2023-06-03 Reason Is Fun #3 - Inexplicit Ideas and Embodiment
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Duration: 01:16:01
Transcript
Lulie Tanett
Welcome to the Reason is Fun podcast. I’m your host, Lulie Tanett, and today I’m having a conversation with David Deutsch about inexplicit ideas and embodiment. And this is kind of a conversation that’s at the edge of both of our understanding, as far as I can tell. So it’s quite niche, but I think it’s a fun one. So enjoy. I want to ask about, basically I want to understand inexplicit ideas. Last time I spoke to you about this, we were talking about Popper and the ideas that you were developing and whatever, and you said that the idea that inexplicit ideas are the same type of idea as explicit ones and that it obeys the same logic, and that’s a contribution that you have made to the Popperian critical rationalist thing. Maybe. I don’t know whether, you know, maybe it was obvious to Popper. The other thing is that I’ve been talking to Christopher and about this meta-rationalism thing, and they have these different ideas around, they have like a different epistemology which has interaction with the environment as being one of the epistemological pillars that isn’t really talked about in your conception of things. And so to them, there’s kind of a jump between inexplicit ideas and explicit, or there’s this thing that’s in between. And I was actually listening to the podcast with Ben Chugg from the Increments podcast because he recently went on Christopher’s Patreon Only thing. And part of the thing about their conversation is that, so Popper has these three worlds, and you kind of think, you know, three worlds doesn’t really, like to you it’s more like two worlds. Basically there’s the realm of abstraction and there’s the physical world and then there’s our fallible ideas about all of these things. But according to that conversation, and you know, I haven’t read Popper on three worlds so I don’t really know what it says there, the realm of the subjective world is actually very close to Jake and David Chapman’s idea of this interaction thing, namely that, so you’ve got the existing ideas, so you’ve got, you know, inborn ideas, you’ve got ideas from culture and everything, and then you have the physical world where you can test these ideas. But then there is this third thing which is that interacting with stuff changes, has some kind of physical effect. In other words, that there is some kind of epistemological thing involved in interaction with objects, or like the environment or whatever. Because instead of it being this indirect thing of I create ideas and then I look out onto the world and whatever. So an amoeba, say if there is some kind of chemical, then it will go towards that and if there’s a different kind of chemical it will go away from that. And there’s no thinking involved, it’s just that is part of the process. And then so the theory is that the human, physical human beings have a bunch of those as well and this is not just completely disconnected from our cognition. That it is not purely reaction, it is, there’s also this sort of thing where it…
David Deutsch
Yeah, well, I mean, I wouldn’t classify interaction as a separate thing because once you understand that there’s such a thing as the mind acting on the person and therefore on the outside world and the outside world acting on the senses and therefore on the mind and on the person. If you put those two together, that’s called interaction. And when you like in science where you have a theory, you have to go and test the theory. But it also, the same idea applies to interacting with your own body. So if there’s a lot of computer processing going on inside your gut, for example, which is a popular idea apparently now, then this is not separate.
Lulie Tanett
So okay, that makes sense.
David Deutsch
This is not a separate conception from things happening in your brain. I mean, it could be that your brain and your gut are a combined system, just as your visual apparatus and your auditory apparatus and your higher cognitive functions and so on. They’re all, in a sense, separate processes going on in the brain and they interact with each other. And if some of that goes on in the stomach, that’s fine. The place where I would draw the line is if you say that the stomach doesn’t need a physical connection to the brain because the stomach is also part of you and therefore you are thinking within the stomach. This reminds me of people asking what would it feel like to be in parallel universes?
Lulie Tanett
What would it feel like if you were split into a person in ten different universes?
David Deutsch
Well, in order for that to feel like something, there has to be a flow of information from one universe into another. And then it would feel like whatever the laws of physics say that information flow has to be. Normally in our everyday life, there is no information flow between universes and so even though the other versions of you are all thinking, there is no such thing as, there is literally no such thing as what it is like to be this multiple person. And to the extent that there is, like there could be once you are on a, once you’re on an AGI running on a quantum computer, there is a certain amount of interaction between the universes and so there is such a thing as what it would feel like. Same, and that’s how I, that’s the most that I can conceive of the gut participating in thoughts would be like.
Lulie Tanett
How do you mean?
David Deutsch
Well, it would mean that it was having thoughts and the brain was having thoughts and they were interacting and becoming aware of each other’s thoughts indirectly.
Lulie Tanett
But you would think that it wouldn’t feel the same, I mean that it would feel the same?
David Deutsch
Well, it would feel like, like I said with the parallel universes, it would feel like whatever it actually is, a small amount of information coming from the gut into the brain and we already know that a lot of information goes from the brain into the gut. So, you know, people can be dyspeptic.
Lulie Tanett
Just what?
David Deutsch
That’s an old word for having indigestion which takes into account that when you have indigestion you think differently.
Lulie Tanett
Amazing, what is the word?
David Deutsch
I think it’s dyspeptic. Dyspeptic. Dyspeptic and there’s also another word, liverish, which is even more…
Lulie Tanett
I need to bring these words back into the consciousness of today. That is even more what?
David Deutsch
Is even more speculative. There’s no known interaction between the liver and the brain as there is between the gut and the brain. But still, you know, lots of things are attributed to the liver. And of course there’s heartache which attributes things to the heart. Butterflies in the stomach is a real thing because that’s adrenaline.
Lulie Tanett
I think it’s all real though. I think all of these things are real.
David Deutsch
Well, so heartache for example is perfectly real but it’s got nothing to do with the heart.
