00:00:00.000 Welcome to the TED interview, I'm Chris Anderson.
00:00:08.120 This is the podcast series where I sit down with the TED speaker and we get to dive
00:00:12.200 much deeper into their ideas than was possible during their TED talk.
00:00:24.640 He has a reputation of being something of a inclusive genius.
00:00:29.000 He lives by himself in a home in Oxford, working late into the night, trying to unpack
00:00:37.760 His thinking has really had a dramatic impact on how I see the world.
00:00:41.840 Here's the thing, most scientists would tell you that human beings aren't just that significant.
00:00:49.200 We are just this little speck of dust and a random planet in a obscure part of the universe.
00:00:58.760 He actually says people matter, and the reason they matter is that they are incubating
00:01:06.000 In David's view, knowledge is a force of almost unlimited power in the universe, and also
00:01:15.880 We can survive, and we can fail to survive, but it depends not on chance, but on whether
00:01:27.160 We're overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed
00:01:31.680 are now history, and if we want to be the exception to that, then logically our only hope
00:01:39.320 is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species and our civilization from
00:01:45.200 all the others, namely our ability to create new explanations, new knowledge, to be a hub
00:01:55.400 David's thinking about knowledge has had a huge impact on me personally.
00:01:59.720 In a book called The Fabric of Reality, David argued that the way in which we think of
00:02:04.400 knowledge has broken up into all these different fields is misguided, actually all of knowledge
00:02:08.800 is connected, and if we spent a bit more time understanding those connections, understanding
00:02:14.240 the context of what we know, that is where real understanding comes from, where the real
00:02:21.200 Believe it or not, I honestly think it was reading that book that finally gave me the
00:02:25.200 courage 18 years ago to leave my company and take over leadership of Ted, which back then
00:02:31.000 was an annual conference in California, devoted to bringing together technology, entertainment
00:02:37.760 You see, if Deutsch was right, the sharing of accessible knowledge between different disciplines
00:02:43.920 wasn't just a short-term fad and wasn't just limited to those three subjects, it was
00:02:51.840 So he inspired me to take the leap, and here we are, and honestly, David, it's an honor
00:02:59.840 Well, it's very nice to be here, and thanks for the dramatic introduction, and I'm very
00:03:07.400 So David, in the first Ted talk you gave, you had this phrase that you quoted really
00:03:14.720 Stephen Hawking referred to humans as basically chemical scum on the surface of an obscure
00:03:22.680 And that's actually quite a common view of how science is thought of as treating humans.
00:03:29.600 We started thinking we were the center of everything, and then we gradually discovered
00:03:33.120 that no, we're just a planet revolving around a star, and then that star is just one of
00:03:37.200 100 billion in a galaxy, and that galaxy is one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies,
00:03:41.560 and goodness knows, we become very quickly, completely insignificant.
00:03:47.800 You, I think, disagree with that characterization.
00:03:51.160 And you're right, that's the prevailing view, because that's the view that's kind of forced
00:03:57.320 on us by a narrow conception of what science is.
00:04:02.240 According to that view, you classify things in the universe in a sort of hierarchy of
00:04:09.680 more massive and powerful versus less massive, and so on.
00:04:14.200 And so we used to the fact that the big objects, like the supermassive black holes in the
00:04:21.760 center of a galaxy, affect a star, can rip a star to pieces, but the star being ripped
00:04:28.880 to pieces hardly affects the supermassive black hole.
00:04:32.720 And it's the same with the sun and the solar system, you know, the sun affects the earth,
00:04:37.960 but the earth barely affects the sun and so on.
00:04:40.920 But the funny thing is, on earth, on the surface of the earth, everything's the other
00:04:49.640 Everywhere you look, you see the effects of life on earth and life.
00:04:55.640 Every living thing that you see is the result of the action of a single molecule, or two
00:05:03.280 molecules or something, depending on what kind of organism it is.
00:05:08.200 So this sub-microscopic entity commands vast resources.
00:05:15.480 Now humans take this to a wholly different level where we are capable of becoming cosmically
00:05:22.200 significant, not just dominating the surface of a planet, but dominating the galaxy and
00:05:29.640 Well, how does that mean by kind of star-tract like exploration or something else?
00:05:35.800 Yes, star-tract or rather colonisation, it's what we do.
00:05:43.600 Humans evolved unlike all other existing organisms to find new environments which are initially
00:05:55.040 lethal to them and to change the environment such that they can live comfortably there.
00:06:01.480 Here I am sitting in Oxford and if it weren't for technology, I would die within hours
00:06:09.240 because without clothes, without shelter, without medical attention, without sources of
00:06:15.280 food from far away, I would be very hard put to it to forage and the territory here
00:06:23.800 supported only a tiny number of people in the early days of our species whereas now it supports
00:06:30.600 And so the difference between your survival and otherwise is human knowledge turned into technology
00:06:38.800 which has built the house, the central heating, the clothes and so forth that keep you alive.
00:06:48.080 And I mean when you talk about like that humans kind of have indefinite impact on the
00:06:52.840 universe through star-tract like expansion out, like at first glance a lot of people
00:06:58.080 listen to that will say, well already that's sounding a little silly, that science fiction
00:07:06.280 But your whole second book, this idea of the beginning of infinity, is arguing that knowledge
00:07:11.760 in principle has infinite reach and therefore if you don't include that in your worldview,
00:07:17.280 you are missing out on something fundamentally important.
00:07:20.960 So talk a bit more about how we could think of that reach of knowledge.
00:07:28.000 It's more illuminating to think of this the other way around.
