00:00:00.000 We're going to the top cast and part two of Dream of Socrates from the beginning of Infinity
00:00:19.360 There are characters and there's a setting, there's a plot and a side to the audience.
00:00:26.800 This episode Hermes came to Socrates in a Dream, or by some other means, and using a
00:00:31.120 secretic method drew out of Socrates something close to the epistemology of Karl Popper,
00:00:38.520 Now Socrates is about to teach his companions what he learned about epistemology.
00:00:43.200 Now just for some context, one of the main protagonists here is Aristocles, commonly known
00:00:48.040 as Plato, Plato was a student of Socrates, and in turn Aristotle was a student of Plato.
00:00:55.600 And we also hear about Kaphon, who's one of the main characters.
00:00:58.720 Kaphon was a friend of Socrates around the same age as Socrates, while Plato's substantially
00:01:05.320 And at the time of the visit to Delphi, perhaps Plato was around about a teenager, I think.
00:01:10.200 Kaphon is a character who's somewhat conservative in his values and values tradition.
00:01:15.280 Whereas Plato is highly energetic and quick on the uptake, but slow to notice his own
00:01:20.080 As many of us think, Plato, for all of his genius, goes on to be one of the greatest
00:01:24.320 apologists for tyranny in the entire Western or ancient canon.
00:01:28.560 His book, The Republic, sees democracy as necessarily falling into tyranny.
00:01:33.320 One reason for this is that Plato misunderstands what democracy actually is, and he thinks
00:01:37.680 it's about who should rule, rather than as an error correcting mechanism.
00:01:43.320 That misconception must be admitted, almost everyone ever since has held, and it took
00:01:50.160 Plato, of course, believed in platonic ideals, so there must be an ideal kind of ruler
00:01:54.800 who, once they've been installed, would be quite wrong to remove.
00:01:59.280 Hence democracy cannot be the best form of government, except for all those others that have
00:02:03.120 been tried from time to time, according to Plato.
00:02:06.200 Plato taught that if a ruler, let's say a king, was also a philosopher, a philosopher
00:02:10.640 being a lover of wisdom, then this would approach the ideal.
00:02:14.640 Popper himself laid out the blame for totalitarianism in the 20th century at the feet
00:02:20.000 Plato was no doubt a genius of absolutely the first order, but some of us don't really
00:02:26.360 Being a genius doesn't mean that all of your ideas are going to be good, being a genius
00:02:30.080 might mean that some of your arguments are great, but it could also mean that you're
00:02:33.240 just very, very good at providing excellent arguments for really bad ideas.
00:02:37.800 So while Socrates had all of the questions, and this is what some of us love about him,
00:02:41.600 the so-credic method, Plato was in possession of rather too many ultimate answers, or
00:02:50.680 Now the character of Plato, as presented by David here, is of course largely a comic
00:02:54.880 book version of the real Plato, of whose personality we don't know very much.
00:02:59.880 David's Plato is extremely eager and eager to please, and very competitive, especially
00:03:06.440 The Socrates character demonstrates marvelous levels of patience with his younger friend,
00:03:10.360 and we can see the differences not only in what we know about their philosophies or worldviews,
00:03:16.000 but also the psychology that is driven by those underlying philosophies, and which in turn
00:03:20.600 may lead to driving certain kinds of worldviews.
00:03:24.240 There's the desire to investigate on the part of Socrates versus the desire for answers.
00:03:30.080 There's patient thoughtfulness versus our competitive approach.
00:03:33.760 There's creative conjecture versus extrapolation from some perceived pattern.
00:03:38.680 So I think David here captures much of Plato's philosophy in his character, as we'll
00:03:44.520 Here, how Socrates actually improves on what he learned from the god Hermes, while Plato
00:03:52.560 And that too is a deep message about critical rationalism, and learning that any lesson, no
00:03:57.920 matter how well delivered and with what clarity can be muddled, even by the supposedly
00:04:04.040 The second part of our story begins with K for Unknocking on Socrates' door at the end,
00:04:08.120 where they are staying at Delphi, apparently waking him from his dream.
00:04:12.520 Soon, Plato joins them and launches into his conversation barely waiting for a pliers,
00:04:24.440 Thank you again a thousandfold for letting me come on this pilgrimage.
00:04:27.760 But I was thinking last night, does it really count as a revelation if the oracle tells
00:04:32.320 We already knew there was no one was in news, so I thought, shouldn't we go back and
00:04:38.000 No, wait, don't tell me the answer, let me tell you my best guess first.
00:04:43.200 So I thought, yes, we already know he's the wisest, and that he's modest, but we didn't
00:04:48.880 And that's what the god revealed to us, that Socrates is so modest, that he'd contradict
00:04:55.760 And another thing, we knew of Socrates' excellence, but now Apollo has revealed it to the
00:05:00.960 But I wish the whole world had chipped in for the feed.
00:05:10.920 So there we have Plato showing a bit of his character.
00:05:13.880 After this section comes another, and I'm going to skip that one, where Plato reveals
00:05:19.600 He wants to call Socrates master, because that's what Spartans do.
00:05:23.720 He admires their martial prowess, so he's impressed by the use of force.
00:05:28.080 He mentions how devout Spartans are with respect to the gods, and this indeed has some
00:05:33.520 They maintain the piece of Delphi, for example.
00:05:35.960 Plato, the character, has what I might call, not merely the irritating habit of extrapolating
00:05:41.120 from what someone says, but rather attributing those extrapolations to the mind of the
00:05:46.400 speaker rather than to his own imagination, finally he played her, shuts up long enough so
00:05:51.360 that Socrates can tell him about what else Hermes has said.
00:05:59.360 He came to reveal to me a new branch of philosophy, epistemology, knowledge about knowledge,
00:06:05.440 which also has implications for morality and other fields.
00:06:08.520 Much of it I already knew, or partially knew in various special cases, but he gave me
00:06:15.600 Interestingly, he mainly did this by asking me questions and inviting me to think about certain
00:06:21.400 It seems an effective technique, and I tried some time.
00:06:24.240 Tell us everything Socrates, start with the most interesting thing he asked, and you're
00:06:28.720 Well, one thing he asked me was to imagine a Spartan Socrates.
00:06:32.160 A Spartan, what? Oh, I see. That must be who the oracle meant. How sneaky a polo is.
