Episode 106: Karl Popper and God

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:01]  Unidentified speaker: Hello out there.

[00:00:02]  Peter: This week on The Theory of Anything podcast, we talk about Karl Popper and God. Specifically, a short interview from 1969, where he makes a case for agnosticism, asserts that all men are religious, and discusses the problem of evil. We use this as a starting point to discuss whether we live in an inherently meaningful universe, or a universe ruled by something like entropy. We discuss arguments for the former related to fine tuning, causation and beauty. Out of all the podcasts that we have done, I'd say this is one of my favorites. And I enjoyed this conversation with Bruce immensely.

[00:00:55]  Peter: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast. How are you doing, Bruce?

[00:01:01]  Bruce: I'm doing good today. I have been sick for a while, so I'm doing much better today.

[00:01:06]  Unidentified speaker: I'm so happy to hear that.

[00:01:08]  Unidentified speaker: You sound good.

[00:01:09]  Unidentified speaker: And...

[00:01:10]  Unidentified speaker: [Does that clear my throat?]

[00:01:11]  Peter: Oh yeah, well, I mean, hopefully you'll leave this discussion feeling even better.

[00:01:20]  Unidentified speaker: I think I will.

[00:01:21]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:01:23]  Peter: Well, today is a little bit of a divergence from our last three podcasts on third-way evolution, which have been very informative for me. But you know, maybe there's some connections here too. Today we're going to talk about Karl Popper on God, and then move in to a discussion on, I don't want to say religion necessarily, or God, more like this idea, do we live in a universe ruled by entropy? Or do we live in a world where meaning is something that's more built in to the fabric that defines our reality? Something that I've been thinking about.

[00:02:19]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not...

[00:02:20]  Unidentified speaker: So can I...

[00:02:21]  Unidentified speaker: I have a comment there, actually.

[00:02:23]  Bruce: I can't remember if I said this, like we had a religion episode where I talked a lot about stuff like this, and I can't remember if I said this there or not.

[00:02:29]  Unidentified speaker: This might be a repeat.

[00:02:31]  Bruce: But if you pay attention to how people use the word God, it may mean something somewhat specific if you're talking about exactly one religion, but even then, maybe not. But if you kind of think about the concept of God in general across many religions, there's some sort of commonality, and these religions can talk to each other about God, and they have meaningful conversations about it. And yet, if you really try to dig into what are they meaning when they say the word God, it becomes super vague. But there is some sort of commonality there, and I think it's exactly what you just said. Is there something that gives the universe meaning? And for some people, it might be a personal God, a God that's an actual person, that's what that means.

[00:03:17]  Unidentified speaker: For some religions, it might not be.

[00:03:19]  Bruce: Like for the Buddhists, it's not, right? They instead see it more like the universe is a certain way, and yet they will still speak of God, and the idea is translatable for them, if that makes any sense.

[00:03:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:03:33]  Bruce: So I actually think the way you're presenting that's a really, really useful way to think about God. I think I've called that something like God. Instead of calling it God, I say, something like God.

[00:03:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:03:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:03:45]  Peter: I've read several books on this by, you know, I'm not a religious person. I guess at one point, well, for many decades, I would have called myself an atheist. I suppose now that I would move more into something like agnosticism, a spiritual agnostic, maybe. Part of this is there's several things that would go into this. Several books that I found influential here. Thomas Nagel's book where he makes the sort of a case that neo-Darwinism cannot explain morality and beauty and humans. You know, it's a very, it's a book. I see a lot of epistemic humility in his book. He's really just making, he's not really, I mean, [unclear], having definitive answers on anything. He's just really asking a lot of questions. Philip Goff's book was similar. Bobby Azarian's book that we've talked about on this podcast. But more than anything, I think that I enjoyed Paul Davies' book, The Cosmic Blueprint. I want to give that a massive shout out. I would encourage our listeners to just, just Google Paul Davies. And he, you know, he, he really, who was a big influence on David Deutsch again, I believe. And you know, he makes the case that he talks, the book kind of makes the case that we don't live in a world ruled by entropy. And that some kind of blueprint baked into the laws of physics is really the best explanation for not just fine-tuning, which we're going to take a deep dive into, but just the organization of nature, the laws of physics, mathematical order, the evolution of life and consciousness.

[00:05:45]  Peter: You know, so these are the kinds of things that I want to segue into after we talk about Karl Popper. I was hesitant to get into this too much, but you know, hey, it's my life. And I just put myself out there on the podcast. Some of this podcast comes from a lot of anxiety, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of thinking about love and life and family. And I mean, I like probably half the people out there. I got divorced recently, and it hasn't been the best time in my life. And, you know, it just, it... As people can imagine, anyone going through a lot of transition in their life and a lot of pain, it just, it...

[00:06:43]  Unidentified speaker: You come out of it a different person.

[00:06:45]  Peter: And that's partly where I'm coming from. And, you know, I will say that I don't know if I could ever actually subscribe to a religion, even though I think I've become somewhat sympathetic to some of the ideas. But, you know, I will admit straight up, I don't want to live in a universe ruled by entropy. And when I look at just music and love and the beauty that we're surrounded by every day, it's very hard for me to believe that we do live in that world.

[00:07:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, so that's my bias.

[00:07:25]  Peter: But anyway, so the Karl Popper interview on God, that's quite an interesting history here. It's from, I believe, the early, or it says 1968 or something.

[00:07:41]  Unidentified speaker: That's a date on here.

[00:07:42]  Peter: It's somewhere in the either early 70s or late 60s.

[00:07:47]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, it says 69 here.

[00:07:49]  Peter: And there was a student who was, I believe, a rabbi in training, was also taking philosophy courses from Karl Popper and Agassi and some related people. And he interviewed Karl Popper about God. And it's just a short interview. And it has sort of a strange history because Karl Popper told him that he did not want the interview published until after he died. And, you know, as probably most people know who are listening to this, Karl Popper went on to live another couple decades and did not die until, I believe, 96. And then, so the interview was published right after that in Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer's magazine. I hope I didn't get that wrong about the Skeptic Magazine, but I think that's what I saw. And it just is a short kind of a blurb about, I mean, I don't even know, it's a little bit mysterious to me why Karl Popper would be so, would not want it published. I mean, he doesn't really make anything, that's that outrageous or groundbreaking. I mean, it's just, he basically makes a case for agnosticism, a very powerful case, I think. He talks about sort of his take on the God-shaped hole in our, or is it God-shaped gap or hole?

[00:09:27]  Unidentified speaker: I just, why does that not sound right?

[00:09:29]  Peter: But God-shaped hole, God-shaped gap in our brains. And then talks about, well, he says that clearly religion is not falsifiable, it exists outside something that is testable, which is, that's another thing I'd like to get into a little bit, is fine-tuning an explanation. And then he talks about the problem of evil. So, you know, in this short interview, he kind of hits all the main bases. Perhaps I can read, let me start by reading maybe the most compelling statement from the interview, and then I can get your take on it, Bruce.

[00:10:13]  Unidentified speaker: Is that sound OK?

[00:10:15]  Unidentified speaker: Sounds good.

[00:10:15]  Peter: So this is where he makes the case for agnosticism in a very witty and succinct way, as he always is in his books. That's something that I've found about his work is that, I don't want to say funny, but he's got some wit to him.

[00:10:41]  Unidentified speaker: I'll say that.

[00:10:44]  Peter: Although I am not a Jew by religion, I've come to the conclusion that there is great wisdom in the Jewish commandment not to take the name of God in vain. My objection to organized religion is that it tends to use the name of God in vain.

[00:10:59]  Unidentified speaker: That was funny.

[00:11:00]  Peter: I don't know whether God exists or not. We may know how little we know, but this must not be turned or twisted into a positive knowledge of the existence of an unfathomable secret. There is a lot in the world that is in the nature of an unfathomable secret, but I do not think that it is admissible to make a theology out of a lack of knowledge, nor turn our ignorance into anything like positive knowledge. Some forms of atheism are arrogant and ignorant and should be rejected, but agnosticism, to admit that we don't know and to search is all right. I would be glad if God were to exist, to be able to concentrate my feeling of gratitude on some sort of person to whom one would be grateful. This is a wonderful world in spite of the mess that bad philosophers and bad theologians have made of it. They are to be blamed for many wars and for much cruelty. While monotheism is philosophically and emotionally superior to polytheism, many things can be said in favor of the latter. By its structure, it is more likely to admit other religions and not as likely to lead to as much fanaticism. In monotheism, it is much more difficult to make room for other religious truths. The whole thing goes back to myths, which, though they may have a kernel of truth, are untrue. Why then should the Jewish myth be true and the Indian and Egyptian myths not be true? So yeah, it's a case for agnosticism is what I get. What do you, Bruce, as a religious person make of such a case?

