00:00:15.680 K-O-W-S 107.3 FM, Occidental, California, the what now show Monday's 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
00:00:23.200 Live on the telephone from the United Kingdom. We have David Deutsch. Good afternoon. Good evening.
00:00:28.160 Good evening. What is it, 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock when you are? It's just past 7 o'clock again.
00:00:34.960 All right, excellent. Have you had your supper? What yet? All right, well, maybe we can
00:00:40.880 stimulate your appetite of just a little bit more. Yes, I've just been playing bad news for
00:00:45.440 them, so I'm having a nice rest now. Yeah, how's your game? Bad. Well, practice, practice.
00:00:53.520 Oh, good. Thank you very much for joining us. Should I refer to you as Dr. Deutsch or Professor
00:01:00.960 David? Absolutely. I'm getting a little bit of an echo. I don't know if you're hearing any,
00:01:05.440 but it's tolerable. It's not bad at all. Okay. Yeah, I don't want to take the time to call back.
00:01:13.680 I think we're going to make do here. Okay. Are you an Oxford? Yeah. Okay, Doug. By way of introduction,
00:01:21.440 David Deutsch, fellow of the Royal Society, Israeli British physicist at the University of Oxford.
00:01:30.800 I'm reading from Wikipedia. He is a non-dependentary visiting professor in the Department of
00:01:38.720 Atomic and Laser Physics at the Center for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory of
00:01:44.160 the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field. This is going to take a moment. He pioneered the
00:01:49.920 field of quantum computation by being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum
00:01:55.520 touring machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. He's
00:02:01.920 also a proponent of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I want to go through this,
00:02:07.840 David. Hang on with me. Okay. In the Royal Society of London's announcement of Deutsch becoming a
00:02:13.200 fellow of the Royal Society a couple of years ago, the Society described Deutsch's contributions thus.
00:02:20.560 Quote, David Deutsch laid the foundations of the quantum theory of computation and has subsequently
00:02:26.640 made or participated in many of the most important advances in the field, including the discovery
00:02:32.640 of the first quantum algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum computational networks,
00:02:40.400 the first quantum error correction scheme, and several fundamental quantum universality results.
00:02:48.880 He has set the agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new interdisciplinary field made
00:02:55.520 progress in understanding its philosophical implications via a variant of the many universes
00:03:02.240 interpretation and made it comprehensible to the general public, notably in his book The Fabric
00:03:08.400 of Reality. And The Fabric of Reality is some maybe 14, 15 years old now. And the new book,
00:03:16.160 which is causing quite a buzz, is called the beginning of infinity. So we're very privileged to
00:03:23.760 have you on the show and welcome and thank you. Well, thanks for inviting me. I'm a long time,
00:03:29.760 I'm a New Yorker and I've been reading The New York Times for 55 years. And a couple of months
00:03:37.360 ago, I suppose, let's see. Yeah, in the book review, The New York Times Book Review gave the
00:03:44.160 beginning of infinity, subtitled explanations that transform the world, a very rare double page
00:03:51.840 centerfold in the book review section with the headline explaining it all. This is quite
00:04:01.200 quite a feather in your cap to be so celebrated. Yes? I was very pleased, especially since the
00:04:09.120 reviewer was David Albert, with whom I have some profound disagreements about more or less all the
00:04:16.800 issues in the book. But what we have in common though is our sense of what is important,
00:04:24.480 rather than what the answer is, and therefore each of us thinks that the other one is making really
00:04:32.000 good contributions, but is it actually right? What is important, David? The main issue in the book,
00:04:42.480 which from which all the other themes of the book flow, is what is the difference between
00:04:50.000 ideas and ways of thinking that work, that can make progress, that can get improved,
00:04:58.560 and those that can't. And this comes up in all sorts of different issues,
00:05:06.160 starting with the fact that the progress from the point of view of the human species as a whole,
00:05:11.600 is very recent and very rare. For most of human species, people would live their entire life without
00:05:20.320 ever encountering an innovation. Whereas now we take it for granted that iPhone updates come more
00:05:30.160 often than is comfortable. David, I'm going to backtrack and get off the phone and call you back.
