David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" - a retrospective in 99 minutes

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Topcast for a special episode, an omnibus type episode, so to speak.
00:00:22.600 99 minutes for my 99th episode devoted to the beginning of infinity, the book that started
00:00:28.760 my podcast. This is going to be not a typical episode in the sense that often what I do
00:00:35.160 is read part of the book and then reflect upon that book. Instead, what I'll be doing
00:00:40.120 is simply giving nothing but my reflections without ever referring directly to the book.
00:00:45.480 There will be very few quotes that might be one or two here, but I'm not going to have the book in
00:00:50.440 front of me and reading passages out of it. For that, of course, you can go to the rest of my
00:00:55.640 podcast series on the beginning of infinity, where I do extensive readings and longer reflections.
00:01:01.160 This is going to be very much a personal set of reflections on what I got from each and every
00:01:09.240 chapter from the beginning of infinity. It'll be very much in my words and shouldn't be taken
00:01:15.160 as representative of what really is in the chapter. David provides summaries at the end of every
00:01:20.440 single chapter and I guess they would be his main points, but this will be my main takeaways from
00:01:25.320 the book. At the end of each chapter that I discuss, I'm going to give the two or three sentence
00:01:31.240 summary of what I think that chapter was about. Again, nothing official in this. This is just my
00:01:36.760 takeaways and many people out there might quite disagree with what I'm taking away as the central
00:01:41.400 message of that chapter. The beginning of infinity is special in many ways. Firstly, as
00:01:46.280 Naval Ravakhand has said, there seems to be many people who purchase the work. Somewhat fewer
00:01:52.840 readers of the work and fewer still people who actually have a good understanding of what's being
00:02:00.120 said there. This is somewhat perplexing to me in a sense because I don't know why people wouldn't
00:02:05.800 persevere with the book. I get why you wouldn't start the book to begin with. It's a fairly large
00:02:10.520 tone and maybe you just want it to look good on your shelf there. But if you begin reading it,
00:02:16.120 surely you find it captivating. It's amazing. I mean, it's providing you with a different world
00:02:21.320 view, a different way of saying not only science and progress, but just about every area
00:02:27.480 of human interest. It's in some way or other captured there within the beginning of infinity.
00:02:32.680 And it provides an optimistic alternative to all of those other misconceptions and worldviews
00:02:37.480 that are out there at the moment. I'm somewhat reminded of what Popper said when it came to
00:02:42.520 problems in one's life. He said that, you know, essentially the purpose of life to some extent
00:02:47.800 is to meet a problem, to see its beauty and to fall in love with it, to get married to it,
00:02:52.520 and to live with it happily, till death do ye part, unless you should meet another and even
00:02:58.520 more fascinating problem." End quote from Popper. Well, much the same could be said of a good book
00:03:06.120 or even a sublime book like this one, to meet it, to see its beauty and to fall in love with it
00:03:12.360 and basically to spend days and weeks pouring over it. I'm sure some books are possibly pumped
00:03:18.520 out rather quickly like so many blog posts are. I know the feeling of having a particular thought
00:03:24.200 tossing it over in my mind for a while and then feeling the urgent need to commit it to the page
00:03:29.480 in the form of a longer or shorter blog post. I tend to think it over sometimes for only a matter
00:03:34.920 of hours before committing it to the page, but I also know the feeling of having an idea,
00:03:40.760 committing it to the page in draft form, and then tossing it over for days and weeks until it
00:03:46.520 refined to the point where I think, yeah, that's worth publishing. I think that many other books,
00:03:52.600 like popular science books and things, they tend to read a little bit like blog posts of the
00:03:57.960 first kind. There's something the authors have just had to say and had to publish very quickly,
00:04:03.240 or perhaps they've tossed it over in their minds for weeks and months, perhaps a year or two
00:04:08.280 and some special cases. But I know the beginning of infinity took something like a decade to write
00:04:15.240 and it really does show. The beginning of infinity stands apart because each page really does have
00:04:21.480 a new insight. It's often something that counters prevailing misconceptions and it's clear,
00:04:28.200 exceedingly clear, and not merely clear, but eloquent and this sets it apart. But the fact that it
00:04:34.920 is so insightful, I think, is one reason that people might not at times persevere or even see the
00:04:41.560 subtle importance of what's being said. If you're being hit, rapid fire on every page with new
00:04:47.480 ways of thinking about things, one might dare say everything's, it can be disorienting. And of
00:04:54.440 course, this is the reason for my channel here, and the podcast that I produce and the blog posts
00:04:59.960 and so on, because as so many others have said, some sentences in the beginning of infinity
00:05:05.720 could be entire paragraphs. Some paragraphs could be entire chapters and some chapters
00:05:11.240 could be entire books in themselves. So some unpacking and discussion is not necessarily needed,
00:05:18.200 but it is warranted. It's fun to engage with this stuff and see where the new ideas could potentially
00:05:24.680 lead and how they might inform science, philosophy, decision-making, and thinking and progress broadly.
00:05:31.320 So this episode is an unusual one. The plan is this. I'm going to take about four to five minutes
00:05:37.480 per chapter and just highlight what I think is important. What was key for me out of that chapter.
00:05:44.120 As I say, this time, no quotes, no reading, nothing direct, maybe except some incidental quotes
00:05:49.800 here and there that I might remember off by heart or I feel I need to just pull out of the book.
00:05:53.560 But in the main, it's going to be my interpretation of the chapters. So it's more like a translation
00:05:59.800 of a kind. So it's more like the beginning of infinity filtered through me in a sense, so expect to
00:06:05.080 lose something. Expect to lose a lot in that process. As I always say, none of this is a substitute
00:06:11.960 for the book itself at 18 chapters and four to five minutes per chapter. That gives me a few
00:06:17.480 minutes here at the beginning to do this introduction and maybe some minutes at the end to do a
00:06:22.120 little bit of a conclusion. And what I'll do with these four to five minute breakdowns of each
00:06:26.280 chapter is probably just published them separately on Twitter as well as putting them together.
00:06:31.400 Here and now for you as a complete podcast. And the reason for that is once again, I hope it
00:06:37.400 really does entice people to pick up the book and delve more deeply into it. I know I've already
00:06:43.400 done the 45 episodes on the beginning of infinity and that is, in fact, close to two complete
00:06:50.520 days worth of continuous beginning of infinity content, not counting the questions with David and
00:06:56.280 the other things that I've published as well. But this is an interesting challenge. I think it's
00:07:00.360 important to accept the reality sometimes that some people simply won't ever read the book. But the
00:07:07.080 ideas in this book are just so important, especially right now, and will continue to be that we need
00:07:12.920 to repackage them over and over again, informats more accessible to some people. The Naval podcast is
00:07:20.920 doing that. I think very successfully if the feedback is anything to go by. Naval has great reach
00:07:26.600 of course and extremely, hopefully a deep understanding and appreciation of these ideas and one
00:07:32.360 hopes that anyone inspired by Naval when it comes to the beginning of infinity and the fabric of
00:07:37.480 reality will turn to those books. And so that's what I hope to do here as well. Turn to the book
00:07:44.120 for more details, of course. There's so much proper and Deutsch content out there now. All of David's
00:07:51.080 interviews in various places and the various other podcasts that are out there now as well,
00:07:55.240 the Duix Blaine podcast, the fallible animals podcast, the theory of anything podcast, the lunar
00:08:00.600 society podcast to name just a few. David has really inspired an entire ecosystem of online podcasts
00:08:08.680 and YouTube channels and blogs. So it's really getting difficult for someone who's a big fan like me
00:08:14.680 to even keep up with everything that's out there now. And so I guess personally, I'm not really
00:08:19.800 helping things right now by producing yet more beginning of infinity content. It's an embarrassment
00:08:25.560 of riches to some extent. And I don't just mean the proper and Deutsch-related material. I also
00:08:31.160 mean the broad intellectual science philosophy broadcasting space. All that said, I think our corner,
00:08:39.560 the David Deutsch corner of the internet really is still David against Goliath, David Bing,
00:08:47.000 David Deutsch and the rest of us on his side of the ledger and Goliath Bing, well,
00:08:53.160 mainstream misconceptions, mainstream academia and intellectual culture and all those other kinds of
00:08:59.960 so-called rationality that are out there. Some better than others, but none quite getting to the
00:09:05.320 heart of the matter about why it is we need to be optimistic. Why it is that we continue to make
00:09:09.960 progress and what it is about science and philosophy and reason that really sets humanity apart
00:09:16.040 at this particular epoch and time and the people in the Enlightenment tradition as compared to
00:09:20.680 everything that has gone before, as I say. At the end of each chapter that I'm about to go through,
00:09:25.960 I'm going to give you my personal key learning from the chapter. Emphasis on my
00:09:31.320 others might very well take something else, more important away and maybe David's intention
00:09:35.880 was something completely different to what I say is the central message that I've got.
00:09:41.160 Of course, the worst thing about even attempting this, of course, is that I've already said
00:09:46.440 that each chapter could be an entire book in and of itself. So why would I go in the opposite
00:09:51.000 direction and try and reduce the chapter to a few sentences? I just thought it would be a cool,
00:09:55.240 curious little challenge that I'd set for myself. So without further ado, let's get to my
00:10:00.520 brief reflections upon each chapter in the beginning of infinity, the most ground-breaking work
00:10:07.400 so far of the 21st century. Chapter one, the reach of explanations. In this chapter, David Deutsch
00:10:16.040 makes some genuine progress in epistemology. Prior to Popper, we had this notion of empiricism,
00:10:22.360 that the way in which knowledge was generated was you went out into the world and you observed
00:10:27.800 the world and from your observations, you managed to drive knowledge from those observations in
00:10:33.640 some way, shape or form that was never really specified. Empiricism at least put observation
00:10:39.800 at the center of knowledge creation. It was a relief to be relieved from superstitious notions
00:10:45.560 of how knowledge might be generated or the idea that certain authorities possessed the knowledge,
00:10:51.400 the final truth to a certain extent or the best version of a truth and everyone else should
00:10:56.440 agree with what the authority said was known or said was true. We know that empiricism can't be
00:11:02.920 true because we know that, well, seeing is not believing. Our go-to example in the beginning of
00:11:09.480 infinity in various other places and the one which I always turn to is this idea of observing
00:11:15.480 stars at night and seeing small dim points of light. But is that what a star is? A small dim
00:11:25.000 point of light? No, and no amount of repeatedly making those same observations over and over again
00:11:31.080 can get you one jot closer to the nature of what a star really is. What we now know is that
00:11:38.280 stars are not cold but hot, not dim but bright. They are extremely distant, hot furnaces,
00:11:47.160 fusing hydrogen nuclei protons into helium and other more complicated processes as well.