00:07:31.480 So suppose there were some extraterrestrial beings, intelligent beings looking around at
00:07:37.320 the stars from let's say 100 light years away or something in the galaxy and they would
00:07:43.200 see various stars and they might use astrophysics to predict what these stars will do.
00:07:54.360 For example, the fact that there's oxygen in the atmosphere which tells them that there's
00:07:59.920 life here and then they would detect if they kept watching the earth for a while.
00:08:04.640 I mean I'm kind of imagining them with technology similar to ours.
00:08:09.080 They could detect more if they had better technology.
00:08:11.680 But if they watched the earth for a couple of decades, they would see that the mean
00:08:16.840 temperature of the planet is changing faster than it possibly could.
00:08:22.360 The artificial intervention can change the temperature of the earth as fast as it has
00:08:28.360 This is inexplicable without the presence of intelligent beings.
00:08:33.560 And if they then ask themselves, well this influence, the influence that affected the
00:08:38.560 atmosphere of that planet, could it possibly affect us?
00:08:43.120 And the answer is yes because the issue of whether a spaceship can get there is a matter
00:08:52.480 of what we decide to do and it's also a matter of the laws of physics.
00:08:57.440 So David, I think it's important almost now in this conversation to bear in mind that the
00:09:03.040 way you think by thinking in sort of theoretical terms about what knowledge might in
00:09:12.760 That has implications for how we should think of human beings and our role in the world.
00:09:20.680 And so when we talk about aliens and we talk about the potential for exploration, you're
00:09:25.800 not saying that, hey this is going to happen anytime soon.
00:09:28.280 What you're saying is it is in principle possible for this species that has evolved on earth
00:09:36.280 to have a future that is imaginable, it may not happen, but it is imaginable where it can
00:09:42.440 become indefinitely more influential in our solar system, eventually maybe our galaxy and
00:09:50.560 And so it's that fact that that is possible in principle, which creates this anchor, this
00:09:57.000 fundamental idea that knowledge, there's no limit to how powerful an influence it can
00:10:03.120 eventually have, starting with Oxford and central heating and moving out in theory,
00:10:08.880 indefinitely beyond and that that is a remarkable fact that needs explaining.
00:10:13.320 Yes, you asked about the cosmic significance, so the answer that I give to explain it in some
00:10:20.440 sense must involve things beyond everyday life.
00:10:24.000 But everyday life as we see it would have been regarded as completely magical even a few
00:10:29.840 centuries ago, let alone for the most of the period of the human species.
00:10:35.200 For example, you know, I can sit in Oxford and look a bit beyond my house and look up
00:10:42.160 Now the fact that a metallic object weighing a hundred tons is flying there at 500 miles
00:10:47.920 an hour and has come from another continent, that is as much of a jump from natural human
00:10:57.440 beings as what we're discussing, this kind of space travel space exploration is from where
00:11:04.360 In fact, I think comparing those two, I guess we have already come further in terms of
00:11:10.720 knowledge than what lies between us and space exploration.
00:11:14.600 I'm not saying exploring the galaxy that would require more knowledge, but that's all
00:11:21.240 If you're a scientist and you're asked, is so and so possible, you have to use laws
00:11:27.880 You can't say, well, my intuition is that that will never happen because our knowledge
00:11:32.920 of the laws of nature is far superior to our intuition, which after all was formed in
00:11:39.520 the past and was formed in a very narrow set of circumstances.
00:11:46.360 And so this is really a radical counter view to what I would say is even a traditional
00:11:55.640 biologist view, which is that we should be more humble as a species.
00:12:00.760 Yes, we have our extraordinary skills, but frankly, every species has its extraordinary
00:12:06.560 skills where we're good at language and we can build these amazing things.
00:12:10.680 But you know, an elephant has thousands of muscles in its trunk and the exquisite way in
00:12:18.400 That's like nothing else we can do, ants and bees have these extraordinary social lives.
00:12:23.880 The species is actually in a very real sense equally evolved as we are because it's been
00:12:29.200 evolving for exactly as long from the original source of life on Earth.
00:12:33.800 So there is no special status in biology to humans and we should we should come off our
00:12:44.000 Now, the implication of what you're saying is actually that's not quite right that knowledge
00:12:49.200 which somehow became part of the human evolutionary story at some point is special and
00:12:55.400 allows this particular species to do things that are not just a different kind of thing
00:13:03.680 Yes, first of all, what gives living things their miraculous power compared with non-living
00:13:10.680 things compared with most of the things in the universe is likewise just knowledge.
00:13:16.360 It is encoded in what is really a computer program in the DNA molecule.
00:13:21.360 Ah, so in your articulation of it, knowledge is something much broader than a worldview
00:13:32.160 Knowledge isn't just a matter of relief and it's not just a matter of human psychology.
00:13:41.800 Knowledge is information that has a causal power.
00:13:44.360 That's a beautifully crisp definition and that's something about three or four definitions
00:13:50.440 of knowledge in my thinking about this and that's my present one.
00:13:55.760 I get this more general concept of knowledge from the philosopher Karl Popper who spoke
00:14:01.840 of knowledge without a knowing subject and the two main types of knowledge that he was
00:14:08.400 interested in was scientific knowledge in human minds on the one hand and knowledge in
00:14:16.280 the form of adaptations in genes of living organisms on the other hand.
00:14:22.840 Now that second type of knowledge is not knowledge in a knowing subject, but nevertheless
00:14:29.320 it's information that is spectacularly honed for its ability to cause physical effects.
00:14:38.360 So the genes for the eye can cause physical effects of focusing which can then change the
00:14:45.440 trajectory of the animal which can then make it kill another animal or escape from another
00:14:52.840 And the program in DNA has punched above its weight by a vast factor.
