00:00:02.400 All right, everybody. This is Chris. So today I'm speaking with David Deutsch.
00:00:08.160 David is a visiting professor of physics at the Center for Quantum Computation at Oxford University
00:00:14.320 and also an honorary fellow of Wolfson College. He works on fundamental issues in physics,
00:00:20.480 particularly the quantum theory of computation and information as well as constructor theory.
00:00:26.720 He has also written two fantastic books aimed at the general reader, the fabric of reality
00:00:34.000 and the beginning of infinity. You can find out more about David at his personal website
00:00:40.800 DavidDeutsch.org.uk or you can go and find him on Twitter at DavidDeutsch.ox. That's O-X-F.
00:00:50.800 Now, as you'll see by the end of the podcast, David talks about how it was to meet his own
00:00:57.440 intellectual hero called Popper. And as many of you already know, my intellectual hero,
00:01:04.480 whose work is the basis and the inspiration for this podcast is David himself. So it was a great
00:01:11.680 honor and a great joy for me to speak with him and I proudly present our conversation.
00:01:18.000 So hold on to your hat and we were to pay and let's go.
00:01:30.080 All right, so I'm here with David Deutsch. David, welcome to DuXplain. Hi there.
00:01:36.240 When I visited you in Oxford a few months back, I brought you some Swedish chocolate bars,
00:01:41.200 some dame bars, and I was wondering if you've noticed any increases in creativity by eating them
00:01:47.040 perhaps. I can't remember which ones they were because there were also some Dutch ones.
00:01:55.360 Oh yes, now I remember. The Swedish ones were delicious. The Dutch ones were different in kind.
00:02:02.560 They were, they were supposed to be put on something like on pancakes and there they were delicious too.
00:02:09.680 Right, right. Well, many people don't know this, but similar to how Coca-Cola supposedly had
00:02:15.600 cocaine in their early product. The dame bars are completely laced with LSD. So I was hoping that
00:02:22.640 that could spark some interesting conjectures for you there when you're writing. Why should that produce
00:02:27.200 any different state from my normal state? Yeah. Exactly. I would actually be interested to have you
00:02:34.000 do a study with that. I've always wondered how your mind works. Yeah, I'd rather not risk it.
00:02:40.080 Yeah, I'll leave that to others. I think that might be wise. So yeah, I thought we could start
00:02:46.960 by revisiting our prehistoric and pre-scientific pasts, which are times that people seem to look
00:02:53.520 back on with very different sentiments. Many, many paint a somewhat romantic view where people were
00:03:01.440 exempt from modern stressors such as Long Days at the office and the increasing horrors of
00:03:06.640 social media. And we're instead free to forage and hunt, spend a large chunk of their days
00:03:11.600 enjoying themselves in tribal societies, resting, playing, singing together and so on.
00:03:17.520 It was a much simpler time or so they say. So I take you to be in the opposite camp here,
00:03:23.440 advocating a much more grim description of the history of humanity. So I like you to just
00:03:30.080 explain why you think it's a mistake to look back on history with envy.
00:03:33.760 Well, for prehistory, we don't have obviously any records and we hardly have any
00:03:44.400 paleontological evidence either. But just the gross facts that we know make this picture of an
00:03:56.480 idyllic prehistoric past really untenable. So one gross fact is that our species
00:04:05.440 has existed in its current form for at least 100,000 years, maybe two or three times that,
00:04:14.640 according to some people. So in that 100,000 years, in this idyllic life,
00:04:20.960 the human population didn't ever grow very much. Whereas today, it does and we have a population
00:04:31.200 of billions. Now, what kept the population down and what kept the population constant
00:04:39.040 in those days for for most of our history? That's one thing. And I think the answer is nothing good.
00:04:46.720 And I think that whatever that was, whether it was famine, disease, war, getting a bite from
00:04:58.320 an insect which you then had a horrible death from, whatever that was, people would have been
00:05:05.440 frightened of it. They would have not wanted this to happen and yet it did.
00:05:11.200 Right. So that's one thing. Another thing we know, just from the little paleontological
00:05:18.480 evidence that we have, is that nothing changed much. So when paleontologists dig up some fossils
00:05:27.920 and they dig up the stone tools or remains of campfires and whatever that they find,
00:05:36.880 they can't date them typically to an accuracy of better than like a thousand years or even more.
00:05:46.240 So that means that technology, which is these people's way of avoiding famine and predator attacks
00:05:58.160 and what have you, those means of escaping from their fears a little didn't improve for thousands
00:06:09.680 of years at a time. And again, today we're used to our lifestyle being revolutionized within
00:06:18.480 a lifetime. And I think these things are all connected and the reason that no progress was
00:06:28.000 made is connected, of course, with the reason why life was horrible. And these bits of evidence,
00:06:35.760 I think, can't be explained on the basis that they were living the lives they wanted to.
00:06:43.840 They were living lives of desperation and fear. By the way, the very capacity for fear and pain
00:06:52.800 and so on must have evolved and did not unevolve during this hundred thousand years when we were
00:07:03.040 allegedly living an idyllic life. It had a use. The people that did not have those feelings
00:07:10.320 preferentially died compared with people that had those feelings a bit more. And the level that we
00:07:17.360 have them at is genetically determined or at least the genetically determined level that we have
00:07:22.720 them at is genetically determined and is roughly speaking optimum for replication.
00:07:33.600 So anything horrible that we experience in our bodies was put there by evolution,
00:07:40.640 and therefore we can conclude that our ancestors felt those things a lot right.
00:07:49.440 Yeah, that's a very interesting take on it. I never thought of it in those terms, but I'm curious
00:07:56.800 if you have, if you're aware of the book tribe by Sebastian Younger. No, I'm not. No, okay, so he
00:08:05.120 argues in that book that humans have evolved to live in smaller close knit tribal communities
00:08:11.840 where survival depended on working together and hence putting the group first because without the
00:08:17.680 group you couldn't survive. And this brought with it or at least so he argues a strong sense of
00:08:23.920 community, a strong sense of belonging where the individual felt needed and his life was imbued
00:08:31.040 with a powerful meaning as a result. And so this tight bond between people, which I hear can be
00:08:38.400 replicated in modern times through, for instance, military operations where the individual once
00:08:43.840 again has to rely on the group to fight for a common goal of survival. But he says that this is
00:08:48.720 lacking in Western society today where there's no direct common threat to our lives in the same way.