00:11:53.400 And we only get to that notion, not because we can actually observe the core of stars where
00:11:58.840 these reactions are taking place. In fact, it's very rare for us to be able to observe directly a
00:12:03.800 star. Whenever you take even a powerful telescope, the star still appears as simply a point of
00:12:08.440 light. There are a few exceptions. So we're not observing stars directly at all, let alone the
00:12:13.240 reactions that are going on inside them. So how did we get this knowledge? We had to conjure it,
00:12:18.120 we had to guess it. And then the function of our observations using telescopes in various other
00:12:23.320 things was to criticize those theories. And as far as those theories were criticized and survived
00:12:28.840 the criticism, then we accepted that we had learned something new via this method of conjecture
00:12:34.840 as Papa told us about what the nature of stars are. Eventually, our theory of stars became a
00:12:41.240 good explanation. And what we mean by good explanation is something that is hard to vary. And this
00:12:46.360 is the insight that David Deutsch provides us in chapter one. It is a genuine epistemological
00:12:53.400 discovery prior to David Deutsch, Papa rightly demarcated science from non-science via this criterion
00:13:01.880 of falsification. However, as David points out, falsifiable theories are a dime a dozen. After all,
00:13:09.000 any crank wearing a sandwich board on the corner of the street saying the world is going to end
00:13:13.640 next Tuesday has a falsifiable theory. And it will be falsified, but simply because it's a
00:13:18.840 falsifiable theory doesn't make it scientific just because it's testable doesn't make it scientific.
00:13:24.840 Someone can say, eat a kilogram of grass, it'll cure your common cold. It's a falsifiable theory,
00:13:29.960 but that does not make it scientific. So what is David Deutsch's great insight? What we're after,
00:13:35.000 not only in science, but everywhere are good explanations. And a good explanation is something that
00:13:40.520 counts for what is really going on in the world and which also is hard to vary, which means
00:13:45.960 every single part of the explanation serves a purpose. And in this view, therefore,
00:13:52.360 experiments and observations serve the purpose of choosing between these theories that we've
00:13:58.760 already guessed. It's very rare for us to have more than one explanation for any given phenomena,
00:14:04.840 but where we do, for example, in the case of gravity, we had Newtonian gravity and we had
00:14:10.440 Einstein general relativity. We needed to craft an experiment, a way of distinguishing between
00:14:16.200 the predictions that these two theories made. And if one of them was inconsistent with that theory,
00:14:22.440 we would say that the observation has refuted that theory while the other, which is consistent
00:14:27.720 with the observation, the theory which is consistent with the observation, we say has so far gone
00:14:32.280 unrefuted and now remains our best explanation of that given phenomena. And those explanations
00:14:37.720 that we generate have reach, they solve the problem they were created for in the first place.
00:14:43.160 And then go on to do even more. General relativity fixes issues that Newtonian gravity could not solve,
00:14:49.560 but then it reaches into things like the expanding universe and the black holes and neutron stars and
00:14:55.560 the GPS system, things that no one imagined two centuries ago under the Newtonian gravity framework.
00:15:02.920 My key takeaway from this chapter is that knowledge creation is a process of guessing what is true
00:15:09.000 and then criticizing those guesses, leading gradually and ideally to the production of good
00:15:14.840 by which we mean hard to vary explanations, which cannot be derived from our observations.
00:15:21.640 Chapter two, closer to reality. Knowledge brings us closer to understanding reality.
00:15:28.760 This idea of realism is the claim that reality is out there and exists independent of what we
00:15:36.040 happen to think about it. But our knowledge, what we come to understand of that reality,
00:15:41.080 which is beyond our minds, as well as our minds being a part of that reality, our knowledge
00:15:45.880 of all of this can be objective and should be objective. And that is,
00:15:50.760 objective in the sense that no subjective Noah needs to be involved in order for the knowledge
00:15:58.200 to actually be knowledge. Knowledge can be recorded in books or stored in computers.
00:16:03.720 It can even appear in objects. The computer on which you are watching this is going to
00:16:08.680 instantiate relationships between the circuits, the knowledge of how to process information,
00:16:14.440 and should all of humanity be wiped out tomorrow, but our artifacts, including our computers
00:16:19.240 left behind, and an alien race found them, then they could reverse engineer what is going on in
00:16:25.000 the computer, and therefore uncover the knowledge that's in the computer by decoding it,
00:16:30.600 and then they would know what we know, what has been stored in the computers. But how is it
00:16:36.200 that knowledge brings us closer to reality? It's interesting because sometimes, in order to come
00:16:41.640 closer to the reality, we need to put multiple objects between us and that reality. For example,
00:16:47.960 returning to trying to understand the nature of stars, in order to better understand what a
00:16:53.240 star is, looking directly at it with an eye that's unaided by any technology, is not going to
00:16:58.760 bring you closer to the reality of what that star is. Instead, putting between your eye, a telescope,
00:17:05.160 and a computer will certainly help in the process of bringing you closer to understanding the
00:17:09.880 reality of stars, putting objects between you and that star, and not only the objects,
00:17:14.040 but also existing explanations can bring you closer to understanding reality as well.
00:17:19.560 You can't see things directly because observation is theory laden. So when an astronomer puts
00:17:26.760 a telescope between themselves and a star, they have to have an explanation first of how the
00:17:33.160 telescope works. They have to understand whether, in to what extent, the telescope might be
00:17:38.120 subtly changing the color of the star, whether there might be artifacts on the lens and so forth.
00:17:43.720 Because, after all, once you produce a picture of whatever the telescope is taking using the computer,
00:17:49.080 you might very well end up with something that's only printed page that is not actually out there
00:17:54.440 and out of space, but it could just be an error introduced by the telescope or the computer
00:17:58.760 processing of the image. This is the sense in which observation is theory laden. Even something
00:18:04.680 as simple as straightforward looking relies upon a complex process of how light gets through the
00:18:10.920 corner of our eyes back to the retina, converted from chemical energy into electrical energy,
00:18:16.280 and then finally, somehow or other, translated by our minds into information of a sort,
00:18:22.360 this process of seeing is extremely complicated, but so long as we're correcting errors,
00:18:28.200 then we do come closer to the truth because this is what knowledge growth really is. It consists
00:18:33.240 of correcting errors and solving problems, errors in our existing theories. It's people who
00:18:40.440 are the creative entities that do the science and grow explanatory knowledge. People like Thomas Edison
00:18:46.520 and others have said over the years that innovation is very much 99% perspiration of 1% innovation,
00:18:54.120 but in fact, that's not true. The perspiration phases of creativity can very much be
00:19:00.920 automated and increasingly are what's so important now is imagination. The inspiration part,
00:19:07.400 that's all of what science is about, trying to find a problem and fall in love with it,
00:19:12.040 as Popper says, and then attempting to find a solution. Unless of course you find a better
00:19:16.840 problem along the way, so the truth is that in science, it's almost all or ideally it should be,
00:19:23.400 mainly creativity, imagination. My key takeaway for this chapter is that knowledge growth is about
00:19:30.200 the identification of errors in our existing explanations and correcting them, and sometimes we need to put
00:19:37.000 lots of things like technology such as telescopes and computers as well as other explanations
00:19:42.280 between us and those parts of reality were trying to understand in order to come closer
00:19:47.880 to explaining what's really going on. Chapter 3, The Spark. It is common these days for
00:19:54.280 intellectuals to embrace the so-called principle of mediocrity. That is the claim that
00:19:59.560 people are nothing special. As recently as 2021, the year in which I am recording this,
00:20:05.000 the biggest paid podcast on earth was called Absolutely Mental, and it featured Sam Harris in
00:20:12.040 conversation with the comedian Ricky Gervais. There have been two series so far. Now,
00:20:17.240 certainly of course it was mainly for entertainment and comedy purposes, but the subtext was,
00:20:22.120 whenever they got into science and philosophy in a serious sense, it really was all about the
00:20:27.240 principle of mediocrity. Over and again, Gervais made the claim and Harris, if not explicitly,
00:20:33.000 at least tacitly, endorsed the notion that we are nothing special, we humans. There is a continuum
00:20:39.160 between bacteria through to lower mammals and then to us. We are just an incremental increase on
00:20:45.480 what went before. Our dolphins and great apes so smart. Look at us. We're just so stupid for polluting,
00:20:52.280 getting in wars and being cruel to other creatures. But this is not merely black comedy.
00:20:58.280 It informs academia as well. Sadly, on this view to some extent, you're an intellectual,
00:21:04.520 if you do, denigrate people. Only silly religious people think humans are anything special.
00:21:10.040 So this principle says we are nothing special, and also the cosmological principle says that
00:21:15.560 the earth, planet earth, is nothing particularly special. It's just a regular planet orbiting a
00:21:20.200 regular star in a rather typical galaxy, one among hundreds of billions of them. But set against
00:21:25.080 all of this is, in the minds of many, a version of what is called spaceship earth.
00:21:30.440 Well, these days, many people say there is no planet B. Even when there are literally many,
00:21:35.800 many planet bees that have been discovered, Kepler 452B, Kepler 10B, Kepler 442B,
00:21:43.480 take your pick. There are even seas and dees and so on. Anyways, no planet B or spaceship earth
00:21:49.560 says, in fact, the earth is a special place and nowhere else is. But all of this is wrong.
00:21:55.640 We humans are special and earth is only special because we are here. We can make anywhere
00:22:02.360 hospitable. The environment doesn't support us. It is barely suitable for us, as David says.
00:22:08.360 Most places are inhospitable. Even on the earth, we make the place hospitable,
00:22:13.800 and soon we will make space hospitable. We've already begun. Only creative innovation allows
00:22:20.360 for us to support ourselves here because the cosmos is dangerous and so is earth.
00:22:26.440 Enlightenment knowledge is the spark that allows for unbounded progress off into an infinite future.
00:22:33.480 This is explanatory knowledge that allows for the solving of human problems.
00:22:38.280 The only other known type of knowledge in the universe is biological, slow, incremental guessing
00:22:43.720 and checking of blind mutations to see if there are any useful adaptations. So the spark is very
00:22:50.280 much us. We people are the catalyst that takes inert useless material and comes to understand
00:22:57.880 what it is made of. We create knowledge of it. Find out what it is and only then it becomes useful
00:23:05.800 and actual resource. With this resource, we can begin the process of transforming our environment
00:23:12.280 into something hospitable. And our environment is the universe. Eventually, this ratcheting
00:23:19.400 up of knowledge creation, allowing us to transform physical reality around us, will stretch
00:23:24.600 out beyond the earth, sparking knowledge creation throughout the solar system and then the galaxy.
00:23:30.840 And from there, who knows where? The Enlightenment has only just begun to glow in an otherwise
00:23:37.640 implacably dark and hostile universe. Eventually, we can bring the rest of the universe to life
00:23:44.440 by making it hospitable. Just as we have done here on a far smaller scale,
00:23:50.280 this is merely the beginning, the kindling of infinite progress. My key takeaway from this chapter
00:23:57.160 is that the earth is a unique place so far as we know in the universe, where an open ended stream
00:24:02.760 of knowledge creation is occurring. However, it will not remain this way as our Enlightenment
00:24:08.120 traditions will spread to other planets and stars and one day, the rest of the universe,
00:24:14.440 chapter four, creation. Knowledge has to be created. Knowledge being useful information or
00:24:21.720 information that solves a problem. There are two kinds known. The information in the DNA of an
00:24:27.320 organism is useful, so it counts as knowledge. It solves the problem of survival for an organism,
00:24:34.520 ideally, but more precisely, how the gene can spread through a gene pool. And the problem of
00:24:40.760 how to be copied, another feature which makes it knowledge. It appears via the process of
00:24:46.440 evolution by natural selection as explained originally by Darwin, and which we now know in a so
00:24:51.400 called Neo Darwinian framework as being about the selection of units on the DNA, double helix called
00:24:57.400 genes. Genes or groups of genes code for structures in the physical structure of an organism.