00:05:36.720 The Echo is a nuisance and we're going to try again. Okay, I could give you another number to try.
00:05:43.360 Well, let me, let me close. I will, it'll take a couple of minutes. I'll be right back with you.
00:05:51.840 Okay, we're going to try it again. Here's a little more music. David? Hi.
00:05:57.840 Hi. We'll see if there any, if we can pull this thing off. As I said a minute ago, I wanted to,
00:06:05.760 I wanted to just take it from the top again. I hardly feel qualified to discuss
00:06:13.280 quantum anything with you, let alone physics or the higher reaches of the kind of brilliance
00:06:19.920 that you're completely, that's attributed to you. If you don't mind, there's a couple of things
00:06:27.760 that I want to offer you. First of all, this is an opportunity for you to speak to our listeners.
00:06:33.840 So I'm interested primarily in what you might feel is important for us to know. So I invite you
00:06:41.040 to address us in that manner. Okay. There are two, there are two ways to do that. One is to speak to
00:06:48.560 us, to meet us more than halfway and speak to us as the common women and men that we are here.
00:06:54.800 And then maybe later in the interview, I would happily invite you to speak to those of us
00:07:00.560 who may be familiar with, with the, the rarefied intelligence that you represent.
00:07:09.840 So would, would you do us a favor? Would you do me a favor? And, and just make a general statement
00:07:15.360 about, about the nature of our life here, the nature of the world we live in. Indeed.
00:07:22.160 Thank you, sir. Yes. So I guess the elephant in the room is that progress that we are so
00:07:31.680 used to now that we're, we're, we're, we're used to reading about new technology and new
00:07:38.240 political ideas and new moral ideas, new ways of life all the time. You pick up the newspaper
00:07:45.200 and, and you're told that something that was very familiar is soon going to disappear.
00:07:50.400 Or you're told something that was very familiar is actually wrong and you never knew this before
00:07:56.080 and so on. This is what our way of life is about nowadays. Rapid change and although a lot of
00:08:05.520 people are very cynical about it, if you take the longer term view of, of decades at a time,
00:08:12.000 this is definitely for the better. So we have to call it not just rapid change but rapid
00:08:19.920 progress and the elephant in the room is that rapid progress in that sense in the history of our
00:08:27.520 species has been exceptionally rare and our civilization is the first one ever, the first one ever
00:08:36.480 on the planet to sustain rapid progress for more than two or three generations. We've sustained it
00:08:44.000 for two or three centuries. Is our progress actually accelerating? The, the, the signs are that it is
00:08:53.040 indeed accelerating. If you, if you look at the sort of rate of change, I'm talking about the rate of
00:08:58.720 change of, the way of life of, of, of everybody, not just things like the volume of scientific
00:09:07.840 literature and so on, which is going up exponentially. But just, just in terms of the number of
00:09:14.400 things you can list on, on the fingers of one or two hands when you say, you know, I can't
00:09:20.720 imagine what life used to be like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever, before we had the
00:09:27.360 worldwide web or before we had Google and so on. Yes, I think we are now used to a lot of things
00:09:37.280 happening fast along those lines. Whereas for most of human history, even say a century ago,
00:09:44.720 a century ago, they also thought that progress was happening fast, but it was nothing compared
00:09:50.080 with the speed now. Right. And likely we're thinking how fast it is now and likely we
00:09:56.800 literally cannot imagine what, what it's going to be like in another 10 or 20 years.
