00:00:00.000 Welcome to the first episode of the Popparian podcast.
00:00:16.440 This would be a monthly podcast where you look at the life and the work of Karl Popper.
00:00:20.720 As always, I'm going to be your host, J. Lee Henry, but on today's program we have Professor
00:00:24.720 Physics at the Center of Quantum Computation at Clarity Laboratory, as well as an
00:00:30.920 He is also the author of two books that I have on my shelf here that I read more times
00:00:34.720 than I care to admit, and this is the fabric of reality and the beginning of infinity.
00:00:45.200 So for many people that have read your work or listen to your lectures, they will know that
00:00:49.200 Popper has been influential to you of your life, but I might wind things back to your
00:00:58.960 This is a story I've heard you say before, it's when you're back in your university
00:01:04.040 You're a student, I believe you're a Cambridge, and it was almost a chance encounter
00:01:11.840 I had literally just heard of Popper once before out of context.
00:01:18.160 I'd heard that he'd written a book called Conjectures and Refutations.
00:01:25.840 I thought it was a book of Conjectures and Refutations, but you know, I hadn't read it
00:01:31.720 and I hadn't read any Popper, and I only remembered the name because it's an old name.
00:01:45.240 I wanted to do research in physics, and I was very curious about finding out about the
00:01:56.840 known and unknown things about physics, but I realized that I had never really thought
00:02:07.560 And so I went to the bookshop and got a book by Bertrand Russell.
00:02:15.320 I've actually forgotten which one it was, but it had a lot about induction in it.
00:02:21.680 And so I wrote an essay about induction and how I hoped to make use of it in my future
00:02:37.840 We were supposed to meet once a term with what they call, in Cambridge, a tutor.
00:02:52.320 The tutor is kind of in charge of your moral welfare, and if you get into trouble or something,
00:03:01.040 then he's the one that you go to in the college, and he helps you out and whatever.
00:03:08.320 And my tutor was a historian called Charles Parkin.
00:03:16.640 And I never knew what to say to him on these termly physics, because it was all like,
00:03:25.040 you know, how you're doing, have you had any problems, and that wasn't, I wasn't like
00:03:39.360 So I never knew what to say, and it was always slightly awkward.
00:03:42.640 So I thought I'd send him before I went to see him, I thought I'd send him this essay.
00:03:48.880 And he said, oh, you know, very interesting, but you know, you've, you've gone about induction
00:03:56.440 Isn't that a bit, how old hat, you know, hasn't that been like refuted by this popper
00:04:04.040 And that was very rare in those days for anyone to have heard of Popper, especially
00:04:13.320 And I said, basically, no, I didn't know we had anything to do with induction, and
00:04:21.080 if anyone's heard of him, and he said, well, yeah, I think that's what they, what they
00:04:32.160 Most philosopher's science thought that Popper was ridiculous, and everybody else hadn't
00:04:38.760 His books were quite hard to get, and so I went straight to the, to the book show after
00:04:46.400 this recommendation, I think it was heffers in Cambridge, and the only book by Popper I could
00:04:56.000 find was the open society and its enemies, volumes one and two.
00:05:03.200 So volume one was about Plato, volume two was Hegel and Marx.
00:05:07.960 And I didn't see how this could be of any interest, but I thought Hegel and Marx would
00:05:12.480 be nearer, you know, nearer to the present day, at least.
00:05:17.240 So I bought that one, and I found that it, you know, it was a completely new way of looking
00:05:27.560 And I was just bold over by the sheer seriousness of the way Popper dealt with ideas.
00:05:41.080 I've been quite impressed with Bertram Russell, but Popper just outclassed him in this feature.
00:05:49.800 Both of them were quite clear in their writing, which I later found is very, very unusual
00:06:00.360 So that's how I got into Popper, and as having read that, I then bought volume one and
00:06:07.800 read that as well, and that kind of told me what volume two was really all about.
00:06:15.320 And then I slowly picked up, found whenever I passed a bookshop, I would go in and
00:06:23.360 see if there are any Popper books in there, you know, there was no Amazon in those days.
00:06:31.600 But it took me about four years to actually really get anything, like I thought Popper
00:06:41.200 was all about falsificationism, and I didn't really get the connection between his political
00:06:50.560 philosophy and his philosophy of science, I didn't really get the philosophy of science either.
00:07:00.080 But I saw that there was something there that was really, really important.
00:07:06.480 And so I carried on thinking about it, and that's how I became a Popperian.
00:07:11.800 Well, that's built up towards that thing that is so important.
00:07:15.680 And I'm going to probably come back to your answer there a little bit later on, and there's
00:07:20.760 a lot of things that ping my mind that I'm going to bring it later on.
00:07:23.680 But let's go back to one of the centralities of Popper here, and there's of course
00:07:31.040 And you have this wonderful history, I believe it's in the beginning of infinity way.
00:07:35.960 You explain this deep course of human history, and you describe it as a history, I believe,
00:07:42.720 But you describe the people alive at the time, and I think this has missed a lot of people
00:07:47.160 that have read your book, or listen to your lectures, bye.
00:07:49.520 You describe them as people that all wanted to know.
00:07:56.000 Yes, I think that our species is distinguished from other species by this capacity to know
00:08:08.160 in the human sense, that is to create explanations of the world, and I think this actually
00:08:19.560 predates our species, but all the other species that had this ability went extinct.
00:08:27.280 They're all related to our species, in the under-thousand, and those species.
00:08:35.320 They're the only survivors, and that's already a bit of a mystery, because if you have this
00:08:42.480 ability, then you're constantly trying to explain the world.
00:08:50.760 We know that it evolved relatively fast as these things go, and therefore it must have
00:08:58.600 been beneficial to the genes, that the people with these genes tended to reproduce more,
00:09:06.680 survive more, so as to propagate those genes, and therefore it must have been beneficial.
00:09:17.920 And yet, if we look at the paleontology and archaeology and so on of those times, we find
00:09:27.800 that for thousands of years at a time, the rhythm, the content of human life was unchanging.
00:09:40.640 So for an individual, an individual would live and die using the same methods of getting
00:09:50.480 food, of making tools, of organizing society or families and so on, and making campfires
00:10:03.800 They were all the same at the time of their death as at the time of their birth.
00:10:09.040 And in fact, they were the same for hundreds of generations at a time.
00:10:16.760 So what was going on, what was going on at that time for this unique ability, which had
00:10:27.400 been so useful when it evolved, not to do anything useful anymore, why didn't it?
00:10:36.560 And now we're used to creativity operating on a time scale of a year or two.
00:10:45.600 You can already tell that the things are old fashioned after a couple of years.
00:10:51.320 In those days, they weren't old fashioned over a period of 10,000 years.
00:10:59.840 And some people say, well, they already had a pleasant way of life, a way of life that suited
00:11:09.320 They didn't apply creativity to trying to make better campfires or better stone tools.
00:11:19.560 They used it for something of which there is no trace, perhaps they used it for song or
00:11:25.000 dance or having deeper relationships with their families and so on.