Lulie Tanett
I think it does have something to do.
David Deutsch
I would be extremely surprised because you can feel physical sensations around your heart area. Most people can feel physical sensations around their heart area. Your heart area is very close to your stomach area.
Lulie Tanett
Not really. I feel different physical sensations in my stomach than in my heart. I mean, when introspecting on emotions, I have very distinct physical sensations in different parts of my body, which by the way also quite often map into what other people feel when they feel kind of similar feelings. The other day I was shocked because usually I feel things sort of in the centre of my chest. And the other day there was a thing that came up and I got this incredible feeling in the sort of lower base of my tummy. And it was about this thing that I was talking to someone about and he also had this feeling and it was like this fiery thing and it was very different from a different feeling that I would have when I’m doing an introspection about a different emotion.
David Deutsch
I’m somewhat sceptical. As I said in The Beginning of Infinity, the ancient Greeks thought that the sensation of seeing actually happens at the thing you’re seeing because that’s where you experience it. It actually happens in the back of your head, but no one experiences it there.
Lulie Tanett
You can experience it there. Incidentally, if you’re doing Alexander technique, one of the things you can do is experience more from the back of your head and then it changes things and it makes it easier to see things in a softer way.
David Deutsch
Hmm. Well, I was going to cite this as an example of the fact that one can be massively mistaken about where a feeling is.
Lulie Tanett
Your feelings can be about and from different things, but that’s because the act of looking in those places physically changes your feelings. So for example, if I am speaking from the base of my torso and I’m doing this thing where I’m thinking about the down and the how do I describe this? I’m putting my attention in the base of my torso and I’m speaking from there. This does a different thing to my voice compared with if I, let’s see, if I’m speaking now, if now I’m going to speak from my head and this is sort of, and so now I’m speaking from my head and I’m kind of ignoring anything sort of below my neck and the quality of my, I don’t know if you can tell, but like the quality of my voice, my voice tone is different now compared with if I, if I speak from my heart and then there’s this thing where if I’m, it’s not like literally speaking from my heart, but I’m noticing the sensations in my heart while I’m speaking and this gives a different tone and a different mood and like I’m smiling in a different way and all three of these things are different and they all affect my physical sensations and emotional sensations and the resonance of my voice and sort of my, you know, phenomenological experience. So how does that fit into what you’re saying?
David Deutsch
Well, only by saying that this could all be true in the sense that it affects your voice and your feelings and so on and it could still all be true even if you’re attributing it to other parts of your body was not true or was less true than you think, like with the Greeks and thinking that when you’re seeing it’s happening over there.
Lulie Tanett
But you can physically feel someone’s body change. You can feel when they’re not putting any awareness in a particular part because that part of their body feels rigid.
David Deutsch
There’s phantom limb phenomenon where you feel things in a limb that isn’t there and it’s, if it’s pain, for example, it’s perfectly real pain, but the attribution.
David Deutsch
I’m not saying that you can’t be mistaken about it. I mean, that’s FM Alexander’s faulty sensory appreciation. Yeah, your feelings are very error prone. However, there is a thing that is a physically embodied thing where you are in fact feeling in the sense that those sensations are in fact there, that your body is in fact moving in a particular way.
Lulie Tanett
There is an objective fact about what sensations exist there to be found. Like there is an objective fact about how much adrenaline is there or what your muscle tone is.
David Deutsch
Yes. I’m not sure what you’re asking. I mean, I think things can be actually there. They can be actually affecting you or they can be not there and still affect you.
Lulie Tanett
The thing I’m trying to point at is that there is something about something like the fact that you are a physical person in a physical environment and that your feelings are physical and all of these are part of how thinking works. What do you think of just that statement?
David Deutsch
I agree with it, but I think you won’t be satisfied with what I’m agreeing with because I would say the same thing about parts of my body, but I would also say it about my computer or about my car or my house. For a scientist, you would say the same thing about your equipment, your apparatus. Both of them, all these things are just manifestations of the fact that when we are thinking, we are using our environment as an add-on to our thinking. I don’t think it’s an add-on. I think it’s possibly a precondition. Yeah, well, so we’ve discussed this before about sensory deprivation tanks. Some people are monks and they go into a monastery where they take a vow not to speak, like either for the rest of their life or for five years or for one year or something. So then they don’t speak. I can imagine a kind of monastery where you also take a vow not to have any input as well as not to have any output. So you have your input and output to God. So you only talk to God and God only talks back to you.
Lulie Tanett
When God talks back to you, I think that’s a real experience, but I think that God isn’t real.
David Deutsch
If you imagine a person who voluntarily, of course, if you went into this thing of not speaking involuntarily, it would be torture. The same with the sensory deprivation tank. But if you do it voluntarily as part of your deep religion, basically, as part of your religion, then you’re allowed to quit at any time you like, but in fact you don’t quit and you stay in there in the deprivation tank for a year and you have all sorts of experiences with and without God, but without any interaction with the outside world, including your body. So you’re having an out of body experience, if that’s the right… That’s not a misleading way of… Maybe. Yeah. So you’re having experiences and I think that… By the way, I had this conversation with ChatGPT as well and it was almost impossible to persuade it that a person in a sensory deprivation tank is conscious.