00:14:59.320 Now humans can transcend that in at least two ways.
00:15:05.120 One is that the amount of information in our brains is vastly more than the amount in
00:15:14.480 So the DNA has built up knowledge by evolution and so on, but we have added to that both
00:15:24.520 And the brain simply holds more bits of information than DNA does.
00:15:29.880 And the other thing is, which is more important, that humans have a different kind of
00:15:35.560 knowledge, namely humans have explanatory knowledge, humans have understanding.
00:15:41.920 And I argue in my second book that explanatory knowledge is the stuff that has infinite
00:15:49.240 It seems unlikely that biological evolution could ever let's say move an animal to the
00:15:57.960 moon and back, but we know that human technology, explanatory knowledge can do that.
00:16:06.960 So what happened at some point along the evolutionary chain, these minds were created that
00:16:11.600 were capable of a different, more powerful kind of knowledge and explanatory knowledge.
00:16:16.040 So this seems to me to come right then to the heart of why you believe we are not just
00:16:23.200 And to me, it's a profoundly inspiring view in many ways of how we can think of who we
00:16:29.480 are, which is that, for whatever reason, we have found ourselves in this moment in history
00:16:34.320 where we have embarked on a journey that has potentially unlimited reach.
00:16:44.000 There is no dream that in principle humans couldn't dream of being part of.
00:16:51.640 And it may, maybe it's not us in the end, it's some success species, but we are part
00:17:03.000 Well, it has the limits of the laws of physics other than the laws of physics.
00:17:09.520 Humans evolved the ability to do what you've just said at least 100,000 years ago.
00:17:19.640 Now, in much the same way, the whole universe starting 14 points something billion years
00:17:27.680 ago, for the first billion years or so, all sorts of new things were happening, a supermassive
00:17:36.200 black holes were forming, galaxies were forming, hydrogen was ionized and the deionized
00:17:42.040 and then new elements were formed and so on, after about a billion, I think it's about
00:17:47.040 a billion years, I could be wrong, something like that.
00:17:51.040 Nothing new happened in the cosmos, stars were formed, they exploded, planetary systems
00:17:59.400 were formed, new elements were spewed into the interplanetary gas again and again and again.
00:18:06.920 And it was just boring for about 13 billion years.
00:18:11.520 And then creativity happened and we are at the phase change where things are from now on,
00:18:22.160 and that is if we plow our cards right, if it's not, it might not happen or someone else
00:18:28.080 But this phase change changes the whole nature of the cosmos.
00:18:32.480 For example, in the first 14 billion years, the rule was that big things affect small
00:18:39.880 things and small things do not affect big things much.
00:18:44.240 After the phase change, everything is determined by small things, small things affect
00:18:50.000 large things and what is the determining factor is not mass or power or energy but information
00:18:59.080 and specifically the kind of information that has physical effects and namely knowledge.
00:19:05.560 Well, that's the most thrilling history of the universe, I've actually heard, but you
00:19:10.840 used to learn in there that I need you to explain that.
00:19:13.120 You said 13 billion years, 12 billion of those were boring, then creativity happened.
00:19:21.800 Well, human type creativity is different from the creativity of the biosphere in that
00:19:30.360 human creativity can form models of the world that say not only what will happen but why.
00:19:38.440 So an explanation, for example, is something that captures an aspect of the world that
00:19:46.600 So explanations explain the scene in terms of the unseen.
00:19:52.120 Whereas biological knowledge is only what works.
00:19:55.600 The eye is like a camera because it gradually moved towards that shape because the animals
00:20:10.640 Okay, so the reason for the existence of a camera is because some humans somewhere had
00:20:17.720 this explanatory theory based on these ideas about the invisible, these ideas about optics,
00:20:25.080 about physics, about how light works and by using that pattern of ideas that allowed
00:20:31.080 them to build cameras and then a lot more beyond that.
00:20:35.560 That is what allows human type knowledge to have this universal reach.
00:20:42.840 Whereas biological knowledge, although it has enormous reach, as you said, it can make elephants
00:20:47.320 trunks and giraffes next and so on, it is actually limited because of the type of knowledge
00:20:56.000 For example, to evolve from one animal to another over, let's say, a thousand generations,
00:21:04.160 every single generation must be viable as an animal because the DNA strands have to be
00:21:11.320 able to just replicate in every single generation.
00:21:14.120 And if one of them fails, if one of them doesn't work, then the species will go extinct.
00:21:19.520 Whereas humans, as the philosopher Karl Popper said, we can let our ideas die in our
00:21:28.200 And that means that we can go through a whole bunch of sequence of ideas that aren't
00:21:34.120 viable on the way from one viable idea to the next.
00:21:42.280 What was the key thing that happened though in human history or in human evolution that
00:21:47.200 allowed this type of expansion knowledge to take off?
00:21:51.440 Almost certainly, this dates back to ancestor species.
00:21:56.720 Species before humans also had the capacity for explanatory knowledge, I believe, and also
00:22:06.160 And I have a rather heterodox theory of why we have this ability, namely, it's needed
00:22:20.000 We evolve cultural knowledge, which is memes instead of genes, and they can evolve thousands
00:22:28.600 So what happened at some point hundreds of thousands of years ago was that hominid minds
00:22:38.320 You would see a pattern in another mind and you would copy it, and that created a replication
00:22:42.680 process that was massively faster than traditional reproduction and allowed multiple things
00:22:48.200 to be explored, essentially, and some of those started to work.
