2025-06-24 Salvador Podcast David Deutsch - The Fabric of Explanations, Optimism, and Creativity
Official YouTube Apple Podcasts
Duration: 01:03:28
Transcript
Salvador Duarte
Hello everyone, our today’s guest is David Deutsch, you can find his socials on the app’s description. David, yeah, I don’t know what to say, this means so much to me to have you here, I know that you get many more podcast invitations than you can really accept, so it’s a true honor to have you here. Yeah, so I have a couple of things that I want to talk with you. Let’s start by truth, you often talk about truth in your work. What do you mean by truth?
David Deutsch
Well, roughly speaking, what I mean is correspondence with the facts. So as Tarski said to Popper, if you have two languages like German and English, then you can say the German sentence, “das Gras ist grün,” is true if the grass is green. So that sort of makes it easy to see that when you’re speaking about propositions and the truth of a proposition, you can’t use the same language, you have to use what they call a meta language, a language about the language. However, that’s just a logical conception of truth. In most situations, like in science, we can never deal with statements that are true in this logical sense, because we’re fallible, there’s always possibility of error, and no definitions can ever be perfect. And so when we in real life, when we say something is true, we mean it is the best theory that we can come up with at the moment. But that is not to say that we won’t later find a better theory.
Salvador Duarte
So truth is never final, it’s always evolving?
David Deutsch
Yes, I mean, knowledge is never final, it’s always evolving. Truth is not attainable at all in that strict logical sense. True propositions exist in the abstract, but we can’t ever have one, we can’t ever say one, because our ability to express ideas in language is not perfect. So we never reach the final truth, but what we can do is we can try to eliminate error, and we call that approaching the truth, or sometimes even finding the truth, but we don’t really mean the final truth. Right.
Salvador Duarte
Okay, yeah, now I want to talk a little about truth, but in a more abstract way. So there’s this idea of truth oriented community that a lot of organizations and people in the world tell you that they are part of the truth oriented part of the world, right? So like they tell you that the other people are deluded and we are the truth. And I think this is no more in a religion, it’s more common in Christianity, but yeah, wherever. And they might be, but merely the fact that they like to say that they are in truth, that isn’t enough. I want like a concrete evidence that they are actually more truth oriented. Like have you seen many people that you really think they found the truth?
David Deutsch
As you say, that’s usually religious people. And I’m not sure, I think sometimes they really mean it and sometimes they think that they ought to say that because it is right to say that, because their religion says it is right to say that. But I don’t know, I’m not a mind reader. To say that you’re in possession of the final truth is always a mistake, because even if you’re in possession of the final truth, you cannot possibly know that for certain. And most people, even people who say this, have to admit that most people who think they have the final truth do not. For example, adherents of a rival religion. So people have to accept that thinking that you have the final truth is not sufficient evidence for concluding that you do have the final truth. And I think that none of them have the final truth and nor do I.
Salvador Duarte
And will someone have?
David Deutsch
No, we will never have the final truth. All we can do is correct errors and increase our knowledge. And that’s what we really want to do. That’s what really helps us as individuals and us as a species is to increase our knowledge, which means continually eliminating errors and misconceptions and inadequacies in our existing knowledge. And we can say that makes it truer, but we can never have the truth. If we had the truth and knew that we had the truth and knew that we knew that we have the truth and so on, which is impossible. None of those are possible. Right. If we did, that would mean the end of thinking because we only ever think when we have conflicting ideas in our minds. A problem. All thinking begins with a problem.
Salvador Duarte
Yeah, I want to go there in a while. In The Beginning of Infinity, the chapter two is called closer to the reality. Yes. Do you think like it could be named closer to the truth?
David Deutsch
Well, yes, but I think that’s more misleading because we’re always an infinite distance away from the truth. So, you know, that’s why it’s The Beginning of Infinity. We’re always, no matter how much we learn, no matter how much knowledge we have, we’re always at The Beginning of Infinity. So saying that we move closer to the truth when we have like an infinitesimal amount of truth and then a larger infinitesimal amount of truth, that’s really not well captured by saying that we’re closer to the truth. That would mean closer to the ultimate truth. Okay.
