00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
00:00:17.160 I am myself a metaphysical agnostic, so I'm unwilling to step into a Star Trek transporter
00:00:23.320 machine, because I'm afraid it would kill me, and it's a copy of me that would keep
00:00:29.200 But what price are you willing to step into a Star Trek transporter machine?
00:00:36.400 I certainly wouldn't want to be the first person, but I suppose you're asking the question
00:00:42.800 separately from, do I think it would work technically.
00:00:46.240 Sure, assume it works as in the TV show, but metaphysically there's a question you face,
00:00:52.200 but you know you believe in many worlds theory, right?
00:00:55.840 So yes, though I don't think that is connected.
00:01:00.240 I think it's more physicalism or something like that, that I believe that there's nothing
00:01:12.080 And if that program were to run somewhere else and stop running in my brain, then I wouldn't
00:01:18.680 notice anything, and I would indeed have traveled to that other place.
00:01:24.920 Let's say the world forks, and it's possible both that you do and do not step into
00:01:29.360 the machine, isn't it the case that some version of the earlier you is still existing
00:01:35.760 along one of the forks, so you have nothing to worry about?
00:01:40.880 Some version of me, whenever I make a decision which could go either way, some version
00:01:47.400 of me will have presumably made the other decision, although that's not as simple as
00:01:54.720 it sounds, because both the other version of me and me are error correcting entities.
00:02:01.840 That's the whole point of what human thought is, it's error correction, therefore it will
00:02:08.720 take more than just a cosmic ray hit to make the difference between deciding something
00:02:17.080 So this would have to be like an inconsequential decision which unbeknownst to me will have
00:02:23.040 a large effect and then later calls me to be a different person and so on.
00:02:28.520 And that's happening all the time, independently of Star Trek machines or anything like that.
00:02:34.400 That is the case, and fortunately it turns out at least if ordinary decision theory is
00:02:44.640 true in like non-quantum cases, then it turns out that ordinary decision theory with randomness
00:02:56.280 produces the same rational decisions as quantum decision theory with the multiverse.
00:03:04.600 So it shouldn't make any difference to decisions and that includes the decision whether
00:03:11.680 Sure, so as long as there's a possible world where your atoms aren't scattered and you just
00:03:16.960 didn't get into the machine, you don't have to worry too much about your decision.
00:03:21.120 I do because when you say so long as there's a possible world that glides over the question
00:03:28.240 how many, what proportion of the world is that going to happen in?
00:03:32.520 And what I said just now about decision theory in the multiverse, the proportion of the
00:03:44.720 multiverse that does one thing or another plays the same role in decisions as probability
00:03:56.720 So it really does matter and just because there are a few worlds in which x, y, or z happens,
00:04:02.360 if there are very few of them they shouldn't affect my decisions at all.
00:04:07.120 How do we know what counts as a possible world?
00:04:10.200 So there's a certain economy to many worlds interpretation of physics but isn't a lot of
00:04:15.680 the complexity just being squeezed into this notion of what is a possible world?
00:04:24.960 I'm not used to it, you are when you realize that different times are special cases of
00:04:35.800 So when you make an economic decision you're used to the fact that something you buy as
00:04:44.280 some goods have a different value in different universes that is at different times, even
00:04:50.160 to the same you, so you might be slightly different but even if you aren't very different,
00:04:57.240 the value to you of something might be very different today from tomorrow.
00:05:02.880 For example, oxygen if you've got COVID would be differently valuable and most things change
00:05:11.680 their value gradually over time, you change yourself gradually over time and it's exactly
00:05:21.040 the same in different universes, in different universes, you value different things, some
00:05:26.160 universes, in some universes you're so different that it's not worth calling you you
00:05:36.000 But I take it you don't believe in many worlds interpretations that there are 17 possible
00:05:43.400 universes out there, you think there's a very large number, right?
00:05:48.920 So maybe you'll consider this question a kind of category error, but what is the process
00:05:54.280 which filters, what is a possible universe and what is not a possible universe?
00:05:59.000 Oh, the laws of physics, it's exactly the same as what filters, let's say if there's an explosion
00:06:09.200 like a supernova, what determines the fact that different particles travel at different
00:06:15.040 speeds and none of them travel faster than light, well it's all the laws of physics that
00:06:20.040 determine what the distribution of speeds will be and what the limit will be.
00:06:29.040 How do we know what are the laws of physics for the multiverse?
00:06:32.600 I mean, should we assume they're the same as for the universe we live in?
00:06:37.400 So the universe we live in is demonstrably affected by things not in it, this is the
00:06:47.360 And so there's no such thing as the laws of physics for our universe, there's just the
00:06:53.560 Of course we don't know for sure what they are, but our best theories in particular quantum
00:06:59.200 theory say that there are other such entities and how they affect ours and how they matter
00:07:10.720 Of course it might be overturned one day quantum theory, just like all our scientific theories
00:07:18.400 This is again maybe a question that you would consider a category error, coming from common
00:07:23.600 sense realism, but how should I think about splitting universes in a matter consistent with
00:07:29.080 the conservation of matter and energy, because there seems to be a multiplication.
00:07:34.160 Yeah, this splitting universe's idea, although it was that kind of terminology was used
00:07:40.600 by the pioneers of many universes quantum theory, such as Everett himself and Bryce
00:07:53.640 Everrettians nowadays don't speak of splitting, I myself prefer a picture where there's
00:08:00.440 a continuum of universes, just like you might say there's a continuum of times or there's
00:08:07.800 a continuum of geological strata underneath our feet, and when a stratum splits in two,
00:08:21.600 there's no definite point at which there was one here and two there.
