00:00:00.000 The horizon. It's like an infinity. You can move towards it to further away from wherever
00:00:15.080 you begin, but you'll never get there. It's unobtainable. You can aim for it, like the
00:00:22.120 sky. Indeed, the sky is even better. You can aim for it, never get there, and yet get
00:00:28.960 right past it. What you thought was there is revealed not to be, and what happens is the sky
00:00:35.280 opens up to something even deeper and more mysterious. Infinity is something you can approach.
00:00:41.680 You can know about it, but you will just never get to it. There is a way to move towards
00:00:47.440 it, or away from it, who are always at the beginning of infinity, in all directions.
00:00:53.120 Back to the horizon, and the ocean. The ocean is vast, but it's a poor metaphor. Even the sky
00:01:03.120 is a poor metaphor. But I'm here because, well, this place is both a metaphor and the actual
00:01:10.000 real thing. This place has the ominous name in Sydney, Australia, of the gap. The history of
00:01:17.120 the gap is not particularly optimistic. It's infamous for reasons the viewer may guess or can
00:01:23.200 research themselves. I'm interested in this place because it is right in the middle between
00:01:29.760 over there, civilization. And over there, nothingness. In a sense, this is a beginning of infinity.
00:01:44.800 We can see where we've started. And out there, hostility.
00:02:05.920 A roiling ocean that we've managed to eke our existence in the midst of
00:02:10.320 civilization making its first inroads into infinity.
00:02:14.800 We are always in the gap between pushing into the front.
00:02:41.120 It is, but just physically, of course. But in a sense, the precondition for all that pushing
00:02:47.200 into the abstract space of knowledge creation, of explaining the rest and so come to the
00:03:18.880 Hello. I'm going to try a little experiment today.
00:03:22.320 I'm going to start reading through parts of the beginning of infinity, just the first chapter.
00:03:27.840 I have sent at least one other Ozzie doing this with a different series of books.
00:03:35.200 I don't know if it'll be useful. I thought I'd try it just as an experiment,
00:03:39.760 sort of thinking out loud, I guess, and just commenting on some of my favourite parts of the book.
00:03:46.560 By doing so, it kind of clarifies my own thoughts about things. That's one thing.
00:03:53.120 The other thing that there is a sense in the critical rationalist community that
00:03:58.320 there's a lot of bad ideas out there, or false ideas, that get a lot of traction in an
00:04:05.680 undeserved kind of way, while the ideas of copper and dutch, for example, don't.
00:04:11.760 And so this might go some way to addressing that.
00:04:18.720 Well, there we are. That's where I began. I wasn't sure where I was going with all this,
00:04:24.560 but I sort of knew the point back then. As I said, it was basically to help me understand the
00:04:30.000 book a little bit better by thinking out loud and clarifying my own ideas about things.
00:04:35.600 And the other thing was to speak about the bad ideas that are out there by way of critique.
00:04:41.680 Competing ideas really are critiques of one another, but in many cases one idea really is a
00:04:48.640 valid critique of another idea and refutes the other idea. The world is flooded in pessimism
00:04:55.680 right now. It is drowning in misconceptions about how knowledge is created. It's saturated by a
00:05:02.080 desire, apparently for stagnation, a kind of precautionary principle when it comes to progress.
00:05:08.480 We, by which I mean Western civilization, saying nothing about cultures that are more primitive
00:05:14.480 still, are trapped by really bad ideas, irrational memes and anti-rational memes.
00:05:21.600 In this book, the beginning of infinity is the best antidote I know of.
00:05:26.160 Sure, there are other works out there about progress and optimism, books that focus on one aspect
00:05:31.200 or another of this grand vision. But none of them, like the beginning of infinity,
00:05:36.000 actually unite all the crucial aspects of this one worldview into one synthesized whole,
00:05:44.160 because it's only in uniting these ideas that you really come to appreciate the cosmic
00:05:50.240 significance of people, or at least the potential cosmic significance of us in particular.
00:05:57.120 But if you take that seriously, it's sadly almost a joke to some people. I was frustrated recently
00:06:05.120 listening to Sam Harrison Ricky Gervais speaking. They've got a podcast out this year, 2021,
00:06:12.880 called Absolutely Mental. And it's entertaining in parts. It's funny, of course,
00:06:17.600 Ricky is a great comedian. But in terms of philosophy, and he is trained in philosophy as Sam
00:06:24.720 is, he is a standard vanilla-style pessimist, and anti-human. He wouldn't think that. He would
00:06:33.040 think that he's a great humanist. But in fact, he denigrates people as being the cause of just so
00:06:40.160 many problems in the style of David Attenborough, and the style of so many public intellectuals,
00:06:46.080 that we are the poison and there needs to be some cure to prevent our spreading across the globe,
00:06:53.520 much less the rest of the cosmos. Now, happily, during this podcast with Sam Harris, Sam
00:07:00.800 did go some way to explaining some parts of David Deutsch's worldview. And invoke the name of
00:07:08.400 David Deutsch, and one would hope that Ricky would go and research some of these ideas, perhaps
00:07:13.360 read the beginning of the finale, but I doubt it, because Ricky dismissed what Sam said.
00:07:19.440 He treated this grand vision of knowledge and people in their cosmic significance as
00:07:25.840 merely of academic abstract interests. He brushed it aside because it seemed to him, I guess,
00:07:32.080 in his own mind, as it does to many people like science fiction rather than actual science.
00:07:38.000 It seems too good to be true, or even worse than that, too bad to be true. That in some
00:07:45.760 moods, of course, people such as Ricky Gervais, such as your standard public intellectual,
00:07:51.920 think that people gaining control of the planet, the solar system, the cosmos is something like
00:07:59.760 a nightmare, because these people have already been convinced, are convinced that we've ruined
00:08:05.920 the planet, that we are like some kind of virus, and that the only cure to this is to somehow
00:08:12.880 eradicate us from the face of the earth, if not that, then to severely diminish our power to survive
00:08:19.680 on this planet. Of course, that's not the way they would see it, but they do, and a large part of
00:08:24.960 Ricky and Sam's podcast was about how we are just on the continuum of all other animals that
00:08:31.760 live on this planet, that we are nothing special, and that even Ricky Gervais explicitly said,
00:08:38.800 we're just like an ape using a tool, but just a little bit better, we're just the next step
00:08:43.680 along that smooth continuum. And Sam did try to mention that this was misconceived, but still,
00:08:52.320 I'm not sure that Sam quite understands what this position of ours actually is.
00:08:59.360 And I suppose to some extent why should he? Why should anyone? The culture is absolutely
00:09:06.160 saturated, as I said, from a decades-long campaign against people, against our significance.
