2025-05-12 Making Sense #414 - Strange Truths - subscriber version
Duration: 02:18:35
Transcript
Sam Harris
I am here with David Deutsch. David, it’s great to see you again.
David Deutsch
Nice to be here again.
Sam Harris
It’s been a long time. I didn’t actually check to see when our last conversation was, but I think it was probably about five years ago. It has to be.
David Deutsch
Well, is it that long? Yeah. Well, a lot has happened since.
Sam Harris
Yeah. Yeah. History has been eventful. So I’m going to take us on a tour through many topics about which you are well-qualified to have strong opinions. The first will seem intimately related as they relate to science about which you have thought much. But at the end, I want to talk about world events and the explosion of antisemitism we’ve witnessed since October 7th, 2023. I know you’re connected to those topics as well. So you and I have had at least two very long podcast conversations where we dealt with mostly the topics in your second book, The Beginning of Infinity, and then tried to bridge a conversation between that and the foundations of human knowledge, its prospects for the future, and also just how that relates to human values and morality. People can go back and listen to those conversations. We have at least four hours, if not five, on those topics. But here, I realize we’ve neglected to talk, I think, at all about the topic covered in your first book, The Fabric of Reality, which was the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, among other things, and also your more recent work, Constructor Theory, your contributions to quantum computing, and also just how you view the state of that. You and I have spoken about artificial intelligence before, and I’m going to want to just hear about your recent thoughts on that and your experience of the developments in the technology. Then, again, we’ll talk about the tractor beam of a very ugly history that seems to be pulling us all back into the stream of things that would be best left behind us. So let’s talk about quantum mechanics and your favorite interpretation of it, the Many Worlds thesis. What is that?
David Deutsch
So first of all, I’ve long ago gone off calling it an interpretation. I think calling it an interpretation is part of the thing that went wrong with physics in the mid-20th century, where because people didn’t like what quantum theory was saying about reality, they invented, well, I guess it was invented by philosophers, but physicists latched on to this idea that the scientific theory consists of a mathematical formalism which doesn’t have a meaning and then an interpretation which assigns a meaning to each of the mathematical objects. And by definition, then, neither of those by itself is testable. So only the two together are testable. Now, I think that’s… That’s a terrible…
Sam Harris
Actually, David, can I just pass over that ground one more time just to make sure people understand what you’re saying? So you’re saying that it was in fashion for many generations to view quantum mechanics as a calculation device that produced absurdly accurate answers, but the picture of reality that it was giving us was open to many quite discordant interpretations. I mean, they were just completely irreconcilable. They looked like very different pictures of reality, and we were left with physicists kind of picking their favorite interpretation or just declining to do that at all and just go on calculating. And so it was just not clear what picture of reality quantum mechanics was giving us. Is that accurate to say?
David Deutsch
That’s what the consensus view has been and probably still is. But I disagree with that. I think there’s only ever been one interpretation of quantum theory, and it was invented in the 1950s by Schrödinger and then Everett, who developed it properly. And it says, among other things, that the reality described by quantum theory is one of many universes. By universe, I mean the thing we see around us, the thing we see with telescopes. It’s an enormously vast thing. But quantum theory says that the true reality consists of that and many copies of it and a lot more. And we call that the multiverse. And so these interpretations of it, for example, things like nothing exists except what we observe. And therefore, when the calculational tools say that there are many of us observing many instances of the thing, that doesn’t say anything about reality. That’s just a calculational tool. And what really happens is that when we finally observe something, all the various versions of us collapse, as it’s called, and only one of them remains, which is much like the universe of classical physics. My favorite analogy for this is, well, first of all, nowhere else in science does anyone do this. It’s only in quantum theory that one splits the predictive part of the theory and the explanatory part like that. So I like to say that this is exactly like if there was a controversy about whether dinosaurs existed, whether the creationist account of the origin of fossils or the biologists account. And people said, well, they’re just interpretations. I mean, the universe was formed 6,000 years ago and whoever created it, the creator, put fossils into the ground to test our faith or whatever. And so therefore, the idea that there actually were dinosaurs, which no one has ever seen and no one will see, and there’s no evidence that any times before 6,000 years ago existed, because all that evidence is just, according to our theory, artificial. And by the way, we don’t see dinosaurs. People say we see dinosaurs because we see their fossils, but fossils are actually stones. All the dinosaur has disappeared long ago and fossils are just stones which take on the shape of the dinosaur in reality.
Sam Harris
So you’re saying that as scientists, it should matter to us which of these pictures of reality is in fact true and only one of them can be true. And the fact that you can cook up a highly implausible, but nonetheless, unfalsifiable variant does not mean that we should consider it as an equally serious candidate for being true.
David Deutsch
That’s right. In fact, the dinosaur theory, the creationist dinosaur theory is actually much more specific and detailed than the so-called other interpretations of quantum theory because they always have a thing like, and then a miracle occurred, which is a bit like, and then God created it. But the thing is, they are willing to say what God created, whereas the other interpretations of quantum theory do not say that. In fact, they say you’re not allowed to ask what happens between the setting up of a quantum experiment and the viewing the outcome.
Sam Harris
Let’s remind people of just the heart of this controversy because I think people will have heard of specific things like the double slit experiment or the Schrödinger’s cat. Maybe Schrödinger’s cat is the best place to illustrate the variant here. What has been the standard view of the seeming paradoxes here and what has been the temptation to follow Hugh Everett into the many worlds theory?
David Deutsch
By now, I think the standard or prevailing theory is just the shut up and calculate, as you mentioned at the beginning, because people have got really tired and feel vulnerable using things like the collapse interpretation, which has got so many holes in it by now. I think most physicists just say, well, I’m not interested in that. I’m only interested in getting results.
Sam Harris
In the collapse interpretation, again, I just feel like we need to double click on some of these things so that people who haven’t recently read one of your books or another book on physics will follow us. It has long been thought that observation plays a key role in reality becoming what it is at the quantum level. Schrödinger cooked up a thought experiment which I believe sought to illustrate how deeply counterintuitive and perhaps unacceptable the state of affairs was, the idea of the cat in the box waiting to be killed or not based on the decay of some radioisotope. It was then left to the greatest physicists of the time to imagine that their physics was telling them that the cat was neither alive nor dead. It was in some so-called superposition of those two states until one of the physicists opened the box and observed whether it was alive or dead. This begets many questions, but starting there, what is unacceptable to you about that and then what does many worlds tell us is in fact true?
David Deutsch
Right. Well, what’s unacceptable to me and to Schrödinger was that this state, not that this state could exist of half alive and half dead or whatever superposition of alive and dead, but that when you open it, this resolves into one of those two. So what is it that resolves it? Well, being observed. Some people said it’s being conscious of the another. Some people said it’s when the outcome becomes known to the scientific community. And meanwhile, it gets peer reviewed. Yes, exactly. And originally, Niels Bohr, who kind of set off this silliness, said you’re not allowed to ask. That quantum theory does not answer that question of what was happening in between when the state was prepared and when it’s observed. You’re not allowed to answer that. Physicists don’t like that. So they produce these various interpretations that make even less sense than that. By the way, Niels Bohr also said that it’s no good looking for a theory of what happens in between those two times. Quantum theory is a complete theory and therefore what it says can’t be asked, really can’t be asked. It’s something one is not allowed to theorize about. So Einstein and some others couldn’t accept that because they thought that physics in particular was about how the world actually is, not about what we are allowed to say or think. So I’ve forgotten what the question was there.
Sam Harris
So the question is, so if it’s not consciousness that’s collapsing the wave function and resolving this superposition, and one could wonder whether the consciousness of the cat, if it has consciousness, why that would be insufficient. How does many worlds come to the rescue? What is said to be true now?
David Deutsch
Yes. By the way, you have to say the consciousness of the cat does not affect it because in principle we could reconstruct the interference. So long as the wave function hasn’t collapsed, you can restore the initial state and have the cat and the poison not be affected yet. So it has to be something that the experimenter does, somebody who is somehow connected with the laws of physics. Now what happens according to Everett’s Everettian quantum theory is that when we do an experiment, countless numbers of us, or if you like a thick layer of us, a stratum in the multiverse with many identical copies, all of them setting up the experiment and starting the apparatus going, all of those remain identical to each other until they look at the cat. And at that moment, the interaction of the outside world with the cat and with the version of us makes us differentiate into two copies or actually millions of copies, but let’s just say two copies. Where did these copies of us come from? They were already there in the modern interpretation of the, in the modern version of the theory. The way that Everett originally framed it or rather the way that DeWitt originally, Everett himself didn’t have an opinion about this, but DeWitt called it splitting into two. But since then the consensus among Everettian physicists is that the multiple copies are always there. Some of them perform this experiment and from then on we can talk about them, what happens to them. And then that continuum of observers or of experimenters differentiates that they’re no longer identical. The interaction with the cat makes them no longer identical, just as the cat itself is no longer identical across the swath of universes in which it exists. In half of them it is alive, in half of them is dead. When we interact with that, the same thing happens to us. We see alive and we see dead in different universes. So the copies that were already present before the experiment was …
Sam Harris
Performed, these presumably were made in prior splittings based on prior quantum events, correct?
David Deutsch
So there are parts of the multiverse in which we don’t exist at all because the planet that hit the earth billions of years ago destroyed all life.
Sam Harris
Okay, so now this, I must admit this at first glance and perhaps even at second glance seems like the least parsimonious theory ever proffered. And we seem to be, at least we imagine we’re in the parsimony business in science. How is it that this is acceptable? This idea that, I mean, can this be summarized by saying that everything that can happen does happen?
David Deutsch
Well, everything that can happen according to the laws of physics. Right. But like literally, so everything that’s possible, …
Sam Harris
Is it the same as saying that everything that’s possible is in fact actual somewhere?
David Deutsch
Everything that’s possible according to the laws of physics is actual somewhere, but you have to add that most of those things happen in widely differing proportions of the multiverse. So if I toss a coin, roughly 50% of the worlds will see heads, roughly 50% tails, but a few of them will see the coin melt and dribble off the table onto the floor.
Sam Harris
Okay, so this is now kind of amounted to a bit of a sidebar conversation. I’ll get us back to the main topic, but this interests me. So what this does to the notion of possibility is that it conserves it in the sense that, well, there’s no such thing really as possibility. Everything that can happen does happen. It doesn’t happen the same number of times. So there’s kind of like a frequency difference across the multiverse.