00:06:38.600 It's the Spartan Socrates who is the wisest man in the world, though only by a breadth
00:06:43.960 But being Spartan, he's probably the greatest warrior as well, awesome.
00:06:47.880 Of course, I know you were a great warrior in your day too, Socrates, but still a Spartan
00:06:51.920 Socrates, so we're going to Spartan the same right away, please.
00:06:57.640 So epistemology is knowledge about knowledge, and when you've a god's eye view, it
00:07:04.520 Recognizing small parts of epistemology is something all of us can do without much learning,
00:07:08.360 but when you take a deeper interest in any field, the whole can become breathtaking.
00:07:14.000 And epistemology is very much like this, because it is universal in its domain, which
00:07:20.240 And epistemology, as the point of the beginning of infinity aims to show, is the very thing.
00:07:27.920 Knowledge is the very thing that transforms the entire world, epistemology being the process
00:07:32.080 of finding new knowledge, or creating new knowledge.
00:07:35.720 So it's not a parochial human concern of an esoteric bit of philosophy, really.
00:07:40.480 Epistemology is the reason why large portions of planet Earth look the way they do.
00:07:46.640 It is what explains societies that persist, while others go extinct.
00:07:50.920 As Socrates says, at one stage, Holmes made me aware of the fundamental distinction between
00:07:55.840 the Athenian approach to life, and the Spartan.
00:08:02.080 I'll start because this is basically what my poem was about.
00:08:06.680 Sparta glories in war, and she values all the associated virtues, such as courage and endurance
00:08:12.160 Many of Socrates' companions suggest answers to the riddle of what the basic difference
00:08:22.200 I think that the god told me what their overarching concern is.
00:08:27.880 Though alas, we also fight for all sorts of other reasons, of which we often repent.
00:08:35.120 We Athenians are concerned above all with improvement.
00:08:41.080 Two opposite objectives, if you think about it, I believe you'll soon agree that this
00:08:44.880 is the single source of the myriad of differences between the two cities.
00:08:48.360 I never thought of it that way before, but I think I do agree.
00:08:56.320 That's because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form
00:09:00.960 Another difference is, they don't want a living poet, only dead ones.
00:09:04.800 Because dead poets don't write anything new, but live ones do.
00:09:12.400 Because they don't want their kids to dare question anything, so they won't ever think
00:09:17.320 You are quick on the uptake as usual, aristoclis.
00:09:26.840 Athens wants improvement, or Sparta wants stasis.
00:09:31.360 And this is the single source of all the other differences between the two cities and of
00:09:34.360 course between so-called dynamic societies, as David terms them, or open societies as
00:09:39.520 Poplewood say, and static societies, societies that do not want change.
00:09:44.880 But we haven't yet heard what exactly makes a dynamic society, a society that values improvement.
00:09:52.360 She says that in Sparta there are no people like him, and no leaders who want improvement.
00:09:59.360 In Sparta there are no such politicians, and no such softists, and no gadflies such as me,
00:10:04.800 because any Spartan who did doubt or disapproved the way things have always been done would
00:10:10.320 What few new ideas they do have are intended to sustain the city more securely in its current
00:10:16.880 As for war, I know that there are Spartans who glory in war, and would love to conquer
00:10:21.240 and enslave the whole world, just as they once set out to conquer their neighbours, yet
00:10:25.880 the institutions of their city, and the deeper assumptions that are built into the minds
00:10:29.520 of even their hotheads embody a visceral fear of any such step into the unknown.
00:10:35.080 Perhaps it is significant that the Statue of Aries that stands outside Sparta represents
00:10:39.320 him chained, so that he will always be there to protect the city.
00:10:43.520 Is that not the same as preventing the god of violence from breaking discipline?
00:10:47.960 And being loosed upon the world to cause random mayhem with its terrifying risk of change?
00:10:56.280 So there's a hint at the key, the key difference between the static and dynamic societies.
00:11:01.400 Any new ideas the Spartans do manage to come up with are retained only in so far as they
00:11:06.200 can sustain the city more securely in its current state.
00:11:13.640 China has a lot of amazing new technologies, specifically for monitoring its citizens.
00:11:20.680 It has cameras, it has systems to see what you're up to, to monitor your use on the internet,
00:11:29.440 They have a system of social credit, they call it.
00:11:33.400 And if you're credit, your social credit is low, and then monitoring the things that
00:11:37.360 you're getting up to to inform the government about whether or not you're a good citizen.
00:11:43.120 If you're credit is low, you're going to have trouble.
00:11:45.880 You're even going to have trouble buying food at the supermarket, because your social
00:11:49.280 credit is too, forget about your financial credit.
00:11:53.520 Social credit is maintained and monitored by a complex computer system, and it's determined
00:11:58.040 by the extent to which you fall in line with what society expects of you.
00:12:02.720 A new idea, that's a new idea, so it's a new idea they've had using technology to maintain
00:12:08.440 So they've got a new idea, it's just that it maintains order in China.
00:12:14.240 In the West, we don't quite have things as bad as that, although sometimes you see people
00:12:19.400 wanting to monitor people's use of the internet, but there are forms of status, which
00:12:31.440 Sustainability is one such, maintaining the same environment in some sort of so-called ideal
00:12:37.920 state or closer to ideal status, if there is some kind of ideal kind of environment.
00:12:46.320 Now Socrates then goes on to convey a rather frightening message about how societies such
00:12:50.200 as Sparta view Athens as a threat, even if Athens is peacefully keeping to itself, because
00:12:59.000 the very existence of Athens, however peaceful, is a deadly threat to Sparta's stasis,
00:13:04.800 and therefore in the long run, the condition for the continued stasis of Sparta, which
00:13:11.680 It is the destruction of progress in Athens, which, from our perspective, would constitute
00:13:17.960 I still do not see specifically what the threat is.
00:13:22.040 Well, suppose that in future, both cities were to continue to succeed with their overarching
00:13:28.640 The Spartans would stay exactly as they are now, but we Athenians are already the envy of
00:13:33.480 other Greeks with our wealth and diverse achievements.
