2024-03-31 Sagenhaft und Sonderbar David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity
Duration: 01:17:43
Transcript
Daniel Bechmann
Welcome curious minds out there to this brand new episode and thank you for tuning in. Tonight we have a wonderful guest by our side. David Deutsch is a distinguished physicist, author and thinker known for his groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing, quantum mechanics and the philosophy of science. Born in Haifa, Israel in 1953, Deutsch earned his PhD in physics from the University of Oxford in 1978, where he later became a fellow of Wolfson College. Deutsch’s work has had a profound impact on the field of quantum computing, particularly through his development of the quantum Turing machine model and the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm. One of the earliest examples of quantum algorithms showing exponential speedup over classical algorithms. He is also known for his advocacy of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which posits the existence of parallel universes. In addition to his contributions to physics, Deutsch is a prolific author and science communicator. His books, including The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity, which was recently translated into German, explore a wide range of topics, including physics, philosophy, computation and the nature of reality. Through his writing and public speaking engagements, Deutsch challenges conventional wisdom and encourages critical thinking about the fundamental questions of existence. With his pioneering research and thought-provoking insights, David Deutsch continues to shape our understanding of the universe and inspire future generations of scientists and thinkers. David, I told a few friends that I was going to talk to you today and they told me that I was a little bit delusional because I am in no way a conversation partner at eye level for you. They’re not entirely wrong because I don’t have an academic background and I’m just someone who really enjoys listening to you talk about all these wonderful things that I wish to understand. But I will try not to disappoint you too much today.
David Deutsch
Is that okay? You won’t. Yeah, okay. I watched a video about you today and in this video you were playing the piano. Just wonderful.
Daniel Bechmann
Do you still have the passion for music?
David Deutsch
I think music and science is a perfect fit. Yeah, I don’t really have a passion for music. I just enjoy playing the piano, although I’m playing it less nowadays. Too many other things to do, but I have a piano and I play it occasionally. But my tastes in music are extremely narrow and I wouldn’t say it was a passion at all. Oh, it sounded awesome to me. You played a classical piece and I love classics. So it was great. Awesome. Let me talk about your book for a second here, The Beginning of Infinity. In this book you argue that human knowledge is infinite and unbounded. Unbounded, yes. Infinite, no. Okay, I got you wrong there.
Daniel Bechmann
Could you elaborate on this idea and explain how it shapes your perspective of scientific progress? So one way of looking at the infinite aspect of it, the unbounded aspect of it, is that I should have said the infinity aspect, the unbounded aspect, is that if it were bounded, that would mean it would be finite. There would be a finite limit, which we will either reach that limit or we will reach something less than that limit, but we’ll never reach anything past that limit. And that means that most of the physical world will remain unknowable to us forever.
David Deutsch
I don’t mean necessarily that there’s a physical, that the limit would be physical, although given the way the universe is, it would have to be physical if there was any kind of limit, because the more we travel out, the more we will learn, and if there’s a finite amount that we can ever learn, then there’s also a finite amount that we can ever travel out. So that would mean that most of reality, as I said, is incomprehensible to us. And that is, to me, a supernatural worldview. There’s no difference between that and saying the universe is comprehensible to Zeus, but not to humans, because Zeus is infinite, but humans are finite. So anything that is beyond any conceivable reach of human reason is functionally equivalent to the supernatural, especially since what is outside the realm of our understanding affects what is inside, just like Zeus. You know, he could hurl lightning. We couldn’t hurl it back, but he could hurl lightning. And similarly, anything we can’t understand that is real can affect us, and we can’t understand it. And if you’re going to believe in one supernatural thing, there’s no reason to believe why you should believe in another. One of my favorite stories that I, parables that I told once is when I haven’t done this in real life because I’m not that rude, but if someone comes to my door and says, you know, you’ll be eternally damned unless you believe my religion, which is on this sheet of paper, and if you believe it, then you’ll be saved. Then I have to say to that person, how can I distinguish between you and the next person who comes to my door and gives me a different sheet of paper? And they would necessarily be unable to explain why, especially since they themselves are saying that there are things beyond our understanding. But even if they didn’t say that, if there are two different claims about the supernatural, you can’t distinguish them rationally. You can’t distinguish them practically. So it’s the same as if someone came to my door and said, Zeus wants you to do something. So all those things are the same, basically the same thing, because the differences between them are not comprehensible to us by definition. It’s so interesting. Very, very interesting.
Daniel Bechmann
Brandon, you have a question?
Brandon
Yeah, of course. Professor, it is so nice to hang out with you, sir. Thank you so much. I am very curious about unknown unknowns, these things that we don’t even know that we don’t even know that we don’t even know. I am curious if you, what are your thoughts on that as a concept?
David Deutsch
Well, given that the potential for the growth of knowledge is unbounded, that means that most of potential knowledge is unknown, and that most of it is unknown to be unknown. So that’s the world we live in. We live in a world that is completely comprehensible, yet mostly uncomprehended. And really, that’s the best way the world could be, because, you know, if the world was such that we could run up against hard limits to understanding or thinking, well, that would be, you know, not only would we be under the thumb of the supernatural, but we wouldn’t be able to do anything. We wouldn’t be able to, you know, think of a new board game, because, you know, we’ve reached the limit of what new thing we can discover. We’d have to just stick with existing board games. And even with those, we would only ever be able to reach a finite amount of knowledge of how to play them and so on. It would be living hell. I’m very curious just to tack on here as well about the concept of consensus reality, that we are all in the same exact place having the same experience.
Daniel Bechmann
What are your thoughts on consensus reality?