David Deutsch
Yes, it turns out that frequency is not good enough to support the notion of probability that we need in physics and in everyday life. And I inaugurated a research program called the Decision Theoretic Approach to Probability in Quantum Theory. Others took that and ran with it, and now we have a really watertight version that’s not based on frequency, but it’s based on what a rational person would do if they thought that there are Everettian universes and that the future is going to differentiate. So it comes to the right answer. So there isn’t any dramatic conclusion from this except that probability works as it was postulated to work from the beginning of quantum theory. But probability in this case is a useful
Sam Harris
Fiction? Yes. Okay, so we’re in a kind of actualist universe. There is only the actual. It just happens a countable number of times, and those number of times are different depending on …
David Deutsch
What we’re talking about. Yes, a measurable number of times, but a countable number of …
Sam Harris
Different times, yes. Okay, well, the nerds can thank us for that little detour. Again, back to this question of parsimony, this just does seem on its face to be multiplying things quite literally way too much to seem plausible. Before we dig into more of the details, what was your psychological, give me your psycho biography with respect to this theory. How long did it take you to accept it? What was that process like, and what do you recommend to those who are hitting stumbling blocks on it?
David Deutsch
Well, I was a graduate student at the time, a first year graduate student, and I’d heard of this theory before. Like you said, I thought it was one of a number of different interpretations that one could use for the formalism. I was just learning the theory, and I was obsessed with physics at the time, not metaphysics. So I didn’t much think about it until, well, two things happened. One is that I met Bryce DeWitt in a pizza place in Oxford, and we were having lunch, and a bunch of us. And I happened to know that DeWitt had been active in promoting Everett’s theory. So I asked him, I forgot what I asked him. It was very kind of him to answer, because he’d probably been asked this question hundreds of times. But I asked him something like, well, if there are many copies of me, which one am I? And he very gently said, well, you are actually all of them, and they are all asking that question. And so he explained it to me. We went into the details of the theory as well. I was going to say mathematical details, but it was the physical details that we went into. And by the end of that conversation, I was convinced. But I was still not very interested in working with- …
Sam Harris
Well, some of you were convinced. There have to be parts of the multiverse where you were not convinced, and you walked away astounded that a fellow Oxfordian could believe such a thing.
David Deutsch
You’re omitting the existence of error correction. And error correction is a very important part. It’s a very fundamental part of human thinking, especially rational thinking. So you might think that there’s a 50-50 chance that I would get up from that table convinced…
Sam Harris
And not convinced.
David Deutsch
Well, not 50-50, but maybe even just one in a million. There’s some universe…
Sam Harris
Where you died, you were struck dead mid-sentence by the power of his words.
David Deutsch
That has got nothing to do with being persuaded and not persuaded. Let’s consider the universes in which I survived. Then I think the ones in which I was not convinced are a tiny, tiny proportion. It’s like if someone wanted to say to me that electrons are actually as massive as bowling balls, and there it’s the other way around. In most universes, he wouldn’t have persuaded me. It would take something like a cosmic ray strike to undo the error correction that would have happened.
Sam Harris
So then what do you make of the failures of error correction, at least on your account, demonstrated by your fellow physicists who don’t accept this theory? Presumably there are people, even contemporaries of DeWitt and Everett, at the time, people who you greatly respect who didn’t know what to make of any of this and certainly weren’t seduced by it or captured by it. I don’t know if Feynman ever said anything about this. Go through the pantheon of great physicists. Is there anyone who you know had all the intellectual tools to grasp this theory, I mean, run through the list? Gell-Mann? You know the list better than…
David Deutsch
Well, John Wheeler, my boss.
Sam Harris
So what explains their non-acceptance of it and who was most stridently opposed to it?
David Deutsch
I’m not an expert on human irrationality and anti-rational fads, but there were a lot of them in the 20th century. There are a lot of different ones now, which maybe we’ll discuss later. But logical positivism had just reached its heyday at the time when people were beginning to argue about what quantum theory means about the world. And the quantum physics community was very small at the time. It was only, I don’t know how many it was, but 30, 50 people, and they all knew each other, and they were all part of a common culture. And that culture was dominated by Niels Bohr. And he, as I said, latched onto these bad philosophies of physics, including logical positivism. He had to change it a bit because he was a physicist after all. But his version came to be called the Copenhagen Interpretation. And these collapse versions, which were invented later, are now erroneously called the Copenhagen Interpretation. So audience, please note that Bohr’s interpretation, the Copenhagen Interpretation, was not the wave function collapse interpretation, just so you know. Anyway, something happened to that little community, a little fad of, I don’t know what it was.
Sam Harris
How would you summarize the central dogma of positivism as it was operating?
David Deutsch
Oh, that the only ideas that make sense are ones that can be confirmed by experiment.
Sam Harris
Right. So it’s quite literally meaningless to propose something for which there isn’t a way of verifying that proposition.
David Deutsch
Yes. So therefore, dinosaurs, for example, wouldn’t exist if they took that view seriously, because nothing can ever confirm that the dinosaurs existed.
Sam Harris
Right. Because we have this alternate theory that God put the fake fossils in the ground, etc.
David Deutsch
Yes. So somehow this got to be a compulsory membership card of the cool kids in fundamental physics. And a few resisted it, like Einstein. And then they started teaching it to their students. And that’s when the disaster set in. Because this thing about you’re not allowed to ask the question, or it’s a bit of bad philosophy. But when it’s applied to teaching students and telling them that they’re not allowed to ask questions, then it’s psychologically devastating. And that continues to this day, although the actual theories that were propagated at the time, as I said, they’re not very popular nowadays. But the attitude that says it’s okay to be a shut up and calculate person, that in physics, in fundamental physics, that that’s okay, is a surviving effect of that initial sociological weirdness and I don’t know what to call it. By the way, I don’t think Bohr intended this. He had this kind of position among the physical community and he had these ideas. I don’t know what he would have said if someone had told him that that idea is still going to be there in 50 years time. He might have said, that’s very disappointing. Or I don’t know what he would …
Sam Harris
Have said. Is there a piece of evolutionary logic that might come to the rescue of the people here who are arguing for a kind of pragmatism and instrumentalism and just willingness to suspend judgment and not grasp at some realistic picture of things? This could be a point we’ve made in other contexts in prior conversations, but from an evolutionary point of view, we being social primates who are leveraging our cerebral cortices in surprising ways and ways for which they could not have evolved, higher mathematics and fundamental physics being among those things, it would stand to reason that if we’re discovering anything fundamental about the nature of the universe, space time, the tiniest constituents of matter, et cetera, time scales that are very vast or very small, that our intuitions which are born of picking up sticks and hitting our neighbors on the head with them and manipulating objects at that scale, our intuitions for what is real and for what is satisfying and what counts as an explanation are bound to be frustrated. To be reasoning like Bohr or any of his students and say, listen, this is never going to make sense. Your attempt to make sense of any of this is bound to be a dead end because we primates, we don’t have the tools to form intuitions about any of this, but we know as a calculating device it works. So that’s got to be good enough. Why doesn’t that silence you on this particular …
David Deutsch
Point? Well, for one thing, this has not happened in other branches of physics and it didn’t happen for relativity either. And I happen to think that relativity is much more counterintuitive, general relativity is much more counterintuitive than quantum theory because although quantum theory has lots of weird counterintuitive features, the one that people get hung up on is this many universes feature. And in the 20th century, many conceptual shocks of that magnitude or greater were accepted by physicists very fast. Relativity, special relativity killed the idea of simultaneity, which is very, very difficult to remove from one’s intuition. I don’t think I can do it. I have to adopt a special hat to realize it. And then general relativity said that there was a beginning of the universe where the universe is, was infinitely dense. And before that there was nothing, not a vacuum, literally nothing. And that was, you know, at first many, many physicists didn’t want to believe that. And Eddington did an experiment that verified the predictions and still some people didn’t want to believe it and so on. And, but very quickly physicists got to believe it when, especially when they were using the machine, the machinery of relativity instrumentally, even though it’s a non sequitur, you know, it might work instrumentally, but not be true. But nevertheless they did. And the same thing happened with statistical mechanics with Boltzmann. He was reviled by the major physicists of the time. He committed suicide. Some people say it was because of that, but they would say that wouldn’t they? But anyway, he was reviled. And just a few years after that, he was not only vindicated, but all physicists in the world started using statistical mechanics the way he wanted it to be used. So Mach and other people who’d said that it was meaningless were just swept away. Only in quantum it swept away into the dustbin of history, you know, or rather their ideas were. I wasn’t aware that Mach was on the wrong side of that debate. Oh yes. He almost dragged Einstein over to the, basically it was by consciously rejecting Mach’s anti-realism that Einstein managed to form the physical intuitions that led him to …
Sam Harris
Relativity. Right. Right. So there are many tempting byways we might go down there because I share your sense that many of those conclusions are deeply counterintuitive. You know, simultaneity not being a thing is near the top of the list, but I’m going to resist. So bring me back to the moment where you understood many worlds to be the most plausible way of capturing the data. Obviously we’re speaking to mostly to non-physicists. You’re speaking to one non-physicist right here. How can you illuminate the steps intellectually here for a non-physicist?
David Deutsch
Can you try your best? It wasn’t, it wasn’t, first of all, it wasn’t the most plausible. It was the only rational way of understanding quantum theory. But at that time I didn’t much care about it because I was interested in other things. It was then when I went to Texas to work with John Wheeler and he was very into consciousness and consciousness collapsing the wave function, but he didn’t like collapsing wave functions. So he wanted to build on Bohr’s philosophical theory. And so I realized that this is contrary to Everett because Everett is strongly realistic. It believes in realism. So I made some arguments to Wheeler.
Sam Harris
I think we should define how you’re using the term realism in that sentence.
David Deutsch
Oh yes. So realism is the philosophical theory that the world exists and may not exist in the way that we see it, but it exists and we can understand it by the methods of observation, theory, criticism, and so on. We can get a better understanding of it. So the polar opposite of realism is solipsism or nihilism where either only I exist or nothing exists.
Sam Harris
Yeah. Or anti-realism as well. Yes. So is there any decisive role for consciousness in this or is that what is that’s what’s helpfully subtracted from this picture?
David Deutsch
Yeah. So there’s no decisive role for consciousness or observation or measurement or any of those.
Sam Harris
So things just happen. Things just happen whether we know about them or not. Correct. Okay. Now that’s deeply, that is quite satisfying to our intuitions, I think. I mean, what was so weird about some of these interpretations of quantum mechanics was the role given to consciousness and the sense that Einstein summarized this with this cartoonish question. You mean to say the moon doesn’t exist? If I’m not looking at it, I’m not sure any fans of Copenhagen signed on the dotted line there, but there is this sense that, yes, clearly we live in a reality that extends beyond what any conscious agent currently knows. And to say that that reality only becomes real by being known somewhere by someone and otherwise it exists in some state that is not real, but yet ready to be realized by an act of consciousness, that does seem like somehow less than satisfying to, I think, most people’s sense of what reality must be in order to be real.