00:25:04.440 Mutations of the DNA are, in essence, like guesses about what might work in a given environment.
00:25:10.680 Most of bad guesses and only damage the organism, rarely some are mutations which are advantageous
00:25:16.680 and survive into the next generation, as they cause that organism to be more fit in the given
00:25:22.200 environment. They go on to be copied generation after generation. This all looks a little like
00:25:28.120 the growth of explanatory knowledge, where existing ideas can be changed somewhat, but most
00:25:34.760 changes are not good. Knowledge in the DNA, ending human minds of the explanatory sort, is hard to
00:25:41.400 vary. Small changes will ruin and not improve the knowledge, broadly speaking. That both ideas
00:25:47.480 and genes can be copied and are copied means they are replicators. But they do exist differences,
00:25:53.880 explanations can be deliberately changed, intelligently designed if you like, by the free and
00:25:59.480 conscious choices of people who can see a problem and deliberate over it, and consider the best
00:26:05.000 knowledge available and imagine into existence new ideas. There is a genuine act of creation on
00:26:11.800 their part, but there is no mind behind the generation of biological knowledge. That is a blind
00:26:18.360 process. And biological knowledge of that sort never does much more than ensuring the survival
00:26:23.560 or not of a particular organism or species. While explanatory knowledge has reach, it solves the
00:26:29.960 local problem a scientist, for example, is interested in, only for it then to go on to solve problems
00:26:35.880 elsewhere at different times. The problem of what the structure of the atom is eventually leads
00:26:40.760 to uncovering the cause of radioactivity, and eventually leads to the possibility of generating
00:26:45.640 electricity for hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of people using nuclear fission reactions.
00:26:51.000 Explanatory knowledge reaches into areas creators of it can never quite imagine initially.
00:26:57.480 Evolution by natural selection replaced Lamarchism. The idea that biological knowledge can be acquired
00:27:03.640 by some sort of process of extrapolation, where drafts necks got longer because they try to make
00:27:09.080 their necks longer. Similarly, inductivism assumes that explanatory knowledge is a process of
00:27:14.760 extrapolating from observations, somehow the knowledge in both cases spontaneously appears out
00:27:20.760 of trends, both Lamarchism and induction are thus wrong. Evolution by natural selection solved
00:27:27.160 an important problem, that of the problem of the appearance of design. But taking a look at the
00:27:32.600 universe as a whole, the physical laws and the constants there, also have the appearance of design,
00:27:39.720 it seems as though the laws have just the right form and especially the right parameters,
00:27:44.520 those parts of a theory that needs to be measured, the constants of nature like the gravitational
00:27:48.680 constant or the charge on an electron, for the universe to be bio-friendly. But the claim that
00:27:54.520 cosmologically, fine-tuning is solved by a designer suffers from the same floor as it does in
00:28:00.360 biology. We don't yet have an explanation for the appearance of fine-tuning, but this is only
00:28:06.120 because we do not yet know enough. Whatever the case, we shouldn't be leaping to, it looks like design,
00:28:12.040 therefore it is design, so there must be a designer that is exactly the same as the area in biological
00:28:18.200 creationism before evolution by natural selection was known. We cannot say why there is an appearance
00:28:24.040 of design in the physical laws, but postulating a cosmological multiverse or a megaverse,
00:28:29.720 a multiverse of multiverses where the other universes have different laws doesn't solve the problem
00:28:34.520 either. In truth, this notion is rather too easy to vary as it could account for any set of laws,
00:28:41.160 including the ones we know to exist in our universe. My key takeaway from this chapter is that
00:28:46.280 both biological organisms and the physical constants in the universe that permit life
00:28:51.640 have the appearance of design, but appearances can be deceiving. Although Darwin solved the problem
00:28:57.320 of why life appears to be designed, the question of why the constants of nature seem to be
00:29:03.080 designed seem to be fine-tuned remains unsolved. Chapter 5. The reality of abstractions,
00:29:10.600 what happens from one moment to the next in the physical universe is determined by laws of physics
00:29:16.360 acting on fundamental particles. This description of reality happens to explain very little.
00:29:23.000 It is at best predictive, but even then in practice the prediction for large ensembles of
00:29:28.760 particles is intractable and in principle there can be no computer so powerful in our universe
00:29:34.440 that it could actually predict what happens moment to moment, precisely because to know what
00:29:40.040 happens next with high precision requires knowing now with high precision where all the particles
00:29:46.040 are and how fast they are moving. But there is no single now because of the relativity of
00:29:51.720 simmultanarity. What has this to do with anything at all? This determinism is a form of
00:29:56.920 reductionism where it is assumed, wrongly, that explanations at the lower level are necessarily
00:30:02.840 superior to explanations at the emergent level. But sometimes the emergent explanation,
00:30:09.480 indeed mostly it is the emergent explanation in day-to-day life, is the only known proper explanation.
00:30:16.200 Now go to example here is the parable of the copper atom as I have come to call it. It first
00:30:21.800 appear in the fabric of reality and I have done a number of podcasts on it, including one
00:30:25.960 devoted exclusively to it, but in short it goes like this. In Parliament Square in London there
00:30:31.720 stands a statue of Winston Churchill. It is made of bronze and at the tip of the nose of the statue
00:30:37.400 is a copper atom. Why is that copper atom there? The deterministic predictive explanation goes like
00:30:44.360 this. Matter was produced at the Big Bang and some of that matter eventually coalesce into stars
00:30:48.760 and at the core of those stars eventually copper was fused during a supernova explosion.
00:30:53.880 Some of that copper ended up forming the minerals on the earth which were mined and under the
00:30:58.920 action of the forces of the laws of physics, the copper atom eventually ended up at the tip of
00:31:03.720 the nose of Winston Churchill. Now that explanation works for anything anywhere anytime. It doesn't
00:31:09.000 matter what the object is, it doesn't matter what the particle is that you're talking about,
00:31:12.440 beginning at the Big Bang, following the trajectories which are determined by the laws of physics,
00:31:17.000 you will end up with the particles being where they are right now. That's predictive. It's not
00:31:22.280 explanatory. A genuine explanation of what's going on is the reason that there's a copper atom
00:31:26.840 at the tip of the nose of Winston Churchill's statue is because we make statues out of things
00:31:31.960 like bronze and brass which contain copper that helps them not corrode away quite so quickly.
00:31:36.440 And the reason the statue is there at all in the first place is because Winston Churchill helped
00:31:40.280 to fanned the west, the enlightenment, against fascism. And we like to build statues honouring
00:31:46.680 great leaders like that. And so that's why there is a copper atom at the tip of the statue in
00:31:52.520 Parliament Square. Now this explanation involves things in its full context of culture and
00:32:00.120 choices and war and things that do not reduce to physical forces and fundamental particles.
00:32:06.840 Things like culture and the choice to go to war involve abstractions, the reality of abstractions.
00:32:13.880 Numbers and not the numerals that represent them, but numbers are abstractions as well.
00:32:19.240 Anyone can go online and look up now on Wikipedia what the highest presently known prime number is.
00:32:25.400 We happen to know there is an infinite number of prime numbers, but at any given time we only
00:32:30.520 know of a particular highest prime number. Now what is the next highest prime number?
00:32:35.240 We know it exists, but we haven't found it yet. Now in what sense does it exist? Well it doesn't
00:32:40.280 exist in physical reality right now. No one's found it. It hasn't actually been transcribed
00:32:45.480 into a computer anywhere. It hasn't been printed on sheets of paper. It doesn't exist in our
00:32:50.280 physical universe, but it exists. It's an abstraction and it can cause things to actually happen.
00:32:56.680 That prime number actually causes people, human beings, to go out and search for it.
00:33:01.720 So abstractions absolutely exist and can have causal effects on what goes on in physical reality.
00:33:07.880 And it does not reduceable just to the action of particles and physical forces.
00:33:13.480 Perhaps the most controversial of all abstractions is this idea of free will.
00:33:18.040 I regard free will as an abstraction. It is just the capacity to choose and sometimes
00:33:23.000 to create knowledge, to freely choose to create knowledge, which wasn't there before.
00:33:27.320 But our minds also are abstractions. They are instantiated presently in the neurons within
00:33:32.760 our brains, but there is no reason in principle that whatever is going on in that brain could not
00:33:37.400 be emulated, simulated in the silicon workings of a computer, which means whatever it is,
00:33:42.600 is not identical to the firings of the neurons in the brain. My key takeaway from this chapter
00:33:48.440 is that non-physical stuff, or rather stuff that is independent of its physical instantiation.
00:33:55.720 In other words, abstractions can affect physical stuff. It is rarely the case that a description
00:34:02.200 of events in terms of physical interactions is a complete explanation. We often need to invoke
00:34:09.240 really existing abstractions among the most important of which our ideas, chapter 6,
00:34:15.480 the jump to universality. It is a jump to universality that really makes the difference between
00:34:20.680 people by which we mean humans and the possibility of alien intelligence, and perhaps in the future
00:34:25.880 the possibility of artificial general intelligence. It's a jump to universality that makes
00:34:29.800 difference between these kinds of people and all the other living entities that are out there,
00:34:35.640 those entities that cannot generate explanatory knowledge. We have a kind of universality that is
00:34:42.440 explanatory universality. But what is this thing about a jump to universality? Well, firstly,
00:34:49.000 the first kind of universality to have a reason that we know of seems to have been the DNA code.
00:34:55.640 It is a code which cannot just make some limited number of organisms, but rather can explore the
00:35:01.560 space of all possible carbon-based life. It's a strange kind of thing DNA. It can code for bacteria
00:35:08.520 and single-celled amoeba and simple life, but also fission birds, aquatic and air and land of course,
00:35:14.680 mammals and so on, and some things in between like amphibians and reptiles. It can do insects
00:35:19.800 and dinosaurs and everything in between those. Basically, if it can be alive and built from amino
00:35:26.280 acids joining together to form proteins, allowing cells to hold water in which are dissolved
00:35:30.680 the chemicals of life, then DNA seems to be able to build it. It's a universal code for life.
00:35:37.880 Human beings have created forms of universality as well. Take ways of communicating. At first,
00:35:44.120 pictograms were used, pictures representing words. This system is not universal because if a new
00:35:50.040 word was invented, then a whole new picture was needed. So the existing system could never
00:35:55.240 represent whatever word or concept was needed when a discovery was made, but our present various
00:36:00.840 systems of alphabets, for example, the English alphabet, is universal. Words might get longer,
00:36:06.440 or in some cases shorter, but it's not like we're going to run out of letters or words,
00:36:10.360 and number systems like Roman numerals are cumbersome and not so easy to use to represent large
00:36:16.440 numbers or to complex arithmetic efficiently. But the modern Indian Arabic system of 0 to 9
00:36:22.920 is universal. It's easy to represent whatever number you like and perform with relative
00:36:27.880 e's calculations in that system. The number 0 through to 9, represent any number simply by changing
00:36:33.640 the position of the number 9 units, 9 tens, 9 trillions, and so on, or with a single digit,
00:36:40.120 and then add a few zeros. It's universal. The most important example in technology of universality
00:36:47.000 is the computer, the Turing machine, a device able to do the work of any other device that
00:36:52.280 computed stuff was his invention, including the human mind, by the way, could do the work of that,
00:36:57.880 too. So in principle, the universal computer, the universal Turing machine, could be programmed
00:37:03.880 with intelligence. And then David Deutsch made a further jump to universality with the notion
00:37:08.840 of a quantum computer, a computer that took advantage of the actual known laws of physics,
00:37:14.360 the quantum laws of physics, to allow for quantum computation. A far more efficient way of
00:37:19.960 calculating certain things. Importantly, things like quantum systems, which meant that all physical
00:37:25.800 systems could be efficiently simulated by this computer. Provably, that includes human brains.
