2023-05-23 Reason Is Fun #2 - Physics of Inexplicit Ideas
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Duration: 01:11:36
Transcript
Lulie Tanett
Welcome to the Reason is Fun podcast. I’m your host, Lulie Tanett, and today I grill David Deutsch about inexplicit knowledge. And it turns out we talk about the physics of inexplicit knowledge. So that was unexpected. I hope you enjoyed the episode. So inexplicit ideas. Yes. Most people use the word tacit knowledge or implicit ideas. Yes. What made you coin inexplicit ideas?
David Deutsch
I don’t think I coined it. If you look at the OED, it is there. I may have introduced it to this kind of discussion. But anyway, the reason is quite simply, the more normal word for this would be implicit. But the trouble is that implicit is more usually used for things which are not inexplicit. So if you say, for example, I’m in favour of everyone having the same income, then implicitly you are a communist, but not explicitly. So if somebody says that and you reply to them, well, I disagree with communism and so on. And that person says, I never said I was a communist. I’m not advocating communism. I just think everyone should have the same income. So then you would say, well, it’s implicit in that theory that you have the same idea as communists. And so the ideas are the same. So in other words, implicit includes the idea that it’s implied, whereas inexplicit doesn’t have that. Yes, exactly. I should have said that.
Lulie Tanett
How did the idea of inexplicit ideas come about?
David Deutsch
Oh, I think it is kind of obvious if you insist on the usual things like physicalism and thinking everything, there’s no one here but us people and that everything in your mind is represented by physical things in the brain and so on. Then you can see that it’s obvious that the meanings of words, for example, can’t be stored explicitly in the brain. I mean, how did it come about in …
Lulie Tanett
Your thinking? Just like that. Or what problem was it solving?
David Deutsch
Well, I can’t remember exactly when I started thinking about inexplicit knowledge, but I basically started thinking about epistemology in regard to physics and epistemology more broadly while thinking about quantum theory. So as you know, the foundations of quantum theory have got entirely clogged with bad epistemology. I initially wanted to just unpick that. Very initially, I just thought it may be little more than a matter of language. Like when Newton said that he induced his theories, he didn’t really mean that. It’s just that that was the language they used to describe epistemology in those days. So similarly, I thought that the bad epistemology at the root of quantum theory was just a manner of speaking and that the real error was an error of physics. So I kind of wanted to express everything in Popperian terms, which meant becoming more tuned to thinking about what the physical correlates of everything are, things like problems and ideas. And then as soon as you think about the mind as a computer and thinking as computation and so on, then we don’t know how to make an AGI, but what would we need? Well, one thing that’s missing in existing computer programs is meaning. So could you just have meaning be another program? Well, that leads to a circularity or an infinite regress. Namely? Well, the computer is not going to… When the computer sees a word, or when the AGI sees a word and it wants to know its meaning, it can’t possibly look that up in a dictionary, because the dictionary will only consist of words itself. And so you’d need to look up the meanings of all those and so on ad infinitum. And it’s obvious that therefore, that the meanings of words can’t be encoded in words. How does inexplicit ideas solve this? Because wouldn’t that just move the problem rather than actually solve it?
Lulie Tanett
Inexplicit knowledge is not stored as words. It’s not stored as assertions or statements. It is more like knowledge that is stored in the actual physical thing, the brain. Like a switch, a light switch on the wall, it doesn’t… Well, modern light switches may have a microprocessor inside where they store lots of information, but an old-fashioned light switch that just switches on and off, its state of being on or off is not stored in a memory inside it. It’s stored in the state of the actual switch. And that’s… More generally, what a computer does when you feed a bit of information into it, that’s stored in the physical constitution of the computer. I mean, there might be many levels of this with RAM and ROM and so on, but when you eventually get down to physics, it’s not stored as instructions. It’s stored as the physical properties of the medium that the computer is made of. And the instructions are at a higher level than that. And what about for a person or a biological system?
David Deutsch
Well, for a person… So a person also has this physical substrate of neurons and things, but inexplicit knowledge for a human is at a level above that. It’s because it’s changeable, unlike the inexplicit knowledge of a computer or a light switch. There’s a level above the level of neurons. So you can…
Lulie Tanett
When you say level above, do you mean emergent?
David Deutsch
Yes. So are you saying that inexplicit knowledge in people is a physically instantiated… Like, I’m not sure what the analogy is exactly. Well, so all knowledge is physically instantiated. But it comes in layers. So knowledge like, lions are dangerous, is expressed in words. But the meaning of that sentence is stored or is also stored in the brain, but not in words. So what is it stored in?
Lulie Tanett
It’s stored in configurations of neurons, which are changeable. How is that different?