David Deutsch
Yes, indeed. Popper quotes Churchill of all people who, if I can remember the quote, something like, lots of people are more learned than I am about science and so on, but I think the sun is hot, that the sun exists and that it is hot, and if they don’t believe it, they should go there and see. Right. Yes, so what happened next with Wheeler is that he said, well, give me an alternative. He didn’t try to browbeat me into his worldview any more than he had Everett, by the way. He was Everett’s supervisor, PhD supervisor. So he said to me, probably what he said to Everett as well, I want to understand quantum theory and if you think you can do better than Bohr and me, then go ahead and do it. So then I started to seriously study the Everett version of quantum theory and as luck would have it, Bryce DeWitt was there just in the corridor around the corner. And so he told me about various problems with the theory and how he’d changed his mind since he’d written his famous papers about introducing Everettian theory. And the most important problem he said was that he thought that Everett hadn’t dealt with probability properly. It’s what we were talking about earlier. Right. And it’s a very funny psychological thing that may interest you. I would go into his office, I would see him from time to time, like every few days, go into his office, tell him what I’d been thinking about, and he would give me wise advice. And then he would say, you should solve this problem about probability because it’s annoying. And I would say, it doesn’t seem problematic to me. And then he would write up on the blackboard. They had blackboards in those days. And when he’d finished, I would understand what the problem is. And then I would go home. By the time I got home, I couldn’t any longer grok what the problem is. Right. And this happened, I don’t know, three, four, five times. And finally, I still understood the problem when I got home. And then I spent a few weeks and produced the beginning of what became the decision theoretic approach to probability. So what is the, again, back to Wheeler or any other …
Sam Harris
Very smart, competent physicist who didn’t accept this thesis, given your faith, really, in the power of rationality and explanation and how, ineluctably, people are led step by step into a conclusion, sometimes kicking and screaming, but nonetheless led all the way there because these each, the ratchet of reason turns in only one direction. What happened? Why wasn’t Wheeler convinced? And how would you convince a physicist today?
David Deutsch
I think that because the human capacity for explanation is unlimited, so is the human capacity for error. The thing that we have to ask is not how could they be led into such a large error, but how could they not be persuaded to come out of it? That’s the mystery. And I used to think, until quite recently, again, we might get into this when we talk about politics, I used to think until quite recently that this is a function of culture, of the education of children, of scientists, generally the interaction between an individual and the culture. The general worldview contains errors, but that’s not harmful. But it does contain anti-rational strands. That is, strands which are not only false, but which prevent rational thought. Richard Dawkins’ favorite example of this is God. Once you believe that there’s a God who can see everything you think and is going to torture you for eternity if you think that he doesn’t exist, then this is a disincentive to ever thinking about the matter, especially if it’s quite complicated, as it may well be for people who are brought up in a culture where this is deeply entangled with morality and metaphysics and so on. So I thought this is the origin of irrationality, if we can call this thing where reason doesn’t work.
Sam Harris
Is there a simple step that, again, I ask this, feel free to say this just can’t be done, but I’m just wondering, how technical do you have to get with respect to the physics or the relevant math in order to elucidate the step that you think must be taken that the unconvinced are not taking here so as to decide that many worlds is really the only explanation for what we see?
David Deutsch
I think it’s different for different people just on the grounds that there are many more ways of being wrong than right. So different people are attached to different wrong ideas about the world. But I think the thing that has to become important to them in order for them to be easily persuadable of Everett, just like dinosaurs, is to care about reality. Not just to care about what a particular theory will do for you, what it will protect you from, what it will comfort you about and so on, but whether it describes reality or not and to criticize it on those grounds and reject criticism on other grounds. What actually happened? What is actually there? Do you really believe that those fossils were put there 6,000 years ago? If so, what happened when various relationships, why were there various relationships between different kinds of fossil? If it’s because there’s a God playing a trick on us, why only in that narrow area and not in the area of fundamental physics? One could say to a creationist and vice versa. To a physicist, I say, well, why wouldn’t we say about this about creationism? So you have to care about reality. There are many reasons why people make excuses for not caring about reality. Again, there are lots of ways of being wrong, but I think that it’s funneled into that one point. Of course, there are people who are entirely rational in the sense of being able to not only to use the theory, but to make progress in the theory. Some of the people who worked on quantum computers, for example, were followers of Bohr. I must say that there it is a minority. The majority of people who work on quantum computers are Everettians because in quantum computers, you’re dealing with the nitty gritty of what different universes are doing at different times in the computation. It’s very difficult to think that those aren’t really there. They’re just a calculational tool.
Sam Harris
Do you have a sense of how, I’m sure there must have been polls done at the end of various physics conferences of late? How popular is many worlds at this point? What do some of the big names in physics believe? I’m thinking of Frank Wilczek and Ed Witten, and I’m trying to think of their contemporaries. What very smart people whose names will be recognizable to the audience are onside or offside with this particular controversy?
David Deutsch
I don’t know actually. The last time I saw such a poll was at least 10, maybe 20 years ago. Again, when I first realized this strange scandal existed, I was very interested in that number. People did surveys, as you say, at the end of conferences. It was like 10% of people were Everettians and 90% weren’t. 90% adopted some other view. People would say, people would tell me, yes, it’s only 10%, but among the young people, it’s much higher. In the future, and that didn’t happen. My impression is it’s still 10%. Why? Is it because the young people who… It isn’t because the young people who are persuaded by Everett give up physics. That doesn’t happen. There are lots of reasons for giving up physics, but that isn’t one of them. I don’t know. Again, this is a sociological thing, and I’m not really competent to judge.
Sam Harris
In defense of a skeptic, it will seem an unfair move to consider the basis of skepticism on this point a psychological condition rather than born of science, rival scientific insight or interpretation. What’s the most charitable version scientifically of the argument against many worlds? Let’s say I could make a phone call, and I could hear that Ed Witten did not believe this interpretation. What’s he most likely to say
David Deutsch
When asked why? Well, I’m the wrong person to ask. First of all, I don’t actually psychologize on this matter as an argument. I only put forward the psychological theory because you asked why aren’t people persuadable. Many people are persuadable. I could name drop as well. I could say Hawking. Similarly, being charitable is also not to the point. That is also an ad hominem type theory. I’m most comfortable talking about what is true or not true, what is a good argument or a bad argument, not why people believe strange things. Is that Michael Shermer’s book’s name? I don’t know. As I told you, I had a theory, or one small theory, and I no longer believe it. Why people believe weird things. Is it why people believe weird things? Now I forget. Now the title is in a superposition
Sam Harris
In my brain. We’ll resolve it eventually. Let’s move on to constructor theory. What is constructor theory? I know you’ve been spending more time on that.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Constructor theory is a new mode of explanation in fundamental physics that I proposed and now advocate. Although the theory as I first proposed it is now so changed that I don’t know who really proposed what we have now, me and some colleagues. What’s a mode of explanation? Well, a mode of explanation in science, if it’s good science, it begins with realism. It says the problem facing us is what is there in reality? How does reality behave and why and what accounts for our experience of it, which is only a tiny sliver of reality. But if we get that wrong, then the whole assertion about reality can’t be right. So it begins there and then the current prevailing mode in physics is to say that what counts as an explanation in physics is a set of laws of motion and a set of claims about what kind of particles and fields exist in nature. And then the claim that those particles and fields are obey those laws of motion. And also for the big bang, we want some initial conditions that these particles obey because for the big bang, we can’t explain it using the laws of motion because there was no motion before it. So we have to have a set of initial conditions, a set of kind of objects that we’re talking about and laws of motion. Now, constructor theory is just a different mode of explanation. It never talks about initial conditions and laws of motion are more an emergent property of the thing that it’s really about is what can be caused to happen and what can’t be. So we can’t take something that isn’t moving at the speed of light and move it faster than the speed of light. So that’s an example of an impossible task. Whereas moving it at 10 miles an hour, that’s usually a possible task. So if you think about the set of all conceivable tasks, if you divide those into the possible and the impossible, then you will have stated the laws of physics, the laws of motion and the initial condition. Although in both cases, it might be intractably difficult to work out, let’s say, what laws of motion cause there to be universal computers in the distant future. So there are some that allow it and some that don’t. If the constructor theoretic law says there will be universal computers, sorry, sorry, it doesn’t say that. It can be. Yes, it is possible to cause matter to form itself into universal computers. Then that has an implication for the initial conditions or implications, most of which are intractable to work out. So …
Sam Harris
Just to be clear, is this an ontological proposal or is it a methodological proposal? I mean, are you talking about a new way of thinking about physics in terms of making claims about what is real rather than a …
David Deutsch
New way of just simply describing old physics? Yes, it’s the former. You could call it a new ontology or a new mode of expressing ontology, which includes both actual, factual and counterfactual statements, and it treats them uniformly. We would like to know which of them are factual, but we can only ever find that out approximately. They are emergent properties. Which are the factual things that can only follow from this dichotomy between possible and impossible tasks? This sounds far-fetched at first, but note that we already have that theory about the final state of the universe. Just imagine for the moment that the universe is going to last only a finite time like people used to think, that there’s a big bang and a big crunch. It’s easier to think of that rather than the infinite future. But there’s something very odd about the fact that the prevailing conception, the initial conditions plus laws of motion way of setting up theories in physics, it’s a bit odd that that treats the initial conditions and the final conditions totally asymmetrically. Initial conditions are supposed to be subject to some kind of statement about what they are, and the final conditions are supposed to be completely unknowable because they depend on the future growth of knowledge, as I would say, among other things. But we don’t care about the fact that we don’t know the final conditions. Hawking and also Penrose both produced theories which treat the initial conditions and the final conditions uniformly. They are extremely counterintuitive theories and didn’t really succeed.
Sam Harris
Wouldn’t they be uniform in the case of a big crunch? Wouldn’t we just reach another singularity?
David Deutsch
No, because there’s an infinite number of things that the big crunch could be like. Frank Tipler, for example, thought that the big crunch would be an infinite amount of knowledge
Sam Harris
Creation. Yeah. And didn’t that have some Christian overtones?
