2025-04-02 The Falsifiable Podcast A Woven Web of Guesses with David Deutsch
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Duration: 00:52:59
Transcript
Eric Denton
Hello, everybody. This is the falsifiable podcast. I am your host, Eric Denton. And today we have a very special guest. It is Professor David Deutsch. He is the author of two books, one being the fabric of reality and the other being The Beginning of Infinity. Anybody that’s listening to this podcast currently already knows this. I’m sure both of these books are very inspirational and they’re quite different than any popular science books I’ve read that I can actually think of that are for the general public. And I’m going to ask a couple of questions about these books. But before I do that, are there any shows or movies or books currently inspiring your work right now? And the reason I’m asking this is creativity tends to be inspired by other creativity. Is there something that you’re watching that is sort of juicing you as we speak?
David Deutsch
Not right now. I mean, I have said before that there are certain pinnacles of cinematographic excellence or television excellence that have inspired me in the past, though not specifically. It’s more that I’ve been encouraged that there are people out there who like see things the right way. So one of them is House or House MD, as you call it. And that’s fairly obvious why I like that, because it’s basically about epistemology. It’s about how scientific knowledge is created and how that’s often, well, it’s always fallible and how it’s often counterintuitive. And they get it right on that show again and again. I don’t especially like all the series of it, all the seasons of it. But where it talked about epistemology, I agreed with it. And another one that I particularly liked, which had the same problem that not every season was actually good, but the ones that were good were superb. And that’s Buffy. And that’s for a different reason. Buffy investigates all the nuances of having a universe in which morality is not the same as it is in our universe. I don’t mean the quantum universes. I mean, an entire setup of laws of physics and of the people and different kinds of people and laws of morality and reasoning about this that is different from ours. And they immediately encounter and address the various problems that arise. For example, if it really makes a moral difference, whether someone has a soul or not, or just looks as though they have a soul, you know, they move around and walk and talk and so on, but they don’t have a soul. Is it conceivable that that makes a moral difference to how you should treat them? And this has come up, it’s called the zombie problem by philosophers. And there’s more than one take one can have that seems to make sense. And some of them seem to make sense, but don’t make sense. And so I was a Buffy fan.
Eric Denton
Wow, that’s it’s interesting how both of those shows are so popular. And for some reason, whenever I think of you, David, I would think like, oh, David’s going to have this obscure like show that he watches. And these are really popular shows. But you pinpointed something in them that most people don’t, which is in the one house being epistemology and the other Buffy being this landscape of morality that’s different in other, you know, so that’s that’s a different thing. That’s super fascinating. Does that sort of stuff inspire whenever you’re writing a book, though, does it inspire how you or fiction in general inspire how you write your books?
David Deutsch
Well, it, again, I don’t think inspire is the right word. What that sort of thing does is it gives me a view of the lie of the land, like what people are thinking about this kind of thing. What people find interesting, what they don’t find interesting that I think should be interesting and you know, that sort of thing. I also watch bad documentaries for the same reason. I find them both entertaining and revealing in that they show me what kinds of bad argument are swallowed by many people and why you know, I can guess in each case why I may be wrong. But you know, so that’s another thing to think about. I certainly don’t think that’s an example of being inspired. Is it when you say bad documentary, do you mean something like Fahrenheit 9/11 or something by like Michael Moore? Is that what you mean? I haven’t seen that. No, I mean, documentary series. Oh, OK. On things like the Discovery Channel or whatever really badly misnamed by now. So, you know, things like things like. And supernatural and flying saucers and that kind of thing. I don’t really watch it for the content. It’s more for the way that they put together arguments. And they’re obviously catering to a market, a fan base or whatever you call it. And again, that gives me an idea of. Of. How can I put this? Because presumably that’s not my audience, but it does. It’s not the people. It’s the arguments. It’s the way that the arguments work, the way that bad arguments work.
Eric Denton
That interests me quite a lot. What’s in it? Can you this is kind of hard to do off top of your head, but what’s an example of that? Would you say?