David Deutsch
Well, the difference between on and off, like whether up means on or up means off, like, you know, up means on in America and in Britain, down means on. Now, the connection between… And so the on and off are the meanings, the meaning of the physical state of a light switch was installed in the light switch by the electrician who connected it up to the light bulb. And no amount of switching up and down, you know, input to this. You said that the electrician installed the meaning of the light switch, but wasn’t the meaning… Like, what does even a meaning of a light switch mean? It means which of the physical angles of the light switch represents light on and which represents light off. So the meaning is the relationship of the state of the object to the reality that it refers to. Isn’t the state of the object part of reality? Yes, they’re all part of reality, as it is just an object. Yes, they’re all part of reality, but they can refer to each other. And that reference is part of what we mean by meaning. For a light switch, it’s very simple, and there’s like only one or two levels between the state of the light switch and the actual light being on or off, the actual light coming out of the bulb or not coming out of the bulb. With the more complicated things like light switches that have microprocessors in them, or computers, or brains, the relationship between physical states of the information object and their meaning can be very complicated, and it typically comes in layers, layers of abstraction. So you were thinking about the structure of thought and the structure of information instantiated in physical systems and in minds, and so you came to the idea of inexplicit knowledge because you noticed that if you just have explicit knowledge, then that leads to an infinite regress. Yes. The definitions. By the way, that’s not my idea. I’m sure that’s in Popper, and I’m sure it’s many people have noticed this. Yeah. I guess I’m curious how you in particular came to this idea because I think not many people do or not a lot of people or not everyone does. Well, so if you look at the… It came from quantum theory. So as you may know, or as you must know, the conventional interpretation of quantum theory has to do with… It asserts that mental states of humans and observers drastically affect physical processes in atoms and so on. Does it really? Because I thought that was just a misunderstanding or something that people say, but they don’t know what they’re talking about, but is that something seriously believed by most people? Well, I don’t think there is such a thing as believing, but people who write to me, people who send me emails, either just members of the public who are curious or physicists who ask me questions about quantum theory, very often I would say typically express their question in terms of this conventional interpretation. So they’re asking some variant of what counts as an observer, when does the wave function collapse, and who collapses it, and there used to…
David Deutsch
There’s less now, but there used to be questions of, …
Lulie Tanett
You know, does a rabbit collapse the wave function when it looks at something? Does it?
David Deutsch
There is no wave function collapse. So what is the actual thing? The wave function, which is in any way, in any case a bad way of looking at quantum theory, but it’s a mathematically valid way, never collapses. It has various branches which describe parallel universes. So why are people talking about observers? How did this come up? Because the prevailing conventional interpretation often misnamed the Copenhagen interpretation, which was actually something else. So the collapse interpretation says that when we observe a quantum system, which is described by a wave function, which is a sum of two terms, something happens and something else happens, then when we look at it, it changes to just one of those two, and that’s called collapsing. And then what does this have to do with inexplicit knowledge? It has to do with knowledge, because if this were true, then there would have to be a physical theory with equations and so on, which describe this change from a superposition wave function to a non-superposition wave function, and the transition from one to the other would be caused by observation. And observation means the observer changing their physical state. I mean, it would have to mean that if it meant anything. So this theory would have to say, if it were written down in a proper physics way, would have to say that a certain change in the brain causes a change in the electron’s wave function. So were you taking that theory seriously, and that’s why you looked into inexplicit knowledge? Yes. Oh, interesting.
Lulie Tanett
Wait, so you took it seriously initially?
David Deutsch
Yeah, well, I didn’t know the Everett interpretation initially. I found out about the Everett interpretation while looking into this stuff, and I saw that it did solve that problem, but I thought it had other problems. And so I didn’t change my worldview to the Everettian worldview. I just took that on board as a possible promising line of investigation, because I had doubts. And it so happens that the moment came when I was sitting with a group of graduate students in a pizza place in Little Clarendon Street, and I was sitting across from Bryce DeWitt, who was the leading proponent of the Everett interpretation. And I was sitting across from him in the pizza place, and I thought I’d ask him, since he’s an expert on this. And instead of sort of face-palming my questions, which he’s no doubt been asked a thousand times before, he just very kindly and adequately answered my questions. And then so I walked out of the pizza place thinking, oh, that’s what the world is like. And I never looked back.
Lulie Tanett
It is wild to me that you can get to the concept of inexplicit ideas from quantum physics, because my interest in it is more about the psychology and what are emotions and what is it like to be a person in the world and so on. Whereas for you, it was more solving a very specific problem of this mystery of the observer in quantum physics, which then turned out to be not even a thing. How did the idea of inexplicit knowledge?