00:22:51.320 The first thing that happened, even before that, that there are some species still today,
00:22:56.880 like chimpanzees and so on, that have memes, and they replicate the meme from one individual
00:23:07.720 They have mirror neurons and that kind of infrastructure in their brain, which allows them
00:23:16.600 Now, our ancestors somehow latched onto the evolutionary advantage of having memes, but they
00:23:24.600 both vastly increased the memory, but then they also evolved creativity, because humans
00:23:33.440 copy other humans by completely different method to what's used by St. Jim Panziz.
00:23:46.120 So you can watch someone doing something, let's say opening your safe cracker and you're
00:23:53.000 secretly watching someone opening their safe and you look at the combination that they enter
00:23:59.080 and then they turn one wheel and another wheel.
00:24:01.680 Now, you might go there and do the same thing, or you might open the safe by a different
00:24:09.800 You might be lowered in, like in some of those films, you might be lowered in from the
00:24:14.680 skylight and have to turn the knobs with your feet.
00:24:19.520 Now, a chimpanzee could not do that because that's not copying the behavior.
00:24:23.760 That's just copying the meaning of the behavior, but to humans, it's second nature to copy
00:24:30.320 In fact, if you go to a lecture and you understand what's in the lecture, you might go
00:24:38.840 and tell someone else, but almost certainly not in the same words that the lecturer used,
00:24:44.960 you would explain it in your own words if you understood it.
00:24:48.560 And if you didn't understand it, then you might explain it in the same words that the
00:24:53.200 You might say, well, the lecturer said so and so, but I don't know what the hell he was
00:24:59.200 So let me put this together and see if I've got this right.
00:25:01.760 So some of our ancestor species develop this ability to copy memes.
00:25:06.720 Memes, by the way, let the term is now used often just to mean sort of internet images
00:25:11.760 or animations that take off and are spread virally, which is a very narrow interpretation
00:25:16.520 of rich and dark and original intention, which is a meme is anything that can be copied
00:25:20.720 from brain to brain, whether it's an idea, a phrase, a poem, a piece of music, anything
00:25:28.400 And so this took off as a sort of biological ability in our ancestors.
00:25:33.200 And then at some point, it shifted to a whole gear where it wasn't a direct copy of
00:25:37.960 behavior that meaning of what was underlay some of these activities started to get copied.
00:25:44.520 And that's the moment when, I guess you would say, the understanding comes into the equation.
00:25:48.440 That someone is understanding someone else's intent or action and doing something based
00:25:54.720 on that understanding and understanding is I think everything almost in your view of the
00:26:00.840 I mean, say a bit more about what it is to understand something.
00:26:04.040 I use the term understanding and explanation almost interchangeably.
00:26:08.240 And explanation is something that explains what you see in terms of what you don't see.
00:26:13.840 It explains what might happen in terms of general ideas about what can happen.
00:26:21.600 So understanding transcends the initial application of what it's for.
00:26:27.600 Let's say you initially learn how to throw a ball from one person to another for fun
00:26:33.600 or you throw it as a weapon or something like that.
00:26:36.840 But then later, someone can ask what passed as a ball take and then that may allow them
00:26:43.960 to construct a better weapon or a better defense or a million other things in future generations,
00:26:51.920 which all depend on the meaning and may have nothing to do with the original application.
00:26:58.760 But I should add that this initial burst of understanding or creativity into the world was
00:27:07.760 blighted by the fact that memes tend to evolve like genes, memes tend to evolve to breed
00:27:17.480 That is, memes which can get themselves faithfully copied are preferred to ones which can't.
00:27:25.560 So regardless of whether they're true or not, regardless, right, that's their tendency.
00:27:33.720 And so initially, creativity was used only for copying ideas faithfully, which is almost
00:27:42.480 the opposite use of what we consider creativity to be used for today, which is to improve
00:27:50.880 This is why our ancestors spent a hundred thousand years basically doing nothing before
00:27:57.040 very, very slowly, they changed their lifestyle, first better tools and so on, and then
00:28:07.920 But still, improvements were extremely rare so that most people, most humans, did not experience
00:28:20.040 And so what's an example of a meme that could be reproduced but is basically not true,
00:28:25.920 it does not conform with, you know, it doesn't give any value to helping someone understand
00:28:31.560 Oh, well, I mean, Richard Dawkins' favorite example of this, and maybe the reason why he introduced
00:28:37.760 the concept is religions, I mean, you don't have to be an atheist to understand that
00:28:44.560 most religions are memes and that they are false.
00:28:49.840 So it could be that there's, you know, let me concede that there could be one religion
00:28:53.160 that's true, but that would mean that the others are false.
00:28:56.200 But also, much more prosaically, and I guess importantly, we don't expect any of our knowledge
00:29:03.360 to be completely true, you know, Newton's laws were thought to be the last word in mechanics
00:29:11.360 and gravity and dynamics and so on for hundreds of years, and then they were overturned
00:29:17.040 in quick succession by Einstein's relativity and by quantum theory.
00:29:22.120 And now we know that they are false, now they are still knowledge.
00:29:26.640 Knowledge doesn't have to be true, it just has to contain some truth, enough to be useful.
00:29:31.680 And so the key, one of the key contributors then to this take-off was the development of
00:29:37.360 processes that could distinguish between memes that were just reproducing and memes that
00:29:46.040 In other words, there was this error correcting mechanism started to take off.
00:29:52.880 So there we have to jump forward like a hundred thousand years or some hundreds of
00:29:56.560 thousands of years to the scientific revolution.
00:30:00.840 It's rather arbitrary where you date it to some, some people might say, the Renaissance
00:30:04.400 was the beginning of it, and I think that this Renaissance or revolution or enlightenment,
00:30:11.680 as I call it, tried to happen several times in human history, right back to antiquity.