00:11:32.800 But that's obviously untenable because we know that they had very short life spans, that
00:11:42.120 they died of things that are very painful and unpleasant and for which the cures were very,
00:11:50.240 very simple by our standards, for example, better shoes, cooking their food, and yet
00:12:05.520 they didn't improve, they didn't improve these things over tens of thousands of years.
00:12:11.720 So they wanted better, but they didn't get it, that's what I mean.
00:12:18.920 So that's a step that for them, another step here, what were these original sources of
00:12:25.280 knowledge for, so who iron back the clock two times, as opposed to before the enlightenment,
00:12:31.000 what were the sources of knowledge, is it only coming from authority at that time?
00:12:35.920 Yes, well, it came from tradition, which is still the case today, all our knowledge is
00:12:43.480 based on tradition, but we change it faster, we improve it faster.
00:12:47.720 In those days it also came from tradition, but the tradition included traditions of stasis.
00:12:58.520 That is, the ways of dealing with ideas were fine-tuned to keep the ideas unchanged.
00:13:10.360 And the paradigmatic example of this is religions, which actually say explicitly that if
00:13:16.920 you change it, then you will suffer eternally or whatever.
00:13:25.600 It's rather unusual for traditions and ideas to explicitly say that they want to remain
00:13:32.760 in place, it's more usual for them just to be evolved to have that property.
00:13:40.440 So yes, it source of knowledge was tradition, and that was also a source of a great
00:13:49.080 That is the human condition, that our ideas are always full of errors.
00:13:55.080 But nowadays it's much less the case that they are entrenched errors.
00:14:01.160 There's still are many entrenched errors today, but our entire society and way of life
00:14:12.440 So I can see it's built in this forward to the problem situation that Papa found himself
00:14:18.200 So you mentioned the enlightenment and this important moment where authorities are rejected.
00:14:24.360 But you also go on to say that rejected authorities is not quite as important as it always
00:14:31.280 And of course, one of the things, one of the implements which people brought about to
00:14:36.400 reject authorities time was what you mentioned earlier, empiricism.
00:14:40.440 So what was the change there and what was empiricism?
00:14:45.240 Yes, as I said, the authorities had been challenged many times.
00:14:55.760 In fact, it's quite common for authority to be challenged and overturned.
00:15:00.920 But what had historically been the case is that authorities had been overturned and replaced
00:15:10.160 So there's this poem by Yates of the biggest change places, but the lash goes on.
00:15:23.320 What happened in the enlightenment was a new thing that may have also happened many
00:15:31.120 times before, less often, but on all previous occasions it had been snuffed out within
00:15:40.960 That was challenging authority for the purpose of setting up a new authority, but for the purpose
00:16:04.520 That is, the idea was that what we were rebelling to do was to have an open-ended increase
00:16:17.200 So you began to get the idea that the whole of the enlightenment would pervaded by the
00:16:22.680 idea that humans are fallible, but that we can improve.
00:16:30.520 And that the important thing is to set up conditions under which progress improvement
00:16:38.360 is possible, which contradicted almost all previous traditions, the very idea of a tradition
00:16:51.160 But with the enlightenment, Candice knew kind of tradition, which proper called tradition of criticism,
00:17:02.000 which he traces back to pre-socratic philosophers in ancient Greece, but it never took
00:17:09.760 hold as a fundamental feature of society before, or at least not as a lasting feature of society
00:17:21.520 until the European enlightenment of the 18th century.
00:17:27.000 So from that, of course, we're walking through philosophers here, some bacon and for the
00:17:32.440 Of course, one of the solutions that philosophers came up through the years for the problem
00:17:36.800 of empiricism was induction, and the idea in short that not just the unseen in some
00:17:44.960 ways resembles the scene, and of course, proper has a deep challenge to this.
00:17:50.680 So why is it that the unseen doesn't resemble the scene?
00:17:53.760 Because I know I've encountered many people myself.
00:17:56.760 This feels, it seems to feel instinctively true for many people, even many scientists in
00:18:03.880 They seem to have this instinctive feel that you can somehow gather knowledge simply
00:18:11.640 Yes, it's surprisingly tenacious this idea since it is in fact refuted all the time
00:18:25.440 So it's simply not true that the future resembles the past.
00:18:32.720 But I guess, and by the way, I should say in your quick history of philosophy, you left
00:18:40.280 out back that empiricism, when it was invented, was an enormous improvement on what went
00:18:48.360 Even though it said that knowledge comes from the senses, which is not true, that it comes
00:18:53.480 from observation, which is not true, that we can gain authority by observation and so
00:19:00.040 on, which is also not true, none of those things are true, but it was contradicting the
00:19:06.080 previous alleged sources of knowledge and authority, namely political authority from kings
00:19:15.040 and so on, and the authority of ancient writings in philosophy and science and so on,
00:19:25.360 and the authority, of course, of religion, in morality and so on.
00:19:30.080 It was challenging all those, and that was initially an enormous benefit, but it simply
00:19:39.080 wasn't true from beginning to end, that we gain knowledge in that way, and with empiricism,
00:19:50.480 as you said, came induction, the more specific idea that we get it from looking at repeated
00:19:57.200 things in the past, and we see that repeated things in the past tend to be repeated in the
00:20:02.600 Now, careful philosophers notably David Hume, but it goes right back to antiquity, noticed
00:20:13.960 that there is no such process, that no such form of justification, that no sequence of propositions
00:20:30.240 can possibly tell you anything about the next proposition, if you have some sequence of
00:20:35.760 propositions that you know nothing about the next one, then you cannot deduce anything
00:20:40.600 about the next one from the previous ones, simply a simple logical fact, and that pulls
00:20:49.360 the rug out from under empiricism, and people had known that therefore that empiricism,
00:20:55.240 that induction is invalid, but they thought that perhaps we still do it, even though it
00:21:01.280 is invalid, and there's something that, you know, that something beneficial about the universe
00:21:06.400 that just makes it so that inductions turn out to be true quite often, and it isn't
00:21:15.640 the case, that the vast majority of things that you see when you're from, when you open
00:21:21.320 your eyes in the morning to when you fall asleep at night, you have never seen before.
00:21:28.960 There is something about them that you have seen before, like when you look out of the
00:21:36.600 window in the morning and you see the sun and the clouds and so on, you have seen the
00:21:42.360 sun and clouds before, if you were to take an image of those and look at the pixels,
00:21:51.120 there would be many pixels that weren't the same as yesterday's pixels, and it would
00:21:55.280 never be the case that most of the pixels are the same as what they were yesterday.
00:22:00.920 You might not even look out of the window, you might not look out in the same way, and
00:22:06.000 So the reason why we subjectively tend to think that we're seeing the same things is
00:22:13.680 that we have a theory about what it is in the scene that is important, what it is that
00:22:21.600 will have regularities that we can rely on, and that is because we have theories to that
00:22:28.920 effect, and so this leads to the Popper's Maxim, that the theory comes first, induction
00:22:35.840 may seem to be true because we make the observations in the light of theories, come on.