David Deutsch
Well, actually, it’s not quite not even a thing, because once you take it all seriously, once I took it all seriously, I eventually got to the thought experiment to test Everett, which necessarily involves an AGI running on a quantum computer. So both the sort of connection between quantum theory and consciousness or whatever you call it, although it came out in a different way, but some remnants of that idea still remained. And also the idea of a quantum computer came out of it, even though I didn’t call it a quantum computer then, because I wasn’t thinking of computers. But the thing that I wrote a paper about, we would now call a quantum computer, the thing that I was then thinking of as consciousness, we now do not think of as consciousness. We think that thing is irrelevant. Which thing? The thing which would make the wave function collapse. The thing in the brain which would make the wave function… In the not Copenhagen interpretation. Yes. In the school physics interpretation. Yes. So was the thing that was purported to make the wave function collapse inexplicit knowledge? Or how did that… I still don’t fully know how that fits into… It was consciousness, conscious awareness of the result of a measurement. So were you trying to understand what is consciousness because that was said to affect the physical properties of systems? Yes. What a weird idea by the way. It’s wild to me that that is a thing that people are just like, oh I guess physics is like weird and wacky. Well I don’t care how weird and wacky it is. Physics is trying to solve certain problems, and the theories are far beyond our experience and you’ve just got to take the theory seriously. That means… Take the view that if the theory is true it says some specific thing about reality. But what is the theory that consciousness affects physical systems? Because I don’t know, I mean the image I have in my head is that there is some kind of mystical substance called consciousness that somehow emanates from our brains and then touches objects and then causes light to go in one direction instead of another. Yeah, I think that’s roughly the mental image that people have when they are thinking of the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Now in the Copenhagen interpretation they were a bit more sophisticated and therefore a bit more sneaky. They would say that this process that you just described of some mystical thing coming out of your brain and touching the object and so on, that doesn’t exist because it’s not described anywhere in quantum mechanics, in the equations of quantum mechanics. But when you ask well what does exist? You are told you can’t ask that question. That’s not a legitimate question. That’s a classical way of looking at the world. And this thing that they called the classical way of looking at the world is what I call explanation. So the Copenhagen interpretation rejected explanation on principle.
David Deutsch
Because they were instrumentalist. Well they were instrumentalists or positivists because they wanted to reject explanation on principle. And why did they want to reject explanation on principle? Because the straightforward explanation with this stuff coming out of the brain and so on is obviously nonsense. I mean it’s obviously not described by quantum theory so it can’t be included in a theory of physics. And other versions either didn’t account for the observations or they didn’t make sense mathematically and so on. So to avoid all that you say the quantum world view is a radically new world. Not only is it a new theory of physics, it’s a new role for epistemology in physics. And that was very much like positivism or instrumentalism. Though even then they didn’t connect it. Like they didn’t write a philosophy paper saying, I suppose people did later, but the founders of the Copenhagen interpretation didn’t say well now we have to have a combined theory of physics and philosophy where knowledge plays a different role and explanation is ruled out and so on. Or explanation only exists at the classical level as they would say. I still don’t get what is the standard school physics view of what the observer does or how. So if we think of the light, so it’s okay, but when does it come up?
Lulie Tanett
When does the observer affect physical systems? So that’s the question which is not allowed by the Copenhagen interpretation. Right, but I’m not asking the Copenhagen interpretation, I’m asking about the school physics normal. So in school physics the physical process would be analyzed in the form, suppose that the photon approaches a barrier in a certain state. You can describe it with a wave function or in several other ways. And then later the photon strikes a barrier at a certain place. Here are some equations that tell you how to work out the probability that it will reach a certain place on the barrier as a function of what its initial state was. And what does state mean?
David Deutsch
A complete physical description of it. So like what angle it’s tilted at and where it is and how fast it’s moving and that sort of thing. Exactly. So then, so you have this formula and you can do an experiment and you can test it and you can see where it comes out on the screen and what the different probabilities are and like which place it comes out more brightly, less brightly. You can work all that out. Then the student may well ask or if too timid to ask may well think, Okay, but what brings about this thing? What is it that makes the photon change course and then go to some places and not to other, never to other places and so on. And if they can work up the courage to ask that question, then well as I said in the Copenhagen interpretation the answer will be that’s a classical way of thinking. You must stop thinking that way. There is no such thing as what brings about the outcome. I think lecturers and teachers are too embarrassed to talk like that nowadays. So I think they would normally say, I mean I haven’t been in a quantum mechanics classroom or lecture room for many years, but I think what they would say nowadays is that’s a deep question that people wonder about and you don’t need to know it for this course.
Lulie Tanett
Where does the observer come into this?
David Deutsch
This thing about where you see the outcome, which place is on the screen it goes and which it doesn’t go to, that formula that you’re told only works when an observer is looking at that. If you continue the experiment after that place and no one looks at it and it stays in a vacuum and nothing affects it and it does other things, then the thing and then you do an experiment, then you observe it, then that second observation will rule out all the possible places where it could have been at the intermediate stage. So you can rule out that it was at any particular place. How can I put this? For each place where it might have been you can rule out that it was there or you can rule out that it was only there.
Lulie Tanett
Okay and then what does the observer have to do with this?
David Deutsch
Well the formula that you’re told only applies, you’re told, to physical events that are seen by an observer. The ones that are not seen by an observer are governed by a different equation. And then your conclusion as a young physics student is what?