00:30:18.560 And in each case, the static type memes, which prevent innovation, one, the battle.
00:30:30.920 And sometimes it lasted one generation, sometimes it lasted two generations like an ancient
00:30:37.120 And then with the scientific revolution, it took hold, and it has now been around, depending
00:30:43.800 on how you count it, it's been around for 300 years, 400 years, something like that.
00:30:50.480 And there's been exponentially improving ever since.
00:30:54.880 I think it's easy to see just how big a deal this is, that in a way you had a species that
00:30:59.720 for hundreds of thousands of years had developed this extraordinary ability to have a mental
00:31:04.960 life, but it was effectively running around in random directions, not making real progress,
00:31:12.920 because there was no way of saying, this is actually the way forward.
00:31:17.880 And what you're describing is what science did was it said, it found a way of gradually
00:31:21.920 cutting out the negative signals where someone was running into a brick wall or running
00:31:30.120 And so that creates this process whereby we gradually start to get closer to an understanding
00:31:39.480 I mean, even without the quote, even without the quote, it really is an understanding of reality.
00:31:46.000 And it matters that we slowly start to model it, in some ways, in our minds.
00:31:53.920 Now, error correction is an extremely simple concept, although very profound, I mean, absolutely
00:32:00.200 everything depends on it, since everything depends on knowledge.
00:32:04.000 And knowledge doesn't come to us on a silver platter, so everything depends on error correction.
00:32:08.720 But although that's a simple fact, arranging for that to happen is not at all simple.
00:32:18.280 So we don't understand it either on the level of how creativity works in a single human
00:32:25.640 mind, and we also don't understand what it takes in a culture for the culture to support
00:32:34.440 error correction, because it's almost paradoxical.
00:32:38.720 What we want is a system for correcting traditional knowledge, but tradition by definition
00:32:45.600 is something that stays the same over generations.
00:32:48.800 And so Carl Popper coined the phrase, a tradition of criticism.
00:32:54.040 This is an extremely unusual form of tradition.
00:32:58.840 It's happened very rarely in human history, and the one we call the scientific revolution
00:33:03.760 is the ancestor of everything good we have today.
00:33:07.720 But we don't know what it takes for a culture to have a tradition of criticism in it.
00:33:15.800 Now we are very lucky and we take for granted that we have things like the scientific community,
00:33:23.880 We take for granted that if a professor is asked a question in a seminar and says, you're
00:33:31.160 not allowed to ask that, just trust me, I'm the professor, he will be laughed at.
00:33:38.240 Although there are many areas of life where he wouldn't be laughed at, but science is
00:33:44.040 one where it's taken for granted that criticism is part of the culture.
00:33:53.800 And so in many ways it's a miracle that this ever happened, and there's a sort of fragility
00:34:00.520 It's your view that this type of knowledge liftoff almost happened, or started to happen
00:34:05.640 at other times in human history, perhaps during the Greek civilization.
00:34:18.840 We can't know because our enlightenment is the first one that's lasted for more than two
00:34:25.600 I don't think it got to where it is by accident.
00:34:30.080 It didn't get to where it is today by not being stable.
00:34:34.680 On the other hand, there definitely is no guarantee.
00:34:41.000 We could do the wrong thing repeatedly and end it.
00:34:45.120 Just one thing, though, I would like to say that when people compare our civilization
00:34:51.360 to other civilizations that have lasted for centuries or whatever, and then collapsed,
00:34:58.000 and they compare ours with theirs, like it was caused by losing self-confidence and then
00:35:03.280 the barbarians at the gates and that kind of thing, I think that's wrong because none
00:35:08.960 of the other long-lived civilizations in history has had a tradition of criticism.
00:35:20.480 They were fragile precisely because they couldn't create the knowledge to cope with unforeseen
00:35:27.080 But when you look at the world today, David, there's people like you and many others
00:35:30.680 in the scientific and other communities who are really driven by respect for science,
00:35:37.040 There are many others, including people in power, who are not.
00:35:41.040 And it can seem that we may forget the importance of a knowledge and ignore it and let
00:35:48.520 go or blow up or destroy much of the preciousness of what we've built.
00:35:54.040 Is that a lens that you have, what would you, what are you most concerned about as you
00:35:59.400 Well, I think it has always been true since the Renaissance, since with the scientific revolution
00:36:04.280 where you count the beginning of our enlightenment to be.
00:36:07.880 It's always been true that most people haven't appreciated it.
00:36:11.800 Most people have values that kind of contradict it.
00:36:16.680 So it has survived by being stable in its own terms.
00:36:21.360 And when you start referring to the political side of it, they're the equivalent of the
00:36:27.600 scientific revolution is liberal democracy or whatever you want to call the values that
00:36:38.560 And this does seem, especially the Anglo sphere part of it, does seem to be incredibly
00:36:45.400 If you look at the early to mid 20th century, the age of the great dictators, totalitarian
00:36:53.560 ideologies were sweeping the world, all the intellectuals in the world were either fascists
00:37:02.600 And in many countries, fascists and communists took over the government and caused all sorts
00:37:08.840 of damage, and if they had won, they could easily have ended civilization.
00:37:16.960 But it's, I think it's extremely significant that not one of the Anglo sphere countries
00:37:26.480 And when you say that democracy is the kind of the political equivalent of the scientific
00:37:33.320 revolution, liberal democracy is, I guess the key point I'm making there is that you
00:37:37.520 could think of a democracy, a liberal democracy as an era correcting system.
00:37:41.760 That is actually the most fundamental way to think of it.
00:37:45.120 It's not that it automatically, it doesn't automatically create good.