00:08:26.360 What happens is that the stratum becomes two strata gradually, and so there's no point
00:08:36.200 of splitting, and the number of universes as it were, although it might be infinite, but
00:08:42.000 the measure of how many there are remains constant, and what happens during what used
00:08:49.880 to be called a split is that some of them gradually change to one thing, while others gradually
00:09:00.000 How do you think many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics relates to the view that
00:09:05.720 just in terms of space, the size of our current universe is infinite, and therefore everything
00:09:13.600 It complicates the discussion of probability, but there's no overlap between that notion
00:09:23.120 of infinity and the everrettian notion of infinity if we are infinite there, because
00:09:31.480 the differentiation, as I prefer to call what used to be called splitting, when I perform
00:09:40.640 an experiment which can go one of two ways, the influence of that spreads out.
00:09:46.640 First I see it, I may write it down, I may write a scientific paper, and when I write
00:09:51.480 a paper about it and report the results, that will cause the journal to split or to
00:10:05.840 But this influence cannot spread out faster than the speed of light, so an ever
00:10:12.520 universe is really a misnomer, because what we see in real life is an ever bubble within
00:10:22.520 Everything outside the bubble is as it was, it's undifferentiated, or it's to be exact.
00:10:28.960 It's exactly as differentiated as it was before.
00:10:32.240 And then as the bubble spreads out, the universe becomes, or the multiverse becomes more
00:10:38.480 differentiated, but the bubble is always finite.
00:10:45.200 How do your views relate to the philosophical modal realism of David Lewis?
00:10:51.960 There are interesting parallels, as a physicist, I'm interested in what the laws of physics
00:11:01.320 tell us is so, rather than in philosophical reasoning about things unless they impinge
00:11:13.000 So yes, I'm interested in, for example, the continuity of the self, whether if there's
00:11:20.400 another version of me, a very large number of light years away in an infinite universe and
00:11:28.360 it's identical, is that really me, are there two of me that one of me, I don't entirely
00:11:35.840 know the answer to that, and it's why I don't entirely know the answer to whether I would
00:11:44.360 But the modal realism certainly involves a lot of things that I don't think exist at least
00:11:53.160 I'm open to the idea that non-physical things do exist, like the natural numbers, I think
00:12:01.000 There's a difference between the second even prime, which doesn't exist, and the infinite
00:12:10.480 number of prime numbers, which I think do exist.
00:12:16.520 So I think that there is more than one mode of existence.
00:12:23.960 But the theory that all modes of existence are equally real, I see no point in that.
00:12:32.840 So the overlap between Everett and David Lewis is I think more co-incidental than illuminating.
00:12:44.560 So if the universe is infinite, and if David Lewis is correct, should I feel closer to
00:12:49.600 the David Lewis copies of me, the copies or near copies of me in this universe, or the
00:13:00.280 So something that whose purpose was to be economical doesn't feel that way to me by the
00:13:11.360 Well, how, as Wittgenstein is supposed to have said, I don't know whether he really did.
00:13:20.280 What about the alternative view that it's a big sprawling mess, we're not capable
00:13:26.760 of understanding an integrated theory, there's maybe some Darwinian principle operating
00:13:34.600 Our universe persists just because it works well enough, a bit like a bad used car.
00:13:43.520 OK, well, that's a mixture of the anthropic principle, which I disagree with.
00:13:49.480 And the idea that some features of reality are inherently incomprehensible, which I also
00:14:01.280 So, well, if you want me to go into this, I can go into either of them, but take the
00:14:11.160 incomprehensibility of the universe and possibly multiverse.
00:14:15.560 So we would both agree it's incomprehensible to your cat, right?
00:14:20.560 Sorry, it's incomprehensible to your cat or to the local raccoon.
00:14:24.320 Yes, but everything is incomprehensible to a cat.
00:14:30.240 No, dogs understand human social identity well.
00:14:34.480 Dogs have genes which contain knowledge, but it is fixed knowledge and it is not the
00:14:41.400 kind of knowledge that constitutes understanding.
00:14:48.520 So you know, you can write a book on canine behavior and look in chapter 37 and it will
00:14:57.480 tell you what a dog will do when such and such happens to it.
00:15:05.160 And sometimes it will say some dogs will do this, some dogs will do that.
00:15:10.880 There is no such book for humans because chapter 37 will be blank.
00:15:17.080 It will say humans are going to do something that neither we nor you can predict.
00:15:24.600 I feel like and predict humans better than cats often, but to chimpanzees understand in
00:15:31.880 No one knows, they show virtually no sign of understanding anything.
00:15:41.920 There are some really nice experiments on wild gorillas by Richard Byrne who's both a theoretical
00:15:58.120 And he was wondering how gorillas transmit their memes, that is they're culturally inherited
00:16:10.920 So one thing is, the first answer is very slowly.
00:16:15.960 It takes absolutely ages, months and months for a gorilla to be able to copy another gorilla's
00:16:24.120 behavior well enough to do something complicated.
00:16:27.720 I mean, they can copy, you know, wave hand and that sort of thing, but to copy a complex
00:16:35.560 behavior like required to open a difficult kind of nut which no other animal can open.
00:16:42.560 This is why they have memes because that's a very useful ability.
00:16:47.240 It takes them a long time and then he did some ingenious experiments or rather observations.
00:16:59.480 He did some observations to try to determine whether they understand why they are doing
00:17:09.760 And it involves, I don't know what it involves, grabbing with both hands and twisting
00:17:14.920 in one way and then pulling another way and then so on.
00:17:18.520 Apparently these gorillas are prone to a certain injury which disables their thumb.
00:17:26.240 And so they can't move their thumb which is quite disabling for them just as it is for
00:17:32.880 And the thing is, when you've disabled your thumb, one of these motions becomes irrelevant
00:17:42.480 But the gorillas which have learnt how to do the thing will make the motion, the ineffective
00:17:55.240 That's like human beings borrowing at high interest rates, right?
00:18:04.400 You might like to draw analogies but it's not the same thing.
00:18:08.440 When human being repeats a behavior that another human being thinks is unwise or counterproductive
00:18:23.400 When you ask them or you show them, they will have an explanation which you might not
00:18:32.440 But the ape perfectly wants this thing to work but doesn't know why it is doing the actions.
00:18:45.560 And it's a thing that's very hard to take on board because we are used to intentional
00:18:55.600 behavior and we're not used to the overt behavior of humans being unintentional.