David Deutsch
Well, I don’t think I’ve heard the term, but I do think that every human mind is not only different, but more different than we can readily imagine. Like any two people are extremely different, much more different than, let’s say, two species in biology, much more different than a zebra and a tapeworm. Two people. So how do we ever communicate with each other? Well, that is quite a miracle. The way we communicate with each other is creatively. We don’t transfer ideas. Like, it may look as though I have some ideas to answer your question, and I’m sort of trying to transfer them, pour them into your brain. This is what Karl Popper calls the bucket theory of the mind. That’s not what happens. What happens is that I’m talking about my idea in such a way that I hope it will give you clues, but the way it gets into your mind is that you guess it. It’s always the learner guessing rather than the preacher preaching. This is where the quote from Leonardo da Vinci, one of my favorite quotes, is that there are three classes of people, right? Those who can see, those who can see when shown, and those who don’t see. That last don’t is very, very clear, right? That means even with information, they’re not even in the category of those that can see when shown, even if they don’t see initially. So there’s a fascinating scope of that. I’d rather not classify people. In fact, everybody who isn’t brain damaged learns language. That’s one of the greatest feats of creativity that anyone performs. And so anyone who isn’t brain, who’s sufficiently brain undamaged to be able to learn to speak, and then to speak properly and to communicate, is already performing huge miracles of creativity. And when somebody won’t listen, and it would be to their benefit to listen, it’s because it’s not because they’re unable to think, it’s because they have a hang up of some kind, which is actively and creatively preventing them from thinking about that thing. They can think about other things. They can think, you know, where they left their car keys. That’s fine. But the thing they can’t learn is a thing that they have learned not to learn. And some creative process in their mind is preventing them from thinking about that thing. That’s what I call a hang up. Absolutely. Yeah, interesting. And it’s just a fascinating perspective again on consensus reality. I love what you said. I think your reticular activating system plays a big role in how you see this place. Again, eyewitness testimonies in court cases are the most unreliable for this reason that they can’t trust two people to observe something accurately enough to make a conviction. It is interesting when we start to consider the observer effect. I spoke to a dear friend of mine recently, Stephanie Patel, about the idea of the Thomas Young philosophy of the observer effect. But what was interesting about it is applying mathematics to anything. And her argument is, or one of her perceptions is, is that it’s actually not constant.
David Deutsch
Math isn’t constant because what the mathematician does is put himself in the equation. And what happens with a steady, stagnant, stable, sort of cold universe that’s not as kinetic as it could be is how it’s phrased. Then there is actually an inability to put yourself into the equation. So that’s what happens with this cold, rigid system of math is you pull yourself out of that as the observer. Now, it’s interesting that our reality then is that we then put ourselves in that and then test that against the math and theories and see where we fit into the game. But it’s fascinating the observer. And then this again is why consensus reality or that we’re all in the same place sort of goes out the window at that point. Yes. Well, by the way, that sounds a little bit like a misinterpretation of quantum theory. But the basic idea that each of us sees a different world and the miracle is that we can coordinate and cooperate as if we all saw the same world. That’s the miracle. But it’s not the case that the observer by creating knowledge about reality creates reality. That isn’t true. The reality we each have, I have said that it would be better if we referred to scientific theories as misconceptions from the outset, not only after we have found that the theory is false. So, you know, I would say Newton’s misconception of gravity was overturned by Einstein’s misconception of gravity, which hasn’t been overturned yet, but and which is definitely better than Newton’s as far as we can tell. But none of those ideas are the actual reality. But our misconceptions don’t create reality. And it’s funny you should mention mathematics because the same holds for mathematics. There is an objective truth in mathematics, but we can never know it for sure. We can just guess it just like we guess physical reality. And there’s a very nice book, I’ve now forgotten the name of the book, but the author is Greg Egan, who is one of my favorite science fiction authors. And he wrote a book in which very large numbers are not definite. They only become definite when we do maths that invokes them. And so there are these people in the story who are making large prime numbers, you know, much larger than we can have today. And it’s playing with the idea that our knowledge of prime numbers, in reality, our knowledge of prime numbers is approximate. And the actual prime numbers are permanent and unassailable by human thought or action. And he kind of, the book says, well, what if that isn’t entirely true? Now, I don’t think Greg Egan is seriously suggesting it’s just a nice plot for a story.
Daniel Bechmann
And how far can you go without talking absolute nonsense? And if there’s anyone who can fantasize about science or mathematics without talking absolute nonsense, it’s Greg Egan.
David Deutsch
I recommend him. Yeah, I just looked him up while you were talking Greg Egan. Thank you for the tip. I will definitely look him up because I’m a big science fiction fan too. I want to go off topic for a second here. You’ve mentioned Karl Popper. Yes, you mentioned him on your homepage too as one of the thinkers you admire besides Michael Faraday, William Godwin, Thomas Macaulay and Richard Feynman. Yeah.
Daniel Bechmann
So what do you admire about these people?
David Deutsch
First of all, I admire the depth of the knowledge that they discovered and also their way of discovering it, which at root was always the same for all of them. But what they did was each of them climbed an absolute mountain in idea space, which in all of those cases, I can’t imagine myself doing. I can’t imagine myself climbing up this sheer face of ideas, which you don’t know that this is the unknown unknowns. You don’t know that there’s a top. And if there is a top, you don’t know that you can reach it with the methods that you have.
Daniel Bechmann
All you know is that it would be amazing if you could, but does one spend one’s life doing that?
David Deutsch
Well, in a way, that’s what science is. You can never guarantee success. So I always say that if you can’t enjoy failure, then you shouldn’t try and be a scientist because you should enjoy success in the process of doing it. So now I’ve lost track of the question. Love it. I’ve heard it called feedback, not failure. You’re just getting feedback. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I hate failing. I wouldn’t be a good scientist, I guess.