[00:12:40]  Unidentified speaker: I'm curious.

[00:12:42]  Bruce: You know, I guess I feel very similar to what he says. So let me, maybe I'll take a little bit harder line than him, though. So let me take the idea of an atheist. So there was a survey, the World Survey, that found that, let me actually find it, that one in five atheists in the United States prayed and nearly one in twenty prayed at least once a week. What does that even mean to have an atheist praying and to have so many of them praying, right?

[00:13:16]  Unidentified speaker: I think that it's complicated.

[00:13:17]  Bruce: Usually atheist is a term that's more of a political term. You're trying to politically position yourself in a certain way. And it may not say much about your beliefs in God or not, right? Even though theoretically it means you don't believe in God. And I've tended, when people ask me, are you an agnostic? I'll say, you know, I don't like the term agnostic. It's got too much of a political overtone similar to atheism. I've tended to tell people that I am a, what I've only seen it spelled, but it's called Fideism.

[00:13:55]  Bruce: And just Googling it on the internet, it says, Fideism is a view of religious belief that holds that faith must be held without the use of reason or even against reason.

[00:14:06]  Unidentified speaker: Faith does not need reason.

[00:14:08]  Bruce: Faith creates its own justification. Use that term faith very broadly, so not necessarily talking about God. And I think that that statement is basically true. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that we absolutely without a doubt live in a reality is faith-based natured. We live in a faith-based natured reality. And I know that a lot of people are uncomfortable with me putting it in that way, but I think it's true. And so it's something that I don't feel comfortable just ignoring when that just is really the way reality seems to me. And you've probably heard me talk about how I feel like people even when they claim they don't have beliefs, beliefs are way more common than people will admit. In fact, I won't, let's maybe earmark this one, but I would like to maybe talk about why I believe in beliefs. And here I don't necessarily mean religious beliefs, although I mean those too, but why the very concept of belief is such an important concept and it should not be removed or taken out of our vocabulary or some of the things I've seen David Deutsch to some degree try to do and really his followers have kind of taken it further. And why I feel that's really an incorrect thing to do and in fact blinds you.

[00:15:25]  Unidentified speaker: I guess that's kind of where I stand.

[00:15:26]  Unidentified speaker: Does that make me an agnostic?

[00:15:28]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe.

[00:15:28]  Bruce: I mean, I guess technically maybe I'm an agnostic, but like I just don't relate to that term at all politically, if that makes any sense.

[00:15:37]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:15:37]  Peter: Well, it seems like there's two different connotations to it, which you're kind of rejecting both. Some people say, well, it's someone who is unsure about which religion is right.

[00:15:49]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:15:50]  Peter: Or someone who truly believes it's just impossible to know. And it's I kind of get what you're I'm feeling like there you're getting at sort of a third way.

[00:16:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:03]  Unidentified speaker: Of looking at that.

[00:16:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:16:04]  Bruce: And Fideism is the closest I could find that already was an existing term. But I'm not even sure that quite describes what I have in mind either. But it's probably the closest.

[00:16:13]  Unidentified speaker: Fideism.

[00:16:14]  Unidentified speaker: Fideism.

[00:16:15]  Unidentified speaker: I had not heard of that.

[00:16:16]  Unidentified speaker: F-I-D-E.

[00:16:18]  Unidentified speaker: F-I-D-E-I-S-M.

[00:16:21]  Bruce: I think the problem is, is that term has multiple meanings too. And so I just read the one that's the closest to the definition that the closest to the one I feel. But like, if you looked it up, it has all sorts of other meanings that probably don't fit me at all.

[00:16:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:35]  Peter: Well, the next the next statement Popper goes to is about the God-shaped gap, which I think leads perfectly from what you say into it. And one thought I've had about this is that most people, including myself, see it as a reason why we're biased, in a sense, that we want to believe something in God or that we live in a meaningful world.

[00:17:09]  Unidentified speaker: Believe in something like God.

[00:17:11]  Unidentified speaker: That's why I use that term, right?

[00:17:12]  Bruce: That we do want to believe in something that is similar to God.

[00:17:17]  Peter: But then you can also turn that around and think, well, why do we have this longing? I mean, I love my dog, but I'm pretty sure my dog doesn't give a hoot one way or the other about living a meaningful life or wanting to live in a meaningful reality. Like, why do we have this longing? Where does it come from? Maybe that could be seen as evidence for the assertion that we might live in a...

[00:17:57]  Unidentified speaker: A special kind of world...

[00:17:58]  Unidentified speaker: .inherently, yeah, special kind of world.

[00:18:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I like how you put that.

[00:18:02]  Peter: So about that, about the need for religion, Popper says, this is a shorter statement. He says, I do think that all men, including myself, are religious.

[00:18:12]  Unidentified speaker: I totally agree with that.

[00:18:14]  Unidentified speaker: Totally agree with him there.

[00:18:15]  Peter: We all believe in something more important and more. It is difficult to find the right words than ourselves. While I do not want to set up a new kind of faith, what we really believe in is what I call a third world, something which is beyond us and which we do interact in the literal sense of interaction and through which we can transcend ourselves. It is a kind of give and take, but not on the animal expressive level, of learning from works that have been created.

[00:18:48]  Unidentified speaker: The arts are an example.

[00:18:50]  Peter: Music is the art that means the most to me. I can lose myself in my music, which for me is an objective experience through which I try to improve myself. That statement really spoke to me as a lifelong music obsessive. I would say that other than maybe some of the fine-tuning stuff that like, you know, when I feel immersed in a piece of music, and, you know, I don't think I'm unique in this way, you know, when I really start thinking, like, suddenly, I make my mind transition to, well, is this just sort of an arbitrary feeling that goes back to my genes and evolutionary history? And can this just be explained by, you know, whatever some of the explanations that we've actually talked about on this show for why humans like music?

[00:19:53]  Unidentified speaker: Is it really just cheesecake for the ears?

[00:19:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:19:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:19:55]  Unidentified speaker: It doesn't ring true for me.

[00:19:57]  Unidentified speaker: It really doesn't.

[00:19:58]  Peter: I mean, I think that at the very least, I guess, objective, objectively beautiful, which, you know, that to me, that opens, at least in my current way of thinking, that just the concept of objective beauty kind of opens up a can of worms. I mean, what does it mean if we really take that assertion seriously, that something can be objectively beautiful? I mean, is that just another way of saying that beauty is baked in to the laws of physics?

[00:20:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:20:30]  Peter: I mean, that's a pretty outrageous assertion.

[00:20:33]  Unidentified speaker: It is.

[00:20:33]  Bruce: It's a very outrageous assertion. In fact, it's, as I've mentioned, it's one that I find a little hard to believe, but want to believe because it's so outrageous.

[00:20:43]  Unidentified speaker: But I know exactly what you're talking about.

[00:20:45]  Bruce: The idea that there could be beauty baked into the laws of physics.

[00:20:48]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, wow, right?

[00:20:51]  Unidentified speaker: That's like just amazing.

[00:20:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:20:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:20:56]  Peter: So, you know, that leads us. We're a critical rationalist podcast. I guess some people probably who have listened to us don't think they don't think we are.

[00:21:11]  Unidentified speaker: I think we are.

[00:21:12]  Unidentified speaker: We're fake, fake critical rationalists.

[00:21:14]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe we're fake.

[00:21:15]  Unidentified speaker: We may be fake critical rationalists, maybe.

[00:21:17]  Bruce: Or maybe maybe we've accidentally invented a new form of critical rationalism and we're on the family tree somewhere.

[00:21:23]  Peter: We're highly fallible critical rationalists, okay? But that's just just just who we are. The you know, I guess that that opens up the can of worms.