David Deutsch
Oh, yeah, it is hard to do off the top of your head. Let me see. Well, something like. So they want to say a documentary wants to say that something or other is is supernatural or reveals the presence of aliens or past civilizations or, you know, that that kind of thing. So they say. Typical sort of pattern of argument is. Scientists assume that so and so is true. Now that that’s already, you know, technically, technically speaking, that’s that’s a lie. But, you know, where you can say, well, all scientific theories are conjectures. So in that sense, they are assumptions. OK, so I’ll let that one go. And then they say, but here is something, you know, as a strange piece of evidence. Could it be that this was left by the aliens or whatever? Could it be? No, that’s just asking questions. A typical sign of a conspiracy theory. We’re just we’re just asking questions. And then later. A minute later or five minutes later in the same documentary, they are assuming that as a fact. So, and they’re assuming it as evidence of further things they want to allege. And I can see how that works as an argument, because in real life, you know, in rational life, no argument is watertight. They all depend on a friendly going along with the argument. Suspending belief, as Popper says, he says, it’s never rational to believe something, but it’s often rational to suspend belief. So you suspend belief in, you know, whatever you thought, and you and you let them make their best case. And this can be subverted. This can be misused. And I think. I think most people are presented with many bad arguments during their education, and so they have a very low bar for criticizing arguments. And so, you know, when another another thing, another trope that I see a lot is, is that they look as though they’re how can I say this succinctly? They look as though they are a teacher in a science class. And they know that they often have a whiteboard or animations or some examples. And they say, just as just as, you know, I don’t know, every every creature in the forest runs away from a forest fire. So humans run away from ideas which challenge their beliefs. And so you’re thinking, oh, I don’t want to be that kind of human. And so the very openness of people’s thinking can be turned against them and that this can can make people cynical about all arguments and so on. So you see, there’s this I don’t claim to be an expert on this kind of stuff, by the way. I just I mostly watch it for, as I say, grounding myself in the in the lie of the land.
Eric Denton
Right. Yeah, it shows like ancient aliens and stuff. And then they have a scientist that will say something. And then as you say, they’ll stick them in front of a whiteboard with equations on the back. And the average person will look at that and say, well, this is an authority of science right here. And they think of science as an authority. And then they say things like science tells us and use science as like this thing.
David Deutsch
And the root of that of that scam is that this is exactly what teachers in school and university do. They set themselves up as authorities rather than as I and Popper would have it. What they should be doing is saying here is a problem and here are some conjectures that people have made. Now, you know, come at me. What’s wrong with my conjecture? That that’s what a science lesson should be. But it never is.
Eric Denton
There are people that come off as knowing more than they know to the public when they’re iconoclastic, I feel like. It’s when they’re negative about things, which is, you know, if you study Popper, the whole idea is criticizing theories. But again, what you’ve added to that in your books and I’m going to go to a quote of yours in a moment. You’ve added this idea of it’s all about explanatory power. So whenever you present an idea, it’s not just asking questions. You’re asking a question based on a theory that you form, which is because it’s a good explanation that that you have in your head, which is an explanation that’s hard to vary. So then you can test from there. You don’t just ask arbitrary questions, you know. Yes. And as you said a moment ago with like the on these shows, they’ll say something like an alien could have set this here. I’m like, and you would say, well, anybody could have set it there. But that’s not the question. Yes. So that leads me to this right here. This comes from the fabric of reality, which is interesting because a lot of people cite your book, The Beginning of Infinity, far more than The Fabric of Reality, as far as I can tell in the public. And that book, Your Beginning of Infinity, I think just keeps selling more copies as time goes on rather than less. It’s an interesting and to your it’s great phenomenon. But you have a yeah, well, that’s and I and I preach these books to people. I tell them, you know, not as not as an authority, but I but I try to tell them, listen, read this. It will open you up. But you have a quote in here first. It’s in the Roman numeral pages on the preface. It says, Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make far more sense than common sense does. For a person that’s never that doesn’t know anything about you, that is a hard statement to unpack. What do you mean by that?