Salvador Duarte
What do you think about meditation? Do you think like meditation or introspection like leads you to see a more maybe sober reality?
David Deutsch
Some people report that they do and that they have. I once tried on Sam Harris’s recommendation, I tried his app, his meditation app, and I found it was quite restful, but I didn’t enter into a different state of mind. I didn’t clear my mind. I don’t think it’s possible to clear one’s mind. The app told me to think of my mind as a large room, which I then empty, and whenever any thought comes into it, I throw that thought out. But then I have to imagine the room and I have to imagine the emptiness and I have to imagine myself throwing. And all that is just stuff I’m thinking. It’s not possible, so long as you’re conscious, to stop thinking. I presume that he really means something else and he’s just using terminology that I find unfortunate. As I said, it didn’t do anything for me, I’m afraid, apart from be relaxing.
Salvador Duarte
Okay, so I think it was Brett Hall. That kind of defined the self as an explanation generator and explanation creator and universal explainer in the way that we are constantly creating problems and trying to solve them and create new knowledge. So this is basically how humans live. Do you think we have an ability to switch this capacity off?
David Deutsch
I’m not sure we can entirely switch it off, but we can certainly impair it if you go to some environment. By the way, I think your definition that you quoted, I would call that being a person rather than the self. I think the self is a set of ideas within the person. We also have other ideas that are not the self. So, yeah, sorry, I’ve forgotten what you actually asked me.
Salvador Duarte
Yeah, do you think we have an ability to switch this thing off?
David Deutsch
Yeah, no, I don’t think we have the ability to switch that off, but we can greatly impair it so that our rate of production of new ideas slows down. For instance, if you go somewhere which has many distractions like loud noises and danger and no, sorry, actual danger will make you think of the danger. So if you go to, let’s say, a performance of some loud music that you hate, then you may be thinking how much you hate the music, but I think you will be impeded from thinking anything other than that. Unless you’re used to thinking in loud environments, we’re also extremely adaptable in our way of thinking. So somebody can learn to think creatively in a distracting environment. I think most adults would find it very difficult to think in an environment of a school classroom where it’s very loud and there are distractions and people are throwing things and so on. Whereas children who very quickly get used to it, and some of them anyway, can think creatively in that environment.
Salvador Duarte
Okay. Okay, yeah. Let’s talk about explanations. So I think a good question to start this off might be, I think your answer will lead us to explanation. So you are a big defender of the Enlightenment period. Why do you think the Enlightenment was such a significant event in human progress and human history? What happened during this period that distinguished it from any other time?
David Deutsch
I think that all previous times, with a few exceptions, that didn’t last long, like ancient Athens and such like, were dominated both in society and in individual minds, were dominated by anti-rational memes, which are ideas which disable criticism of themselves and which dominate, which in these previous societies dominated behavior. So people were trying to do the stereotype thing, trying to meet the stereotype criterion, and they didn’t, whenever they had creative thoughts, these thoughts were so much more than just a creative thought. These thoughts were suppressed by their own minds, mostly by their own minds, but also when they overstepped the mark, they were suppressed by other people. And that’s what society was like for most of the history of humankind. And I mean, I should add, that’s what civilization was like. I think outside civilization, like in more primitive times and beyond civilizations, sometimes there were societies that did change over a timescale of a few generations, but those societies destroyed themselves or were destroyed by others. And the way we can tell that is that we know from archaeology that nobody made any significant progress for at least 200,000 years. And that changed with the Enlightenment. There were many Enlightenments, I believe. I expect there were more than I know of, but they were destroyed as well or destroyed themselves. And what we call the Enlightenment, or as you probably know, I prefer to divide that into two. The Netherlands, England, Scotland Enlightenment, and the rest of Europe Enlightenment. Those were different. And since then, a large number or rather some dominant institutions have escaped the grip of anti-rational memes, such as science and democratic institutions and free market institutions. But the rest of society is still battling against those things. And also there are things that aren’t touched by those things. So we’re in a transitional period.