00:09:14.480 And the reason for that comes from things like environmentalism,
00:09:19.520 yes, that we are the cause of the ills of the world, but also it's a reaction against superstitious
00:09:27.520 religion, which in many ways, it's been right for people to criticize and to reject the bad parts
00:09:36.240 of religion. But in doing so, they've thrown out the baby with the bathwater. There was a lot
00:09:43.040 of baby in that bathwater. I know that Sam thinks there's not, but there really is. And importantly,
00:09:49.680 a very important and crucial part of many of the big religions of the world is placing people
00:09:57.840 at the center of the cosmos, in a sense, certainly at the center morally. And Sam might say,
00:10:05.120 you know, the moral landscape is a book that he wrote about the significance of consciousness
00:10:10.560 for morality. But the problem is he doesn't put people there at the center of morality. The
00:10:17.920 concerns of people rather than all conscious creatures, as if all conscious creatures have a
00:10:24.720 claim to moral status, to the extent of their conscious. And I think this is wrong. And I think
00:10:31.120 this is wrong because the kind of consciousness we have, at least one aspect of the consciousness
00:10:37.680 that we have, an aspect of consciousness, this mystery of whatever it means to be a person,
00:10:43.600 one aspect of this mystery is our capacity to create explanations. And for reasons to be on the
00:10:49.200 scope of this episode, because I've talked about it so much, I think that is the crucial
00:10:54.720 feature of our existence. That means we are categorically different in moral terms compared to
00:11:03.360 any other conscious creature. And so even Sam who tries to salvage something from the
00:11:10.960 religious morality, which is that people are important. And they're not just another physical
00:11:17.440 system, but they actually have consciousness or creativity, the capacity to understand the
00:11:23.200 universe in which they find themselves. Sam lumps them in, just as Ricky does, just as every
00:11:29.840 public intellectual almost today does, alongside all other animals. And that we're nothing
00:11:36.480 ultimately special in the cosmic scheme of things. The beginning of infinity is a different
00:11:42.400 worldview. It is a reaction against this kind of thinking. So I think it is sad, something has
00:11:49.920 been lost with the rejection of religion by public intellectuals, because there are many important
00:11:57.760 things to salvage there. And I'll come to some of those later. But importantly, the, for
00:12:04.160 one to the better word, sacredness of humanity, the sacredness of the individual human life.
00:12:10.240 And this is not about religious thinking. It's not about starting a different kind of religion,
00:12:16.240 because there's nothing here that one needs to believe. Honestly, there's nothing here that you
00:12:22.080 need to believe as actually finally once and for all truth. There are no dogmas or doctrines.
00:12:28.880 What there are, are fallible explanations. And that itself is not a belief either.
00:12:36.320 Any of this can be overturned, criticized, reinterpreted by you in a way that suits you,
00:12:44.240 that works for you, that solves your problem, allows you to move forward and make progress,
00:12:48.960 and hopefully everyone else to make progress as well, to come to a consensus in order to resolve
00:12:54.720 conflicts, but not to adhere to the text in some way, as religious people would. And as people
00:13:02.000 who are against religion do exactly the same thing adhere to the text and say, well, that's wrong
00:13:06.880 because of precisely the way it's been written. Or we must believe it because of the
00:13:12.160 precise of the way it's been written. And this is a shame, even within religious communities,
00:13:17.600 which we have to admit, the overwhelming majority of people are still religious to a greater or
00:13:23.440 lesser extent. And even many people in the West who ostensibly call themselves religious
00:13:28.480 are losing their faith in the sacredness of the specialness of human life, that they regard
00:13:38.640 not only other creatures on the planet as of equal moral status, but of the inner planet itself
00:13:45.680 as of equal moral status, that we need to sacrifice ourselves to the planet. This is not something
00:13:54.560 that comes out of traditional religion, but I'll try and tell you it does now. We have things
00:13:59.520 in Christianity, I know, because my background is Christian, I've worked in Christian institutions,
00:14:04.800 Catholic institutions. They have things like eco-theology now, eco-theology. The way in which we need to
00:14:14.000 basically worship Mother Earth. This is, to some extent, mainstreamed Catholic teaching.
00:14:22.160 So they're off the rails to a large extent. But traditional religion is losing its way
00:14:29.600 insofar as it had a good way at all to begin with. The things that were redeemable about it
00:14:36.400 are being lost, diluted by even worse ideas. There is a rank order of bad ideas, some are worse
00:14:45.040 than others. And traditional religious ideas, bad as they are, are possibly superior to the new
00:14:50.720 religion, to the new religions of politics, environmentalism, anti-humanism, at least traditional
00:14:59.840 religions regarded people as being of prime importance, of central importance. And that that's
00:15:07.360 what civilization was about, trying to protect people and trying to enable people to get along,
00:15:14.480 so that they can continue to solve their problems off into the infinite future, and that things
00:15:18.880 would get better as well, that things would get better. Now we don't think people are spiritually
00:15:24.560 divine. We don't endorse souls and mysticism, but the alternative is not to think that people are
00:15:31.840 not special, because we are just not in a mystical supernatural way. We're special. We're not
00:15:40.240 on a continuum with other animals. This is the point I keep returning to. And it's a point I keep
00:15:46.240 returning to, because I think people need to hear it, because of all the messages in the beginning
00:15:52.080 of infinity. The one that I think can do the most work in pushing back against the current
00:16:00.320 moral zeitgeist is pessimism about people. If you recognize that people are different and special,
00:16:06.640 not in precisely the same way that traditional religions have said, but special nevertheless.
00:16:13.440 Then you will do what it takes in order to construct your worldview, construct your knowledge,
00:16:20.240 construct your approach to life, in order to not only allow people to continue to survive,
00:16:27.280 but to flourish, to flourish and make progress faster than ever, to create wealth more than we've
00:16:34.560 had before, to aim for these things as a kind of good in and of itself. So all of this has
00:16:41.920 been motivation for this podcast as I enter this final episode. The book has certainly
00:16:48.880 shaped my mind. Books can do this. And I know a lot of other people have experienced the same
00:16:55.520 shift in worldview or a similar shift in worldview. Discussing books, talking about books,
00:17:01.520 can do this even more deeply. As I've said before, with me, the first time this really properly
00:17:07.360 happened was with the fabric of reality, because I learned that the world could make sense.
00:17:14.400 Someone put into words the idea that everything could eventually make sense and that academics,
00:17:24.000 intellectuals, public figures who relished in trying to confuse with jargon or to try and impress one
00:17:34.720 with their superior knowledge and who would tell you that there's no point thinking about certain
00:17:40.400 things, because that's just a mystery we'll never solve. Here's David Deutsch in the fabric of
00:17:46.000 reality, telling you that this is false. That in fact, the world can make sense and it's more
00:17:53.440 beautiful in the fact that it can make sense. People like Carl Sagan had made these noises, Richard
00:17:58.640 Feynman had made these noises, of course as well, that the vision that you get of reality,
00:18:04.960 once you understand it can be comprehensible, it's so much better than simply falling back into
00:18:13.600 the wonder and mystery of it all without being concerned about what the answers are. You should
00:18:18.880 have both. Or in wonder at the majesty of reality and the fact we can understand it. We people
00:18:27.200 can understand it. We are part of that grand vision because we uniquely, as far as we know,
00:18:33.200 in the universe, can understand parts of that reality and eventually everything that can be
00:18:39.840 understood. So the fabric of reality taught me this. In particular, the first thing it taught me was
00:18:45.760 that quantum theory was perfectly comprehensible. Not in all parts, there are mysteries there,
00:18:50.800 there are open questions, but the parts we do understand can be understood. We don't have to fall
00:18:55.920 back onto nonsense. We don't have to jump to supernatural explanations. In any area, by the way,
00:19:01.200 at any time there's an open question, we do not jump to a supernatural explanation. That's not
00:19:05.920 required. Now after the fabric of reality, it was a long time until I was so impressed by a book
00:19:14.640 again. Not quite equal to the fabric of reality, but it took a while. Now I was reading widely and I
00:19:22.960 kind of thought I understood the worldview in the fabric of reality, but as it turned out, I didn't
00:19:28.080 really. And there's, in a sense, an objective measure of this for me and my own mind, because
00:19:35.120 as I say in my other series that I've just been commenced doing on the fabric of reality,
00:19:40.960 although I'd read that book multiple times and I'd even discussed it online, and I'd even
00:19:45.440 discussed it online to a limited extent with David Deutsch himself, I don't think I'd truly
00:19:51.360 got it in all respects. I mean, most importantly, I did indeed understand I thought the science,
00:19:57.360 but I didn't really take on board the Papurian epistemology. At least I might have understood it
00:20:04.240 academically at one level, but I wasn't living it. I wasn't taking it on board as being part of
00:20:12.560 genuinely my worldview. Because I didn't really notice when people were anti-popurian, when
00:20:22.560 intellectuals, philosophers, people out there in the world were saying things that were just
00:20:28.880 antithetical to the work of car-popper and to David Deutsch. I noticed the errors some of the time,
00:20:35.920 but not all of the time. So one of the first books that kind of didn't impress me after the
00:20:42.000 fabric of reality was in 2004 Sam Harris published his first book The End of Faith, and that was
00:20:49.840 the beginning of the whole series of books published on the same thing that were anti-religious
00:20:56.320 theirs books by Richard Dawkins, by Christopher Hitchens, by Daniel Dennett, and I read all of these,
00:21:02.400 I bought all these, I just ate them up voraciously. In the case of Sam, I loved his style of writing,
00:21:09.200 it was lyrical, it was metaphorical, it was poetic, I just liked that style of prose, the clarity
00:21:17.840 of it. And I already was on board with so much of what he said. In terms of the anti-superstitious
00:21:27.760 stuff, the anti-faith stuff, it certainly was the most withering and clear attack against
00:21:36.320 standard organized religion and faith that I'd ever read until that point. And listening to Sam
00:21:42.640 speak in those early years of his fame was refreshing, because there are a few people out there
00:21:50.720 that I was aware of in the media who could speak with such clarity and just cut through the nonsense.