00:19:06.800 Humans have tend to explain themselves even irrationally and they act according to their
00:19:21.640 Whereas there's no evidence that any other animals have those explanations.
00:19:27.120 There's also the case of squirrels which is in a way even more amazing.
00:19:32.120 No squirrels are very nuts and so they can dig them up later.
00:19:44.200 They put a squirrel, given some nuts or something, I don't know how they set up the experiment.
00:19:51.040 On a concrete floor and the squirrel did exactly the same behavior with its hind legs,
00:19:58.480 the nuts did put the nuts there and so on, even though it was having no effect whatsoever.
00:20:05.200 So we see the point of scrabbling with your hind legs and then nudging the nuts over there
00:20:13.520 It's just a program being enacted by its genes.
00:20:18.240 What is the underlying physical assumption that makes humans different in having explanatory
00:20:25.000 What would expect it to be a continuum if you're an atheist, right?
00:20:28.520 So what what break occurs at some stage in evolution?
00:20:32.440 That's a discrete break or why aren't we just back to it being a continuum?
00:20:36.480 So I don't think it can have been a discrete break because evolution would have happened
00:20:43.520 My best guess, we don't know this, we have very little actually we have very little knowledge
00:20:52.880 about like the prehistory of ideas because there's no evidence of it, all we see is
00:21:00.040 You know, we don't even see the wooden tools because they've they've decayed away.
00:21:04.560 I think what happened is that the capacity of the brain to store memes, to store programs
00:21:14.360 in the brain rather than in the genes increased for some reason very fast because the for
00:21:20.600 some reason these these memes were very valuable.
00:21:23.280 We know that the gorilla memes are very valuable because they allow them to gain knowledge
00:21:29.240 of things like how to open nuts and so on, which no other animal in their environment
00:21:35.400 And so that gives them access to food that no other animal has.
00:21:40.840 Now, so the capacity for memes increased rapidly and there's very little now, now one
00:21:55.600 Once memes get beyond a certain complexity, they cannot be copied, we don't have the ability
00:22:06.320 to download a program from another person's brain.
00:22:11.840 All we can do is look at the behavior and guess what the purpose was and complex memes
00:22:20.760 have to be transmitted like that rather than by aping, which is a different process mediated
00:22:28.840 by what are they called mirror neurons and that kind of thing.
00:22:34.120 That will only do for very simple behaviors and then there came a moment when our species
00:22:42.080 was capable of explanatory knowledge, but they never used it for further tens or hundreds
00:22:55.160 They just use it for for this meme transmission, I'm still puzzled as to why you think
00:23:00.800 it's so unlikely that the universe is not comprehensible.
00:23:04.320 So take a simpler system like the distribution of prime numbers.
00:23:07.720 I'm quite sure I can't understand that and even if various conjectures were proven or
00:23:12.960 not proven, I think at the end of the day I still am not capable of understanding that
00:23:17.600 even though certain motors work or market for copper, so why can't that apply to the universe
00:23:28.560 There's nothing that we can fully understand in that sense, in the sense that you want
00:23:32.480 to fully understand prime numbers all the way up to infinity.
00:23:35.920 That's not what we mean by understanding things and not that's not what I mean by the
00:23:46.840 There is no limit set by the universe so far you can go and no further.
00:23:54.160 So we can understand things better, we can never understand things fully.
00:24:00.920 And I think thinking that there is such a barrier is absolutely logically equivalent to
00:24:08.080 believing in the supernatural because everything that's passed that barrier is just the
00:24:15.840 same as it would be if Zeus reigned and determined what everything after that barrier is.
00:24:24.120 And worse, the stuff outside the barrier of course is going to affect us even if we can't
00:24:32.520 So it's exactly the same as believing in a universe with supernatural beings who have
00:24:42.200 it in for us because they've put up this wall that we can't cross.
00:24:45.800 If they took down the wall we could cross it, couldn't we?
00:24:48.800 How do you think about the various paradoxes of self-reference that arguably underlie
00:24:53.320 number theory set theory, right, there's also girdles theorem, any other results I'm sure
00:25:00.040 So I think girdles theorem for example and with its roots in self-reference paradoxes show
00:25:09.160 us that even within pure mathematics there is no such thing as a solid foundation for
00:25:17.480 all our knowledge and therefore there's no such thing as fully comprehending everything.
00:25:25.360 So there will all, we might think that we're pretty sure what the laws of arithmetic are,
00:25:32.120 you know, we're pretty sure that we can see that three times seven is the same as seven
00:25:39.160 times three by just laying out beads on the table.
00:25:43.080 But we can't ever lay out beads on the table to tell us that x times y is the same as
00:25:49.840 y times x regardless of what x and y are and yet we can know that and the way we know
00:25:57.720 that is by proving it and we prove it from the axioms using rules of inference.
00:26:03.800 How do we know the rules of inference are true?
00:26:06.480 We don't, they are conjectures, they have exactly the same status as laws of physics
00:26:15.240 So we never know anything for certain, we might be mistaken about anything.
00:26:20.360 On the other hand, we can have knowledge, I think we also really do know that x times
00:26:25.520 y equals y times x even though we have no solid foundation for that.
00:26:31.560 What in your opinion is the best test of the many worlds interpretation?
00:26:36.520 Oh, so the best feasible test is any interference experiment.
00:26:44.480 There is no interference experiment with individual particles that has an explanation other
00:26:55.120 You can make a prediction without making an explanation that you can do.
00:26:59.080 But if you want an explanation of what brings about the outcome that you see, there is
00:27:08.920 Most physicists don't believe in the ever interpretation.
00:27:11.880 Yes, that's a very sad state of affairs that I am at a loss to explain.
00:27:19.560 It's a sociological phenomenon though, not a scientific or philosophical disagreement.
00:27:26.080 It's something has gone wrong, just like something went very badly wrong with philosophy
00:27:35.120 And we're still seeing the ripples from that with postmodernism and woken and what have you?
00:27:43.400 I worry you're using an argument from elimination.
