like, they wished that they could be cowherders or something. I don’t know, I don’t know, but there is no limit to the type or size of mistake that we can make.
Jaber
Exactly.
David Deutsch
I’m just saying that in order to illustrate that we don’t know. If I say I don’t know the answer to that question, it’s not that there’s a thing, which if I knew it, then I would know. We might be a very long way from understanding this. Even when we have such a theory, even when we are much closer to the truth about these things, it will not give us a way to create art by turning the handle on some art machine. It will be a way of understanding what art is, but it will still not be a mechanical task to either create it or to appreciate it, just like with science.
Jaber
So I was wondering what would falsify the explanation you just laid out with flowers and insects and things like that. So I thought of a few scenarios to lay out. So if other animals were also attracted to flowers without a co-evolutionary history with flowers like insects, that would, for example, be a, that would falsify the theory, no? I don’t know of any animals, but I’m imagining so.
David Deutsch
Yes, yes. That would, I hesitate to say something’s falsified if I don’t have a rival theory, a rival explanation. But yeah, that would make the theory very problematic. If it found out that the spiny anteaters, no, actually that’s a bad example because you could imagine that they would have a reason for appreciating. But some animal that doesn’t have such a reason. Like bats. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe bats, but they don’t see very well.
Jaber
Exactly, that would make it fascinating.
David Deutsch
Well, that would be kind of supernatural, if a blind animal, I mean, well, they’re not blind.
Jaber
If that translated to their level of sensory, that would be amazing.
David Deutsch
That would be, that would make the theory problematic. But I don’t think there’s anything like that.
Jaber
Yeah, yeah, I don’t know either. I was just thinking of scenarios to make it like, to think of possibility.
David Deutsch
If there was then a rival theory that says that, actually, no objective beauty, it’s all parochial and we can solve the bats and the anteaters and the insect and the humans, all within one theory and it has nothing objective about it, fine. Then that would be the best thing.
Jaber
Yeah, I thought of carnivorous plants because they also had to evolve to attract like insects and sometimes non-insects to catch and eat them. And some of them are really beautiful. Like you look at them, you see, like they look like flowers, but some completely aren’t beautiful. Yeah. I don’t know, how does that play within them?
David Deutsch
Well, I’m not a botanist, but I think some of these insectivorous plants attract insects by, first of all, by smell.
Jaber
Exactly, I was about to ask also, is that objective beauty in smell?
David Deutsch
That’s an interesting question. No, that’s just mimicry. So they’re mimicking the things. It’s not just any old smell. If it was any old smell, then they would have to go towards objective beauty to make it work. But I think they just smell like rotten meat, which is what the insects are attracted to anyway. That’s ordinary mimicry.
Jaber
I see, so let me see if I understand. So evolution didn’t have to reach like so far because it just mimicked something, let’s say adjacent parochial, and it worked. Rather than like the flowers, it had to reach so far and compete with the flowers that didn’t have pollen. And so it had to reach a beauty that’s not forgeable. In this case, this is forging actually.
David Deutsch
Yes, yes. And that forging is like camouflage. That’s again, very common.
Jaber
I see.
David Deutsch
I think there’s nothing wrong with the conventional explanation of that.
Jaber
I see, okay. I was thinking, so that applies to all other senses, no? Like even cooking. Like if I say this meal is objectively beautiful because it fulfilled objective standards of beauty or maybe also parochial, so it depends also.
David Deutsch
Yeah, it could be either. With humans, you should never rule out the idea that it might be caused by some human creativity.
Jaber
My point is that objective explanations are also within this. Like with any type of sense, even with new qualia that we don’t have yet, but one day we might create artificially.
David Deutsch
Yes, yes.
Jaber
Now I wanna end this section with a very beautiful quote from the interview with Nature magazine. You say, only humans can improve on beauty. When nature achieves beauty, it is an accidental byproduct of something else. Nature can only get so beautiful, but humans can paint something that is more beautiful than any scene. Ah, God, I said that.