David Deutsch
Later, he added Christian overtones. But that just goes to show how diverse it is. The big crunch is nothing like the big bang. The big bang is simple, and we can hope to understand it using simple laws like it’s homogeneous in space. Turns out that that’s not enough. We need more. But for the big crunch, we need a vast amount of information, much more than the universe can hold to specify what the big crunch even had. Even in its final moment? Yes, because you might think, well, the entropy is very large and it’s very hot and so on. But just as there are many more ways of being wrong than right, so there are many more ways of being hot than cold. Basically, there are a few ways of being cold, but there are very many ways of being hot. So just saying the big crunch is going to be hot doesn’t specify anywhere near enough about it. So none of that arises in constructor theory. Among other things, it’s entirely local. Anything far away or in space or time is emergent. The law doesn’t specify it. The law about possible and impossible determines it emergently. What is a constructor on this account? When I say we’re making laws of the form that distinguishing between what can be caused to happen and what can’t be caused to happen, this cause to happen is being done by something other than the thing we’re talking about. So when I said we can’t make a thing go faster than light, I’m saying there is no thing such that when you apply it to an object, it will make it go faster than light. So that’s a statement about all the things in the universe. None of them are a constructor for making something going faster than light. Not only none of the ones that are now in the universe, but none of the ones that could be …
Sam Harris
Made. Isn’t that statement fungible with a statement from the old physics that would just say there is no law such that an object can be made to go faster than the speed of light?
David Deutsch
Yes, but that doesn’t specify anything because when you’re specifying things in the initial conditions plus laws of motion thing, you have to say what the initial conditions are. So you can say the initial conditions are such that there isn’t a black hole heading towards us or that when we break an egg, it won’t form itself back into an egg. So you have to say something about the laws. By the way, thermodynamics is another branch of physics that is already very much in constructor theory form because when we say that that never happens to eggs, we’re saying that nothing in the world could cause that egg to reform. And that includes things that we don’t know about yet.
Sam Harris
Is that actually true from the point of view of QM? I thought quantum mechanics said that in some very small number of universes, the egg does reform. Yes, but there are …
David Deutsch
No universes in which it can be made to reform. So if it reforms in a small number of the universes in which you do a thing, that doesn’t count as having caused it to happen. Having caused it to happen means that it will happen in arbitrarily large proportion of the worlds in which you do …
Sam Harris
The thing. Right. So what causes it to happen in the cases where it does happen in those …
David Deutsch
Vanishingly small number of universes? Those aren’t universes. So this is a different issue.
Sam Harris
What are they? And where do I get those eggs? How much do those cost now once tariffs have been imposed?
David Deutsch
So when we say I can cause a thing to happen, like I can cause the water to boil and the egg to boil, what I mean is I can have a machine, namely my stove and a pan of water and so on, which if I treat it in a certain way in a large proportion of the universes until the future of that, it will boil or do whatever I said was possible. The universes in which that doesn’t happen are… So a universe, by the way, is a thing that is causally autonomous. So that’s why we have classical physics because it’s almost causally autonomous. So we don’t see quantum mechanical phenomena on a large scale because the multiverse is roughly partitioned into these causally autonomous channels, which are universes rather like the universes of classical physics. There are other things in the multiverse as well, which are not causally autonomous. So in the causally autonomous ones, when the thing is done, we can say, ah, that egg boiled because it was put on the stove, because there was hot water there and so on. We can give an account which is entirely confined to the universe in which that happened. In the universe, so called, or in the parts of the multiverse, shall we say, where the universe didn’t boil because the egg decided it didn’t want to be boiled and hopped out of the water, those parts of the multiverse are not explicable in their own terms because to understand them, you have to understand that there were many other parts of the multiverse where that didn’t happen. It’s rather like winning the lottery. If you win the lottery, you might say, why me? But there’s an answer to that. It’s because there are a million other people and it had to be someone. If it weren’t for those million other people and you just got one lottery ticket and you won the lottery, no, actually that doesn’t work, does it? Anyway, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, no. To explain why you won requires-
Sam Harris
If I told you it was a billion to one and you’re the winner, the why me question is pressing. Exactly. But in the case where you have this strange behavior, this non-classical behavior predicted by quantum mechanics, what on this, feel free to invoke constructor theory or many worlds here or both, what is the explanation for that behavior that is non-classical? Like the egg that was boiled suddenly becomes no longer boiled or the egg that was broken puts itself back together.
David Deutsch
Well, so in quantum theory, we would say when you speak of the water, for example, being at 100 degrees, that’s an approximation. The water has a range of temperatures across the multiverse, which is peaked at 100 degrees once it’s boiling, but which has a long tail and which goes out from all temperatures from absolute zero up to whatever the temperature that would cause us to form a black hole instantly is. So a huge range. And all those things exist, in the multiverse. So if we ever found an egg that did jump out of the pot, well, actually, the most likely explanation is still that something was happening, like someone’s playing a trick on you or whatever. But let’s, you asked about-
Sam Harris
Well, actually, can you put it in terms of, and this actually goes to another question I have for you, the relation of information to all of this and entropy and whether constructor theory says anything new about that. And so entropy is part of this picture. So you have an egg, let’s forget about boiling for the moment, you drop it, it breaks. Isn’t it a prediction of quantum mechanics that there’s a possibility, if not, albeit an infinitesimal one, that that egg could sort of reassemble itself spontaneously? And if that remains possible in the many worlds interpretation, what accounts for that possibility where that is realized in a world that is suddenly behaving non-classically?
David Deutsch
So what accounts for that is presumably that the air molecules happen by chance to form themselves into such a configuration that they lift up the egg and reassemble it. So the question then would be, why did the air molecules do that? And the answer is because most air molecules in the …
Sam Harris
Multiverse did not do that. Right. This is a lottery. You won the lottery here of egg assembly…
David Deutsch
Air molecules. Whereas if we take the normal behavior of the egg, you don’t need to invoke the other universes or the rest of the multiverse. There is an explanation that is almost entirely confined to a thing that is behaving almost classically. So again, this restores a …
Sam Harris
Deterministic universe to us. So we’re no longer dealing in probabilities, we’re dealing in everything that can happen does happen somewhere in different amounts. And then, okay. So where does information come in here to the picture? How do you think about information in light of …
David Deutsch
Constructor theory or many worlds? Well, to our surprise, to my surprise and to Chiara’s surprise, we worked on this together, Chiara Marletto, Constructor Theory of Information was the first application of Constructor Theory that worked out and produced results. So we have a theory of information entirely in terms of possible and impossible tasks, which not only defines information as it has been defined in the work of Shannon and so on, but which has, which equally applies to quantum information. So it accounts for things like entanglement and channel capacity doubling and all those kinds of things, which until recently, and I think for most physicists even today, unfortunately, they think of quantum information theory as classical information theory plus a few weird effects that they can’t explain, but they know what the equations say. So in the Constructor Theory of Information, which is very compatible with quantum theory, with Everettian quantum theory, although we don’t need it for this particular application, these properties of quantum information are entirely uniform. You can write down definitions of information that apply to classical and quantum information at the same time. And interestingly, there are various things, unexpected things that came out of that. Like for example, quantum computation is, intuitively speaking, it’s a way of processing information that has additional power compared with classical information. Constructor Theory of Information shows that this additional power is due to a class of possible computations on the variables that are forbidden by quantum theory. So by forbidding certain computations, it enables new types of computation to exist. And a simple way of seeing that is that quantum cryptography is, so classical cryptography is always crackable in principle. If you had a lot of ciphertext, you can do statistical tests on the results and eventually, if you had an unlimited amount of computer power, you can always crack any classical computational system. That’s true. That’s actually practically true. Or is there …
Sam Harris
Enough time and compute in the universe to do that for any classical cryptography?
David Deutsch
Well, I’m not an expert on cryptography. But the trouble is, or one trouble is, that although there are definitely cryptographic protocols that would take the age of the universe to crack classically, we don’t know which they are. All the trapdoor functions and the functions that are currently used to make codes that are uncrackable in practice, they haven’t been proved to be uncrackable in practice. So somebody could win the Fields Medal by inventing a new method of factorizing large integers. And that could render obsolete some cryptographic systems. In quantum theory, with quantum cryptography, there is an absolute bar on cracking a quantum cryptographic system. So if you wanted to crack it, you would have to not just win the Fields Medal, you’d have to win the Nobel Prize because you’d have had to prove quantum theory false. And you’re saying that constructor theory anticipates that? Well, it explains it. Yes, it explains it. Again, this was known. It’s well known. It’s one of the things that people like about quantum cryptography. But quantum cryptography, in the conventional way of looking at it, is a thing that’s just tacked on. Oh, yes, quantum theory doesn’t let you do that. Great. It allows you to detect an eavesdropper. Well, amazing. No classical cryptographic system allows you to detect an eavesdropper who doesn’t perturb your system. So quantum cryptography does. So we all know that.
Sam Harris
But why that happens? Can you say more about that? Again, let me know if I’m pushing into a thicket of technicalities that would be uninterpretable to 99% of the audience. But …
David Deutsch
How is it that we can detect an eavesdropper in quantum terms? So there’s this in the constructor theory of information and also with hindsight in the quantum theory of information, there is quantum information which is inaccessible to locally, as we say, it’s inaccessible for anyone doing an experiment on only that thing. There is information in the thing that can’t be extracted. It can only be extracted if you have access to another thing, which in cryptography is the key, which the other end has. And an eavesdropper doesn’t have it. What’s more, if they just randomly look at the key, they spoil the quantum interference that’s inside the object. And the amazing thing is that this quantum interference is inside objects like photons and so on, which don’t interfere. They’re decoherent. They can’t be used for computations other than cryptography.
Sam Harris
Is this an example of observations suddenly rearing its head again and playing a mystical role in the proceedings?
David Deutsch
Well, obviously cryptography is a science in which the meaning of messages and the sender and receiver of the messages and the eavesdropper have to be characters that appear in the story. But their attempts to crack the code and so on are interpreted in terms of interactions that they can have with the various objects. So there’s nothing subjective about it.
Sam Harris
So perhaps we should back up for a second. Now I think we’re talking about quantum computing. How is quantum computing different from classical computing and how does it map on to a many worlds picture?
David Deutsch
So the very simplest quantum interference experiment is a two-slit experiment or something. You aim a single photon at a pair of slits and you have the photon be wide enough to cover the two slits. It goes through the two slits and at the other end it may arrive at some places and cannot arrive at other places. If you send in lots of them, you then build up a pattern. But the pattern is already there when you just send one of them because you can predict that it will not arrive at some places and it will arrive. It can arrive at other places. Now the amazing thing is that if you then open another slit, then you get a different pattern. I like doing this with holes rather than slits because you see that the pattern on the screen is totally different from the pattern of holes. So you open another slit or make another hole, open another hole, and there are places on the screen where having opened another hole, now the photon never lands. You’ve opened more paths for the photon to potentially go down and by opening the hole, it has prevented it from ever going to certain places. Now that’s easy to explain if you’ve got lots of photons because it means that they interfere with each other. But if you only have one photon at a time going through, then what is preventing it from getting to that place on the screen just because you’ve opened another hole? It means that the photon can’t just be going through one of the holes. It must be going through both of them or all three of them or all googol of them. So that is explained in the Everett interpretation, sorry, Everett in quantum mechanics. I mustn’t say interpretation. In regard to computation, think of it this way. This is where I first thought of it actually. What would happen if you put in a little quantum gate in each of the holes? Then one of them flips it, turns it from zero to one, one half flips it, turns it at 90 degrees and so on. What happens at the other end? You can’t do that in real life. It’s too difficult to do with photons. But theoretically speaking, if you could do that with photons, the pattern that you would see at the other end would again depend in a very complicated way on both the holes and on what you put in the holes to do things to the photon on its way through. If those were computational elements, then the result would depend on all three of them. In other words, it would be a parallel computation with three, let’s say, parallel computations going on at the same time, but performed by the same photon. So just one photon went through, it performed these different computations in different universes, then they came together and produced the same output, like whether the screen is dark or bright at that point, that depends on all three things. That’s a parallel computation performed by a single photon.