00:37:50.080 What it does is it weeds, it eventually weeds out the bad.
00:37:55.160 And so if you imagine human political endeavor, human endeavor generally is this sort of
00:38:01.400 a thousand flowers flourishing and trying to grow in different directions when some of
00:38:05.600 them start to grow in the wrong direction, a democratic system will reign that in say,
00:38:12.320 Let's put someone else in and try and grow differently.
00:38:14.840 Yes, peacefully, that's the thing because if it's not done peacefully, then knowledge
00:38:20.400 is destroyed in the war or in the civil war or whatever, or in the coup that overturns
00:38:27.440 The political tradition is judged by whether it can remove bad policies and bad leaders
00:38:37.080 So when people worry today about a rise in demagoguery, for example, you're reasonably
00:38:43.200 confident that the system is a correction mechanism is all kicking to gear.
00:38:48.480 Yes, I mean, this is, I mean, I can't say how little I'm concerned about that danger.
00:38:57.400 If civilization is going to be destroyed, it's not going to be destroyed by some government
00:39:10.280 And I think a lot of people will be sitting there crossing figures and hoping you are right
00:39:14.520 I mean, I think you think of the realm of the total amount of knowledge and understanding
00:39:23.800 It's not like there is, we'll discover the grand equation and suddenly we'll know all
00:39:28.280 of science that we should rather think of knowledge, almost as this growing sphere against
00:39:34.040 the unknown and the more we know, the more we know we don't know, is that the right way
00:39:41.240 So, as again, Karl Popper put it, solving problems creates new problems.
00:39:45.640 And therefore, in our infinite ignorance, we are all alike.
00:39:50.000 And maybe the reason why knowledge of the human type has this infinite scope and could
00:39:58.400 take us across the galaxy or whatever and also, you know, down to nanotechnology and all
00:40:04.240 that is because of the special relationship that human minds have with the laws of physics.
00:40:13.160 It's this explanatory knowledge that human minds are capable of that can see beyond the
00:40:21.320 So we can look up in the sky and see a cold, tiny dot of what looks like cold white light.
00:40:29.720 And we know that that is actually a star, which means it's actually a million miles
00:40:36.200 across and it's at 25 million degrees in its interior and 6,000 degrees on its surface.
00:40:43.760 And if we went there, we'd be fried to a crisp so we can never experience it, at least
00:40:54.760 We can sit here and know about it in enormous detail and in ever increasing detail.
00:41:01.480 The reason that this is possible, as I said, is because human minds and explanatory knowledge
00:41:08.600 has a special relationship with the laws of nature.
00:41:12.600 So this seems implausible to all out of people, right?
00:41:16.360 A lot of people would say, look, every species knows something.
00:41:18.960 A dog knows that a bone tastes delicious, but it doesn't know scientific theory.
00:41:25.360 We know a set amount of scientific theory, but it's ridiculous to imagine that we could
00:41:29.360 know that there must be a whole lot of things out there, that we are never even in principle
00:41:42.880 There are two sites that comparison, first you compare the dog with a human and then you compare
00:41:47.960 with a human to the putative, unknowable things that there might be out there.
00:41:56.080 I've already explained why the dog is inherently different from us.
00:41:59.480 It's because the dog knows that the bone tastes good because it's some of its ancestors
00:42:07.080 And the dog doesn't actually know anything, it's it's genes know that.
00:42:11.440 And there are certain types of things that can become known that way, but the vast majority
00:42:16.920 of things in the world in the universe cannot become known that way because the dog cannot
00:42:21.920 try to eat the sun and be burned and that kind of thing.
00:42:25.600 No one could gain the knowledge of the sun by that same method.
00:42:29.360 Now the other thing, what if there was knowledge out there, what the things out there
00:42:35.960 Well, as a logical possibility, of course, it's always possible that there are incomprehensible
00:42:44.440 But I have argued that taking that seriously is exactly the same as a belief in the supernatural
00:42:51.760 because you can never have an explanation of the form.
00:42:56.360 This thing that can have an effect on us can never be understood.
00:43:01.680 Because if it can have an effect, we can theorize about what causes the effect and we can
00:43:08.920 And it's your belief that the type of experti knowledge that we have can wrap around
00:43:15.520 any imaginable explanation that could be out there.
00:43:21.480 It's not like there is sort of human knowledge and then there might be some knowledge that
00:43:25.480 gods or fairies or whatever have that is fundamentally different and more profound or other
00:43:31.920 So this makes me wonder whether in your worldview, there are similar liftoffs happening
00:43:41.440 We don't know, as you know, there's this problem of if there is intelligent life on other
00:43:49.480 planets in the galaxy, there are many arguments that say we should have seen them by now.
00:43:55.080 This is called the Fermi paradox, although I would rather call it the Fermi problem because
00:44:03.800 Suppose there are just two explanatory species in the galaxy, then having reached the explanatory
00:44:13.760 take-off like the scientific revolution in the twinkling of an eye on the cosmic scale,
00:44:19.360 we will have settled the whole galaxy and the galaxy exists on timescrows of billions
00:44:27.120 So compared with the age of the galaxy, the moment from when humans first evolved to when
00:44:33.800 humans have settled the whole galaxy is just a blink of an eye.
00:44:38.800 And therefore, the chances that two civilizations emerge at the same time is infinitesimal.
00:44:48.960 So that means that if they exist, they must be millions of years ahead of us.
00:44:53.320 And if they're millions ahead of us, why aren't they here already?
00:44:56.320 Because the argument said that they would be here already.
00:45:02.680 Well, there are lots of reasons that, first of all, one solution to the Fermi problem might
00:45:11.400 People kind of reject that because it's kind of boring, you know.