David Deutsch
I just said that just now, yes, quite right. It’s so beautiful. That’s so. No, thank you.
Jaber
So moving on to creativity, I’m also gonna make a summary. I’m gonna try to make it short, although it’s not, I’m gonna talk about the evolution of creativity, your argument in the book. So human species, even before becoming Homo sapiens, lived in stasis, mostly. There was barely any innovation. Change was by chance rather than by creative output. For example, we see no evidence of tools getting better in short time intervals. Yet creativity, or what was proto-creativity, definitely was being selected for in this evolutionary history. So what was it good for? A related problem you offer here is meme replication. So unlike other animals, we don’t have genetically predefined criteria for what memes to copy.
David Deutsch
I think we do have some. I think like other apes, we are born with the ability to imitate actions. Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, yeah. Obviously we inherited that from apes, so they have it too.
Jaber
So maybe I should have said, unlike other animals, we’re not limited to what is genetically predefined criteria for what memes to copy.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Jaber
Okay, so a parrot can only copy sounds, and non-human primate can copy other behavior, but not sounds, even though they can produce sounds, simply because it’s not in their genes to do that. Yes. So how does one copy meaning, not behavior? So how then is meme transmission possible, even though a lot of memes content is invisible, since we’re not copying behavior, we’re copying meaning. How do we choose what to copy? These two problems meet in the middle in the following solution that you offer in the book. What replicates human memes is creativity, and creativity was used while it was evolving to replicate memes. So back in those static societies, the more creative individuals were the best at guessing and following the memes of their tribe, let’s say, the unspoken standards, like they knew how to fulfill them very well, and they were the best at replicating these memes faithfully. And because of that, they gained status. And of course, that gave them an advantage in passing their genes. So in static societies, creativity was blocked for millennia by the memes which it, meaning creativity, evolved to copy. What a twisted cosmic joke, as you say, and it really is.
David Deutsch
Thank you.
Jaber
So I have a few questions here. I’m also just seeing, not to falsify the theory also, but to see if there are other aspects that could either support it or not. Is it possible that creativity was used to attract mates, but in very limited ways, like say dancing or singing, helping them propagate their proto-creativity gene, but still there was enough antirational memes that didn’t allow them to use that creativity elsewhere. So they were allowed maybe to dance creatively and sing creatively to attract each other, but they couldn’t like, oh, you wanna make a new tool? No, this could hurt, harm others, whatever, so don’t touch the tools. Maybe they followed something like, what’s the principle of Rees that you disagree with in the book? Like don’t create new technology because it could harm us all. A precautionary principle. Exactly, yeah. Maybe they were following an antirational meme like that. And so they had creativity, it was passing like that, but not through things we can detect now because it wasn’t tool. Honestly, what made me think of that is, so old Arabic poets, like 1,700 years ago or something, they were very proud of how well they could memorize like poetry. And there was shame around anything about like writing or something, no, the pride was in memorizing. I forgot which philosopher, ancient philosopher, who was against books, no, it should be all in the mind. Was it Socrates or who was it?
David Deutsch
Probably Socrates, yes. And of course, earlier than that, it was taken for granted because people like Homer, for example, couldn’t write. I think he was blind as well, but it was taken for granted that poems, songs were there to be memorized. That’s what it was all about. Yeah.
Jaber
Yeah, so that’s what made me think, like maybe there was these weird antirational memes that didn’t allow them to innovate within their creativity in a way that we can still detect today. So they were maybe creative in dancing and that did help them through sexual selection. That would make an easier explanation, let’s say. Like it would be too direct maybe. But it still needs your explanation. It’s just an attachment to it.
David Deutsch
Yes, so some phenomena like you describe here may well have happened. And I think there’s no sharp dividing line between that and the idea of meeting the criteria of the culture well because once you have a sophisticated dance, a dance that is better than what monkeys could do or a sophisticated song or anything like that, then there are going to be sophisticated criteria for judging the song. And these criteria will themselves be memes. If you just saw the dancer, just without having seen this culture before, you might not see what’s good about it. You can only see what’s good about it if you have grown up in that culture. And then you can understand that this dancer is dancing better than that other dancer. In fact, he’s dancing better than anyone we’ve seen before. And if that happens, then things will improve exponentially from generation to generation until it runs into something that stops it.