David Deutsch
Well, so what I meant by that is please read the rest of the book and you’ll see what I mean. Right. So the thing is that common sense, the take on things that we have without necessarily having investigated it or without forming a scientific theory or the theories that that take the takes on things that used to be natural before the advent of science before the scientific revolution. People, people look up at the sky and they saw that the sky was blue in the daytime and black at nighttime and it had but at nighttime, it also had these shining spots, you know, and so what are they? Well, nobody, nobody before quite recent times guessed what they are not even close. They’re like I say in that book, they are spheres of gas, a million kilometers in diameter, powered by nuclear fusion, which, again, was not known about until the 20th century. So nobody, nobody came close so that they had common sense ideas. Well, what could it be? Oh, and they all rotate round in synchrony. They all go rigidly rotating, keeping the same angles and distances towards each other, except a few, the planets. Planets means wanderers. So even in ancient Greek times, it was it was known that the common sense theory can’t be true because what the common sense theory was is that the sky was a sphere surrounding the earth and the stars were lights on that sphere or else holes in the sphere through which light from the outside, you know, from heaven or something was shining. And that is simply refuted by planets. And even though it’s refuted by planets, it’s so common sense that people continue to believe it until like the Middle Ages. So on. So that’s why common sense doesn’t make sense if you look at it close to it closely enough. But our best theories make much more sense than that, because our best theories do not have that kind of mismatch or gap or hole in inconsistency in them. They have had all those inconsistencies repaired and the theory altered again and again and again so that it makes sense. And now it’s almost impossible to look at the sky and find something that even even an amateur interested in astronomy could not explain. Could not explain. You know, with powerful telescopes, we can see things that nobody can explain. But even now, but still the it is far superior than the common sense explanation. And people who aren’t interested in questions like what are the stars really? They still have those same misconceptions, even to this day. That that’s no criticism of them. Nobody has to be interested in everything. And, you know, if it’s as long as long as they don’t try to force this common sense theory onto other people. It’s fine. It’s they’re doing what people ought to be doing. They ought to be trying to find good explanations of things that do interest them.
Eric Denton
Right. And you’re in this book or it’s I think it might be in The Beginning of Infinity. You talk about when right now you’re talking about understanding things in a way that’s much deeper than just knowing facts. You’re talking about how things work. And for the longest time, what you’re describing is induction. You look at the sky and then you think there’s like this complicated series of events that are happening. But where these things go in a circular pattern, everything else behind that’s going in this pattern. And you and you write it out on a thing and like just say that’s the facts. This is how it is. And this explains everything. Where, in fact, that, again, doesn’t make sense if you encapsulate everything like seasons and stuff you have to have there has to be something further. But we don’t see this thing. It has to be created in our minds. And this is what you’ve pointed out in your books and what led me to reading Popper. And I think a lot of people have this experience with you is that this idea of creating something in your brain and foisting it onto and applying that to the world. It’s never perfect, but this is how we know things and understand things. Yes. Yes. And when you were reading Bertrand Russell back in your day and you came to where it just as you say, I’m one of another podcast I heard you. You say you get to Bertrand Russell, you read like the history of Western philosophy and then you get to induction, the problem of induction. Full stop. That’s where it ends right there. And then Popper continues this. What was your experience whenever you got to Popper? Like how when you’re reading his book, which at the time was the political philosophy that he put forth in open society. What about it struck you? I mean, did it take a long time for this to hit you or was it?
David Deutsch
Yeah. Well, no, it hit me as being good immediately. I mean, I only had to read a few pages and I saw the difference in quality, sheer quality of argument, even from Russell. And Russell was pretty good compared with other philosophers. So but you said it ended with induction. My experience was and when I look back on it, I realized that, you know, there’s something serious going on here. My experience was that I saw nothing wrong with the theory of induction. I read Russell explaining it and how and I even read his critique of it. It’s a feature of the theory of induction and of the problem of induction that induction has been in a certain sense has been known to be false. From the time that it was first proposed in ancient Greece. But instead of saying this is the reason why it can’t be right, let’s look for a better theory of how knowledge is created. It was elevated into the problem of induction and philosophers ever since and even to this day have just think of themselves as addressing the problem of induction. And they write a new thing about this great problem and know it’s sort of almost taboo among that school of philosophers to claim to have solved it. And Popper begins one of his books or one of his articles, I forget, with the words, I think I’ve solved a major philosophical problem, the problem of induction. And this causes him to be despised in certain circles because it’s their sacred problem. How dare you solve it? Anyway, he did solve it. And I as in those days, it was hard to get Popper books. You know, I could have ordered books, but I didn’t know which ones to order. And it’s not like today where you can browse them on Amazon. So the first one I bought was was one of his political philosophy books, which didn’t inherently interest me at the time. But already, as I said, already I could see there the huge increase in clarity and philosophical quality in his writing. So it got me sort of interested. And then I understood his also his theory of knowledge. And then I got some of his other books. There was a period when whenever I went somewhere to a to a city or wherever, I would find a bookshop and see if I could find any Popper books. And sometimes I did. And then I bought them. And that was sort of how I got to read more and more Popper randomly. But it took approximately four years from the moment when I realized or when I realized that Popper was good or on the moment when I began to call myself a Popperian to the moment when I actually got it. It took about four years. Because it is counterintuitive. It may be less so now because because other people have taken up trying to explain Popper. And it’s not that, as I keep saying, it’s not that Popper is obscure in his writing.