00:10:01.840 That's exactly right. So it's, it's going to be unimaginably different from today. And so one
00:10:09.040 of the themes that, so I said that that was the basic theme of my book, the, the, what the difference
00:10:14.720 between what can bring about progress and what cannot bring about progress. So one of the things
00:10:21.760 that, that this tells us is that if there is going to be rapid progress continuing,
00:10:26.400 we cannot predict the future. And that raises some very interesting and important questions about
00:10:36.000 what is the rational way to think about an unknowable future? How can we plan for an unknowable
00:10:43.520 future and so on? And some of the common sense ideas about what to do in that situation are just
00:10:49.600 wrong in my opinion. For example, assume that our best technology of today is still going to be there
00:10:57.360 50 years from now. It's still going to be the best 50 years from now, which is sort of assumed
00:11:03.520 in a lot of planning is just silly. It's preposterous. Indeed, indeed, but, but then the interesting
00:11:11.760 question is what can we do? What, since we don't know the content of future technology, future
00:11:18.880 ideas, even future conceptions of right and wrong, you know, things that we think are, I think
00:11:25.360 things that we thought were fine 50 years ago are considered horrible crimes today, things
00:11:32.640 like, I don't know, beating children or racial discrimination and so on. And that is going to
00:11:39.680 accelerate too. So what can we do? I think the main thing to realize is that the same thing that causes
00:11:52.480 this horizon of predictability is the very thing, is the very thing that is our only possible
00:12:01.920 defense against it and that is rapid progress. We're going to encounter problems that we cannot
00:12:09.920 predict. And the only way to deal with that prospect is to make as much progress as we can
00:12:20.320 as in understanding the world in a fundamental way, because if you have fundamental theories,
00:12:26.880 then there is a chance that they will be able to cope with unfamiliar situations. If you
00:12:32.480 merely have parochial rules of thumb that work for the moment and in a certain situation,
00:12:38.080 then you're going to be in real trouble when the unexpected arises. And we're already doing that.
00:12:43.680 So it's not, you know, not calling for a radical change in the whole society. I think our
00:12:48.880 society is already like this. It's more that people find it scary when it is actually the reverse.
00:12:58.880 Well, it's an absolutely unprecedented opportunity.
00:13:02.640 It is. It is. And we don't, you see, we change things for the better whenever we
00:13:09.120 can see it for the better. So the unforeseen problems are going to be of the form,
00:13:13.200 something or other looked as though it was going to be good, but raised an unforeseen problem.
00:13:19.280 And that's, you know, that's not too bad. And a lot of times in the past, people intentionally
00:13:24.560 cause horrible things to happen. That's not what we're doing in our civilization.
00:13:33.200 So the title of the book, the beginning of infinity is actually an optimistic.
00:13:40.800 Or an optimism maybe isn't the right word. It's actually an intuition that we may well be
00:13:56.400 I think it's more than an intuition. I think that this follows from the best knowledge we have
00:14:03.280 about how knowledge works, what the relationship is between theoretical knowledge on the one hand
00:14:11.840 and technology on the other, the ability to change the world. And that I do call that optimism,
00:14:17.040 even though it's slightly different from the conventional meaning of the word, something like
00:14:23.600 expecting the best outcome. I don't necessarily expect the best outcome. It's just that
00:14:28.960 the best outcome is possible. That is that there are no fundamental barriers to progress.
00:14:39.600 That's the optimism in my sense. In other words, to achieve things that we want to achieve
00:14:46.960 is just a matter of knowing how. Provided we don't want to violate the laws of physics
00:14:51.920 by going faster than light or something, making a perpetual motion machine. Provided we don't
00:14:59.280 want to do that kind of thing, we can do anything if we have the right knowledge. And we already know
00:15:07.360 fortunately how knowledge is created basically through the methods of science and reason.
00:15:13.360 Right. And we also need the right heart, don't we? Yes. Well, one of the, another of the themes
00:15:22.720 of the book that comes out from this is precisely that, that moral ideas and also aesthetic ideas
00:15:32.640 that I have a whole chapter on why flowers are beautiful, objectively beautiful. And also moral ideas
00:15:41.680 are objectives, must be, there must be objectively such a thing as right and wrong. There is no
00:15:48.480 automatic way of knowing what it is, any more than there's an automatic way of knowing whether
00:15:53.360 the Higgs boson exists. What we have to do in the case of the Higgs boson of scientific
00:16:01.760 controversies is conjecture, testable theories, and then do experiments to distinguish between them.
00:16:08.960 With moral theories, we can't do tests, that you can't test experimentally whether a given goal
00:16:17.120 that you have is morally right or morally wrong. But what you can do and what is perfectly analogous
00:16:24.240 is you can apply rational criticism. You can see whether that theory meets the criteria that
00:16:33.760 it is intended to meet, whether it's consistent with other things, whether it's consistent with facts,
00:16:38.640 which we can test, and so on. And in that way, this is how the moral progress that we've made
00:16:45.520 already has happened. So there is such a thing objectively as right and wrong, objectively beautiful
00:16:53.600 and ugly, just as much as objectively true and false in science and mathematics.