00:21:57.120 But I mentioned this because although I was reading all of these guys, Harris Dawkins, Hitchens,
00:22:03.280 Dennett, and others as well, what I didn't notice was all of the errors throughout these works.
00:22:15.520 It seemed to me that if a sentence was written clearly and made sense, that was enough.
00:22:22.720 And it didn't jump out at me that so much of this writing, so much of this work that people had
00:22:29.760 done, the anti-religious stuff, which touched on the intersection or the clash between the
00:22:37.600 religious and the scientific worldviews, that I didn't notice the poverty of epistemology and
00:22:44.720 an understanding of science there and the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics
00:22:49.760 and just the general way in which we view people now. And that's there in the fabric of reality
00:22:57.040 to a large extent. I didn't notice, I didn't notice because although I'd read the fabric of reality,
00:23:02.880 multiple times, and I was having online discussions about it, and I understood it at a level,
00:23:09.200 it hadn't really formed part of the memeplex, so to speak, that was in my mind, my literal way
00:23:18.480 of seeing everything, analyzing everything, in particular people's writing and people's speech.
00:23:24.240 So I was quite readily persuaded to a large extent by clarity of writing,
00:23:33.520 clarity of writing that criticized nonsense like superstition. And I thought, well, if they're
00:23:40.480 criticizing superstition well, then they're correct in the way that they do it. And I was wrong
00:23:48.000 about that. It's right to criticize superstition and religion, but there are ways of doing it
00:23:52.960 that are better and worse. The end of faith was published in 2004, and that's interesting because
00:23:59.040 it's exactly mid way between the publication date of the fabric of reality and the beginning of
00:24:05.120 infinity. And the reason I mentioned that is because of this psychological phenomena of learning
00:24:10.960 that I want to speak about. And that is, as I say, my world view change when I read the fabric of
00:24:16.720 reality, I thought I understood science far more deeply. And academically, I thought I understood
00:24:23.360 the epistemology to some extent. If you, for example, if you pressed me to make a study of a
00:24:29.440 particular passage of text and to say, what was wrong with it in light of Popper's philosophy,
00:24:36.080 I probably could have done it with some effort, with some effort, but it wouldn't have been
00:24:41.440 second nature to me. It was only after the beginning of infinity, but possibly for the first time,
00:24:46.880 I don't want to talk myself up. Maybe it took a second read and some discussions, but whatever,
00:24:51.920 soon after reading the beginning of infinity, things became what I can only describe as effortless.
00:24:59.760 I was, without effort, able to read a text and almost immediately the errors in epistemology,
00:25:10.160 the errors in thinking, the pessimism, the prophecy, the poverty of content was immediately revealed to
00:25:17.200 me. What was there in my mind, in an academic sense after reading the fabric of reality,
00:25:24.320 became my lived experiences, people say, after reading the beginning of infinity.
00:25:28.960 I didn't simply remember the facts that were in the fabric of reality. I understood,
00:25:34.000 and in particular I understood what epistemology was, and that became so obvious to me,
00:25:40.880 psychologically, because prior to the beginning of infinity, if I had heard a person,
00:25:46.080 everyone else said was smart, saying something smart, erudite, insightful, I'd typically not
00:25:53.520 along, and in some sense be transfixed by the clarity of their language, and I'd think to myself,
00:25:59.440 well, they're making sense, that's enough, but after the beginning of infinity, so much more often,
00:26:06.080 I began thinking, when people were speaking publicly, writing beautifully clear articles,
00:26:12.400 I would think to myself, well, that makes sense, but making sense is not enough,
00:26:17.440 they're making errors, they're making serious errors, errors that kind of like dominoes
00:26:22.160 caused their entire argument to collapse, you can make perfect sense and be completely wrong,
00:26:29.760 and you can make perfect sense and reach the correct conclusions by an invalid argument,
00:26:38.800 because you began in the wrong place, the premises were wrong, the premises were wrong,
00:26:44.960 but you followed the rules of inference and you reached a conclusion,
00:26:48.480 which is the correct conclusion by an invalid method, because you're,
00:26:53.520 which is the correct, which can happen by chance, it happens by chance, or if not by chance,
00:27:00.080 it's because people know what the correct conclusion is, but have worked backwards
00:27:06.160 using a false epistemology, by which they can prove just about anything, including the
00:27:11.120 true conclusion, by a bad method, so I began to think that I understood why smart people thought
00:27:18.320 what they thought, and then I understood why they were wrong, so if I take, again, it's a book
00:27:25.200 that I recommend to people, and I think it's written beautifully, and as one of my
00:27:32.560 maxims in life is one of the greatest things you can do for any work and any ideas to criticize,
00:27:41.280 so let's take the end of faith, Sam Harris' first book. I understood why the central thesis
00:27:48.160 made sense and why you would reach those conclusions, and why those conclusions were, in fact,
00:27:53.520 correct some of the time, but the argument was wrong. For example, why being an atheist,
00:28:00.960 now Sam doesn't use the word atheism or atheists, I think, throughout the book, and he's made
00:28:04.560 this point quite a few times, but on this worldview of Harris' Dawkins' Kitchen's denards,
00:28:11.840 and almost everyone's worldview, the standard intellectual take, is that you're an atheist because
00:28:18.640 there's no evidence for God, there's no evidence for God, so one should not believe in God,
00:28:25.360 and at the time when I heard these things over and again, I thought it was completely
00:28:31.600 a reasonable position to hold, that is why one is forced into atheism, why one doesn't believe
00:28:41.280 theism, but it's wrong, there's no evidence for anything, and the fact is that I know,
00:28:50.320 forget belief, I know there is no God. Now, why? Well, because no explanation requires me to invoke
00:28:58.240 the existence of God. I mean, the same place as Laplace, talking to Napoleon Bonaparte, who, when Laplace
00:29:05.680 explained, I think it was projectile motion to Napoleon. Napoleon said, these equations are lovely,
00:29:11.440 but where is God? And Laplace apparently said, well, Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis,
00:29:18.320 and this has been true ever since I've kind of come to the realization, one does not need to
00:29:24.400 invoke that God hypothesis to explain anything. There are open questions, certainly, but we do
00:29:31.120 not need to leap to God as the explanation. So again, when I say, I know that God does not exist,
00:29:37.760 it does not mean I am certain God does not exist, and you can see my blog post for this, but I
00:29:42.400 raised this, because this is, again, another thing that Ricky Gervais seems to insist on, that we must
00:29:48.480 be agnostic on almost all questions, because in his mind, and I think this is just common knowledge