00:08:55.600 And this is how he wants to explain much of our modern suffering like high levels of depression,
00:08:59.840 suicide, six sided disorders. And I'm not sure I agree with the idea that we need this hardship
00:09:06.960 to feel a tight bond with other people. However, I do think he has a point when it comes to
00:09:12.320 lack of social cohesion and maybe a sense of meaning in many people's lives today. So
00:09:19.440 is there something to be said for, I mean, in regard to what you just said there, do you think
00:09:25.440 there can be something to be said for people being as happy or even happier in earlier times
00:09:32.000 because they had this much stronger sense of togetherness of being needed than we have today?
00:09:37.520 Yes, it's interesting that when people try to sort of put down humans and denigrate our alleged
00:09:48.240 desire to think of ourselves as good and great. And despite the fact that
00:09:54.880 this denigration is extremely popular and seems to be taken up in all versions. So there's
00:10:01.760 the idea that we are inherently tribal, which is used to explain racism and violence and the
00:10:10.400 lack of it is used to explain, as you just said, is used to explain anxiety and social dislocation
00:10:19.760 and so on. And I don't believe any of that. I think this is just sheer argument by analogy
00:10:27.920 with a fixed conclusion that people are bad, people are mechanical, people are explained by
00:10:40.160 prehistory. I don't think so. Although it may well be true, and I just said earlier that
00:10:46.960 some are at least of our range of feelings and states of mind are evolved. But what external
00:11:00.000 conditions we attach those feelings to is very much determined by culture and by individual
00:11:12.320 choice and individual creativity. Some people say that we're bad because we're tribal,
00:11:21.120 other people say we're bad because we're selfish. Can you have that both ways? And now you're
00:11:28.320 telling me of people who are saying we're good because we're tribal. And I know that there are
00:11:34.320 groups of philosophers who say that we're good because we're selfish. So there you have all
00:11:40.160 four possibilities and all of them ignore the most important thing about humans, which is
00:11:48.400 creative thought, which can and does allow us to transcend our genetic programming.
00:11:57.680 So you do have people who are tribal and you do have cultures that are tribal, but you do have
00:12:04.880 also people who are individualistic and cultures that are individualistic and so on. It takes
00:12:13.520 all sorts to make the human world where it does not take all sorts to make, let's say, the lion
00:12:22.800 world, lions in that respect are explainable by their genes, whereas humans are explainable by their
00:12:32.240 ideas. Yeah, this seems to be a hand in hand with the idea of human nature. And I just like you
00:12:41.040 say there, I hear this concept being invoked often to excuse certain behaviors and observe tendencies
00:12:48.320 among humans, historically, and to argue that something's just can't be changed. Selfishness
00:12:54.160 and violence comes to mind for me as well. I hear them quite frequently in arguments. But
00:12:59.600 okay, so this idea that parts of our psychology are just inescapable, that is trumped by creative
00:13:08.960 thought. Yes. And even not just inescapable, some ideologies say, okay, we can escape it, but we
00:13:17.680 have to try really hard. We have to discipline ourselves or discipline each other or discipline
00:13:24.800 children to override this almost insuperable, bad tendency, whatever, you know, people think it
00:13:33.360 happens to be. And as I keep saying, the fact that people bring up opposite alleged tendencies
00:13:41.120 and make a similar argument from them is in itself a sign that this is a bad explanation through
00:13:48.720 and through. But so if we go back to younger's claim there about the strong need to feel needed
00:13:58.320 or to you hear people say we're a social animal, we're inescapably social animal. I suppose you
00:14:04.480 would argue the same way there, but you think we suffer from the so-called lack of meaning today
00:14:10.240 and that they could have had better social relationships that would contribute to happiness
00:14:16.880 for a person. Well, I think we, our aspirations have definitely improved. I spoke about all the
00:14:25.120 things that our ancestors feared and the fear of those in some sense is still there, but much,
00:14:35.440 much less and doesn't dominate our lives. So I think the things like alienation, I think
00:14:44.960 Marx invented the term in this context. And the theories that you'll mention, you mentioned,
00:14:52.160 they are just theories and people can adopt a theory and then condition their feelings
00:15:03.120 consciously or unconsciously by that theory. So for example, if you have a theory that you belong
00:15:09.440 to a group that's persecuted, then you may find yourself falling into a victim mentality,
00:15:18.320 which means that you are interpreting yourself according to the theory, which is the opposite,
00:15:23.760 is the very opposite of being driven by your genes. This is though what we really do. We interpret
00:15:32.080 ourselves according to theories and attitudes and they come from, maybe some of them come from
00:15:39.680 our genes, but that doesn't make them immutable, but certainly many of them come from culture
00:15:46.720 because we know that some attitudes are recent and did not exist even a few centuries ago.
00:15:54.960 And some come from our own creativity so that a person, like, I don't know, what was that ancient
00:16:07.120 Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel? Was it Diogenes or something?
00:16:12.800 I have to admit ignorance. Yeah, me too. There was some guy who lived in a barrel and he had
00:16:22.560 come up with the idea that this was the good life. And maybe he was depriving himself of things
00:16:31.920 in a rather masochistic way, like people sometimes do now as well. They, you know,
00:16:38.640 no pain, no gain and various ways of life that are based on self deprivation. Or maybe he was
00:16:50.720 trying creatively to, for example, rid himself of interference from other people or rid himself
00:17:01.600 of the obligations that interactions with other people would bring. Or maybe he enjoyed
00:17:10.560 being this eccentric guy that people would come and kneel before his barrel and ask for his
00:17:17.520 wise advice. And maybe that wouldn't have happened if he'd lived in a house. Who knows? But none
00:17:23.520 of those things were in his genes. And if you try to say that yes, they were in his genes,
00:17:28.800 that's just his way of being social. Well, if your way of being social is never to interact
00:17:36.080 with other people, or you know, if your way of being social can mean any actual behavior,
00:17:42.800 then again, that is not a good explanation. It's a very bad explanation.
00:17:49.040 Okay. So when people reference studies done in certain animals, I think rats is common,
00:17:56.000 or monkeys, they've done studies where they deprived the monkey children of their mother,
00:18:01.600 or of social contact, the same for the rats, and the rats that don't get that social contact,
00:18:07.360 they die very quickly. But this is not analogous for the reasons you've already stated to humans.
00:18:14.640 You can't draw that analogy to humans. It's not analogous to humans who are creating ways of life
00:18:23.840 for themselves, they're creating new ideas. So we don't know yet when creativity in that sense
00:18:31.280 sets in in babies. It could be that babies are analogous to newborn babies,
00:18:37.680 are analogous to newborn monkeys, and that they perhaps wouldn't thrive without human contact.