00:22:50.400 My, my well phone thinks that when I say, when I say theory, I'm saying Siri, I cannot
00:23:01.120 get it, I cannot get it to rid itself of that preconception, and so it probably thinks
00:23:09.520 that it's heard the word Siri many, many times, and has thought it was Siri, many, sorry,
00:23:19.360 it's heard the word Siri, thought it meant Siri many, many times, and so this is an additional
00:23:26.120 case and make it even more sure of that in the future.
00:23:29.800 This is, of course, paraphrasing an anecdote of Poppers where he was chatting to the, was
00:23:39.240 it Adler, the psychoanalyst, one of the psychoanalysts, I think it was Adler, where
00:23:46.720 he, Adler, had just interpreted something according to his theory, and Popper said, how
00:23:54.720 And he said, in the light of my thousand-fold experience, and so Popper replied, and I suppose
00:24:03.000 with this case, your experience has become a thousand and one-fold, which supposedly Adler
00:24:13.840 But this just all goes to show that induction just isn't true.
00:24:18.560 It's not just that induction is invalid, which is logically invalid, which is something
00:24:25.480 that had been known since antiquity, but that Popper added to this, that induction just
00:24:37.000 It's not that we do it, but it's invalid, but it somehow works.
00:24:40.800 We don't do it. What we do is we have a theory first, and in the case where we're creating
00:24:45.080 new knowledge, this theory is a conjecture, which is not based on anything.
00:24:56.240 So in Popper's scheme of things, instead of starting with observation and inducing general
00:25:02.840 theories, we start with a problem, then we guess a solution.
00:25:09.800 Then we test it, and that's the place where observation comes in, like it, at step three,
00:25:17.160 Well, I might actually dig into that question a little bit there, because, of course, we've
00:25:21.960 just walked into the great problem that Popper found himself within.
00:25:25.840 In fact, I believe it's objective knowledge the book he starts it off with this, I'm going
00:25:31.680 He starts it off the book with something like, I believe I solved the problem of induction
00:25:36.920 many years ago, but no one paid any attention to it.
00:25:41.000 This goes on, and he does sound a little aggrieved that he's not being listened to, and
00:25:46.400 it's hard to blame him if he's repeating himself so often here, I imagine, but you said
00:25:52.840 It's really an interesting way to look at the world, of course, this idea that the world
00:25:56.240 I think is Popper's quote, the world is theory laden.
00:25:59.120 But you said it starts with a problem, and Popper had a quote, I believe it says, if you
00:26:04.160 want to understand someone's philosophy or theory, you need to understand their problem situation.
00:26:09.960 Why is it that knowledge starts from a problem?
00:26:13.760 Yes, by the way, it's observation that's theory laden, the world is theory laden.
00:26:20.840 Yeah, well, the reason it starts with the problem is this is how this is the only possible
00:26:27.600 way that knowledge could grow, since there is no justified or reliable or probable source
00:26:38.280 of knowledge, like observation was supposed to be, or like the holy books were supposed
00:26:43.360 to be, since there is no such thing, we have to begin with some unjustified knowledge,
00:26:54.880 and we have to have some reason for wanting to improve it, and that reason is called
00:26:59.840 a problem, and in some sense it's always consists of a conflict, either a conflict between
00:27:06.280 two ideas, you know, that oasis seems to be out there, but we know that there's just
00:27:15.880 So there's a conflict between theories which is a problem, or it might be just that the
00:27:21.560 problem might be that we would like to know how to prevent our food from spoiling so
00:27:32.640 that we are in less danger of being going hungry, and so there's a case where some factual
00:27:40.600 theories are conflicting with a moral theory about what we want or with a desire about
00:27:51.920 And the only way we can make progress from having these existing theories which are in conflict
00:27:59.200 to having theories which are in less conflict is by guessing, and that's the conjecture.
00:28:07.800 So we guess, and most of our guesses, what we do next is we criticize them, and we see
00:28:16.000 whether, for example, whether they look as though they're going to solve the problem, or
00:28:30.520 If somebody proposes as a conjecture, maybe if we put the food in the dark, maybe it won't
00:28:44.080 That's sort of, we know now that that's kind of halfway to a solution, but if you have
00:28:51.120 no explanation to go with that, then you can't distinguish it from the explanation if
00:28:57.720 we put the food in the light, it won't spoil, or if we cover the food in grass, it won't
00:29:02.520 spoil, or if we let our animals eat half of it.
00:29:06.160 So there's an infinite number of possible conjectures.
00:29:10.800 What we want is a conjecture that's a purported explanation of that will meet the problem.
00:29:18.760 And we now know that the better answer would be put where it's cool and dry.
00:29:27.840 And very slowly, general theories come out of these conjectures.
00:29:34.800 One of the conjectures that solves the particular problem has generality and turns out
00:29:47.440 And it sometimes happens, and when it does, we sort of get a leg up so that we can see
00:29:56.800 further than we saw before on the landscape of knowledge.
00:30:08.800 Well, some people listen and might instinctively say, why can't I start with a foundation?
00:30:15.360 Why can't we wind back to something that we are certain to be true?
00:30:21.840 Why can't we wind it back as, you know, so many other philosophers have done over
00:30:25.080 the years, wind it back to some first principle, some found in some foundation, and then
00:30:32.360 Yes, sort of bootstrap, pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps in a way.
00:30:48.920 Foundation, for this idea of deducing knowledge from a foundation, depends on that foundation
00:30:59.600 being secure and having in it basically all knowledge, already implicit in it.
00:31:06.000 And indeed, people did think there were such things in the past, and as I said, holy
00:31:14.200 books, but also traditions, and the trouble is that they were false.
00:31:32.680 All the things that were have been used as purported foundations have been proved wrong.
00:31:44.120 And even in pure mathematics, where it was thought that mathematical proof was the ultimate
00:31:55.640 arbiter of whether, sorry, of whether mathematical propositions are true or false, was
00:32:04.320 proved itself proved wrong in the 20th century by Kurt Gurdle.
00:32:10.680 So there are no foundations, there are no possible foundations, because of the bootstrap
00:32:20.640 problem, we'd have to justify the ultimate source of justification, and there's no justification
00:32:28.280 for an ultimate source of justification, so that's a problem.
00:32:35.320 And some people have concluded that therefore knowledge is impossible, which, again, is rather
00:32:42.760 absurd if you consider that it's not a coincidence that you and I are speaking at a distance
00:32:54.960 It's because a great deal of knowledge has gone into creating the means for us to do
00:33:02.000 So there is no knowledge, but we didn't get it from any foundation, therefore it must
00:33:11.280 How can that be, since conjectures are not judged by where they came from, well, it is because
00:33:22.080 they are judged by whether they solve the problem or not.
00:33:25.360 So we're not looking for theories that are going to be true forever.
00:33:30.520 We're looking for ways of correcting mistakes in our existing theories, if they are problematic.