00:37:32.840 It's not a metaphor that the human brain is a computer. It is the literal truth of the matter
00:37:37.080 given the known laws of physics. All of these computers, quantum or classical, rely on
00:37:42.040 error correction, making them digital devices. The common feature of all these kinds of universality
00:37:48.040 is that they exist in digital systems, but the most important jump to universality in the universe
00:37:54.520 is us, the jump to explanatory universality. Even if are the animals can think, and I'm not sure
00:38:01.080 that they can, but if they can, it is about a fixed range of things, whatever is encoded in their
00:38:07.400 genes, but humans, being people, are universal in their capacity to explain the world. This gives
00:38:14.360 us a special relationship with the laws of physics, because what it is in here going on in our minds
00:38:20.840 comes to resemble what is out there over time with increasing fidelity. My key takeaway from this
00:38:26.920 chapter is that many systems gradually improve over time, but sometimes, some systems reach a point
00:38:33.640 where there is a sudden increase in capacity, such that the system is now able to do everything
00:38:39.960 in some class of tasks. For example, although pre-humans might have been able to explain something
00:38:45.640 about reality, people today can explain everything that is explicable. Chapter 7 Artificial Creativity.
00:38:54.440 What is called artificial intelligence is really just an incremental improvement on the kinds of
00:39:00.440 tasks computers have always done, calculating, extrapolating and doing very little that is
00:39:06.200 surprising. A program that is created to learn to play computer games does exactly that.
00:39:12.840 It does not tend to stop and decide to write a poem on a word processor. Computers presently
00:39:19.080 do precisely as they are programmed to do. They do not disobey, but people disobey. Creativity requires
00:39:28.200 disobedience to go against what was known or acceptable before. What this tells us is that the
00:39:35.720 programs running on these computers do not create anything new. Only the programmers do.
00:39:43.000 A computer that beats a chess grandmaster is impressive, but it is impressive because of
00:39:49.400 raw power and clever programming. It is not creating new knowledge. It is literally calculating
00:39:56.280 among known possibilities. It is not having fun and it is not ever able to do anything else
00:40:02.200 other than that one thing. Even a computer programmed with a wide repertoire of abilities is not
00:40:08.680 approaching universality of the explanatory kind. Universality of that kind, actual creativity,
00:40:15.000 actual artificial general intelligence, intelligence like ours has no fixed repertoire. We can
00:40:21.960 invent new tasks unlike a computer. We have problem situations. Likewise, evolutionary algorithms
00:40:30.840 are not examples of actual evolution being simulated either. A PhD student who designs a robot
00:40:36.920 with legs, or even just simulates one, which then goes on to learn to walk through trial and error,
00:40:42.760 has been given a fixed task, learn to walk. And it has a criteria for learning to walk,
00:40:48.360 so it is unsurprising that it manages to achieve this modest task eventually. But if it then
00:40:53.800 begins to dance a wall without ever being programmed, that would be a truly impressive display of
00:41:00.520 evolution. And if it ever then went on to invent beautiful new dances no one had ever seen before,
00:41:06.200 then we should all think we are in the presence of an actual artificial intelligence,
00:41:10.440 an AGI, a person. Until then, all we have are dumb computers. Impressive, a Tesla car is
00:41:18.040 impressive, but it is not intelligent. When a programmer writes a so-called evolutionary algorithm,
00:41:24.440 the thing is they are putting their explanatory knowledge into the code and some of that
00:41:30.280 knowledge has reached. What this means is that the knowledge itself ends up being able to solve
00:41:36.200 problems, the programmer might not have thought of. But this does not mean the code or the knowledge
00:41:42.280 on certainly not the robot is actually thinking of those problems. It just means that the problem
00:41:47.080 is encountered, and the code was already a solution for that problem. There's a thought experiment
00:41:53.240 in this chapter, which basically goes, a true evolutionary algorithm, if it is to replicate
00:41:58.600 evolution by natural selection, which recall is an iterative process of random mutations,
00:42:04.520 the random being important here. Anyways, an actual evolutionary algorithm would not begin with the
00:42:10.120 knowledge of the programmer. It would begin with almost no knowledge. So if we took say a robot that
00:42:16.360 could walk, replace its program by a sequence of random numbers and then have a random number
00:42:23.080 generator introduce more random numbers each time the programmer is run, and you keep the same criteria
00:42:29.400 in the program for succeeding as in any usual evolutionary algorithm. If, after some years of doing
00:42:37.080 this, the robot ends up walking at all, then we've refuted the idea that in those other programs,
00:42:42.840 it was all just the programmer's knowledge achieving the task after all and not evolution.
00:42:48.440 Evolution is, after all, blind and the mutations are random. This thought experiment also points
00:42:53.720 to the fact. We do not understand how actual evolution by natural selection works in very fine
00:42:58.840 detail either. We know there has been a ramping up of complexity in some species at a time.
00:43:03.800 We cannot say precisely why, because our existing understanding of the theory says that
00:43:08.360 evolution is blind, and as always, the maximum, if you can't program it, you haven't understood
00:43:13.480 it holds. In both cases, evolutionary creativity and explanatory creativity, we do not understand
00:43:20.200 how to program a computer to simulate either of them, which would be to actually create a
00:43:25.160 version of either. And at least in part, this is because we do not understand how
00:43:29.560 universality in either of these cases is operating and represented in the DNA or the human mind
00:43:36.040 respectively. My key takeaway from this chapter is, if you can't program it, you haven't understood
00:43:41.720 it. And we can program neither the ability to simulate the creation of biological knowledge,
00:43:47.640 nor of explanatory knowledge using our computers. Indeed, first we're going to need algorithms
00:43:53.480 for both to be constructed before we can begin to think about actually writing some code,
00:43:58.680 chapter 8, a window on infinity. Mathematical infinities can produce some seeming paradoxes.
00:44:05.880 David Hilbert imagined an infinity hotel to push our intuitions about infinity around.
00:44:13.320 If you consider a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and all of them are full,
00:44:18.600 then you might think that, well, if they're all full, there's no room for more patrons.
00:44:23.960 But let's think a little more carefully. Unlike with a regular finite hotel,
00:44:29.640 if infinity hotel is full, it doesn't actually mean there's no more room.
00:44:34.280 For example, if another guest does arrive, all the management need to do is to announce via the
00:44:40.120 PA system that everyone should move to the next highest number room. So the person in room 1,
00:44:46.280 moves to room 2, the person in room 2, moves to room 3, and so on. That would leave room
00:44:51.000 number 1 unoccupied. There is no last room, so it's not a problem what actually goes on there.
00:44:57.720 However, infinity hotel can be overwhelmed. This is because room numbering in infinity hotel
00:45:05.640 consists of countable room numbers. You can literally count them, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.
00:45:11.800 But some infinities are uncountable. It was georganto who proved using a diagonal argument.
00:45:18.920 How some infinities are larger than others? The way a diagonal argument works is this.
00:45:23.720 Imagine the rooms in infinity hotel were assigned. One of the decimal numbers between 0 and 1,
00:45:30.840 there are clearly an infinite number of those. Would we be able to assign one decimal number
00:45:36.920 identically to one of the hotel rooms? Imagine we did this at random, so room 1 got assigned
00:45:43.080 to the number 0.5567 and that goes on forever. That ellips there, the three dots means the number
00:45:50.440 continues without end. Imagine room 2 is 0.542. Imagine room 3 is 0.971, 4 is 0.509,
00:46:02.360 and you keep on doing this for all the rooms in the hotel. Would any decimals be left over?
00:46:09.560 Would some ever go unassigned? What about this number? Let's construct it by differing from the number
00:46:17.400 assigned to room number 1 by the first digit. So instead of it being 0.5, let's take the 5
00:46:24.520 and we'll change it to a 6, but you could pick any number that you like. So far we've got 0.6.
00:46:29.800 And let's say it differs from the second number by the second digit in some way. So instead of
00:46:34.680 0.54, so instead of the 4 in that second place, we will take that and change it into a 2 arbitrarily.
00:46:43.480 And in the third number we take the third digit and we change that and so on for all of the numbers
00:46:49.800 assigned to the rooms of the hotel. By the end of this process you will have constructed a number
00:46:55.720 different from any of the numbers assigned to any of the rooms in the hotel. And so there would be
00:47:01.720 a decimal number that appears between 0 and 1 that is unassigned to any room in the hotel by
00:47:08.680 definition. This is a diagonal argument and you've produced there a proof of an uncountable infinity.
00:47:15.720 A kind of infinity that includes numbers not in the infinite sequence that you might otherwise
00:47:21.000 think contains all the possible numbers. And the curious thing is about counting integers is that
00:47:26.680 no matter where you start you're always unusually close to the beginning because you're always
00:47:31.480 infinitely far from the end. There is no end after all you're infinitely far from infinity.
00:47:37.160 And in physical reality we like to say we're here at the beginning of infinity and we'll always
00:47:41.560 be at the beginning of infinity and unusually close to it. That's what infinity just happens to be
00:47:47.800 like. We live in a multiverse where we actually can't count the universes. There might be
00:47:52.840 uncountably infinite numbers of universes and therefore copies of each of us that differentiate
00:47:58.120 into infinitely many copies over time. And we, as the knowledge creators in physical reality,
00:48:03.960 only know something of whether a thing is true or false because the laws of physics allow us to do
00:48:09.720 the knowing, the proving or the calculating or explaining that is possible to do given the physical
00:48:15.800 brains that we have. It is therefore physics that underpins what it is possible for us to claim
00:48:21.960 to know, including claim to prove in mathematics. That some mathematical theorem is true or false
00:48:28.920 may be independent of physics but our fallible human knowledge of that theorem is not
00:48:35.720 independent of physics but bound by it. After all our brains are physical objects,
00:48:41.240 proof and explanation are physical processes. My key takeaway from this chapter is that
00:48:47.080 we are always at the beginning of infinity so we are still unusually primitive compared to people
00:48:53.800 of the distant future. We are thus lucky compared to our ancestors but terribly unlucky compared
00:48:59.960 to our descendants, chapter 9, optimism. All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.
00:49:07.640 This is what David Deutsch has called the principle of optimism. To some extent it is a special
00:49:14.360 case of problems are soluble. Unless there is a physical law preventing us from solving the problem
00:49:20.360 then the problem can be solved by creating the knowledge needed to solve that problem.