00:29:55.840 out there among intellectuals of a certain stripe, that no means be certain of. But you can't actually
00:30:03.360 say, I know that unless you are 100% sure, which is a standard no one can reach, and so Ricky
00:30:10.000 rejects saying that he knows that God does not exist. Instead, instead, he just says, he doesn't
00:30:15.120 believe it. Of course, in my appearing world view, I don't have beliefs either. I just have knowledge,
00:30:20.080 and I act on the knowledge, or I don't act on the knowledge. But also, now, the end of faith,
00:30:24.720 again, I recommend a book, it's a withering attack on religion, but now, after the beginning of
00:30:32.800 human infinity, I'm not personally particularly anti-religious. The anti-religious arguments now
00:30:40.720 strike me as like, level big brain, you know, these memes as big brain, galaxy brain thing,
00:30:46.560 well, the anti-religious stuff is like big brain, rather than being caught in religion,
00:30:52.720 you then just reject it all. But I think the galaxy brain take is more like, although superstitions
00:30:59.840 and parts about angels and gods and miracles are false, there's a heck of a lot to preserve
00:31:06.000 with religion. And there's reasons for this, in much the same way, there's a heck of a lot to
00:31:10.080 preserve in civilization broadly. And that thing that's worth preserving is a certain kind of tradition,
00:31:19.040 and although it has a type to use the word, a certain kind of collectivism, which is not
00:31:23.280 a collectivism of a political kind, or a coercive kind, but it might be something where I would
00:31:29.680 distance myself from iron, ram, type, objectivism, where I think that is highly, highly anti-religious.
00:31:37.920 And to some extent, highly anti-traditional as well, but I'm against force and the extraction of
00:31:45.440 wealth and coercion, all that kind of stuff. What I am talking about here in endorsing tradition,
00:31:53.760 endorsing religion, the galaxy brain view of these things, which is a real step beyond
00:32:03.920 traditional skeptical philosophy. And even certain types of modern skeptical philosophy is I'm
00:32:11.280 talking about the value of having traditions and cultures, of organizing societies and communities,
00:32:19.040 which themselves contain in explicit knowledge about how to keep dynamic societies
00:32:26.560 from falling into statistic. Let me just say that sentence again.
00:32:36.240 I'm talking about the value of having traditions and cultures, of organizing societies
00:32:42.080 and communities, which contain in explicit knowledge about how to keep dynamic societies
00:32:48.880 from falling into statisticity. It's a rather verbose sentence in some ways, and I think it's
00:32:54.560 constructed particularly well. But I just say it and put it on the screen there to illustrate
00:33:01.040 something. I think that if you understand English, you can read that sentence and you can say,
00:33:07.600 okay, it makes sense. But if you are knowledgeable about the beginning of infinity world,
00:33:15.280 you're deeply knowledgeable. You will understand that sentence at a very different level to what
00:33:21.440 anyone, no matter how clever they are, how erudite they seem, how well-qualified they are,
00:33:27.520 you'll understand it in a way that is very different to everyone else. Because notice how
00:33:32.400 densities, how dense with knowledge that sentence is, how much background one needs in the entire
00:33:38.400 worldview of the beginning of infinity to get it. I mean, really get it, not just superficially
00:33:45.120 be able to read the words and guess one understands what is intended. Notice if I wanted to explain
00:33:51.680 that sentence in the beginning of infinity terms, how it would have to explain whole aspects of the
00:33:59.040 worldview for hours on end, just to explain a single sentence for someone who'd never read the book
00:34:05.360 before, in explicit knowledge. What is that? Well, I'd have to begin with a perperian view of what
00:34:12.960 knowledge was in the first place, so there's a whole hour of conversation. Then the in explicit
00:34:19.200 part, not merely implicit, in explicit. Then moving on to dynamic societies, that would require an
00:34:27.760 explanation about, well, explanations and progress and memes, memes, goodness, that there's another
00:34:34.720 whole episode if I was going to unpack this. And memes would take us into cultures, cultures takes us
00:34:42.880 into static societies and anti-rational memes, and then how certain traditions, specifically traditions
00:34:50.880 of criticism, allow for open ended progress. Look, already in explaining what I would need to
00:34:59.280 explain, to explain that sentence I've gone on for ages. And this is what I mean about the beginning
00:35:06.720 of infinity once you take it on board. Some people have said recently I've observed that
00:35:12.480 Naval has remarked more than once that the beginning of infinity is not an easy book to read,
00:35:18.000 and others have said that that observation is a disservice to the book, but Naval's absolutely
00:35:23.120 right, it's not easy, but that shouldn't put anyone off. That's not a criticism, and that shouldn't
00:35:28.000 frighten anyone away. That's what it means for a book to have value. If it was easy, everyone would
00:35:33.040 already understand what's in there anyway, and there'd be no point reading it. The interesting
00:35:37.280 books are sometimes hard to read. The Lord of the Rings is hard to read, but I love it. I read
00:35:41.360 it every couple of years because it's just a great entertaining book. And there's a sense in which
00:35:47.120 the beginning of infinity can be read because it's entertaining over and again. But it's far, far
00:35:53.200 deeper than something like Lord of the Rings. There are many more levels, of course,
00:35:58.080 but it's not easy. A single sentence like the one that I just tried to unpack
00:36:03.360 began to unpack, to explain to unpack how I would unpack it.
00:36:08.400 Illustrate why this podcast series has been important to me, because as I said in that very first
00:36:16.240 episode, I'm trying to clarify in my own mind what this is all about.
00:36:20.480 Fun things are not necessarily easy. It's what makes them fun is the challenge. And in reading
00:36:28.400 the beginning of infinity for the first time, or maybe the second time, to use a biblical passage,
00:36:34.880 the scales fell from my eyes. And I saw properly, properly saw what was there in the fabric of
00:36:41.360 reality the whole time, and what's there in poppers work to a large extent the whole time.
00:36:47.200 And it was then that my actual perceptions of the world, the qualia, my subjective experience of
00:36:54.960 the world did indeed change, because where before I could appreciate excellent writing,
00:37:01.440 just for its own sake, now so much of it seemed much more worse than before. And I'm not
00:37:09.200 here referring mainly to the work of Sam Harris. It's much, much broader than this.
00:37:14.880 I mean in most every other book on my shelf, every other nonfiction book on my shelf, when I
00:37:19.520 flicked through it became a confusing trial of the mind, I would just spot error after error,
00:37:25.440 and it happens to this day. It's not to say that I can't learn from certain books,
00:37:30.240 so that books have ruined it all for me. For example, more than once, I've recommended
00:37:36.080 a fortunate universe, life in a finely tuned cosmos by astronomers, Barnes and Lewis.