00:33:39.000 So let me, again, drill into that for a second, because, again, I'll get you to shoot
00:33:44.640 me down a little bit here, because I can imagine people listening and thinking, well, if
00:33:49.000 all we have is this error correction, and we can only be certain of or anything, and we can
00:33:53.760 never have a foundation for anything, and fallibleism is the way forward here, then it might
00:34:00.240 give some sort of soccer to the post-modernists who say, there is nothing, then there is
00:34:08.040 If we can ever be sure anything is true, then what is to say that there are those truths
00:34:12.280 that truth actually exists out there in the world?
00:34:14.320 How do we know there is an objective truth, even if we can ever be sure that we have it?
00:34:18.760 Yes, part of this is what post-modernists call truth, and therefore conclude doesn't exist,
00:34:31.520 So this is a token of how radical a change popper wrought on philosophy.
00:34:44.240 The notion of truth in popper's philosophy is different from that of post-modernism and
00:34:51.600 of all traditional philosophy, where basically knowledge was defined as justified true beliefs.
00:35:05.880 So the critical attack on that actually popper attacks all three of those alleged properties
00:35:18.240 of knowledge, but in particular the attack on justification, which is not unique to popper,
00:35:31.520 of course is one to conclude that justified true belief doesn't exist.
00:35:37.320 And if you call that truth, then truth doesn't exist, but this isn't what we call truth
00:35:45.640 What we mean by truth in everyday life is that if somebody tells me the shops are going
00:35:54.400 to shut today because of lockdown, then that is a statement that's capable of being
00:36:05.080 I can go and see whether the shop is open and shut, not with perfect reliability of course.
00:36:15.160 A shop may look open yet be shut or vice versa, and there's no limit to how misled
00:36:28.680 But nevertheless, it is meaningful to say that the statement that the shop is open is true
00:36:46.600 This theory of truth is also not original to popper, it's in a way the common sense theory
00:36:54.400 of truth, but it was made systematic by the mathematician, Tarski, who popper recounts
00:37:06.240 that he explained it to him while sitting on a park bench in Vienna.
00:37:14.160 Interestingly, Popper says that he had built his philosophy of science initially without
00:37:24.520 ever referring to truth because he was afraid that critics would say that there is no
00:37:32.600 such thing or that you can't coherently talk about that sort of thing.
00:37:38.000 It was only when Tarski explained his theory of truth as correspondence to the facts and
00:37:44.920 explained to him that this could be made mathematically rigorous as well using the idea
00:37:51.080 of meta theories that Popper with a sense of relief rewrote his stuff so as to actually
00:38:05.120 Of course, no theory that we can actually utter is going to be exactly true so that the
00:38:11.520 notion of truth in Popper's philosophy has a slightly different role.
00:38:16.120 When he says we are seeking the truth, he means we are seeking to correct errors.
00:38:21.760 But when we correct errors, there are always other errors left that we haven't noticed
00:38:27.800 and also new errors introduced by how we're removing the old error.
00:38:33.800 So we're seeking the truth means we're seeking to correct error.
00:38:37.560 But by that very fact, truth is a fundamental sort of regulating principle in the theory
00:38:48.840 Not because we can obtain absolutely true propositions but because there is a meaning to
00:38:58.840 So Popper has a very interesting quote and you touched on it about half or you touched
00:39:04.520 on it in part a few answers ago and when you said all claims to foundations or all claims
00:39:10.640 to infallibleism are proved to be wrong but Popper had a quote that went a little bit
00:39:16.240 I've seen you use it and for many to listen and they would think that doesn't sound
00:39:20.600 quite right when I first hear it but it does sink sin and seems to have a lot of truth to
00:39:26.320 So my key to explain it in Popper says that I believe it's like this.
00:39:28.200 He says the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the source of all tyranny.
00:39:33.480 So not just infallibleism is wrong but it's always going to lead to tyranny as well.
00:39:43.200 So let me first say that that is not an argument against, against infallibleism.
00:39:54.640 It just because it leads to bad consequences that we don't like doesn't mean it's false.
00:40:01.200 So the actual argument for fallibleism doesn't involve this fact that contradicting it
00:40:12.520 However, having knocked down all claims to infallibleism, we can then turn to this other
00:40:23.840 important fact which is also like everywhere in Popper that claims to, well it goes both
00:40:38.400 ways I suppose, claims to have an infallible source of truth leads to tyranny because if
00:40:46.760 you are obviously right then somebody who contradicts you is obviously wrong and that
00:40:53.720 is an automatic justification for using force against them if they insist on pursuing
00:41:05.920 If you want to use force when you fail to persuade somebody, you need to explain at least
00:41:17.800 to yourself but in practice to your followers and to those who would otherwise stop you
00:41:24.680 and perhaps even to your victims, why it should be you imposing your will on them by force
00:41:37.800 You might say that in some ideologies the ideology just says that the stronger person has
00:41:47.160 And it's never really like that, that that's always just a paraphrase because it's
00:41:54.160 always in the form, I have this quality like belonging to the master race or something
00:42:06.840 or having the divine right of kings or whatever which arguably gives me the right because
00:42:16.800 if you didn't have that then then such and such a disaster would occur and so authority
00:42:25.640 about ideas leads inevitably to authority in the political sense and vice versa.
00:42:38.240 I hope you're enjoying the podcast so far and I apologize for this brief interruption
00:42:42.040 but I will take this moment to briefly send out a plug for the podcast itself.
00:42:46.200 The preparing podcast is something that I've been planning for quite a while and it's
00:42:49.760 something that I want to keep running month to month but to do so it's going to need your
00:42:54.520 If you're willing or able or interested please go to the links below the podcast and
00:43:01.160 It will be your help as listeners that keeps the podcast going and keeps the content coming
00:43:05.520 out and I thank you in advance and with that said we will now return to the second
00:43:16.840 So that's step into that political sense then and to those first two books that you picked
00:43:21.600 up the open society and its enemies and we touched on it a fair bit there but one of the
00:43:27.560 central things that Papa gets to when he starts to apply his theory of science across
00:43:32.840 to social matters and politics is he looks at this history of philosophy and he looks
00:43:39.760 at democracy and he says the big problem throughout the years is that people don't really
00:43:45.480 understand democracy even though they have it they think it's about choosing the right
00:43:50.440 leader and how to get the best leader or how to get the best policy and Papa famously
00:43:54.720 says it's got nothing to do with any of that so I want you to take us to the open society
00:43:59.480 and that fund that first fundamental question that he begins to open up there.
00:44:05.000 Yes, as in many of Papa's advances it starts with the problem and it changes the question
00:44:16.160 that has traditionally been asked about that problem to a different question.
00:44:22.520 So in regard to science it changes the question from how do we extract theories from observation
00:44:33.680 and says instead no actually we don't and the real problem is how can we improve our existing
00:44:42.400 theories and in political philosophy he expresses the traditional view as the who should
00:45:00.960 rule view that he says all traditional political political philosophies have just assumed
00:45:06.600 that the problem is we need to find who should rule and how to ensure that that person
00:45:16.360 or people get to rule and that they are they are ruling and he says that that that is
00:45:26.200 a bad question because every answer what's his phrase something like cries out for authoritarianism
00:45:40.440 because if you had an answer to who should rule which was the right answer then it would
00:45:45.240 justify you in using force against anyone who challenges the ruler.