David Deutsch
It’s just that the ideas themselves are so different from what we are, from what the prevailing philosophy of knowledge is.
Eric Denton
Mm hmm. Just to contrast this, to frame this really quickly. So there was induction. This is even though it wasn’t true and people knew that it wasn’t true all the way from like the ancient Greeks till now. And they even talk about this. David Hume lays it out perfectly where he’s like, this simply isn’t true. And yet I’m going to behave as if it is. Yes. And induction for anybody who’s doesn’t know of this is like where you take a particular instance and then you form a theory off of that, a general theory off of a particular. Instance. What Popper did is he reversed that he puts the cart before the horse. And again, common sense tells you to not put the cart before the horse. But Popper says, no, let’s hypothesize first and then test rather than so basically form, have the theory and then use your senses to test that theory. Yes. Although before you have a theory, you have to have a problem.
David Deutsch
So stage one in the scheme is you have a problem. You know, you want to know something, you’re dissatisfied with what you already know. You think there’s something missing. You think there’s something that must be wrong and so on, something like that. So that some problem, then you form a conjecture. So the problem is first, that doesn’t require observation. I mean, it might come from observation, but typically not. And it’s not it doesn’t come from observation in the sense that you want to generalize that observation. Right. Very often it’s that can’t be. How is it that that might look as though it’s true, but it isn’t true. Like when you’re watching a conjuring trick, what that’s all about is you see something happening and you know it can’t be true. And what you’re conjecturing is, what could really be happening? To make it look as though that thing is true, make it look as though the cup was under one, the ball was under one cup. It’s actually under a different one or actually under none of them or actually there are five balls under the cup and so on. So and only then does it come to testing the theory. Once you have the original theory and a rival theory, original conjecture and a rival conjecture, then you can sometimes test them or at least you can always criticize them. You can criticize your new theory and the old one and see which one solves the problem better.
Eric Denton
Right. And some people would accuse Popper of his theory not being falsifiable, which is confused. This is a confusion that’s really I mean it actually it’s obvious what the problem is with this statement. But because he’s saying something metaphysical, he’s not against metaphysics. He’s not a logical positivist. And what he was putting forth is what he called, I think, a metaphysical research program, which is similar to Darwin’s theory, which is it’s an encapsulating. It’s a framework of how to work. Do you could you elaborate on that at all, David?
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, as you rightly say, the this scheme of Popper’s about testing theories and so on, that applies to science, which is where the theories are about the physical world. And we’re trying to form general theories about the physical world. Now, if you have a theory that’s about something else, say, mathematics or morality or and then there are there are or. Evolution is a case of that, because at least in Darwin’s time, we couldn’t actually observe evolution. Right. Yeah. The evolution, if it happened, happened too long ago to have left any records. So what we do, what we have to do is we can’t proceed with experiment. So we have to. But luckily, the problem isn’t that the problem is with the problem Darwin was solving was. How can this be? How can something so perfectly adapted to performing a certain task have got that way without being designed for it? And that’s the problem he solved. And so this is not the same as. Trying to solve the problem of. Why do elephants exist or not? Not quite why it’s why? Why specifically elephants? Why? Why not an animal with six legs instead of four and so on? So that’s a different question. That’s a question about the history of biology. Not the metaphysics of biology, the philosophy of biology. And that’s really what Darwin solved, although it’s a it’s a philosophical problem that does have its roots in observation. But again, it’s not that we’re trying to say. If you started out with an ancestor of the elephant and put it in the same kind of environment, would it evolve into an elephant after a few million years? That’s not the question. And even if it did, the problem that Darwin solved would still be there. The problem would still be how can that be? How can that happen without design? And so now other problems. Also, philosophical problems. So Popper’s accused of not being scientific. Well, again, same thing. Even if you had a theory of the brain that could predict whether a given brain is going to be like an Einstein or Darwin, that wouldn’t begin to solve the problem of whether it works by induction or not. Or if not, what does it work by? That’s a different question. And it’s a more interesting question in both the epistemology case and in the Darwin case.