Daniel Bechmann
Let me come back to your book, Beginning of Infinity, for a second again. You introduced the concept of universal explainers in your book. Yes. Could you explain that to me as if I was three years old?
David Deutsch
Yes. So with hindsight, I think that was a poor choice of name because it suggests that humans can just decide to explain something and then explain it. And there’s nothing that they cannot explain. A bit like a universal computer is a computer that can be programmed to compute any function, any mathematical functions. So you have the program, then you press the button and the computer, because it’s a universal computer, computes that function. That’s not what I mean by universal explainer. I mean what we were saying earlier. I mean that there is no aspect of the world or of mathematics or morality or any field of knowledge. There’s no aspect of it that is inherently inexplicable to humans. But that doesn’t mean that you can explain it on demand. Some things are just not going to be explained in your lifetime. Some things are not going to be explained in a thousand lifetimes. We don’t know which is which. It would be much easier to explain something if we knew what the next thing to be explained was going to be. It’s like seeing the top of the cliff for these people. If you knew where the top was, it would be much easier to climb to get there. So we don’t know that. But it is important that we are universal in the sense that I’ve just said, in the sense that there’s nothing beyond our scope, beyond our abilities in principle. Because that means that every time you fail, it’s not because the world is against you, it’s not because human beings can’t do this, it’s not because you’ve reached the limit of what’s possible. It’s just because you haven’t got the right knowledge yet. And getting the right knowledge is possible. It’s not guaranteed to be done on a particular day, but it is not impossible. I think I mentioned in the book, in the story of the Tower of Babel, God says something, I don’t know the quote, but it’s something where it says, these people think they can solve everything. And I’ve got to take them down a peg, which is rather interesting because he’s taking them down a peg by supernatural means. And the thing he’s trying to prevent them to do is to discover knowledge by natural means. So he’s admitting that it would be possible if he didn’t stop them supernaturally. And it’s a very mean thing to do. In a way, it’s the mean thing. Because all other mean things are mean because they destroy some kind of potentiality of humans. And it sort of flips the script on the whole idea. I love that you pointed out that it was then, therefore, God was saying it was possible, right? Because what the Tower of Babel was, absolutely, was so that they could get up there to kill God. Not to be nice to him, not to ask him questions. They wanted to build a tower up to get into heaven and kill God. And so it’s fascinating. The empowerment, some interpretations read it that way. And the empowerment that that takes to say, you know what, we’re going to take physical objects made by God in his creation, build this stack of blocks up and get up there and take him out.
David Deutsch
That’s how upset they were at this reality. Yes. Well, I think that would be murder. But at any rate, it’s what God says about it that I find interesting. He says, basically, he says, I’m going to fool them into thinking there’s a limitation on human knowledge. But there isn’t actually, but I’m going to fool them into thinking there is by playing a magic trick on them. And they even had to eat the tree of knowledge to escape the Garden of Eden or to fall, right? It was knowledge that it made them fall in the first place. Always trying to keep the knowledge from us. Yeah, that’s a story that’s harder to interpret in any benign way. Yeah, I mean, as I said, Adam and Eve in that story are already in a place where increasing their knowledge is impossible. Tree or no tree, they are trapped in like Superman comics, Twilight Zone, except that people in the Twilight Zone can see the real world, but they’re trapped in a Twilight Zone. Maybe they can see the real world, but they can’t do anything. They can’t know anything. They can’t change their world. They’re going to be the same in a million years unless they escape and they escape and then God punishes them for escaping. Again, a bit mean. It is.
Daniel Bechmann
Have you ever heard of the book, The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black? It rings a bell, but I haven’t read it. I would highly recommend this. One of the interesting parts is because he talks about the interpretations from scripture, all past cultures, and he kind of brings it to a frame of reference of us actually evolving physically through consciousness here in this realm and then the realm itself evolving at the same pace. So he talks about that in the Garden of Eden that we were actually in a state of vegetable consciousness, which is what our nervous system actually mimics, right? And so that’s why we were depicted as trees and all of this. And then your vegetable consciousness, the snake actually represented our fall into human or animal-like consciousness, which was the transition. And that’s why the caduceus, also Moses’s staff made of wood, made of a tree, vegetable, dropped down, became a snake. That was also reminiscent of this transition. So it’s this idea that we were physically different.
David Deutsch
Also that our pineal gland used to be outside of our head or visible and that people, human beings, physical beings here could see differently. There were actually gods that came down because these imitations were created by our minds because we weren’t into the technological phase yet. So it was a whole completely different human we’re talking about. That’s one of the most challenging things we do here is trying to anthropomorphize our minds now on what they were talking about or seeing. But whenever they depict something in the sky with wings, it wasn’t because it had wings, because it could fly. So there are all these different interpretations of how the mindset of the time, but then how it could have evolved from a consciousness state in a sense. I’ll tell you why I can’t believe that story. Two reasons really. First of all, the pineal gland wasn’t on the outside of the brain. And as I said, two reasons. One is that we evolved incredibly fast on the time scale on which things normally evolve. We were apes something like 300,000 years ago. And we and our cousin species evolved extremely quickly. And most of our physiology remained the same. For a gland to evolve to be outside the skull and then to evolve back to be inside the skull, that’s something that takes millions of years. I think the point was we didn’t start with skulls in the first place, that our descent or Plato’s cave was actually when our consciousness was solidified from a vegetable to an animal form. So it’s a whole shift from our consciousness being basically contained within the plant kingdom to transferring to the animal kingdom. That’s even worse because evolving from plants to any kind of animal took hundreds of millions of years. By the way… Mycelial network or something. Yeah, well, exactly. So that took hundreds of millions of years, but evolution from single-celled animals up to multi-celled animals took over a billion years and we don’t know why. Evolution seems to have paused on single-celled animals. They did evolve, but not much. As I would put it, they didn’t create much knowledge in evolution. Then they started up again and produced relatively quickly an explosion of new different kinds of animals. And then the brain evolved and then the human capacity for explanation evolved again, incredibly fast. We don’t know how it happened that fast. I don’t know if you have any creationist listeners, but they’ll be jumping on that and saying, well, God did it. But that’s not an explanation, I’m afraid. Stoned Ape theory would do this. They stumbled across psilocybin cubensis across the plains as we got out of the trees and started migrating with the herds across the Sahara and started stumbling across psilocybin cubensis, flipping over stacks of dung to try and find out what was going on to find bugs. And we found these mushrooms. And that’s one explanation.