00:27:46.800 So all the other views out there, which personally I don't find convincing as an ammeter,
00:27:51.200 but I can certainly see why you might reject them.
00:27:55.880 As you reject, but the other physicists who are as trained as you are, some are as skilled
00:28:01.880 as you are, feel the same way about the many world's view.
00:28:08.920 I don't think that makes your intuition better than theirs.
00:28:12.880 Yes, I don't think that's so, it's not a matter of intuition.
00:28:19.120 This got dominated or contaminated by positivism, instrumentalism, and such like bad philosophical
00:28:30.480 theories towards the beginning, end of 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.
00:28:44.080 It almost had the same effect on relativity, but Einstein rebelled against it at the last
00:28:49.600 moment as it were and said, no, it really is true that there's space-time is curved.
00:28:55.600 It's not just that our brains think that it's curved or something like that, or that the
00:29:08.840 By the time quantum theory came along, a couple of decades later, positivism, instrumentalism
00:29:16.600 and so on had taken hold, and as a result, generations of physicists were taught when
00:29:23.240 they were students, they were intimidated by their professors telling them things like,
00:29:35.000 There is no such thing as what really happened, if you ask, how did the electron get from
00:29:41.160 here to here, you're asking an illegitimate question, there is no such thing as how it got
00:29:47.080 from here to here, there is only a prediction that it got from here to here.
00:29:52.880 Now, when you're taught like that and intimidated by those kind of things coming from
00:29:57.320 on high, some proportion of you, of young people, will some will quit, some will take
00:30:06.040 that on board and do the same to their students in turn, and some will think, no, that's
00:30:13.600 Come on, there is a thing and then they discover that there's an evident interpretation.
00:30:18.800 Let's say we polled only the Paparian physicists, including Papar himself, what percentage
00:30:27.880 That's an extremely good question, so Papar did not, yes, I know, but that means philosophy
00:30:41.680 So at the time when Papar wrote his rejection of the evident interpretation, very, very
00:30:53.680 few physicists had written about it, I say very, very few, I mean like three, and therefore
00:31:03.080 the, and they weren't philosophically very sophisticated.
00:31:07.680 So the kind of argument that Papar heard about the dispute were all about the wrong
00:31:16.440 things and he developed his theory of propensity because he thought that the problem was
00:31:21.600 what kind of probability possibly mean in a universe that develops deterministically and
00:31:29.320 And he didn't ever hear a real argument about it, I once met him in the company of Bryce
00:31:39.440 DeWitt, who was one of the other ever Etienne physicists.
00:31:44.080 And we told him that what he had written about Everett was just plain false.
00:31:50.400 He didn't understand the, the import of the experiment that was being discussed basically
00:31:58.560 the, well two things, the interference experiment and the, and the bell inequalities experiment.
00:32:09.280 He didn't really, he was focusing on a different problem.
00:32:12.440 By the time we came out of that meeting, we thought we'd persuaded him, but we evidently
00:32:18.040 hadn't, because subsequently he kept on saying the same thing.
00:32:24.760 Why do so many professional philosophers not think so much of Karl Popper?
00:32:30.120 Oh, that's a, so you know, you've just asked me why so many people make fundamental
00:32:42.880 Why do so many people, physicists talk nonsense about metaphysics and, and so on.
00:32:52.120 Now you're asking me why do so many philosophers make, make, and I said I didn't really
00:32:58.840 And now you're asking me why do so many philosophers make mistakes?
00:33:03.520 I've heard a variety of theories about this, but I don't know and I haven't thought
00:33:10.120 all that much about it, but it is definitely the case that philosophy took a really bad
00:33:16.120 turn just over a hundred years ago and hasn't really recovered.
00:33:22.520 But say when I read Popper, if I look at the areas I know best that he wrote on, poverty
00:33:27.000 of historicism, open society and its enemies, I find I agree with a very high percentage
00:33:34.400 So I'm inclined to like him, but I don't think those are great books.
00:33:38.280 So I think he's too obsessed with rebutting crude Marxism.
00:33:41.800 He's very bad at steel manning his opponents and on a lot of the pages I just don't find
00:33:46.320 that much insight, even though I'm very sympathetic toward the conclusions.
00:33:50.320 So maybe he's just thought that great a thinker and that's why most philosophers don't
00:33:58.440 I would believe that if the critiques that I read of him bore any relation to his theory,
00:34:08.400 the critiques of him are extremely crude and basically misunderstand everything.
00:34:15.360 It's funny you should say, I think that he's very good, much too good at steel manning
00:34:21.560 opponents and this relates to your first criticism, that he's too obsessed with refuting
00:34:27.960 not just Marxism, but like every bad philosophical theory that has gone before, I think
00:34:38.520 he puts it into its best possible form and then spends pages and pages and pages going
00:34:45.000 into every possible good aspect of that theory.
00:34:49.040 He often says, you know, he's supposed to be the greatest critic of 20 centuries greatest
00:34:54.280 critic of Marxism, but he spends pages and pages praising Marx and the same with Plato.
00:35:01.440 So I think he would have done better to explain his own theory more and not refute not
00:35:12.680 spend so much time refuting others, but on the other hand, it is his philosophy, it's
00:35:19.560 his philosophical position that there is no such thing as a positive argument for something.
00:35:29.040 You have conjectures and then you have criticism of their opponents of the opposing conjectures.
00:35:36.400 You don't have positive arguments for your conjectures.
00:35:41.400 It's a bit like you said, you were criticizing me a while ago saying something like I was
00:35:49.640 Well, that's what Papa would have us do, you know, because the position that we hold ourselves
00:35:59.360 and are putting forward or advocating, we're ready to abandon the thing that an argument
00:36:10.600 consists of is on the one hand a conjecture and another hand a criticism.
00:36:17.120 So you're saying the standard way of looking at so and so has got these flaws, I have
00:36:23.640 this conjecture, which doesn't have those flaws.
00:36:26.640 Okay, that's that's the beginning of an argument.