Eric Denton
Let’s say you have somebody like Paul Simon or Mozart. It is fascinating that why this person? Why? Why is it that because creativity, I equate regular creativity, artistic creativity with scientific creativity. And why is it that somebody like Einstein? What was it about him? We’ve done stuff like this where we’ve studied his brain. What did we find from that? Absolutely nothing. And but it is curious, though. And I guess and the reason I mentioned it just as a sheer maybe I’m trying to form a theory tacitly that I don’t know of. But it does. I see what you’re pushing against. See if this makes see if this is what you’re pushing against. You’re pushing against this idea that basically an authority, it sort of falls in the camp of authority in a way because it’s like a person that nobody else can attain this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Deutsch
Exactly. Yeah, that is one of the things one of the inevitable consequences of this way of thinking that poisons young people’s minds. Because who is going to think actually think I’m like him? No, as soon as you say you’ve got to be like him, you’re setting up an impossible goal in the wrong direction. So it’s a it’s impossible and B, it’s in the wrong direction.
Eric Denton
You know what? I’m working on a book right now myself about Popper and Darwin. And one of my one of the things actually is this where I’m talking about how biographies don’t matter. But in order to do that, I have to talk about their biography. And it’s like I have to say, listen, the one thing interesting about Darwin, actually, not much, not as much. Popper was precocious as all get out. Darwin was pretty ordinary, almost in every facet, except he had this one idea that extended to every realm almost. And it’s and it’s very curious that he that he had this idea. But it was a very bold conjecture. And where you actually can make predictions and all with this and to this day, it hasn’t been refuted to it remains Darwinian evolution remains the best theory on offer.
David Deutsch
Well, it’s neo Darwinism, neo Darwinism. Yeah. And Darwinism plus genetics. Right. You mentioned Mozart, by the way. So Mozart. Well, I think I understand from a Mozart expert I spoke to that the stereotype of Mozart writing everything down in a pristine way without ever changing anything. That’s just false. He did make lots of mistakes and crossed out and tried different ideas. But nowhere near as much as Beethoven, for example, threw away draft after draft after draft before he hit on what he wanted. And so that there’s Mozart, who’s relatively laid back about the composition process. Beethoven, who agonizes over everything and Brahms is different again. And again, he would get up early every morning, sit down with one cup of coffee after another and just compose and compose and then stop. It was like being on an assembly line for him.
Eric Denton
Right. Oh, you’ve just okay. You’ve just opened this up for me as we’re speaking. It is it is the fact that they these guys, all of the guys we’re talking about right now, whether it’s whether it’s Darwin, Mozart or whoever, it’s that they landed on a problem, which was a gift that kept giving. And that was their whole thing. They had a problem. How what is this composition? I can’t figure it out. It’s never going to be perfect because compositions just come from your head. And, you know, you can take notes, add notes and whatever is the Beethoven’s fifth. It is it is what it is today. He could have added another note, though, that we that we just don’t know about. But for some reason, it landed where it’s at. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn awesome. But it’s because they landed on a problem is what I think it is. That’s exactly right.
David Deutsch
Right. And they I think in the case of those three composers that we mentioned, they no doubt it can each of their works can be improved without limit. But they stopped when they couldn’t think of a way of making it any better. So long as they could keep thinking of ways of making it better, they didn’t stop. And their personalities had to adapt to that necessity. The epistemology is always the same. It’s always Popperian. Right. But how a particular person who is driven to solve some problem, how they make that work in their own life depends on what kind of person they are, but not on the problem or its solution. That’s that their life doesn’t come into that. The Brahms is coffee doesn’t come into judging his music.
Eric Denton
Right. Yeah, that’s that’s a good question. It’s their problem situation that they’ve come upon, which is it’s like the idea that whoever invented, which I don’t know this off top of my head, but whoever invented numbers, they never realized that with those numbers, they were going to create endless problems. And now we have all these problems with numbers. They never knew that these whatever it is, 10 numbers, zero through nine would have would have given us so much to work with, essentially.
David Deutsch
So, yeah, so the number system was invented by the Babylonians. They did have they were interested in abstract problems with numbers and nothing to nothing compared with today. But, you know, they knew Pythagoras’s theorem and they knew about prime numbers and they knew about solving equations and that kind of thing. So they we don’t know who these people were. They didn’t name their discoveries in those days.