David Deutsch
Now for that, you actually have to put the three different things in, which means that you haven’t gained anything. You have to put the gates or whatever it was into the holes. So you’ve made room for three parallel computations, even though one photon is enough to set them all off. But if you now think of not having the different computations performed by the photon caused by passing through three different holes, but instead have, let’s say, an electron and an electric field does things to the electron and to the neighboring electron and to the one. If you have two electrons, it’s doing four things. If you have three electrons, it’s doing eight things and so on. You have n electrons, it’s doing two to the n things. They can all be caused to do them by a burst of laser light that puts them all into quantum states. They then do their computation. Another burst of laser light makes them all produce the same answer in the output. They’ve done two to the n computations, two to the n sub computations, which combine to form the answer that you wanted. Now two to the n can be very, very large, or at least once they’ve perfected actually building one of these, it will
Sam Harris
Be very, very large. So where are they? What has been built to your knowledge to date and what …
David Deutsch
Principles of? I don’t know. I’m not an experimental physicist. And to me…
Sam Harris
But there are quantum computers of some size, right? And I mean, they’re constrained by temperature and they’re not
David Deutsch
Practical. But people argue about this. The question is how general are the programs that… Suppose you had a thing with 50 qubits. In principle, that can do two to the 50 computations, which is enormous. But the trouble is how well can you control this laser pulse or whatever you’re causing them, however you’re programming them? Can you really reach all the 50? So you have to prepare them with 50 different pulses or one pulse doing 50 different things. How well can you control that so that it can cause any quantum program? So I’m not competent to judge that. But another colleague of mine, Mario Villaris, has made a series of YouTube videos about quantum computation, which are excellent. So I recommend them to you and your audience.
Sam Harris
So is the jury still out on whether quantum computation is ever going to be practically possible? Or I mean, we might be up against some laws of physics that just rule it out as ever being something
David Deutsch
We can implement. Yes. I think we can confidently say that unless there is a law of physics that we don’t know about, it can be done. It can be done. Yes. But of course, we can’t prove that there isn’t a law of physics that we don’t know about. Right. But we haven’t yet done enough
Sam Harris
To answer that question in terms of the applied physics of it.
David Deutsch
That’s right. We haven’t. It’s like, I don’t know, at the time of the Wright brothers, you could say, well, it’s definitely possible to build an airplane that can cross the Atlantic.
Sam Harris
Right. I think famously, one of them said to the other, I think something like two months or a year before they actually flew that it’s going to take a thousand years for humanity to get in the air.
David Deutsch
But again, it didn’t require new laws of physics. They knew that with the laws of physics that they knew they could build airplanes. Right. If you’d said to them, what if there’s a law of physics that says that nothing can travel faster than 100 miles an hour? Well, then all bets are off.
Sam Harris
Okay. So let’s now pivot into AI in its current form. What are your thoughts about AI as we’ve come to know it in the last couple of years?
David Deutsch
Yeah. Well, I must say at the outset that I think that AI and AGI, artificial general intelligence, are two very different things, almost opposites of each other. The thing that’s been making spectacular progress is AI. And I’m amazed at what it can do and at how fast it’s been improving. Yeah. I don’t think it is a sign that AGI is imminent, but people say to me, well, if you’re amazed at how well AI is doing, how do you know that it’s not heading towards AGI? Well, that’s rather like saying, how do you know that the Wright brothers were not on the brink of inventing a mole machine that can burrow its way through the center of the earth? To me, in my way of looking at these things, at computation and at thinking and knowledge creation, those are just different kinds of things which will require fundamentally different technology, much more different than a flying machine and a mole machine.
Sam Harris
So you don’t think the current path they’re on using the LLMs is even in the limit a way of generating general intelligence?
David Deutsch
Correct. I’m sure that it isn’t.
Sam Harris
Why do you say that given that you’ve been surprised by the products of these narrow intelligences?
David Deutsch
Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from things that surprise me. I’ve been surprised by a lot of things that happen and a lot of things that I would have been surprised by haven’t happened. So it doesn’t tell you much. But I mean, the reason I think it won’t work is that it is, as I said, in many ways, it’s the opposite of the technology that would be needed to make an AGI. I always describe this in terms, maybe a bit old fashioned now, but in terms of chess playing engines. But the same holds for LLMs. We’ve got an amazing LLM, but it’s annoying because it has these hallucinations. So the companies that make it tweak it to reduce the number of hallucinations and reduce the severity of hallucinations. Now that means that in the possible search space that the LLM-based AI is exploring, there were some that were undesirable to the users and they have found a clever way of chopping those off. And I used to say, with chess playing programs, the reason that they work and don’t take the age of the universe to calculate what will happen in the chess position is that they have ingenious ways of preventing it from exploring part of the search tree, where you have a heuristic that says that part of the search tree is not worth exploring, or at least not worth exploring first. And so the way to make a better AI, LLM-based AI, or a better chess engine is to reduce its options, to reduce the number of possible things that it could think as it were. Whereas for an AGI, the difficulty is how to make it so that there is no possible avenue of thought that is closed to it. There might be avenues of thought that it doesn’t bother to follow and so on. But the point about an AGI…
Sam Harris
Haven’t we been, in so many words, discussing the abundant evidence that the human brain functions under just such constraints that we’re talking about even trained physicists who, for whatever reason, are showing their inability to think certain thoughts to the end?
David Deutsch
Well, you’re making my point. So to be an AGI, among other things, an AGI must be capable of stubbornly sticking to bad theories. It must be capable of not doing so, but it must also be …
Sam Harris
Capable of doing so. But isn’t that, I think this is what we’re seeing to some degree in these LLMs, right? Clearly people are capable of flagrant irrationality and incoherence, i.e. what we’re calling hallucinations on the part of LLMs. And they’re capable of reconciling those when they’re pointed out as LLMs are, or they’re capable of denying the contradiction as not being real, even though it is real. I mean, they were capable of a multitude of errors as LLMs are. I mean, some of the ones, what’s surprising about the hallucinations we see from LLMs is that if we anthropomorphize them, if we imagine having access to that amount of knowledge and having just said the thing that demonstrated the kind of near omniscience of certain facts, the kinds of errors they make, we feel, are not the kinds of errors that would be open to us at that point, right? Like if you know everything about U.S. presidents, it shouldn’t be possible for you to say that George Washington wasn’t a U.S. president or something like that, that obviously contradicts the totality of your knowledge. But there are surprising moments of …
David Deutsch
Incoherence like that. For example, if you knew everything that was known about physics in 1900, as for example, Michelson did, and one of the things you’d be most sure of is that there is such a thing as a force of gravity. You might not be absolutely sure that it’s an inverse square law, but you would say it’s bound to be very close to an inverse square law because it gives such fantastically accurate predictions. And a few years later, Einstein, who also knew a lot of physics, contradicted that and said that there is no force of gravity. Everything we thought we knew about the force of gravity is explained in some other way. And this new way is not in the existing body of knowledge. It doesn’t come from either experiment or from existing knowledge. It comes from a problem. The problem was first, for special relativity, how do you reconcile the way that electromagnetic waves behave with Euclidean geometry? And the special relativity was the solution to that problem. They seemed to contradict each other. And with gravity, it was even worse because there it was, how do you reconcile the existence of gravity with special relativity? And the answer was general relativity. So in both those cases, not the whole of physics, but the whole of existing physics as applied to that question, namely, how does gravity behave or how does geometry behave? In order to solve that problem, you had to contradict everything that was known. LLMs can’t do that. I have asked them. Not that that’s a good test, but I’ve tried to train a ChatGPT to form new conjectures that don’t just regurgitate existing theories. And I’ve told it to form a new conjecture about a thing, and nevermind how bad it is, just form one that’s different from everything that’s gone before. So it does that. I don’t know whether it’s really different, but then I say, now form a criticism of that, why it is wrong. So it does that. I can tell that it did that correctly. And I can say, now form a conjecture that hasn’t been said before, which contradicts your improved version and so on. So I can’t tell how well it’s the more further down the line I go, the less it is possible to detect whether it’s being original. But then this is the thing that persuaded me that they’re not yet. I said, okay, now you see that we’ve gone through a certain cycle of conjecture and criticism under certain conditions that I laid down. I’m not going to ask you to do that again. I’m asking you to do that again 10 times and then just tell me the output of the last one. And what it did was, of course, I shouldn’t have been so silly. It just gave me another one. And as if I had asked it to ask for one iteration. I can detail far more elementary errors produced by …
Sam Harris
My interactions with LLMs than that. You’re subjecting the LLM to some kind of Popperian torture that no human grad student could survive either, I would point out.
David Deutsch
Oh, yeah, they could. If it was something they were interested in, they could do that all right.
Sam Harris
They’d have to go away. It would certainly take more time, presumably. Yes. But yeah, there are glitches that should seem impossible. This is far simpler, but I’ve asked ChatGPT, give me 10 points on this topic, but use only the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post as your sources. And then it says, sure, I will do this and using all of these as my sources. And then it responds with answers sourced to MSNBC and CNN. And when the error is pointed out, it apologizes and still keeps screwing up, right? So there are major glitches here, but it sounds like your skepticism is born of just not having received a satisfying answer. Presumably, if you do receive it… So there are two ways your skepticism could be formed here, or at least two. One is, you’re interacting with these machines and not being satisfied that they’re doing anything at bottom creative or general.
David Deutsch
Yeah, no, I already knew that. That’s not what I was testing.
Sam Harris
But two, you just think that the actual processes that are delivering us this performance of intelligence can’t possibly give us something general or something creative based on that analysis of just what the machines are doing.
David Deutsch
Yes, knowing how they work. And what I was doing is checking how they work. In other words, they work by producing a likely continuation or something very sophisticated version of that. And that’s what it was doing. And of course, it’s not going to waste 10 times the amount of compute that it’s got just to comply with my command when it can guess what 10 times would look like. I could ask it for 100 times. I could ask it for a million times. It would still answer, I guess.