Lulie Tanett
I may be just as obstinate as ChatGPT. I would like to go back to basics because one of the first ideas that I was persuaded of back in my rationalist days that allowed me to explore all of these ideas about consciousness and feelings and all of that was this idea of inexplicit ideas. So what actually are inexplicit ideas? So explicit ideas are those that are expressed in a natural language like English or a formal language like mathematics and so on where the symbols in which it is written can be independently manipulated. You can have an idea and then say, oh no, that part isn’t true and so you can insert a not, the word not into the sentence that you had previously said and that would make it better, truer. Do explicit ideas have to be propositional? No, so they can be things like questions. Because then you wouldn’t have a not in that?
David Deutsch
No, well, okay, you might not even in natural language. If I say to you, do you mind if I use the wrong pronouns for you, then the English language doesn’t provide a difference between that and if I say, do you not mind if I… I guess… use the wrong pronouns.
Lulie Tanett
My question is that, is sort of trying to find out how logical, explicit language has to be to count as explicit. Well, hardly at all. Logic is… So I guess we have the ancient Greeks to thank for the superstition that natural language is kind of almost the same as logic. Logic is a very special purpose language, which is very useful in things like pure mathematics and physics and so on and some other places like law, but it’s not really modelled by natural language. Natural language hasn’t got this structure of and, or and not and so on. It has a much wider repertoire, but it pays for that by being a little bit harder to criticise in the places that logic applies. Does the language of feelings count? As in, there are a ton of sensations that I have in my body when I introspect and I can poke them in certain ways and then get answers and get different things.
David Deutsch
Does that count or does that not count? I’m not sure quite what you mean, but it sounds as though you’re referring to inexplicit ideas, although we can always try to put inexplicit ideas into words and make them explicit. So if you have a feeling… When people try to put their feelings, express their feelings to others, for example, or convey their feelings to others so that the other person has the …
Lulie Tanett
Same feeling, like you might say, isn’t it a pity that there’s a war going on or something?
David Deutsch
There’s the explicit level, but maybe what you actually want to do is to get the other person to feel your pity. In that case, you cast around for ways of putting it into words and if you’re a great poet, you may be able to do that quite accurately. But if you’re not a great poet, you may be only able to do it inaccurately. So we’ve talked about explicit ideas. What actually are inexplicit ideas? They are all information in a mind that can affect the mind but is not expressed in words in any kind of language, symbolic language. How is that even possible? Because presumably the brain has some kind of code that it’s running and presumably it has some kind of symbolic language that it’s running. So how is it even possible that there could be inexplicit ideas? I don’t think that the brain has a language in that sense. So it’s not a computer? It is a computer, but its functioning is… So the logic in a brain, unlike the computer, is an emergent property of what the brain is actually doing. And what the brain is actually doing is similar in structure to what a monkey’s brain is actually doing. And if you were studying all that with a microscope and a supercomputer to analyse it, you’d have to go quite deep into the analysis before you could see that the human mind is using symbols abstractly to represent things. So rather like alphabets evolve, early alphabets or early writing had pictures of the things that the symbols referred to. So that was kind of halfway between having a symbol and having a language. And then the symbols evolved and eventually the symbols themselves came to represent nothing, nothing at all. We can even have silent letters in our words and so on, which are historical and also sounds that are not represented by letters. But the word therefore has a much sharper meaning because the language has abstraction and symbolism and that is the level at which the brain is like a computer, although it has a different program from a computer, so it’s still unlike it. But there is logic in the brain at an emergent level, but at a lower level there’s just physics, there’s just biology. But in order to have thoughts which are representational, then you would presumably have to have some language that those thoughts are encoded in. Yes.
Lulie Tanett
Would you say there is an internal language that inexplicit ideas are written on? You could only call that a language by extension. It’s not a language in the sense that I could say, you know, humans have language but monkeys don’t. The brain does not have a language in the sense that humans have language. And the brain doesn’t have a language in the sense that computers are written in a language?
David Deutsch
The brain does not, right. What makes the brain different from computers? Like I don’t understand what it is written on or in, if not a language. Well, so the brain has a physical state and you could represent that physical state in terms of physics as a list of like where all the atoms are or where all the electric currents are or whatever the brain uses. And you could do the same with a computer. But that doesn’t capture what the brain is or what the computer is. For a computer, all these positions of the atoms and everything are all finely tuned to doing a specific thing, namely executing instructions expressed in a language. So that like they could call it machine language or something. And with the brain, there probably is a kind of language like, which is less like machine language and more like neural net language, which has the same computational power as machine language, but it’s got a different architecture, which is much harder to translate into explicit language. So it does have a language and it’s like machine language or are you saying that’s different?
Lulie Tanett
It has language in the same sense that a computer has. There are too many things here. There are too many. So there’s the monkey, the human and the computer and by the way, the computer with neural net in it. So that’s four different things. And each of those has levels at which it has a language, you can have something you could call a language and something which it doesn’t. The easiest way that I can express what I mean by explicit is to say that monkeys do not have an explicit language.
David Deutsch
Human minds do, but not when they’re born. They have to learn to have one, but the underlying structure is already there when they’re born. And computers have an explicit language, but it’s nothing like English. It’s a machine language with zeros and ones and so on. And the computer that’s got hardware neural nets in it, which some of them do now, that has also got a highly tuned physics to make what you might call a language. But that language is different in detail from machine language of conventional computers, but it’s the same in its universality, in its function. In both cases, things like English have to be programmed in at a higher level to that. The neural net alone doesn’t understand English. I still have no idea what this means. So there is something going on where a single homo-sapiens has some kind of thing that is equivalent to machine language. So you’ve got a computer and it can compute and that’s language, you can program it, and then it has some kind of machine code, machine language or something, and then it has the physical hardware. And the machine language navigates between the code… And even below that, there’s the laws of physics. And below that, there are the laws of physics. But between the code, which is explicit, and the hardware, which is just hardware, it’s neither a language nor it’s just an object, there is a thing called machine language, is that right? Machine language, which I think in the catalogue it passes for an explicit language, but nobody could understand an explicit language. But nobody could ever read that language for a real program because it’s too complicated.