00:45:16.080 And why should we be so special, well, someone had to be, and we kind of reject that
00:45:20.640 as a possibility because there's no structure in that idea, there's nothing further
00:45:26.680 to say, but it could be true like a load of other things.
00:45:31.000 So the next possibility is, yes, the galaxy is full of a civilization and they're going
00:45:38.720 But I mean, you believe that human creativity is a fundamental part of the whole knowledge
00:45:43.440 liftoff and the aesthetic expression of that is certainly a big part of who we are.
00:45:49.480 To me, one of the puzzles is not that we don't see spaceships coming.
00:45:53.760 It's that we don't see any evidence of the galaxy having been engineered.
00:45:58.480 You know, if dolphins were to make a breakthrough and start developing periscopes that
00:46:04.040 could look up and examine the world around them and they poked them up and looked at the
00:46:08.440 surface of the earth, they would see buildings and astonishing structures
00:46:13.400 that seem to crowd for an explanation that looked like they were the objects of intentional
00:46:20.440 We look out at the galaxy and see nothing, you'd think at the very least you'd see some
00:46:24.720 sort of, you know, some stars had been convergent to spectacular artistic displays or there'd
00:46:33.320 The fact that there's no evidence of engineering suggests that the main game in town out
00:46:38.320 there is still the same old physical processes that filled the prior 13 billion boring years.
00:46:45.120 Well, so first of all, we haven't looked very carefully yet.
00:46:48.040 I mean, this kind of thing looking out for evidence of technology in other star systems
00:46:53.840 is only just beginning now and we can only detect very powerful things.
00:46:59.640 And I don't think we should take for granted that these type, although I think we should
00:47:04.720 take for granted that if an intelligent species exists, it will colonize the galaxy very
00:47:12.000 I don't think we should take for granted that it will enter this phase of type one,
00:47:19.640 For the simple reason that once you're type three civilization, what are you going to do next?
00:47:25.320 And certainly they will be capable of doing that.
00:47:28.680 But again, like us, they will have to decide what to do.
00:47:33.280 They would have to be a reason why they go for, for example, enormously increased power
00:47:41.200 I think the chances are they won't want it because they will be information based.
00:47:47.360 They will be entirely in virtual reality, except when they want to go out into the physical
00:47:54.480 And they may not want to go very far from each other because of the communication difficulty,
00:48:00.160 unless again, unless there's a strong reason for it.
00:48:03.120 So that strikes me as a really compelling solution to the problem, if you like.
00:48:07.440 Because based on your view, what matters when you have a knowledge liftoff is knowledge.
00:48:13.400 And knowledge can be encapsulated in many forms, often which can be vastly smaller even
00:48:23.800 And to me, it's possible to imagine an alien species developing ever more rich forms of
00:48:31.480 creativity in ever smaller spaces that the whole notion of physical conquest would become
00:48:38.840 just an absurdly old fashioned notion of what made life interesting.
00:48:42.920 It's like a white-bother to do that when you have infinite control over a much smaller
00:48:48.440 structure of information space that you can pattern in any way you want.
00:48:52.440 And so there's that sort of almost that conversion of the material into the virtual that
00:49:00.240 Yes, as Feynman said, there's plenty of room at the bottom, there are more like orders
00:49:07.120 of magnitude to explore in on the microscopic world than there are in the macroscopic
00:49:15.200 And once you have a civilization that is capable of interstellar travel and extending
00:49:23.960 down to the microscopic, it's not obvious what they will think best from their point
00:49:29.880 The great disadvantage of living in the galaxy is not the size of it.
00:49:35.840 It's the time, it's the fact that you can't have a coherent culture where the parts
00:49:43.080 of it are a hundred light years from each other.
00:49:45.440 Right, so right there, that's a good reason to theorize why growing intelligence would
00:49:53.360 So it's possible that you're still so taken with your history of the universe of 12
00:50:01.880 Presumably it's compatible with what you just said that it might turn out not to be 12
00:50:06.120 There might be all these spectacular takeoffs of intelligence, understanding, knowledge
00:50:11.240 in different pockets of the galaxy or of the universe, but just that we don't yet
00:50:16.920 We're not yet supposed to any of that of that history.
00:50:19.360 So there might be, I mean, I myself hope that part of the morality of any advanced civilization
00:50:26.800 would be that they would come and rescue us as soon as they found out we exist.
00:50:31.200 But here's another narrative that is compatible with what we see, which is that as a species
00:50:36.400 takes off and starts developing knowledge, that inevitably things go wrong at some point
00:50:44.400 that we inevitably create the technologies capable of destroying us, and it's either in
00:50:50.760 the nature of the dynamics of power or in the nature of the dynamics of complexity, that
00:50:56.800 something horrifying eventually goes wrong, and these attempts that lift off get wiped out.
00:51:04.960 So I'm sure that's not inevitable, and that's for exactly the same reason why unlimited
00:51:15.720 If it were inevitable, that means if it were true that everywhere in the universe, whether
00:51:21.360 it's explanatory knowledge starts taking off, it will destroy itself within, you know,
00:51:28.120 say, a thousand years, that would be a law of physics.
00:51:33.160 So if you're going to postulate that there's this law just in order to make your nightmares
00:51:36.520 come true, you may as well just to start with believing in goblins and demons.
00:51:42.560 Although there is this sort of plausible way of thinking about it, just on earth level,
00:51:47.080 which is that as technologies get more powerful, the stakes get ever higher.