Sam Harris
Right. And what persuades you that in the limit, we’re not going to be able to brute force our way based on this kind of platform into general intelligence that satisfies all the criteria we would put to it being general?
David Deutsch
I can’t rule it out. For example, it could be that although making it better and better at obeying commands in this sense narrows its options, you can always expand its options again by asking it to be random about a certain thing. So you can ask it to be random, which again expands its options. It didn’t think of it by going outside the box in one direction, but staying inside the box when you ask it to be random could give the same answer as going outside the box. Now, I don’t think that’s possible. That is rather like asking to simulate the evolution of intelligence on a computer. I don’t think we can even simulate the evolution of a grasshopper on a computer yet because there’s something about evolution that we don’t understand either. But I would guess that that will come long, not well, I don’t know how long. Let me not prophesy. The way that I see the logic of this problem is that if you could program artificial general intelligence, you would easily be able to program Darwinian evolution. And we can’t. We program something that looks a bit like evolution, but it’s not open-ended. It stops when it’s either met the criterion that we are looking for or comes so close that it’s very, very unlikely it’s going to improve further. So real evolution is open-ended. It keeps going after it solves the problem, it solves the next one.
Sam Harris
Right. Well, so the last time we spoke about AI, you were quite sanguine that the so-called alignment problem that many of us have been worrying about was really a non-issue. The analogy you used at the time, perhaps this was one among many, but the one that sticks in my memory was the analogy to human teenagers. We don’t really have an alignment problem with teenagers, or if we do, it is superable by conversation. And we have enough time and we have enough memory resources by which to converge with their cognitive horizons. And we don’t have an intelligence explosion or any other explosion generally with our teenagers. Do you still feel that way about AI?
David Deutsch
Yes. I still think that’s a very good analogy. But that analogy contains a hidden explosive. Namely, it’s not unknown for teenagers to grow up into tyrannical dictators who destroy things. And at the present state of culture, the same is going to be true of AIs. You asked me last time whether the fact that they will be able to think much faster than humans will make it more difficult to acculturate them. I don’t think so, because as I said then, the things that make them faster are not the things that provide the G in AGI. The thing that provides the G in AGI is bound to be simple, because we know it is simple in humans, because we only differ slightly from chimpanzees. So the program, although there’s a huge amount of culture added to the hardware in humans, the thing that is causing the generality must be a relatively simple program, only a few K or only a few tens of K. And therefore, when it comes to catching up with the AGI offspring, you have to imagine them also having only a small program which is using a vast amount of computer power. That’s like a human having a computer on the desktop. Also, when you do mental arithmetic, you’re not using the G part of your mental makeup. You’re using the dumb computation part. You’re harnessing your brain to do something that’s not really human at all. So we can offload that kind of task to computers, and we already do. I mean, that’s how we use them. And that is how I would like to think of future AGI, that it is a program similar to our program with a lot of computer power, which we could also have access to.
Sam Harris
But our access, aren’t there a fair number of devils in the details of what access amounts to in a case where, again, so to bring you back to the concept of an intelligence explosion, right, if we have now AI agents that are that suddenly become the best programmers and hardware designers, and we have factories wherein they can fabricate the next iteration of compute, then they’re building the machines that are building the machines that are building the machines. And suddenly, we’re in the presence of something that is far more competent than we are across all possible cognitive channels. And now we’re struggling to type faster on our computer that’s on the desktop safely on our desktop, saying, Wait, wait, wait, that’s not quite what we want. Can you just stop this process for a second so that we can have a conversation with you? And now we’re negotiating. So then how are we not playing a very obviously doomed game of chess against a chess engine that has double Magnus Carlsen’s ability now and we’ll have double that 10 minutes from now. And that chess, we know how that chess game is always going to come out, don’t we?
David Deutsch
So to follow your analogy, if I want to play a game of chess against stockfish and have a chance of winning, what I’ll do is use a copy of stockfish. So the thing that makes stockfish good at chess is a program and some hardware. And the program uses the hardware. It’s not that the hardware itself can play chess. It’s the program can make use of that hardware. So can a human, a human can make use of the same hardware.
Sam Harris
But we’re imagining potentially a kind of winner take all scenario where one country or one lab within that country finally makes the breakthrough that is just categorically different from everything that’s gone before it. And it’s general. And it’s I mean, one thing that’s interesting, I mean, perhaps you could tell me what has surprised you about the last few years, but one surprising thing from my point of view, from the point of view of people who have been worried about the safety issue or the potential safety issue here, we always imagined that the most powerful AI would be developed, you know, air gap from the internet and, you know, in a lab and you’d have the engineers perturbing it to see if it was safe to let out of the box. But it’s pretty clear that that’s not what’s happening. Everything is being developed in the wild. Everything is going to be swiftly hooked up to everything else the moment it looks promising, if not from the moment of its birth. And so we’re just, this was a completely specious expectation, this idea that we would be developing carefully, cautiously, scrupulously developing the most powerful systems in a way that was unambiguously safe initially, and then having to decide whether it was safe to change the protocol. We blew way past that, haven’t we?
David Deutsch
Yeah. Note that you’re talking about AI. So AI is being developed in the wild in lots of different ways with unexpected consequences and so on. If an AGI were developed in a bubble and not allowed to interact outside that bubble, that would be a catastrophe. That would be the same as doing that to a teenager.
Sam Harris
But now you’re just, okay, so leave aside the ethics of how we treat these machines once they’re general, because I think consciousness is a separable component, perhaps, or at least it’s not obvious that an AGI would be conscious. Maybe it’s obvious to you, but I think we could argue about that, but we would need another hour. So let’s leave aside the ethics of perpetrating a crime on our machines. Let’s worry about whether we can survive our relationship with them once they become…
David Deutsch
General. The same is true of, I’m sorry to keep coming back to this point, but the same is true of people. We are at present in deadly existential danger from people. We haven’t solved that problem. We haven’t come close to solving that problem. We’ve solved it better than any previous society. So let’s pat ourselves on the back for that. But to say that we’re not now in danger from humans.
Sam Harris
We definitely are, but we would be much more in danger if these humans were thinking billions of times faster than us and far more coherently than us, and were also ill-intentioned toward us.
David Deutsch
I think we’ve had this conversation. The danger is that people who already have bad intentions and have bad morality will be the first to make AGIs and will raise them to be. I could fantasize that this would be a mistake even on their part, because the first thing their nascent dictators will do is kill them long before they kill us. But that’s science fiction.
Sam Harris
Just to put a fine point on this before we move on, I’m going to take the bridge you’ve just built to human misbehavior for us, because that’s the final topic. But you’re still not worried about an intelligence explosion that gets away from us in a way that is in principle harmful to everything we care about.
David Deutsch
I’m not more worried about that than I am about humans. That’s right.
Sam Harris
Okay. Well, yes. I think there are certainly reasons to worry about the human misuse of increasingly powerful AI. Or other technology. Yeah. Everyone shares that. Yeah. Okay. So as I said, you just built a bridge to human indiscretion and evil for us. Remind me, David, what’s your connection to Israel? You were born in Israel. How long did you live there?
David Deutsch
Yes. So my family came to Britain when I was three.
Sam Harris
Have you spent much time in Israel since?
David Deutsch
No, almost none. So I’ve been busy.
Sam Harris
Yeah. Yes. Yes. And yes, we’ve all benefited from that. So what was, you know, I’ve done many podcasts on this topic. I don’t know if you’ve heard any of them, but one of the most astonishing things about October 7th was the world’s reaction to it. And we saw on October 8th and for really every day thereafter, a total failure on the part of many, many people to understand the nature of the moral landscape that was on display on that day and the very different human projects being articulated. And the thing that was especially galling and frankly seemed impossible until it was realized on our streets and even in the quads of our finest universities, even before Israel had responded, some of the smartest, well-educated, most pampered people in our society were taking the side of Hamas, explicitly in many cases and implicitly everywhere. Well, what did you make of all this? What was your experience then and what’s it been since?
David Deutsch
Well, I wasn’t surprised at all. That’s what I was expecting to happen on the day after because I have a different view of what this is all about and also what the anti-Israel tendency among various sub-cultures like woke and leftism and nationalism and what’s going on there. I don’t think it’s about territorial dispute somewhere in the Middle East. I think it is about Jews and it has been about Jews for well over 2000 years. And my theory of this is also I don’t think it’s about bigotry against Jews. It’s not that kind of thing either. It’s a unique moral perversion that doesn’t have an analogue in regard to other issues. I would like to separate two different things. One of them is this moral perversion, which I call the pattern because I don’t want to use the term anti-Semitism because it’s laden with what I think are false theories about what it is and what causes it. So I call it the pattern and it doesn’t change much over the centuries. It is cultural. It exists in certain cultures more than others. Before the 20th century, it was never really the dominant morality of any culture, but it got up to 90% at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, that kind of thing. And then in the 20th century, you had the emergence of cultures which were totally dominated by the pattern. And I haven’t said what the pattern is. The pattern is a moral perversion which manifests itself as a compulsion to legitimize, not necessarily to perform, to legitimize hurting, not necessarily killing, hurting Jews. So it’s a moral compulsion to legitimize hurting Jews. And there have always been individual people where that has become their major morality. And so it overrides everything else. And in the 20th century, you had Nazism and Palestinianism, which were both set up artificially to enhance existing trends of the pattern and make them into the prevailing morality of that society. So that’s one thing. That’s the pattern. The other thing is persecution of Jews, pogroms, persecution, hatred, and so on. That comes in waves. And by the way, it’s usually not top down. It’s usually bottom up. It’s usually the people who decide that it’s time to act on the pattern. Normally, people don’t. Every generation or two, or as the Passover text says, every generation, it says, I think that’s an exaggeration, is every couple of generations, it turns into persecution. And that’s what’s happening at the moment. The usual thing that precipitates the persecution phase is that the pattern seems to be in danger. That is, if there seem to be developments in society that counteract the legitimacy of hurting Jews, then that makes outbreaks of violence happen. And those outbreaks continue until the Jews have been, not only have the Jews been well and truly hurt, but the legitimacy of them being hurt is no longer controversial. So typically, people have riots, the police stand by and do nothing.
David Deutsch
Everybody sees what’s happening and that’s how it should be. And then they forget about it. And unlike other things that lead to expulsions and of unfavored groups, when Jews are expelled, they’re usually let back in quite soon. And when people take part in pogroms and so on, they’re usually quite happy to go and live next door to Jews again. And I’ve been meaning to look this up for ages, but Martin Luther wrote several books about how bad Jews are. And in one of them, he makes the comment, the Jews do this, the Jews do that, and the Jewish physicians have a rule that they must kill one in 10 of their non-Jewish patients. So this was a very common anti-Jewish myth at the time. And he says, and yet we employ them. Now, if you think about that, that is totally amazing. He is pointing out what he claims is a fact, what he perhaps thinks is a fact, although I think is probably the wrong thing to use when it comes to the pattern, because people are acting out, they’re enunciating their morality, not what they think are facts. So he said, isn’t it amazing that now it is amazing, and it shows that the whole thing is a pathology. It’s not caused by what people say it’s caused by.