[00:21:33]  Unidentified speaker: Well, where's where's the evidence?

[00:21:35]  Unidentified speaker: What is the evidence?

[00:21:37]  Peter: So I thought we could go through. I've got a whole list of questions I find compelling.

[00:21:44]  Unidentified speaker: Your Facebook post on this was beautiful.

[00:21:46]  Unidentified speaker: It was thank you.

[00:21:48]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, thank you for saying that.

[00:21:49]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:21:50]  Peter: And yeah, a lot of this is is based on this this Facebook post I made kind of just in a in a whirlwind of of thinking about this.

[00:21:59]  Unidentified speaker: But let me let me just to introduce this.

[00:22:01]  Peter: Let me let me read one more thing that Karl Popper wrote or not wrote but it from the interview about his his about God, which I thought was the other basically compelling statement about God where he takes the argument as moves it outside of of evidence. But then I would like to to question that a little bit, too. You know, because I mean, to be honest, just as a general statement about critical rationalism, it's still something that I wrestle with a lot. I mean, you know, on one hand, I think that critical rationalism is our best method for determining scientific truth or truth about the world, philosophical truths as well, metaphysical truths. But, you know, how to implement that in our day to day lives is not always so straightforward. Or if that's even something we really want to do. But anyway, this is what Popper says. The best religion is so vague about God, and rightly so, that one can hardly say that there's anything tangible which can be tested. It is only something which appeals to our feelings. So far as religion is testable, it seems to be false. This is not an accusation because religion is not science. Rather, it is an accusation against theologians who go on treating religion as if it were science. I have introduced the falsification criterion in order to distinguish science from what is not science, because something isn't science, however, does not mean that it is meaningless. We stand naked before God. In a sense, it is quite all right.

[00:23:53]  Peter: It would be sad if this field, only the learned and clever people, the Pharisees and scribes in the Christian formulation, would be those who arrive. Any discussion of God somehow is in a sense unpleasant. When I look at what I call the gift of life, I feel a gratitude, which is in tune with some religious idea of God. However, the moment I even speak of it, I'm embarrassed that I may do something wrong to God in talking about God.

[00:24:27]  Unidentified speaker: That's so interesting.

[00:24:28]  Peter: He is to be able to speak off the cuff like that?

[00:24:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:24:31]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:24:32]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:24:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:24:34]  Peter: So, yeah, let's transition to evidence, fine-tuning. You know, this idea that, I mean, I don't even think it's that controversial in a sense. Many scientists, not just Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman and probably Einstein and other people have spoke about this issue, is that really, I mean, I'm sure 99% of our audience have heard about this, but if the constants of nature were just a tiny bit different, you know, the mass of an electron or the cosmological constant, we might be looking at a world that doesn't exist, or a big bang that kind of went nowhere, or created a universe of hydrogen atoms with no stars or planets or just nothing. But instead, we have this reality that, you know, in some, from a certain perspective, is like winning the lottery. I mean, if you win the lottery a thousand times in a row, a million times in a row, a trillion times in a row, your first conclusion is probably not going to be that you're just really lucky. It's going to be that there's something off about this lottery that you're cheating or something. You know, it's not, it's, this world is highly, highly unlikely. So let's actually start this discussion from maybe a unique place. I suspect that probably about most of our audience out there is at least highly sympathetic, if not a straight up believer in this, this conception of the quantum multiverse. And, you know, we probably we can, we can apply this to the cosmological multiverse or the mathematical multiverse, or any of these conceptions of the multiverse. Does the multiverse explain fine-tuning?

[00:26:50]  Unidentified speaker: I'm very interested in your thoughts on this.

[00:26:53]  Bruce: Okay, I can, you know what? That there are two really great authors that have talked about this. One is obviously David Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity. He has some excellent, excellent, excellent things to say about this.

[00:27:06]  Unidentified speaker: And the other is Penrose.

[00:27:07]  Bruce: Roger Penrose is awesome on this. Penrose has pointed, so you're talking about cosmological constants and things like that. Penrose has pointed out that the level of entropy, the very, very low entropy state that the universe started in is so improbable that, and we have no explanation for it. He actually has a picture in his book of God, of the white-haired man, taking a little pin and choosing the entropy state where it's that our universe actually started in and how improbable it was, right?

[00:27:43]  Unidentified speaker: So there's a ton of these arguments.

[00:27:45]  Bruce: It's not just the famous cosmological constant.

[00:27:48]  Unidentified speaker: There's like a ton of these.

[00:27:49]  Unidentified speaker: Oh yeah.

[00:27:50]  Bruce: That based on our current understandings in the laws of physics seem so inexplicable or so improbable in this case with the entropy argument, that if you tried to explain it through probability, it wouldn't make sense because for instance, it would be way more probable to have a much smaller universe that then developed life. This is one of Penrose's arguments. So that would have been our expected state. Or it would have been a lot more probable to just have a Boltzmann brain, right? Just a bunch of atoms crashed together and there's Peter, you know, and Bruce floating out in the middle of nowhere. And complete with our memories of what life on Earth was, even though it never happened.

[00:28:31]  Unidentified speaker: And suddenly we die in space.

[00:28:33]  Unidentified speaker: And that's the end, right?

[00:28:34]  Bruce: It says that should really be, you know, from based on our current understanding the laws of physics, you could make a case for that's what we should be expecting to have happen. Another excellent resource on this is Sean Carroll just did a podcast on time. And he talks about a number of these things surrounding some of the mysteries around time. And we did a whole series on this and brought Sadia on and talked about this. And she brought up Boltzmann's brains and things like that.

[00:29:02]  Unidentified speaker: And she has some interesting thoughts on that.

[00:29:06]  Bruce: OK, now, based on my reading from the authors I just mentioned, it is my understanding that the quantum multiverse can in no way explain the cosmological constant fine tuning. Because it should be the same across every single universe in the multiverse. So if you want to explain it using the multiverse, which atheists try to do. OK, like, if you're talking to an atheist, this is just like the Miller-Urey experiment that I hate so much that evolutionists use to shut down creationists and really end up blinding themselves. An atheist will say, well, there's probably a multiverse, and therefore, there's this anthropic principle where we can only be in the part of the multiverse where life exists, and therefore, that explains why we exist.

[00:29:59]  Peter: Yeah, Douglas Adams' puddle thing.

[00:30:01]  Unidentified speaker: Have you heard of that?

[00:30:03]  Peter: Where the water in the puddle wonders why it exists in this particular shape, and so we're like the water in a puddle, I guess.

[00:30:13]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:30:14]  Bruce: Okay, that is literally a terrible, absolutely epitome of what a bad explanation is.

[00:30:24]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:25]  Bruce: I mean, the fact that the atheist is invoking it shows a level of misunderstanding and a level of honestly faith in their own beliefs that they really might as well just be a religious person at this point.

[00:30:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:38]  Unidentified speaker: And let me explain why.

[00:30:41]  Bruce: To be able to have a theory like that where you can invoke the multiverse, first of all, you have to actually have a best theory that invokes the multiverse. And since it can't be the quantum one, the only one that actually gets invoked by our laws of physics, you're basically just making something up.

[00:30:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:56]  Bruce: Now, we got all sorts of really interesting ideas, but we are absolutely in the same realm as something like God when we're talking about them.

[00:31:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:04]  Unidentified speaker: Like absolutely the same realm.

[00:31:07]  Bruce: And so when they talk about the mathematical multiverse or the, you know, Max Tegmark, multiverse one, two, three, I get why an atheist would see those as more scientific, but they are not. They're just really vague ideas.

[00:31:21]  Unidentified speaker: They're not theories at all at this point.

[00:31:24]  Unidentified speaker: There is no way to criticize them.

[00:31:25]  Unidentified speaker: There is no way to test them.

[00:31:27]  Bruce: That you might as well be talking about God.

[00:31:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:30]  Unidentified speaker: And you know what?

[00:31:31]  Bruce: If the atheist could see that, I would really be okay with that because then I'd say, oh, that's your belief in God and we're now equal. And if they could admit that, I'd be okay with that.

[00:31:41]  Unidentified speaker: But of course, they never do, right?

[00:31:43]  Bruce: They actually think they're making some sort of good explanation and they can't see that they're not.