Lulie Tanett
Something, consciousness something?
David Deutsch
Well this, when an observer sees something, you, that’s when you start asking questions about would a rabbit do it and so on. Would a rabbit do it? Well as I said, all the possible answers are ruled out either by logic or by physics or by experiment. So would a rabbit do it? Well a human wouldn’t do either. The whole theory doesn’t make sense.
Lulie Tanett
Are you saying that this doesn’t in fact happen or I still don’t get how this has come about? Or like what’s going on?
David Deutsch
It doesn’t in fact happen because when you observe something, like the outcome of an experiment where the photon lands on a screen, there are other copies of you watching it as well and they all see different things, or many of them see different things. So that’s what is described by the actual quantum theory. And this add-on that says only one of them happens and the change from the ordinary quantum theory to collapse theory, that never happens.
Lulie Tanett
Okay so before I was saying, oh isn’t it wild that people believe that this consciousness thing, which is like this substance that comes from your brain affects physical systems and how weird is that? And now you’re saying, well actually the thing is almost weirder than that, which is that there are lots of copies of you and you’re all seeing different things.
David Deutsch
Well as I always reply to that allegation, there are two different kinds of weird that you’re smushing together here. There’s weird in the sense that it doesn’t make sense, which is what the standard conception of quantum mechanics has. It doesn’t make sense, it says you should stop asking questions and that kind of thing. And then there’s weird in the sense of isn’t that strange, like weird in the sense of, in the sense of as I discovered for the first time myself the other day, the closest planet to earth in the solar system is not Venus, it’s Mercury. And that’s because although the orbit of Mercury is the closest orbit to the orbit of the earth, if you think of them as circles, and the, sorry, of Venus, the orbit of Venus as a circle or as a slight ellipse is the closest orbit to the orbit of the earth. But if you look at where the actual planets are, most of the time they are very far apart on those two circles. Whereas Mercury, although the circles are a bit further away, the actual planet is nearer because it’s a smaller circle. So the actual closest planet by quite a long way, I mean it’s not a small difference. Now that is weird. And lots of things are weird. One of my favorite examples is that I know intellectually that people in Australia are upside down compared with me. Like the, if they look up, they’re looking in that direction. They look up into the sky, they’re looking in that direction. If they look down on their feet, to their feet, they’re looking in that direction. Now that’s very weird, but it’s true. But that’s the kind of weirdness that we get by discovering sophisticated knowledge about the world. This kind of weird is just that we’re not used to it. The kind of weirdness where something doesn’t make sense, that has to be excluded and stigmatized from rational discourse.
Lulie Tanett
I think I still don’t fully understand how inexplicit knowledge came into this naive interpretation of quantum mechanics. So was it that explicit ideas do not affect the things that you’re looking at? Or how did that even come about in your thinking? You asked just a while ago, where does this collapse happen? Or when does it happen? Does it happen when the electron is hit by a wave of something from the brain? Or does it happen halfway through? Or does it happen when you look at the outcome? Or does it happen when you think about the outcome? Or does it happen when you understand where the outcome came from? You know, there’s a whole chain of measurements actually. There’s a whole chain of measurements from the original measurement of the photon on the screen to thinking yes or no, that does obey the equation or that doesn’t obey the equation. At some point there, the wave function would have to collapse and that includes the wave function of not just the photon but of the screen and of the space in between and of your brain and of the state of your brain which knows things. Typically people who have thought about this say that it happens at the moment when it enters consciousness because if it happens before it enters your consciousness then you can imagine thought experiments where you come to a contradiction.
David Deutsch
The reason that the process has to stop at least by the time it enters consciousness is not very fundamental. It’s simply that those thought experiments where you arrive at a contradiction would involve doing an experiment inside the brain which is why I came up with my thought experiment where you have an AGI that’s in a quantum computer and it’s very straightforward for it to do experiments on its own brain or on its own mind. And how does inexplicit ideas come into this? Because the explicit ideas come at some later time that that is the explicit idea of this confirms the theory or this refutes the theory comes after the moment when you’re supposed to have collapsed the wave function. You are supposed to have collapsed the wave function when the meaning of the sensation is understood by your brain. And so you are thinking about what is thought when it is not explicit but when it is pre-explicit.
Lulie Tanett
Yes, yes. So I started thinking that there could be a way of saying what is thought when it’s explicit but then because of Popper and because of logic you see that that can’t be the story because the meaning can’t be in the explicit thing alone.
David Deutsch
It must happen earlier.
Lulie Tanett
Do you think that the way that inexplicit ideas work is that if we understood that we would understand consciousness?