Lulie Tanett
OK, so it is a language, but it is too hard to read, and therefore there is code, which is the human readable version. And then in people, in homo sapiens, there is, on the one hand, you’ve got your physical body, you have presumably a squishy brain version of RAM and hard drive and so forth. You’ve got also English, or the language that you speak, and that’s like code in a certain way. You also have the internal version of this, so you might even have, I don’t know, I could imagine you would have language in images that still counts as a language inside your head.
David Deutsch
Yes. And then, and so far all of this is explicit. And then you have the inexplicit stuff, which… Some of the images are not explicit. Like, you might be able to, for example, I can recognize you on the screen, but I wouldn’t be able to describe you in such a way that DALL-E could reproduce your face. That is more because you do not know what the explicit version of that is. Ah, I see. Yes. But the mere fact that I can know one thing but not the other shows that there are different things.
Lulie Tanett
Okay, but in general, the inexplicit language is a little bit like machine code in that it is a language, but it’s kind of too complicated to actually use. Directly.
David Deutsch
Yes, but unlike computer machine code, it doesn’t have some of the features that you would expect in a real language. It’s unlike an explicit language. So it obeys laws of physics, but it doesn’t have as much content as laws of grammar do in real language. In a real language, like a high-level computer language or a natural language or logic and so on, there are grammatical rules that allow much more subtle shades of meaning to be criticized, at least. I don’t know about expressed, because some people might say, you know, you could paint a picture which conveys more than a thousand words, and you can’t even describe a picture which conveys more than a thousand words, and nobody could say it in words, but you could say it as a picture and so on. But even then, it doesn’t convey these subtle meanings in the same way that explicit languages do, namely via grammar and via rules of expression in the language. It does it a different way. And just like we can’t yet describe any qualia in explicit language, it’s not a question maybe one day we’ll, I think one day we will be able to, but at the moment we can’t, which just shows that… This seems very controversial. See novels, poetry… As I said, fine poets and fine novelists can convey some qualia, but this is not the same as having an explicit language. If you know a computer language like C or something, you can… you’re hesitating. Yeah, because when… so if you compare C and then another programming language, which …
Lulie Tanett
Is what you were about to say, you can have a complete one-to-one correspondence. It can do all of the things. However… And all of those things include every instruction that the computer can possibly obey. Yes, but it’s still something like very simple, logical, straightforward. Whereas in poetry, in talking about your feelings, in conveying these things that are qualia, that has so many different levels of stuff that it just… I would say it’s not that we can’t convey that. We can’t do that. It’s just that there is so much content there that it is very difficult to make that… because you can… I can describe something about what red is like, and you can indeed have the same qualia after I describe something about what red is like to an extent. So not 100%, but if you imagine there’s a Venn diagram and there’s my understanding of red and your understanding of red, and I can say, well, red is this warm color, there’s a sort of excitement… I can describe various things. And you can, in your own self, have some of those experiences even if the whole experience is not fully captured. So why would it not be… Why is this not just the fact that when it comes to qualia and phenomena, phenomenology and sensations and feelings and emotions and all of that, it’s that those necessarily refer to a much wider range of stuff because it also interacts with the ideas that you have and the language that you grew up in and your context and what time of day it is and the humidity and all of these things that change the actual content of the qualia, whereas with a computer, all of that is irrelevant because it’s this closed system. Yes. I’m not sure how that relates. I thought we were talking about what, you know, basically what a language is, what explicit means. When I say explicit means expressed in a language, I mean in a language that… of a certain type, a language of a certain type. And that’s what… I want to use the word explicit to refer to ideas expressed in a language of a certain type. But my question is, is it actually a language of a certain type or is this more of a gradation because you can be talking about a wider variety of stuff and once you get so context situated that there is just an impossibly large number of things to account for, then it doesn’t quite have the properties that the computer language has but only just because it’s complicated rather than because it’s impossible?
David Deutsch
Yes. There is the question of levels of explanation. So it could be that, like in fact I’m sure it is, that the mind has the ability to abstract in many different ways. And one of them is the explicit language way. And just like the mind considers… the brain considers a computer, is a universal computer and could express anything, so explicit language is also a universal expression thing. But it makes a difference if something would take the age of the universe to express in that language. Makes a fundamental difference. Well, depends what you mean by fundamental. But what I mean now is that it is a meaningful difference to say that something is expressed in English or something is expressed in the internal representation in my brain. I can translate to some extent between those but not completely. And for many purposes it’s important to know that explicit can’t in practice do a whole load of things that inexplicit can and vice versa.