00:18:47.280 In fact, another possibility, which I've sometimes conjectured, is that creativity
00:18:52.160 is, in fact, partly cultural, and that a newborn baby is kind of, it only has part of the
00:19:01.600 creativity program in the genes, and the rest is provided by memes from culture. Now, you know,
00:19:09.360 I have no evidence for that, but it's one of the many possibilities that could be true.
00:19:14.160 But explaining human choices by analogy with rats or monkeys is just ludicrous.
00:19:25.920 It is, as I said, it is defining away the defining feature of humans.
00:19:32.560 So if anything, our human nature would be that capacity itself, if we have to save that concept.
00:19:40.800 Yes, yes. Yeah, I don't know why we want to save that concept, but yes, there is a sense
00:19:47.520 in which not having a fixed nature is the fixed nature of humans.
00:19:53.280 Yeah, exactly, because it wouldn't strictly be human nature since the way you define a person
00:20:00.080 is that it can be instantiated on a computer. It just happens to be in a biological vehicle at
00:20:07.440 this point, which are called humans. But that's an interesting conjecture about the baby
00:20:12.800 not having the creator program or the creative capacity fully to begin with, but I would
00:20:18.000 suppose it would have to learn those memes fairly early to be able to acquire language.
00:20:25.840 Oh, yes. So by the time babies are learning language, they're definitely creative,
00:20:31.120 because that's a task that, I mean, we can't even program a computer to this day to match
00:20:38.480 a baby's ability to learn language. So that's definitely a hugely creative task.
00:20:46.240 Yeah. But I'm still hearing you say, as you said in the beginning there, we still have the
00:20:52.400 capacity for strong emotions, like negative emotions, like fear and pain and anxiety, which
00:20:59.120 served in evolutionary purpose. But then I'm thinking a very current debate is about the idea of
00:21:06.000 gender differences. And we have, on the one hand, people like Jordan Peterson or Stephen Pinker
00:21:13.120 who argue fairly strongly that biological differences between the sexes best explains the
00:21:18.960 differences in personality and behavior that we tend to observe in men and women. And on the
00:21:23.840 other hand, we have the social constructionists who claim that biology is completely irrelevant
00:21:29.920 and a social contract, social construct as well. And that reality is entirely created by the
00:21:35.680 social norms we have. And so culture is the only relevant factor. I think you reject both of
00:21:41.680 these conclusions based on what you said, but you lean more towards the latter that ideas are
00:21:48.240 the best explanation there. But I'm curious then, what role does the difference in biology
00:21:54.480 play here? Because surely it has to have some, if only in creating different sensations,
00:22:01.040 I find it strange that most cultures have adopted the same type of stereotypical gender roles.
00:22:10.080 Yeah. Well, how do you think about that? I think that both of those theories are not only
00:22:17.600 false. They have completely the wrong end of the stick because
00:22:23.840 how much of human behavior is explained by something or other? Is itself entirely determined
00:22:31.680 by human choices? Or I should say, how much of human choices are explained by genetics or culture
00:22:43.280 or inborn creativity? All of those, how much of human choices are explained by those,
00:22:49.760 is itself determined by human creativity? How do you mean? Can you explicate that all? Well,
00:22:57.280 yes. So genes are just a thing in our environment, like snow for inuit and like a particular
00:23:09.360 language for people living in a particular country. Now, you might do a study to say how much
00:23:16.000 is mathematical ability affected by latitude? And you could make graphs and correlations between
00:23:26.640 the latitude at which a person was born. And then you'd find a correlation and you would say,
00:23:32.160 aha, mathematical ability is explained by latitude. But that's not how I would use the word
00:23:43.440 explain. That just means correlated. The real explanation comes elsewhere. Now, you could also say
00:23:53.360 in regard to mathematical ability that it was determined by the number of the century in which
00:24:02.960 you were born. So in century 20, a certain proportion of people become mathematicians in
00:24:11.600 century zero. It was century one. Actually, there is no century zero.
00:24:16.720 In century one, it was far fewer. In century minus a thousand, it was essentially nil.
00:24:27.760 And again, why were there no mathematicians? Well, because of the harsh life people led,
00:24:34.720 and because of the culture that made them not interested, but perhaps there was a mathematician
00:24:42.560 somewhere. How do we know? Perhaps there was one in the minus 10,000, 10,000 BC. We don't have
00:24:51.680 any record of that because they had no writing in that time. If there was one, and I don't see
00:24:57.760 why there wouldn't have been one, it was because they managed to violate the norms of their culture
00:25:06.160 and transcend the values and preoccupations of their culture and develop an interest that we
00:25:16.480 would now identify as mathematics. Some people might say, well, that's very unlikely for a primitive
00:25:26.240 person to have done that. But today, when we are allegedly all the victims of the same genes,
00:25:37.840 plenty of people violate the norms of their culture and the preoccupations of their culture and
00:25:42.560 so on. And by the way, plenty of people violate their own so-called survival instinct, not just
00:25:49.920 for the benefit of the culture, but for all sorts of reasons, including very silly ones.
00:25:54.640 Yeah. But so how I'm not sure I see the connection to the fact that we see the same
00:26:03.120 generals throughout all cultures or the majority of cultures in previous times. And even now,
00:26:10.720 because it seems to me if it was purely a matter of ideas and the genes didn't influence at
00:26:16.800 all, why would we see that pattern? When I mentioned correlations, I was trying to say that
00:26:24.080 those are cases where most people's attitude to mathematics was indeed explained by their
00:26:36.080 environment, by their genes, by their culture and so on. Because very few people were using their
00:26:44.640 creativity. And we don't have that many creativity-based cultures to go on. Basically, the West
00:26:55.200 is it. I mean, you know, we have maybe ancient Athens or whatever. And the fact is that
00:27:03.760 there are enormous differences between the roles of women in, say, ancient Athens and present day
00:27:10.160 Sweden. And there are even differences between present day Sweden and present day USA.
00:27:17.920 And there are differences between present day Sweden and 50 years ago, Sweden. So come on.
00:27:27.120 The mechanical explanations of gender roles just for flat on their faces.
00:27:32.800 Right. And I mean, you could also perhaps argue that since if we go back to prehistoric times
00:27:40.800 again in the tribal societies, it was just a fact of physiology that if you were going to hunt
00:27:48.240 for food and you couldn't just go to the grocery store, the people with the most muscle mass
00:27:54.400 who were faster and stronger could just naturally, you know, it's not that it's in their genes.
00:28:00.960 It's just, it's the natural interpretation or the natural idea to create.