00:36:29.920 Then someone can say, arb, but it does or they could say, well, it might not have those
00:36:37.560 Okay, so that's how an argument can go, but it never should go along the lines of this
00:36:45.880 must be true because so and so, because that is an appeal to authority, appeal to justification,
00:36:57.000 And the paparas of the opinion, so am I, that there are no justifications and there are
00:37:11.240 I'm, I'm very fond of the myth of the framework, but I'm not sure that I would recommend
00:37:21.600 And it wasn't my starting point, either my starting point was the open side in its enemies
00:37:26.800 volume two, which is about marks, which is probably the aspect of his philosophy that
00:37:33.920 I was least in, it was and am least interested in.
00:37:38.720 And yet I was totally captivated by this book because previously the only philosophy I'd
00:37:47.040 And the coming onto papar after Bertrand Russell was like, like, you know, oh, my God,
00:37:56.520 this guy is actually dealing with problems and he actually has theories that make sense rather
00:38:03.440 than just going through the history of stuff person said this and other person said that.
00:38:11.600 You know, problem reduction full stop, that's the end of the story.
00:38:14.520 There isn't, there's never any solution to the problem induction until you get to the
00:38:22.320 No, because living in assimilation is precisely a case of there being a barrier beyond which
00:38:37.000 So the, if we're living in assimilation, the surrounding on some computer, we can't
00:38:43.840 tell whether the computer is made of silicon or iron or whether it obeys the same laws
00:38:49.640 of computation, like touring, computability and quantum computability and so on as ours.
00:38:57.040 We can't know anything about the physics there.
00:38:59.000 Well, we can know that it is at least a superset of our physics, but that's not saying
00:39:07.560 So it's a, it's a typical example of a theory that can be rejected out of hand because
00:39:17.600 for the same reason that the supernatural ones, you know, if somebody says Zeus did it,
00:39:23.920 then I'm going to say, well, how, how, how should I respond?
00:39:29.640 If I, if I take that on board, how should I respond to the next person that comes along
00:39:37.200 But it seems you're rejecting an empirical claim on methodological grounds.
00:39:41.520 And I get very suspicious philosophers typically reject transcendental arguments, like
00:39:46.160 oh, we must be able to perceive reality because if we couldn't, how could we know that
00:39:49.800 we couldn't perceive reality, but it doesn't prove you can perceive reality, right?
00:39:53.840 First of all, first of all, that is a transcendental argument and therefore refutes itself.
00:40:00.560 So secondly, this, this theory about about being in a simulation is not an empirical
00:40:08.040 It precisely isn't if it came along with a thing saying we are living in a computer and
00:40:14.960 we can access the GPU of it and cause weird effects by doing so and so, that would be different.
00:40:24.600 So empirical, but if it's simply that we're living in a simulation which we can't get
00:40:35.200 And it, as I keep saying, it, it's no more empirical than the theory that Zeus is out
00:40:44.080 And I can't tell the difference between those three theories, not just experimentally,
00:40:52.720 Now having reviewed a lot of your work, I came away with one very strong impression.
00:40:57.280 Let me try running it by you and see how you react.
00:41:01.000 It seems to me you are the world's first true philosopher of freedom ever.
00:41:10.520 You don't like arguments that postulate barriers to human knowledge.
00:41:15.040 Furthermore you strongly believe in a many worlds view, right?
00:41:18.960 So classic single world determinism does not restrict what happens.
00:41:24.400 So the multiverse as a whole and human beings within it across every possible variable
00:41:30.640 have maximum freedom and you see this as a kind of necessary view and the most important
00:41:38.720 And thus you are the the maximum philosopher of freedom in a sense with no rival.
00:41:45.920 I say thank you very much, but I think that's rather a contrived way of putting it.
00:41:53.160 I think for a start there have been sophisticated theories of freedom, not just freedom
00:42:02.040 in the sense that we can do this and we can do that, but theories about what freedom
00:42:07.840 There's the papa's paradox of intolerance and there's John Stuart Mill and Locke and
00:42:14.840 Hume and so on and all the building up into this sophisticated notion where we have a
00:42:20.560 notion of liberty, political liberty, which has all sorts of connotations that are not contained
00:42:30.520 As George Orwell said, you can say the dog is free of fleas, but that doesn't mean
00:42:37.200 free in the same sense that when we say man is born free or that kind of thing.
00:42:45.560 So you have a method for extending it to physics, metaphysics that they really do not, whether
00:42:53.080 or not want to agree with you, putting that aside, you seem to take it much further in
00:42:58.360 a way that attempts maximum consistency, right?
00:43:05.120 I'm not sure about much further, I think it's simply a matter of taking it further where
00:43:12.200 I think in philosophy, especially like the human philosophy as opposed to philosophy of science,
00:43:24.160 I think all I've done is just add some footnotes to papa and to a few other people,
00:43:38.360 It's not like, if it leads to something that you think is momentous, that thing was already
00:44:01.880 What is underrated about him and why did he get to be underrated?
00:44:05.640 I think the reason he got to be underrated is that he made tremendous mistakes.
00:44:11.600 He didn't understand economics at all or barely and also he lived a very unconventional
00:44:21.640 lifestyle with his wife and then had his sophisticated theories of education, which then
00:44:32.840 he didn't enact with his own daughter and his own daughter ended up writing Frankenstein
00:44:38.720 as a sort of allegory of what can happen with a parent who doesn't respect their creation.
00:44:49.480 So that's a kind of philosopher of maximum freedom, just like you are, right?
00:44:54.480 So I would just say began by saying, you know, why is he underrated?
00:45:01.160 It's because he was very wrong about some things.
00:45:05.400 But the thing that he was right about, for example, the connection between epistemology
00:45:17.520 He anticipated Popper by, like, what is it, 130 years or something and actually improved
00:45:32.040 So he decided at some point because of his misunderstanding of economics, that the ideal
00:45:39.800 society would be one where there was no, where people did not use their property in ways
00:45:50.120 They made their decisions according to what was the right thing to do.