David Deutsch
Yeah, I think that’s very plausible. I mean it’s very hard to prophesy what a future theory will be like but I’m inclined to go for the simple option and I expect all the kind of mysterious things about consciousness like qualia and meaning and consciousness and so I expect them all to be solved by the same theory. Another reason I think that is that they all seem to arise at the same time evolutionarily and very quickly. So human evolution from apes let’s say happened very fast and also we know that our DNA is not very different from that of apes. So it’s hard enough to imagine how the program for consciousness could exist in the small amount of DNA that makes us different from apes. Now if we were to have different things like qualia and morality and meaning and so on if they were all evolved at the same time but in different parts of the DNA then there’s even less room to imagine them being in the DNA. It seems much more reasonable that they’re all part of the same thing.
Lulie Tanett
My Alexander Technique teacher speculated that the brain basically is used for coordination of physical movement and responses and in more sophisticated animals then there are more different things that you can respond to more sophisticated ways that you can interact with the world and when it comes to humans because we have social groups and language and we have all of this stuff to respond to that is why the brain is you know bigger or that’s why we’ve got consciousness. You know that it basically explains something about the uniqueness of people that we have evolved to interact with more stuff. What do you think of that?
David Deutsch
What we evolved to do is a bit mysterious and the size of the brain pretty clearly doesn’t have anything to do with it I think because well Neanderthals had bigger brains than homo sapiens. If you look at the size it so this linguist guy I think is called Daniel Everett so this guy Everett is a maverick linguist whose theory you know there’s an interesting parallel. He has this maverick theory and a part of his argument is if you look at the range of brain sizes in humans and in pre-human things that used to be thought of as like ape men and so on the smallest brains of women today are smaller than the largest brains of homo erectus. I think it’s homo erectus one of those very early like not just our immediate predecessors but up to two million years ago our ancestors and so he thinks that brain size evolved as a response to human level thinking not as the cause of it. So once you have human type thinking then you know it’s good to have more memory it’s good to have more ways of connecting ideas and so on but it’s not essential you don’t have to use your memory for that and language especially. Do people with bigger brains have more memory and brain power? I don’t know perhaps not I have no idea I don’t think that’s known but certainly there is no correlation between brain size and computer power. Because people with bigger muscles can lift more things so can’t people with bigger heads think more things? Yeah you’d think that might be so but it isn’t and as I was saying but this Everett guy’s theory he points out that his theory was that people had language up to two million years ago already it’s just that they didn’t have speech. Speech also according to him evolved in response to people having language so they could have language in the sense that they could make arbitrarily complicated sophisticated ideas like if someone came home after a hunting trip and something strange happened on the trip they could explain it to their fellow people without having words and grammar and language it’s just that it was more difficult and so they would use sounds as well they would go and that kind of thing and the ones who could make more subtle sounds and could distinguish more subtle sounds could do that more conveniently and so they survived more that’s why these adaptations in the throat like the hyoid bone and stuff why that evolved but there was no fundamental difference between them and us because the fundamental thing had already happened. That is so cool that is so cool. Yeah I think it is too and he seems to be rather an abrasive personality as well as having this maverick theory and therefore his fellow paleolinguist people are a bit down on his theory. Sounds like my kind of person. Yeah yeah it seems and he went to the Brazilian jungle and investigated the language of the Piraha people not to be confused with Piranha people and he analyzed their language and found that it did not obey the Chomskian model, did not conform to the Chomskian model and these are fully fledged homo sapiens and they don’t have the full range of language that we think is the human range they can learn it but their own language doesn’t have the features of like Chomskian language.
David Deutsch
Wow. According to him I don’t know I mean the other linguistic people think that he’s misinterpreted his data and so on.
Lulie Tanett
Do you have a view about who’s right?
David Deutsch
Well I don’t know who’s actually right but I’m pretty sure that the scenario he envisaged is perfectly possible. It could have happened that way and we would be none the wiser today like from looking at our hyoid bone and stuff like that and so yeah I think he may well be right. Going back to inexplicit ideas do you think that it is always possible to translate between inexplicit ideas and explicit ideas? In principle it’s always possible because our explicit language is universal.
Lulie Tanett
What about in the other direction? Translate explicit ideas into implicit ideas or into inexplicit ideas.
David Deutsch
Yeah well that I can’t give such a knockdown argument in favour of that but if that weren’t so it would be a pretty nasty trick played on us by evolution because it would be a boot stamping on a human face forever. You mean because you could have an inexplicit hang-up and then you’d never be able to learn anything to improve that? Yes. So it sounds very implausible especially if it’s true that all these things co-evolved together. So it’s very implausible that a thing evolved which made for inevitable unpleasantness like inherently inside the brain. Are all inexplicit ideas able to be made explicit?
Lulie Tanett
Can you always translate from inexplicit ideas to explicit?
David Deutsch
Well it might be hard to do in practice but in principle it must be possible because of the universality of explicit ideas. So there’s this thing where we are physical people and we interact with a physical environment like the amoeba that will go towards some chemicals and away from other chemicals and how we have these biological responses. So first of all do you count those as inexplicit
Lulie Tanett
Knowledge or do you count those as just sort of physical processes or how do you class those?