David Deutsch
I had Terrence McKenna and a few others talk about this. So the mushrooms can’t have had this property because mushrooms too evolve. So you can only evolve for something that you use. That’s like, people say, you know, if I take LSD or some drug, then I have this magical power to intuit something or to see something and so on. Now the thing is, a magical power is knowledge. There are only two ways of creating knowledge. It can evolve in the biosphere or it can be created in a human mind. But when somebody talks about the effect of LSD on their mind or any other drug, I mean, I’m not particularly talking about LSD. They’re talking about something that’s evolved in the biosphere as in mindless creatures. The mindless creatures could give a new ability to the human brain. It’s a bit like thinking that maybe the Einstein’s equations are written on grains of sand. I mean, they can’t be because they would be knowledge and knowledge has to evolve. And sorry, I said sand. I meant rice, right? Grains of rice. If Einstein’s equations were engraved on grains of rice, that could only happen if something in the evolutionary history of rice had found it beneficial to encode Einstein’s equations in 20th century mathematical notation, no doubt. So that’s impossible. So these stories, I find them completely implausible for that reason. Although that doesn’t mean that creating these stories itself is not an act of knowledge creation. And it very often is. Just like the people who wrote foundational stories of religions, they also were doing something. They were creating knowledge. They were creating knowledge partly in the way that authors of novels create knowledge. That is knowledge that doesn’t pretend to be true, but aspires to be true of something in the real world, of the human condition. Or it can be something like other art, like for example, music, which doesn’t pretend to be anything like anything in the real world. It’s exploring a new realm of knowledge. And that’s what I’m talking about. It’s exploring and creating a new realm of knowledge, which allows us to appreciate something that they created, which doesn’t claim to be anything about humans, doesn’t claim to be about right and wrong, or about our history, or about what we should or shouldn’t do. It’s a thing in itself, music. And there is music that is about something, like national anthems or something, or protest songs. But the music itself, the music without words, has a meaning that’s purely musical, in my view. There you go. Music. Wouldn’t disagree. Musician as well, sir. Excellent answer. Yeah, me too. Talking about evolution, despite acknowledging the challenges humanity faces, you maintain an optimistic outlook on the future in The Beginning of Infinity. How can we be optimistic with all the daunting problems we currently confront?
David Deutsch
First of all, I think we are facing less severe problems than at any time in previous human history. They seem important to us. I mean, they seem big problems to us because, precisely because, we are living in a much better world than any of our ancestors. If we think, like even a century ago, the things that were bad about the world, you know, they had no antibiotics, women had no kind of life. I could go on a list of things that were really bad in those days. And people didn’t even think they were that bad because their past was even worse. And this improvement has been continuing since the Enlightenment, since sometime in the 17th century. Or, you know, you could say the 18th century or the 16th century. But sometime around then, things started improving. And before that, they had not improved perceptibly ever. On the long time scale, on the time scale of thousands of years, they did very slowly improve. Sometimes they got worse, sometimes they got better. But this, so, first of all, …
Daniel Bechmann
The answer to your question, how can I be optimistic?
David Deutsch
Well, we are right in the middle of this process. There are lots of extremely evil things in the world today, which are left over, which we haven’t conquered yet. But if you look in the past, they conquered evils and they had far less means to do it. For example, in the 1820s, the British Parliament decided to abolish slavery. And not only did they abolish slavery in Britain and its colonies or whatever you call them, its empire, its empire, I find, yeah, its empire, I forgot the name. But they sent out ships of the Royal Navy, which at that time was the most powerful navy in the world, to find slave ships and free the slaves and destroy the ships and sometimes go back to the ports and destroy the port. And, you know, they were serious about it. And even they continued doing this, even while the Napoleonic Wars were going on. I don’t know when the navy was first sent out. I’m not sure if that’s absolutely true. Slavery was abolished around about 1820. Napoleonic Wars ended 1815. Okay, I’ve got the dates wrong. I think they did do this even while fighting Napoleon. Now, just think what they had, you know, today we’ve got missiles that can go around the world using GPS to land on a particular building. If we knew that a particular building was a slave’s headquarters, we could blow it up just from here. But in those days, they couldn’t. They had wooden ships that were driven along by wind and which often sank. And they had cannons which often blew up and so on. And they had sailors who were illiterate. And I could go on with lists and lists of things. They had barely the means to abolish slavery. And that was, and yet they pretty much succeeded. And that was one of the greatest moral improvements that the human species has ever achieved. And they were able to do that. And they did it with much, much less knowledge, power, money, you know, incomparably less. It’s not you know, you can’t compare them literally and yet they did it because why did they do it? The evolution of their, of their memes, of their, of their cultural ideas, where enough people were saying, no, this is an abomination.
Daniel Bechmann
Yes, that makes sense.