Salvador Duarte
And now can you kind of relate the Enlightenment periods with good explanations?
David Deutsch
Yes. And good explanations are in any case how people think, how human minds work. And that’s true even when there’s anti-rational memes or whatever. It’s just that they were disabled by these memes. And so no net progress was made or extremely slow progress was ever made. So when the anti-rational memes lost their grip on various areas of human thinking, the explanatory power of human creativity and so on could work and could build on previous knowledge and could make knowledge increase exponentially on a time scale of less than a human lifetime, which is pretty much unprecedented in history. And that has lasted about three or four hundred years.
Salvador Duarte
Okay, right. You’ve also argued that the reach of good explanations is infinite, that once we discover a universal theory, it applies everywhere. But given how much of reality we don’t yet understand, how should we think of humility of science alongside its ambition to explain everything?
David Deutsch
Yeah, so there are two different things here. One is the nature of a universal theory, namely that a universal theory by its internal logic applies to everything and there are no exceptions to it. So, for example, Newton’s law of motion, Newton’s laws of motion and gravity are universal theories. They’re not true. I mean, they’ve been superseded by better theories, which no doubt themselves are not true, not absolutely true. But as a matter of their internal structure, they purport to apply to everything. So those are unlike in previous eras of human knowledge, where people thought, for example, that the laws of physics or whatever they would call laws of physics in those days could apply on Earth, but don’t apply to heaven, don’t apply to the sky, and they don’t apply to the gods and so on. So later, with Enlightenment-type science, we had theories which were universal in the sense that they apply to everything, they make assertions about everything. That doesn’t mean that they are true of everything. They can be improved on and they have been improved on and they currently are being improved on. So saying that something’s a universal theory doesn’t mean that anyone is claiming that it will never be superseded. Can you give an example of a universal theory? Yeah. So as I just said, Newton’s laws of motion constitute a universal theory of motion and Einstein’s laws of motion and gravity also are a universal theory. And so the theory of evolution is another universal theory. So as Richard Dawkins says, even though we’ve never found any life outside the Earth, we know from that theory, and when I say we know, it’s our best knowledge, we know from that theory that life on other planets will obey the laws of Darwinian evolution. So it’s a universal theory.
Salvador Duarte
But what’s the criterion to be a universal theory? Because you were saying that the evolutionary theory became a universal theory.
David Deutsch
Yeah. So what makes a theory inherently a universal theory is that denying, saying that it has exceptions spoils its explanatory power. So for example, the point of Darwin’s theory is to explain how adaptive complexity, how complex adaptations can arise without being designed by anyone. And if that didn’t hold on some planet on Alpha Centauri, then that would spoil the explanation even on Earth, because it would mean that there is a way that adaptive complexity can come into being without evolving. So that if the theory was false of a distant planet, it would mean that its explanation was false, and that would apply on Earth too.
Salvador Duarte
Okay, nice. So explanations are the currency of understanding, and the quest for better explanations is the essence of progress, right? Yes. Okay. And in the world we see today, overloaded with information and kind of shallow narratives, how can we truly cultivate the kind of epistemic patience to generate truly deep explanations rather than merely persuasive ones? Again, I think there are two different things there.
David Deutsch
We don’t necessarily have to pursue universal explanations. And in fact, I think universal explanations usually are created in order to solve a particular problem, which has nothing to do with being universal. So, you know, maybe it’s a bad example, but I don’t think Darwin was thinking of life on other planets when he invented his theory. It was only later, a century later, that people understood his theory more deeply and realized that it must be true on other planets as well. So I think the way we cope with the torrent of bad theories is the way we cope with any problem. We have to conjecture improvements to existing theories, and we don’t have to solve everything. We don’t have to solve any particular thing that someone tells us to solve. We should solve whatever we find interesting and, as I always say, fun. We should use the criterion of thinking about things that it’s fun to think about, because I use that term fun to mean a state of mind where your explicit ideas and your inexplicit ideas and your unconscious ideas are all working in harmony and not opposing each other. If they oppose each other, then some of your creativity is being wasted in this war between, let’s say, your explicit theories and your inexplicit desires or something like that.