00:13:36.640 What will happen when we improve further, and begin to outshine everyone in the world
00:13:42.160 Spartans so when travel interact with foreigners, but they cannot keep themselves entirely
00:13:48.160 Even going to war gives them some inkling of what life is like in other cities that are
00:13:53.760 One day, some Spartan goos visiting Delphi will find that it is the Athenians who have the
00:13:59.960 What if, in a generation or two, Athenian warriors have developed some better moves on the
00:14:08.720 So the creation of knowledge anywhere and progress anywhere is a threat to such places.
00:14:13.760 What unites the regimes of, let's say, Iran and North Korea to talk about contemporary
00:14:18.400 examples and other places in their apoplectic hatred of the United States and other countries
00:14:26.360 What is the thing that they hate about the United States so much?
00:14:34.920 Well, to some extent it might be a few of weapons, but more than that, even if the United
00:14:41.520 States had less weapons, even if the United States wasn't a military threat to Iran or
00:14:48.200 to North Korea, it is the knowledge and the ideas that are in places like the United States
00:14:55.480 that threaten the regimes of Iran and North Korea.
00:15:01.040 South Korean activists will take hot air balloons or helium balloons with mobile phones
00:15:07.400 attached and have them sail over the border, the demilitarized zone in separating North
00:15:15.120 So the phones, not because they're hoping, I don't know, the phone will be some kind of
00:15:19.200 weapon that when it falls out of the sky or fall onto the head of a soldier and kill
00:15:23.480 So that the phone will land in the hands of a citizen who can then use the phone to find
00:15:31.400 And it's the knowledge that would transform North Korea, less than the guns.
00:15:37.400 The knowledge can cause the citizens to change their ideas and you get enough citizens to
00:15:40.480 change their ideas and then you can have a regime change.
00:15:43.760 So I'm skipping another section now where Socrates warns that even societies like Athens,
00:15:48.840 which are open societies, should be conscious of how democracy can go wrong.
00:15:58.320 By the way, we ourselves should be at least as wary of democracy as I think the Spartans
00:16:03.560 are of bloodlust and of battle rage, for it is intrinsically as dangerous.
00:16:08.480 We could not do without a democracy any more than the Spartans could do without their
00:16:13.720 And just as they have moderated the destructiveness of bloodlust through their traditions
00:16:17.040 of discipline and caution, we have moderated the destructiveness of democracy through our
00:16:25.280 We are utterly dependent upon those traditions to keep our monster under control and on
00:16:29.440 our side, just as the Spartans are dependent on their traditions to keep their monster from
00:16:34.440 devouring them along with everyone else in sight.
00:16:37.720 We might do well to put up a statue of democracy chained to symbolize the fundamental safeguard
00:16:44.040 So when Socrates says that bit there, Plato scribbles down notes, Plato's been recording
00:16:49.280 right, with increasing inaccuracy what Socrates has been saying.
00:16:54.080 Plato's notes read, Democracy is a monster, dangerous if not chained, which is of course
00:17:00.160 What Socrates is in fact saying is that not all democracies are created equal.
00:17:06.160 There are traditions that are needed to help democracy not become a monster in the first
00:17:13.600 This is why it has been said that, for example, the Westminster system is so excellent.
00:17:20.080 It's where traditions are ancient and they've been hard tested over time against many
00:17:25.440 difficult real life situations, many difficult real life scenarios.
00:17:30.440 The monarch has been denuded of almost all power and most centrally important to that
00:17:45.600 All the monarch has is so-called reserve powers to remove a government if things just
00:17:51.120 aren't working at all and to have a new election.
00:17:54.400 This kind of thing can ensure stability under rapid change.
00:17:59.480 Now if you, the self-indulgent, if you Google my name, Brithall and the phrase Republicans versus
00:18:08.640 monarchists, then you'll find an article I wrote about that in particular about how certain
00:18:15.880 kinds of constitutional monarchy have in explicit knowledge, instantiated in the traditions
00:18:22.560 and the systems which ensure stability under change and we should be hesitant to go tinkering
00:18:29.320 with it too much because we don't know all the ways in which it works or the reasons
00:18:34.080 why it works much less the ways in which it could fail if you tinker with it.
00:18:38.960 Of course there also exists upper and lower houses in good democracies and supreme courts
00:18:42.680 such as in Australia or the United States, settle certain disputes between the branches
00:18:47.760 On the other hand, some systems do not permit parliaments to initiate legislation.
00:18:52.120 So although they superficially appear to be democracies, they in fact aren't because the
00:18:56.960 people that are elected can't create legislation.
00:19:00.640 They can't initiate legislation, they can't creatively come up with good ideas or new ideas.
00:19:07.240 And in other, those kind of systems, there's ways and means of unelected people coming
00:19:13.000 up with legislation that can then affect the lives of many, many different people.
00:19:18.320 This is rather like the European Parliament and the European Commission worked together
00:19:22.960 The Commission can create new legislation, initiate new legislation and all the parliament
00:19:30.240 And in fact, the Commission can overrule the Parliament.
00:19:37.640 You can't vote the rulers out, the people that make the rules.
00:19:41.960 Traditions evolve over time incrementally under the pressures of dealing with real social
00:19:48.040 And in this way, processes and subsystems and cultures are whittled away into kind of
00:19:53.240 this machine, this well-oiled machine for critical debate and building consensus and
00:19:57.960 are getting things done, and most especially rejecting bad ideas and rulers.
00:20:02.040 And though David doesn't quite say this here, it seems to me to be somewhat implied.
00:20:09.000 And so the tyranny and indeed, the tyranny of a majority over minorities can be a real
00:20:16.440 So we need democratic institutions to guard against this perversion.
00:20:20.480 It's not just democracy, it's traditions within that democracy as well.
00:20:26.360 In the real world, we do not just have a Congress or just a house of representatives.
00:20:30.960 We have other checks and balances, we have things like houses of review, the Senate or
00:20:36.200 House of Lords, we have courts, we have heads of state.
00:20:39.920 So this is the sense in which democracy has changed, as well as many other things that
00:20:45.320 It is restricted to some extent from overreach and tyranny.
00:20:51.400 Plato finds the concern about the runaway excesses that are possible in democracy as
00:20:57.280 And so concludes democracy itself must be chained completely.
00:21:01.480 The only way to do this in his view is with so-called benevolent dictators, philosophicings.
00:21:07.880 And yet we hear it again and again from public intellectuals these days most especially.
00:21:12.360 Anytime you hear someone argue for more ex-ingovernment, where ex is nearly a scientist
00:21:19.640 You're hearing an argument for a philosopher king, a claim that someone is less prone
00:21:24.120 to error or especially better at knowing what is best for everyone else.