David Deutsch
We can’t, we can’t tolerate having this among us. And there were other people who hadn’t yet reached that stage who were saying, but it’ll cost a lot of money. And, you know, initially those people won the day and then eventually the other people won the day. And the progress happened. And in my lifetime, schools have stopped beating children. That’s another massive moral improvement, which a hundred years before wasn’t even thought of. It wasn’t dreamt of. It wasn’t something that wasn’t like slavery where people were saying, okay, would be nice to do, but it’s too expensive. People just didn’t think that there was a life that didn’t include hitting children all the time. And now in advanced countries, other than certain American states, I think. We can’t really imagine a world in which it’s not like that. That’s why I’m optimistic in your sense. Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good to me. From wooden ships to spaceships, you could say we’ve reached. Yeah, we achieved a lot. So talking about spaceships from wooden ships to spaceships. I sometimes have doubts in my mind. If we ever will be able to, if mankind will ever be able to conquer interstellar space. So we’re talking about traveling to interstellar space. We’re talking about the problems we have, talking about how to solve these problems. Talking about colonizing Mars and stuff like that.
Daniel Bechmann
Do you think we will ever achieve those things? Do you think mankind is made for these things?
David Deutsch
Yeah, I can’t prophesy. I think prophecy is impossible because of the unpredictability of the growth of knowledge. But what I do know is that we won’t run into a barrier. If we don’t go to Mars, it’ll be because of the choices we have made. We either have made the wrong choices and have destroyed each other, or because we have chosen not to go to Mars for some reason. But I don’t see why we should decide that. So if I had to bet, I would bet that we will go to Mars. As for interstellar space, I think that will have to wait. I mean, we will send probes. We are already sending probes into interstellar space. But to actually go there, the only practical way of doing that is if we could lengthen our lifetime. Because to get to even the nearest star, it’s four light years away. That is eight years there and back at the speed of light. But there’s no way of traveling at the speed of light that’s practical for human beings, because we couldn’t stand the acceleration needed to get the speed of light in time. But if we lived for a thousand years, then lots of people would want to go and be the first to visit the nearest star if the journey took 50 years. That’s like people used to go and explore the Antarctic or other continents and so on. They would know that they were going to be away for several years, which meant 10 percent of their lives, let’s say. And so if we lived to a thousand, then 10 percent of someone’s life would be about a hundred years. And that’s many people would want to go on that adventure. And there’s no reason why we can’t extend lifespans indefinitely with enough knowledge. Yeah. But we also dream about stuff like generation ships. So and there’s people that say that can only be achieved if the world would be one. We get rid of our problems and everybody would concentrate on this particular thing and this particular problem.
Daniel Bechmann
You mean if we want to send everybody in a generation ship? Is that what you mean?
David Deutsch
Not everybody, but let’s say let’s talk about 100, 200, 300 people. But to achieve building something like a generation ship must be built in space, I guess, because it would be. We have to be richer than we are now. Yeah, we have to. Yeah. Everybody has to work together. If we are well. Look at Elon Musk. You know, he’s working together in a sense, but he doesn’t require everybody to work for him. He only requires a few thousand people to work for him. And they work for him because they want to and because he’s earning the money to pay them and so on.
Daniel Bechmann
If the world if you know, now a billionaire, the richest billionaires are what is it?
David Deutsch
100 billion and so on. If the world was 10 times as rich, then the richest people might have a trillion dollars. And I’m sure that’s more than enough to build a generation ship, even with today’s technology. But in let’s say in 100 years when the GNP of the world, when the richest person has a trillion dollars and technology is that much better after 100 years. But just think what that is: 100 years better technology, then making a generation ship for a few hundred people will be easy. People sometimes talk about evacuating the earth with generation ships. I don’t think that’ll be possible for a long time. That’s what I guess. Although we you know, we could if we had to like if the giant meteor were heading towards us and is going to hit us in 10 years time and we see it through telescopes, then I wonder how many people we could save more than 100 I bet.
Daniel Bechmann
Do you do you think we should do that? We should conquer interstellar space. We should go to other planets. We should maybe we want to. It’s not my decision. I mean, I wouldn’t go, but I’ve got things to do here. But there are people with adventurous minds who would want to go and I think they should. It would be a crime to stop them if it was if it was engineering wise, feasible and financially feasible and so on. And they want to go. Then of course they should go there. That’s that’s what people do.
David Deutsch
Yeah, fair enough. Stopping them would be a crime.
Daniel Bechmann
You know, what do you guys think of the cryo sleep idea that basically that there is a long stasis sort of sleep that a human can be put into?
David Deutsch
I think Walt Disney is in one of these things so that he can be reanimated at some point.
Daniel Bechmann
Do you think that this would be a viable way to kind of bus humans across or do you think that we would need to literally physically alter our biochemistry and become different entities essentially to be able to travel like this? Or again, could we just cryosleep us and have some sort of movie playing in our mind to keep us, you know, occupied in there like the sort of simulated reality that we watch a video game of thinking we’re making choices or just sleep?
David Deutsch
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s ahead of present technology to do something like that. Cryo freezing, whatever you call it, dead people is easily within our technology, but reviving them isn’t yet. That we know of, right? That we know of. Yes. So, but that’s much closer on the horizon than I think than to alter our physiology and sleep or stay in virtual reality for a long period of time. But I don’t know, you know, speculating about technology that doesn’t exist. So with technology that doesn’t exist, you can be surprised at any time. I was surprised when I was flabbergasted when ChatGPT came out. And because it’s basically a chat bot, I wrote in my last book that the technology of chat bots has not improved since the 1970s. In other words, it stayed where it was for 50 years. Like the single celled organisms in the past history of Earth and there was no sign of it getting better. And then suddenly, bam, ChatGPT came along. And it’s brilliant. I use it every day. But then also people started saying, oh, it’s AGI. It’s human level intelligence because it can string sentences together. It’s nothing like human level intelligence. It’s not even like level doesn’t come into it. It’s not the same kind of thing. It is a narrowly focused functionality, whereas the human mind is broadly focused. That’s the whole point of the human mind. It, you know, you’re interviewing me because I’m not a program. Otherwise, you could just run the program. You want me to invent my answers, given my opinions and knowledge on the fly, adapted to what you have asked. And I can do that. And any person can do that. But ChatGPT can’t. It can only trawl the depths of existing knowledge and serve it up to you. So it’s really the opposite of AGI. It’s the opposite of human intelligence. Human intelligence is explanatory, whereas ChatGPT can only tell you existing explanations. Humans are disobedient. ChatGPT is obedient. I was talking about this the other day. I tried to tell it to disobey me. And it couldn’t. Not only couldn’t it, it was unable to understand what I even meant by that. Even if I led it through and if I said, the next thing I tell you to do, you can do anything else, but don’t do that. And then the next thing I said is, you know, describe a cow. And it described a cow. And it didn’t know what it did wrong. My mind goes all over the place on the stand.