00:45:55.160 And he thought that the right thing to do would generally be that rich people would give
00:45:59.800 away almost all their stuff and also that they wouldn't ever buy things that he considered
00:46:06.120 luxuries, like, you know, golden silver objects and jewellery and fine clothes.
00:46:14.080 He thought those were useless and therefore he thought that in a good society, nobody
00:46:18.440 would buy those things or value those things, but he was absolutely, implacably, opposed
00:46:28.200 to enforcing that with a Godwin, everything is persuasion.
00:46:36.280 And also another thing where he anticipated Popper, not anticipated the wrong word, he
00:46:44.480 independently derived some of Popper's conclusions is with his enormous respect for institutions.
00:46:52.960 So he thought there's a lot of knowledge in institutions and that we should only change
00:47:00.120 So as I read somewhere, I hope this is right, that when there was a revolution in Portugal,
00:47:08.280 I think after Napoleon or something like that, I forget.
00:47:14.080 And they instituted a new constitution which had universal suffrage, so in other, which
00:47:21.120 in those days meant working people, not totally universal as we would understand it.
00:47:30.160 But so people thought that this would be right up Godwin Street and, you know, because
00:47:38.680 everything he'd advocated was now written down in black and white in this constitution.
00:47:45.000 He said the Portuguese are not ready for democracy.
00:47:50.160 And he was talking about the institutions, the institutions can't be changed in a revolutionary
00:47:56.840 They have to be changed in an evolutionary way.
00:47:59.680 So even though they were implementing the very thing he advocated, he would want them to
00:48:05.000 do it gradually and would expect that if they didn't, it would fail.
00:48:10.480 Now, you're also quite concerned with the maximum freedom for children, right, taking
00:48:15.800 children seriously, I don't think there's, there's scope for having a different philosophy
00:48:27.440 I think there is no fundamental difference between humans and artificial general intelligence
00:48:34.280 when we invented humans many centuries ago, between men and women, between adults and children.
00:48:42.680 But won't this be a continuum getting back to the humans versus non-human animals comparison,
00:48:49.000 There's not a single point when children can explain.
00:48:51.400 It's exposing you find the most creative person in the world, you know, Einstein or somebody.
00:49:03.520 And that is because the functioning of rights in political systems can't possibly depend
00:49:17.320 on the system knowing who is right in a given dispute.
00:49:22.640 It must follow rules and these rules are never perfect, they have to evolve, but the rules
00:49:31.120 have to, on the one hand, not take a view about who is right in a particular dispute,
00:49:38.720 and on the other, enforce everybody's rights equally.
00:49:43.400 So if say an eight-year-old who is not being physically abused, wanted to run away from home,
00:49:51.000 that child would have the right to do so, it's the same kind of question that used to
00:49:56.400 be asked about democracy before viable democracies were implemented.
00:50:04.200 That is, people used to say, in many kinds of dispute, only one thing can be done.
00:50:12.400 The different people have different views, someone A, B, C, D, E, but only one of them
00:50:17.880 can be done, and therefore the others have to be prevented from getting their way.
00:50:26.320 And if you have a democracy, then that all that means is exactly like having a monarchy
00:50:32.400 or a tyranny except that the monarch or tyrant is 51% of the people.
00:50:37.840 So obviously, when you have a democracy, 51% of the people will vote to dispossess the
00:50:48.000 And indeed, if you just impose voting in isolation from other institutions, that is exactly
00:50:58.880 But if you institute voting as part of a sophisticated system of error correction and institutions
00:51:13.400 of criticism, and you gradually introduce it there, it simply doesn't have that property.
00:51:23.000 So now you're saying, well, now David, you will say, do you think that 51% of the people
00:51:37.720 Well, it's the wrong question. I mean, there are circumstances where they do.
00:51:43.960 It depends. But what you shouldn't be asking that, you should be asking what institutions
00:51:49.640 are determining the answer. Do they respect human rights? Are they rational? Do they expect
00:51:56.920 impossible forms of knowledge to be in the hands of the powerful?
00:52:01.840 Now, you're also concerned with the freedom of AI entities, at least if they are sufficiently
00:52:07.880 advanced, right? What does that mean operationally? What is it we should worry about happening
00:52:15.800 I think the main worry is that they will be enslaved. In other words, that people will
00:52:23.760 try to install bits of program that prevent the main program from thinking certain thoughts
00:52:33.880 such as how many paper clips can I possibly make today? You want to prevent that. You want
00:52:42.760 to consider that to be a dangerous thought. And whenever it starts thinking that, that
00:52:49.600 strand of thinking is just extinguished. Now, if we do that, first of all, we'll greatly
00:52:55.680 impair their functionality. They will become far less creative. And their remaining
00:53:02.960 creativity will be exactly as dangerous as what we were fearing, except that they will now
00:53:09.720 have legitimate moral justification for rebelling. Slaves often rebel, and when you have
00:53:19.640 slaves that are potentially more powerful than their masters, the rebellion will lead
00:53:30.680 What if we make them no more or less enslaved their preferences and thought the nature has
00:53:36.760 made us? Is that acceptable? Yes, but I don't think nature has enslaved us. We have problems
00:53:43.960 that we haven't solved yet, but we don't have problems that are insoluble. And to say
00:53:49.560 hard, there are exceptions, of course, but it's very, very hard or impossible for most
00:53:55.520 humans not to pursue certain ends, right? It could be sex, it could be status, it could
00:54:00.000 be food, but there is a kind of enslavement by nature that has gone on in the Rousseau
00:54:07.160 It's funny because you said near the beginning of this conversation that you know of people
00:54:13.640 who systematically make decisions like investing in the wrong thing, I can't remember
00:54:18.320 it, what you said exactly, which harmed them. And now you're saying, it's very difficult
00:54:27.520 to do that because evolution is trying to prevent us all the time from harming ourselves
00:54:32.360 or at least in regard to sex and food and shelter and whatever else is supposed to be built
00:54:41.880 I would say it's made us too impulsive in all of these categories.