00:28:04.400 Yes. Yes. Absolutely. That is actually, I wouldn't call those gender roles because
00:28:12.560 that is just a practical consideration, just like the person with a broken leg also wouldn't have
00:28:17.600 gone on a hunt. Exactly. And on the country, a woman who was, was unusually strong or was unusually
00:28:25.280 good at throwing spears would have gone on a hunt. What we call gender roles is enforced gender
00:28:32.720 roles, either culturally or legally or by ridicule or whatever. And they are, they are irrational.
00:28:44.480 But differences in behavior that have a practical purpose that the person
00:28:50.240 benefits from or identifies with are only a different category from gender roles in the other
00:28:56.720 sense. Yeah, no, definitely. So I had a plan on asking you about this, but it seems to be
00:29:02.640 related and it's so interesting. So just to try to push back a little bit when it comes to
00:29:08.880 things like twin studies then, not specifically about gender roles, but about genes causing
00:29:15.680 behavior. Now I haven't looked into the twin studies myself carefully, but the claims seem to be
00:29:23.280 that they've done studies where and supposedly a lot of them where people is a call identical twins.
00:29:31.360 Yes. Yes. Yeah. I don't know the different types, but the most identical one where they separate
00:29:37.280 them at birth and they get completely different environments to grow up in and then when they're
00:29:41.920 adults, they seem to share things that seem unlikely to just be coincidence, things like
00:29:50.000 sexual preferences or political leanings or musical taste. So how would one explain that then?
00:29:59.280 Because it seems too haphazard to just say that they just happen to develop the same interest in
00:30:07.280 music, for for instance. So I take it that none of these twin studies are double blind studies,
00:30:14.720 that is none of them have these twins wrapped up in an opaque container,
00:30:23.280 unable to communicate other than by typing in and out, so that in fact, these identical twins
00:30:32.080 who are placed in allegedly different environments, they are seen and their behaviors are noted by
00:30:42.800 people, by people who are genetically, culturally, sub-culturally and so on, inclined to interpret
00:30:54.240 behaviors in a particular way. So if someone's very good looking, they might have a different
00:31:05.200 experience of high school from someone who is less good looking. And those different experiences
00:31:12.080 in high school might affect their interests, their sexual preferences, you name it, it might influence
00:31:20.320 it. And even if they then go to different schools, the fact that they are equally good looking
00:31:29.600 will have the same bias, biased effect on them, which people in the study will later pick up and
00:31:38.480 say, oh, this is coded for by genes, but it's not coded for by genes any more than the country
00:31:43.920 you live in is coded for by genes, even though that too has a strong genetic correlation. Right,
00:31:50.960 I think, okay, so it's similar, I think you write a similar example in the beginning of infinity,
00:31:56.160 your book, your second book, where yeah, being attractive, you're talking in the context of
00:32:03.040 happiness research, which does a similar thing here, 50% of happiness is encoded in genes and
00:32:09.600 is immutable. And so maybe people just treat attractive people better. And so that is what causes
00:32:15.840 you to be more happy. And you share those genes, but it's not the genes. Yes, I doubt it's as simple
00:32:24.000 as that because treatment of somebody, which is intended to cause a certain effect, rarely does,
00:32:31.840 but it might cause a coherent effect, even if a different one from the intended one. So yeah,
00:32:38.240 it would be very surprising if identical twins reared separately did not have a lot of traits
00:32:47.680 in common, even if there was no genetic coding of those. And as I said before, the whole concept
00:32:56.000 of genetic coding is a mistake because how much of the genetic coding gets translated into actual
00:33:03.120 behavior and personality is itself determined by creativity. The person can decide not to behave as
00:33:12.560 their genes are telling them, like the people who take up aesthetic lifestyles and deprive themselves
00:33:21.200 of this or that food, which they really enjoy, because they have adopted an idea, either they
00:33:28.960 invented it or they adopted it from someone else, that this is better than what the genes are telling
00:33:34.880 them. Right. So okay. So we, I mean, we have genes, we have starting ideas as it were. And then
00:33:44.880 we quickly start using our creativity to improve upon that. So we're, yeah, it is a starting point.
00:33:51.760 And then, but that's all it is. Yeah. So this is Stephen Pinker has this idea that his opponents
00:33:59.040 believe in a blank slate at both. Yeah. And that's, that's, I think that metaphor comes more or less
00:34:06.640 from, from Locke. So I would say we have a slate, we're born with a slate that's the Scott
00:34:13.760 tons of stuff on it, some useful, some not useful, some nonsense and so on. But it's a slate,
00:34:20.960 it has chalk on it. It can be wiped off easily. And it is very common for people to act in ways
00:34:30.480 where, where for any animal, that would be the one of the deepest things in their genetic makeup,
00:34:36.480 like like eating, having sex, avoiding pain, all these things are commonly overridden by humans
00:34:48.160 for the most trivial of reasons. Yeah, exactly. I choose to fast intermittent fast every day
00:34:55.360 because it's in fashion to do so. And I get more likes on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But
00:35:02.720 um, no, I think I think the word people would have trouble with there is easily that we can
00:35:08.320 easily change the slate. But I would agree with you on that. Well, so let me, let me say commonly
00:35:15.040 and that is already enough to refute the, the theory. I mean, it is common for teenage girls to
00:35:22.320 become anorexic. You know, it's, it's, it's common for people to go on diets or to, to binge eat
00:35:31.520 or both and, and all those things are supposedly explained by genes. Well, you know, bad explanation
00:35:39.280 again. All right, folks, time for the fun stuff. So if you really enjoy what I'm doing here,
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00:36:14.960 me out is to go over to iTunes and ride me a five star review. That would also be very helpful.
00:36:21.280 All right. Thank you very much. Let's get back to enjoying the show.
00:36:27.040 All right, man. So I want to switch gears a little bit and go over to the philosophy of mind.
00:36:32.480 And you, you argue that the brain must be a computer and you make use of the functionalist
00:36:39.520 distinction between brain and mind hardware and software, respectively. And a lot of people would
00:36:46.320 take issue with that. For instance, I remember there was an A on article called the empty brain,
00:36:52.320 circulating a while back. The summary of the article was your brain does not process information,
00:36:58.080 retrieve knowledge or store memories in short. Your brain is not a computer. Now I'm convinced
00:37:04.720 after reading that, but it went on to say that speaking of the brain as a computer is no more
00:37:11.520 true than how we've historically described it as consisting of hydraulic pumps, wheel works
00:37:17.280 powered by springs and gears being a telegraph. It's just a convenient metaphor that continually
00:37:22.640 changes with our current technology, and that the computer metaphor will meet the same fate as
00:37:28.160 the others soon enough. But I mean, clearly a laptop and a brain are different at one level.