Eric Denton
And now here we are today. You got interested in science for whatever reason. Actually, you kind of do land on it in The Beginning of Infinity where you were literally asking yourself, can how people back in the past were so lucky they could understand everything. You know, like, you know, Socrates or whoever became a form could understand everything because there was not as much to understand. And now then you think realize, like, wait a minute, actually, that that would suck to understand everything. It’s better to have an endless, you know, it’s better for everything to be open, which in fact is the case that that learning is we’re never going to land on the truth. And if we did land on the truth, we wouldn’t know that we were on the truth. Yes, the whole thing for sure. Do you think that this kind of brings so that was I say all that just to put a fine point on your biography. Do you find just a transition here speaking of conspiratorial thinking and bad explanations as a user of X or Twitter? I don’t use it anymore. I just couldn’t stomach it as much because of all the bad explanations that were going on is how much of a problem is this nowadays? Do you see it rising or falling or is there is this a legitimate question?
David Deutsch
What do you think? No, it’s a legitimate question. It’s a very interesting question, which and a set of problems that I think need to be solved. I think Twitter has had similar problems ever since it was founded. There’s an inherent tension between the need to moderate. It’s just the tension between toleration and intolerance. You know, Popper says that we have to take the right to be intolerant of intolerance on a discussion forum. It’s perfectly possible for a small proportion of people to completely sabotage every discussion, because if you wake up in the morning and see, you know, your feed on the discussion. And you’ve got 90 abusive replies and three polite ones. Well, what do you do? Well, I have found that block is your friend.
Eric Denton
Right. Yeah. Yeah, that’s hmm. That does go along with Popper’s. Yeah. Tolerant not being tolerant of intolerance. Yes.
David Deutsch
But the problem is not solved. Right. When October 7th, the pogrom happened, I had been reducing my Twitter presence, my X presence, whatever you call it now. Simply because it. It took up more time and intellectual energy than the pleasure of engaging was worth. It’s not that it wasn’t pleasurable to have engaged with random people around the world about random ideas. I think it’s wonderful that we can do that now. And I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the world in which one can’t do that. But I was doing it too much. And then October 7th came along and first of all, there was this torrent of bad ideas. And I contradicted them. Previous to that, by the way, I had blocked maybe half a dozen accounts in my whole time on Twitter, whatever it is. 10 years. And now I started blocking 30, 50 a day. Right. And I couldn’t have gone on like that. But I did find that’s why I say block is your friend. I did find after a while, it went down so that there’s something in the way it works that people there’s this pile on phenomenon that once one person in a certain subculture is posting, then the others will as well. And if that person isn’t posting, then the others also don’t. So now I’m down to blocking maybe one a day, maybe two. And it’s no longer a serious problem. And I feel that I have to stay on because there are things that I know or know how to explain that aren’t explained enough. And so I’m staying on. So I’m now posting just about as often as I did when I decided not to post so much.
Eric Denton
Oh, OK. Yeah. As like a I think you’re right, actually, to sometimes I’ll argue the case that it’s just I think everybody’s every intelligent person should detach. But if we do that, then there’s a couple of theories in mind here. The theory there like I think about but the possible outcome would be that just bad ideas don’t get checked. And then you just have rampant bad ideas, whereas you a good explanation for you to stay on or somebody in your position is that you’ve now amassed quite a bit, quite a big following and to just give away that mouthpiece because of being uncomfortable or something like that. It might you do have to weigh that because we do need rational voices out there. I’ll read your I still look at your posts, but I don’t engage with anything. But I’ll look at yours or somebody like Steven Pinker and just see Richard Landes, who I had on this podcast. I’ll look at what he has to say. And yeah, so I’m glad that those voices are still there. But something I’ve noticed, like with Steven Pinker, is he’s basically taking the comments off. He doesn’t want to get the feedback. He just wants to put which I completely understand that because, you know, when you’re talking some of the ideas that he puts forth, a lot of people actually, I think people think they’re square. Anyways, so yeah, I on that on the October 7th thing I did. I had and this was actually you recommended me talk to him, Richard Landes. I read his book. Can the whole world be wrong? Had him on a very interesting conversation. And he, you know, mentioned the theory, your theory, which is the pattern, which is this idea that there’s this undercurrent of it’s not anti-Semitism. It’s something much deeper than that. It’s the legitimization of hurting Jews for being Jews. Like this idea that you legitimize hurting Jews for being Jews. This is what the pattern is. And it started long ago, thousands of years ago. Yes. And actually, I think I asked Richard what his thoughts were on how why that came about. And he didn’t I don’t know if he had a definitive answer there. What do you have an answer to that?