Lulie Tanett
The reason that I’m picking on this is that I have a sense that you say that inexplicit ideas work in a more different way from explicit ideas than I’ve now come to think. Which is interesting because before I thought there’s basically there’s explicit ideas and these are the good ones and these are the ideas that you can easily criticize and that we should make all of our inexplicit ideas into explicit ones and whatever emotions you’re having you should translate them into these explicit ones. So I used to think all of that. And then I was persuaded by you that, oh actually, most of our ideas are inexplicit because for any explicit statement you make that refers to a ton of inexplicit stuff. However, you also said that in order to change, so I was sort of alarmed by this idea that most of our ideas are inexplicit because I thought, well then how do you criticize and improve them and get better ideas? And at the time you said that the way to do that is to change the environment in which they are evolving. And I still don’t fully know what that means. Basically the idea I had was, okay, there’s a ton of inexplicit stuff. I started taking the inexplicit stuff seriously and then I thought, okay, so basically you can work with the explicit stuff and you can only indirectly work with the inexplicit stuff. And then I did a bunch of these personal development courses and looked into emotions and discovered techniques like focusing from Eugene Gendlin and all of this stuff where you can directly go or I don’t know if direct is the right word, but you can systematically make some of that inexplicit stuff explicit so that the technique of focusing is basically reaching into your unconscious subconscious and then pulling out and making explicit what’s there and then checking it against the inexplicit stuff because you have a physical body and it turns out that a lot of inexplicit stuff is basically accessible via physical feelings, physical sensations. Like your body will have a different kind of sensation associated with different ideas and then you can check your guesses about what your explicit ideas are by basically saying them to yourself and seeing if your body kind of responds in certain ways. Then I thought, ah, maybe inexplicit ideas do have their own internal language and that you need these translating tools like Gendlin focusing to do that, but you kind of say, oh well, they’re not really in a language, they’re not really accessible unless you change the environment under which they evolve. I’m thinking, what do you think inexplicit ideas actually are? I don’t know, what are all of your thoughts on all of that?
David Deutsch
I think learning explicit techniques to manipulate and also read out one’s emotions are just a special case. By the way, it’s not just emotions, I’m talking about inexplicit ideas per se. So the impression that you get, like if you think of a particular problem or if you bring to mind a particular person, each of those ideas will have a sense associated with it, like a quale. Yes, and by the way, I would add to what you said that it’s also possible for an entire process of criticism and knowledge creation to take place inexplicitly and even unconsciously without any technique being used at all. Sometimes it could be luck. So recently I’ve seen some remarkable statistics about how people have been changing their minds about certain things in the last few years. Gay marriage, for example, is an example where just a few years ago the great majority of people opposed legalising gay marriage and now the vast majority in the West anyway are in favour. And a similar thing has happened with this old question where even the question reveals something about the context in which it was first asked.
Lulie Tanett
Would you live next to a family of a different race to you? And again, some decades ago the answer was overwhelmingly no and now it’s overwhelmingly yes. And what’s more, in both cases, most people will be unable to describe what changed their mind. Because I think in both these cases they were aware of the arguments on both sides from the beginning.
David Deutsch
They were aware of them at the beginning, the explicit arguments. But there was something changed of the form of feelings, of something which used to seem icky now seems perfectly normal and you can’t really imagine anymore why you found it icky. And so something has gone on there which, because it’s a growth of knowledge, it can only be conjecture and criticism. There ain’t nothing here but us people. And yet you’re not explicitly aware of what it was and you’re not consciously aware of it. That is, it’s not even of the form, yeah I know what the changes were but I can’t put it into words. It’s not that. It’s that you don’t know what the process was at all. Now that happened like maybe presumably because of some social phenomenon, cultural phenomenon where it was really your interaction with the culture that made you inexplicitly question your own feelings about this matter and found them wanting and created new ones and all without knowing that you’re thinking about it.
Lulie Tanett
But to come back to what you said earlier, I can also imagine that you can initiate this process intentionally and explicitly.
David Deutsch
You can say, you know, if someone, if your friend answers no to the question about living next to a person of a different race, maybe you could invite them to dinner and introduce them to your neighbours of a different race or maybe more subtly, you know, cause an interaction which like I’m just thinking off the top of my head, you know, supposing you were deep, passionately engaged with some issue, political issue or something or, you know, the Russia-Ukraine war or something and then your, you know, friend tells you about his friend who has done this amazing thing in regard to that and then later it turns out that that person is of a different race, then that could have been an explicitly thought out. They’re very sneaky, David. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s no more or less sneaky than poking the person’s body. I mean, you’re a bit sneaky. Yeah, I suppose you’re…
Lulie Tanett
I mean, if you’re intentionally telling a story about someone that someone then has feelings like, oh, wow, that guy’s a hero and then you say, oh, by the way, it’s this and you do that deliberately in a sneaky, you know, that could cause cognitive dissonance. Yeah. Well, I suppose you could make it the same if rather like you say, well, I’m now going to like manipulate your neck muscles or whatever you do. It’s not how it goes, but okay, go on.
David Deutsch
Yeah, but I’m just speaking off the top of my head, as I said. Or you could say, when the person says, I would never live next to that kind of person, then you could say, well, I could tell you a story that may change your mind. Yeah. Okay. But going back, so did you finish your… My response to your saying that there are these techniques for accessing your feelings, your inexplicit knowledge. And so what’s the basic response to that? If I understand it correctly, it fits well into my worldview. I mean, I don’t see why that shouldn’t be so. And the example of the neighbour and so on is an example of a case where you’re doing a similar thing using the physical world to…
Lulie Tanett
Right.
David Deutsch
Yeah. That example that you gave seems to be more of the type that you were talking about, namely changing the environment under which your inexplicit ideas evolve.