00:51:51.680 We have already invented technologies that in principle, you could imagine it's not that
00:51:56.320 long before a single deranged student in a lab and might be able to engineer a virus that
00:52:01.280 could really quickly spread and take out the human race, but after staying invisible to
00:52:07.640 people while it cultures and spreads for 30 days and then suddenly boom, it's possible
00:52:12.040 to imagine that knowledge brings with it the potential for unlimited destructive power
00:52:17.880 and that as the sort of humpedy-dumpedy theory of, you know, it's easier to break things
00:52:28.560 Of course that's a possibility, because if it wasn't a possibility then continued progress
00:52:35.560 But the knowledge of how to defend civilization against existential threats is also a form
00:52:45.960 So if we fail to create that knowledge, we're doomed.
00:52:49.840 If we do create that knowledge, we're not doomed.
00:52:55.600 So the possibility is there for us to create it for, as I put it, for the good guys to
00:53:02.960 But also there is something about the bad actors that makes them progress more slowly.
00:53:20.440 And therefore they have to be in a state of mind that can tolerate being wrong and therefore
00:53:28.640 In fact, with the realistic ones that you perhaps have in mind, destroying the tradition
00:53:34.720 of criticism is the main, their main objective.
00:53:44.040 That makes them inherently trail the good guys.
00:53:51.480 There could be a breakthrough by by some of the bad guys.
00:53:54.960 That's why I say we have a moral obligation to stay ahead of them.
00:53:59.440 I mean, that's a beautifully optimistic argument in a way that there's such a thing as
00:54:03.680 a clever devil, but not as a super clever devil, because by being a devil, you're taking
00:54:07.640 away the ability to be truly clever in the long term.
00:54:19.560 I hope that I truly hope that that one works out.
00:54:22.400 I just want to ask you this last question, David, which is if you, if you could implant
00:54:27.600 in the minds of the good majority of people on this planet, a single idea, what would
00:54:36.960 I think it's got to be the idea of optimism that all evils are due to lack of knowledge.
00:54:44.560 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
00:54:46.520 So you just give a definition of optimism there that is not what most people think of as
00:54:50.480 the most people think of optimism as a feeling of hope about the future.
00:54:54.760 Your definition is different because it's so explained that.
00:54:57.280 Well, hope that isn't based on an explanatory theory is rather, I mean, isn't it, isn't
00:55:05.280 It's whistling in the dark, the optimism as I define it has to do with knowledge.
00:55:15.960 If you explain failure as being inevitable or due to some malevolent force in Superbowl
00:55:24.040 malevolent force or just the way things are, then that's a recipe for stasis, which is
00:55:35.440 Therefore, I think that all failure has to be explained in the form.
00:55:40.560 The reason we didn't succeed is that we didn't know how to.
00:55:44.840 And the knowledge of how to is in principle attainable.
00:55:50.120 We don't have it now, but we could have it in the future if we do the right thing.
00:55:56.000 In fact, it follows from this whole conception of knowledge that we've been talking about
00:56:04.760 Otherwise there would be a limitation, which would mean the supernatural and all that stuff.
00:56:09.800 The arguments are watertight all the way from the scientific worldview to optimism in
00:56:16.960 Here's how I would distill this David Deutsch worldview, which I have to say, David, I find
00:56:26.680 Here we are, this homo sapien, we've had this surprising moment of liftoff where we're
00:56:32.360 able to create new knowledge, new understanding, but it's a fragile thing.
00:56:37.480 It's full of errors, full of mistakes, if we could inspire everyone out there to adopt
00:56:44.680 the mindset that knowledge was precious and that when things go wrong on our planet,
00:56:49.840 it's not because there's some evil force there that needs punching in the gut and spitting
00:56:56.920 It's just because we're not understanding something and our job and our duty is to seek
00:57:03.240 to understand, to look for those errors, to correct them, and if we were to adopt that
00:57:08.120 mindset, then there's literally no limit to the journey that we can go on together, a journey
00:57:15.360 of growing knowledge and unlimited creativity and kind of like lives of wonder and so forth.
00:57:24.200 I mean, that's what I take from you, that knowledge is not a thing for schools, libraries
00:57:29.480 or whatever, it's this superpower that humans have developed, if they're willing to look
00:57:38.560 We must also expect to make lots of mistakes, so it's not just, you know, just knowing
00:57:46.000 that the problem is to create the knowledge, doesn't mean there's an automatic way
00:57:51.000 In fact, it's conjectural, we're going to make many mistakes, that's why we have to set
00:57:58.560 And so mistakes should be viewed as gifts in a way, as long as they learn from them and
00:58:06.800 John Wheeler said that our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible.
00:58:11.680 You look out of the world, certainly getting that part right.
00:58:18.880 David Deutsch has been such a delight to speak with you and I really thank you for those
00:58:22.960 many, many hours of, you know, I picture you, you know, and that home just sitting there dreaming,
00:58:27.240 thinking, puzzling, what you have put together from that, I think is really remarkable.
00:58:40.200 This week's show was produced by Sharon Mashihi.
00:58:57.640 Our associate producer is Kim Nadevane, Peter Sir, Special thanks to Helen Walters, our show is
00:58:56.280 mixed by David Herman and our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown.
00:59:01.080 In our next episode, I sit down with Sam Harris to discuss whether science can answer moral
00:59:08.880 The most important questions in human life are questions we have to be able to talk about.
00:59:13.840 And we have a very large proportion of humanity that is saying, okay, these most important
00:59:20.280 questions, how to live, how to cause your children to live, and what to die for.
00:59:26.440 These are questions that we're not willing to talk about rationally.
00:59:32.320 Now if you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review on Apple podcast or whatever
00:59:37.640 your listening, or find some other way of sharing with anyone you know who is curious.