Sam Harris
Or it shows that non-Jewish doctors of the time killed at least 10% of their patients…
David Deutsch
Inadvertently, however inadvertently. I don’t think they had statistics in those days.
Sam Harris
Okay. So what are the causes of the pattern in your view?
David Deutsch
Unfortunately, I don’t know. I know that it has existed with amazing fidelity for, as I say, some people blame the pattern on Christianity. They’re totally not true. It existed well before Christianity. And all the explanations that have been given, I think, just fail on the facts. Like, Jews are more successful. Yeah, Jews are more successful in some cultures, but there have been cultures in which Jews are less successful than the norm, including the enlightenment culture before, let’s say, the 18th century. Jews were less successful, less prominent in all sorts of fields than other people. And they were from time to time persecuted for that. Like, that’s what Voltaire had against Jews. They hadn’t accepted the enlightenment yet.
Sam Harris
Right. I think, I forget whose point this is. It might’ve been Vasily Grossman or someone, but just noticing that the ever-protean nature of antisemitism, Jews have been attacked for being capitalist, they’ve been attacked for being socialist, they’ve been attacked for being rich, for being poor, for being cosmopolitan, for being rednecks, effectively. I mean, so like, this name the extreme or name the sin and Jews have been found culpable for it.
David Deutsch
Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, I think the standard view of this is that there has been, …
Sam Harris
And we can take the pre-Christian roots as being, I mean, so there’s been the problem of religious sectarianism that reaches all the way back to the beginning of religion, presumably, and the uniquely insular quality of Judaism. The sort of the chosen people, shtick, and the fact that they’re not, have never been disposed to be a missionary faith looking for converts, that has been a kind of algorithm, a kind of social algorithm that has proved, if nothing else, a very tempting target in a larger environment of rival, you know, competing religious dogmatisms and tribalisms. And it was explicitly enshrined in Christianity from, you know, at some point onward. I mean, it’s obviously incoherent when you look at the details because Jesus was Jewish and the Virgin Mary was Jewish and all the apostles were Jewish. And so just how anti-Semitic can you be in the end. But as the history of Christianity proves, and as the history of, you know, its casuistry and hair splitting theology proves, you could justify a virulent form of anti-Semitism on theological grounds because the Jews in every present generation in maintaining their Jewishness are explicitly repudiating the central claim of Christianity, which is that Jesus was the Messiah and that he came back to save all of us from our sins and that you don’t need this original covenant with God because, you know, you are now saved through faith in Jesus, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, you Jews who don’t accept that are, you know, the spawn of Satan, et cetera. So the theology was there. What the Nazis gave us was started to happen in the, you know, the late 19th century. And what the Nazis explicitly gave us was a racialized conception of the difference between Jews and everyone else. And I should say that Islam has its own theology wherein the Jews are anathema. And that, you know, goes back to the seventh century. And we have the example of how Muhammad treated incorrigible Jews who he came across. So all of that was just as, nearly as dangerous and invidious as what we had in Christianity for Jews for many, many centuries. But then, you know, post World War II or really, you know, during World War II, you have, you know, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al Husseini, explicitly becoming a Nazi and touring Auschwitz, I believe with Heydrich, you have this marriage of Nazi style racial anti-Semitism and Islamist theocratic anti-Semitism. And that gets exported back into the Muslim world. And so now you have in the Muslim world, you know, a rather avid readership for the protocols of the elders of Zion, you know, a Russian anti-Semitic forgery and Mein Kampf. And, you know, and you have people who will say that though they doubt the Holocaust occurred, they, you know, wish it had occurred and they’ll bring it about out on their own terms. And that’s, you know, what more or less every Jihadist aspires to. So you have this, a fairly explicit history of memes traveling and becoming enshrined in various ideologies. And that’s the pattern I see.
Sam Harris
That’s how anti-Semitism mostly exists. I mean, I guess there’s another variant we have to add, which is the confusion on the left. And that has something to do with anti-colonialism and the way that heuristic has been gamed on the left by Islamists and Jihadists, you know, fairly cleverly. The all-powerful admonition to not be racist has been weaponized on the left to the disadvantage of Israel and Jews everywhere. Jews are, in this case, are imagined to be white colonialist oppressors and their victims the brown oppressed. And this extends even to, you know, Ethiopians who might be fighting for the IDF at this moment, strangely. It sounds like your view of the pattern is different from what I just expressed. Where do you get off the ride I just invited you on?
David Deutsch
I think that that whole list of things that you’ve just recited are all retrospective excuses, justifications. Post hoc, people who think that way have the impulse, the sometimes overriding impulse to legitimize hurting Jews. And then they think of reasons. And not only the things you mentioned…
Sam Harris
Just to be clear, these are on my account terrible reasons, right? I’m just trying to trace the history of ideas here.
David Deutsch
I think that they’re not only terrible morally, they don’t make sense logically. They’re not the kind of reason you might have for hating someone. So, you said, just to take an example at random, that I just remember you said, people think that Jews are white and Palestinians are brown. In fact, I think statistically, the reverse is true. And the Palestinians oppress black people in their midst, and the Israelis don’t. I think when you confront people with that, it will not change their opinion about that, their opinion that Israel is bad. And you might say, I was about to say that Israel is bad and the Palestinians are good. They don’t believe the latter either. When there’s Palestinian suffering that they can’t blame Israel for, they still blame Israel for the suffering that they do blame Israel for, and they don’t care about the other suffering. They never mention it. So the pattern must be at the bottom of that. But again, I think I posed
Sam Harris
This question to you already, but why do people hate Jews then? What is at the bottom of this?
David Deutsch
Well, I think hate, it’s not hate. The vast majority of people who are even quite strongly possessed by the pattern do not hate anyone, at least in the West, because hating people is frowned upon in our society. They feel the compulsion to- …
Sam Harris
Well, you just said, you just demurred from my explanation by saying that the sorts of reasons I gave you could not be the cause of hatred in the general case. But now you’re saying that hatred isn’t the problem. So what is the problem?
David Deutsch
Well, I suppose the immediate problem is the recurring pogroms and intermittent…
Sam Harris
Let me just say to you, unless there be any confusion with my audience, because I’ve said many things on this topic, I agree with you that psychologically, hatred is not the operative emotion here that we need to worry about. When I look at jihadism, I don’t see people who are just ruled by hatred. They’re ruled by a worldview that is quite antithetical to our own. They have certain expectations about what happens after death and the moral order of the universe. I think these are people rather often who are experiencing fairly classically positive emotions like ecstasy and triumphal smugness, and they’re certain that they’re right. The people who came across the border on October 7th and started killing innocent Israelis were not just seething with hatred merely. This was a religious ecstasy in many cases. So that’s just a footnote I wanted to add.
David Deutsch
Ecstasy is right, because ecstasy is what happens when you consummate the thing that is at the top of your morality. So that’s what it was. I don’t think religion has anything to do with it either, because the Soviets, for example, it was sheer accident that there wasn’t another Holocaust perpetrated by Stalin. He died just before he was about to start one. He was an avowed atheist and the people who would have carried it out were avowed atheists. Now, you might think that perhaps they still had their old religion.
Sam Harris
Let’s just say that the genocide of the Jews could be over determined. I mean, there are atheist roots to it and there are religious roots to it. But in either case, what you believe to be true has to be relevant. What you think…
David Deutsch
No, I think that what you say you believe to be true is downstream of what you feel you have to do. By the way, that’s not only true of the pattern, it’s true of a lot of things. Morality often takes precedence over facts. For example, a random example, people don’t want to publish evidence that they think shows that black people are less intelligent than white people, even if they think it’s true. Or they persuade themselves that it can’t be true because it would be immoral. Now, I think they happen to be silly because I don’t think there is such a thing as being, as a matter of hardware, more or less intelligent. So, I disagree with them. But I’m talking about their psychology. There are definitely people who would sacrifice scientific truth in favor of what they think will cause the right moral outcome. And that’s true of good morality and bad morality. And when it comes from bad morality, then it is amplified. Churchill said, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. He was talking about what would happen if the Nazis won the war. Right. So, the Nazis also had a perverted science that they said justified their political acts and so on. But they obviously invented that in order to perform the acts, not vice versa.
Sam Harris
Yeah. So, when I ask you the LLM named David Deutsch, what is the source of the pattern? Causally, how do you explain any of this?
David Deutsch
Speaking in my capacity as an LLM, which being a G, I can presumably do to some level of accuracy. The closest I’ve ever heard to an explanation of what the pattern is comes from my colleague, Matjaž Leonardis, who said, it’s like gold. So, what does he mean by that? So, gold has been used since prehistory as a form of money in various medium of exchange and store of wealth and so on, because it has certain properties that make it suitable for that. Like, for example, it’s dense and so it’s easy to carry around. You don’t need large stone wheels. And so, people started using it, but they also started using lots of other things. Silver, in many languages, the word for money is still to this day the word for silver. And yet, gold is preferred as a means, not just it’s more valuable per ounce, it’s preferred as a means of doing all those things. Once a lot of people are doing that, then when there’s an emergency and you have to find a quick way of making your possessions liquid or whatever, you know that there’s a history of people using gold and that there’s never been a time when people haven’t used, when you arrive somewhere and you offer them gold and they don’t accept it because they don’t like gold, that never happens. So, it might be that once the pattern or rather the practical manifestations of the pattern become more widespread so that there’s an escape velocity, like with gold, after which people just, it’s just in the culture that when you’re ready to do a certain thing like- Like-
Sam Harris
Find a scapegoat for your problems or- …
David Deutsch
For example. Then you will use the Jews if possible and then you will invent the reasons. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book about anti-Semitism in which he came up with a similar theory, though he doesn’t make anything of it, he’s just kind of sarcastic about it. But he says it’s a predisposition and he gives several examples, like a woman who was very anti-Semitic and he asked her why and she said, because the furriers are all dishonest and they burned my furs and they’re Jews. And so Sartre asked her, well, why don’t you hate furriers? Why do you specifically hate Jews? And she didn’t have an answer. And he gives several examples like that, which all go to show that it’s what he calls a predisposition. It’s a predisposition to, by the way, this woman didn’t go around murdering furriers or Jews. She just liked talking about it. She liked spreading the legitimization of hating furriers or legitimizing hurting them.