00:17:00.480 Yeah, you've written in that chapter that deep truth is often beautiful and that mathematicians
00:17:08.480 and theoretical scientists call this form of beauty elegance, which you say is the beauty in
00:17:15.520 explanations. Yes, explanations are the theme that links knowledge in different fields.
00:17:26.000 So that what you just said is an example of aesthetic knowledge being linked in a way that we
00:17:32.560 don't yet understand, but which is perfectly obvious when you're participating in it.
00:17:40.880 There's a link between aesthetic knowledge about beauty and mathematical knowledge,
00:17:48.000 which is about abstractions, and also knowledge in science, which is about the laws of physics.
00:17:53.280 So explanations are the link. Explanations are statements of what is there in reality,
00:18:00.240 and why, and how it works. Are we coming to understand who we are? Are we starting to get some clarity
00:18:08.640 about human identity? The short answer is yes, but this is something that one of the least understood
00:18:17.680 things. We know who we are, what we are as animals. That is, we know quite a lot about
00:18:26.800 our evolution, and we also know quite a lot about how evolution in general takes place.
00:18:33.200 But how our minds work, which is the distinctive thing about humans that makes us
00:18:38.800 qualitatively different from every other currently existing animal on earth, is our minds.
00:18:47.760 And we don't know how those work. And there are lots of ideas which claim to know that the field
00:18:54.080 of artificial intelligence for the last 50 years has believed that it was on the verge
00:18:59.600 of creating an artificial one of these things, an artificial mind. And it hasn't yet,
00:19:06.560 and in my opinion that is because there is a very important outstanding problem about how
00:19:15.680 creativity works. And again, as I say in the book, I have learned to apply a single
00:19:23.920 criterion to all planes by people who claim that they understand the human mind. Namely,
00:19:30.960 can you make an artificial one by programming what you think is the explanation of how it works
00:19:38.720 into a computer? And no one at the moment can. And therefore, I don't take any such
00:19:44.160 claims seriously at the moment. Of course, it's definitely the case that such computer programs
00:19:55.280 can be written, but we just don't know how to do it yet.
00:20:03.840 Do you have some sense of what we're living for other than just participating in the unknown
00:20:09.520 phenomenon of being here and developing and evolving?
00:20:16.720 Yes, again, this has to do with both moral and aesthetic values. What we're trying to do,
00:20:23.120 even though many people try to deny this, they deny that they are seek trying to do what is right,
00:20:30.400 or trying to create what is actually beautiful and so on. But that is what we're trying to do.
00:20:36.000 And that is the meaning, the religions traditionally thought that the meaning was already known
00:20:47.200 or had been revealed to humans and that what our task is, is to live up to that, to enact it.
00:20:57.200 My view is the other way around, that the meaning of life is something that we are using
00:21:04.160 creativity to discover, to build, there isn't a perfectly accurate word for what we're doing.
00:21:14.240 But that we can't find the meaning of life in the world out there, nor just by
00:21:23.280 pure thought or by reference to an authority. What we have to do is form explanations
00:21:31.600 about what is right and wrong, what is better and worse, what's beautiful and ugly,
00:21:37.040 and hone those theories while also trying to meet them. At any one moment, we will meet them
00:21:44.240 imperfectly, just like scientific theories at any one moment, are only an imperfect explanation
00:21:51.920 of what the physical world is like. But through criticism and conjecture and seeking the truth,
00:22:02.800 we can eliminate the errors in what we had previously thought and thereby make progress.
00:22:08.400 And that is trying to find the meaning of life, trying to create the meaning of life,
00:22:14.640 is the meaning of life. So we want to model and articulate reality.
00:22:24.080 Yes, both moral, pathetic, as well as abstract and physical reality, yes, exactly.
00:22:34.000 Is the idea of a single universe quaint, is it already anachronistic?