Lulie Tanett
Yes. However, I’m saying there is a way of making them explicit and doing a more direct, I’d say direct-ish. It’s not fully direct, but a more direct affecting them. Yes. I suppose they could be linked in that it might be that in some cases, the person whom you’re affecting with this neighbour tactic would be enabled to understand what their own feelings of ickiness are. You know, the person might halfway through the process, the person might say something like, well, that person’s a real hero. He’s obviously not icky. And so that has brought to the surface the fact that he’s… That still seems quite indirect. So the way that I imagine it is that you have some hangup about…
David Deutsch
Yeah, let me see if I can come up with a simpler example or a different example. Suppose you are afraid of spiders. And the reason that you are afraid of spiders is that …
Lulie Tanett
When you were young, spiders looked much larger and much scarier and they moved fast and you didn’t really know what was happening. And you genuinely didn’t know that it can’t do anything to you. It will at most tickle and be kind of annoying. Depends on the species. It’s just depending on the species, yeah. And suppose there’s some reason to get over this hangup, because I think a lot of people have a spider phobia for various reasons, possibly partly biological, who knows. So you want to be an entomologist and so you are actually working with, and by extension arachnids. And so you notice that you do this genuine focusing, you go into your feelings, you resurface some kind of either memory or vague impression from when you’re young of this. You suddenly realize, ah, I have the thought, I don’t know if this spider can hurt me or whether this spider is dangerous. And you realize, wow, I’ve been living my entire life thinking maybe spiders of a certain type, you know, common house spider in the UK. God, there’s other stuff in America. But in the UK. And Australia. And Australia and other places, I’m sure. And I’ve realized that there is no spider that can possibly reach me right now that could actually harm me. But I had been, I had this idea that they could. And then, so sometimes what happens is that people go into their head about this in the sense that now they have the explicit idea that, ah, I notice that I’m afraid that spiders could hurt me. And obviously that’s a nonsense idea. And obviously they can’t, but for some reason I still feel like they are. When you do something, and now this somewhat invokes a thing called coherence therapy, which is where you can modify your emotional memories or your emotional associations with stuff by activating the emotion such that that collection of inexplicit ideas then becomes changeable. Labile, is that the word? What’s the word for it?
David Deutsch
Yes. Such that they become labile. And so the idea, so you can do this in this heady way, like I said, and then that’s not going to change anything. However, if you bring up the feeling of like, yeah, I’m afraid of that spider, you know, hurting me in some way. And then what’s the technique? And then you, it’s kind of like you ask the feeling, what would it need to feel safe? Or what would it need to, what would it need to know in order to change? And it might be something extremely silly, like I would need to, let me just make up an example. It’s interesting because it’s very difficult for me to make up examples with my head. I have to actually like imagine a feeling to make something up that is realistic.
Lulie Tanett
Ah, so it could be something like the, okay, this is a weird example, but it could be something like the, this memory stemmed from when you were a toddler and uncoordinated and now you’re an adult. And so now if you feedback this information to your feelings, hey, I’m an adult, I can, I can crush the spider, I can capture the spider, I have all of these abilities to deal with the spider now, and I’m not confined to a cot where I can’t escape from the spider, things like this, then your feeling can physically change. It can be like, oh, I’m actually safe now. There is something I can actually do about this situation. Or it could be that you inexplicitly thought that spiders have fangs or the ones that are near you are poisonous or something like this. And that maybe there’s some kind of a picture or something that you can see very clearly that, that the fangs are not poisonous. I don’t know, I’m just making this up. And then that updates the feeling. So this I would say is a more direct thing than the situation that you were describing where you tell a story and it’s, I mean, it depends how, does, does that make sense? Does it seem more direct to you or is it, does this seem like the same type of thing to you? It seems like the same type of thing. Also, I’m, I mean, it’s separate matter, but I’m scared, this seems to have the touch of this psychoanalytic thing or Freudian thing where you need to discover the root cause and then undo the root cause and then that, that, that.
David Deutsch
I don’t think you need that, but I do think you can do it that way though. It is also possible to do it the way that you’re suggesting where you basically change your explicit ideas on it and that can trickle down. But you can also do a thing where you go to the original thing and what is the original misconception because the original misconception can be the thing that everything is sort of.
Lulie Tanett
Okay, so if you have a hangup, this means that there is something that is being blocked from getting you information. So blocked from updating the hangup to then not be a hangup, but just be an idea like any other. And therefore, and so quite often what happens is that there is some kind of hangup that is entrenched when you are young. And so even if you do a lot of the explicit criticism of all of the ideas that sort of stem from, or that originally kind of came out of that, it’s like the source doesn’t matter except in the case where the source is being, you know, is the thing that is entrenched, the source is being entrenched, namely that it doesn’t matter if it’s the source or not, it just matters where the entrenchment point is.
David Deutsch
Well, for one thing, we’re getting into ramifications of ramifications, but for one thing, I think a hangup with a certain origin, like you say, begins in the cot where you can’t get away from the spider or whatever. As you experience that, or as you are affected by that entrenched process later in life, that may have begun much later. It may have begun when you were a child or when you were also an adult or whatever, and so it may not be necessary. It seems to me that often it would be too much effort, unnecessary effort, to trace the history of that entrenchment. The entrenchment probably didn’t happen at one instant. It probably happened over time with several experiences. And then there’s the question of why didn’t it go away?
Lulie Tanett
Why didn’t it go away when you were an older child? Why didn’t it go away with a whole load of other bad ideas when you became an adult? And the answer may be that although it began with some early thing, the reason why it’s with you today is much closer in time to today. You mentioned wanting to be an entomologist. So I think if you want to be an entomologist, you don’t have to do much to lose your fear of spiders. It will happen naturally. You don’t have to go back to your childhood or your hang-ups or anything like that. You will, as an entomologist, you will have a way of dealing with spiders that involves excessive precautions and barriers and so on. You can do it that way, but I’m saying there is a way of doing it in a more straightforward, direct and… No, no, sorry. That’s not what I meant. When you have these excessive precautions, that’s a problem because it means that when you go into the spider laboratory, it’s going to take you extra time to do particular things.