David Deutsch
I have no idea. I can. Well, I have some ideas which aren’t good enough. Let’s put it that way. But the best idea I’ve heard is from my colleague, Matjaž Leonardis, who is my colleague in theoretical physics. He thought maybe it’s like gold. And when I first saw it’s like gold, what’s he talking about? Well, the thing is, for thousands of years, gold has been used as money. People use it as a medium of exchange, as a store of value and so on. And if wherever society is breaking down or there’s a disaster or something, people go back to gold. They go back to now. Nobody told them to. And if somebody told them to, they wouldn’t obey. They go back to gold only spontaneously. There have been cultures which used silver. And that is like used in a bit of the same way. But gold is the gold standard. Yeah, that’s interesting. So if you ask why gold, why did they use gold? Well, that’s on the face of it is a bit of a mystery because there are other things like silver or diamonds, which have the same property that they are rare, they are hard to destroy, they are easy to check for authenticity, so on, you know, that they are similar to gold in its attributes. So maybe what happened is that once gold had achieved a certain takeoff, momentum, then people in the situation where they’re desperate to have something portable to take their money with them when they’re fleeing from the enemy army or whatever, that they will immediately think of gold because they have heard of people doing this before and they’ve never heard of anyone regretting it. Right. So. It’s possible that the various reasons that have been adduced for why the Jews, you know, like, is it because they are a scapegoat? Is it because they are a weak minority? The endless theories, libraries of books have been written about this, right? Where everyone with a different theory and is it like witchcraft and so on? So according to Matjaž, that’s the wrong way to look at it. Several different groups could have been chosen. They had that they had the right attributes. But the fact that Jews were chosen for some time in antiquity before the time of Jesus, but, you know, not before the time of the Babylonians, so that there were no Jews at that time. Yeah. So at some point, it became a common thing for whatever reason. And from then on, it existed because it existed. So that’s why, as I say, almost anything, any idea or movement or set of errors or whatever that gets sufficiently immoral merges with the pattern.
Eric Denton
That’s so weird.
David Deutsch
Yeah, that is itself a pattern. So it’s a bit like saying whenever conditions in a certain place get bad enough, people look to gold.
Eric Denton
Right. That’s a good that’s a good analogy. Yeah. Wow. Matjaž landed on something with this analogy.
David Deutsch
Yeah, I don’t think it fully works. But as I said, that’s the best. That’s the best theory I’ve heard.
Eric Denton
Hmm. Yeah, I was raised a Christian. Now I don’t believe I mean, for obvious reasons, but I think that bad explanations is why I don’t believe. But you know, it’s funny is my culture in my household. I was always bewildered or baffled by the idea of people hating Jews. And yet it’s so prevalent. It’s the strangest thing I’ve I mean, it’s just it is very odd. And I think you’re right to point out that this is deeper than regular racism because it has this aspect where you’re putting them as the leaders of the world. You’re also putting them beneath everybody. You’re putting them as the enemy. I mean, it just encapsulates so much. It’s very odd in that way. And so, yeah, when and whenever you were, you know, I remember you were posting a lot about this on October or after October 7th. And I can only imagine some of the abuse that was coming your way for defending.
David Deutsch
Yeah. And if it had continued, I definitely would have left X. Right. Fortunately, the block worked.
Eric Denton
Right.
David Deutsch
And Elon Musk changed the block functionality and I was sure it would stop working. I thought that it would stop having this protective effect.
Eric Denton
But it didn’t.
David Deutsch
You know, again, I would have left if it had happened as I thought it would.
Eric Denton
Yeah. Well, glad I’m glad that it’s working out for you in that respect. Yeah. Gosh, well, we’ve come up on our time here, David. I would go down these rabbit holes. We could do it all day long. But man, thank you so much, David, for responding. I’ve been trying to I know you’ve noticed my email pop through at least once every six months. And I was just so happy that we were able to do this today. The Falsifiable podcast probably wouldn’t exist without having read your book, both of your books and going down the rabbit hole of Deutsch. I think in 2013 is whenever I started this journey and I’ve not really looked back since. And it’s just been trying to find good explanations and doing all this kind of stuff. But I’m good. Yeah, absolutely. And I know a lot of people feel the same way. So, again, David Deutsch, thank you for coming on the Falsifiable podcast.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me.
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