00:22:39.520 In my opinion, yes, but I have to give a warning to go along with this theory that the overwhelming
00:22:50.880 majority of my colleagues among fundamental physicists who work on fundamental physics would disagree
00:22:58.960 with me. The clinging to a single universe worldview and trying to explain away both the theory
00:23:08.640 and the experiments of quantum mechanics is the majority view. Now, I think this is deplorable,
00:23:16.400 but I don't want to go around giving the impression that my view is the only one about this,
00:23:23.040 quite the contrary. I think perhaps a few of them 10% of my colleagues would agree with this,
00:23:30.960 but I think this is just a sociological phenomenon. Something went badly wrong with the physics
00:23:41.120 community round about the 1930s, and we haven't yet got over it. And it's a bit of a scandal,
00:23:50.320 I have to say. It is exactly as if paleontology, the denial that quantum mechanics described
00:24:00.800 parallel universes is exactly the same logic as denying that fossils represent dinosaurs,
00:24:09.840 that fossils are evidence of dinosaurs. So what people say is, okay, the quantum mechanics
00:24:15.680 experiments come out as if the photon in our universe was being affected by photons in other
00:24:22.720 universes and so on, but that doesn't mean that there are other universes because no one's ever
00:24:27.920 seen one. And that's the same logic as saying, okay, so dinosaurs are the only known explanation
00:24:37.600 of fossils as we see them, but no one's ever seen a dinosaur and no one ever will, and therefore
00:24:43.920 it's optional whether you say those dinosaurs are real or not. And so just as people say that
00:24:51.760 quantum mechanics is only the study of what we will see when we do an experiment is exactly the
00:24:58.800 same as saying paleontology is only the study of fossils, not the study of what animals brought
00:25:07.760 about those particular patterns in rocks. I'm not saying that the state of mind of physicists
00:25:16.880 when they try to avoid that many universes conclusions is the same as that of creationists,
00:25:25.760 but I am saying I'm afraid that the logic of their argument is identical to that of creationists
00:25:34.240 who say that there are fossils but no dinosaurs. Are you satisfied with the precision of language?
00:25:41.440 No, but that's only because new ideas, if they're fundamental, they often make existing language
00:25:55.040 misleading and imprecise. So this certainly happens in parallel universe theory and in some of
00:26:02.720 the other fields that I've worked in. But I don't, I think the idea of having a perfectly precise
00:26:09.760 language in order perhaps to get rid of all human disputes and so on. I think that's a chimera.
00:26:16.640 There's no way to do that. What we have to do is be precise as is necessary to express
00:26:26.400 the explanations that we want to express. The perfect precision is impossible. And also
00:26:31.840 terminology, language always contains also built-in assumptions, some of which will be wrong,
00:26:42.320 and therefore language contains built-in full theories. One of the ones that I described in my
00:26:49.280 first book was language contains this full theory that time flows, that the present moment
00:27:00.080 moves from yesterday to today to tomorrow. But of course nothing moves from yesterday to today
00:27:06.560 to tomorrow. Yesterday always remains where it always was behind today. So this idea of the flow of
00:27:15.520 time which is built into our very language is just a mistake. And it's one of the things that one
00:27:21.120 has to unlearn when one deals with time in physics. And that's a general thing that language
00:27:29.520 contains assumptions and theories which may be false. Do you find existence
00:27:41.520 fascinating? And more than that, do you find it worthy of ecstasy?
00:27:47.680 Yes, now here we come immediately to a place where language is perhaps not precise enough.
00:27:59.920 I think that because of the unity of these many different kinds of truth that I mentioned,
00:28:06.480 physics, morality, aesthetics, and so on, the pursuit of joy, I would say, rather than ecstasy
00:28:20.560 is really the only, on the largest scale, it's really the only token that we have that we're doing
00:28:27.920 the right thing. And yet I've immediately got to contradict what that sounds like. It sounds like a
00:28:34.480 hedonistic advocacy of a hedonistic worldview. You have to remember that, again, if we'd want to
00:28:42.960 try to fit this into the general scheme of being at the beginning of infinity, of expecting unlimited
00:28:49.520 improvement in the future, that means that we have to be critical of the criteria that we use
00:28:56.160 to be joyful about something. So while using it as a criterion, as a guide, we must not use it as an
00:29:08.800 authority. So it's not that we subordinate everything to joy or pleasure or so on, but that we use
00:29:18.640 it as a guide while being open to changing it. So we should be ready to change what we enjoy
00:29:28.240 to something better. This is, by the way, one of the things that's wrong with utilitarianism,
00:29:34.560 the idea that morality consists of maximizing one's preferences or maximizing the greatest good
00:29:43.520 of the greatest number. It assumes that our preferences are fixed or biological or so on. And in fact,
00:29:52.400 that denies the most important thing about human beings, namely that we alter our preferences.