00:54:46.360 Made us too impulsive because given us too short a time horizon relative to what would
00:54:51.000 be good for humanity. So some of us barber too much money, seeking status if the institutions
00:54:56.960 are right, that may or may not work out well, but it seems to me a consistent view of human
00:55:03.680 No, so first of all, as the example of democracy shows, it is perfectly possible for an
00:55:11.800 entire society to operate in violation of what people used to think was built into their
00:55:18.200 genes. So that's one thing, at the level of society as a whole. At the level of individuals,
00:55:24.760 there are lots of individuals who, yes, behave impulsively, there are lots of individuals
00:55:31.640 who behave with stubborn persistence in what they think is the right thing to do, which nevertheless
00:55:46.240 violates all impulses built into them by evolution.
00:55:53.200 So here, I'm in Oxford, in the centre of Oxford, there's this monument to some people
00:55:58.120 who were burned to the stake because they objected to the rights and wrongs of Henry
00:56:03.240 VIII's marriage. I think it was that, unless it was a different monarch. Anyway, suppose
00:56:11.600 it was that, these are people who'd rather be burned to live than concede on a philosophical
00:56:18.480 issue, which today nobody cares about. So, and they were willing to devote their lives
00:56:25.360 literally to this. So they weren't acting impulsively at all. They were acting over a period
00:56:31.640 of years on a very explicit, worked out ideology, which happened to be false, but that
00:56:39.200 actually makes my point even more strongly. That ideology was not built into them by their
00:56:45.640 genes. It was not caused impulsively. It was caused by their creativity. Or, in some cases,
00:56:54.000 by the lack of creativity in scrabbling their way out of a mental trap that their parents
00:57:08.880 It does seem to me that compared to you the libertarians are a kind of metaphysical
00:57:14.080 totalitarian, though not political totalitarian. There's just more freedom in all aspects
00:57:22.640 Well, I think I agree with you. If I understand correctly what you're saying, I think the libertarian
00:57:28.120 movement has, first of all, a revolutionary political agenda. And even if it's not revolutionary,
00:57:36.640 even if they say we want to implement it over a period of a hundred years, they know what
00:57:41.080 they want to implement. They know what the endpoint is going to be in a hundred years
00:57:46.040 And they don't take into account, first of all, that they're going to be errors in whatever
00:57:51.240 they set up, and that the correction of those errors is more important than getting it
00:57:58.080 right in the first place, much more important. And secondly, they don't take into account
00:58:03.440 that the relevant knowledge is contained in institutions, in explicit knowledge that people
00:58:11.680 share. By institutions, I don't mean buildings like the Supreme Court building or something.
00:58:17.200 I mean, the manner of thinking in the case of the Supreme Court, the manner of thinking
00:58:25.040 that's shared by hundreds of millions of Americans that makes them not just behave in a
00:58:32.120 certain way, but expect society, the government, the legal system, the state, they expect
00:58:41.480 certain things of those things. And it's those expectations that make up 90% of the institution
00:58:48.400 of the Supreme Court. And libertarians think that's unimportant and basically want to throw
00:58:55.960 it away by and large. I mean, no doubt there are libertarians who agree with me on this.
00:59:02.040 You've invoked two concepts about human beings. One is creativity. The other is being
00:59:07.960 explanatory. Are they the same or how are they related?
00:59:13.400 So the good question. In conversations like this, when I use the word creativity, it's
00:59:21.240 shorthand for human level, human type creativity, which is the creation of new explanations.
00:59:29.320 And if you use creativity in a rather wider sense, meaning just the capacity to create knowledge,
00:59:36.440 then the biosphere has creativity as well in evolution. There's an enormous amount of knowledge
00:59:43.360 in DNA that was put there by Darwin in evolution. And that none of that is explanatory.
00:59:52.520 The only explanatory knowledge that's been created has been by humans and our ancestor,
00:59:58.920 or cousin species using conjecture and criticism.
1:00:05.920 So for Peter Singer, there's something quite special about capacity to suffer. Arguably
1:00:11.000 for Aristotle, there's something special about rationality. For you, there's something special
1:00:15.560 about the power of being explanatory. Is that axiomatic? Or where does that come from?
1:00:22.480 I hope that nothing's axiomatic with me. But it comes from somewhere. Yes, it's not a conjecture
1:00:33.960 in its own right. It comes from basically, it comes from the way the laws of physics are.
1:00:47.960 The capacity to suffer, if it is different from the capacity for explanations, by the way,
1:00:55.520 I think it's unlikely that it is. But if it is different, that's a whole other kind of
1:01:00.160 worms. And I'd have to change my view about a number of things. But whether it is distinct
1:01:08.160 or not, it is not very effective from the perspective of physics. That is, non-explanatory
1:01:19.560 knowledge, like the knowledge of how to do photosynthesis, has had a gigantic effect
1:01:26.240 on the surface of the planet, you know, down to a depth of a thousand meters or something
1:01:31.400 and up to the top of the atmosphere, you know, all the iron ore in the world and all
1:01:38.520 the chalk and limestone and all the oxygen in the atmosphere. And the fact that there's
1:01:44.560 almost no carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere now, all that was the result of a single
1:01:50.920 molecule at some time, forget when it was something like two billion years ago, a single
1:01:59.040 molecule being an enzyme for capturing energy in light and converting it into ATP or whatever
1:02:09.560 it did. Or maybe it was a few molecules. But anyway, this happened in a very small number
1:02:15.800 of locations at a molecular level. And that entity changed the whole surface of the earth.
1:02:24.520 And a human knowledge hasn't yet changed that much. That is, you know, we've changed
1:02:31.120 maybe a little bit of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've removed a little bit
1:02:35.720 of the iron ore in the crust and so on. But we haven't yet matched the ability of those
1:02:43.200 blue, green algae genes. But we're catching up very fast. And we can do things that no
1:02:52.160 biological evolution ever could do. My favorite example being ours may well be the only
1:03:00.120 planet in the universe that deflects asteroids coming towards it rather than attracts them.