00:49:25.720 Among all the categories of different problems that exist, evil is one kind. Not all problems cause
00:49:32.920 suffering or evil only some do. Some problems are fun and lead to no harm at all. The problem
00:49:38.840 of how to improve the CGI in a movie is not an evil but it is a soluble problem and fun for some to
00:49:44.600 try and figure out a solution to but problems which do cause suffering. Evils are due to our not knowing
00:49:51.640 how to fix that problem. Yes, serial killers are an evil but so are earthquakes and cyclones. If
00:49:57.320 we knew how to prevent all murder we would do so but we don't know how. And the same is true
00:50:03.400 of any other natural disaster and people do evil things because they don't know better.
00:50:08.760 Morally they do not know what the right thing is. Even if they claim they do know what the right
00:50:13.640 thing is and choose to do otherwise. This is still an example of a lack of knowledge, a lack of
00:50:18.200 actual moral knowledge which would have directed their behavior towards something better.
00:50:23.000 Something they should have done in morality as in physics or mathematics. It is possible to make
00:50:28.760 objective progress. With morality, consider it as that domain concerned with what to do or what
00:50:35.160 to do next or what you should do. There is something objectively better and something objectively
00:50:41.160 worse in the choices before you. And in the limit there must be something like an optimal choice
00:50:47.080 to make given the values of any particular person. And those values are themselves claims about
00:50:52.360 what is right. And they could possibly be wrong and so they can be improved. All of this means
00:50:58.440 that in morality as in physics it is possible to be wrong. And because there is something to be
00:51:04.680 objectively wrong about, there are true and false claims we can make in these areas. What we need to
00:51:11.080 do everywhere is to seek out good explanations as they will never come a time where in any domain
00:51:16.920 our knowledge is anything like complete. There can be no end of science and no end of progress.
00:51:23.720 Failablism is the claim that we might be wrong about something. And this is an optimistic
00:51:28.280 way of viewing the world because the capacity to be wrong means the capacity to error correct and hence
00:51:34.520 the possibility of making objective progress. And that is always our circumstance. At the level
00:51:41.000 of society we want an open and dynamic society, one that has a tradition of criticism. A tradition
00:51:47.320 of criticism means we take nothing for granted and attempt to objectively improve our best explanations
00:51:52.760 over time by incremental means. The key thing here is error correction. Identifying areas where we
00:51:59.800 can find them and conjicturing ways to correct those areas. What is important for our civilization
00:52:06.120 is to continue to preserve the means of error correction. Our society, the civilization that
00:52:11.480 continues the Enlightenment tradition has been especially long lived and uniquely long lived in
00:52:17.240 fact preserving error correction means preserving our civilization because that means preserving
00:52:22.840 progress and problem solving. For almost all of geological history on this planet whenever an
00:52:29.320 asteroid was on a collision course with Earth it struck this planet. For the first time ever
00:52:36.200 our planet is in the unique position in the universe so far as we know where asteroids will be repelled
00:52:42.760 by a planet. Our planet in the form of our technology created through our knowledgeable use
00:52:49.960 of resources. So whenever anyone says that the chance of civilization being destroyed by an
00:52:56.680 asteroid is 1 in 10,000 in the next 100 years what they mean is completely absent human
00:53:03.720 knowledge and choices. We cannot prophesy the future with any reliability because we cannot predict
00:53:11.720 what people will choose to do in the future and especially we cannot predict what knowledge
00:53:19.160 they will have created. This is as true for climate change and viruses as it is for asteroids.
00:53:26.440 It is never a matter of probability but knowledge. Problems are soluble. My key takeaway from this
00:53:34.760 chapter is that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge. If we continue to create the wealth
00:53:39.880 needed to fund the solutions to solve our problems we will be in the best position to prepare
00:53:45.080 for the unknown problems of tomorrow, chapter 10. A dream of Socrates. In this chapter David explains
00:53:51.960 a epistemology. What knowledge is and how we create it through a dialogue largely between the
00:53:56.920 god Hermes and Socrates. In this chapter we find that all knowledge is conjectural it is
00:54:03.080 guessed. But that doesn't stop it from being objective, it tracks reality and is independent of
00:54:09.480 what anyone believes to be true about that knowledge. And so knowledge is not what the ancient
00:54:14.280 say a form of justified true belief. After all the standard of justifying as true is
00:54:20.280 impossibly higher to begin with and as for believing knowledge, well there are many instances where
00:54:25.640 not only would this not be desired, it would be absurd. It would be wrong to believe as true
00:54:30.840 a flat earth, but constructing the concrete base of your home on the assumption that the ground
00:54:35.320 there is ideally flat is a reasonable one. But you don't need to believe that. I also don't need
00:54:41.080 to believe Newton's law of gravity. I know it, it's part of my knowledge, but there's no possible
00:54:46.280 way I can justify it to be true. Indeed, I know it to be false, yet it is knowledge. It solves a problem.
00:54:53.640 We cannot see what is before our eyes. That we can, although we should endorse the claim that
00:54:58.920 seeing is believing, ignores most of what is interesting in science and elsewhere. I cannot see
00:55:04.200 the atoms before my eyes. I cannot see the oxygen in the air that I breathe. Yet I know about
00:55:09.320 atoms and I know about oxygen. Knowledge is not primarily about the information our senses provide us
00:55:14.680 with. In fact, it is more about correcting the errors in the misconceptions our senses naively
00:55:19.800 lead us into. Our senses lead us astray all the time. Indeed, our thinking can and anything,
00:55:26.200 therefore, can be doubted. Just because we cannot think of a misconception right now about a piece
00:55:31.320 of knowledge that we have does not mean that piece of knowledge is once and for all finally true.
00:55:35.640 It may just mean we have a lack of imagination considered the claim that through any two points
00:55:39.960 of unique straight line can be drawn. This is not actually true. Look into that a little,
00:55:45.320 perhaps here, whatever the case. It might be that there is just one central moral maxim.
00:55:51.480 That is, the moral maxim that brings morality to some extent within the sphere of epistemology.
00:55:57.480 The one thing we should never destroy the means of error correction. This idea of should,
00:56:05.160 that's a moral claim. This idea of error correction, that's epistemology. And further,
00:56:10.280 our latest understanding coming from construct a theory is we might also say that what is
00:56:15.080 possible to error correct and ultimately how physically to correct an error is a matter of physics.
00:56:21.880 And this is pure speculation on my part, but in a distant future, might there be a physics of
00:56:26.520 morality? What I am not trying to say is that we will ever be able to determine by some calculation
00:56:32.520 what to do morally, but what I do mean is that perhaps physics itself will place limits upon us
00:56:38.600 morally, even if it cannot tell us what to do. It will say perhaps what is impossible
00:56:44.440 amongst all of our shoulds, but this is beyond the scope of this chapter, so I'm cheating a little
00:56:48.920 bit. The chapter here also contains our perspective on the so-called so-cratic problem. The problem
00:56:54.040 of what Socrates, the philosopher, really said or thought, what we know of Socrates comes to us
00:56:59.800 filtered through the writings of Plato, and while Socrates seems in some moods to be a fallobilist,
00:57:05.240 Plato wasn't. Plato was a genius of course, but also all sorts of wrong on epistemology and
00:57:10.760 political philosophy and morality and mathematics and so on. So it may be that he simply misunderstood
00:57:15.880 Socrates' teacher, misunderstanding is the natural state of affairs, of course, as proper admonished,
00:57:21.480 it is impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood. In this chapter, David
00:57:26.760 also makes some remarks about the nature of philosophy compared to other academic disciplines.
00:57:32.120 In philosophy, as it appears in universities, there's rather a lot of attention paid to the
00:57:37.240 history of philosophy. What this or that, ancient or classical philosopher actually said or meant.
00:57:43.640 It should perhaps be more like physics or chemistry or science broadly, where we almost never
00:57:48.760 consult the original source of some idea or theory. Instead, we just take the idea itself for granted,
00:57:54.760 and then, make some progress. My key takeaway from this chapter is that knowledge is not derived
00:58:00.760 from the senses. It is we, people who create it in our minds by a process of guesswork.
00:58:07.960 We guess what is true and criticize those guesses in the light of our observations and other
00:58:13.080 kinds of refutation. The purpose of observation is to decide between theories already guessed.
00:58:20.360 Chapter 11. The Multiverse. The experiments in quantum theory can only be properly
00:58:25.880 explained by recourse to a physical reality that is tremendously larger than the one we observe.
00:58:33.160 This continues that tradition in science that the size of the reality we inhabit
00:58:38.600 seems to only ever be going in one direction, getting bigger and bigger to include more and more
00:58:43.960 stuff that we don't ever hope to directly observe. To explain the motion of particles we do see
00:58:51.240 in our universe. We need to invoke the existence of entities we do not see. These other entities
00:58:57.320 are behaving like fundamental particles, which means they are fundamental particles, because they
00:59:02.840 affect the fundamental particles we can see. This tremendously larger ensemble of entities,
00:59:08.600 beyond what we can see, we call the multiverse. There are many experiments that are used to illustrate
00:59:14.840 this reality. One is known as the Mark Zender Interferometer. Here, two half-silvered mirrors are placed
00:59:21.560 with two regular mirrors. The half-silvered mirrors allow photons particles of light to either go
00:59:27.640 through, be transmitted, or bounce off, be reflected. At the first mirror we cannot predict in our
00:59:34.600 universe whether a given photon will be transmitted or reflected. We can only say that it's got a
00:59:40.280 50% chance of either. At the second half-silvered mirror at the end of the experiment what happens
00:59:46.360 is that the photon is always detected at the arrow that says photon out and never at the nothing
00:59:52.760 out arrow. But why? Why isn't it 50-50 here as well as it was in the first mirror? The reason
00:59:59.160 is that in truth at the first mirror what happens is that the photon that interacts with that mirror
1:00:04.440 is a multiverse object. That means it occupies many universes. We are in one universal one group
1:00:11.880 of universes so can only detect it either going along x or y even though in truth it does go along
1:00:19.400 both. We know this is true because only if that photon takes both paths, the one we see and the
1:00:26.120 one we do not see, can we explain how the two photons interfere at the second mirror and recombine
1:00:33.080 there causing it to always go in only one of those directions rather than both. This is the only
1:00:39.400 explanation. Something is interfering with the photon at the second mirror and that something is
1:00:44.680 its counterpart in the other universe if we did not live in a multiverse. If our universe did
1:00:50.120 not consist of many things that we do not observe we should expect a 50-50 split has at the first
1:00:56.520 mirror. What is happening at that first mirror is that the photon differentiates into two groups
1:01:02.120 and thus so do the universes and the observers in those universes. This is going on all the time.
1:01:08.200 All objects we can see are multi-versal objects. They exist in the universe we observe
1:01:13.480 and many others we do not sometimes would slight or even very great variations. And the truth is
1:01:19.160 deeper still. What we observe is a universe but it is a universe of objects that have fungible
1:01:25.800 instances. Perfectly identical instances in the same place at the same time that occupy different
1:01:32.120 universes. So they are different in that sense because they could potentially partition themselves
1:01:37.400 into universes which cease to be fungible. The theory of quantum computation requires
1:01:42.680 that a multiverse exists because it is otherwise impossible to explain what quantum computers
1:01:48.280 are in principle and one day will be in practice capable of doing. Namely a quantum computer would
1:01:54.440 be able to perform calculations that a computer even the size of our entire universe could not
1:01:59.880 possibly do and it can only do this because it the quantum computer can take advantage of computing
1:02:05.800 power in other universes using interference. We cannot explain how a quantum computer
1:02:12.040 does what it does in retrospect by appealing to a single classical history. We have to invoke
1:02:18.040 once more the existence of histories we observers did not occupy. This again is testament to
1:02:24.680 physical reality being more than just a single classical universe and as unpalatable as it might be
1:02:29.880 to some people this means we're in a multiverse. Many semi-parallel at times barely interacting
1:02:36.200 and sometimes not interacting universes. A person on this view in the multiverse is a channel of
1:02:42.920 information flow along which knowledge grows. This is unique in the universe and this knowledge
1:02:49.320 may turn out to be among some of the longest persisting structures in the multiverse.