David Deutsch
Sometimes you’ll do a shortcut and you’ll say, okay, I won’t do that this time and it’s not going to bite me this time. I mean, sorry, that’s all explicit. Yeah, the implicit version. Yeah. And this is manipulating your environment, not through any kind of plan to do it, but simply because that’s the logic of your situation.
Lulie Tanett
Again, I think that is a valid way of getting over hang-ups and I don’t think it’s the only way and I don’t think it’s the most direct and fast way. Especially if you don’t have much time to go into it or whatever, then that approach seems fine. But there is also this thing where you can sit in your room and do an introspection and do some trauma processing and then you come out and then you just are not scared of the spider anymore. You do this with a therapist or something and then you are transformed as a person from doing this and that all of the ideas that that hang-up thing was holding tightly together, they also get freed up and it’s easier to have different ideas and go through life and so on. So, yes, I don’t know. Basically, you keep saying, oh, well, you can change the environment in which the hang-ups evolve. And I’m like, yes, that is definitely one way of doing it. This is probably an unfair comparison, but let me just say it anyway. It reminds me of gay conversion therapy. So, my view of gay conversion therapy is different from everyone else’s.
David Deutsch
I think I’m sure that there is a way of doing gay conversion therapy that, quote, works in that a gay person who says they want to not be gay, there exists a way of doing that, a way of changing their physical environment for a while such that when they come out, they’ll be a, quote, well-adjusted straight person. I think that exists, but it is absolutely not known how to do it and the gay conversion people enormously underestimate the amount of knowledge that would be needed to construct such a therapy. Now, my sort of impression, just my impression, and I said you’d think it was unfair, but my impression of this spider conversion therapy is the same, but less, I think much less knowledge is needed. And I’m sure that there are spider conversion therapies that will work for many spider-afflicted people, but I’m sure, I have the quale of being sure that there are many spider-afflicted people, well, of course there are many who do not want to lose their phobia or whatever, but even among those who do, I think there are many for whom it won’t, there won’t be any known therapy that can do this.
Lulie Tanett
Okay, I assert there are known therapies, plural, that can do this, and it’s not even as hard as you’re thinking, although there is a skill in learning how to do the right type of introspection, and so there might be, you know, you might need to acquire the skill before you can then go in and address hang-ups. But I think, and again, I want to say you imagined this conversion therapy as changing the environment in which the inexplicit ideas evolve, which I think is the slow way of doing this, and it’s a convenient way, in a certain way, but that there is a much more direct route in. Well, isn’t the conversion therapy more direct? Because they don’t like question the person and say, well, when did you first have gay feelings? Or maybe they do, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know, I’m not going to tell you. But I’m saying, like, when you have an actual phobia or a thing that interferes with your life, or a hang-up, or a way that your mind feels stilted, these are the things that stuff like Gendlin focusing and coherence therapy and internal family systems therapy are excellent at addressing relatively quickly, and I think they’re very, very important to me, relatively directly. It might take us a whole other conversation to go into exactly what are each of these things and why do they work? So maybe I’ll just leave it at that.
David Deutsch
Okay, yeah. I mean, do you think this would work for racism and, you know, big problems like that?
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of difficulty with hang-ups that are attached to social environments, like to basically we get into systemic therapy and things where your ideas are being affected by the culture that you’re in. Yes.
David Deutsch
We have done a ton of work on how to address hang-ups around parents and children and families and romantic relationships. So we’ve, as a society, we have focused on those partly because that’s where a lot of the stuff stems from. In terms of bigotry, I guess we’d say, yeah, I think basically yes, but with the disclaimer that these are big things and so it would take, you know, it’s not going to be like a spider phobia where, you know, it might take a couple of sessions to get over a spider phobia, like because it could be that some things are fixed in place because you have wrong ideas about, you know, the nature of other peoples or something like this.
Lulie Tanett
Also, usually when people are, when there’s this like conversion therapy type thing, at least based on the stereotypes of how people talk about it in everyday life, it sounds like they are coming to this, it’s that they are not fully on board with being converted. You know, a racist doesn’t actually really want to have an intervention where people say, oh, you’re a bigot and you should change your ways. And so the more there is, so basically that they have to actually be interested in this and I don’t know, and there’s also a gay thing of, like what is right? It might be right for that person to be gay and it might be that he finds out that when doing this therapy thing, actually this is his true calling and the reason that he wanted to change was just to please his parents and therefore he doesn’t get converted to being straight, but he gets converted to being super gay, you know. And then I think that the same can be true of any hang up. You don’t know what the answer of the hang up is at the outset. You just know that there’s a conflict. I very much agree with that. You can’t know who’s right. So when you’re acting on someone, even voluntarily, you don’t know who’s right. Maybe the thing you’re both jointly trying to do to that person is the wrong thing. The reason I keep going back to all of these examples with Gendlin focusing and changing inexplicit ideas directly is that it seems that my ontology for what inexplicit ideas is, is different from yours. You say that they aren’t like, I mean, right now I’m even confused what is language even, because it seems like there are gradations of what counts as language. Is imagery language?