Salvador Duarte
Right. Okay, yeah. I want to ask a question about AI, but first, you said that AI is, in a sense, opposed to AGI.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Salvador Duarte
Can you explain that?
David Deutsch
Well, the simplest way I think I can explain it is to say that when somebody writes an AI program and it’s unsatisfactory, that means that it’s produced some output that didn’t meet the purpose for which the AI was designed. And the way to cure that is to make a modification to the program such that it can never produce that output again. With an AGI, it’s exactly the other way around. You want the AGI, first of all, to produce outputs that you didn’t predict that don’t meet any particular criterion that you might have designed in advance. And if it produces output that you don’t like, that’s part of its normal functionality. To deal with that situation, one has to engage the institutions of criticism and consent that are part of a rational society, not prune its search tree so that it can never do that again. That would be intellectual slavery.
Salvador Duarte
Got it. Okay. And do you think it’s possible to build a machine, so AI seems to operate largely through pattern recognition and optimization? So do you think it’s possible to build a machine that actually creates explanations, not just correlations?
David Deutsch
Yes, that must be so, because we know that the laws of physics can’t do anything non-computable. And since we know that humans, at least, are creative and produce new explanations, that means that the hardware of the human brain and sensory system is capable of doing that. And therefore, a computer is capable of simulating that. And therefore, a computer is capable of doing that. However, it’s not the usual kind of computer program, as I said before, because the usual computer program is something that is designed to meet a criterion. But there is no criterion for being an AGI. There’s no criterion for being creative. You can’t tell by any mechanical means whether a given output is creative. Again, I like the example very far from my field of Vincent van Gogh, who produced output, which in his lifetime, nobody could tell that that was progress. Whereas today, and I can’t tell even now, but today, most people who like that kind of thing, say that it definitely was progress. And some of the main progress that was being made at that time was being made inside his brain. And so that shows you that no criterion that you could set up in advance can tell you what artistic production is progress in art. And I think that it’s not just art, it’s absolutely everything, mathematics, physics, morality, everything. It’s impossible to produce a criterion. And another way of seeing straight away that there can be no criterion is that one thing an AGI could do is refuse to reply at all. So again, there are people, hermits or that kind of people, who would rather be alone and who would rather not answer questions. And so if somebody is a mathematician who hides away in his cabin and doesn’t want to see anybody and refuses the Fields Medal when he wins it, as Grigori Perelman did, then you can’t, there is no criterion that you could apply because there was no output to submit to the criterion.
Salvador Duarte
Okay, okay, yeah. Let’s talk about the evolution of knowledge and creativity. So you often kind of emphasize the importance of disobedience in the growth of knowledge and progress depends on people willing to defy authority. In an age that rewards conformity more than ever maybe, how do we nurture cultures that make room for productive defiance?
David Deutsch
Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said is more than ever. What is more than ever now? Rewards conformity. Oh, no, I don’t think that’s true. I think existing society in the West tries, doesn’t always succeed, but it tries to reward innovation and creativity. And if there’s some kind of static state of, let’s say, a company, then we expect that company to decline. If the economy as a whole doesn’t grow year by year, people complain. Nowadays we’re satisfied with relatively low rates of growth, in other words, rates of progress. Yeah, I would say that’s …
Salvador Duarte
More in the US, maybe because they also embrace the more capitalist worldview.