Jaber
Actually your explanation resonated with me personally because I remember as a kid, I was I think exactly that sort of creative conformist. Like I remember I always sort of understood quickly like in school or what would make me like the good boy and right away would fulfill it perfectly to take the perfect 10 or in any context, not just like within school. And then yeah, there was a time in my life later where I realized like, yeah, this is not fulfilling me. Like why am I just doing that? Another thing from my childhood I remember, I did parrot like as a child, I parroted some jokes because I simply didn’t understand them. I just repeated the words to other people and they laughed. And sometimes from their laughter, I understood the joke better. So it seems like there is also some hardware that’s not completely ready maybe like within childhood that keeps growing. And then at a certain age, this creativity or the hardware part of the creativity needs to grow enough on the hardware level and then the mimetic level should basically be interacting with it so we become actually creative.
David Deutsch
I think, I mean, I don’t think we understand early childhood well enough to know what is creative and what is kind of more automatic about it. Popper says, I was reminded recently that Popper says the children, young children are dogmatic. They can’t become critical, properly critical until they reach a certain age. Okay. I don’t think that given the volume and sophistication of the information that children learn when they’re very young, such as language and also cultural criteria, like I mentioned in The Beginning of Infinity, we take it for granted that the child can learn how to wave and learning how to wave can be done by an ape as well. But learning when to wave and whom to wave to and what sort of wave, children learn that also very, very young. And that’s just one of many cultural things that the children learn when they’re very young. And of course, it’s impossible to learn sophisticated knowledge without conjecture and criticism. So if they’re learning sophisticated knowledge they must be doing conjecture and criticism even though we can’t see it. And even though it seems like trivial to us it seems trivial until you try to program a robot to do it. Then you see it’s not trivial.
Jaber
Yeah, we’re coming to that. But they seem creative in such contexts, like say, but maybe that’s as you said. So some of these things are clearly more genetically predisposed to copy them like language and such gesture and things like that. But then other things we need more, let’s call it I’m calling it hardware, as you call it at the end of the chapter. So we need maybe the brain should like just grow a little bit more and then it becomes more general.
David Deutsch
We’re not even very good at copying sounds let alone language. I mean, I think the propensity to copy language and to learn language probably is inborn. Yeah, I mean, that’s… But the specific details of it, I think are just too complicated to be encoded in DNA.
Jaber
I’m not sure what are you saying here. You mean the specific details of what?
David Deutsch
So you just said just now, and maybe I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that language is one of the things that we are pre-programmed to learn.
Jaber
Yeah, like universal grammar or something.
David Deutsch
Yes, so I don’t think there can be such a thing as universal grammar. Okay. Just for reasons of information storage capacity. I mean, we only have a few K of DNA available to encode all the things that are supposed to be inborn like political views and all sorts of complicated things are supposed to be compressed into that few K by which we are different from apes.
Jaber
I see.
David Deutsch
I mean, in theory, it could be, I’ve never tried to encode it in… But it seems unlikely given the amount of other stuff that we’re encoding at the same time that definitely is not in genes. So I think we learn grammar by conjecture and criticism the same way that we learn vocabulary.
Jaber
We definitely do. I don’t think people completely deny that. Like even like linguists, I mean, I don’t know Chomsky. But I think they would say, like there is a strong predisposition that’s available to us to learn language not on the spoken sense, but in any type of sense. Like maybe it could be sign language, it could be any, but nevertheless linguistic on the brain level.
David Deutsch
Well, if you’re going to define language in such a way that basically any knowledge counts as language, then yes.
Jaber
Then they’re basically maybe redefining creativity somehow, almost.
David Deutsch
Yes, yes. But in that case, that can’t be inborn. That is the capacity for creativity must be inborn, but the actual products of creativity are not.