[00:31:49]  Unidentified speaker: So first, let me say that.

[00:31:51]  Bruce: Now let me unfortunately take the other side because there's actually a good argument. The religious people use this argument all the time to prove the existence of God.

[00:32:00]  Unidentified speaker: And it makes me really mad.

[00:32:03]  Bruce: And when I was, I've mentioned I went through a very dark period for a while where I was in pain all the time. I was at my absolute lowest faith. I was, I just said that I agreed with Popper that everyone's religious.

[00:32:17]  Unidentified speaker: I guess I shouldn't say that.

[00:32:18]  Bruce: I think everybody healthy is religious, right? But like we talked about Tolstoy and how he was getting pretty close to committing suicide because of he had bought into the meaningless universe idea, like really almost fully, he was just shy.

[00:32:34]  Unidentified speaker: And then he saved himself by becoming a Christian.

[00:32:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:32:38]  Bruce: I think there are such things as people who completely buy the meaningless universe point of view. And I don't think that we would ever consider them anything except unhealthy and insane maybe. I was really at my low in terms of just having faith in a meaningful universe for a period of about two years when I was in a lot of pain. And I was trying my hardest to get out of it, to use every scientific principle I could. I went to go see 14 different doctors. None of them had any clue how to help me. I was getting very close to living on opioids for the rest of my life because it was so bad.

[00:33:17]  Unidentified speaker: And I just could not live my life anymore.

[00:33:19]  Bruce: I started looking for a second career, and I had got taken advantage of. I mean, it was a really bad set of circumstances because I thought I was going to get fired from my job because I couldn't do it anymore, because using computers caused pain, because like moving a mouse caused pain. And I had a friend that was helping me. And this is kind of a sad story, and it makes me sad just to even explain it. But he was super helpful and nothing he did. He was one of those MLM type guys, and he had all these herbal things, and he had seen lots of people be healed by using natural processes. And he had me try each of them, and he even bought them for me. He's had a lot of money because he was an MLM guy.

[00:33:59]  Unidentified speaker: He's one of the successful ones.

[00:34:00]  Unidentified speaker: And I tried everything.

[00:34:02]  Bruce: And I at some point admitted to him, he's like a member of my congregation for my church. And at some point I admitted to him, because I thought we were close enough friends, I could kind of explain this to him. I said, I'm really struggling with my faith because of all this and kind of explained. And I kind of saw this look in his eyes that was disappointment in me. Which I understand why he might feel that way. And you know what, I'm not even going to call him out on that, okay? And he immediately used the cosmological constant argument. Says, well, of course there's a God, because there's this fine tuning.

[00:34:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:34:39]  Bruce: And I had to explain to him, I probably shouldn't have explained to him, but I had to, this is my personality, I had to explain to him why that absolutely was not an argument for the existence of God. And that to invoke God as an explanation like that, absolutely is irrational, and it does not make sense to do it.

[00:34:59]  Unidentified speaker: And I've had so many real...

[00:35:00]  Bruce: And he like later kind of, I more no longer connected on Facebook, I really think I kind of hurt his feelings really bad. And I really wasn't trying to, like I was in some ways just trying to open up to a friend with the point of my struggles and why they were so hard on me. And I was definitely looking at it as I want my faith, right? Like that's something I want, I'm losing it against my will. I didn't explain it well, and I should have approached it better, because I do think there is a way to look at his argument. He didn't understand how to put it, but there is a way to look at the fine tuning argument as an argument for God that actually does make sense. It just isn't invoking God as the explanation. Well, it's fine tuned because God made it that way. That's a bad explanation for exactly the same reasons that invoking the multiverse as, well, that's the explanation, is a bad explanation.

[00:35:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:35:55]  Bruce: And of course, if you talk to Deutschians, because Deutschians understand this better, because they've read about this in Beginning of Infinity, I saw one say to Philip Goff, isn't the really the correct serious explanation that we don't know? And he, Philip Goff responded and he said, well, I guess I was thinking that we don't know was not a serious explanation, but I kind of see your point. You know, maybe that is the best explanation, is that we don't know. And really it is, right? But here's the thing, and here's the thing that I wish I had said instead. If you invert these arguments, they become meaningful. So instead of trying to say, oh, we've got the whip tail and it's because God did it, or oh, we have fine-tuning and it's because God did it, which just doesn't work.

[00:36:46]  Unidentified speaker: Like, absolutely it's terrible.

[00:36:48]  Bruce: And I can't even get my mind to even think about this without pain. But let's say you instead say, you know what? It's a fact that we live in a fine-tuned universe, and that we don't have an explanation for what it is. And let's just look at the beauty of that, that we live in a special universe.

[00:37:10]  Unidentified speaker: What I really have in mind here is something like Lee Smolin's theory, which atheists will sometimes invoke.

[00:37:16]  Bruce: It's this idea that universes evolve, that that explains fine-tuning, that there is some sort of evolution of universes, and just as evolution can explain the appearance of design for life, evolution can explain the appearance of design for universes.

[00:37:34]  Unidentified speaker: Now that explanation, it's so nascent at this point, it's not really any better than a multiverse explanation.

[00:37:40]  Unidentified speaker: In fact, it requires a multiverse to work, obviously, because you have to have birth of multiple universes.

[00:37:46]  Unidentified speaker: So it's still not a good explanation today.

[00:37:47]  Bruce: But let's just pretend like that is the explanation, that we discover some way to turn that into a best theory. It makes testable predictions, it's not ad hoc. Think about the implication of that, that literally, universes create knowledge, not just through life, but the universe itself is a product of knowledge creation. There's something so awe-inspiringly beautiful, something so something like godlike, that at this point, you are almost invoking god, but not as the explanation for fine tuning, but you're invoking fine tuning as the explanation for god, if that makes any sense. Now we really are, what we're doing is, instead of invoking god as explanation, we're letting the explanation invoke god.

[00:38:42]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's totally okay.

[00:38:44]  Bruce: In fact, I totally agree with that approach.

[00:38:46]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:38:47]  Peter: Well, let's put it a little differently. Is fine tuning itself a kind of explanation? I mean, is the idea that, whether you want to talk about god or just something in the laws of physics, which has made the universe something that creates, not just planets and stars, but humans and meaning?

[00:39:16]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:39:17]  Peter: Is that really a worse explanation? Could that be considered our best explanation if the alternative is that it's all randomness?

[00:39:28]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:39:28]  Peter: Is randomness really a good explanation for this?

[00:39:31]  Bruce: So Popper, I don't have the quote handy, but Popper actually says that. He seems to keep in mind the era that Popper comes from. So he takes this idea that was popular at the time, that evolution, because evolution can't explain how life got started, the explanation that was offered at the time was, oh, it just happened to happen by random. And nobody, like, there are nascent explanations now that are better explanations than that. But Popper, in this quote, he talks about how that is absolutely the worst possible explanation, but you can kind of tell he accepts it. And he's talking about is, these are kind of beliefs, right? That we accept some things that aren't in any way a good explanation. Now, if Popper lived later, he probably would have said, well, there's actually some good nascent explanations we need to pursue those better. But I don't think people in that era could even conceive what those were going to be. And so they just couldn't even think about them yet. So the fact that we live in a different knowledge state allows us to think about this in a different way that they're just incapable of at that point. The fact is, is that the random explanation is exactly a bad example of a bad explanation.

[00:40:44]  Unidentified speaker: It is the epitome of a bad explanation.

[00:40:47]  Bruce: So it really has no business being invoked in science.

[00:40:52]  Unidentified speaker: So could, sorry.

[00:40:55]  Bruce: So I was going to say that that was really the, I don't have the quote handy, and so this is obviously my interpretation. But that was the point Popper was making.

[00:41:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:41:03]  Peter: So could, in theory, a theory of everything explain fine tuning? I mean, I guess there's two different ways to think of the theory of everything as far as I know, and that one is to unify the relativity with quantum theory, and one is just a theory that explains everything in the world. From what I understand, at least. But is in terms of, I don't know how to make the question kind of vague. Is there a conception of a theory of everything that could explain why these numbers exist, why these numbers seem to explain so much about our reality? I mean, it's really, it's very strange.

[00:41:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:41:55]  Unidentified speaker: Isn't it?