00:21:28.040 In some cases, I won't mention names because these are people I respect, these public intellectuals.
00:21:33.720 I have heard explicit regret about only if we could have a benevolent dictator, a scientifically
00:21:41.600 minded benevolent dictator instead of the present systems around the world.
00:21:46.240 And that benevolent dictator could write the wrongs, as if they would be less fallible.
00:21:51.720 Indeed, in the next part that I'm about to read, the companion discussed how if Sparta figured
00:21:57.320 out that the fact that thinkers, philosophers and scientists and so on were useful in a society,
00:22:07.800 Caperon sounds this sounds like a dangerous secret to be discussing out in the open.
00:22:13.200 If the Spartans in general were capable of understanding that secret, they'd have implemented
00:22:18.240 it long ago and there'd be no war between our cities.
00:22:21.600 If some individual Sparta tried to advocate new philosophical ideas, he would soon find himself
00:22:26.400 on trial for heresy or any number of other crimes.
00:22:31.840 Unless the one who had taken up philosophy was a king.
00:22:34.640 Trust you to find the logical loophole or a stickly use.
00:22:37.600 Theoretically you're right, but in Sparta even the kings are not allowed to change anything
00:22:42.600 If one were to try, he would be deposed by the E4s.
00:22:45.640 Well, they have two kings, five E4s and 28 senators, so mathematics tells us that if only
00:22:50.120 15 senators, three E4s and one king were to take up philosophy.
00:22:53.400 Yes, Aristically, as I can see, if the rulers of Sparta were to take up our style of
00:22:58.200 philosophy and would then to seriously embark upon criticizing and reforming their traditions.
00:23:02.760 Here, the kings of philosophers, the same as a philosopher who's a king, so whether
00:23:11.560 Well, perhaps it's more likely that one benevolent king would have seized power.
00:23:15.080 So there's plight of getting the Republic room.
00:23:16.640 I'll just skip ahead to where he also gets knowledge room, he scribbles down Socrates
00:23:22.320 Socrates is the wisest man in the world, because he's the only one who knows, he has no
00:23:25.880 knowledge, because genuine knowledge is impossible.
00:23:28.400 Wait, justified belief is impossible, really, are you sure?
00:23:33.640 Sorry, but it's a somewhat perverse question, Aristically.
00:23:39.640 No, the Plato is just asked for a justification of the belief that one cannot justify
00:23:46.080 No, I'm not sure if anything, I never have been, but the god explained to me why
00:23:50.080 that must be so, starting with the fellibility of the human mind and the unreliability of
00:23:55.160 The only knowledge of the material world that's impossible, useless and undesirable, he gave
00:24:00.640 me a marvelous perspective on how we perceive the world.
00:24:03.800 Each of your eyes is like a dark little cave, one on whose rear wall some stray shadows
00:24:08.600 fall from outside, you spend your whole life at the back of that cave, able to see nothing
00:24:13.440 but the rear wall, so you cannot see reality directly at all.
00:24:17.320 The ziffrey of prisoners change inside a cave and permit it to look only at the rear
00:24:22.320 We can never know the reality outside, because we only see fleeting distorted shadows of it.
00:24:27.720 Note how Socrates is slightly improving on Hermes here, and Plato has been increasingly
00:24:33.920 He then went on to explain to me that objective knowledge is indeed possible.
00:24:37.520 It comes from within, it begins as conjecture, and then it is corrected by repeated cycles
00:24:42.000 of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our wall.
00:24:46.040 The only true knowledge is that which comes from within, how, remembered from a previous
00:24:51.360 In this way, we frail and fallible humans can come to know objective reality, provided
00:24:56.440 we use philosophically sound methods as I have described, which most people do not.
00:25:02.040 They come to know the true world beyond the illusory experience, but only by pursuing the
00:25:07.880 Socrates, you really ought to write all this down, together with all your other wisdom,
00:25:11.000 for the benefit of the whole world and posterity.
00:25:13.040 No need to realistically, posterity is right here listening, posterity is all of you,
00:25:18.280 What's the point of writing down things that are going to be endlessly tinkered with
00:25:20.880 an improved, rather than make a permanent record of all my misconceptions as they are at
00:25:24.920 a particular instance, I would rather offer them to others in two way debate.
00:25:29.160 That way I benefit from criticism, and may even make improvements myself.
00:25:32.960 Whatever is valuable will survive such debates and be passed on without any effort from
00:25:37.360 Whatever is not valuable would only make me look a fool to future generations.
00:25:43.920 I'm not going to move on to part two, B, by changing location.
00:25:48.680 Okay, after that quick change of location and apologies for the camera quality, I'm just
00:25:56.840 doing a quick and cheap version of just the final part of this chapter.
00:26:02.520 I'm really looking forward to doing the next chapter on the multiverse, and there I can
00:26:10.800 So at the end here of chapter 10, A Dream of Socrates, there's just a short section
00:26:15.680 that David has written that is outside of the rest of the chapter, so to speak.
00:26:23.880 And he begins the last bit of the chapter by talking about the so-called Socratic problem.
00:26:28.120 The Socratic problem is Socrates never wrote anything himself.
00:26:31.680 The only reports we have are from Plato, who did write down some stuff.
00:26:36.920 And Plato's character of Socrates changes throughout his writings.
00:26:42.400 Of course, the classic Socrates is thought of as the person who invented the Socratic
00:26:47.760 He is this interlocutor who probes with questions to try and elicit the knowledge that
00:26:52.720 the other person involved in a dialogue often already possesses.
00:26:56.280 Or if they don't possess it through clever questioning that they're able to use their
00:27:04.240 So I'm not going to read that particular part of David's exposition, I'm just going to concentrate
00:27:11.480 on something he says here in part of the essay effectively that's at the end of this chapter.
00:27:19.160 Importantly, the section where he tries to explain how learning occurs and how communication
00:27:24.200 can be difficult because of the way knowledge is actually constructed, because it's not
00:27:30.760 Because knowledge isn't a fluid of some sort, you can't pour it from one person into
00:27:35.560 the next, the process whereby knowledge is produced in the mind of a learner, in the
00:27:41.320 mind of someone who's trying to understand something, has to be a process of conjecture
00:27:46.120 and refutation, of them guessing what the meaning is that you're trying to impart.