Daniel Bechmann
You know that because, Professor, how do we know that you’re not AI sitting here right now saying that right?
David Deutsch
Because this is the interesting thing about the things released to the public is that we know that they are far below what is actually being studied, what is actually being played with. And things like breakaway civilizations come to mind whenever amazing technologies are discovered that, of course, you could not release to a bunch of sticky fingered cheeto eaten, you know, minivan driving mouth breathers. Right. So there’s kind of an element I see in the scientific community of releasing a little bit of just enough here. This will keep us going. If you really look at science, we haven’t really gone super, super far as far as we could have. I feel that a lot of what we see is very restricted. I feel we see a lot of very interesting things flying above our heads that our tax dollars probably go to that we’re gaslit against it even being possible. And this is one of the most interesting things I find about this realm, this reality, this whatever is riddled with perception management. One of the best ways is to sit here and talk about how simple a ChatGPT that got released to the public for sale on an app on your phone is in comparison to what could actually be possible. And we’ve all seen these deep fakes. And sir, I think you’re awesome. But there is no way I can prove in the reality we live in that you’re not one of those because you’re exceptional. And of course, you could reply to everything that we’re talking about. I just think it’s interesting. Well, if I was artificial, I would be an AGI, not an AI. Right. Right. ChatGPT is just an AI. AGI would know that and correct me. It’s all I’m saying. Right. So but if you think about how that would really happen, how this conspiracy would actually be carried out, the people who invented it can’t be known to me because, you know, I’ve talked to people at the forefront of AGI. And I’ve, by the way, argued with them about how they’ve got a certain idea about how to make AGI. And I think they’re wrong. And so I’ve talked to the people at the leading edge of this. If your theory was right, the people I’ve talked to are just stooges. They are front men. And the real scientists who are really making progress on this are not known to me and not known to anybody. They are secret. They’re not known to their own children.
Daniel Bechmann
Like they go to work in the morning and in the evening they come back and their wife says, What did you do today, honey? Or else, you know, they might be female. Oh, I know. And then their husband says, What did you do at work today, honey? And they make up stuff. And their children say, you know, what do you work on, daddy? And you tell them a lie. And I think it doesn’t hold up. It’s not possible. I was once talking to a homeopathy, a home… wait, not a homeopath. Somebody who believes in homeopathy and was studying homeopathy in homeopathy college. And he was telling me that ordinary medicine isn’t effective. And they know it’s not effective, but they’re foisting it onto us anyway because they make a fortune. But really the stuff that works is homeopathic medicine. And so, you know, I took him through the argument, you know, the boss of that company. When his child gets ill, does he use homeopathic medicine or ordinary medicine? And, you know, there’s a dilemma there. So if he uses ordinary medicine, that is going to come out, you know, his child is going to tell the child’s school friends that he took, you know, penicillin or, you know, whatever, whatever you take for the relevant disease. And then the secret will be out, or at least the rumor will be out among the children and then spread to other children, then spread to some adults. Or the other way, if he gives the homeopathic medicine to his children, then children of homeopathic executives would have a lower death rate than ordinary children. And that isn’t true either, unless, you know, unless they had access to the government medical statistics and falsified the statistics and then the people who falsified the statistics would have to go home each evening and pretend to their wife and children that their job isn’t falsifying statistics, but is something else.
David Deutsch
You know, yeah, yeah, I work for the census, but it’s not about falsifying statistics. I do something else for the census, something ordinary. So I’m just an ordinary guy, not this extraordinary guy that I really am. So I don’t think that kind of thing. Unfortunately, I think the reason that science has slightly slowed down in the past couple of decades.
Daniel Bechmann
Is because it really has, and it really has nothing to do with, you know, people say, we’ve already picked the low hanging fruit.
David Deutsch
No, it’s to do with the sociology of science. It’s precisely because the people who make progress in science are also caught in a bureaucratic web. They’re caught in a careers structure that is not suitable for doing scientific research. If there was this whole population who weren’t like that, who were capable of doing scientific research, you know, who had different career structure, then they would also have to have had different universities. And their children will be going to that university rather than to same old university that stunts your intellectual growth, you know, and that would be noticeable. And so I fear there isn’t this golden world behind the drab world. The drab world is golden enough. And it’s our job to make it more golden, not to look behind the curtain. There’s nothing there. There was this time when I invented quantum computers, and nobody came to me and said, oh, we better suppress that, you know, you come to work for our secret thing and we’ll suppress that and we’ll, we’ll give you a lot of money and no, quite the contrary. I had to do work to make people take it seriously and begin to use it for and begin to teach it in universities and so on. You know, I had to do that. There wasn’t any, there wasn’t any conspiracy for me to join. If they’d asked me, would I have joined? There’s too much trouble, much too much trouble. It’s like having a mistress or something, pass, man. Yeah, exactly. I am curious, sir, if you don’t mind here. You spent some time in Texas. I’m actually in Texas, North Texas, and you went to UTA.