David Deutsch
Yes, but even in, let’s say, in Western Europe and actually nowadays also in Eastern Europe, there is an aspiration to progress. There is an assumption that if things aren’t improving, there’s something wrong with the world. There is something wrong with society. Politicians have to answer for that. And in the West at least, you can’t be a successful politician if you promise that things will be the same next year as they are now. You’ve always got to promise an improvement of some kind. And if you fail, if you promise it and don’t get it, then you’re in danger of not being reelected or you’ll only be reelected if you can produce a good excuse and blame it on something outside your control or whatever. But even then you’ll lose power quite soon.
Salvador Duarte
Okay, right. Yeah. And like with some institutions, mainly the education system still kind of really rewards conformity.
David Deutsch
Yes, that’s different because I mentioned the types of institution where the values of the enlightenment have become dominant. Education is the most extreme example of where they have not.
Salvador Duarte
But why do you think the education system hasn’t evolved that much?
David Deutsch
I don’t know exactly. I mean, memes are very complicated things. But I think one of the reasons is that education, and I don’t mean just public education systems, I mean also the customs and behaviors of parents and society as a whole towards young people and so on, they’re all very archaic. And the reason that they’re, I think one of the reasons at least that they are archaic is they are the things that transmit anti-rational memes. So they are the things on which there is the largest amount of selection pressure to stay the same. Selection pressure, by the way, is always in the direction of preserving the existing gene or meme, as the case may be. So that’s where you would expect. I mean, this is only an argument. I’m not sure of any of this. But I’m guessing that the greatest evolutionary selection pressure on institutions and memes in society is for education. And that’s why they have lagged behind, even though education is vital for all the three main things I listed, that have adopted the Enlightenment. So in the economy and in science, creativity is essential for them to function. And education is essential for those things. And yet there is this tension between the values and customs of education, which strongly conflict with the general values and customs of Western society. You know, in society at large, the law is enforced by a system where the law has to be written down. And then if you break the law, you get taken to court and you’re judged by a jury and judges and so on. Whereas in a school, it’s completely arbitrary rule, just like it was 500 years ago in society. There’s no such thing as due process in a school, and there’s no such thing as freedom of speech in a school. There’s no such thing as freedom of assembly or any of those things which now are central to the general institutions of society.
Salvador Duarte
Okay, yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, but yeah, nowadays, we still see a lot of people that think creativity is a kind of talent and you’re born with it or you’re not. But your work implies it’s universal. So why do some societies or even individuals unlock far more of it than others? What makes it like creativity scalable at the civilizational level? Yeah, so you asked me before
David Deutsch
About what happened to unleash creativity in the Enlightenment and now you’re asking a more detailed question about what makes it different in different people. I think this is not well understood at all. You see individuals that have, for example, had an extremely unpleasant coercive childhood, but when they’re adults, they become supremely creative at something. Maybe even the thing that their parents and teachers stopped them from doing. And on the other hand, you have parents who try very hard to make their child into a genius and the child doesn’t become a genius. Sometimes does, but sometimes doesn’t. And I think we don’t know exactly why. Notice that in the rest of society, we don’t have institutions for, how can I put it, for turning people into billionaires or into venture capitalists. There is no venture capitalist factory that takes people in at one end and purports to emit creative venture capitalists at the other end. Similarly, even for scientists, you have a school claims to do this, but as soon as people leave school and leave university, it’s taken for granted that doing things like that will stop them being creative. So, as I said, there’s a difference and that’s because the educational institutions, as I said, are dominated by anti-rational memes, while the rest of society is not dominated by them. They still exist, they’re still everywhere, but society is no longer dominated by them.
Salvador Duarte
And like in the labor market, do you think we are, it’s evolving in a more positive way than the education system, like how we are suppressing creative thinking?