00:27:52.480 And so this has all sorts of interesting consequences because you can't speak perfectly,
00:27:59.720 There is no fallible means of transmission between what you know and what the other person
00:28:06.280 And so quite often, what happens is miscommunication.
00:28:09.160 And so I'm just going to read a section here from the end of chapter 10 where David writes,
00:28:15.760 in reality, the communication of new ideas, even mundane ones, like directions, depends
00:28:20.520 on guesswork on the part of both the recipient and the communicator and is inherently fallible.
00:28:26.600 Since there is no reason to expect that the young Plato, just because he was intelligent
00:28:30.080 and highly educated and by all accounts a new worshiper of Socrates, made the fewest mistakes
00:28:37.880 On the contrary, the default assumption should be that misunderstandings are ubiquitous,
00:28:42.400 and that neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate is any guarantee against
00:28:47.160 It could easily be that the young Plato misunderstood everything that Socrates said to him,
00:28:51.760 and that the older Plato gradually succeeded in understanding it, and is therefore the more
00:28:55.640 reliable guide, or it could be that the Plato slipped ever further into misinterpretation
00:29:04.120 Evidence, argument, and explanation are needed to distinguish between these and many other
00:29:08.840 It is a difficult task for historians, objective knowledge, though attainable, is hard
00:29:14.680 I'll finish there and just my commentary on that.
00:29:18.320 This has important consequences, of course, for teaching and learning.
00:29:24.120 We are taught, I dare say all of us, that error is a bad thing, or that error is somehow
00:29:32.680 But when genuine efforts are made, on the part of someone trying to learn something,
00:29:38.000 and they fail at that, it's a necessary part of the learning process, because the speak
00:29:46.080 They can fallibly try to transmit some knowledge and fail at it.
00:29:51.240 They can be failure on the part of the listener, and that's no fault of their own either,
00:29:56.320 because that's part of being human, we're not gods.
00:29:58.960 And this is putting aside the fact that institutions like schools are inherently coercive
00:30:03.360 anyway, and so the person attempting to learn is doing it under duress quite often, and
00:30:08.480 trying to learn things that they're just not interested in.
00:30:10.880 So all of this is stacked against the typical student, because the entire culture of whether
00:30:15.640 it be primary school, secondary school, tertiary education, is one in which errors are punished,
00:30:23.120 because of course we do so-called assessment tasks, examinations, we write essays, and
00:30:33.480 We get graded to the extent that we've met so-called outcomes, and outcomes are where we
00:30:41.960 The whole purpose, supposedly of school and university, is to learn, but the process of
00:30:46.640 learning requires that we make errors along the way, but errors are not rewarded.
00:30:51.440 Instead, errors are punished, if we're bad marks or low rankings and so on, but the
00:30:55.840 ironic thing is that a high rate of errors typically means you're making lots and lots
00:31:01.320 And of course, there are some wrinkles here, someone who just attempts to write down
00:31:04.760 all the wrong answers in an examination, is of course deliberately making lots and lots of
00:31:10.880 And sometimes people don't put in any effort, but why should they put in any effort to
00:31:14.520 something that they don't really have any interest in?
00:31:17.880 This will take us too far of a field from this particular chapter, so let me get back to
00:31:21.880 reading a little bit about the culture of philosophy as an academic discipline in particular.
00:31:27.360 And I don't think it was until I read the beginning of an affinity that I really reflected
00:31:30.960 upon this, and realized that when I was at university studying philosophy, then in fact,
00:31:36.600 it's a rather bizarre thing to study, not just because as many people complain, it doesn't
00:31:41.680 have a lot of practical use, although I think it does, but rather for these reasons that
00:31:47.200 David's about to mention, so let me read, he writes, courses in philosophy, plays great
00:31:53.000 weight on reading original texts and commentaries on them, in order to understand the
00:31:57.160 theories that were in the minds of the various great philosophers.
00:32:00.720 This focus on history is odd and is in marked contrast to all other academic disciplines,
00:32:08.360 For example, in all the physics courses that I undertook at university, me too, by the way,
00:32:14.760 both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, I cannot recall a single instance
00:32:18.640 where any original papers or books by the great physicists of old were studied, or even
00:32:23.040 on the reading list, only when a course touched upon very recent discoveries did we ever
00:32:30.680 So we learned Einstein's theory of relativity without ever hearing from Einstein.
00:32:34.880 We knew Maxwell, Boltzmann, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and so on, only his names.
00:32:40.440 We read their theories in textbooks whose authors were physicists, not historians of physics,
00:32:46.320 who themselves may never have read the works of these pioneers.
00:32:50.880 The immediate reason is that the original sources of scientific theories are almost never
00:32:56.760 All subsequent expositions are intended to be improvements on them, and some succeed,
00:33:03.720 When there is a deeper reason, the originators of a fundamental new theory initially share
00:33:07.720 many of the misconceptions of previous theories.
00:33:11.080 They need to develop an understanding of how and why those theories are flawed, and how
00:33:15.880 the new theory explains everything that they explained.
00:33:18.960 But most people who subsequently learn the new theory have quite different concerns.
00:33:23.840 Often they just want to take the theory for granted and use it to make predictions or to
00:33:27.160 understand some complex phenomena in combination with other theories, although I may want
00:33:30.720 to understand nuances of it, that have nothing to do with why it is superior to the old
00:33:34.720 theories, although they may want to improve it.
00:33:37.120 But what they no longer care about is tracking down and definitively meeting every last
00:33:41.360 objection that would naturally be made by someone thinking in terms of older, superseded
00:33:45.960 There is rarely any reason for scientists to address the obsolete problem situations that
00:33:50.240 motivated the great scientists of the past, pausing there in just my commentary.
00:33:56.080 But in philosophy, that's precisely what goes on.
00:33:58.760 When you're trying to understand some of what they can't write about, I love Descartes,
00:34:02.240 I love reading Descartes' meditations in particular, and Descartes had this thing called
00:34:08.520 The method of doubt was a very interesting philosophical thought experiment.
00:34:13.440 It's basically about what the limits of doubt are.
00:34:18.840 When you read him, he's sitting by the fireplace and he's wondering whether or not
00:34:23.000 his body is real, could he doubt his body and he concludes that yes, he could doubt that
00:34:27.000 he's body is real, because he might be dreaming.