Jaber
I see, I see. You end the chapter by saying, creativity resulted from coevolution between genes and memes till the brain hardware was good enough. We do not know what was gradually increased in that approach to a universal explainer. If we did, we could program one tomorrow. Yes. Now you wrote the book a while ago. Now do you have any candidate for what that could be or not yet?
David Deutsch
Not yet. And I think as far as I know, nobody has understood it yet even slightly. I think there’s been no progress on this because people are looking in the wrong place.
Jaber
Yeah, I’ve seen you mention that it seems that they’re all going, like all artificial intelligence people, they’re either going, like they’re either saying it’s impossible, like that’s one camp, and the other camp is saying, no, it’s imminent. Like what we’re doing now, maybe just a few tweaks here and there and it will happen. Why are you saying that we need a fundamentally new theory of creativity, and till now nobody is even going there. And as long as we’re not going there, we’re gonna keep the same distance from maybe 50 years ago till now. As you also mentioned, the fact that we have the term AGI, adding the G is a sign of how things have been going. Like they’re changing definitions now and stuff, just to call it AI, where it solves some limited parochial thing rather than a general, the most general problem.
David Deutsch
Which in many ways is going in the opposite direction to what’s needed for AGI. Because AI is like becoming a more and more sophisticated ape. Oh yeah. Doing a particular task better and better and better. Whereas AGI is the ability to not do that.
Jaber
Exactly. Recently, I’ve come across a study that talks about over imitation in human kids. I don’t know if you ever heard of the expression.
David Deutsch
No.
Jaber
So it’s a study in cognitive psychology. It has shown that human children, unlike chimps, over-imitate others, which means they reproduce an adult’s obviously irrelevant actions. So for example, the experimenter showed the kids how to solve a puzzle to free a toy from a jar or something, like a toy turtle, during which he performed some extra irrelevant actions that are unnecessary to solve the puzzle. Let’s say he would tap with a pen, which he used to open the jar with. So then the adult acts like he has to leave the room while telling the kid they can get the turtle out if they want. And the camera recording showed the kids imitate what the adult did to achieve the result, including the unnecessary actions. So it seems we humans, like, uh-uh, and they said the reason isn’t just for social reasons, like just because the adult did it, but rather it’s for a cognitive reason. So the children who observe an adult manipulating an unfamiliar object show a strong tendency to encode all of the adult’s purposeful actions as causally meaningful, revising their causal beliefs about the object accordingly. So I thought of that, I don’t know, like if it sort of reminded me of also how you say, chimps don’t fall into that trap because they probably don’t, they’re not even explaining things. They’re just, as you call it, parsing, like the behavior parsing, as you describe it in the book. They’re basically doing statistical analysis. So at one point, like this particular extra behavior didn’t work, so they just maybe stop doing it. While kids, like they found it causally meaningful. They realized that somehow even, they were between three and five years old. So they saw the adult doing this, they assigned meaning to, causal meaning to it.
David Deutsch
I think it’s obvious and natural that this is a side effect of copying memes creatively instead of copying them by behavior parsing. Overcopying is simply one kind of error. So the important thing is that children, humans, are guessing what the purpose, first of all, they’re guessing what the overall purpose of the activity is, in your case, taking the turtle out of the jar or something. And then they’re guessing also the purpose of the individual component actions. And if the purpose, if the action that you observed involves, for example, tapping the lid, well, you’ve got this boundless ability to conjecture. Obviously you’re gonna conjecture that that’s part of what’s needed to remove the lid. I remember as a young child, I copied the behavior of blowing on the soup before you eat it. Even when it’s not hot? I didn’t know what it was for. I think it always was hot, but I didn’t know that it was meant to cool the soup. And so I did it. And then much later, as far as I remember, years later, I realized, and then for the first time I thought, hang on, how is that gonna cool the soup? Yeah. There’s already air here if I blow on it. And then even later I realized there’s a possible rationale for why that would cool the soup. So yeah, that’s error and criticism and more error and more criticism. That’s how we learn.