David Deutsch
Again you know it’s pointless to argue about classifications and words but I don’t think it’s helpful to regard those things as knowledge. Whether there is one chemical or another is information that the amoeba can assimilate and embody in its whole being by moving towards one place or another place like a light switch. That information I think it’s unlike Popper I don’t think that information is worth calling knowledge. I think that’s only confusing because there is no growth of knowledge happening there’s only an acquisition of information. There is knowledge in the amoeba in the amoeba’s DNA which also the amoeba can’t change. It’s like in a way it comes to the amoeba from the outside like it’s telling it what to do but the amoeba can’t change the DNA. But in another sense so from the point of view of the amoeba it’s not gaining any knowledge when it encounters the chemical. But you can consider this whole process as part of the great landscape of evolution where the whole population of amoebas is surviving or not depending on how they react to the chemicals and in that sense the change in one base pair of its DNA which causes it to behave differently is a bit of knowledge that the amoeba species has created. I wonder if it is different in amoebas compared with animals compared with people and in particular so I’m wondering whether
Lulie Tanett
When you have these physically instantiated interactions information patterns in people because people can change their ideas and they can change various things they do then it takes on a different character from the amoeba thing where it’s just it can’t like there’s no change happening there but in people the same thing could actually be relevant to thinking.
David Deutsch
I’m not sure whether you mean what I’m about to interpret you as meaning but I think that so as you said in our last conversation humans have inherited a lot of behaviors and ways of responding from our animal ancestors and it’s in our DNA and we can decide to reject it and behave differently and all that stuff but also I think what happens a lot is that we interpret our own behavior so when we what’s a very simple case when we touch something and it’s hot we weren’t expecting it and we quickly pull our finger away it may be that what has happened there is the same thing as what would happen if a monkey or a dog did the same thing maybe that the actual physical process was the same it wasn’t using the human part of the brain at all but a human will interpret it will attach by observing what he himself is doing a human or she herself a human will attach a meaning to that saying it was unexpectedly hot and that caused pain and I didn’t want the pain and so I withdrew my hand so that would be an interpretation which might be false it might be completely not what happened but that might well affect what happens the next time the person touches something hot or something cold or whatever it may be that this interpretation of a completely animal response becomes the true explanation of future events and there because it’s then when it’s the true explanation once it’s become part of the person’s explanatory framework the person can change it and can reinterpret and can decide you know when receiving the injection or something and then and the injection hurts you, you can know that you did have one interpretation of that but that now you’re going to criticize that and call it something else and you’re going to say I’m going to interpret that as an inconsequential sensation which I’m not going to react physically to or mentally you know humans are changeable by themselves they can reinterpret themselves they can reinterpret their own thoughts and their own behavior an example that I had in mind is that most people when they are playing catch will put effort into it and they will keep their eye on the ball and they will put a layer of human level thought into the playing catch and that we found in Alexander Technique that if you do that everything works worse and that if instead there’s a particular thing that you do in order to allow the what seems like the animal system to simply catch the ball catching is effortless you don’t have to look at the ball it looks very elegant it’s you know related to being in flow and so it’s interesting to me that there is a bunch of stuff that the animal part of the human
Lulie Tanett
Can do better than the explicit thinky part and also when you are doing this Alexander Technique way of catching a ball you are more open to other things happening so like another ball being thrown at you or someone saying something to you or other streams of information because instead of focusing and concentrating and getting tunnel vision on catching the ball you now have this open awareness thing where other sources of information can reach you and so I don’t know yeah I’m not sure what my question is here but it seems like there is something around allowing inexplicit ideas to do their thing and maybe it’s not even just the animal part maybe it is the animal part plus inexplicit human ideas or maybe it’s one or the other or a mixture or maybe the inexplicit ideas come up in certain situations like when you’re trying to learn how to do a particular type of throw that didn’t actually exist in your monkey predecessors yeah I don’t know what do you think of all of that? We’re not born knowing how to catch balls I don’t know if dogs are born knowing how to catch things so and if so you know do they need some practice before they can catch well how do you know that we’re not born knowing how to catch balls?