00:45:51.880 He is again the authority in regard to politics creates a spurious authority in regard to knowledge
00:46:01.640 So he says let's replace that by a better question which you know he kind of says we should
00:46:08.680 have been the real question all the time namely given that the rulers will make mistakes
00:46:16.800 how can we set things up so that their mistakes can be corrected and the rulers themselves
00:46:21.840 can be replaced without violence so the problem within in politics being being the discipline
00:46:32.240 of how force should be used basically how laws should be made and enforced how do we improve
00:46:49.120 policies and replace rulers without violence and he says that democracy is the the various
00:47:01.360 forms of democracy are jointly the best ways of solving that problem I would like to
00:47:11.680 phrase that in terms of legitimacy they are way of legitimizing obeying the law when
00:47:21.840 you disagree with it that it has gone through the democratic process is a very powerful
00:47:31.800 way of legitimizing that because otherwise you have to say that you would prefer that
00:47:39.200 you impose your theories and therefore democratic systems have to be judged not as ways
00:47:49.040 of implementing the rule of the people with their people being sort of imaginary thing
00:47:56.880 that is imagined to rule under democracy but it is instead the solution of how do we best
00:48:09.840 remove ideas from being policies and the answer is through various systems of voting there's
00:48:20.880 an interest in side point of this and I believe I heard you say in it a few years ago and
00:48:26.400 I believe it comes from Popper you were saying it around the question when Brexit was
00:48:31.480 still very much being debated in the public square and I think it does apply a lot today
00:48:38.240 when people have the strange tendency to look at our democracies and lament how messy they
00:48:44.080 all look and how conflicted we all feel and seem and often have the strange adoration for authoritarian regimes
00:48:52.880 I think perhaps I could be like that because it seems to work with a bit more harmony and a lot less
00:48:58.720 mess and open in fighting and you've said this and of course I think it's from Popper he says
00:49:04.720 of course if democracy is all about the best error correcting system the error correct bad leaders
00:49:11.920 and bad policies it is also the case that systems that are good at error correcting are going
00:49:18.480 to make more mistakes yes they're going to make more mistakes more small mistakes
00:49:26.480 the authoritarian systems of course always collapse eventually because they are less able to
00:49:35.440 solve problems that the whole point and so you can have by the way it's so it's we tend to look
00:49:46.560 at long-lived authoritarian systems like long-lived monarchies or the Egyptian pharaohs and so on
00:49:57.360 but most authoritarian systems don't last longer than the dictator or even shorter than that
00:50:05.360 the practice of entrenching particular ideas and particular leaders
00:50:20.160 is not itself a source of knowledge is going to entrench mistakes and it's only a matter of time
00:50:28.560 until a problem comes along that the knowledge in that system can't solve and where the ideas
00:50:38.320 that would solve it don't come into existence because proposing rival ideas has been suppressed in
00:50:48.480 that system so the the mirage is that we see some long-lived authoritarian system
00:51:03.680 and we imagine that it's going to last forever because it says it will
00:51:08.240 and we compare it with the messiness and working across purposes that happens in democratic
00:51:19.120 systems and we say look here people are working against each other there in that system
00:51:23.680 they're all working towards one end okay so the end might be slightly wrong but at least they're
00:51:28.880 making progress you know and and then it collapses I remember that by the way this reminds me that
00:51:46.400 Sanghai wrote a book called Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984 so there must have been before
00:51:54.000 1984 this book was written and I remember how how people
00:52:04.000 ridiculed this the idea that that the Soviet Union is going to collapse was you know by induction
00:52:12.400 they they had seen it lasting for decades unchanged in its system the idea that it would collapse
00:52:19.120 was absurd at science fiction stories I remember science fiction stories about the distant future
00:52:26.800 you know the two or three hundred years ahead had stories about the Soviet Union and the United
00:52:33.600 States as they will be in the three or four hundred years time as as as if as if neither of them was
00:52:41.600 going to change and it so this idea that the authoritarian system was unstable seemed ridiculous
00:52:56.400 but it was perfectly true and they always are even the ones that last for thousands of years
00:53:03.120 that which are the remote exceptions cannot deal with problems for example the Egyptian one was
00:53:12.960 repeatedly overthrown and made very little progress in in the thousands of years that it existed for
00:53:22.480 so on the other side of this again focusing in on a lot of the feeling that some people seem to
00:53:28.480 have about democracy today and you touched on a little bit there this idea of consensus people have
00:53:35.360 this idea that is very important to have consensus inside democracy and of course part of
00:53:42.960 purpose philosophy of of political systems not just involves not selecting the best leader but
00:53:50.480 under remove bad leaders quickly but it also has an implication that once we do elect leaders that
00:53:58.480 they actually had a chance to govern and implement their policy and that runs against this
00:54:04.800 common notion today that we should all be compromised and it should be consensus on everything
00:54:09.200 yes well a compromise by definition is something that nobody believes is a good idea
00:54:14.240 or at least nobody believes it's the best available idea and so it starts out with that inherent
00:54:25.040 disadvantage consensus pleases no one but but there's a worse thing about consensus which is that
00:54:37.120 it violates papa's criterion that that is when consensus policies that nobody advocated are
00:54:49.520 put into effect then whenever there's a problem nobody has been proved wrong in particular the
00:54:56.000 leaders haven't been proved wrong they have what they did was they negotiated a compromise
00:55:02.800 and then enacted a thing they didn't believe in so it impedes the removal of bad policies
00:55:15.520 and bad leaders so violates papa's criterion politicians tend to love it because politicians are
00:55:24.960 always trying to evade responsibility for when their ideas go wrong and they often do because
00:55:31.040 politicians are fallible like everybody what a politician would ideally like is a way of staying in
00:55:38.640 power and without ever being held responsible when things go wrong so they're looking for ways
00:55:47.520 of not being responsible and systems of government that have consensus like proportion
00:55:54.160 representation at their heart also have irresponsibility at their heart the ability to say
00:56:04.800 not only does the buck not stop here but doesn't stop anywhere because there was nobody
00:56:10.560 who advocated that in the first place so to wind some of papa to the current moment for a
00:56:18.080 brief interlude here it is very common these days to hear a lot of people speaking in you know
00:56:25.520 looking at the American system but also the British system back when Brexit it seems to run
00:56:29.520 across countries at different moments this and it's this it's it's a fear that democracy is
00:56:36.960 failing in some ways people say there's big in terms like democracy is at risk our very system
00:56:42.720 is about to force existential threat to our society and our system and I follow you on Twitter
00:56:48.320 and you're one of the common voices telling people that you're not so worried about this at all
00:56:53.040 and I believe you see a lot of this as a crisis of hyperbole and not a crisis of democracy so
00:57:00.720 in this world where people talk about fake news and disinformation campaigns and people seem to
00:57:06.880 worry about the whole system of democracy breaking down why are you so calm about it there's