00:37:34.560 Our brain doesn't have the Von Neumann architecture. And it's made up of neurons and blood vessels
00:37:40.400 rather than metal and silicone. And it's constantly rewiring itself, the neuroplasticity. But
00:37:46.880 I take your claim to be much more fundamental than that. So how do we know, first of all, that
00:37:53.680 the brain is a computer, and then also why is it crucial to make this hardware software distinction
00:37:58.960 between the brain and the mind and not just talk in terms of the brain?
00:38:03.200 Okay. Well, you ran through a lot of ideas there. I'm not sure I can remember them all.
00:38:10.480 But the basic thing is that, first of all, the basic thing is that the brain is a physical object
00:38:17.280 and a base the laws of physics. Now, some people would deny that. Some people would say that
00:38:23.040 the brain is in part a supernatural object controlled by a supernatural entity, the soul,
00:38:30.960 which doesn't obey laws of physics. Okay. That is a different argument from everything else you
00:38:39.360 said. And if you want me to go into why I think that's a bad idea, I guess I could. But I think
00:38:49.440 it's more important to address the points that take for granted that the brain is a physical
00:38:57.200 object. And the question is, what kind of a physical object? Is it like a steam engine? Is it
00:39:01.440 like a computer? Is it like a blank slate? You know, whatever. And it's rather sad that it's getting
00:39:12.480 on for a century now that Alan Turing solved this entire problem. Or if you'd like, it might have
00:39:22.720 been solved even earlier in the, in the 1820s by, by Babbage and Lovelace or perhaps Lovelace and Babage.
00:39:32.000 Not sure. I think it may have may have been Lovelace who had the, the idea of computational
00:39:39.760 universality as I now understand it rather than Babage. But anyway, Turing certainly did have it.
00:39:46.480 And he understood that if the brain obeys laws of physics, then no matter what kind of soul
00:39:59.040 or whatever or what kind of juices may be powering it, its functionality is information processing.
00:40:07.440 That is nerve impulses or chemical impulses in and nerve impulses and chemical impulses out,
00:40:17.440 which, which then cause our actions and our speech. And they also cause our memory and therefore
00:40:27.440 our introspection and our explanations of why we do what we do and of what we are.
00:40:33.600 This is all the processing of information. Now, nowadays we take like, since Turing really,
00:40:41.440 we, we have taken information processing to be the same thing as computation.
00:40:48.480 But that's only the case if computation is indeed universal as, as during a conjecture.
00:40:56.080 And why is that you mean? Because then if, if computation is universal, that means that there is
00:41:04.320 only one kind of information, the kind that can be processed by a Turing machine.
00:41:10.320 That there isn't another kind that could be processed by a different kind of machine, which the
00:41:14.880 brain might be. There cannot be such a thing if universality is true.
00:41:20.080 Right. Okay. Yeah. And Turing conjectured that, he also argued for it quite powerfully.
00:41:30.800 But if quantum theory is true, then we can do better than that because I actually proved
00:41:40.000 that physical systems that obey quantum theory support universal computation. So the universal
00:41:47.680 computer, not quite Turing's but what we call quantum computer nowadays, is a universal
00:41:54.640 computer and can perform any computation that any other physical object can perform,
00:42:00.000 including a brain. So when we say that a brain is a computer, we are saying an amalgam of two things,
00:42:07.920 we're saying that a brain is an information processor, all the functions of the brain,
00:42:15.360 information processing functions, just because it is a physical object. That's one thing.
00:42:21.680 And then we're saying it's a computer because actually there is only one kind of general
00:42:26.480 information processing device. And it has the same, they all have the same repertoire.
00:42:33.840 And that's why we say the brain is a computer. This isn't an analogy. This is just a way of
00:42:39.040 saying some substantive things that we know basically from physics. Right. So could you say
00:42:45.680 that the information processing, that process of input, processing, and output is analogous to
00:42:55.040 initial states, loss of motion and what final state, final state, yeah.
00:43:01.760 Yeah. Yeah. Kind of, although it's, it's rather awkwardly phrased in that sense because
00:43:10.880 human thought doesn't necessarily have an output in the sense of
00:43:15.440 limb movements and statements made by the mouth. Some of the output just stays in the brain.
00:43:23.840 And, but it's subject to the same laws. We can think things that we never tell anybody,
00:43:30.480 like, you know, I might be thinking something of you now. And I'll never tell anybody what it is.
00:43:38.240 But nevertheless, by the same argument that I made earlier, that thinking was a computation.
00:43:44.480 And in that it processed information, it had an input, it had an output, even though the output will,
00:43:50.720 you know, will never pass my lips. Therefore, the input output model of computation is a bit
00:43:59.040 awkward when applied to the brain. But from the point of view of whether a brain is a computer,
00:44:05.680 that doesn't matter. Yeah, because if there wasn't such a thing as universal computation,
00:44:11.040 then different system might process information in different ways. And then we couldn't talk about
00:44:17.360 everything using computation, everything being a computer.
00:44:20.720 That's right. And so if physics were different, if the universe were different that way,
00:44:25.440 then animals and people could have been built differently. There could have been two kinds of
00:44:31.680 information that are not interoperable and two kinds of computation, or maybe 10 kinds. But that's
00:44:39.520 not how our world is made. Wow. Okay. Now I get it. That's fascinating. So, but, um, okay,
00:44:47.040 if we go back to the distinction then between brain and mind, why is that necessary?
00:44:52.720 Yes. Ah, well, that's necessary to understand certain things, not others. But the point about
00:45:00.720 the information, the reason why it even made sense to guess that that there might be universal
00:45:10.160 computation is that the properties of information are independent of the substrate that it is
00:45:18.160 instantiated in. So, lots of different kinds of physical object can store the same information,
00:45:25.280 a DNA strand, can store a Mozart symphony, and people have done things like this. And,
00:45:32.400 and of course, computer memories store our words and our ideas in a completely different form
00:45:39.680 from the way that our brain stores them. And we take for granted that you can make hardware,
00:45:46.000 like microphones and loudspeakers and so on, which translate from one way of storing to another.
00:45:57.440 So, the information in the brain, that is the mind and other information in the brain,
00:46:04.240 is the substrate independent part. And in fact, when we use it, even without technology,
00:46:13.280 we are constantly changing information from one form into another. Even in ourselves,
00:46:22.720 information in DNA gets transcribed to RNA, and then it gets transcribed to proteins. And we can
00:46:29.920 see that even though these are different types of physical object, the information is the same.