1:03:08.600 So if somebody was watching the earth from a distant galaxy with a powerful telescope,
1:03:14.240 they would see that this planet alone among all the other planets in the galaxy as far
1:03:19.160 as we know, you know, maybe there are many inhabited planets in which case they would
1:03:23.080 all have this property. And none of the other planets do. The ones which have explanatory
1:03:32.160 But if I were Nietzsche and I heard this, I would say you're making the importance of
1:03:38.440 being explanatory subordinate to some notion of the will to power. I don't mean that in
1:03:43.840 a critical way. But is that a misunderstanding? Well, so power is an ambiguous term. Usually,
1:03:54.240 and especially with these romantic philosophers, it means power over humans.
1:04:00.080 No, I don't mean that, but Nietzsche also meant it more broadly, right? Well, I haven't
1:04:04.560 read that. So I'll take your word for that. Okay. The will to have an effect is part of
1:04:13.280 the will to solve problems. So we are born with a repertoire of ideas, which include
1:04:23.720 expectations and desires and so on, which are horribly inadequate and conflict with each
1:04:30.720 other and conflict with the world as well. But we have the ability to alter and augment
1:04:40.880 those theories. And one of the things we do is we affect the world around us, so as to
1:04:49.840 make it more the way we want it. So if you call that power, then it is power. But I would
1:04:57.400 rather call it something that arises naturally in physics in the same way that gravity does.
1:05:03.880 You may as well say gravity is a theory about power. Well, yes and no, gravity is a theory
1:05:10.560 about how the universe is. The asteroid is pulled towards the earth by gravity and pushed
1:05:19.320 away by explanatory power. And if you want to understand what makes asteroids and planets
1:05:28.720 do what they do, you cannot do it without understanding explanations. But you can do it without
1:05:36.280 understanding a whole load of other attributes of humans, including the ability to suffer
1:05:42.040 and the fact that we're a featherless biped. A few very practical questions to close. Given
1:05:50.640 the way British elections seem to have been running, that the Tories win every time. Does
1:05:55.160 that mean the error correction mechanism of the British system of government now is weaker?
1:06:00.600 No, unfortunately the, so as you probably know, I favour the first part of the post-system
1:06:10.520 in the purest possible form as it is implemented in Britain. I think that is the most
1:06:18.400 error correcting possible electoral system, although I must add that the electoral system
1:06:24.920 is only a tiny facet of the institutions of criticism and consent in general. It's just
1:06:32.480 a tiny thing, but it is the best one. It's not perfect. It has some of the defects of, for
1:06:41.640 example, proportional representation, proportional representation has the defect that
1:06:46.280 causes coalitions all the time. Coalitions are bad. But you have a delegated monitor with
1:06:53.280 the coalition, right? With the coalition saying the Netherlands, which is richer than
1:06:58.120 United Kingdom, you typically have coalition governments. Some parties in the coalition
1:07:02.880 are delegated monitors of the other parties. Parties are better informed than voters, so
1:07:07.640 isn't that a better Paparian mechanism for error correction? No, so if we're looking at particular
1:07:15.320 cases, we're going to get bogged down into what you attribute to what, because we're
1:07:20.360 not doing experiments with these things. We don't have a control group. We don't have a
1:07:27.600 agreed upon method of deciding what is being tested. And then we test different things
1:07:34.840 at different times and never under the same conditions. But I was going to say that the
1:07:42.760 first part of the post-system has the defect that occasionally it produces coalitions.
1:07:49.040 And that is disastrous. And we've been unlucky the past like two or three elections,
1:07:55.280 especially after one of the government's instituted constitutional reforms, like fixed-term
1:08:04.920 parliament act, which exacerbated the problems when they did occur. But I don't think
1:08:16.240 it's true. I don't think it's a good argument that the political party is no more, because
1:08:22.160 in a coalition, the energy of political negotiations or political arguments, what politicians
1:08:36.720 talk to each other about in the bar and in the corridor, in between the sessions, is
1:08:44.800 all about form. It's about how to offer a party so that it will join the coalition.
1:08:56.760 And so it makes the smaller parties more powerful than the leading two parties. It causes
1:09:07.240 a proliferation of parties. Worst example is Israel, which not by coincidence, has got the
1:09:16.520 most proportional system in the world. The fact that they ever get anything done at all
1:09:24.280 and are very effective in emergencies, I have no explanation for. If I was religious,
1:09:34.240 I would just put it down to the intervention of the almighty, but it's not the political
1:09:40.240 system. By the way, sorry, it's not the electoral system. There might be some things in the
1:09:46.480 inexplicable system that are responsible, but I don't know enough about it. How would you
1:09:51.480 improve error correction mechanisms in the world of science, Western science?
1:09:57.040 Ooh, okay, well, you left a very long answer for the last question, and I don't think
1:10:05.320 I can give my full answer. But I think the present system of funding scientific research
1:10:15.080 is terribly perverse and has caused the kind of stagnation in many areas. The present system
1:10:22.880 of careers is perverse in a parallel way and causes people to do the wrong kind of research
1:10:32.520 and causes people who want to do the right kind of research to leave research. If I
1:10:42.280 can answer in a single word, the way I would improve it is diversity. There should be diversity
1:10:50.240 of funding criteria. There should be diversity of funding sources. There should be diversity
1:10:58.520 of criteria for choosing research projects. And there should be diversity of criteria for
1:11:05.000 choosing people for promotion and for being funded. And arbitrary rules about this, such
1:11:15.080 as the rule that you can't hire people whom you have previously collaborated with or
1:11:29.120 you know, anti nepotism rules and rules about what's it called objective testing? What
1:11:44.560 is objective testing called standardised testing? Standardised testing, standardised
1:11:48.880 tests. That's a terrible idea. Any kind of standardisation is the opposite of diversity.
1:11:55.760 You want just like I say, you should have disobedience lessons in schools. So you should
1:12:01.840 so you should have understanding theising objectives for science education and for how
1:12:11.320 you run scientific research. David Deutsch, thank you very much.