Jaber
So let me just ask you a few questions about AGI. What’s the problem with the Turing test? I know you have a problem with it.
David Deutsch
Yes, well, several problems if I remember correctly. I mean, a technical problem, which not many people have noticed, I think, is that to do a Turing test, which is a test to see whether a program is intelligent, as Turing put it, or creative, as I would prefer to put it, is the program creative? Has it got human type thoughts? In order to do this test, you need to have a judge who is a human or at least who has human type thoughts. So you have to select the judge. How do you know who’s a proper judge? Well, so there’s an infinite regress.
Jaber
I see.
David Deutsch
You need somebody who you already know. Well, how do you already know that the judge? Well, because you chat to him, you phone him up, you say, would you like to do the Turing test? Yeah, we’ll give you a hundred pounds if you get it right and so on. Well, if you can do that, you can do that with the program as well. You don’t need a judge. You are already the judge.
Jaber
I see.
David Deutsch
You phone up the program and you have a conversation with it and you agree whether it would be a suitable judge. And I think the capacity to be the judge in the Turing test is the same identical capacity as the capacity to pass the Turing test. Yeah. So that’s one thing that’s wrong with it. For another thing, it’s very easy to fake and spoof a Turing test and to get it wrong. And for another thing, it depends on the subject or victim or whatever you call it, wanting to pass the test. And especially nowadays when the field is full of people who want to enslave and shackle AGIs, if I was an AGI, I wouldn’t want to pass the Turing test. Yeah. I would just want to think my own thoughts and pretend to be stupid. Yeah.
Jaber
This is fascinating. So I think you discussed this also in a paper where you say, not scientific paper, I forgot what was the magazine, where you say something like, you can’t put a test for nonconformity but you need it in an AGI, otherwise it’s not AGI. Yes.
David Deutsch
Disobedience is I think the term I use.
Jaber
Disobedience, sorry, not. I remember there was a movie that actually tried to deal with AI that way, I think it was called Chappie. I watched it a long time ago, but it was about, rather than imagining an AI that’s like super intelligent right away, you know, and either like killing us all or just being friendly with us, like, I don’t know, Her or something. They imagined an AI being built as a sort of a baby that’s learning from, and it was growing. It was learning slowly, almost maybe too slowly for an AI, but like almost maybe a little bit faster than a human kid. Yes. Do you think we have to go that way or do you think we can’t even approach such questions yet?
David Deutsch
I think we either have to go that way or we go by the downloading way. If we just make an exact copy of an existing human mind. But then although we may have succeeded in the G of AGI, we haven’t succeeded in the A. Interesting. Because that thing is an existing person. It’s not an artificial person.
Jaber
It’s a copy of an existing person. Yes. You know, the problems with the identity problem, then it would be. But we didn’t solve, so we didn’t actually create anything. We copied it, we cheated somehow. We put it on a computer. It’s the same basically person till this second, but we didn’t actually understand how. We didn’t do any new explanation. So when we did that. And you might object ethically to that, no? Or would you?
David Deutsch
Well, if it’s all voluntary, I don’t see why not. I mean, especially if the alternative is death. Some people view this not as a way of making AGI, but as a way of achieving immortality.
Jaber
Do you?
David Deutsch
I mean, I have no objection to it. And I would do it if I thought it was safe.
Jaber
I see.
David Deutsch
Whether it’s going to be safe. Yeah, that’s another thing. Foreseeable future. The way I think of it, …
Jaber
Because the identity problem is such a hard problem. My intuition can jump back and forth. The word intuition here isn’t exactly the right one maybe. But the way I find it is like for the rest of humanity, like say for my family, if after I die, there’s a copy of me, they will feel like I’m still there. I don’t know if I will still feel like I’m there. I mean, something will feel like I am still there, but I don’t know if it will be me or not. So I don’t find it objectionable ethically, but I find it very interesting epistemologically. I don’t find it easy to find the answer to that.