00:57:12.960 why do you think this is not the threat and they're not they're all over react in a little bit
00:57:17.920 well so many things where do I begin first of all the the well there's this hyperbole fad
00:57:28.320 which where it there's a competitive hyperbole on on all sides where people accuse each other
00:57:37.520 of being Nazis and fascists and enemies of democracy and enemies of the human race and and and
00:57:44.880 so on over issues that even 50 years ago would have been regarded as laughably trivial
00:57:53.680 the the you know at the time of the Great Depression when millions of people were literally
00:58:04.720 going hungry in the most advanced societies in the world and where totalitarian ideologies
00:58:13.040 were making inroads and actually getting supporters you know ideologies which were literally
00:58:28.960 despite all that danger and all that suffering coming at the same time
00:58:37.440 the institutions were never seriously at risk that is the institutions in the anglo sphere let's say
00:58:47.600 where the enlightenment traditions in politics are the strongest
00:58:58.480 they although there were millions of people who were who were fascist sympathizers and communist
00:59:08.560 sympathizers and anarchists and people who blew things up and people who stage general strikes
00:59:16.160 and and so on nevertheless such people did not win elections there are very very few
00:59:29.280 adherents of extremist policies one election in
00:59:45.600 these so that level of assault on institutions of consent
00:59:55.840 seems to me it is like an order of magnitude greater than anything we see today
1:00:00.960 and yet people somehow because of this hyperbole or perhaps it's the other way around this is
1:00:07.760 what causes that hyperbole people I don't know which way around it is people seem to like the
1:00:15.200 idea that they are living in a time of momentous challenge where where the stakes are
1:00:24.800 exactly like well analogous to what the stakes were in the second world war you know where it was
1:00:34.800 good against evil where if evil wins it's it's the end of civilization and therefore fighting
1:00:44.400 against that is glorious and is worthwhile and gives meaning to life and so the more you can talk
1:00:55.920 in terms of these hyperboles the more life seems worthwhile it's as if making rapid quiet peaceful
1:01:11.120 progress which is what's actually going on all the time now isn't exciting enough for
1:01:28.000 well that's open up another aspect of that just from that answer of yours of course
1:01:35.040 another aspect of the open society here is not just democratic systems but also the society
1:01:40.480 itself and I'm going to I might introduce what I'm this question with a quote of yours I believe
1:01:46.560 you gave it in a talk recently when you talk about AGI which you spent a fair bit of time focused
1:01:51.760 on recently and the quote runs like this I'm going to cut it into two here but it says
1:01:56.800 the knowledge of how to prevent people being dangerous is counterintuitive it took our species
1:02:02.000 millennia to create it but now that we but now that we do have the knowledge okay the only way
1:02:08.080 to prevent people from being dangerous from to prevent people from being dangerous is to make them
1:02:14.240 free and that is a wonderful way when I thought it to summarize what Popper was trying to say here
1:02:22.160 but many people listening will of course think how is it that you make people free and then
1:02:26.880 that's the way to make them non-dangerously is it not the case that if people are free then they are
1:02:32.640 free to be dangerous so to speak why are people law-abiding so the traditional answer was
1:02:45.760 because they're afraid of retribution that's not true over if that were true the forces of
1:02:57.920 law and order would be totally overwhelmed as they are in societies where people do lose
1:03:05.440 respect for the legitimacy of law in those societies the political order of things gets overturned
1:03:14.400 and then you know the beggar on horseback is replaced by the beggar on foot but the lash goes on
1:03:20.800 the enlightenment created a radically new kind of society as society where there is legitimacy that
1:03:32.480 is not based on fear and obedience but is based on a reason on identification with the process
1:03:45.200 a process that one considers fair one can tolerate when when it makes a mistake
1:04:01.600 so there is a kind of miracle I think Roger Scrutin of all people pointed this out that
1:04:10.640 we don't recognize enough how much of a miracle it is that when a party loses power
1:04:22.320 in a democratic country and especially in the angler sphere they just leave they leave
1:04:33.920 not only do they leave like the the reins of power the army control of the police not only do
1:04:46.000 they leave all that behind but they would actually fight and die
1:04:55.600 to enable their opponents who they believe will ruin the country with their economic
1:05:02.080 policies or whatever to enable them to get into power now this is amazing
1:05:09.760 and it it it is counterintuitive if you think of
1:05:20.160 if you think of human interaction as being mechanical as if you omit the element of creativity
1:05:29.440 so if if no new ideas could be created then the only way that existing ideas could
1:05:36.240 could confront each other would is ultimately by violence and
1:05:47.360 the enlightenment created a different kind of society where where creativity is
1:05:52.320 harnessed to create not consensus but consent the thing about about progress is that
1:06:02.960 in the short run it involves a lot of confrontation and bickering and
1:06:09.680 disagreement about what should be done next and a lot of fuss being made but in the long run
1:06:15.360 it causes unanimous agreement so my favorite example being slavery where where a couple of hundred
1:06:23.520 years ago almost everybody in the world took for granted that slavery was a fact of life
1:06:31.200 now almost everybody in the world thinks that slavery is one of the great abominations
1:06:39.760 and this this change happened through the political process largely in the angler sphere
1:06:52.160 it's true that many societies had regulated or even abolished the slave trade or slavery itself
1:07:02.640 in the past but this was this was this was different this was not because of an idea of
1:07:11.840 that human rights transcend other considerations it was just sort of in the way that
1:07:19.040 governments often free prisoners as well criminals to create something goodwill and you know whatever
1:07:26.720 the the the west and especially the angler sphere
1:07:36.240 adopted a view about slavery that grew out of their view of themselves
1:07:45.360 it they wanted slaves to be freed for the same reason that they wanted themselves to obey the law
1:07:53.920 if laws made by a party different from their own so they identified with with the tradition of
1:08:04.320 criticism in preference to their own particular views and that there's this nice quote from
1:08:11.920 Popper as well see if I can get this right something something like a rationalist to someone
1:08:18.480 who would rather not get his way because he is failed to convince you than to get his way by
1:08:23.920 fourth yes exactly that is that that sums it up nicely so it also sum it up nicely on that
1:08:31.200 top yeah I believe this is you that said this and but I'm not sure if you got it from Popper or not
1:08:35.440 but as you were speaking there I can imagine some people thinking but is it always possible
1:08:41.360 to convince people perhaps some people are just beyond convincing and you have a quote we say
1:08:46.880 all failure is due to lack of knowledge so yeah I imagine you have a theory of that if you
1:08:53.520 fail to convince someone for whatever reason if in fact what you're saying is true then the
1:08:59.040 failure is yours yeah well it might be that they are so irrational that they didn't want to
1:09:06.400 listen to you you know you you may be right and that there but nevertheless the failure is yours
1:09:13.200 in a bigger sense because if they are irrational and not listening their very existence is a problem
1:09:21.040 which will be solved one day and and people will then realize who was being unreasonable
1:09:32.400 this this again it happens again and again in the history of our culture