[00:41:56]  Bruce: So let's start with the Deutschian-Popperian idea that everything's explicable.

[00:42:03]  Unidentified speaker: Now, that's just a theory, right?

[00:42:05]  Unidentified speaker: It's our best theory.

[00:42:06]  Bruce: And this is a case where it actually is a best theory, and it can be invoked as a best theory. But at the end of the day, there's no way to know if everything's explicable or not. But our starting point should be everything's explicable. And therefore, and this is against instrumentalism, where they take the stance things are not explicable, so our best explanation is to just treat theories as instruments. If we take seriously this idea of non-instrumentalism, mixed with our best theory that everything's explicable, then there should be an explanation for why the universe is fine-tuned. And scientists should try to figure out what that is. Even though right now, it's hard to conceive what that could even look like.

[00:42:49]  Unidentified speaker: Right? Like literally, it's really hard to conceive what that could even look like.

[00:42:54]  Bruce: Unless you're going to just invoke randomness or multiverse, multiverses that aren't part of the quantum multiverse. I mean, you're literally just making stuff up.

[00:43:02]  Peter: I mean, to be fair, that's like a lot of things in life. I mean, it's impossible to, or for our ancestors to have even conceived of our current state of knowledge.

[00:43:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:43:12]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:43:13]  Bruce: Having said that, that was one of the things that, like, Frank Tipler was trying to do with the Omega Point Theory.

[00:43:19]  Unidentified speaker: Now, I have to have my standard disclaimer.

[00:43:21]  Bruce: I do not believe in the Omega Point Theory.

[00:43:23]  Unidentified speaker: I think the theory is wrong.

[00:43:25]  Bruce: And I actually agree with Deutsch more than Tipler about the problems of the Omega Point Theory. And that was one of the things I actually was most excited to talk to David Deutsch about when we had him on the show and interviewed him, because I really wanted to understand where he was coming from. And he did a good job of explaining his point of view, which, by the way, I would consider a faith-based viewpoint. Tipler is trying to get past that. He doesn't want to have a purely faith-based viewpoint. And there's something heroic about his attempt to not be agnostic about this. And this is where I might a little bit disagree with what Popper. I think at our current state of knowledge, yes, I can see exactly what he's talking about, that maybe we should be invoking God as vaguely as possible. But I don't think that that's really ultimately an ideal point of view. And just like we want to have an explanation for fine tuning, it would make sense to want to have an explanation for meaning, right? Or morality, or I know these are some of the things that you kind of mentioned. Or in other words, have an explanation for why it is that we keep invoking God, right? And there seems to be a need to do that.

[00:44:36]  Unidentified speaker: And this is really what Tipler was trying to do.

[00:44:38]  Bruce: And again, my standard disclaimer on Tipler, I have no delusions that he's anything but a nutter.

[00:44:44]  Unidentified speaker: But man, I love him.

[00:44:46]  Bruce: That, in fact, I think his nuttiness is what allowed him to think thoughts that nobody else could think. And no, his theory didn't ultimately work, but he got so much further than what I thought was possible. Like, he got way, way, way further than what I thought was possible. And in some ways, it broke my lack of faith that I was dealing with during that time period, where I started to say, you know what, I don't think this is the right theory, but I'm just way stupider than I thought I was. And the type, like, one of the things he tries to explain, and again, I'm not trying to say this is a correct theory and it's not, okay, but he's trying to explain things like, why does the universe exist in terms of the Omega, the universe is the Omega point, right? Like, the Omega point, the universe crunches down into the Omega point, so the universe is the Omega point. You start in the singularity, you end in the singularity. There's a physically, based on theory, there's a connection between those two singularities. In some sense, they're one singularity. But they're different, they have an asymmetry in that one has no knowledge in it, and the other one has literally all knowledge in it. So he sees both singularities as God, but obviously the end one is the one where all the knowledge exists. And he tries to then take that and use the lack of, the fact that the physics are reversible. You know what I'm talking about here, where physics is supposed to work both directions in time.

[00:46:28]  Peter: Okay, time is just kind of an arbitrary thing, like any other vector or something.

[00:46:32]  Bruce: Yeah, and I'm not going to do justice to the way he does this. It's a giant mathematical book where he goes a lot further than I'm able to explain. And he tries to use that to explain the existence of existence. And in essence, the universe has to be the way it is because that's the universe where the omega point exists. And what's the odds of being fine-tuned if you know the omega point exists?

[00:46:59]  Unidentified speaker: Well, the odds are 100%.

[00:47:02]  Bruce: It's not improbable at all anymore.

[00:47:05]  Unidentified speaker: No, I don't know.

[00:47:06]  Bruce: I mean, like, this explanation makes me a little uncomfortable for a great number of reasons. And I could go into what I don't like about it. But I mean, there is a kind of nutty great thinking here where you look at it and you go, whoa, that almost made sense.

[00:47:24]  Unidentified speaker: I wonder if we could take this further.

[00:47:26]  Bruce: Like, I wonder if they're like, he's on to something and he just isn't quite there yet.

[00:47:30]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:47:32]  Bruce: And there's like, I had so many epiphanies like that when I read his book. And it was always the same thing, this kind of discomfort.

[00:47:38]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, this is wrong.

[00:47:40]  Unidentified speaker: Mixed with this.

[00:47:42]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, wow.

[00:47:42]  Bruce: This is really creative thinking that I just never would have come up with. And it did really kind of level my my feelings of how much I thought I knew. And I started to say, you know what, I guess I know a lot less than I think I do. And maybe I shouldn't be drawing conclusions about the meaninglessness of life so quickly or so easily. And that's kind of what I also see Karl Popper is saying, right? Is that to be arrogant where you think you know that there is no meaning, there is no God, that's a problem too, right?

[00:48:14]  Unidentified speaker: It's the same problem.

[00:48:16]  Bruce: So I guess that was where I would start with this idea that what would explanation look like to explain fine-tuning. I'm not recommending the Omega Point as a correct explanation, but I think I am recommending it as an example of how it might look. And the idea that maybe there could be such an explanation and we should never assume that there can't be an explanation just because it seems like there can't be an explanation today in our current knowledge state.

[00:48:45]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know, does that make sense?

[00:48:47]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, it does.

[00:48:48]  Peter: And that's probably one of the most powerful statements regarding that I've ever heard, honestly. So very well put.

[00:48:59]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:49:00]  Bruce: That's my relationship with the fine-tuning question. So I don't believe it can be used as an explanation. You use God as an explanation for it. But I do think it is in some sense evidence that the universe is more meaningful than we think it is. And even if it's not a best theory at this point, that is my faith-based belief. And I think it's the right faith-based belief because the alternative is just not worth having.

[00:49:26]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:49:27]  Peter: So it sounds like you've gone outside of critical. You will admit that you've gone outside of critical rationalism a little bit if you have a best faith.

[00:49:36]  Unidentified speaker: What does that mean?

[00:49:36]  Unidentified speaker: A best faith-based belief?

[00:49:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:49:38]  Bruce: So let me actually put it into critical rationalism.

[00:49:43]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:49:43]  Bruce: Because I understand why you're saying I'm going outside of critical rationalism, maybe in a way I am, but I don't know that I am. So, okay, let's take this idea that we have no need for the concept of belief. This is something that we actually asked David Deutsch about, and he made the argument, well, you might need the word if you're talking about theology, but it has no place in science.

[00:50:03]  Unidentified speaker: He's just so totally wrong.

[00:50:05]  Unidentified speaker: He just really is.

[00:50:07]  Bruce: So, let's say that you're Einstein. Einstein had this moment, where it suddenly occurred to him, that you could think of the force of gravity as instead an acceleration, right? And it was the, quote, happiest day of his life. He then spent eight years taking that little thought and turning it into a powerful testable theory.

[00:50:31]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:50:33]  Bruce: What's the, so if I were to ask you the question, was that a best theory that he had on that first day that then propelled him for eight years? The answer from a critical rational standpoint is absolutely no. He did not have a best theory. So for him to be able to get to what is now a best theory, required him to use belief and faith that his hunch was correct that entire time. And that is how science works.

[00:51:02]  Unidentified speaker: Like it is literally how science works.