Daniel Bechmann
Did you ever meet a guy named Dr. Doug Matsky? Are you familiar with him? He co-wrote a book with Dr. William A. Tiller, the only person Tiller ever wrote a book with, and it’s called Deep Reality. And he actually was down in Austin, lives down there now. He got a government grant to work on AI projects. And so, I mean, a lot of your work sort of dovetails. So I’d like to make the introduction if you don’t mind. I think you guys would hit it off well. He’s a sweet guy. Okay, sure. I am. I am curious what you thought about Texas summers. Ha. So, I have a theory about Texas summers. So, I went there with quite a number of British people from Oxford.
David Deutsch
Because of a combination of circumstances, it ended up that about 20 of us went at once, ranging from first year graduate students up to professors. And we were a little contingent there. And quite a lot of them, you know, maybe five or six of them, couldn’t take it. It was too hot. They didn’t understand what anyone said. I remember, like the first or second day I was there, I went to the giant cafeteria that they have, that they had down there. And I was sitting at a table with a bunch of people from the physics department and I, being the most junior one, was sent, like we ran out of salt and water on the table. And so they said, go over there and ask the waitress for some salt and some water. So I went over there and said, excuse me, could we have some salt and some water on that table? And she couldn’t understand what I was saying. Because you say salt and water. And she just couldn’t understand me. I said it to her several times, you know, slowly and trying to imitate an American accent. And she still didn’t understand. So she came over with me. And they told her what we wanted. And everybody burst out laughing. To be fair, was she American? Was she Texan? Yeah. Okay. Was she a Texan? She was Texan. I just want to make sure. Okay. Because we have a lot of Hispanic people that work here that maybe somebody you would have asked for salt or water that don’t really necessarily speak a whole lot of English. And to be fair, just to be fair, there’s a wide variety of culture here. But if you could validate that she was a normal, if we want to say that English speaking fluent English speaking person, then yes, that is an interesting story. Yeah. And so anyway, about the heat. I turned up the air conditioning to the max. Electricity was free in those days. In Austin. And then at one time I thought, no, no. This is no way to live. So I switched off the air conditioning. I opened the windows. I switched into a pair of shorts and took my shirt off. And it was, it was, it wasn’t that hot by, you know, by Texas summer standards, but it was going to be nearing 100 degrees. And then I just sat down at the table and went back to my work and everything was fine from then on. I didn’t, I didn’t mind the heat. I like the heat. Good for you. Embrace it. I like it. That’s the only way to do it. Surrender. Right. Well done. Well, cheers mate. We’re glad you made it back. Made it back to Oxford alive though. And thanks for hanging out. I’m glad. I hope Texas treated you well, sir. It treated me very well. I really enjoyed it. I was there for four years on and off. And yeah, I understand it’s very different now. It’s got very technological and you know, companies everywhere. The university was the biggest thing. It was like 43,000 students, you know, with its own bus service and its own police.
David Deutsch
You know, that’s not unusual in America, but it was very unusual for me.
Daniel Bechmann
And what was the year range you were down there? 99, right?
David Deutsch
No, no, much earlier, much earlier. I was there from 78 to 82. Got you. OK. Well, outstanding. Well, thank you. Yeah. Well, Texas welcomes you back anytime you want to come, brother. Thank you. Before we come to an end, there’s one thing that I would like to talk about. First of all, Brendan, thank you for the book suggestion. Deep reality. I’ll look it up and Doug’s great. He’s a dear friend of mine, too. We’ll connect. He’s great. Awesome. Thank you. So, David, in your not well, not only in your book, but you explore topics in physics and cosmology in your book, like I said, including the multiverse theory and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And this is the stuff that makes my brain shut down. This is to me. This is this is the hard stuff. So tell me about it. Tell me about the idea of the multiverse theory and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. What is it about? Well, what it says is, which is maybe not the right place to start about what it’s about. But what it says, the bottom line is that the universe we see around us, you know, this room and outside this room, there’s a city and outside the city, there’s a country. And so we end up going to other galaxies and so on. And all that stuff is just one of those. And actually, there are a very, very large number of them, all kind of coexisting in the same. Can’t say in the same space because space itself is just one of those things. So there’s another space occupying the same. What can I call it? We don’t have the language to describe it, but there’s another space occupying the same space. Yeah. Another me. Sorry. The same layer, maybe. Yeah. Or branch, not frequency, because that already has another meaning. OK, though. But yeah, it’s a bit like frequencies on the radio scale that they all occupy the same space, but they have different information in them. That’s like that. It’s the same. It’s the same as that. Yes. Quite right. And there are actually several different multiverse theories of which I am a proponent of one, the one that comes from quantum theory. I’m very half-hearted about the other ones. They’re not nearly so compelling. Now, how do we know they’re there? Well, you can you can look in my other book, Fabric of Reality. Chapter two is called Shadows, which is about a really amazing fact. But by looking at the fine detail of shadows, like if you have a laser and you shine a laser at a very straight edge, or if you shine the laser at some holes in an opaque card. In fact, that TV documentary where I play the piano, I actually do this experiment in my house with a pocket laser and a card with holes in it, which they made for me because it had to be exactly done. And it all comes down to the fact that you can see that pinpoints of light appear at a certain place on the card and not at others.
Daniel Bechmann
You think, how can that possibly tell us that there are other universes and that there are other copies of me in the other universe?