1:09:38.400 and that step towards the future because some of the really interesting work that
1:09:46.240 that you did that that step beyond Popper was to to look towards the future in some ways and
1:09:52.320 you write that our our our very survival out the niche that we've carved out for ourselves
1:09:59.440 is one where you have to create knowledge that's not in your genes and of course this comes
1:10:04.160 to fret back to Popper in some ways the idea he has this famous quote of we get to let our ideas
1:10:09.600 die in our place so I might get a introduce the difference between evolutionary knowledge and
1:10:14.960 explanatory knowledge and why when we look towards the future it is so important that we continue
1:10:20.880 to create explanatory and to can can you make it too to create it as fast as possible
1:10:27.440 yes well first of all non explanatory knowledge goes extinct always so that there are no
1:10:40.240 species today left over from a billion years ago most species go extinct within within a few
1:10:51.680 million years or less so the the particular knowledge in our genes that defines our species
1:11:02.800 will not stay in existence automatically in fact what will happen unless it is saved by other
1:11:10.720 kinds of knowledge the kind of knowledge in our minds it is that it will necessarily be destroyed
1:11:19.440 and I think you should be a rather scary and and solitary thing to bear in mind that every
1:11:32.560 other species who had this ability to create knowledge in their minds is indeed extinct
1:11:42.160 some people think they're made extinct by competition with our species but whether or not that's
1:11:48.320 true we don't have a guarantee from the almighty that we shall survive
1:12:00.400 everything points in the other direction except the thing that makes us different from all
1:12:06.880 other existing species the reason so that's the reason why we have to change we have to change
1:12:15.040 our way of life so that and in the course of solving problems that arise there will always be
1:12:24.000 problems and if we are to survive the problem there isn't going to be a problem that it will
1:12:31.280 destroy us as as happens with other species then we must create a knowledge to face it the reason why
1:12:38.800 it has to be fast is I think this is something you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation
1:12:46.160 that that individuals have the power to create very large problems and the more knowledge there
1:12:56.880 is in society the more the fewer the the the the the smaller the proportion of people who are
1:13:07.120 capable of destroying society because that to some extent this has always been true I don't want
1:13:12.480 to exaggerate this too much and become you know one of these hyperbole people and gain this
1:13:19.600 Khan did a very good job of destroying civilizations and he was just one man and civilizations
1:13:31.200 have been destroyed before we don't need nuclear weapons the destroy civilizations in fact
1:13:37.280 almost all civilizations that have ever existed have been destroyed either from the outside
1:13:43.440 with fire and the sword or from the inside with just decay and failing to have a way of coping
1:13:52.800 with the next drought or famine or disease so now we have the problem that weapons of mass
1:14:05.840 destruction and so on again give individuals give the bad guys the enemies of civilization
1:14:13.520 the means of destroying civilization unless the knowledge of how to throw them is created
1:14:22.160 and well so long as the organization of few in number we have that going for us but but because
1:14:33.200 small numbers of people can create a large amount of harm that's not enough so the other thing
1:14:39.280 we have going for us is that the enemies of civilization are mistaken they believe things that aren't
1:14:48.720 true and they base their enmity to civilization on trying to entrench these untrue things
1:14:57.760 and so long as they're doing that they are impairing disabling their own ability to solve problems
1:15:10.800 that come up and that inevitably come up but also the problem they're trying to solve of how
1:15:18.800 to destroy civilization so civilizations advantage therefore is speed that is civilization a good
1:15:29.760 civilization has the advantage that can solve problems including the problem of how to defend
1:15:36.160 itself against evil doers um so before we get to a last couple of questions here there's as you
1:15:43.200 were speaking there what echoed in my ear was something really interesting I've heard you say so this
1:15:49.680 rapid need to make progress and the enemies of civilization um of course many people out there
1:15:56.400 are worried that the AIs when they come or the aliens will be enemies of civilization but again
1:16:03.440 you are not you're one of the calm voices saying it won't happen and I imagine
1:16:08.640 correct me from wrong that some of this comes from the ideas of proper that these people
1:16:13.600 are these aliens or these AIs just like us and they will have to create knowledge the same way
1:16:19.520 we have um they so yeah let's go there why why is it that you are not so worried about
1:16:27.680 these loom in AI or alien apocalypse well it it it's not that I am saying it won't happen
1:16:36.800 anymore than I'm saying but humans won't destroy civilization um as I said there's never any
1:16:43.600 guarantee it's possible that that evil doers will destroy civilization and it's possible that
1:16:51.600 civilization will make progress too slowly and will be destroyed by some unexpected problem
1:16:59.120 so it's that's always possible but but you're right to say that my view is that that it's
1:17:09.200 all about the knowledge all these these considerations about destroying or not destroying
1:17:15.360 civilization defending it are all about knowledge creation and not about the vehicle that happens
1:17:23.280 to contain the knowledge it makes no more sense to regard um silicon based intelligence
1:17:34.400 or as being more dangerous than it makes sense to regard people with a certain skin color as
1:17:43.760 being more dangerous it is only the knowledge or the lack of it which is dangerous and uh uh
1:17:53.360 A A G I's artificial general intelligence is when when they are eventually developed will
1:18:02.080 be developed to be members of a certain culture and um exactly as humans are
1:18:12.160 now and there will be members of good cultures and bad cultures the ones that are members
1:18:17.840 of bad cultures will be worse at solving problems than the ones that are members of good
1:18:24.320 cultures and uh we will there will be no difference to what I just outlined just now
1:18:31.440 that the the we we can hope that the good ones are in the majority and we can also hope
1:18:36.480 uh that for structural reasons the good ones will create knowledge faster and that that applies
1:18:43.280 to AGI's just as much as humans and you might say that the whole problem though will be about
1:18:50.000 will be located in the AGI's because they might be faster at thinking than us
1:18:56.960 but uh that's not true either because um that is confusing hardware with software
1:19:05.200 um fast hardware is available to us too we already use super computers to increase the rate at
1:19:14.400 which we solve problems and um AGI's as it were just to have super computers built in
1:19:22.560 but we can have that too uh once we have um um brain add-ons and so on if that's the way it goes
1:19:31.440 that there are many ways that that we can use technology in addition to our built-in technology
1:19:42.240 and uh as i've often said um pen and pencil or slide rules are already using add-ons to our
1:19:53.280 brains to make our problem solving faster we take that for granted um doing it with computers we
1:20:00.560 also take for granted doing it with AGI type hardware um we will take for granted you know once
1:20:09.600 we've had it for five minutes so as uh as we begin to round this up i might at first take you back
1:20:17.520 to that moment as when you were a student and you first encountered popper and you said it
1:20:23.040 it was luck and chance that you bumped into him now i'm wondering as a question of why you
1:20:29.360 think that is the case i mean this is one of those questions that when students start philosophy
1:20:33.760 they say this is um of how do we know anything it seems to be the most important question in philosophy