[00:51:04]  Bruce: That's why the idea of the idea of diversity of beliefs is such an important idea to open societies. Because they are our conjecture and are part of our conjecture engine, if you will. Okay, so beliefs don't have a place on the critical side, right?

[00:51:26]  Unidentified speaker: This conjecture and refutation.

[00:51:28]  Bruce: But they have a huge role in how we get from the conjecture phase to the critical phase in the first place. And I don't think Einstein's belief, and I think that is the right word for it, in his theory, before it was a testable theory, I think that that was a totally justifiable thing for him to do. And I think it had nothing to do with the word justification the way we would normally use that term, when we're trying to say it's true. In fact, Einstein then went on to have the exact same epiphany about how to unify a similar epiphany about how to unify quantum physics and his theory. And we now know he was totally on the wrong track, and there was no chance he was ever going to come up with a good theory based on that. And yet it was the same belief-based hunch that he was working with, okay? So there's no guarantee that a belief is correct. But you won't make progress without them, right? You have to believe before you're going to put the effort in. You have to believe it's true before you put the effort in.

[00:52:32]  Unidentified speaker: And you may be wrong, right?

[00:52:33]  Unidentified speaker: Like you may be wrong.

[00:52:35]  Unidentified speaker: That's the critical side of this.

[00:52:37]  Unidentified speaker: But that is what scientists do.

[00:52:38]  Bruce: They get so excited about their little nascent theories. And then a lot of times they see their theories crushed. A lot of times it turns out to be something better, right? But to be able to get through that, you are working with belief. I understand, let me give some, let me give some nod to Deutsch's view here. I understand that the way we use belief, like particularly if for Bayesians, they'll use it as just simply meaning, this is the theory I accept. Which by the way is a really good way to use the word belief in the English language. Words, keep in mind words mean many different things.

[00:53:10]  Unidentified speaker: There's a range of meaning.

[00:53:11]  Bruce: We invoke them to bring different thoughts. We use context to communicate to people. The word by itself never has a single definition, right? We just invoke it in such a way to get a thought across. If I say to you, I believe in general relativity, you know that what I really mean is that I accept relativity as the most correct, the best explanation we currently have for gravity. Which is very different than religious belief. I can see why Deutsch would want to try to make this separation. The thing he's missing is that the initial belief that gets you to the critical stage is like religious belief. It's belief in the religious way. And I think that's what I've kind of argued in favor of religion, is that there's a great quote from Popper where he says, talks about this. He says, yes, you have to act. For acting, you have to believe in certain things, even if sometimes they are not true. In order to act, you have to accept. Afterwards, perhaps, you can revise your beliefs, although you may not really have enough time. And then, Zerin, who's interviewing him, he talks about taking a calculated risk or chance. And he's invoking this in terms of religion.

[00:54:30]  Unidentified speaker: Keep this in mind.

[00:54:31]  Bruce: And Popper says, to err and err and err, but less and less and less.

[00:54:39]  Unidentified speaker: And Zerin says, yes, hopefully less.

[00:54:41]  Bruce: And Popper says, but that we don't know. A calculated risk is one in which we know only the limits of the risk. So maybe we can do a future podcast on Pascal's Wager. And Pascal's Wager, the way he originally put it, first of all, it makes more sense than people make fun of it, because there were certain contexts that have been removed since then. But Pascal's Wager is a really problematic wager, and the criticisms of it are valid. And I would love to do an episode where we actually talk about that. What I'm talking about is a much stronger version of Pascal's Wager, like one that is absolutely true, where we only have a certain amount of time.

[00:55:25]  Unidentified speaker: We have hunches.

[00:55:26]  Bruce: Those hunches are our best knowledge that we have at the time.

[00:55:29]  Unidentified speaker: We can't necessarily explain them.

[00:55:31]  Bruce: They're just something you feel in your gut sometimes, like Einstein did, trying to imagine gravity as acceleration rather than force. And he went with it, and it turned out to be the right thing to do. Even if it had been the wrong thing to do, that would have been disappointing for him. But then we would have had somebody in the community explore that possibility and show that it wasn't right, and just show that it made no progress. And if you look at it from that standpoint, belief is one of the single most important things that we have going for us in open societies. And that's why I just don't think you should remove that concept from your vocabulary. You shouldn't try to talk about expectations instead. You can call them expectations if you want to be a little bit more specific in some cases. The real problem with trying to remove belief is that you will still have them because they are fundamental to how critical rationalism works. And you will simply stop believing that your beliefs are beliefs. And I've seen this with the CritRat community, where they have these really nascent ideas that are really just beliefs at this point, maybe good beliefs. Okay, like I've kind of invoked anarcho-capitalism. That is absolutely not a best theory, not by any stretch of the imagination.

[00:56:49]  Unidentified speaker: But I think it's a good belief, right?

[00:56:51]  Bruce: I have a problem with the fact that CritRats try to say, oh, it's a best theory. And they basically take every belief they have and call it a best theory, because they're, quote, not supposed to have beliefs, okay? And it leads to a sort of lack of epistemic humility that's really at odds with the whole concept of critical rationalism. Instead, the right approach is to say, I believe in anarcho-capitalism. This is a faith-based belief and I don't really know yet, but I'm going to go down this path.

[00:57:21]  Unidentified speaker: It's my hunch.

[00:57:22]  Unidentified speaker: It is the thing I've decided to act on.

[00:57:25]  Bruce: And I can see it's got a lot of good potential. Maybe we'll never actually get to anarcho-capitalism, but just the belief that it could exist and trying to make progress and trying to improve existing governments by privatizing as much as possible, there's probably tons of verisimilitude in the theory. And by treating it as a belief instead of as a best theory, you can still act, right?

[00:57:50]  Unidentified speaker: You don't lose anything.

[00:57:52]  Bruce: What you lose is the lack of humility and the ability to not shut off and become blind to the truths of other theories that also have verisimilitude, but may also be wrong.

[00:58:05]  Unidentified speaker: Honestly, like communism.

[00:58:06]  Bruce: I mean, socialism has played a huge role in our development of our open societies, even though it is with, you know, I think we all agree it's a false theory, but it had a little verisimilitude to it that turned out to be important. And I think until you can really accept the idea that beliefs are beliefs and the extreme importance of them, you are going to get stuck in this blinding trap where everything's a best theory. Every belief you have, that's the best theory and you must justify it. And you can't even see the criticisms that are valid against it and allow it to do error correction to your theory.

[00:58:46]  Unidentified speaker: And so this is why I believe in beliefs.

[00:58:48]  Bruce: This is why I think beliefs are fundamental to critical rationalism instead of at odds with critical rationalism. But I see them in the conjecture phase rather than the criticism phase.

[00:58:59]  Peter: Well, that's a compelling way to look at it. OK, two more things I want to talk about. One of them would be, I want to get into the Karl Popper's third world, the relationship between that and religion, or meaning, I guess.

[00:59:19]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:59:19]  Peter: Meaningful universe, if we can go there. But first, let's segue into, I guess, causation. Like, we've explored this idea of whether or not a theory of anything could explain fine tuning. But then, you know, kind of even beyond that, there's this thing, you know, I'm not super, like, educated on this, obviously, but I'm just calling it causation, that things make other things happen, starting with the Big Bang. And it's not just uninteresting things. It's everything around us, including natural selection and biology and things we don't understand and 200... Is there 200 billion galaxies?

[01:00:22]  Unidentified speaker: Is that right?

[01:00:23]  Peter: There's billions of galaxies, you know? There's things that are just, and, you know, not, you know, I mean, you might argue all the really interesting things happen on planet Earth, but, you know, space is pretty cool, too. There's this central mystery that, I mean, is it even possible to imagine a universe where causation does not exist? I mean, is that a bit like...

[01:00:53]  Unidentified speaker: Does that even make sense?

[01:00:55]  Peter: Is it, you know, a lot of people will say, I brought up this idea of nothingness, I guess. A lot of people say, well, you can't have nothingness is an illogical concept, which kind of...

[01:01:05]  Unidentified speaker: I get it.

[01:01:06]  Unidentified speaker: I get why they're saying that.

[01:01:08]  Unidentified speaker: But like, I can't...

[01:01:10]  Peter: I mean, could you have a universe without causation?

[01:01:13]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe that's just another way of putting it.