Sam Harris
What’s the role of conspiracy thinking here? That does seem to be a generic structure to much anti-Semitism. There’s a, and explicit in things like the protocols of the elders of Zion, but there’s an appetite for conspiracy thinking and that often works to the disadvantage of the Jews.
David Deutsch
So again, I think one has to think of that the other way around. So it’s in the nature of the pattern that anything that gets sufficiently evil, that is, it gets sufficiently bad morally and sufficiently entrenched not to be reversible. Anything that is sufficiently evil merges with the pattern, just like anyone who has a sufficient need to carry their money in a small box, will converge on the idea of using gold if it’s available. So anything that gets evil enough merges with the pattern and conspiracy theories are inherently anti-rational and have a tendency towards evil because conspiracy theories are about blaming someone or group of people who are innocent for bad things. Blaming people who are innocent for bad things is bad.
Sam Harris
Just another sidebar, albeit brief here. What do you do with the fact that obviously there are groups and individuals who occasionally conspire, not all conspiracies are false. So how would you inoculate our cognitive immune system against spurious conspiracy thinking when real conspiracies are sometimes real?
David Deutsch
So I have nothing against theories that there are conspiracies or rather theories that a particular thing is a conspiracy. The thing that is irrational and is always false is explaining important events like a war or some people being impoverished while others are rich and explaining important features of society by saying that this was caused intentionally and secretly by some group and who are pretending that they have the opposite intention. In other words, they’re pretending that they think that what they’re doing is right and just, but in fact, it is evil and they’re acting to, for example, enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Sam Harris
Why is that as a matter of empirical fact or logical fact always untrue?
David Deutsch
Oh, because as something that might happen once, it is possible, but as something which is an explanation for something in society, it doesn’t work. For example, such a group could never propagate itself to the next generation because I once had a long argument with somebody who believed in homeopathy along exactly these lines because I asked him the question and he held a conspiracy theory that the drug companies know that conventional drugs are ineffective, but they still market them in order to make money and so on. So I asked him when the top executives of the drug company, when they have a sick child, do they give the sick child the homeopathic medicine or the conventional medicine? And we went into, you can imagine, we went into a long argument where there were ad hoc, he was presenting ad hoc theories that seemed to try to make sense…
Sam Harris
Of this. Epicycles and epicycles.
David Deutsch
Yes, yes. But you can see already, without me telling you, that they didn’t make sense because you have a situation where the drug company executive is going to secretly bring the homeopathic medicine, having secretly bought it in a disguise, and he’s going to tell the child that he’s giving him a conventional medicine so the child doesn’t blab at school and so on. You have to go into, as you say, more and more epicycles. So, qua explanation of the world, conspiracy theories, in the sense I’ve defined them, never make sense. They’re never true. Right. Right. Yeah, that’s certainly been my experience.
Sam Harris
One way of describing it is that you really do have a, in the general case, it attributes a kind of mastery and superhuman coordination among people who we know, in fact, are ruled by very different incentives and sometimes antithetical incentives. Yes. And yet, for the purpose of this odious thing that has been brought about in the world, they have conspired perfectly in ways that seem, in every other case, they never manage to do. My favorite example of this is that, to go back to Bill Clinton’s time in the Oval Office, we’re asked to believe that thousands upon thousands of people can conspire seamlessly in something like the World Trade Center destruction. None of them ever has a guilty conscience. No one blabs to their wife on their deathbed. Nobody is overheard talking about it, et cetera, et cetera. And yet, more or less contemporaneous with that, we had the president of the United States unable to keep a semen-stained dress off the evening news, despite his best efforts. So, there are obvious limits to people’s ability to conspire when people have different …
David Deutsch
Life projects and different incentives. And that is only talking about the difficulties the conspirators would have. But even worse is the dupes that carry out their commands without knowing what it’s for. Because you could have a conspiracy, but to have a million people acting it out, knowing what it’s for and not telling anybody is impossible. So, the dupes have to think that they are acting in pursuit of the things that the conspirators claim publicly they are doing. So, they’re claiming publicly one thing, and they’re ordering their lackeys to do a thing which secretly causes the opposite thing and so on. So, it’s both the lackeys and the conspirators who are doing impossible things.
Sam Harris
Right. Right. Okay, David, as always, when speaking to you, I’ve become painfully aware of the limits of time because it is endlessly interesting to talk to you. I guess a final question on this point. What is anyone to do about this problem of the pattern? And in particular, what is Israel to do about it? And what do you imagine the future of Israel will be under the current, you know, world order?
David Deutsch
Well, as always, I can’t prophesy. I think although the pattern is common in Israel, just as in all Western countries, I think it’s not noticeably less. It’s just that they are faced with hard real life choices, no matter what they think is the ultimate or morality of the situation. Very few of them actually want to die. So, I think from a practical point of view, Israel is the least exposed internally to the pattern and externally, they are willing to fight. The rest of the West is in trouble because it’s not just the pattern. I think the reason the West has got itself, what’s the word, gripped by the pattern is, like I said, anything that gets sufficiently evil merges with the pattern. So, we have had postmodernism and woke and other bad philosophies that have kind of, as Gad Saad says, parasitized, used the good-natured tolerance of the West to spread themselves. And now it’s very hard to undo because there’s intimidation, there’s a lack of freedom to discuss it openly, and so on. So, I think the West is in trouble. I mean, I said I wouldn’t prophesy. If I had to guess, I think the West will get out of this. It has got out of much worse before. But I don’t see how. The only thing I would advocate is talking and one-to-one talking, like we’re doing now. After all, no one’s listening, are they? We’re talking to each other. They will eventually. Yeah. Criticism and conjecture about what exactly is going on.
Sam Harris
Do you worry that some of the responses to the recent eruptions of anti-Semitism on, let’s say, college campuses are so heavy-handed that they, in the end, will simply magnify the reasons for the pattern? So, for instance, many people could read into, take the local case, the pressure that the Trump administration is applying to the Ivy League at the moment, ostensibly in response to the problem of anti-Semitism. I mean, one could argue that there’s other things working in the background. But from the anti-Semites point of view, this is confirmation of the conspiracy theory that the Jews are pulling the strings of everything. And look, what happens to you when you conform to the pattern of anti-Semitism? The government of the United States, in this case, comes crashing down on you. And that just confirms the fact…
David Deutsch
That there’s a cabal of evil Jews controlling things. I don’t think, as I said, I don’t think that that sort of thing is the reason why they legitimize hurting Jews. It was the other way around. They first wanted to, and then they have their reasons. And then, of course, they look around and they find other reasons. They were already going bad.
Sam Harris
But what could possibly, truly the difference between believing that the Jews control the global banking system and not believing that under conditions of, let’s say, a global banking failure or some other financial or economic catastrophe, the difference between believing one thing and believing the other will matter to millions and millions of people. So don’t you think that the stature of these various conspiracy theories is something that we need to concern ourselves with?
David Deutsch
Well, because they’re false, yes. But false and consequential. Don’t you think they’re consequentially false? There has been an attack on the Enlightenment, on Enlightenment values, ever since the Enlightenment began. There’s been a war against the Enlightenment and it’s taken many different forms. And this is just one of them. It’s not the most violent. It’s not the most dangerous. Though, as I can’t prophesy, it may blow up at any moment. But I don’t think the pattern is caused by the government cracking down on Harvard University, not even slightly. Nobody is persuaded to adopt the pattern by things like that, although they can be persuaded to act on it by things like that. But that’s neither here nor there, because if that hadn’t happened, something else would have.
Sam Harris
But you seem to be positing some quasi-mystical crystal of animus that got distributed somehow among the various peoples of the earth. And it’s neither caused by ideas and their spread, or it’s neither that nor demonstrably canceled by better ideas, even though you’re recommending criticism as a potential antidote. Again, I understand you’re agnostic or just uncertain about the cause, but I’m sure there are, obviously there are examples of individual anti-Semites being confronted with both the moral consequences of their anti-Semitism, the false beliefs that they have used consciously to prop it up. In the extreme case, you’ve had the Nazis who found out that they were Jewish or part Jewish, and then the cognitive dissonance of all that had to be wrangled with. They’re individuals you can put in a room who are avowedly in possession of or by the pattern, who you can talk to and in certain cases reason out of their commitments. Is that evidence to you that conversation really is the remedy here, even though we don’t know the cause?
David Deutsch
Well, it’s a remedy. I mean, whatever else the pattern is, it’s part of culture. So cultures change, cultures improve. In particular, the culture of the Enlightenment, especially the Anglosphere Enlightenment, is at a logical level, deeply antagonistic to the pattern. It doesn’t make that much difference to individual psychology, at least not on the scale of a lifetime, but on the scale of several lifetimes it does. And traditionally, some populations have been, the pattern has been more central to their moral makeup than others. And in the Anglosphere, there’s rather, I would call it amusing if it weren’t so tragic. The pattern itself decays exponentially very slowly, like the half life is one or two generations. But the acting out of the pattern, discriminating, using violence, that sort of thing, is suppressed by Anglosphere culture. So people are in a state of tension. And we have the strange behavior of Britain in World War II and so on, where Ben-Gurion said, we will fight the Germans as though there were no white paper and fight the white paper as though there were no Germans. And the white paper, which retracted the Balfour Declaration, was, and let me get this the right way around, the white paper was a manifestation of the pattern. The fact that Britons were revolted by the Holocaust is a manifestation of British culture. So there’s a tension. And I think even today, so one hopeful thing that I think is hopeful for the future is that although this is the current outbreak, is the worst example of violence since the Holocaust, there is also a backlash against it, both in practice and in discourse, which has never happened before. I don’t think it’s happened before in the last 2,500 years. So something strange is happening. At the same time as the rising up phenomenon has happened, as it has countless times, this time, the anti-rising up thing has happened, which didn’t happen during Holocaust, didn’t happen during the pogroms. It’s never happened. And now it is happening.
Sam Harris
Just to spell that out, it’s happening in what sense? Just the conversations like this, criticizing? Or the Trump administration’s behavior toward Harvard? What’s the rising up?
David Deutsch
Yeah. So there’s both discourse and action. And both discourse and action are happening in an unprecedented way against the pogrom. Against the pogrom, what you had is the actions of the IDF. I mean, there’s military action against Hamas. No, I take the pogrom to be worldwide. So it happened in American universities and British universities and among Muslims worldwide. And again, in World War II, there were millions of Muslims in the British army. Not one of them raped anybody. Well, at least didn’t go around raping Jews. It just wasn’t a thing that was part of the Islamic culture at the time. So especially not in the framework of an Anglosphere army.
Sam Harris
Yeah. I think that’s a crucial variable there. But all right, David, as I said, we’re given to three-hour conversations and this was nearly one. Thank you for your time. It’s wonderful to talk to you. It’s been fun. Yeah. Until next time, be well. Okay. Bye-bye then.
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