00:46:37.920 And the functionality of, let's say, protein synthesis depends on how good the system is at
00:46:48.800 preserving the information, as it is transferred from one form into another, and also at interpreting
00:46:57.520 it, seeing what is the meaning of the information in a given context. So, when it comes to
00:47:05.040 the brain, the brain has contains information in memory and in neuron firings, and quite likely
00:47:16.720 also in states of various chemical concentrations and so on. And those are independent of the
00:47:28.240 substrate. You can be given an injection of something that makes it related, and then you can say,
00:47:37.520 hey, I'm elated. And you suddenly translated that information from chemical form into the form of
00:47:44.320 sound waves. Whereas the hardware, the only thing that's important about the hardware is that
00:47:51.360 it's capable of universal computation. So, the hardware is constant in a particular brain, although
00:48:01.360 in the future, we will be able to make information processing devices that are functionally the
00:48:09.040 same as the brain, but are built with different things. Just like billions of years ago,
00:48:15.120 evolution had the idea of using DNA as its information storage device instead of RNA.
00:48:22.880 All right. Just in case I'm misunderstood here, I don't mean anything anthropomorphic by this.
00:48:29.840 So, the important part here is the mind is the universal information processor, so to speak,
00:48:37.360 that runs on the brain, the program. Yes, it's a program, that's right. It's a, well,
00:48:42.880 no, I would say the mind is, yeah, the brain is the universal processor, and the mind is a program
00:48:53.360 money on it, which is universal in a different sense. It is capable of supporting any kind of
00:48:59.040 explanation. Right. And that's interesting, because I ended up in an argument with one of my
00:49:04.160 teachers the other day. My classmate and I had held a presentation on how do we know it was an
00:49:11.200 explanation of knowledge and why people should care about it? And afterwards, we were discussing
00:49:17.440 this and I brought up the universality of human minds and even if you agree that computation
00:49:25.360 is universal, how do we know that minds that our minds are universal?
00:49:32.320 That is indeed a different argument, yeah, because he wouldn't buy that.
00:49:36.160 Yeah, well, explanatory universality is, well, I do cover this in the beginning of infinity
00:49:42.880 as well, but I cover it separately from the issue of computation and computational
00:49:48.240 universality. In short, the reason why I think it doesn't make sense to deny that we are capable
00:49:57.680 of explanatory universality is that the theory that we aren't capable of it is, how can I put
00:50:08.000 it? It's functionally the same as a belief in the supernatural, because it is a belief that
00:50:15.440 there is some aspect of the world whose explanation is not even in principle accessible
00:50:23.840 to human minds. For example, it might be accessible to superhuman minds, gods or aliens or dolphins
00:50:36.320 or something and that they might understand, or perhaps no one can understand it, perhaps it's
00:50:42.320 just inexplicable. Well, if we have an inexplicable world or a world that we can't understand,
00:50:49.520 that is affecting us, logically you can't disprove that, it's also not disproved by the universality
00:50:56.480 of computation or anything like that, but it is the very archetype of a bad explanation,
00:51:04.560 because by the same token that the world might be inexplicable, the explanation might be anything,
00:51:13.200 so there might be inexplicable gods out there, there might be inexplicable laws of nature
00:51:21.680 which are just toying with us, or perhaps the laws of nature will come to an end next year,
00:51:28.480 and different laws of nature will come and torture us or else put us into Nirvana,
00:51:33.440 and all these different possibilities are just small subsets of the overarching idea
00:51:44.560 that we are in a bubble of explicability, but that the universe as a whole is not explicable.
00:51:52.080 All those things I've just mentioned fit into that.
00:51:55.520 Yeah, yeah, and it's also non-parcemonias, you're adding an extra assumption there that is
00:52:00.880 unexplained. Yeah, that is true, yes. Okay, so it's there because there's a lot of emphasis today
00:52:09.200 on or at least it has been, I still think it is, but an emphasis on neuroscience and the
00:52:15.520 how essential it is to understanding the mind and AI and all these things,
00:52:20.240 but is there anything important to be learned about our minds by studying the architecture of
00:52:25.360 the brain directly? For instance, what a function seems to be specific for certain hemispheres,
00:52:30.960 or the default mode network is central for self reference and daydreaming and so on,
00:52:36.480 or are we going about that all wrong? Of course neuroscience is very important,
00:52:41.680 if something goes wrong with your brain, you want medical science to know as much as possible about
00:52:46.560 it, but you asked whether it was relevant basically to our idea or minds.
00:52:52.800 Yeah, okay. Yeah, understand our minds, yeah. I think only in a very marginal way,
00:53:03.440 so I said that we are we are born, not as blank slates, but as slates covered with
00:53:12.560 information. Yeah, I can envisage circumstances under which it might be useful to know what that is,
00:53:19.680 so that for example, if there is a piece of inborn propensity,
00:53:30.480 which humans typically abandon, let's say, during the first 10 years of their life,
00:53:41.360 they typically abandon it, or perhaps they always abandon, that's an easier case.
00:53:46.320 Yeah, it was that they always abandon it. Then, if you tell somebody when they're 9 years old,
00:53:54.160 you show them some neuroscience that says that all this struggle that they're having
00:54:00.880 is just to erase the part of their genetic inheritance, and it doesn't actually make sense,
00:54:08.640 then they might say, oh, I always thought it didn't make sense, but it's, you know,
00:54:13.680 it I'm just working my way through that, and it might be helpful to such a person,
00:54:19.840 maybe it wouldn't be helpful, maybe maybe, you know, it's something that you have to work out for
00:54:25.120 yourself. I don't know. I'm trying to explain why I think such knowledge is bound to be marginal
00:54:32.800 at best. That is knowledge of our inborn theories, our inborn wants and values and criteria
00:54:45.360 and expectations and so on. Yeah, so basically, if I've understood you correctly here, you're saying
00:54:50.240 that since the brain is a universal computer, but since it instantiates a universal program,
00:54:58.160 I can create explanatory knowledge, which in term obeys its own, it's independent of its
00:55:04.800 physical instantiation once you have that program. So then the brain, as you said right now,
00:55:10.800 gives us a starting point of the chalkboard with some scribbles on it, but we can always erase
00:55:16.480 all of that. So it's not primary to our understanding in any sense. Yes. And I guess
00:55:22.480 not important, either not very important or not at all important. You're going to get a lot of
00:55:29.520 slack for that, David. Well, the people who give me a hard time for this, I can't blame them,
00:55:36.160 right? It's written in their genes. Yeah, that's great. That's true. So yeah, so okay, so that was
00:55:45.520 the distinction between the mind and the brain, but there's another distinction here then,
00:55:50.320 between the unconscious and the conscious mind. And are you aware of the social psychologist,
00:55:57.200 Jonathan Hight? No, right now. Okay, he, he has a analogy, a rider on the elephant analogy,
00:56:07.360 where he says the rational side is like the rider on the elephant and the emotional side is
00:56:12.640 the elephant. The elephant, or sorry, the rider looks in charge, but when there's a disagreement
00:56:18.720 between these two sides, the elephant usually wins. And so this is a similar version to
00:56:25.040 Daniel Kahneman's system one and two, system one being fast, emotional, system two slower,
00:56:30.720 more logical. How do you currently think about the connection between the unconscious and the
00:56:36.480 conscious mind? I guess this I had a question here, are we essentially ruled by or unconscious,
00:56:41.840 so to speak? I suppose we've touched on some of this already, but yes, I don't think that the
00:56:47.760 distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind is a matter of hardware, first of all.