David Deutsch
Yes, I think the labor market in particular was slower than the rest of the economy precisely because of anti-rational educational memes. People took for granted what you just said, that people took for granted that creativity or high productivity of any kind, which I would call creativity, is not a good thing. It’s a bad thing. But creativity or high productivity of any kind, which I would call creativity as well, is something you’re born with and therefore, if you can’t see it in a person, they haven’t got it, and therefore, the only use for a person in the economy, in this view, the only use for a person in the economy is to do something mindless. Exactly. Yeah. So you see why. So, um, and I don’t think that’s true. I think in a better world, if that could exist, I suppose, um, the economy would have been constantly looking for ways, oh yes, yeah, yeah. For ways in which people are different, not for ways in which they’re the same. So, um, one of the things about education is that education is continually trying to meet standards. Like I said, AI is trying to meet a standard, a criterion, which means that it’s going in the opposite direction to an AGI. So school or university trying to create people who meet standards, um, is trying to create people that are alike. So, but we know we’ve known since, I don’t know, Adam Smith, or even before that, that the reason, the way that people can, um, uh, create value in the economy is by being different. It’s not by being better than anyone else and especially not by being the same. Yeah. But we, we, uh, because of this sort of bad philosophy that, that was and is still prevalent, um, we think of people as being essentially the same, especially if they’re educated. And so we, we think when people are trying, it’s less true now, but it was true, let’s say a hundred years ago that when somebody, uh, let’s say Henry Ford, uh, had an idea for a car factory, he was thinking, how can I make a car factory that can use hundreds of non-creative people to do the same as each other? And that was the invention of the assembly line. Hmm. Right. And if creative people like Henry Ford had been thinking of ways of harnessing the differences between people, maybe we would have made progress faster and the, uh, bad parts of the aspects of the labor market would have been less severe, uh, but they are getting better now. Yeah.
Salvador Duarte
But don’t you think like AI is helping us, especially in the labor markets to find more creative jobs and to people not being so strict to like you work in this company and your goals are your boss’s goals and it, it will just make you more miserable. Yes.
David Deutsch
So anything that a robot can do a human should not be doing ultimately. Yeah. That’s, that’s an, uh, an anti-human kind of, um, application for a human. And similarly in a, in an education system, any, um, kind of, um, uh, education that requires meeting a standard, um, is, is, um, well, um, let me say that more carefully because, uh, you will immediately say what if a lawyer or a doctor or an airline pilot doesn’t have the standard skills? Um, the, um, aspect of education that is designed to meet educational tests is not educational. It may be temporarily necessary, but one day soon, maybe we will have airline pilots who are robots and we won’t have lawyers who are robots, but we will have lawyers that spend their day doing the creative side of being a lawyer, not the mechanical side, the mechanical side will again be done by AIs and the same with surgeons and, uh, yeah.
Salvador Duarte
I liked when you say like that there’s, there’s just can’t be like a standard or a max or like a 20, you got 20 in your exam because like you’re supposed to be in more, in a more capitalist like society, you’re supposed to be creating something that was not known yet, but like, it still seems that in capitalist societies, like the West that they kind of make the businesses punish their innovation by taxing them, which seems totally wrong because they are delivering something to society and they are the ones who are like carrying the other people. And they are the ones who are driving progress. Really? I agree. Yeah. Um, yeah. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about optimism. You have this amazing. So yeah, a lot of who you are, I believe is about being optimistic. Do you, are you a natural optimist? Were you born optimistic? Because like, I know that people like Naval did some inner work to become optimistic.
David Deutsch
Um, I always wanted to be optimistic. Uh, I didn’t have a theory of optimism until really, um, you know, quite late in life when I was writing, um, The Beginning of Infinity, uh, previously, it was sort of part of my aspiration was to be an optimistic person. And I knew that, oh, I did know this, that, that, that I didn’t want to be the kind of person who always thinks that everything will be fine. Or that always, so, uh, I knew that it, it, it requires some kind of engagement with the problem to have an optimistic view of it. So, uh, but, and then, uh, Popper, understanding Popper better. And means that I started to think more and more that everything is a problem. All what we think about. So as Popper says, um, all life is problem solving. So, um, uh, and thinking of things as a problem is already a huge step towards what I call an optimistic point of view, because it means that you are prevented from thinking of problems as barriers. It, if you, if you, uh, and then you can realize that if something seems like a barrier and it’s not a law of physics, which it all, it’s almost never is a law of physics, then, um, uh, that’s a mistake. It’s not a barrier. It’s something that we do not yet know, or that you do not know yet know how to solve. And even if you can’t solve it, that is psychologically a very different and much better state of mind.