1:20:39.360 for many people and after all these centuries of people uh struggling with the question
1:20:44.880 popper seems to have come along and given a very good answer for it and as i i think i
1:20:49.200 quoted him earlier popper himself lamented that no one was listening to him very much
1:20:54.080 and i i've heard you have discussions i'm not i'm sure you must have interacted with it in times
1:20:58.480 when people say things like oh i'm definitely a fellowist and i believe and i'm sorry i'm not
1:21:03.520 believe but i i understand or yes there there can't be a foundation i get that and then the
1:21:09.920 language switches back and they start talking about well we must know something for certain or
1:21:13.760 if we start from this foundation here and i'm wondering why you think that the method or if you
1:21:19.520 think it is the case that the message of popper is difficult for some people to internalize when
1:21:25.360 it also seems counter to the counter intuitively very simple
1:21:31.600 uh basically i don't know and i i don't know even um counterfactually what would have happened
1:21:38.560 if charlie parka hadn't parking sorry charlie parka
1:21:45.600 told me about popper thing is i i wasn't aware of being interested in philosophy i i was and
1:21:51.920 i am a physicist i i'm interested in understanding the natural world i've got interested in
1:21:58.880 philosophical ideas because it is necessary to understand them to do the kind of physics that i do
1:22:09.680 the ideas have reached and that's taken me into other areas as well
1:22:14.240 um and it is a mystery to me why popper isn't understood as having revolutionized as having made
1:22:26.720 substantial progress in philosophy he systematically misunderstood by professional philosophers
1:22:35.680 even more than by laypeople i don't know why that is but it's not unique
1:22:42.560 um in the fabric of reality i have these four strands of of all our existing knowledge you
1:22:49.360 i where i try and fit all our existing knowledge into these four fundamental strands and it is true
1:22:56.640 of allenturing with this idea of universality people don't get it many of many of the misconceptions
1:23:03.520 about a gi are due to misunderstanding allenturing's basic idea of of computational universality
1:23:14.400 and it's the same with um uh with the neodionism the modern synthesis that that in in some
1:23:24.000 sense every every educated person pays lip service to Darwinism and yet they often express this
1:23:36.000 in terms of the survival of the fittest in terms of shows that they don't actually get it
1:23:40.800 and then you have you have people like like uh uh you know Wilson and and so on who who who suddenly
1:23:50.560 turn around and and try to explain um the history of evolution in in terms of uh species selection
1:24:01.040 and that kind of thing so it's it's it's not it's uh not an unusual thing for um progress
1:24:13.520 at the foundations which has happened um over the past century or so to be not exactly ignored
1:24:24.800 because it's it's presence is ignored but the the the it's status as changing how we ought to
1:24:35.840 look at the world has has not taken has not been taken on board i don't understand why in any of
1:24:41.920 those cases the the fourth case is um is Everett's uh many universe interpretation of quantity
1:24:48.800 which is within physics where where i'm i'm kind of rooted and there i don't i don't understand
1:24:56.320 either i i i i i i think it's a scandal that the physics physics community uh it seems that
1:25:05.520 there's an equilibrium of 10 to 15 percent of uh physicists who work on quantum theory
1:25:12.160 uh think in terms of the uh Everett's many many universes uh so-called interpretation basically
1:25:19.920 that just is quantum theory um and the rest just want to use it instrumentally i don't understand
1:25:27.440 why um but as i said it's it's it's uh it's phenomenon the 20th century perhaps it's because
1:25:35.120 20th century is the century in which philosophy itself both professional philosophy and philosophy
1:25:41.840 among uh where it has corrupted common sense um has taken a nose dive
1:25:52.160 so as a final question from that note there um you met popper we we must end on this question
1:25:59.120 you met co you met co popper uh of course many years ago so i must ask you how was that meeting
1:26:06.560 how did it come about and uh yeah what happened there uh well it was amazing um i have told this
1:26:14.480 story before as you as you uh indicate uh i went to meet him with um my boss at the time
1:26:21.520 brice to wit who's a physicist um and uh support of many universe interpretation popper had written
1:26:31.760 some very bad stuff and criticized the many universe interpretation he he just didn't get it from
1:26:38.720 from beginning to end he he he he he thought he he just completely misplaced what what the
1:26:45.360 fuss was about what the controversy was about uh so i i i had exchanged a couple of letters with
1:26:53.120 popper and he he he had replied very politely um uh and um when brice to wit came to Oxford on
1:27:04.400 sabbatical um i suggested that we tried and we were talking about these foundational issues
1:27:10.880 and i suggested that we try and go and uh go and try to speak to popper and persuade him
1:27:19.600 that he was mistaken so um uh so i i wrote to him and uh then found him we were we arranged to
1:27:30.720 meet uh we we drove there in my car and um he lived in high wickham and uh and he met us and
1:27:43.200 and talked to us very graciously i i had heard from several people that that popper in person
1:27:50.400 was very unlike what he advocated in that in regard to ideas that he was dogmatic that he got
1:27:56.640 angry when contradicted and so on so i i sort of was prepared to roll up my sleeves and
1:28:02.960 have a good old fight um their uh metaphorically uh but but uh the very opposite happened uh we sat
1:28:16.880 down we were we were served in nice tea i can't remember whether it was by his wife or not but um
1:28:24.080 um uh and he listened extremely attentively to what we were telling him um he he asked questions
1:28:36.880 uh he asked the right questions um he uh and he said that therefore he was going to have to
1:28:45.680 uh make some changes in a book that he'd just written and that he was going to have to
1:28:51.200 change a lot of things and and you know that it it seemed to go perfectly uh and and and then we got
1:28:59.040 to talking about something else uh other things that the conversation moved on to lots of interesting
1:29:05.280 topics uh both in physics and outside and i was i there there again i've told this story before
1:29:12.480 but i kept having this strange sensation that every time he said something uh and and i was thinking
1:29:22.480 oh my god i unbidden the thought came to me how weird that this old guy is so accurate and so
1:29:32.160 good at expressing popular popular in ideas and then and and instant later i thought oh yeah it's
1:29:39.200 popper so and this happened again and again during the competition uh very strange psychological
1:29:46.240 effect anyway so we we were glowing with this and and we drove back to Oxford and so on and a few
1:29:51.680 months later this book came out i forget which one it was actually uh this book that he'd been
1:29:56.800 writing came out and we eagerly look i eagerly looked at it and it didn't have any of the things
1:30:02.720 so he he he he simply remained uh with all his um misconceptions so uh there you are i don't
1:30:12.880 know what to make of that but but uh personally he he was not in the least uh harsh of putting
1:30:22.720 or dogmatic or any of those things he he he seemed to be exactly as should be according to his philosophy
1:30:33.760 and that is also a wonderful note to end the podcast on of course i'm going to link below the
1:30:39.120 podcast um i linked David's personal website you can find a link to uh is two books the fabric of
1:30:45.200 reality in the beginning of infinity but also to other lectures and his ongoing work on things
1:30:50.400 like construct uh construct a theory so i can't recommend people go there enough you will enjoy
1:30:55.680 and it's always fast then and uh David thanks for the time you've been so generous and also so
1:31:00.960 interesting as always uh thanks for coming on the podcast well thanks for having me and thanks for