[01:01:14]  Unidentified speaker: You absolutely could.

[01:01:15]  Bruce: I mean, isn't that more or less what a heat death universe would be?

[01:01:21]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:01:22]  Bruce: Where we're always just kind of in the same state, more or less, statistically identical states.

[01:01:28]  Peter: So it's kind of like a really boring, really, really boring universe.

[01:01:32]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:01:32]  Peter: Is your idea of nothingness.

[01:01:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:01:36]  Bruce: I mean, you could argue that's not nothingness and that nothingness is a different level. But yeah, Roger Penrose has a book about this, where he's actually theorized that heat death is...

[01:01:52]  Unidentified speaker: I'm going to get this so wrong.

[01:01:53]  Bruce: And I listened to the book on audio and it was all formulas.

[01:01:57]  Unidentified speaker: So I couldn't follow any of it.

[01:01:58]  Bruce: I'm not even sure why they made an audio book out of it. But at some level, his theory is that when you reach the entropy state, it's mathematically identical to a low entropy state for a new universe.

[01:02:12]  Unidentified speaker: And so you end up with a cycle.

[01:02:15]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know that this theory is true.

[01:02:16]  Bruce: I mean, we all know Penrose is a super creative thinker, but he's wrong about all sorts of things, right? So again, I'm not trying to endorse this theory in the slightest, right? I love Penrose in part for the same reason I love like Deutsch and Tipler. They humble me in a way where they've thought of things that are so creative that I've never thought of.

[01:02:39]  Unidentified speaker: And that makes me go, oh, I need to give this way more thought, right?

[01:02:44]  Bruce: And so when Penrose, he had this idea that you kind of move the, I've got to find, I just can't do this well enough, so I'm not going to even try. But he had this idea of a cycle, right? Where the universe goes through, it moves through a set of causation towards what we would call heat death. And then at that point, it's mathematically equivalent to the next universe that then goes through a similar cycle. I mean, this isn't the most hopeful universe, and I'll make a point, universe would be much, much better than this. But like, it does make you wonder about, okay, how much do we really understand about this? We try to imagine a nothingness universe, a heat-death universe.

[01:03:27]  Unidentified speaker: What does that really mean?

[01:03:28]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:03:29]  Bruce: It humbles you to realize, it's not even clear mathematically what the difference is between the start of the universe and the end of the universe, if you use his formulas that he's using. So I know exactly what you're talking about. On top of that, there's the idea that we don't even know how to explain causation in terms of physics, because physics is always time-reversible.

[01:03:51]  Unidentified speaker: So it's unclear what causation even means.

[01:03:53]  Bruce: Now, this might just be an emergent philosophical problem.

[01:03:57]  Unidentified speaker: Like it may have nothing to do with the laws of physics.

[01:04:00]  Bruce: But if you look at like Deutsch and Chiara Marletto's Constructor Theory, they're like making progress against some of these concepts that I think people originally thought, well, there's just no reason to worry about them. You know, yeah, we use the idea of causation.

[01:04:15]  Unidentified speaker: We invoke it.

[01:04:15]  Bruce: There's no actual scientific description of what it means.

[01:04:18]  Unidentified speaker: Who cares?

[01:04:19]  Bruce: It's just an emergent thing that humans use to talk to each other, and it's useful. And they're actually showing that it can be invoked in physics in a way, right? And I don't know that they've solved all the problems around this, and I'm not even sure if Constructor Theory is the right way to go about this. But again, the very fact that it came up with some creative way to start invoking, dealing with it, makes you go, oh, wow, I'm so stupid that I thought I already knew what the answer was, right?

[01:04:47]  Unidentified speaker: And I thought the answer was there was no answer.

[01:04:50]  Bruce: And this, again, I want to emphasize this idea of explicability. There's just no reason to ever say there will be no answer here, right? We should start with the assumption that everything's explicable, even things that seem like they should be completely inexplicable.

[01:05:08]  Peter: Okay, well, that's a good answer. Let's transition to the third world. And, you know, it just actually dawned on me to frame it in this way when I was reading that quote, where he talks about how all men are religious. And then he says, while I do not, I'm rereading this, but whatever. He says, while I do not want to set up a new kind of faith, what I believe in is what I call a third world, something which is beyond us and with which we do interact. He says, it's something that transcends itself beyond an animal-expressive level. And then he talks about music, which he loses himself in. So the third world, as I understand it, is the area of memes and tradition and all these ideas that come from our ancestors and flow through us. And there's music, and everything outside of either the physical, biological reality and our own subjective inner consciousness is this world that we tap into every day that flows through our minds. And I mean, I think it's an incredible way to think of it.

[01:06:33]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:06:34]  Peter: I'm kind of thinking off the cuff here, but is there a relationship between this, this just this majestic, alternate reality that humans have access to and religion?

[01:06:53]  Bruce: So the object, the third world is objective knowledge, right, to Popper. So again, think about like Tipler, that third world is God. It's just that it's has to, it goes to an omega point where all knowledge is obtained, right, at infinity.

[01:07:10]  Peter: Wait, is the third world just objective knowledge? I mean, is that, it's not necessarily knowledge. It's just, I mean, they could be, it's just their ideas, all kinds of ideas, even false, isn't false ideas.

[01:07:22]  Unidentified speaker: You're right.

[01:07:23]  Unidentified speaker: You're right.

[01:07:23]  Unidentified speaker: That would be part of the third world.

[01:07:25]  Peter: Everything that could potentially be knowledge, maybe.

[01:07:28]  Unidentified speaker: Is that another way to think of it?

[01:07:29]  Bruce: Yeah, you know, I've seen this argued different ways, and everybody seems to have a firm opinion on it.

[01:07:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:07:36]  Bruce: And I'm intentionally being a little bit loose with my language here.

[01:07:39]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:07:40]  Bruce: So, if I were to invoke David Deutsch's Constructor Theory of Knowledge and say, is astrology knowledge? It puts people who believe in his theory in a bad spot, right? And I brought this up in our coverage of Constructor Theory of Knowledge. Because astrology clearly is part of the third world, and it's something that's been very interesting to humans, so it's a meme that has persisted. So, how can you call that knowledge? And yet it is exactly part of the two sources that David Deutsch tries to invoke, as it's self-perpetuating, it keeps itself instantiated, etc.

[01:08:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:08:23]  Bruce: And it has causal power on us as human beings.

[01:08:26]  Unidentified speaker: To keep it instantiated.

[01:08:31]  Bruce: So, it is knowledge under David Deutsch's Constructor Theory of Knowledge. But it's not knowledge in the traditional sense that we would think of the word knowledge, right?

[01:08:44]  Unidentified speaker: And David Deutsch does this all the time.

[01:08:45]  Bruce: He uses the word creativity to mean human creativity, and then suddenly all the crit-rats want to declare AlphaGo not creative, even though it invented an entire new way to play Go, right? And until you can wrap your mind around the fact that David Deutsch is intentionally using existing words in a new way, and that's okay, but it doesn't mean that was the actual meaning of that word and everybody else was wrong. Until you can wrap your mind around that non-essentialist viewpoint, you will get very confused about things like this. So when I say it's the realm of objective knowledge, I guess I mean it more in the Deutsch Constructor Theory of Knowledge sense. And I admit that there may be things in that world that we may not traditionally think of as knowledge.

[01:09:34]  Peter: Wait, is that where we live as humans in the third world?

[01:09:40]  Bruce: So we are the second world.

[01:09:42]  Unidentified speaker: We are the second world.

[01:09:44]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:09:44]  Bruce: And we live in the first world, which is the physical world.

[01:09:47]  Unidentified speaker: OK.

[01:09:48]  Bruce: So this isn't my strongest thing, because I haven't had a ton of interest in this. Of course, I've read quite a few Popper books, and this was really important to his thinking. But I haven't made the attempt to fully understand it because it hasn't been a huge part of my thinking, if that makes any sense. He was trying to solve certain problems, I'm trying to solve different problems. It's hard for me to see how, since my problem I want to think about is like AGI, it's a little hard for me to think about how The Three Worlds is going to help me with AGI, if that makes any sense.

[01:10:18]  Unidentified speaker: OK.

[01:10:18]  Peter: Well, so we sort of transcend our physical reality. We are on the Dyson Sphere.