00:30:01.200 We can improve them just as we can improve all our other ideas. Preferences are just ideas.
00:30:06.480 So the stereotype, reputation of utilitarianism is that your friend asks you
00:30:21.440 which job, which of these two job offers should I take? Which of these two jobs should I want?
00:30:28.800 It's really the question. And you say, well, choose the one that you prefer. And he says, yes,
00:30:36.080 well, don't be silly. That's what I'm asking you. I'm asking you which one I should prefer.
00:30:42.160 And utilitarianism cannot describe the meaning of that exchange, but I think it's perfectly
00:30:49.840 obvious what it means. It is possible to be undecided about what to prefer.
00:30:55.520 And this is something that only humans, again, can do because animals do have fixed preferences.
00:31:06.000 They can be trained to do one thing or another. But if one animal can be trained to do it,
00:31:10.240 then so can another. And there are things that for each animal, there are things that it is
00:31:16.400 impossible to train it to do, which seem perfectly obvious and natural to a human to do.
00:31:22.080 I'm curious why you chose to turn away from the word ecstasy.
00:31:30.080 Because ecstasy to me has a connotation of a renunciation of criticism. It's one is
00:31:41.360 one falls into an ecstasy, one is dominated by ecstasy, and it is something supposed to be primal
00:31:53.840 and beneath the level of critical thought. Whereas the thing that I'm aiming for is entirely subject
00:32:05.200 to critical thought. Do you have regard for the work of Thomas Perry and Brian Swim?
00:32:15.760 I don't know them, I'm afraid. I see. Well, among other things they produced a book called
00:32:20.000 The Universe story about 20 years ago, and it's kind of like the family album. It kind of gives us
00:32:28.320 a beautifully articulated sketch of the history of our universe, this particular universe.
00:32:38.000 I just thought you might be familiar with it. David, these days we're witnessing a tremendous
00:32:47.920 social phenomenon around so-called spiritual ideas and practices. Does the word spirit have any
00:32:56.400 real meaning? Rather than ask about the word, I would prefer to concentrate on the phenomenon.
00:33:06.080 I think this progress that I refer to at the beginning, which was caused by the pursuit of truth
00:33:16.320 and good explanations and so on, has been accompanied from the outset by various forms of rebellion
00:33:25.280 against it, so that some of them are very overt, and I think the spiritual trend that you're
00:33:36.880 referring to, if I understand correctly what you're referring to, is one of the rebellion, the sort
00:33:42.480 of rebellion against reason. It is saying that there is something more to the world than true
00:33:49.280 and false, that perhaps if we feel that something is true, that can make it true,
00:33:57.360 perhaps if we want something to be true, that can make it true. Or hope it to be true.
00:34:02.720 Or hope that is true. Of course, there is a grain of truth that, as I said earlier,
00:34:10.560 only the laws of physics stand between us and knowledge stand between us and achieving what we want,
00:34:16.160 but that's not what we mean here. The spiritual angle that I was criticizing is that
00:34:22.240 we can make things be true just by believing them to be true or hoping or wishing, as you said.
00:34:28.320 That rebellion, I think, is wholly false. It's a sort of hangover from pre-rational times,
00:34:39.920 but it also has an entirely modern aspect, which is that it is a rebellion.
00:34:48.000 The ancient spiritualism and religiousness and so on was not a rebellion against reason.