David Deutsch
Well, sort of. It has some of the properties of language. Is it universal? I don’t, maybe? Well, that’s the thing. I mean, there are universal languages and they are different from non-universal languages. So that’s one difference. Among the universal languages, there are ones which are more efficient and less efficient at the same time. And there are ones which are less efficient at describing or doing certain things. So there, you can have languages which are universal, but it’s just infeasible to use them for certain things.
Lulie Tanett
Why don’t you say that inexplicit ideas are language if you say that machine code is language?
David Deutsch
Well, machine code and English have in common that it’s fairly easy to persuade oneself that they are universal. With computers, certainly, you can actually prove that in this language you can instruct the computer to do anything that it is capable of doing. In English, it’s not a matter of instructing people, but still it’s more to do with expressing things and so on. But still, it’s hard to imagine that there are things that you couldn’t say in English if you had enough time and effort and money and so on. With pictures, although it’s said that they are worth a thousand words, it’s not obvious that you can express things in pictures that are subtleties that it’s relatively easy to express in language. Like, you know, let me think of an example, you know, what’s the difference between very dangerous and extremely dangerous? Well, you could have a sort of cartoon. But there’s also some things that are much easier to express in pictures compared with in language, in English language. So I kind of want to say, aren’t these languages just better at expressing different things? Yes, but unlike English, there are things that they can’t express. They can express certain things much more conveniently than English can, but there are certain things that they can’t express at all which English can.
Lulie Tanett
Are there not things that English can’t express about imagery? Well, like the qualia, which you were saying earlier?
David Deutsch
I don’t know about qualia. So it could be that qualia don’t behave in the way that I think they do. It could be that there’s a whole different universality to them.
Lulie Tanett
Do you think that in principle you can fully, fully express the qualia of seeing a painting in English in principle? In principle, I would have thought so. And why do you not think that the same is true vice versa?
David Deutsch
Well, maybe it’s a failure of my imagination, but if you… I can’t imagine a way of expressing, say, a deep equation in physics in the form of a picture. The only way I can think of doing that is by imagining a picture of someone looking at a sheet of paper with the equation written on it. What the ideas expressed in that equation are not of the kind that pictures express. I mean, they express some of them, of course. So what is the type of thing that inexplicit ideas express? Or, like, okay, do you think that it is a language or not? That’s a matter of words. I mean, I think they are different from the kind of languages I’m referring to when I say that something is explicit.
Lulie Tanett
How are inexplicit ideas stored that is different from explicit ideas?
David Deutsch
They are stored in exactly the same way. But they look different? Are they…? They could… just as they can both be stored in a computer memory. Are they objects? Is it a bit of code? What actually is physically an inexplicit idea? Yes. Like physically and abstractly. I’m trying to tease out what actually is the difference between inexplicit ideas and explicit ideas, according to you. So it’s very unlikely that ideas like a painting are stored in the painter’s mind as bitmaps, like they are in a computer. They are stored in some other way, which we don’t know. But then we don’t know how anything is stored in the brain. It’s certainly not the same as how we do it in a computer. So both the equation and the picture can be stored in a computer. When the equation goes into a computer, it can be translated directly into something that a person can read. In the case of a picture, you have to see it to appreciate it. I don’t know. You’re probing the fact that I don’t know what qualia are. But nor does anyone.
Lulie Tanett
The reason that I’m digging into this inexplicit ideas thing so much is that I expect that this is related to what consciousness is and how we come up with new creative ideas and what is the thing that is different in the human program compared with a dumb computer or an animal. And it seems that you and I have different ideas about what inexplicit ideas are, how they function. And so that’s why I’m interested in this. Do you also have the suspicion that inexplicit ideas is possibly the secrets of consciousness? Or what do you think of that?
David Deutsch
Well, a secret of consciousness. Since we have no idea how to encode things like consciousness and qualia in a computer, there’s something we don’t know. And definitely, if that something did not include qualia and so on, then they wouldn’t be sufficient. They wouldn’t be sufficient to make an AGI and so on. So whether understanding that is enough to make an AGI, I don’t know. And whether understanding it once we understand it can be translated back into the form of things like equations. I don’t know that either. Equations or words in English and so on. I don’t know that either. I think maybe the reason that I’m resisting your different worldview is that I just don’t know what it is. And I want to make the simplest assumptions I can about how it might work. But I’m perfectly open to thinking that it might work in a different way. And it might require an entire new vista on things. And as I just said, it might be that once we’ve got this new vista, we can then translate it back into the old vista. And we find that it doesn’t require anything new after all, like people did with theory of evolution. You know, it was thought that you’d need something other than physics to explain living things. And then Darwin solved the problem. And then, like a hundred years later, we worked out how to translate these concepts like genes into concepts like molecules.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, it seems to me that there is low-hanging fruit in psychology and phenomenology that could provide some answers to these questions in philosophy. And so that’s why I’m diving into it. Well, that’s one of the reasons. Cool. Fruit, yes. Good. Yeah, any final questions I have? What would you need to know what these vistas are that I’m exploring?
David Deutsch
Well, I think you’re providing it. If I heard more kind of high-level theory about what this vista is and how it relates to vistas that we know about. Vistas that you know about. Yeah, if you say so.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, no, but I mean, seriously though, like I think that there are some very good ideas that seem completely separate from anything you’ve thought about and that fit in very well. Okay, so it sounds like in a future conversation, I can bring to you some of the theories and just give you the high-level things and see how they fit in. Yeah. All right. Cool. Sounds good. Cool. All right. I think that’s all the time we have for today. So thank you for joining me.
David Deutsch
Well, I look forward to continuing.
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