00:56:53.520 I don't think there's a unconscious thought module and a conscious thought module and
00:56:58.560 and sort of lots of neurons connecting them and sometimes those connections crackle and get hot
00:57:05.200 and then one side wins. I don't think it's like that. I think conscious and unconscious is just
00:57:11.280 a rough way of describing the fact that the content of different ideas is sometimes structurally
00:57:24.240 different, is often structurally different. It's like, I don't know if I can think of a good
00:57:30.000 analogy, but if you go on a motorway and you see police cars and normal cars, you may form a theory
00:57:40.880 that police cars obey one law of motion and ordinary cars obey another law of motion and
00:57:47.680 and you'd be wrong to think that police cars and ordinary cars are made in different factories
00:57:52.880 or operate by different principles or are fundamentally different in any way. What makes
00:57:59.200 and different is just software. The difference between a policeman and a non-placement is just
00:58:08.000 software and it's the same with the police car and the non-police car. So it's not that there
00:58:13.360 are strictly speaking unconscious ideas and conscious ideas and they have to interact with each
00:58:22.800 other. That's just a way of summarizing the fact that some processes are aware of other processes
00:58:31.120 but not aware of a third kind of process and so on. It's a matter of what's aware of where of what
00:58:37.360 and I certainly don't think that there is any kind of rule enforced by the brain or whatever
00:58:47.120 that one kind of idea always wins over another kind. Surely it's a matter of everyday experience
00:58:55.440 that people often do things that they have a strong desire not to do and on the contrary that people
00:59:07.760 also often do things that they have a strong desire to do but consciously think is wrong
00:59:14.960 and in that sense don't want to do it. Another thing that's slightly wrong with that whole picture
00:59:20.800 is that it assumes that the conscious mind by itself is consistent and therefore can be said to
00:59:30.800 have a desire and a preference like the rider on an elephant. But what if the rider on the elephant
00:59:38.240 is in two minds or in a hundred minds? That's more like it. The mind is full of ideas which are
00:59:47.360 full of various kinds of conflict with each other. So you couldn't therefore have a rule that says
00:59:55.200 one kind of idea always wins over the other. By the way if there was such a rule then if
1:00:01.760 preparing epistemology is true this thing wouldn't be universal. It would be unable to
1:00:10.320 understand certain things specifically the things which the part of the mind that is supposedly
1:00:19.200 dominant is wrong about. But again everyday life it's full of examples of people not doing
1:00:31.440 what their emotions say or not doing what their reason says and having conflicting emotions
1:00:38.480 and having conflicting ideas it all happens all the time. Right I mean if there was a rule there
1:00:46.640 instantiated as say it would basically be justificationism or foundationalism you would have
1:00:52.400 yeah it wouldn't all be conjectural which it seems to be. But so on this view then because
1:00:59.440 often here studies reference like oh the smell of garbage makes people express more socially
1:01:05.360 conservative views or if you get a person to hold something warm or cold if it will influence how
1:01:12.320 they judge a person they're talking to as warm or cold. But that's not a matter of unconscious
1:01:20.320 ideas overriding or the emotional the elephant overriding the right or it's just
1:01:27.600 creating sensations that you then conjecture ideas around and they just happen to be
1:01:31.920 yes and they might be like you said about the archaic people the men more likely to go hunting or
1:01:41.680 whatever. In a particular culture it might be the case that smelling garbage makes you more likely
1:01:50.240 to dwell on one kind of idea and not another. These studies even if they were done in every culture
1:02:01.440 there are false ideas in every culture and there are ideas which like you know slavery which was
1:02:08.240 once considered normal in every culture and now is considered abnormal in every culture in almost
1:02:13.600 every culture. So it's not surprising that there are correlations between unrelated things
1:02:23.680 it would be very surprising if there weren't it would mean that our ideas are in some high level
1:02:28.800 sense randomized in every way except ways that we know of. So it's not surprising but I don't
1:02:38.080 think this explains anything useful about how minds work or how people make decisions and by the
1:02:44.400 way these ideas always I think always but perhaps it's only almost always the conclusion is always
1:02:52.800 the same humans aren't what they they're cracked up to be humans aren't what they pretend to be
1:03:01.040 they aren't what they want to be instead they're just mechanical their machines they need to be
1:03:09.360 controlled put down you know and so on. It's funny that the conclusion is always the same
1:03:15.520 and yeah I don't know why why we're so self-deprecating in that regard and as humans it's
1:03:22.880 weird to want to look at humans that way yeah I mean we're very upset if you just choose
1:03:29.280 one group of people and claim they are bad yeah that's a no no but if you include all of
1:03:35.040 humanity which is I guess as racist as you can become yeah I don't know why that's all right yeah
1:03:41.280 but so okay this is yeah this is an interesting point here so I want to hone in on that a little
1:03:47.920 bit because yeah speaking about humans as rational or at least having we're not as rational as
1:03:54.640 we like to believe as you said one way well known way of framing such irrational tendencies
1:04:01.200 quote unquote in humans is in terms of cognitive biases which I believe was popularized by
1:04:07.920 Kahneman and Torski and basically it's presented as systematic errors in thinking ways we tend to
1:04:13.920 fail in our reasoning in particular situations and one explanation that one often here is that
1:04:20.320 these biases are side effects of evolved mental shortcuts heuristics that has been very useful
1:04:26.320 and effective in the past for making decisions because we don't want to waste we don't have time
1:04:30.400 to waste too many mental resources but these shortcuts can end up misfiring as it were
1:04:36.160 and as a result our capacity for rational thinking is limited by these biases yes and perhaps in a
1:04:43.200 fundamental way from this perspective so I don't think that biases in that sense exist that what
1:04:50.080 exists are errors and people people make errors and sometimes people make the same error again and
1:04:57.120 again and that's because there's an error there's an error somewhere in the either in their thinking
1:05:03.520 or in their ideas or in their fixed ideas sometimes different people make the same error