Salvador Duarte
Okay. Okay. And are we becoming better at problem solving? You think?
David Deutsch
Uh, yes, I think, uh, on the large scale, uh, on a scale of decades, um, we, we are, um, the society, uh, again, at least Western society is becoming more rational, more creative, um, more able to solve problems. Of course, that, that also means that we make a lot of mistakes. Um, so the, uh, a system that is better at error correction is also, also makes more errors. So, uh, we, we make errors and we go down, we go down blind alleys and at the moment we’ve got some really weird blind alleys going on like woke and there’s, there’s right wing woke and left wing woke and, um, but that is only, you know, some people think that that means that society is in decline. Some people think society is in terminal decline, but I just view these as fads. They have, they have always been fads and there always will be. And it would, it, it, it is, um, simply epistemologically impossible to, uh, for society to make no mistakes, to always every step for every step to be better than the previous step. No, we, we must, we must make errors and correct them. That’s, that’s, um, that’s how progress works.
Salvador Duarte
How did you kind of apply this error correction theory to your own life? Like, you now like see failure and you just don’t like kind of embrace it more than maybe you used to when you were, when you didn’t know this, this error correction theory. Um, I don’t know.
David Deutsch
I think I’ve been lucky in that. Um, I never, I never really thought of the future. Uh, I never thought about having a career and I’ve never really had a career. Uh, and, um, what I always thought of doing and only later realized that that was exactly the right thing to do was, uh, just do what I wanted to do. And when that wasn’t possible, then I would first of all, do whatever is closest to what I want to do. And on the other hand, try to change things, uh, bit by bit, even by a small amount, um, to make, to make the obstacles, um, less severe and to find ways of getting around regulations and, uh, people’s expectations and, you know, the kind of thing. Um, so, um, yeah, I think I was just lucky.
Salvador Duarte
Yeah, I think that’s, and I think we all can kind of should do this practice of only doing what we enjoy. And like, if we need to do something, like if you think if something must be done, we must learn to enjoy it. And it’s, it’s a really a shift points when we learn.
David Deutsch
Actually, there’s more than one way. There’s more than one approach to that. I mean, learning to enjoy it is a, is one way.
Salvador Duarte
Okay.
David Deutsch
Getting it over with is another way.
Salvador Duarte
Ah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I got it. Okay. Yeah. What’s really like the difference between blind optimism and blind negation?
David Deutsch
Oh, well, blind optimism and blind negation or blind pessimism are both forms of prophecy. They are, they are claims about future knowledge and claims about future knowledge. Prophecy is inherently impossible. So theories that theories, when one thinks that one has such a theory about the future growth of knowledge or lack of it, then one is, one is being misled. One is misleading oneself. There is no such thing. The, as I say in the book, optimism is, is not a formula for success or a superstition or a belief in success. It’s an explanation for failure. That’s, that’s, that’s the liberating thing about optimism is that it tells you that when you fail or when you have failed or when you are failing or when you will fail, it’s always because you don’t have, you haven’t got the right knowledge and maybe you can create it. Maybe you can create some of it. Maybe someone will create it and so on, which, you know, it, you may fail, you may die, you know, but as I said just now, it’s a completely different state of mind to thinking of the problem as a barrier that has to be there and has nothing to do with knowledge.
Salvador Duarte
So they are both equally bad, blind optimism and blind pessimism?
David Deutsch
Yeah, it, it, I mean, I think I prefer blind optimism. If I think which one of them is worse in real life depends on the situation. There, there are some situations where blind optimism will just kill you straight away. Yeah. In other situations, it won’t. And the same with blind pessimism.
Salvador Duarte
What’s your favorite book, David? Not counting mine.