1:02:55.160 For more on all of this see my now seven part and indeed more than seven hours series on the
1:03:01.240 multiverse right here and see also this the nexus video for more on what the philosophy of people
1:03:07.960 and the philosophy of self might be in the multiverse. My key takeaway here is that the physical
1:03:13.480 universe is tremendously larger than what we can ever hope to observe. We call the approximately
1:03:18.600 autonomous regions closed off from us other universes and together with our own universe we call
1:03:24.440 the entire ensemble the multiverse chapter 12. A physicist's history of bad philosophy. A reason
1:03:32.680 why the Everett or quantum multiverse is not more widely known taught or even taken seriously by
1:03:39.720 actual practicing quantum physicists is bad philosophy. There was a retreat into some sort of
1:03:46.520 relativism and instrumentalism by physicists in the early 20th century. Instrumentalism is a fancy
1:03:53.160 word for this idea of shut up and calculate. It is the idea that science probably considered
1:03:59.240 it is simply about being able to predict the outcome of experiments rather than actually understand
1:04:05.320 and hence be able to explain what is really going on in reality. Anyways this chapter is about
1:04:10.440 how the equations of quantum theory describe particles as seeming to be in multiple places simultaneously
1:04:17.240 and having multiple velocities simultaneously. So to take the theory and the formalism literally
1:04:23.400 as a description of reality particles do have those properties however when you go to observe any single
1:04:30.280 particle we find it in a single place. So how do we square this? The theory is saying one thing
1:04:36.200 the particle has multiple positions at the same time and our observation the particle only has
1:04:42.120 one position at a time. Well if you're a physicist struggling to understand all this in the early
1:04:47.640 20th century you might well throw your hands up in the air and say all the possibilities except
1:04:52.920 for the one we observe collapse or disappear upon the act of observation. This seems to put the
1:04:59.160 observer the act of observation right in the center of fundamental physics. Observation is doing
1:05:05.400 something fundamental to the physical theory and that has led to all sorts of nonsense claims ever
1:05:11.400 since being made about quantum theory bringing in consciousness and mind to the quantum realm.
1:05:16.600 This idea that observation destroys all the positions a particle was occupying except for one is
1:05:23.560 known as the measurement problem. How it actually happens no one could say and people gave up for
1:05:29.560 a time trying to really find out they just accepted it. All of this was at least in large part
1:05:35.880 motivated by bad philosophy. This is philosophy that's not merely false but it actively prevents
1:05:42.840 the growth of knowledge. The idea that science should only be about predicting the outcome of
1:05:47.960 experiments acts to prevent us from improving actual explanations of reality. After all it rules
1:05:54.440 out explanation is even being a part of science in the first place but bad philosophy is not
1:05:59.160 only affected physics it's also infected some other sciences or what should be sciences like
1:06:05.240 psychology. Behaviorism in psychology is instrumentalism as applied to that subject and says that
1:06:11.640 because we cannot directly observe minds we can only observe human behavior and trends in human
1:06:17.160 behavior then this serves as a proxy for understanding why people do what they do. This denies
1:06:23.400 of a having good explanations of the human mind consider that an antidepressant may make a person
1:06:28.920 objectively happier or it may simply lower their standards for what they think of as happiness.
1:06:35.640 Presently there is no good explanation and no experiment that can distinguish these two
1:06:41.080 possibilities. Happiness could be a state of continually solving your problems and when
1:06:45.800 you are constantly thwarted in solving your problems then your happiness turns to unhappiness.
1:06:50.600 But behaviorism looks at behaviors including people self-reporting that's a behavior talking
1:06:56.440 that indicate more or less happiness without ever wondering what the causal link between what
1:07:01.480 it's actually going on in the mind in terms of thoughts and ideas and what causes behaviors.
1:07:07.080 We call this explanation less science. It might all look like real science is going on,
1:07:12.680 experiments might be done, papers written, graphs with trend lines produced but if we cannot ever
1:07:17.880 say why something or other constitutes happiness in the first place if we do not have an explanation
1:07:23.960 of what a particular mental state is at the level of ideas in the mind then we cannot hope to
1:07:29.320 maximize it let alone treat deficiencies of it. Bad philosophy continues through to today.
1:07:35.560 Relivism is a form of bad philosophy that denies the possibility of objective knowledge and
1:07:40.680 objective truth. It really took off. Soon after Wittgenstein published his major works,
1:07:46.600 Wittgenstein thought most of philosophy reduced to puzzles and it was all just about language
1:07:51.400 that people were using rather than actual philosophical problems. Wittgenstein is still extremely
1:07:56.280 popular today. Many people think that philosophy is just about argumentation rather than solving
1:08:02.440 particular philosophical problems. Reducing every single problem to nothing but a puzzle in
1:08:07.640 language is quite a dangerous route to go down and it breeds a form of relativism which we inherit
1:08:13.080 today in certain kinds of workism. My key idea from this chapter is that instrumentalism is the
1:08:19.640 idea that the purpose of science is to predict the outcome of experiments. This constitutes a kind
1:08:25.560 of bad philosophy which we define as philosophy which actively prevents the growth of knowledge
1:08:30.600 by denying reality or truth or the possibility of finding good explanations.
1:08:36.200 Chapter 13 Choices When people have a choice before them, it is often
1:08:41.640 not a case that pure logic and therefore any mathematical process of objectively weighing options
1:08:47.880 is going to lead them to the best choice. Instead what people actually do, both individually
1:08:54.280 and even when acting as part of a group, is to creatively conjecture new options no one
1:09:00.360 had on the table before. So it cannot be a process of weighing existing options because the
1:09:06.120 existing options can always be changed. Social choice theory is an attempt to turn decision-making
1:09:12.280 by people into a purely logical exercise to make it perfectly rational. The motivation I suppose
1:09:19.160 was a noble one. Take out the messy emotions and subjective feelings from the issue and look
1:09:24.040 simply at the facts and apply some rigorous rational mathematical framework to the situation
1:09:29.240 and see which choices actually calculated to be best. The problem with this is that all such
1:09:35.480 schemes for trying to turn decision-making into a branch of mathematics encounters what are known
1:09:41.560 as no-go theorems, paradoxes and things that are simply illogical. One of the most famous of these
1:09:48.120 discussed in the book is known as arrows theorem. This theorem is about how a group might come
1:09:54.360 to a consensus. Arrow begins with a set of axioms that any such group would want to adhere to if
1:10:01.640 they're going to make a rational choice. These uncontroversial axioms, the starting points,
1:10:06.920 will be things like, well if a group is going to be unanimous on a particular decision,
1:10:11.800 then that decision should be whatever the unanimous vote happens to be. Logical. Another axiom is
1:10:19.400 called the no-dictator axiom. One person cannot be said to represent the whole group unless everyone
1:10:25.960 already agrees and consult the book for the others or look up arrows theorem. These axioms are
1:10:31.480 completely uncontroversial. You'd want to be able to agree with them. Here's the problem. What
1:10:37.480 arrows showed is that the uncontroversial axioms, despite being perfectly reasonable, are also
1:10:44.040 inconsistent logically with one another. In other words, they cannot all be satisfied simultaneously.
1:10:51.160 This is a deep problem, a fatal blow to the idea that decision-making can always be a perfectly
1:10:58.440 logical exercise. So what do we do? Do we just give up on logic? No. What we do in these cases,
1:11:05.080 whether individually or as a group, is to create new options and have a good explanation either for
1:11:11.160 some existing option or the new one. We then choose among our options by choosing among the
1:11:17.240 explanations and criticizing and hence refuting the other options. This is actually how decision-making
1:11:23.480 works. It's not a process of weighing, but criticizing. Truly objective decision-making,
1:11:29.080 more resembles objective science. We have some theories or policies at the level of society,
1:11:34.280 and we seek to refute all of them except for one ideally. And that one that goes unrefuted,
1:11:39.320 that survives the critical process, that's the one we accept as our best explanation or as our
1:11:44.840 best policy. Or if none of them happen to be satisfactory, what do we do? We use our creativity as
1:11:51.320 people to invent a better theory or policy. Democracies, are systems of government for making decisions.
1:11:58.360 But the quality of a democracy is to be judged not by whether the best ruler is installed
1:12:03.880 and to what extent this is isomorphic with the era that science is about finding the once and
1:12:09.640 for all true theory. Instead, what democracy is, is a system for removing rulers and policies
1:12:16.680 easily without violence. That is the standard by which we judge democracy and its institutions broadly.
1:12:23.720 This also means that the plurality voting system is the best system of voting. Because it means
1:12:30.040 a ruler can be more easily removed if they're a bad ruler. This is unlike in any preferential
1:12:35.880 voting system, where that bad ruler can form a coalition and get preferences to keep themselves
1:12:41.640 in power. The more parties there are, the more coalitions can form, and this means deals are
1:12:46.360 done to keep themselves in power, even when the voters no longer want those elected officials in
1:12:51.320 office. Politicians like preferential voting systems for this reason. And on this point, compromise
1:12:58.840 has an undeservedly good reputation. What a compromise is, is a theory or a policy that
1:13:04.680 wasn't anyone's first choice in the first place. So when it fails, as inevitably it often will,
1:13:11.560 everyone involved in the compromise can turn around and say, well that's not what I ever wanted
1:13:15.960 anyway, and therefore no one actually learns anything when the compromise fails. My key takeaway
1:13:21.240 from this chapter is that making a choice is about choosing the best explanation. When there are
1:13:26.680 options before you, the only rational thing to do is to criticize them in the hope that all but
1:13:32.680 one of them are refuted. If none are satisfactory, then we use our creativity to come up with a
1:13:37.880 better option. And unless there's a threat of violence, don't compromise, chapter 14. Why are
1:13:44.440 flowers beautiful? Aesthetics, art, music, and beauty are all domains of objective knowledge.