1:05:09.920 and that might be due to culture or it might be due to just the logic of the situation that
1:05:15.440 the certain errors are easy to make and the truth is hard to come by and so on so that's that's
1:05:22.720 biases in general that's why I don't think anything is explained by biases that isn't just
1:05:30.080 a natural consequence of the fact that humans are absolutely jam packed with errors of every kind
1:05:37.200 so when you say errors you mean we just have the wrong ideas about something
1:05:41.440 yes yes full theories it could be our slate that we start with and then we just never
1:05:47.680 conjecture a better idea or yeah my guess is that the slate gets completely overwritten quite
1:05:54.160 fast but but you know it might be it could be that there are bits of the slate that in a certain
1:06:00.320 culture or in maybe in all existing cultures tend to survive and then form an error that almost
1:06:06.960 everybody makes but as when that was pointed out it would if that was pointed out by somebody
1:06:14.000 then it would no longer be the error that everybody makes but there's a worse thing once you
1:06:19.440 go beyond the idea of just biases which I say they're just errors so as long as you know that
1:06:28.560 they can be erased and argued against then it's it's not so bad to to think of them
1:06:35.600 as somehow different from other errors though they aren't but if you think that they are in
1:06:41.600 born and have to be overcome then you're in there's a much more dangerous territory there because
1:06:52.400 in born biases can only possibly be finite in number and therefore there is an implicit project here
1:07:02.080 to overcome let's say they're 23 of them yeah the project is to identify these one by one
1:07:10.560 very clever people have to identify them by by somehow getting round them and then seeing them
1:07:18.160 for what they are and analyzing them with Bayesian statistics and and then telling everybody else
1:07:25.680 and everybody else has to introspect and find those errors and get into the habit and practice
1:07:31.760 of not having those errors and once you have once you have found five or six of these
1:07:38.720 error of these 23 errors you are a better person and that means that there are two kinds of people
1:07:46.880 in the world the ones who have overcome their biases and ones who have not yet overcome their
1:07:53.200 biases and those are the the best and the rest and that that kind of way of thinking about people
1:08:02.240 is terrible it's a first of all it's false for the reasons that I've given but it's also dangerous
1:08:10.320 it's authoritarian it contradicts all the not all it contradicts some of the best traditions of
1:08:20.640 western rational society it sort of tends towards justifying government by these best people
1:08:33.280 or that government should consult these best people or that government should test to see how
1:08:39.280 many biases you have to and you only get the vote if you have fewer than a certain number of biases
1:08:45.120 and heaven forbid that somebody decides that they have eliminated all 23 they will then become a
1:08:54.080 psychopath yeah well yeah I mean that's interesting I never thought of it in moral terms that's an
1:09:02.080 interesting argument yeah so I remember listening to Daniel Kahneman on Sam Harris's podcast and
1:09:09.600 he asked Kahneman and by the end okay so you've worked in this field almost the entirety of your
1:09:16.880 life and with these biases and so have that helped you at all in your thinking and he laughed
1:09:23.760 and just said that no I'm just as biased as anyone else like there's no way to get around it
1:09:28.400 pretty much what's the implication there okay so he is he has resisted that conclusion
1:09:33.440 yeah exactly did he give a reason for resisting it I mean he seems to think that some of them
1:09:41.680 because this is an argument they'll often make that even if you're aware of certain biases it
1:09:47.920 doesn't seem like people still seem to do the same mistake they tell you about the bias and then
1:09:52.880 they test you and you do the same thing in a week or two but I've always thought if you follow
1:09:57.920 your argument here it's just errors it might just mean that we haven't actually found what the
1:10:03.280 error is and so we haven't guessed it is we're going about it the wrong way right exactly yeah
1:10:08.800 that's what it must be yeah yeah no that's that's fascinating so David I appreciate your time
1:10:15.440 I thought I might just ask you quickly as a last questionnaire I've heard rumors that you got to
1:10:21.840 meet Karl Popper once in your life I just want to know how that was like for you yes it was amazing
1:10:30.640 I went there with Bryce Dewitt oh and and seeing those two people you know just being a
1:10:36.800 fly on the wall when those people were having conversation was was an exceptional honour
1:10:42.880 I can imagine it was a very fun conversation he was very popular and as I tweeted recently I
1:10:52.640 kept feeling it kept you know it kept sort of mentally slapping myself down because I kept thinking
1:11:01.520 wait a minute how come this old guy knows so much for period philosophy how come he's so
1:11:08.080 how come he expresses it so clearly and yeah it is it you know somehow cognitive dissonance or
1:11:16.000 something you know it's not often that one meets people with those attributes and especially an
1:11:26.000 old philosopher you know I would expect an old philosopher to have the opposite of those
1:11:31.360 attributes yeah I'm not being too rude here but so it was amazing and Bryce Dewitt also
1:11:38.720 was amazing during that time and he always was amazing as well but as we were leaving
1:11:43.680 Dewitt asked Papa what do you think is the most important problem in physics and Papa said
1:11:52.640 the problem of why all electrons have the same mass and Dewitt said and this is a really brilliant
1:12:01.040 answer that's interesting that that perhaps shows the difference between a physicist and a philosopher
1:12:06.560 because for me it's like this if some electrons had different masses from others I would assume
1:12:16.240 that there must be some kind of field that accounts for the different mass and I would expect
1:12:22.640 there to be that that I would expect that field to have equations of motion and to obey quantum
1:12:27.360 theory and I would want to find out what that was and so them all having the same mass is a
1:12:35.600 known problem for me so I thought it was a very nice answer yeah that is and not to I mean it's not
1:12:44.160 a perfect analogy because obviously you're still a very young man David but I I mean I have the
1:12:50.000 same feeling speaking to you how can you know everything about poetry philosophy it doesn't make
1:12:54.560 any sense but I very much appreciate your time David and this has been a lot of fun for me
1:13:00.400 and well yeah fun for me too oh I'm glad to hear that have a great night until next time okay