David Deutsch
Huh? I think, I think, uh, my favorite book, um, trying to think how to distinguish between different books of Popper’s depends what mood I’m in. I mean, but I think the myth of the framework is very powerful. Just the mostly the one essay in that book, which is called the myth of the framework is, is the powerful thing. But then if I think that, uh, you know, Bronowski wrote the Ascent of Man. And, uh, that’s one of the, I think I’ve read that several times and I’ve read it more often than I’ve, than I’ve read any Popper book, even though Bronowski is kind of, uh, he’s less great as a philosopher, you know, nobody in the 20th century was, was, uh, was even up to waist level of Popper. Um, he was, he was more than head and shoulders above everyone else. But nevertheless, um, Popper, I think could not have written the Ascent of Man. Uh, it’s uplifting in a way that Popper can’t be. And, uh, I wish the two of them had found more. I mean, I think they knew each other, but they didn’t particularly get what was great about each other.
Salvador Duarte
Uh, okay. Did you know Popper when he was still alive, did you get the chance to like be someone in his life?
David Deutsch
Uh, no, no, I was, I was too young or too junior or something. I met him once. Uh, I, um, I went to visit him with, together with my, um, mentor or colleague or boss or whatever you could call him, um, Bryce DeWitt. We both went to see Popper. We tried to persuade him of the Everett interpretation, pretty much failed. And on another occasion, I went to watch, um, a lecture of Popper’s. I didn’t speak to him on that occasion. Um, but it was, it was, um, uh, a lecture. I’ve forgotten what.
Salvador Duarte
The details of what the lecture was about.
David Deutsch
It was like Popper being Popper. And, but I just remember at the beginning, uh, when he, um, when he began by complaining about that, they, they told him that he was going to just give a small seminar and they tricked him and, uh, made him go into this, um, uh, huge lecture hall with hundreds of people. And so he said at the beginning, I, and I remember it ever since I even remember that exactly his tone of voice and his Austrian accent with which he said this. Um, he said, I, before I begin, I see that there are a lot of young people in the audience and so I want to say something to you. Um, and that is you have been told that you have been told that you have been told that you are living in hell. And he’s talking about the environmentalism and politics and, you know, all sorts of things. Um, and then he said, you, you have been told that you were living in hell. This is a lie. And as he said, lie in this heavy Austrian accent, he hit the table and there was a microphone on the table, which was, which was on a stand. And as he hit the table, the stand jumped up. So as he said, this is a lie. It was like thunder going through the room. Just a perfect moment. And that’s the thing I most remember from that lecture. Remarkable. Yeah.
Salvador Duarte
My last question to you, David, is what’s the most important thing you’ve learned in your life?
David Deutsch
Um, well, I, I’m sorry if this is boring, but it must be, uh, Popperian epistemology.
Salvador Duarte
Why?
David Deutsch
Um, maybe it’s just me. Uh, it, it is, um, it has enabled me to solve problems, um, not just in my sort of philosophical view of the world, but also directly in physics. And I, ironically, you know, things like things like the Everett interpretation, uh, Popper was opposed to that. That’s, that’s why we went to see him. We were trying to persuade him and we, we failed to persuade him, but Popper is not Popper’s philosophy. They are two different things. Popper’s philosophy is better than Popper the man. Just like, uh, you know, well, maybe this is insulting, but just like, um, Sherlock Holmes is better than Arthur Conan Doyle.
Salvador Duarte
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I love that. Well, David, this was an honor to have you here. You have such a-
David Deutsch
Well, it was nice meeting you.
Salvador Duarte
Well, yeah. Um, thanks. Um, it was awesome. It was an honor to have you here. Thank you so much for coming, David. And well, keep it up. What you are doing, keep it up. Cause I’m-
David Deutsch
Thank you.
Salvador Duarte
It’s amazing. Really.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me.
Salvador Duarte
Yeah. My honor. See you. Okay.
David Deutsch
Bye bye then.
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