00:37:42.480 It's a good book. I can learn from it and I recommend it to people. It's written very well,
00:37:48.000 it's funny in places, but it's just to say that now I notice glaring errors in epistemology all
00:37:55.280 the time. And when the claims about science, the extensive topic over the book, the main subject
00:38:03.840 matter of the book, I can recognize when those claims are dubious, no matter how certain the authors
00:38:10.240 claim to be. In short, I no longer feel no matter how qualified an expert happens to be.
00:38:16.480 I don't think they're necessarily better than me, even in those areas where they claim expertise.
00:38:22.480 I've ceased to be intimidated by expertise, and that's a very good thing. I'm very anti-authority
00:38:29.200 now, and this is the sense in which it's self-help. I'm error correcting constantly now,
00:38:35.680 double thinking what the expert opinion is, no matter how confident they seem to be, because I'm
00:38:41.760 comfortable asking rather than trusting. I think it's a great virtue to ask and ask and ask,
00:38:49.040 until you understand, rather than just assuming that by virtue of the fact someone is qualified
00:38:54.080 in a particular area, that they will know better than you. They may, but you better have a good
00:38:59.520 explanation as to why they should know better than you on that particular claim they're making.
00:39:04.320 When I was at uni studying philosophy and physics at the undergraduate level, especially,
00:39:09.920 I was somewhat in awe of the professors. Even just the PhD students, I thought they must have been
00:39:15.760 so deeply knowledgeable and clever. I almost thought their minds must operate in a different way,
00:39:22.480 and when it came to famous public intellectuals, forget it, I thought they must have been on a
00:39:27.120 different plane altogether, but I was wrong to think all that. They're all just people.
00:39:31.760 I never understood, for example, why the philosophy professors who taught me back then and who
00:39:37.200 mentioned pop-up during lectures and tutorials once or twice didn't biggim up more,
00:39:42.240 why they didn't make a bigger deal about it, because I knew that David Deutsch was in the
00:39:45.200 fabric of reality, for example. But now I know. I didn't know then, but I know now, and I can say
00:39:51.200 without any concern they didn't understand him. Experts in pop-up at university aren't actually
00:39:59.440 experts by and large. I know what this is like now. I read pop-up soon after I read the fabric of
00:40:05.760 reality, and the knowledge was there. I could regurgitate it, not entirely, because I hadn't
00:40:12.960 really taken it on board, and if I had gotten into a debate with someone about the content of
00:40:16.800 Carl Popper's work, I guess I would have come up short, because you need a proper guide, and the
00:40:23.040 beginning of infinity was my proper guide. Now, I can't fully explain why I didn't get it there
00:40:29.840 in the fabric of reality. It's probably to do with the fact that you sometimes need the lesson
00:40:35.280 more than once, and you need to talk about these things, and really think them through. But the
00:40:41.520 fact is that the beginning of infinity did indeed reveal Carl Popper's epistemology to me.
00:40:47.360 It took David Deutsch to do that, and then I could go back and properly appreciate
00:40:52.000 Popper in a new light, far more deeply, and then realize those others who tried explaining his
00:40:57.200 worldview typically got it all wrong, totally wrong. They treated Popper just like another
00:41:02.560 purely academic philosopher, just another set of readings alongside Kent and Descartes and so
00:41:08.000 on, but it's not. It's a way of thinking. Now, this is not to say, I should add, that I don't
00:41:15.760 recommend studying philosophy at uni. I can recommend it if you want, but I don't think that
00:41:21.040 they're advertising material in this day and age is at all true when I go looking at
00:41:25.920 university courses on philosophy. They say that it will help you think better. I think it'll
00:41:32.000 help you, if you're not prepared, if you're not prepared with a certain amount of intellectual
00:41:36.480 self-defense, it might cause you to think worse, far worse. Philosophy at uni is like
00:41:42.800 history and literature more than anything else. You read the texts, you study the texts,
00:41:47.600 you argue about the texts. You won't really improve your thinking. You won't become, by any
00:41:52.720 stretch of the imagination, a critical thinker. At least at the universities that I've looked at,
00:41:57.280 maybe there are some unicorn universities out there who do a really good job at this.
00:42:01.840 Mainly, if you're not prepared, you'll become indoctrinated into inductivism, justificationism,
00:42:07.120 and so on and so forth. All of the bad ideas of today. I now recognize, for example, that my
00:42:13.040 own father, who never went to university, none of my family did. My extended family, my grandparents,
00:42:19.280 to this day, I'm the only one for generations to have gone to university. And it's not a source
00:42:25.440 of pride to me that I went to university, but is this a source of pride to me that the rest of my
00:42:30.720 family didn't because their method of thinking was so much superior and remained so much
00:42:36.720 superior to many mainstream academics that I've encountered throughout my life. My father,
00:42:43.760 especially, is better than, I better thinker than, the philosophy professors who taught me,
00:42:48.800 my father was an aircraft engineer. And he understood what it took for things to work,
00:42:55.360 and how to identify garbage when it was being presented to him. But academic philosophers
00:43:01.040 often can't do this. They don't understand the practical consequences of certain kinds of reasoning.
00:43:09.120 But again, that, too, took reading the beginning infinity to figure out. Common sense realism
00:43:15.040 is, after all, what pop out refined and made explicit. Most people are common sense realism.
00:43:22.960 The galaxy brain is common sense realism. It's only the big brain take that is
00:43:29.680 anti this and anti that with their Bayesianism and their evidence for and their justified beliefs.
00:43:35.520 That's all confusing abstract style thinking disconnected from the actual practice of solving
00:43:42.960 problems. Now, the only difference really between, I should say, between men on the street-style
00:43:48.480 thinking and popularion-style epistemology is that popularion-style epistemology has the vocabulary
00:43:55.680 to explain how thinking works and how progress is made and how problems are solved.
00:44:00.560 That's all it does. It makes explicit these things that already work out there in the world.
00:44:05.120 And people don't need to understand how it works broadly speaking. I've compared this before to
00:44:11.840 the difference between an airline pilot and an aircraft engineer. The aircraft engineer better
00:44:18.400 know how the engines work. The pilot doesn't really need to. Maybe they have some basic ideas,
00:44:22.800 but they're going to have a whole bunch of misconceptions as well. All they need to do is to fly
00:44:26.000 the aircraft from point A to point B without ever really worrying about the details about what's
00:44:30.720 going on with the computer systems, with the avionics, with the the engines, and so on and so forth.
00:44:36.400 They have a limited understanding of those things. This is the difference between
00:44:40.880 someone who really understands popularion epistemology. That's like the engineer.
00:44:45.680 And the person who just gets on with making progress. That's the pilot. There are other people out there
00:44:51.280 call them, call them, Bayesian engineers, who all they do. They never actually work on engines at all.
00:44:58.720 They never actually are able to figure out how the whole machine keeps on going. They're over there
00:45:04.000 at the side with something that they call an engine, but in fact, there's just a pile of sticks
00:45:08.720 and they're explaining how this pile of sticks. If only you could put them together into a
00:45:12.880 particular way would indeed be an engine, but they never ago about actually creating an engine.
00:45:18.720 Whereas what a perperion does is actually explain the already existing engine and how it works
00:45:24.880 and why it functions. And if something starts to go wrong, they can identify why the progress stops,
00:45:31.120 why there is a problem in science. Here's the error. Let's correct the error. That's what a
00:45:36.240 perperion epistemologist does. They're more like the engineer, an actual engineer working on real
00:45:40.960 engines, rather than imaginary ones, which is what various other kinds of epistemology do.