00:34:56.000 The reason, as we know it, hasn't really been invented. But the modern one is, and just for
00:35:03.040 completeness, let me say, that I think a more dangerous enemy to reason is not this overt rejection
00:35:12.800 of it in spiritualism, but the apparent acceptance or even the worship of it. The best way I can
00:35:22.400 describe this is that the French Revolution described itself as the triumph of reason. The result
00:35:34.160 was mass slaughter, including the killing of the most prominent scientists in France,
00:35:42.080 and the imposition of bloodthirsty dictatorship, followed by Napoleon, and war, and so on.
00:35:52.880 All this was done by people who believed that they were overthrowing ancient unreason
00:36:01.760 in favor of reason, but actually, and they call this the Enlightenment.
00:36:06.400 To me, this is just another rebellion. This is the Enlightenment rebellion against reason.
00:36:17.840 The Enlightenment also had another strand, which was followed more initially, followed more in
00:36:25.520 the English-speaking countries, which was in favor not of establishing,
00:36:33.280 immediately, a state called reason, which would be the ideal state in which would then not
00:36:42.240 need any further improvement. But on the contrary, to try to improve things, so that institutions
00:36:49.840 were able to correct their own errors. So this was a very gradualist and evolutionary approach
00:36:58.160 to unlimited progress. One of the paradoxes of the bad kind of application of reason
00:37:10.320 is that even if you were to succeed in doing that, it would mean that you had an
00:37:14.720 achieving your utopia. It would mean that no further progress was possible, and if no further
00:37:20.400 progress is possible, then what we were saying earlier is the essence of humanity would no longer
00:37:28.160 be possible either. Humans would just be functionaries in this idealized utopia, and there'd
00:37:34.720 be no point in being one. But in practice, it just led to violence, whereas the good side of the
00:37:44.080 enlightenment is the thing that is now the basis of our Western civilization, and has the potential
00:37:54.000 for unlimited further progress in the future. If we make the right choices, if we make the wrong
00:37:59.360 choices, we could just destroy it and go back to spaces or worse, just has happened with every
00:38:08.240 previous attempt at progress in human history. Do you sense any obligation that we have to succeed?
00:38:24.800 I suppose we do. If you recognize that you have an obligation to
00:38:33.200 future generations, then really, I don't see any alternatives, but to say that we need progress,
00:38:45.360 because progress is simply helping future on that time scales, helping future generations,
00:38:53.120 not to suffer, not to be thwarted in their attempts to improve their lives, helping them
00:39:04.080 to be better in whatever ways they turn out to want to be better, which we hope will be better
00:39:12.000 ways than we currently think are better, so everything can improve. The only alternative,
00:39:18.400 which is sometimes called sustainability, is to assume that everything that works today,
00:39:30.560 we should never do anything today that isn't going to work indefinitely, and that means,
00:39:36.080 if we take that seriously, that means that we're aiming for spaces. I know that
00:39:42.240 people who are in favor of sustainability don't think of it that way, they think of sustainability
00:39:49.360 as sustainable progress, but that is a contradiction, in fact. If you analyze that in the light
00:39:59.280 of what progress actually consists of and what is required to make progress,
00:40:05.200 unfortunately, it is impossible because progress requires conjecture and criticism,
00:40:12.800 and therefore it requires errors, and if we try to achieve an error-free state,
00:40:21.360 we will also have a progress-free state. As my old boss, John Wheeler used to say,
00:40:27.600 our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. He was speaking about
00:40:36.320 within physics, trying to improve our knowledge of the laws of physics, but the same thing
00:40:42.320 is true of all knowledge. Our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible,
00:40:49.200 and conversely, arranging things so that we don't make any mistakes, so that we can't make any
00:40:56.880 mistakes, or that we're trying to make a way of life that doesn't have mistakes,
00:41:02.720 is also necessarily a way of life that can't make progress.
00:41:10.320 You were, at one time, maybe you still are involved in a project called taking children seriously.