00:34:28.800 He can't sometimes tell whether during a dream if he's actually dreaming or if he's awake.
00:34:34.520 Whatever the case, this idea, it's sometimes known as the cogito, from cogito ugo sum, which
00:34:41.120 is Latin for, I think therefore I am, interestingly enough, in the meditations he never
00:34:44.960 says, I think therefore I am, he says, I think I am.
00:34:48.480 And I think I am is a necessary truth each time someone thinks.
00:34:51.320 And so this is supposed to be something that's infallible, many, many modern philosophers
00:34:55.760 that they take it for granted, that this is the fundamental thing that you cannot doubt.
00:35:01.320 So long as you think, well then if you think, even if that thought is trying to doubt
00:35:07.080 that you're thinking, something is doing the doubting, therefore that thing exists, okay,
00:35:12.840 I won't go into the details why I now think that in fact is wrong, that's misconceived,
00:35:16.680 it's a misconception to think that that is an infallible truth, rather what's interesting
00:35:23.040 about this is that we read it in Descartes meditations.
00:35:26.440 We read the translation of the French, Descartes read French, and we consulted the original
00:35:33.040 and we critiqued the original and then we read some commentaries on the original, namely
00:35:37.800 other philosophers who criticized Descartes, but why?
00:35:43.200 Why aren't there texts of philosophy where you can just look up Descartes cogito?
00:35:48.640 Well, in fact, you can, these days, there's lots of popular philosophy books where you're not
00:35:52.960 reading the philosophers' ideas in their own words, in their original words, but rather
00:35:59.080 someone else who has distilled out the useful stuff, and I think that's a far better way
00:36:06.240 Sometimes the writing is quite beautiful, I should say that, I do enjoy reading people
00:36:10.040 like David Hume, I think that's interesting, and of course Karl Popper is very interesting
00:36:16.640 But, as those old philosophies, especially, are critiqued and improved, there's no reason
00:36:24.120 for us to go back, except as a matter of some sort of literature, to read the old philosophers.
00:36:30.240 There's better ways to understand those ideas now, and I'll just read one final bit here
00:36:35.240 right at the end of this chapter, and David's further talking about why we wouldn't
00:36:39.920 consult the original formulation of any scientific theory, so we wouldn't go to Einstein's
00:36:46.600 original papers published in 1915 to understand the theory of relativity, for example.
00:36:53.600 The reason why the scientists are trying to learn the theory, and also why they have such
00:36:58.720 disregard for the faithfulness to the original, is that they want to know how the world
00:37:05.160 Crucially, this is the same objective that the originator of the theory had.
00:37:09.480 If it is good theory, if it is a superb theory, as the fundamental theory of physics
00:37:13.400 nowadays are, then it is exceedingly hard to vary, while still remaining a viable explanation.
00:37:19.560 So the learners, through criticism of their initial guesses, and with the help of their
00:37:23.400 books, teachers, and colleagues, seeking a viable explanation, will arrive at the same
00:37:30.120 That is how the theory manages to be passed faithfully from generation to generation, despite
00:37:34.280 no one caring about its faithfulness one way or the other.
00:37:39.520 This is a remarkably optimistic way of thinking about learning.
00:37:43.280 But let's say you're interested in physics, and a lot of people when they're interested
00:37:48.800 in physics, they follow a sort of classical trajectory through physics where you learn
00:37:56.600 You learn about so-called classical mechanics, most of it was invented by, discovered
00:38:02.480 by Newton and Laplace and some others, and then you move on to relativity by Einstein, then
00:38:09.280 you move on to quantum theory, and then it gets more specialized from there.
00:38:12.640 Now, the interesting thing here about what David said is that if you're trying to genuinely
00:38:17.160 understand Newton's theory, and you will eventually do feel you have a good grasp of Newton's
00:38:22.160 theory, you've gone through the same process as Newton.
00:38:26.600 You are now as smart as what Newton was, in terms of that theory.
00:38:30.280 You understand the theory, as well as probably better than what Newton did, because Newton
00:38:35.120 didn't understand all the ways in which his theory was actually wrong, and now we do
00:38:37.920 and probably in understanding Newton's theory, you know how some idea, if you understand
00:38:48.160 So I'll say that again in a different way, if you're trying to understand a new actually
00:38:52.760 succeed in understanding, you really feel you've succeeded in comprehending the special
00:38:57.960 theory of relativity, invented by Einstein, discovered by Einstein, then you're just as
00:39:03.840 good as Einstein in terms of that theory, because you've gone through a similar process.
00:39:09.880 If you've actually tried to learn it, you've tried to solve certain problems, at least
00:39:13.480 the scientists who are trying to use the special theory of relativity, let's say, to solve
00:39:18.720 certain practical problems, they will have gone through that process, proper physicists
00:39:25.000 will have gone through that process, proper chemists will have gone through the process
00:39:29.880 that men deliver views in order to understand the periodic table and so on.
00:39:34.520 In the next chapter, chapter 11, the multiverse, which I've been really excited about,
00:39:39.720 completing, it's going to take me some weeks, I think, to do that one, it's about quantum
00:39:48.400 It's about how we best understand quantum theory today.
00:39:52.000 It's controversial, but it's not more controversial than other aspects of just quantum
00:40:00.040 And the struggle that people have even today in appreciating what quantum theory is saying
00:40:05.600 about reality and the world that we live in is, during large part two, consulting the
00:40:14.080 original authors of quantum theory, so to speak.
00:40:18.120 They were struggling very much to try and understand what on earth reality was telling
00:40:23.120 us about itself through this theory of quantum physics.
00:40:28.240 And initially we had all sorts of really weird ideas, people were saying that this kind
00:40:32.800 of suggested things like electrons, atoms even could be both particles, a particle is
00:40:41.880 a thing that is isolated at a place and a time, so it's right here, right now, it's
00:40:48.280 in a particular place and time, it's isolated to a point in other words, that's what
00:40:54.480 But atoms and electrons, for example, they're particles, but they can also sometimes
00:41:01.720 And a wave is not a thing that's isolated at a point in space, a wave is a thing that is
00:41:08.080 So in other words, quantum theory on this view, and it's sometimes called the Copenhagen
00:41:12.720 interpretation, on this view, on the Copenhagen interpretation, something like an atom is both
00:41:18.840 a particle isolated at a point and a wave extended throughout space, isolated at a point
00:41:31.600 People ever since have consulted the original authors of quantum theory, people like
00:41:35.600 Heisenberg and Dirac and Schrodinger, who were debating all of this at the time and
00:41:42.040 struggling to try and understand what the meaning of all this was.