00:45:47.200 They're abstractly being concerned about possible engines.
00:45:53.200 Okay, that is a very tortured analogy. I apologize for that. Whatever the case,
00:45:58.080 proper and doic make explicit, the ways in which people really do think, really do learn,
00:46:04.240 really do create knowledge. How it all works. How civilization is built. As Naval tweeted recently,
00:46:10.960 civilization is not built by pessimists. And in my last episode I remarked about the unholy
00:46:15.760 trinity of pessimism and prophecy and how it's all fed by this force of epistemology.
00:46:22.880 So if you want to study philosophy, especially at philosophy at university or anything at all,
00:46:28.160 I think you do need intellectual self-defense against the dark arts of the intelligentsia
00:46:33.440 that rules there now. I think a lot of people have little crumbs of the story. I mean,
00:46:37.760 there are people who rightly oppose Marxism in universities and post-modern type thinking,
00:46:43.280 and all the doubles speak that goes on there now. But again, if you want the full suite of armor
00:46:48.720 and the shield and the laser sword, then you want the beginning of infinity. And of course,
00:46:53.600 if you read the fabric of reality as well and the work of Popper and, well, other things
00:47:00.000 recommend at the beginning of infinity, then you'll be like a fully kitted out intellectual Jedi
00:47:05.120 master of a kind. And you'll be able to sit in on philosophy seminars, debates, discussions,
00:47:10.640 and learn without fear of ever being indoctrinated and be able to quickly identify errors in thinking.
00:47:18.480 Now, there has been one of the longest preambles to any of my episodes, but it's only fitting
00:47:25.600 as this is the last episode on the beginning of infinity. And as well, I don't have much left
00:47:32.240 to read. And in this section that I am going to read, this final section, there is a vast list
00:47:39.920 of deep questions, which of course illustrate the beginning of infinity. They're profound
00:47:45.920 mysteries. And to a large extent, they're going to leave your head spinning. And I want to unpack
00:47:50.880 some of them. I'll have no answers, but I do want to discuss some of them. So let's go back to
00:47:57.600 the book and David writes, the economist Robin Hanson has suggested that there have been several
00:48:03.840 singularities in the history of our species, such as the agricultural revolution,
00:48:09.520 and the industrial revolution. Arguably, even the early enlightenment was a singularity by that
00:48:15.360 definition. Who could have predicted that someone who lived through the English Civil War,
00:48:20.160 a bloody struggle of religious fanatics versus an absolute monarch, and through the victory of
00:48:24.560 the religious fanatics in 1651 might also live through the peaceful birth of a society that saw
00:48:31.200 liberation and reason as its principal characteristics. The Royal Society, for instance,
00:48:36.960 was founded in 1660, a development that would hardly have been conceivable a generation earlier.
00:48:44.400 Roy Porter marks 1688 as the beginning of the English Enlightenment. That is the date of the
00:48:50.640 glorious revolution, the beginning of predominantly constitutional government, along with many other
00:48:57.120 rational reforms, which were part of that deeper and astonishingly rapid shift in the prevailing
00:49:02.880 worldview, pausing their just my reflection on this. Roy Porter is a historian that I learned about
00:49:10.240 from David Deutsch, from this book, and I think David tweeted once that it was Roy Porter,
00:49:17.920 who explained that there were two distinct kinds of enlightenment, one of which was the English
00:49:25.680 Enlightenment. And so I went and investigated this more, and it really inspired me to read the work
00:49:30.640 of Roy Porter and to listen to some of these lectures. And in one of those lectures,
00:49:35.200 indeed, about one of his books, there's a video of him, and this is on YouTube, by the way.
00:49:42.560 His thesis is that there were two things called the Enlightenment of a very distinct kind, and indeed
00:49:49.360 they were opposite in many ways. They were absolutely opposed to one another. There was the English
00:49:57.040 Enlightenment, and by English, by the way, he means British, because certainly Scotsman,
00:50:04.080 like Adam Smith and David Hume, were involved, but it was called the English Enlightenment. He's
00:50:09.200 called it the English Enlightenment, because the other thing that was altogether separate was the
00:50:13.840 European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was going on the continent of Europe, France and Germany,
00:50:18.800 in particular, and here we really get into the philosophy wars, and I don't use that word lightly,
00:50:25.040 because it really did. The ideas there set the scene for war later on. I mean, there are a lot
00:50:32.560 of reasons in a lot of ways in which we could explain the missteps in Europe, especially over
00:50:39.360 the recent decades, relatively recent decades. And one of the impulses of course,
00:50:46.560 primary among them are the ideas that people have. Ideas are levers that push people's
00:50:53.360 behaviors. And importantly, philosophical ideas motivate political ones, which motivate politicians,
00:51:02.480 which then cause militaries to do what they do. So this is not mere abstract arguing. It's
00:51:07.360 not merely of abstract interests. This has absolutely real world consequences. And there is a reason
00:51:14.720 why the English tradition, the British tradition of governance, and just tradition more broadly,
00:51:23.040 resists tyranny and violence. And this is controversial to say, but I'll just say it.
00:51:31.120 There is a reason why the French Revolution happened in France, why the violence there was so
00:51:37.200 great, and why Germany has had the political problems that it has had, and why Spain has,
00:51:43.360 well through to today. It is no accident. The EU exists in Europe. And many people of course
00:51:50.800 think that an organisation like the EU exists to benefit the region and the world. They say
00:51:58.960 it exists in part to keep the peace. But why does the peace need to be kept on the continent
00:52:05.920 of Europe in the first place? Why is Europe a special problem? Is there an underlying reason
00:52:13.840 for the conflict that seems to degenerate into violence there? Violence which we should be
00:52:20.080 eager to keep in mind Britain has stood against numerous times. These are not accidents.
00:52:28.560 But in these matters, I must say I'm a complete amateur and I recommend the work of
00:52:32.800 Roy Porter on this, and also Daniel Hannon, his book Inventing Freedom. But my take, my take
00:52:39.600 away from Roy Porter among others on this, is that it really is people like Emmanuel Carte,
00:52:46.080 the German philosopher, versus people like Adam Smith, the philosopher credited with the beginnings
00:52:54.800 of capitalism. Lock on freedom, Hume on reason. These guys, Smith, Locke, Hume against
00:53:03.760 Kant. And yet they're all studied in the philosophy departments around the world and universities
00:53:10.240 as if, well, they're all just different aspects of the same kind of enlightenment. And they're
00:53:14.320 not. They're absolutely not. Kant is standing against those guys. He's standing against capitalism
00:53:22.160 and freedom and reason, Smith and Locke and Hume. What was Kant about? Well, among many things,
00:53:28.640 and I don't want to get into a long exploration of the ideas, the poverty of ideas of Emmanuel
00:53:34.560 Kant. But he had a critique of reason. He said, yeah, I have a critique of pure reason. I'm not
00:53:41.360 going to defend Kant. I will just say he was about how people cannot trust themselves,
00:53:47.680 or their own minds. And as a consequence, require strong leadership. He argues against individuals.
00:53:55.440 And to some extent, like Plato, for tyrants, or for tyranny, something like Plato's philosopher,
00:54:01.280 kings. He thinks that we should subjugate ourselves. Can't think this. We're morally obliged,
00:54:07.760 for example, to obey every law of a government. He exalts government to the place of a god.