David Deutsch
Well because you can throw a ball towards a baby and it won’t catch it okay but humans unlike other animals develop a lot when they are outside it could still be that they have the genetic knowledge but they need to physically learn the coordination as in like they need to get stronger or they need to acquire balance and then certain things can kick in so it could be that they are in fact born with the propensity to or with the code to do that once they reach a certain physical state. That’s possible so the ability to catch a ball if it’s inborn it must be overlaid by some other things like you know you definitely have to learn not to suddenly catch a knife if you’re putting a knife in the dishwasher and you drop it you have to learn not to suddenly grab the blade depends how skilled you are I suppose well it does however skilled you are there’ll be cases which are at the limit of your skill when it could well be that so I think dogs can catch things inherently better than humans they can catch things unbelievably fast and accurately at least adult dogs I don’t know how much they have to learn to be able to do this but they can certainly outperform humans at this but I think in a ball game people are doing a lot more than catching and there are cases where you know in tennis you have to make a split second decision in less time than your reaction time to decide whether to go for the ball or not because sometimes going for the ball means that it will be the other person’s point and sometimes going for the ball means that it’ll be your point and it depends on the rules of the game which …
Lulie Tanett
Can change and you have to adapt to the rules of the game changing and so on so even if it’s true that there are built-in things or inexplicit things that we can cede control to and perform better the reason that there is an explicit level or I would say a conscious level because in the tennis case it’s your conscious thinking that makes you decide whether to go for the ball or not your explicit there’s no there’s no time to form the words so when you make that decision you’re making it according to the rules of tennis but they have been compiled into an inexplicit form but an inexplicit but conscious form in what way conscious well you’re conscious of what like some process leads to you going for it or not going for it that process has an entirely conscious component because it’s got to be tuned either to the one objective or the other objective why would that need to be conscious instead of subconscious like I would have thought I would make it worse and the conscious part would come up after the game when you’re reviewing it but not during well that’s when the explicit part would come up but I think the conscious part I think you don’t need the conscious part you would because so you could have it however you could also be in one of those states where you are so in flow and you’re just responding that you don’t have that layer of conscious thought well we don’t know what consciousness is we don’t know what the difference between you know ultimately well we do know what conscious thought is which is namely some kind of self-awareness or awareness of what’s happening or like one meta level up so when you move your limbs intentionally and moving them intentionally is different from moving them unintentionally so you know so like when you say conscious thought are you just talking about using the consciousness program of human in other words the creative thing rather than on the level of so the creative thing must exist on conscious unconscious explicit and inexplicit levels they all go together so in which definition of consciousness are you invoking here when we move our limbs intentionally that is that we are conscious of moving them I disagree when you are sufficiently trained in Alexander Technique it subjectively feels like you don’t have a body and so what you’re conscious of is the environment around you or the thing that you’re doing or your intention I can accept that that in that case what the tennis player is conscious of is the ball the court the racket yeah and so on but then he has intentions for the racket and intentions for the ball and he consciously makes those intentions happen do you mean deliberately do you mean self-awarely do you mean explicitly do you mean using the human creativity program do you mean none of these there are some things where we when remembering them afterwards we confabulate the tennis player may be saying well I thought it might be going out but then I changed my mind and I knew that he’s the kind of guy my opponent is the kind of guy who will do this kind of shot and then so on they will give a story about this event that happened in a fraction of a second which could not possibly have happened there it’s a thing that he is attributing to what he did which isn’t a true story so the process that made him do what he did made his limbs do what they did is not explicit it’s not expressed in language they may express it in language afterwards accurately or inaccurately but it’s not actually true if the person says
David Deutsch
I thought it was going in but halfway to hitting it I decided it was going out and I pulled back the racket that might well be describing a conscious process that really happened because it doesn’t involve words and what do you mean by conscious well again you know I don’t have a theory of consciousness so I can’t but what is this word doing in this sentence it’s distinguishing that kind of thing from unconscious things like the person’s heart rate increasing which are done by a process that I would call unconscious the person is not aware of it happening or if they are aware of it happening they’re not causing it so non-biological or can you have unconscious thoughts yes you can have those too okay so what does conscious mean then or what does it not mean when you’re choosing your words which word will go next in the sentence like ChatGPT apparently does you are not conscious of the process that chooses the word so when you were talking about the tennis player and you said that he is conscious of you know hitting the ball in a particular way what do you mean by conscious in that sentence because you don’t just mean oh it’s not a purely physical like heart beating thing or breathing or something because also in unconscious you’re saying that ideas
Lulie Tanett