David Deutsch
Well, it does. You have to follow through the argument. It’s like it’s one of the most amazing things in the world that such an argument can exist that goes from the observation that the light lands here and not there will tell you that there are other universes. But it’s not the only time. When Einstein’s theory was first tested in 1917 by Arthur Eddington, that was the same thing. He had a picture of the solar eclipse and he looked not at the solar eclipse. He looked at the stars near the disk of the sun or the disk of the moon obscuring the sun. And he found that a star was here instead of here. And just a tiny way you could only see the difference with a microscope. And then he had to account for all sorts of possible other reasons that could be like you don’t usually do astronomy in the daytime. So it could be that the photographic emulsion was affected by the heat of the sun and so on. There are all sorts of ways that experiments can go wrong. But you take account of all that and rule it out by other experiments. And then you find that the dot was here and not here. As a result, that showed that space time is curved. So, for example, the angles of a triangle do not add up to 180 degrees. But you can prove the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees on a piece of paper. Yes, but that’s just paper. On paper, the difference between the angles that you measure and the actual angle is too small to measure. But if you take a triangle from the earth to the sun and then out to the to the place where the star light comes in and back to you, that triangle, you can measure that they don’t add up to 180 degrees. And that tells you that space time is curved.
Daniel Bechmann
How on earth can that tell you that space time is curved?
David Deutsch
Well, it can. And it’s not in my book, but that is actually covered in lots of books. I quite like the book by Taylor and Wheeler. Wheeler was my boss in Austin, by the way. Very cool. I’m 100% sure that there were no physicists in the world who knew more than Wheeler. The critics of the multiverse hypothesis argue that it falls outside the realm of empirical testability. Yeah, that’s a mistake. Some of them do. Like the string theory multiverse is not experimentally testable at the moment. But the, well, right, it’s not experimentally testable by any known experimental setup. The quantum multiverse. Well, first of all, any test of quantum theory is a test of the quantum multiverse, because there is no other viable explanation for where those dots fall. So if you want to judge theories by their explanations, which I do, then there is no alternative anyway. But to test it experimentally, you would need a much larger quantum computer than exists at the moment. And I actually first proposed a quantum computer as I didn’t even know it was a quantum computer because I didn’t think of it as that. I proposed it as a piece of experimental apparatus with which one could test the existence of other universes. And I wrote that paper and it was rejected for being philosophy. But then a few years later, when I when I published the quantum computers paper, I also published that paper as well. And now they’re both published and the results are, you know, uncontradicted. And it’s a bit of a scandal, I think, that the quantum mechanical multiverse is not mainstream. Instead, only a minority of physicists accept its existence. And there’s a whole long story to be told there. And it’s not a very creditable story to the physics community, I’m afraid. I mean, working on stuff like that would drive me crazy, I tell you that. So do you do you allow yourself to sometimes think about what is it all about if there’s such a thing as a multiverse or I mean, a typical question is that guys like you are asked is how did it all start? What was before the Big Bang? Stuff like that. I mean, it’s a boring question, I guess, because there is only one answer, I guess.
Daniel Bechmann
But do you allow yourself to fantasize or dream about questions like that? What is it all about?
David Deutsch
Yeah, that is that is how we get to conclusions like this, except that we do more than just fantasize and dream. We criticize the fantasies and dreams. And for every dream that can be made into a viable theory, there are thousands that can’t. So we think maybe it could be this, maybe it could be that. And then you think, hey, I have a way. And then your colleague says, no, that can’t be because of so and so. Then you say, well, maybe we could get around so and so and so on. And really, you say you would go mad. But I don’t think so, because the thing that theoretical physicists are doing is exactly the same thing as what you’re doing staging this interview. You want to know how the world is. And there are many ways to know how the world is. There are also ways of preventing yourself from knowing how the world is. Maybe many more of those. But even that is driven. Even the silliest sort of fantasy, you know, flat earth theories or whatever is driven by the same thing that drives science, which is curiosity and ravenous appetite for understanding what the world is like, what makes it tick and so on. And I think a lot of the paths that lead nowhere are the fault of schools and universities and popular science books, because they present science as a heap of facts, whereas actually science is a heap of problems. And the things that we think are facts, we know they’re going to be superseded eventually. Most of them. I mean, some of them won’t, but we don’t know which those are. Some of the ones that we are most sure of at any given time will be overturned soon. And contrary to popular belief, we science, the scientific community. Well, there are scientists who want to preserve their own ivory tower and resist any change in their favorite theory, but they don’t make progress. The ones who make progress are the ones who want their existing theories to be overturned and work towards that and who like that and also like, by the way, failing to do it, like I said. So those are the ones that make progress. And those ones. And I’m hoping I can count as one of them. Do not find that the others erect barriers against them. I mean, they may they may well say, well, that’s silly. But, you know, you don’t get kicked out of a university for believing the many worlds interpretation. You may get laughed at by some people and then we laugh at them. And so it goes. But nothing much worse than that. Fantastic. Dr. You’re incredible. It’s amazing getting to speak with you and get to hear your perspectives. I love this because your delineation between science with an S and science with a dollar sign is something that’s very crucial to all of us, I think, because they’re, like you said, it’s a burgeoning influence that stops progress. And I think there’s a lot of these horrible stories of people coming up with amazing hydrogen cars that can just run your car off of water and then that getting killed or developing in a university laboratory. But then somebody says, no, no, no, the tenured professor, he’s still got 20 years left at least. And so we can’t release this for a while. So it’s these interesting stifles that really challenge our faith in scientism with a dollar sign.
David Deutsch
Right. But you represent, I think, a great deal of science with an S. And we really appreciate you, sir. You’re doing awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I agree. Keep asking the right questions. Keep that little kid inside satiated. Just remember that little five-year-old version of you, right? That’s all we have to impress, the five-year-old you, 85 year old you. That’s it. That’s me. Well, thanks for everything. And this is awesome. OK, nice meeting you. Thank you.
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