00:41:45.720 Most they're just throwing around ideas, they were making lots of errors.
00:41:49.840 As you do when you're trying to understand something new, the problem now in the culture
00:41:53.800 and the culture of physics in particular is it resembles, to some extent, that mistake that
00:42:00.800 philosophy still makes today, namely consulting the original authors of the theory and trying
00:42:09.400 And their confusion has filtered through to today.
00:42:12.720 There was someone who actually figured out his name was Hugh Everett.
00:42:17.000 He figured out how best to interpret quantum theory, realistically speaking, in other words,
00:42:22.040 in a way that didn't violate logic, in a way that didn't upset the normal understanding
00:42:26.960 of the way in which words are used, so that we can understand quantum theory in a realistic
00:42:33.680 Now it says some profound and interesting things, but it makes sense even if those things
00:42:38.920 are profound and interesting, anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself because that's going
00:42:43.640 Now I just absolutely find a thing for this chapter and addendum to what I said earlier
00:42:53.320 David tweeted, just after I think I recorded that last video where I was trying to explain
00:42:59.280 how certain kinds of democracies might be better than some others, or certain so-called
00:43:06.880 In particular, I was talking about what I call the excellence of the Westminster system and
00:43:12.600 compared it to certain other systems, namely the EU parliamentary system, in the EU parliamentary
00:43:19.440 system, the parliamentarians there, the members of the European Parliament, can't initiate
00:43:25.120 The rulers, the people making the rules, they're in the commission, the EU commission,
00:43:32.360 But the voters have no way of removing those rulers.
00:43:37.600 The commission people are installed by national governments, and so they're immune to being
00:43:44.800 So if they make a mistake, if they make bad policies, there's nothing that the voters can
00:43:48.920 Now, sometimes people have complained that, oh, well, that's like your queen, that's
00:43:53.040 like a queen in the Commonwealth, okay, the Queen of England, the head of state there.
00:43:59.080 Because again, as I try to explain, the head of state in the Westminster system has zero
00:44:07.080 They can't make up policies, okay, they have a certain constitutional function, but
00:44:14.600 And so because they don't make policies, there's no reason to try and correct them.
00:44:18.080 Now, there could be things that go wrong in a constitutional monarchy with the monarch,
00:44:26.160 So the constitutional monarchy, just by looking and observing and trying to explain the world
00:44:31.960 as it is, has shown itself to be a robust institution that allows for great stability
00:44:40.320 So it's no accident, many of us think that the enlightenment and industrial revolution
00:44:45.680 in particular happened in England and in around the United Kingdom.
00:44:53.160 Will you change scientific change, cultural change, and yet the society to remain quite
00:45:00.400 Well, we think in certainly in large parts because of this parliamentary democracy in a
00:45:07.960 Now, an extra thing to say about this, is there a way of, let's say, ranking something
00:45:18.520 like the Westminster system against another good system, like the United States Republic,
00:45:25.160 okay, the United States democratic system or republican system, as they often say, it's
00:45:31.400 a republic rather than a democracy, some people say, it's still a democracy.
00:45:36.000 In pop-as-view, a democracy is nothing but a system which allows the removal of rulers,
00:45:41.720 the purpose of the democracy is the removal of rulers that you don't want there anymore,
00:45:46.960 Now, I hint at what I'm about to say in that article that I pointed people to, monarchist
00:45:58.680 versus republicans in Australia, again, you can Google that one, where I actually hint that
00:46:06.880 in Australia there has been a debate over the years about whether or not we should remove
00:46:11.520 the British monarch as a head of state, and instead have a president, a president of Australia,
00:46:18.280 who would be separate to the prime minister of Australia and the rest of the government in
00:46:23.120 Now, I don't completely object to this, but I object to certain models of this, so I say
00:46:28.320 in my article without going back and reading it now, I'll try and do this for memory,
00:46:32.280 I say in part there that certain models of an Australian republic would be a really
00:46:37.400 bad idea. If we were to just take out the substitute we have for the head of state, the
00:46:43.240 technical head of state is the Queen, the Queen of Australia, the Queen of India, she's
00:46:48.240 the Queen of Great Britain, she's the Queen, and she's our technical head of state, but
00:46:53.680 who represented even Australia is called the Governor-General of Australia, the Governor-General
00:46:57.200 of Australia can technically remove the government, and it's happened once before, where
00:47:01.520 the Governor-General has removed the prime minister. Now, if that works reasonably well,
00:47:08.520 although it was called the constitutional crisis when the prime minister at the time
00:47:12.000 called Gough Whitlam was removed back in the 70s, some people still disagree about that,
00:47:16.920 and there's a whole bunch of material out there about whether it was legal to do and
00:47:21.360 what happened, it's all very interesting, politically speaking, in terms of history,
00:47:26.200 unless Australia has remained politically, relatively stable for a long, long time.
00:47:31.000 In other words, there's been no violent insurrections over the years. Now, if we were
00:47:37.040 to just replace the Governor-General as representative of the Queen and have exactly the
00:47:44.560 same position, filled by a President, appointed by the Parliament, because the Governor-General
00:47:50.080 is appointed by the Parliament, and then the Queen approves or something, it's just a
00:47:54.560 matter of ticking off. If we were to have President of Australia instead of Governor-General
00:47:58.840 of Australia and call ourselves a Republic, that wouldn't worry me too much. But some models
00:48:04.680 for an Australian Republic call for a popularly elected President, which I think would
00:48:11.600 be a terrible idea. And the reason I think it would be a terrible idea is because then
00:48:16.040 you'd have another seat of power. In Australia, we've got the House of Representatives
00:48:22.920 and we have the Australian Senate. And these two houses form the Parliament of Australia.
00:48:30.440 There's an executive within the Parliament of Australia, but it's not separately elected.