00:54:14.400 And this is the European tradition of their view between the individual and the government.
00:54:21.120 And in fact, now, aspects of American politics, Australian politics, Western politics broadly,
00:54:28.560 there is this battle. There is this battle between the British Enlightenment tradition,
00:54:34.400 of freedom and the individual, and of pursuing wealth, and the more European style of tyranny,
00:54:41.520 authoritarianism, and subjugating the individual before the state.
00:54:46.320 The English tradition, to be fair, does not devalue government. It has a place for government.
00:54:52.720 It just doesn't offer it up as a substitute either for God or the individual mind.
00:54:58.640 The whole point of the tradition of the British political culture
00:55:02.720 is that government is there to preserve the rights of the individual. Now, of course,
00:55:08.800 that ideal is one that all political parties, over time, through the British tradition in whatever
00:55:14.960 country, they fail to live up to this ideal. Again and again, they fail to live up to it.
00:55:20.160 But at least it's there as an ideal, as an aspiration. The ideology underlying the alternative
00:55:25.520 democratic systems is to subjugate oneself to the authority of the government. It's a stark
00:55:31.520 difference. And so this is a very interesting area of the history of philosophy,
00:55:36.560 and of philosophy. But I think more work can be done on following the work of Roy Porter,
00:55:41.760 that even today, our ideological conflicts can be traced back to the antecedent centuries ago,
00:55:49.360 where people were debating the relationship between the individual and the state,
00:55:55.040 the role of reason in the world, and could people, individuals, come to create knowledge such
00:56:04.160 that they could be to use modern parlance, error-correctors of their own lives rather than relying
00:56:10.400 upon some authority to do it for them, to sit back in and pass even hope that the man on the
00:56:17.680 television screen wearing the tie with the title will tell you what to do next, rather than
00:56:25.680 you reasoning it through yourself. It's the British tradition versus the European tradition.
00:56:31.040 And it seems very parochial, but of course these things have universal application.
00:56:35.840 And to every other continent of the world and every other people in civilization of the world
00:56:39.920 as well, there's a choice to be made back to the book, David writes. Also, the time beyond which
00:56:48.000 scientific prediction has no access is different for different phenomena. For each phenomena,
00:56:53.520 it is the moment at which the creation of new knowledge may begin to make a significant difference
00:56:58.720 to what one is trying to predict. Let me just repeat that because this explains the distinction
00:57:08.320 between prediction and prophecy in a very clear way. David said, the time beyond which scientific
00:57:17.280 prediction has no access is different for different phenomena. For each phenomena, it is the moment
00:57:24.640 which at the creation of new knowledge may begin to make a significant difference to what one is
00:57:30.400 trying to predict. In other words, a prophecy is, I guess, about the future where new knowledge
00:57:41.120 creation is going to have an effect on that phenomena. But a prediction, I usually like to say,
00:57:48.080 it's a derivation from a scientific theory, a logical derivation from a scientific theory,
00:57:52.720 which is true, but it's not the full story. Because from a good scientific theory,
00:58:00.720 I can make the prediction, and this is the example that David has used. I've used.
00:58:06.080 I can make the scientific prediction from good astrophysical principles, laws,
00:58:10.560 laws of physics. Every astronomer has done this. Every astronomer has ever had a podium somewhere
00:58:15.680 has talked about this. That he and approximately five billion years, something like that,
00:58:19.680 this sun will expand into a red giant and will engulf the earth, or at least extinguish life
00:58:25.120 on the earth by boiling the ocean, something like that. That's a prediction, apparently,
00:58:32.160 but not really, not according to this, because we don't know what humans of the very distant
00:58:38.240 future will do. They might save the earth if only to preserve it like a museum piece, as I think
00:58:45.280 David has said in various places. So that's not a real prediction. It's a prophecy about what
00:58:50.640 people will do, or what it will be possible to do. Now, on the other hand, if I make a prediction
00:58:55.840 that tomorrow, the sun will continue to shine, given the laws of physics today. That's a prediction,
00:59:01.440 because there is no sign whatsoever that knowledge is going to be created in the next 24 hours that
00:59:06.400 is going to allow us to affect the sun in some way. So there's your distinction. Back to the book,
00:59:13.280 David writes, since our estimates of that too are subject to the same kind of horizon,
00:59:19.120 we should really understand all our predictions as implicitly including the proviso,
00:59:24.240 unless the creation of new knowledge intervenes. Yes, I so I like that. So it's got that
00:59:28.560 proviso. There's a lot of proviso is here when we speak using the language at the beginning of
00:59:36.880 new infinity. When I say I know something, it comes with the proviso that provisionally,
00:59:45.120 things could change. I could be wrong about this. It doesn't mean I'm certainly absolutely
00:59:49.760 confident that it must remain the same forever, that it's inherent. There are all these kinds
00:59:55.120 of provisors. I expect things will continue to get better because I expect that people continue
1:00:03.200 to produce knowledge and solve problems. With the proviso that we don't end up falling into an
1:00:08.960 ideological hole where people decide that it's better for us to stop creating any kind of pollution
1:00:16.800 and to ensure that the state has complete control over the means of production and that kind of
1:00:22.480 thing. Okay, so with those provisors, with the proviso that we continue to exploit resources
1:00:29.200 and use the best of our enlightenment traditions and ideas in order to fuel knowledge creation
1:00:35.280 back to the book, David Rites. Some explanations do have reached into the distant future far beyond
1:00:40.960 the horizons that make most other things unpredictable. One of them is that fact itself.
1:00:46.480 Another is the infinite potential of explanatory knowledge, the subject of this book.
1:00:50.880 Okay, so just pausing there. So some things do reach off into the infinite future.
1:00:56.320 Namely, how knowledge is constructed, the infinite potential of explanatory knowledge, the fact
1:01:01.760 that explanatory knowledge will enable the transformation of physical reality around us
1:01:11.040 because of what we choose to do. That will always be the case. Nothing about explanatory
1:01:17.280 knowledge can change that. Unless, you know, including the fact that we could choose to
1:01:22.000 do ridiculous things that cause us to go extinct and the way of the dinosaur.
1:01:28.320 The potential was always still there, the potential for explanatory knowledge to radically
1:01:35.040 transform the universe, the cosmos. Let's keep going, David Rites. To attempt to predict anything
1:01:42.000 beyond the relevant horizon is futile. It is prophecy, but wondering what is beyond it is not.
1:01:47.200 When wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes speculation, which is not a rational either.
1:01:52.480 In fact, it is vital. Every one of those deeply unforeseeable new ideas that make the future
1:01:57.040 unpredictable will begin as a speculation. And every speculation begins as a problem.
1:02:02.880 Problems in regard to the future can reach beyond the horizon of prediction two.
1:02:08.160 And problems have solutions. In regard to understanding the physical world,
1:02:12.800 we are in much the same position as a roster thing was in regard to the earth. He could measure
1:02:18.720 it remarkably accurately and he knew a great deal about certain aspects of it. He meant
1:02:23.040 to be more than his ancestors had known only a few centuries before. He must have known about such
1:02:28.000 things as seasons in regions of the earth about which he had no evidence. But he also knew
1:02:34.160 that most of what was out there was far beyond his theoretical knowledge as well as his physical reach.
1:02:39.840 We cannot yet measure the universe as accurately as a roster thing measured the earth.