00:41:19.520 Yes, this is just another application of the same idea. In the broader sense,
00:41:32.000 a lot of ideas that are prevalent today are hangovers of a time of spaces,
00:41:40.720 the time of a static society that preceded what we call Western civilization. There was a gradual
00:41:48.720 change beginning round about the time of the Renaissance, and those ideas were all about
00:41:55.840 trying to keep existing knowledge the same, because they thought that all things worth knowing
00:42:01.600 had already been said perhaps in holy books and whatever, and that the whole of society was just
00:42:08.720 a gigantic machine for keeping the existing ideas, morality, knowledge, technology, ways of life
00:42:18.480 a big anger, of course religion, the same, preventing change. And if you think about
00:42:28.240 how we think about education today, it's one of the things that hasn't really caught up
00:42:35.440 with the enlightenment. When we think of what, for example, what makes a good school, a good
00:42:42.560 university, a good educational system, it's high standards. Well, high standards means
00:42:51.520 everybody, as many people as possible, should meet the standard. In other words, they should be
00:42:56.640 as alike as possible, and what's more, they should be alike by the way that was defined by the
00:43:05.040 previous generation. And really, that is the exact opposite of what we need to make progress. And as a
00:43:13.360 result, the values that are embodied in the educational system, like do as you're told and meet,
00:43:24.320 become standardized, and so on, are actually in conflict with the values of our society in the
00:43:34.960 broader sense. So, constantly issues arise about a conflict between one of the things that people
00:43:45.760 take for granted should be normal in a school or in a family between parents and children
00:43:51.520 on the one hand, and things like freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of thought,
00:43:58.560 and so on, on the other hand. And we need to, I would say, I was just going to say, emancipate
00:44:09.520 children from compulsory education, but emancipate is the wrong word, because it has a connotation
00:44:15.600 of politics. Just having freedom for children is not the same thing as it is in freeing slaves
00:44:26.400 or making women equal and so on, because what really counts with children is not so much what
00:44:36.480 they're allowed to do or not do, as how they're thinking is supposed to go. What one expects
00:44:42.960 is a good life to be for a young person, and at the moment the idea is that youth is a time
00:44:55.360 during which one becomes assimilated to the standards by which one is going to be judged when
00:45:04.400 one is older, and a freer concept, which is closer to the values of the enlightenment, is to say that
00:45:15.840 youth childhood is a time of creativity and creativity is unpredictable, and the real thing we need to
00:45:25.840 try to do is to make the whole of life like that, rather than to chew on children and young people
00:45:35.120 into an existing path. All of us, all of us, yes, amen to that. We have to wrap it up in a minute,
00:45:41.920 though, sir. I have one question, and it's this, is at least for now, is the universe or the
00:45:51.760 multiverse, anything other than blazing intelligence itself? We can make it so, well, I don't know
00:46:01.360 about anything other, but it is implied by the idea that progress is that there are no bounds on
00:46:10.160 progress, but if we play our cards right, if we want to, we can become the major thing that is
00:46:19.760 happening in the universe. Both in physical sense, that is by leaving the planet on the spaceships
00:46:29.760 and going to other planets and then to other star systems and eventually other galaxies and spreading
00:46:36.080 across the universe and making all the matter and energy there increasingly do what we want it to,
00:46:43.840 what gives us joy, what we think is right for it. And when I say we, I don't just mean humans,
00:46:50.000 and if there are any extraterrestrial doubt there, then we and they will be doing this together.
00:46:56.480 So there's only one kind of person possible in the universe. But not only in that physical sense,
00:47:03.200 but also in the moral sense, in the aesthetic sense, that we will be the thing that is deciding
00:47:11.440 what should happen next and what is beautiful. So yes, I don't think it's quite right to say
00:47:21.520 that mind will be everything, but mind can, can, if we play our cards right, if it plays
00:47:29.280 its cards right, can dominate everything, can be the most significant thing about the universe.
00:47:36.880 And we have every reason to trust it. It's not really a matter of trust because trust again
00:47:45.520 suggests that there is something immutable about the values that will come up. So trusting them
00:47:52.560 would mean that we're not going to change them, but we are in fact going to change our values.
00:47:56.720 We are doing it very fast already and we will be doing it faster.
00:48:00.480 I'm very grateful that you came and spoke to us today and many, many thank yous.
00:48:07.840 Very interesting questions. Thanks for having me on the show.
00:48:10.480 I hope to speak to you again all the best. Okay, bye bye then.
00:48:15.040 David Deutsch in Oxford, Great Britain, the author of the beginning of Infinity,
00:48:21.040 explanations that transform the world, also author of a...