1:13:51.880 Yes, people have subjective preferences. No one denies this, but this is not to say that there
1:13:58.040 is no such thing as one particular thing in truth, in reality, actually being more beautiful than
1:14:03.160 another. There are objective differences, not merely between noise and music, but between
1:14:09.240 music of different epochs, the proverbial cave people banging on drums and modern music today,
1:14:15.400 or cave art and modern 3D computer generated art. Cave people would have liked to know how to paint
1:14:22.520 better, and there really is a better. They would like to have made objective progress in their
1:14:27.880 art and storytelling. The waste paper basket as we like to say of the musician and the composer
1:14:33.560 fills up over time because they are trying to reach an objective standard, trying to make something
1:14:39.240 sound better, and not merely to them, but to everyone and in actual truth. Some sounds simply
1:14:45.800 are more harmonious, more beautiful than other combinations of sounds. The fact that today we
1:14:51.080 cannot rank order all musicians that have ever existed from worst to best in a way that everyone
1:14:57.480 would agree with does not mean there are no objective standards. It just means that we don't know
1:15:03.000 much about those objective standards yet, and those standards are sometimes swamped by,
1:15:08.520 yes, the subjective taste of people, but the existence of subjective taste does not rule out the
1:15:14.520 existence of real objective standards in music and elsewhere in art and aesthetics. Beauty,
1:15:20.680 if we think of it as attractiveness, is something humans have tried to produce and surround themselves
1:15:26.120 with since time immemorial, and art pieces objectively beautiful because people are attracted to
1:15:32.520 it by the measure that people return to it over and over again in the gallery. Not all of what is
1:15:38.520 called art does this. Some art rejects the notion of beauty altogether and exists rather to provoke
1:15:45.160 or make a political point, but again this rejection of beauty is likewise no proof that
1:15:51.320 objective beauty and the capacity for something to be more or less attractive does not exist.
1:15:56.520 The existence of creationism doesn't show that there's a problem with evolution by natural
1:16:01.080 selection, likewise the museum of modern art with its do-shamp urinals doesn't prove that the
1:16:07.320 classical art gallery does not contain objectively better art. Flowers are attractive. Insects are
1:16:14.600 attracted to flowers, but so are people. Whatever it is that flowers are doing and creating beauty
1:16:20.200 in nature, it acts to attract both insects and people. Something needs to be explained here.
1:16:26.280 There must be some objective standard of beauty operating even if we cannot in fine detail say
1:16:32.440 exactly what it is, but it seems to be the case. That flowers are beautiful because they
1:16:37.080 needed a way to signal across diverse species. Insects co-evolved with flowers and so the
1:16:43.000 flowers evolved to be beautiful and we humans seek out objective beauty also, so we find flowers
1:16:49.400 beautiful because they are actually in reality beautiful. It's not just our opinion. Evolution design
1:16:56.280 them that way to attract insects. People enjoy objective beauty because we are trying to signal
1:17:03.160 across the wide gap between us and other humans. Between one human person and another,
1:17:09.880 there is a vast gap in preferences and knowledge and more besides the differences between one
1:17:15.480 person and another, alike the differences between species. So if we are to signal to one another,
1:17:22.200 what we like, we will learn to appreciate objective beauty too and so we will create things
1:17:27.640 more and more beautiful. This signaling to one another and attracting one another to our creative
1:17:33.480 output is what we're all about. The best way to do this is by finding those objective standards
1:17:39.560 of beauty, just as flowers did. My key takeaway from this chapter, there is a parochial kind of beauty.
1:17:46.840 We've all got our own tastes and preferences, yes, but there are also objective standards for
1:17:51.880 beauty, some of which have evolved in flowers and many of which we have only just begun to discover
1:17:58.600 through our creative and artistic endeavors, Chapter 15. The evolution of culture.
1:18:04.360 This chapter contains some really new and deep insights about memes. The concept of a meme
1:18:10.600 was invented by Richard Dawkins and is the abstract analog of a gene. In other words,
1:18:15.720 it's a replicator of a kind. It contains knowledge, certainly information, and can be combined
1:18:21.320 in complex ways to direct a behaviour. Moreover, memes evolve. In short, memes are a kind of idea,
1:18:28.920 a kind of idea that persists, but may also change gradually over time. Cultures consist of many
1:18:36.520 memes. And Deutsch's deep insight in this chapter is that there are important differences between
1:18:41.960 cultures in terms of their memes. Deutsch refines this notion to be about dynamic and static societies.
1:18:49.560 Why is it that so many societies have gone extinct, especially given that the brains of people in
1:18:55.080 the past were anatomically almost indistinguishable from the ones we have today? They, those primitive
1:19:01.160 people, had the capacity to be creative. So why weren't they? Well, because they used their
1:19:06.440 creativity to keep things the same, something that I'll return to in the next chapter.
1:19:11.400 Ideas that people have, which tend to keep a society the same, or in other words,
1:19:17.000 actively prevent the growth of knowledge, are called anti-rational memes. These are not merely
1:19:23.560 irrational ideas, which might be thought of as bad ideas. But rather, anti-rational memes are the
1:19:28.840 ones which say, you may not criticise this thing. They disable the person's critical faculties.
1:19:34.840 So you can imagine all sorts of evil notions, like those that say, if you do raise an objection
1:19:39.800 to anything in this holy book, you can be put to death. This acts to prevent anyone from
1:19:44.600 criticizing the holy book, and in time it stops them even being able to think of criticisms.
1:19:49.800 It is an anti-rational meme, and it can get replicated as parents teach their children that and
1:19:54.840 their children teach their children and so on. But a rational meme is one ritual lies on a person's
1:20:00.200 critical faculties to get itself replicated in the first place. A person tries to criticise the idea,
1:20:05.800 but fails to find any valid criticism. And so they pass it on because they think,
1:20:10.440 that's a good idea. Implicitly, they think, I couldn't refute it. So I'm going to regard
1:20:15.080 this as part of my knowledge, and I'm going to spread it out into the world. Theories in science are
1:20:19.480 like this, so are musical tunes and jokes. The underlying idea gets passed on, even if it's
1:20:24.680 not verbatim. A culture is a set of ideas or memes that cause the people in that culture to
1:20:30.680 behave in more or less similar ways, but there is an important way to distinguish between two
1:20:35.880 extreme kinds of society. The two extremes are a static society. This is the one that is ruled
1:20:42.520 by anti-rational memes for the most part. In such a society, centuries and millennia can pass,
1:20:48.360 and almost nothing changes. But a dynamic society, a society like ours, is ruled by rational
1:20:54.920 memes, where the anti-rational memes have not quite been eliminated, but minimized to a large
1:21:00.680 extent. It is one where the thing that stays the same is change. The enlightenment is the longest
1:21:07.400 surviving example of a society where it is dynamic, because there exists this overarching anti-rational
1:21:14.840 meme, a rational meme in other words, but a special kind of rational meme that guards against
1:21:19.800 the anti-rational kind. And that meme is the traditions of criticism or the tradition of criticism,
1:21:26.040 if you like. The underlying idea of which is this, it's all up for grabs, and you can criticize
1:21:30.920 anything. Free speech and institutions protecting free speech and more besides to protect the means
1:21:36.440 of progress. Now, there is no perfect example of either a static society, something that really
1:21:42.920 doesn't change at all over time, even the near static societies do change, but very, very gradually.
1:21:49.160 And even our culture, it's not a perfect example of a dynamic society. There are threats,
1:21:53.960 even now, that slow down progress. The creeping workism and so on, and kinds of political correctness
1:22:00.040 that cause people to not criticize ideas for fear of offending someone or suffering legal action.
1:22:07.080 But in the main, our society is a very robust and good example of a dynamic society.
1:22:13.960 We are the best society to have ever existed. Primitive societies were unimaginably bad.
1:22:20.360 We are always at the beginning of infinity, so even our society is transitioning and because of
1:22:25.800 creativity, which is error prone, we will always be transitioning to something even more dynamic,
1:22:31.480 like he take away from this chapter. Dynamic societies like ours value criticism,
1:22:36.120 and protect our ability to correct errors in our ideas through the propagation of rational
1:22:41.400 memes. This stands in stark contrast to static societies where anti-rational memes have taken hold,
1:22:48.680 disabled the holders' critical faculties and make people reluctant to criticize,
1:22:53.480 and therefore improve existing ideas in the culture. Chapter 16. The evolution of creativity.
1:23:00.280 Humans are creative entities. Our defining feature is that we can create explanatory knowledge.
1:23:07.080 Any other people in the universe, be they aliens or artificial general intelligence,
1:23:11.640 will be able to explain their environment. So why is it then that for most of human history,
1:23:18.520 most humans, living in primitive societies, fail to do much good explaining. Hence,
1:23:24.360 why did they fail to make much progress? The enlightenment began around 1700 or maybe a little bit
1:23:29.960 before, and the Industrial Revolution began to happen just a little bit later than that.
1:23:34.520 But why did neither of these things happen a thousand, or even 10,000 years earlier,
1:23:40.360 if people had the same capacity for thinking and creativity as the people then did,
1:23:45.240 and the people today have? The answer is that the creativity they did have was being used
1:23:51.720 to keep things static the same and unchanging. In a static society, the way to stand out as a good
1:23:58.440 person and get a mate or get respect or gain authority and so on would be to enact the
1:24:04.040 memes of that society, the culture ever more strictly, to be especially static in your outlook,
1:24:10.440 to be especially obedient and uncreative, the replication of a meme takes creativity.
1:24:16.680 It cannot be copied directly because we do not have direct access to each other's minds,
1:24:21.480 and what we do when we copy a meme, or rather replicate it, is to replicate it's meaning.
1:24:27.000 That's the whole content of a meme, it's meaning. Some thinkers on the topic, for example,
1:24:31.880 the wonderful Susan Blackmore who has popularised the field of memetics as much as anyone,
1:24:36.760 has suggested meme replication occurs by imitation. But David Deutsch explains that this is
1:24:42.280 not possible because we do not have direct access to the memes, the ideas in people's minds
1:24:47.720 or brains in order to do this. Instead, what actually happens is we observe behaviour,
1:24:53.800 and we don't directly copy that either. It certainly looks as if we are copying, but it can't
1:24:59.080 be that. After all, let's imagine a simple example, a child learning to wave back at someone.
1:25:05.560 If it was all about copying that behaviour, would that mean going to stand where the other person
1:25:11.480 is and wave from that exact location back towards where the child was previously standing?
1:25:16.680 Would it mean the child getting a stool and standing on it so their hand is the same
1:25:20.520 height as the person waving at them? Would it mean putting a little bit of artificial hair on their
1:25:24.680 arm so their arm was being copied somewhat more faithfully from the adult? What exactly is being
1:25:30.280 copied or imitated in this situation? Well, David relates the story of how Popper would begin his
1:25:36.360 lectures on the philosophy of science with one word. He'd say to the students, observe, and then
1:25:42.920 just wait. Eventually, one of them would ask what they were supposed to be observing. Well,
1:25:48.200 exactly. You need a theory first of what to observe and how before you can begin observing.
1:25:54.360 This was perhaps one of Popper's deepest insights. Observation is theory laden, and so when we are
1:26:00.360 trying to replicate a meme, we have to come at that situation with a theory to begin with.
1:26:05.480 David imports this whole notion into the field of memetics. It cannot be straightforward
1:26:09.960 imitation of behaviour or copying. No, rather the child or anyone else seeking to uncover what
1:26:15.800 someone else is thinking to replicate their meme, so to speak, has to guess what is true.
1:26:20.600 And wait for feedback from the world. A child might, very well, upon being waved at,
1:26:25.160 run over towards a person and need to be corrected at some point by a parent who helps them learn.