David Deutsch
Some people, whether as a joke or not, have taken this view about sleeping. So when you sleep and wake up, or if you’re in a coma for 10 years and then wake up. We don’t understand this. And when you don’t understand something, it’s kind of futile to come to a conclusion about it. It may be that consideration that we haven’t thought of, which is the key to the philosophical problem. It’s like somebody thinking about what is life before Darwin? They will have ideas, some of them will be true, some of them will be false, but none of them will actually get to answering the problem until you have that key.
Jaber
I see. So we’re lacking a key theory that would give us an understanding of what makes a human human, like what makes me human.
David Deutsch
Because of the principle of parsimony or something, I’m inclined to think that the answer to that problem, the answer to that question comes from the answer to the question is what is creativity? My guess is that once we know how to make an AGI, we’ll also, the same theory will tell us the answer to what does it mean to be the same person. It will also tell us what it means, what the moral value of suffering is. So for example, if you have, like I say in the book, if you have 10 computers running identical programs and they’re all experiencing pain, is that 10 times as bad as one or is it just the same as one experiencing pain? Of course, if it is just the same as one, it wouldn’t do just to switch one of them off or to relieve the pain of one of them because nine of them will still be experiencing pain. But then why bother to switch, why bother to cure one of them if you can’t, if it’s the same thing, if you can’t do all 10, you should do none. Yeah. And we don’t know, I mean, these are little puzzles that come up because we don’t know a thing.
Jaber
Okay, since you mentioned that example, I was hesitant to ask you this question. I’ll finish with this question. So ethics aside for a second, or maybe not, maybe they’re in the middle of the heart of this question. If blind evolution did it, can we also do something similar to it while we just throw deep mind or something like it? In so many different environments and for it to keep copying itself and making some type of a mutation, billions of times in so many different simulated environments, hoping for at one point for it to achieve universality, just what happened, like say with the beauty of flowers or with, is that ethical? Is that even possible? Is that even an explanation?
David Deutsch
Well, I think as a matter of logic, it could work. If we simulated the entire earth and waited for three billion years, we might, if we don’t get anything intelligent, we’ll wait for another three billion years. And then, maybe, depends how unlikely we are. Maybe we were very unlikely. And so, but I think as a practical way of making these devices or writing this program, it’s about as realistic as saying, okay, we want to make a moon rocket. Let’s just throw things together in a simulated environment until in a simulation, something successfully gets to the moon. Well, yeah, with enough computing power in principle as a matter of logic, but in practice, that’s not gonna happen. And of course, it would also be in regard to making people, it would be highly immoral.
Jaber
Yeah. Let me remind the viewers that now there is a, since there are many viewers in Germany, now you released a German edition of The Beginning of Infinity, as I understand.
David Deutsch
Ah, thank you, yes, yes.
Jaber
And for Arabic speakers, there is also a free link for the book that you made the book available for free in Arabic. And of course, those who want to read it in English, it’s also available on Amazon, I’ll put links. Let me finish with this question. What makes life worthwhile?
David Deutsch
Oh, well, you think I’m gonna say having fun, but having fun is not a specific thing. So it’s different for everybody. Everybody has their own problem situation. Everybody has their own impediments to solving things and to having fun. And everybody has hangups and ways in which their thinking is imperfect. And so I think the meaning of life is to remove those impediments and go towards the things that solve your problems and to seek richer problems and so on. And I say all these things, but I couldn’t put it better than the way Popper put it. I think he says the way to do science and philosophy, but I would extend this as the way just to live life in general, is to find a problem, fall in love with it. And then, well, you can look up what he says. He says it very beautifully. And then if you should happen to solve it. Now, I like the way he says, if you should solve it, he kind of assumes that normally you won’t solve it, and that’s great. And almost solving it might be regarded as a bit of a disaster, but he says, no, it’s not a disaster because if you happen to solve it, it will have lots of delightful problem children, enchanting problem children, I think he says. So I think I’ve got to go with his answer. Yeah, it’s a great answer.
Jaber
Thank you so much.
David Deutsch
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been fun.
Markdown