1:02:45.440 And we too know how ignorant we are. For instance, we know from universality that artificial
1:02:51.760 intelligence is attainable by writing computer programs, but we have no idea how to write or evolve
1:02:57.680 the right one. We do not know what qualia are or how creativity works, despite having working
1:03:04.320 examples of qualia and creativity inside all of us. We learned the genetic code decades ago,
1:03:10.080 but we have no idea why it has the reach it has. We know that both of the deepest prevailing
1:03:15.120 theories and physics must be false. We know that people are of fundamental significance,
1:03:20.320 but we do not know whether we are among those people. We may fail or give up.
1:03:25.280 And intelligence is originating elsewhere in the universe may be the beginning of infinity.
1:03:30.240 And so on, for all the problems I have mentioned and many more, Wheeler once imagined writing
1:03:36.400 out all the equations that might be the ultimate laws of physics on sheets of paper all over
1:03:40.880 the floor, quote from Wheeler. Stand up, look back on all those equations,
1:03:46.320 some perhaps more hopeful than others. Raise one's finger commandingly and give the order,
1:03:52.000 fly. Not one of those equations will put on wings, take off or fly, yet the universe flies
1:03:58.960 and quote from Meisner, Thorne and Wheeler, in their book, Gravitation 1973.
1:04:05.840 We do not know why it flies. What is the difference between laws that are in
1:04:09.520 stansiated and physical reality and those that are not cause their my reflection?
1:04:13.840 So this idea of flies. Well, it presumes, I think, to some extent that laws can exist
1:04:21.760 independently of a physical reality. I don't know what that would mean, that you could have
1:04:29.280 physical laws, alternative physical laws out there in abstract space. Now, if they do exist out
1:04:34.640 there in abstract space, they, you know, in a sense, one might argue that they would give rise to
1:04:40.160 an alternate physical reality, which we don't have access to. I don't know. But certainly,
1:04:44.800 it might be a mystery as to why this set of physical laws exist at all in the first place,
1:04:50.400 governing this particular universe. So maybe there are physical laws extanciated in physical
1:04:56.240 reality, namely these ones here and no others, but we don't know the answer to that yet.
1:05:01.120 Either way, it's a mystery. If all possible physical laws are instantiated out there in the
1:05:04.960 universe somewhere, why? If they're not, why? Interesting question. Here are some more questions.
1:05:14.160 David goes on to say, quote, what is the difference between a computer simulation of a person
1:05:19.680 which must be a person because of universality and a recording of that simulation, which cannot
1:05:26.400 be a person end quote. So we've got the possibility of a person, which is what we are.
1:05:34.080 If we took the program that's running on our brains and stuck it into a computer,
1:05:39.600 then that would be a person as well because it would be thinking it would be processing information.
1:05:43.920 That's what we're doing. It would be constructing knowledge because it would have the relevant
1:05:48.000 program, the program which constructs knowledge in a computer. I'm doing this action because I'm
1:05:52.560 pointing at my own laptop. Presumably you could stick it into a laptop. I would also say there's a
1:05:59.200 moral hazard here because who knows what the quality would be. It could be terrible suffering.
1:06:05.280 So don't do it yet until we know. We know we're near that anyway, by the way.
1:06:10.400 But if you could, if you could simulate a person, but then you recorded that and you played
1:06:19.840 the recording. Is the recording not a person? Presumably not. So what's going on?
1:06:25.680 This is the distinction between whether or not something has a subjective content,
1:06:30.480 quality or consciousness and something that does not.
1:06:32.960 David goes on to ask, quote, when there are two identical simulations underway,
1:06:41.680 are there two sets of qualia or one? Double the moral value or not? Our world, which is
1:06:50.480 so much larger, more unified, more intricate, and more beautiful than that of us,
1:06:53.760 a roster themes, and which we understand a control to an extent that would have seemed
1:06:58.000 godlike to him is nevertheless just as mysterious yet open to us now as it was to him then.
1:07:05.120 We have lit only a few candles here and there. We can cower in their parochial light
1:07:10.960 until something beyond our can snuffs us out or we can resist. We already see that we do not
1:07:17.520 live in a senseless world. The laws of physics make sense. The world is explicable. There are
1:07:24.480 higher levels of emergence and higher levels of explanation, profound abstractions in mathematics,
1:07:30.000 morality and aesthetics are accessible to us. Ideas of tremendous reach are possible,
1:07:36.240 but there is also plenty in the world that does not and will not make sense until we ourselves
1:07:42.000 work out how to rectify it. Death does not make sense. Stagnation does not make sense. A bubble of
1:07:49.280 sense within an endless senselessness does not make sense. Whether the world ultimately makes
1:07:55.200 sense will depend on how people, the likes of us, choose to think and act, pausing their
1:08:00.880 my reflection. So as I've said many times before, this is a great rebuttal response,
1:08:07.840 refutation against other public intellectuals of our time. Prominent among them, Richard Dawkins,
1:08:16.720 and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the biologist and the astronomer, coming at this from two different directions.
1:08:24.640 Richard Dawkins says, we've evolved in middle world so our brains have evolved such that we can
1:08:29.920 only understand the things that are of approximately our size and our speed and so on. So it is
1:08:34.320 no mystery. Why we can't understand the universe as a whole. It's too big. We didn't evolve for that.
1:08:39.600 Or quantum theory. It's too small. We didn't evolve for that. He doesn't understand what
1:08:43.920 universality is, the universality of the mind. We can model within our minds anything. It doesn't
1:08:49.120 matter what the size of the thing is. That does a parochial misconception about what a human
1:08:55.440 person's mind is. We're not like all those other creatures. And Neil deGrasse Tyson says,
1:09:01.120 well maybe the ultimate laws of physics are just so complicated. We'll never come to understand them.
1:09:07.280 Again, this is a misunderstanding. Computational universality might be falsified in some way,
1:09:14.320 shape or form. But until then, we've got nowhere else to leap to. The best understanding that
1:09:19.440 we have is that our minds contain within them universal computers or can emulate something
1:09:25.440 and emulate universal computers. Our brains are universal. Our minds are universal. We can,
1:09:31.520 therefore, simulate phenomena that exist out there to any degree of fidelity that we like. We just
1:09:38.400 have to keep learning more and more and more. So he doesn't understand universality either,
1:09:42.800 universality of the laws of the physics and the relationship between our minds and the structures
1:09:48.160 that are out there. This concept of self-similarity that I've talked about before,
1:09:51.920 David Deutsch has this positive worldview that things make sense and that that's not going to end.
1:09:58.640 For the last time, in terms of this book, I'm reading others right now, of course,
1:10:07.600 go to the physics of canon carved, go to the fabric of reality. You can hear me say this phrase
1:10:12.960 again, but for the last time with the beginning of infinity, I'll say. And David writes,
1:10:20.720 quote, many people have an aversion to infinity of various kinds, but there are some things
1:10:27.440 that we do not have a choice about. There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making
1:10:32.240 progress or of surviving in the long run. And that is the way of seeking good explanations
1:10:38.240 through creativity and criticism. What lies ahead of us is, in any case, infinity.
1:10:44.800 What we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right,
1:10:51.600 death or life. We're only in chapter one and already there are these phenomenal
1:11:01.440 advances in philosophy, phenomenal advances in epistemology,
1:11:06.240 excellent explanations of what our best explanations of epistemology and philosophy are,
1:11:12.960 all illustrated with some excellent science. That'll do me for now. That's quite a bit of reading.
1:11:20.080 And maybe tomorrow, I'll try and get into chapter two. We'll see how we go. See you.