Can be there and so you’re saying that there is a type of thinking called conscious thinking that is different from unconscious thinking what does conscious mean conscious things have qualia associated with them they are there is such a thing as what it is like to have that thought so you think it’s possible to translate inexplicit ideas to explicit ones because explicit language is universal yes how is it not the case that inexplicit ideas are something like containing a massive context such that so an explicit idea can be expressed as, say, a proposition or a statement however perhaps inexplicit ideas cannot be expressed that way like they cannot be about a specific narrow thing because the nature of inexplicit ideas maybe is that they are taking into account the whole context or there’s a way that they are not making these divisions like you can make with statements and propositions and so that perhaps it’s something like a single inexplicit idea is actually connected to all of the other inexplicit ideas in a brain and this isn’t actually translatable to explicit language because of the nature of what language is like well I’m very sympathetic to the idea that most ideas in the brain in the mind are spread out oh and take into account a lot of context or you know maybe all contexts or whatever but the thing is however large they are they’re not infinitely large and the brain is not infinitely large and it only has a certain number of neurons that can be in a certain number of states and in principle you could write down the exact state and that would include the state of all your inexplicit ideas is it possible that inexplicit ideas also are stored or contained or refer to physical things in the physical environment so in other words so with explicit ideas we’ve got words and you can program them into a computer with inexplicit ideas not only do we have the like the sense that something and the parts that we can translate into words we also have reactions physical reactions to things in our environment so for example if you are afraid of dogs and you notice that there is a dog and then your body will physically start up the fight or flight processes which then affect the inexplicit ideas around dogs and so could it be that inexplicit ideas are more distributed as in they are not just in the brain but they are partly in the interaction between the brain and the environment yes this doesn’t have any effect on whether they could be made fully explicit or not because the environment is also finite and in principle you could is it though don’t we have an infinite environment oh well we may well have an infinite environment but only a finite amount of it can possibly affect anything in your mind because of the finite speed of light oh ah but no but counter things that are far away affect things that are less far away which affect you and so everything is connected it affects you later so for example when you’re looking at the sun you are seeing it as it was eight minutes ago and so okay but then all of that stuff still affects you even if it was not at the time yeah but why does that matter because if it only affects you after the thing you’re trying to explain then it can’t be involved in the explanation ah so you’re saying that when you are trying to explain something you are only trying to explain a specific small piece and that not everything is going to be relevant to explaining that specific small piece however if you want to properly translate the inexplicit ideas which would contain everything then everything does affect you no so if you were to translate the contents of the brain and you know the gut and whatever else is within a light travel time of your view into explicit form in the positions and motions of atoms and that kind of thing if you did that explicitly then it’s true that that contains information about what you would do if for example a lion suddenly appeared in the room that you can although there’s nothing about lions in any of that let’s suppose there’s nothing about lions in encoded in any of those atoms it nevertheless follows from the atoms and from the laws of physics what you would do if this unlikely and unexpected thing were to happen so and that’s all finite again and it could be in principle encoded in explicit form that would not include explanations of course you might be able to work out from this that if the lion came you would suddenly you know say the word frog if you wanted to explain that that might be a lot more work but it would be work that again could be done explicitly on that explicit representation what do you think are the most interesting questions about inexplicit ideas I think the issue of qualia sort of touches all these things like consciousness and AGI and explicit and inexplicit and all that you spoke of really amazing things before one of the really amazing things is that it is definitely possible that you could have a box a metal box and inside that there was a thinking being and there could be inside that there could be a thinking being who is interacting with a virtual world and they might not even know that they are in a virtual world and it might be like the matrix and so on but the point is the amazing thing is in there. Now the box is finite it has a finite number of bits or a finite number of qubits let’s say it has a trillion bits in it the amazing thing that I’m pointing to is that some of them. So then there are a trillion bits therefore if it’s a classical computer let’s say there are two to the power of a trillion possible states of that computer inside the box the amazing thing is that some of those states are immoral some of them are so immoral that they are worse than anything that’s ever happened to humans ever what do you mean some of those states are immoral well some of them involve a person suffering or people suffering or people suffering more than it’s physically possible for a human to suffer all those things I’ve just mentioned are possible states of these bits and this is related to the simulation hypothesis yes well and possible basilisks the simulation hypothesis says that this has actually happened and we’re in it and I disagree with that but that it is physically possible for it to happen I think is a pretty direct consequence of our knowledge of physics so it could happen and therefore there are immoral numbers because this thing can be represented as a binary number the entire contents of the box can be represented as a number with a trillion digits all zero or one some of those are unimaginably evil numbers we have no idea and some of them have qualia of course I think only the ones that have qualia are evil the ones that don’t have qualia aren’t evil so we don’t know how to tell the difference we just know that you know you could start with zero one two three four five up to a trillion for each one you would say bit number three so when you say that the numbers can be evil what you’re really saying is that a human consciousness can be programmed into a computer which is represented by numbers and so I mean really the evil thing is about the emergent properties namely the consciousness and the suffering and the numbers are sort of not really here nor there you know if it turns out that we are not represented by numbers and we need something else then that would also be uh evil so if the computer isn’t running then there’s nothing evil there it’s got to be running so that I would like to run so yeah well the numbers are changing and it’s the change that actually embodies suffering and therefore it’s the change but we don’t know I mean it’s neither here nor there we don’t know what states what numbers what programs are good or evil we don’t know which of them are AGIs and which aren’t we don’t know how to tell the difference certainly not by the Turing test because this box has got no inputs or outputs so in answer to the question what are the most interesting questions around inexplicit ideas you would say what makes something conscious or not what is with this qualia stuff what is with this suffering thing I think you know if I have to pick one of them as being more like urgent to solve or whatever it’s the qualia one but I also think that they’ll all be solved by the same theory in a single day in a single hour somebody will have the right idea and that will solve all of them though they may not realize it at first wow well I think that’s a great place to end it it’s been fun as always
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