00:48:36.120 The executive is the Prime Minister, Annie's Cabinet, and they're the ones that do the
00:48:40.880 day-to-day business of governing. The Governor-General has absolutely no power to create
00:48:45.640 legislation. He's not a ruler, or she's not a ruler. All they do is if there's a crisis,
00:48:52.640 a constitutional crisis, they can create another election, okay, or in fact remove the entire
00:48:59.280 government and put the opposition in if the opposition can form a government. Okay, don't
00:49:03.920 want to get into the nuances of that. If you had an elected President here in Australia,
00:49:09.480 you'd have the Senate, you'd have the House of Representatives, and then you'd have an
00:49:13.120 elected President. Let's say the policies of the Government of the Prime Minister and of
00:49:19.680 the House of Representatives differed starkly from the policies of the President of Australia.
00:49:26.240 The President of Australia, if they're popular elected, would be popularly elected during
00:49:31.480 an election where they're standing up in front of the TV cameras and so on and giving
00:49:36.280 interviews about why they're the best person and why they're the best person would have
00:49:41.840 to come down to what ideas they have for Australia. They would have policies about what's
00:49:47.840 the best. So now you've got a problem. If you have a popularly elected President in Australia
00:49:52.960 and a popularly elected government led by a Prime Minister, if there was a difference of opinion,
00:50:00.000 what do you do? And what would the population do if the Prime Minister was constantly in
00:50:06.320 disagreeing with the President and could the President remove the Prime Minister if there's
00:50:09.800 a sufficient disagreement? And would they just be if they're from different parties just constantly
00:50:14.160 removing one another? Would it just be a constitutional crisis almost all the time? Let's
00:50:20.800 consider what's happening right now. I'm recording this in 2020. The President of the United
00:50:26.080 States is currently under impeachment and the process is going through the American Senate.
00:50:32.640 This is distracting from the normal business of government. It's for some people, for some
00:50:39.920 anarchists out there, this is a good thing. It's slowing down the ability of the government to
00:50:44.000 actually do anything useful. And by useful, some anarchists, some certain people who don't really
00:50:51.200 buy the idea that states are necessarily a good thing as in large state apparatus. So if you can
00:50:57.680 slow down the government from doing stuff, they're actually slowing down the government from
00:51:01.760 impeding progress or leave that aside. For the purpose of a functioning government,
00:51:08.000 the problem then becomes that you have various seats of power and these various seats of
00:51:13.600 power mean that none that all of them can deny responsibility when things go wrong. I just want
00:51:19.920 you read David Deutsches tweet back on the 24th of January 2020 and he wrote in his tweet,
00:51:28.640 having an elected executive independent of the legislature is already bad.
00:51:33.360 dissipates responsibility away from both. Don't know how to fix that. He's talking about the United
00:51:39.840 States here and he rather Riley suggests, consider amending the constitution to revert to a
00:51:45.920 parliamentary system and inviting Harry and Meghan to be king and queen. So possible, but what he's
00:51:55.280 saying there and I tend to agree is that the United States does great democracy, the United Kingdom
00:52:00.720 great democracy, but really objectively speaking, one is more democratic than the other. The West
00:52:08.560 Minsta parliamentary system is better. Why? Because when a mistake is made by the rulers, by the
00:52:16.960 government as a whole in some way, there's a clear accountability on the part of the West Minsta system
00:52:24.720 in terms of the government. The government and the House of Commons in particular are the people
00:52:31.680 responsible for what's going wrong. In the United States, you have Congress and you have the Senate
00:52:38.880 and you also have the independently elected executive, namely the president. And so when the
00:52:44.080 Congress and the president as is happening right now are at loggerheads, less happens and this
00:52:50.080 happened under Obama as well. And it happened under Clinton. It's happened again and again in the
00:52:55.120 United States. Now some might see this as a virtue because it slows down the ability of the government
00:53:03.360 to actually do too much in theory, in practice, however, many people are worried about just how much
00:53:09.840 the United States government is doing. The federal government is doing, I think they should be doing
00:53:13.440 less. Again, the point of government on purpose view is that it is a system for removing rulers
00:53:21.440 with no violence. And the rulers we want to remove are the rulers who've made policy mistakes
00:53:28.240 over time. But if you've got distributed power such that the president, let's say, is popular
00:53:35.040 elected and the Congress is popular elected and both can kind of come up with rules. The president
00:53:40.080 can regulate and the Congress can legislate. Then the difficult theory varies. If there's a problem
00:53:48.160 arising, whatever that problem is out there in reality, in Australia right now we have a drought
00:53:54.960 going on and there's various different policies about what we should do to try and conserve water
00:54:00.560 or to create some more water by desalination and so on. When there's a real problem out there in
00:54:05.760 the world for which government might be a useful solution or might be able to bring to bear a
00:54:10.640 useful solution. If I was to migrate this problem to the United States, the president might be able
00:54:17.360 to make some regulations about what should happen with the water. The Congress might be able to
00:54:21.840 make some legislation about building dams and so on. And when these two things are at loggerheads
00:54:29.040 who are on another, when they disagree with one another, then both sides can say it's the other
00:54:33.680 person's fault. So they are immune to a certain amount of responsibility. When in reality what you
00:54:40.640 want from a political leader is the ability to come up with a policy, they then get voted for,
00:54:46.800 they enact the policy. And if the policy fails, then it is clearly their responsibility. They can't
00:54:53.040 turn around and say, oh, I did my best, but it was the other mob with power that was the problem.
00:54:58.320 In fact, here in Australia right now, there in fact is a version of this where there is the
00:55:04.560 federal government and there's the state government. And the federal government and the state
00:55:08.480 government are complaining when it comes to bushfires that have been happening. And for example,
00:55:13.520 the drought situation I was just talking about where both of these seats of power have
00:55:20.080 responsibility for the same thing in a sense. And so they're both complaining that it's the other
00:55:26.880 mob who is actually in charge of this. And it's the other mob who should be held responsible
00:55:32.000 for things going wrong, for the problems that are happening. Or because the institutions are not
00:55:38.080 perfectly in line with Papa's criterion of democracy. Namely, they have to be able to be removed
00:55:45.680 on the basis that their policies are bad. And if their policies are bad, then we can clearly
00:55:51.600 identify that it is that group of leaders that is responsible. Okay. So won't be talking politics
00:55:59.920 for a quite a long time now because I'm onto the multiverse completely abstracted away
00:56:05.600 from anything to do with droughts and political systems to a large extent. So look forward to that