1:26:30.440 Now, you don't need to run over there when someone waves at you. You can just stand here and
1:26:34.600 move your hand or something like that. Anyway, the child guesses what is correct and eventually
1:26:39.960 they get it. Apes and parrots can ape and parrots, but they cannot construct knowledge like humans
1:26:45.160 can. Although they've got memes, the repertoire of their memes is fixed by their genes, but their
1:26:51.080 brains are sufficiently evolved so that they can change the sequence of the memes that are fixed
1:26:56.920 in many different ways. It's rather like they've got 100 pieces of a puzzle which can be arranged
1:27:01.800 in perhaps thousands of different ways to do different things. So from the outside, it kind of
1:27:06.680 looks a little like they're creating knowledge. However, the repertoire is fixed. The number of
1:27:11.960 possible combinations is fixed. This explanation for how lower animals, like apes,
1:27:18.280 imitate behaviors, like sounds and even signed languages, called behavior passing and so it kind
1:27:24.520 of looks like what we're doing, our thinking, our creativity. It was discovered by the animal
1:27:29.080 behavior theorists Richard Byrne and it requires no actual creativity on the part of the ape or
1:27:35.720 the parrot of the explanatory type, but humans are different. We invent new puzzle pieces all the
1:27:42.680 time and so our repertoire of possible behaviors is unbounded. It is not fixed by genetics. We flew
1:27:49.400 that coupe long ago. Now, most evolution goes on outside the genes. Genetic evolution was just
1:27:55.320 a prelude. Most of the rest of the history of evolution in our universe will be about the evolution
1:28:00.680 of names. My key takeaway from this chapter is that for most of human history, people were
1:28:07.160 using their creativity in order to simply keep things the same. And they were doing this because
1:28:12.680 the way to be more accepted in a static society is to be more conformist, to be more obedient.
1:28:19.080 But in a dynamic society, the way to stand out is to innovate and to be creative. Chapter 17,
1:28:25.080 Unsustainable. Static societies reveal an important truth. If criticism is not valued by a society,
1:28:31.880 it will go extinct. The parable of the Easter Islanders is salient here. They built great monuments
1:28:38.280 for no more purpose than appeasing their superstitions. As whatever tragedy, disease or
1:28:43.640 famine or some other natural disaster fulfill them, the rate of their monument building increased.
1:28:48.600 They failed to try something new to criticise the way things were done. So they went extinct.
1:28:55.240 Over and over again, lost civilizations are testament to not solving their problems in time.
1:29:01.640 We are unique because we value criticism, but it is a tradition of criticism. And so we have
1:29:07.960 to be careful that the institutions that preserve that tradition likewise are protected.
1:29:13.640 So we are making progress fast and slow in fits and starts, and it has been unrelenting for
1:29:19.400 a time, but it's not inevitable. We need resources to build it, energy to fuel it, David Attenborough
1:29:26.520 and other naturalists have gifted the world with a deep misconception over many decades now.
1:29:33.000 And that misconception is that something like the tragedy of Easter Island is an example of
1:29:37.560 there having consumed the resources there in an unsustainable way. But this is false.
1:29:43.960 It is false because the island could never sustain them in the first place. The island was
1:29:49.000 always a death trap. It had not enough trees that grew not fast enough. It had insufficient
1:29:54.680 arable land, two little drinking water, storms hit them, drought hit them, what they had of crops
1:30:00.200 routinely destroyed by weather or pests. Bacteria and worse got into their water supply when it
1:30:05.560 did rain. It was a hellhole. And if they knew how to sail elsewhere to somewhere with more resources,
1:30:11.320 more pleasant, they would have done so. Or if they knew how to use the resource already there,
1:30:16.280 perhaps more importantly, they would have survived. Nothing is a resource, after all,
1:30:20.680 until the knowledge of how to use it as such is discovered. Resources are plentiful.
1:30:26.760 The earth cannot sustain us into the indefinite future. The lesson of Easter Island is that we need
1:30:32.360 to make progress faster. We need more energy and cheap energy, not less. We should be optimistic
1:30:38.280 that problems are soluble. There are many, many problems ahead of us. Climate change is one of
1:30:43.400 them. If we want to survive it or whatever we eventually will discover is why worse than climate
1:30:49.240 change, we must have more wealth. Wealth we define as the repertoire of physical transformations,
1:30:56.040 we are capable of making. To have more wealth, we should be seeking out more and cheaper resources
1:31:02.040 and exploiting them. If we have insufficient wealth, when the proverbial asteroid or even worse virus
1:31:07.960 eventually does arrive, we will not be sustained by anything else but our wealth. All we've got
1:31:14.360 is our knowledge. That unique capacity that the laws of physics allows in us to understand anything
1:31:20.280 out there in the universe and thus solve any problem we try to. Throughout the decades, people
1:31:25.240 have drawn incorrect guesses about the future, which we call prophecies that suggest doom is coming.
1:31:31.160 They say the world is entering a new ice age. Presently we are told we're entering a period of
1:31:35.720 warming. While we should take seriously the explanations of the experts on these matters when
1:31:40.040 they are brought to us, we should also keep in mind that slowing progress and reducing wealth
1:31:45.160 by concentrating it in the hands of authorities is not a solution. It does not create rapid
1:31:50.840 knowledge growth and progress. To solve a problem, we need knowledge and that knowledge could come
1:31:55.240 from anywhere. It could come from a child presently struggling to learn to read in an
1:32:00.520 impoverished country somewhere if only they had very cheap electricity and semiconductors.
1:32:06.120 That child could be interacting on the web with people learning to read far more rapidly
1:32:11.000 and eventually learning the physics needed for him or her to solve the problem of climate change
1:32:15.400 quickly and efficiently. Perhaps by uncovering what it takes to make electricity from fusion
1:32:21.320 reactors more cheaply. We cannot know that this is not the case. Who knows what resources I
1:32:27.240 yet to be discovered and which will make many of our present political discussions moot
1:32:31.880 in light of a new fuel source or way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
1:32:36.600 It was once said that the only way for a colour television to work was with phosphores
1:32:41.000 and the red phosphorequired European. Supplies were fine not on earth and so it was a mathematical
1:32:46.200 certainty that colour television would eventually be a thing of the past once the European was
1:32:51.080 consumed. But no one now uses European for the production of red pixels on screens.
1:32:56.040 We use LCD technology. The lesson here should not be lost on anyone. The growth of knowledge
1:33:01.480 is unpredictable and so we should have a start of optimism with regards to what people can
1:33:07.160 actually achieve when left to their own creative capacity to learn and discover.
1:33:12.680 A key takeaway from this chapter is that nothing is a resource until the knowledge of why it is
1:33:17.960 has been discovered. It is only knowledge that changes rocks into pure metals or uranium
1:33:23.240 ore into electricity. Chapter 18. The beginning. It is sometimes claimed we are near the end
1:33:30.040 of discovering everything that is to be discovered. But not merely as the human mind
1:33:35.480 finite in scope, but the very laws of physics themselves have almost all been discovered.
1:33:41.560 This was even the prevailing view under Newtonian physics at the end of the 19th century.
1:33:46.920 It was thought Newton was lucky to have uncovered the laws of physics.
1:33:50.600 Einstein and his relativity and Einstein and his quantum theory and the quantum theory of
1:33:55.160 lots of other people showed that impulse wrong. But it is not gone away. John Horgen wrote a book
1:34:01.240 called The End of Science which captures the mood of many scientists and even physicists.
1:34:06.520 There isn't much more to know on this view. People talk about a final theory of everything,
1:34:10.600 where the four known forces are unified. And then we will have an equation for printing on a
1:34:17.240 T-shirt that will be able to predict everything that happens anywhere forever, in principle.
1:34:22.280 Or once we have a complete understanding of neuroscience, then we will have a complete understanding
1:34:27.880 of the human mind. Once we have a complete understanding of genetics, then biology will almost be done.
1:34:33.240 But all of this is terribly pessimistic. It says that progress must come to an end in this place
1:34:38.520 or that place and perhaps altogether. It also says we aren't aeroprome. But our
1:34:43.800 fallibility means that we will never have perfect knowledge. Era is simply a part of us and our
1:34:49.480 knowledge. And this is wonderful. It means error correction must go on forever. It means there can
1:34:55.160 be no final theory and so progress has no war before it, beyond which no further discovery is
1:35:00.120 possible. We are instead just scratching the surface and always will be. Should we find a way to
1:35:05.560 unify gravity with the three fundamental forces? We can ask why is G the value it is? Why does it
1:35:12.600 have that strength? Why is that law the one that operates in our universe and not something else?
1:35:18.600 What is the theory that explains the physics we have discovered? We will want to go deeper,
1:35:23.400 other actually other universes with other physical laws. In what sense were other laws even possible?
1:35:29.240 If they are possible, where are they? If not possible, why not? Our future understandings of
1:35:35.240 deeper reality are still before us. But we can rule out some bad ideas now. For example,
1:35:40.600 quantum theory is not fully understood, whatever that can mean, fully. There can be no fully.
1:35:45.320 Nevertheless, some people have postulated that because we live in a multiverse, we might be a
1:35:50.200 mortal. This is on the theory that should you die in this universe that you occupy,
1:35:55.320 you persist in the others. And the problem with this is, well, we don't understand the place of
1:36:00.120 consciousness in the multiverse exactly for a start and besides, if you are a person who did not
1:36:06.120 did not just commit quantum suicide or just plain old suicide. Why should you then suddenly become
1:36:13.160 the person that did? A person that survives quantum suicide presumably does so because they never
1:36:19.640 actually did commit suicide. That person who actually did commit suicide, they're no longer part
1:36:25.480 of this strange thought experiment. We don't know enough. We can also rule out living in a matrix
1:36:31.240 or Plato's cave or being deceived by Descartes demon or that we are simply dreaming reality
1:36:36.600 into existence. The most recent famous example that's logical to the equivalent to all of these
1:36:42.200 is of course, bostrom simulation argument, which says that in the future, people will build super
1:36:47.240 computers on which whole universes or even whole multiverses will be simulator. And those will
1:36:53.240 that number the number of base realities, presumably, that's just one of those. So we should
1:36:58.280 presume to be in a simulation. We can become superhuman. We already are compared to the
1:37:03.960 ancients and those people drawing in caves. We can go and extending our lives and extending our
1:37:09.640 reach. My key takeaway for this chapter is a special one. It's simply quoting the last three
1:37:15.160 sentences of the book. Quote, there is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress
1:37:21.880 or of surviving in the long run. And that is the way of seeking good explanations through
1:37:27.640 creativity and criticism. What lies ahead of us in any case is infinity. All we can choose is
1:37:35.240 whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, right or wrong, death or life. End quote.
1:37:42.920 Well, there we go. That is my omnibus episode going through all 18 chapters of the beginning of
1:37:50.360 infinity and 99 minutes. And all because I still continue to regard this book as the most
1:37:57.000 groundbreaking book of the 21st century, I can't claim to have read all the books from the 20th
1:38:03.160 century. I think the fabric of reality might be there at the top of that particular century.
1:38:09.080 And we don't know what's coming next either. Maybe David's next book throughout my podcast
1:38:13.560 series. I still plan on referring more to the beginning of infinity. And next episode we will have the
1:38:19.240 complete interview. Episode 100 between myself and David Deutsch. And then episodes 101 and
1:38:26.040 101 to ask me anything episodes as well. So there's a lot to come on the theme of the work of
1:38:32.520 David Deutsch, the beginning of infinity and associate ideas. But until next time, bye bye.