[01:10:26]  Unidentified speaker: We've solved death.

[01:10:28]  Unidentified speaker: We're on the quantum computer, whatever.

[01:10:30]  Peter: We're, I mean, where, where are we?

[01:10:33]  Unidentified speaker: What are we?

[01:10:34]  Peter: Are we, are we, which world are we in then?

[01:10:37]  Bruce: So here's the easiest way to explain it, I think. You have to look at the problem Popper was trying to solve, which is very different than our problem space today. So Popper's a philosopher. He's dealing with philosophers in general believing that a book contains no knowledge, that knowledge can only exist inside a mind, because that's what knowledge is. Knowledge is this subjective thing that's inside our minds.

[01:11:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:11:07]  Bruce: So he comes up with the three worlds to try to explain, that's just not true.

[01:11:12]  Unidentified speaker: Knowledge actually exists outside us.

[01:11:14]  Bruce: That book does contain knowledge.

[01:11:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:11:17]  Bruce: And then David Deutsch's Constructor Theory of Knowledge is based on that same idea, but it's trying to take it much, much further.

[01:11:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:11:23]  Unidentified speaker: And trying to work out what the testable consequences are.

[01:11:26]  Bruce: I think one of the things that you would have to admit, particularly if you're looking at this more from the Constructor Theory of Knowledge standpoint, and I want to emphasize, I know very little about the Constructor Theory of Knowledge.

[01:11:36]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:11:36]  Unidentified speaker: I read Chiara's book and we did an episode on that and we interviewed her.

[01:11:40]  Bruce: But I think one of the things that comes out of that is that there's not really much difference between what Popper called the second world and what Popper called the third world. And in a very real sense, knowledge in the mind is the same sort of thing as knowledge in a book.

[01:12:01]  Unidentified speaker: They're not really separated.

[01:12:02]  Unidentified speaker: They're just different substrates.

[01:12:05]  Bruce: So it becomes confusing to us today, particularly if we're familiar with Deutsch's work, and The Three Worlds seems counterproductive. But if you see it from the problem he was trying to solve, which is he was trying to explain to people, yes, there is a second world, subjective knowledge, but there's also this third world. And he's trying to work that out, what the relationship between those are. And I remember he worked out some really interesting things that rang true to me, but I can't remember what they are. I'd have to probably go read up on that before I could do an episode on it.

[01:12:39]  Unidentified speaker: Let's mark that down.

[01:12:40]  Bruce: Let's maybe you and me read about The Three Worlds and try to actually summarize it better, and try to get it more straight in our minds. But if you see it as the tool to try to explain to people that a book is knowledge, and the argument that a philosopher at that day would have made is they would have said, well, a book isn't knowledge. If you read it, it becomes knowledge in your mind, but it's not itself knowledge. It's just a bunch of ink on a page, right? If all the humans died, it would contain no knowledge at all. And Popper was really uncomfortable with that way of stating things because it's wrong, so he should be uncomfortable with that way of stating things. So he invented—so he admits to the physical world, that's world one. He admits to the second world [that the philosophers exist?], that's world two. And then he's trying to produce what this third world is that they're not seeing, that there is this objective knowledge that exists outside of them.

[01:13:36]  Unidentified speaker: And you're right, I probably should be saying objective ideas that exist outside of them.

[01:13:40]  Unidentified speaker: And it really is kind of an interesting idea.

[01:13:42]  Bruce: And similar to like his demarcation criteria, which I kind of argued was wrong the way he did it. But the way he did it was so important to understanding how he developed his epistemology, that I think, I don't think you can tease it back out. I think there's no way to understand his epistemology without first taking his demarcation criteria seriously, understanding why it was so important to him, work out how that turned into his epistemology. And I think only then are you in a position to say, okay, really, his demarcation criteria was wrong, I could probably make a better one.

[01:14:22]  Unidentified speaker: Standing on the shoulders of giants, of course.

[01:14:24]  Bruce: And we had an episode, the episode where I worked out how to apply Popper's theory to metaphysical theories. That's the new, in my mind, that's my suggested new demarcation criteria. I don't think I called it that at the time. But what I'm really trying to explain is that there are certain ideas that have real constraints and consequences that we can test. It's not always scientific ideas.

[01:14:47]  Unidentified speaker: It could be mathematical ideas, for instance.

[01:14:49]  Unidentified speaker: It could be logical.

[01:14:52]  Bruce: And Popper does admit this, but I don't think he ever quite made a strong, at least not in the books I've read, made a strong statement as to... He would like to try to separate mathematical knowledge from scientific knowledge and then explain how they were different. But I think the demarcation criteria kind of runs through what he called metaphysical theories, and that some metaphysical theories are just much better than other metaphysical theories, precisely because they're actually on the other side of the demarcation criteria. But he was thinking too much in terms of empirical tests, and there's other kinds of tests that are just as good. And that was really what I was trying to say in the episode about what's the difference between a bad theory and a good metaphysical theory, that you have to kind of understand his demarcation criteria a little more horizontally.

[01:15:41]  Unidentified speaker: It's almost the same.

[01:15:43]  Bruce: When I did it, I simply took his demarcation criteria and I made a few little tiny adjustments to it. And so it's not much of a change, right? But you start to realize certain metaphysical theories really are closer to being like scientific theories, and probably deserve to be on that side of the line. And then other [medical physical theories?], like belief in God or something like that, really, and oh, he has a great statement about this, where he talks about how belief in God is not meaningless just because it's metaphysical. But there are certain theories that simply have no testable consequences at all. They're not meaningless, and they deserve to be broken out from, say, computational theory, which no one would mistake for an empirical theory, but it's not anything like, say, belief in religion or God or something like that, right? It's something that says something about the world, where you know exactly what a counter example would look like. And so you can't test it through an empirical test, but you can test it by trying to figure out if you can come up with a counter example that could physically exist. And nobody can, so we ended up accepting it as the best theory, right? Even though it's supposedly a metaphysical theory, it's way closer to a scientific theory. And this is really what I was trying to get at, right? Is that there's these things that we... Instead of always invoking metaphysical theories, well, my theory is metaphysical, metaphysical theories aren't meaningful.

[01:17:12]  Bruce: You understand that the demarcation criteria determines if your metaphysical theory is good or not, too. Or if it's just a basic belief at this point that drives you, but it's not really a best theory.

[01:17:25]  Unidentified speaker: That was really what I was trying to get at.

[01:17:26]  Unidentified speaker: I know this is a slightly confusing concept.

[01:17:28]  Bruce: It's something that I've only slowly worked out myself. And ultimately, it means that I slightly disagree with Popper on where to draw the demarcation criteria. And I think there's a slightly better way to do it. But I feel like he was just dang close to being correct, and it is so basic to the idea that certain theories are better because they can be tested in some way.

[01:17:51]  Unidentified speaker: They can be checked in some way.

[01:17:54]  Bruce: And then we can go check them and attempt to refute them by counterexample. I think there's maybe even like when we get into Bayesianism, I've been studying Ivan Phillips' book on Bayesianism. I think that even the word refute might be wrong, that there are certain types of probabilistic criticisms that are valid, and that Popper would have accepted as valid and he would have tried to force fit them into the word refute. And maybe that's just not the best way to speak of them, because you're not really refuting the other theory. You're really just showing it's less probable. And there are cases, Bayesian's go wild with this, and I don't agree with everything they do, but there are cases where that's like totally valid, right? Like otherwise machine learning wouldn't work.

[01:18:40]  Unidentified speaker: Ones that are based on like Bayesian reasoning.

[01:18:42]  Bruce: So everyone you ever talk to, they try to like, Deutsch will try to make a distinction between Bayesian epistemology and Bayesian reasoning. And he'll say, Bayesian reasoning is fine, Bayesian epistemology isn't, but I've never seen anyone explain what the difference is, except in really vague terms, right? Not nearly well enough that I can tell just by listening to them, oh, this one's fine and this one isn't. So that's one of the things I've been trying to study is, what's the actual line between when it's being abused and when it's not being abused? And I'm starting to form an opinion on that. And I think Ivan Phillips book has been really helpful in trying to me understand that. And I feel like the increment guys have said some great things about this too, that I found really useful. And I think reading Deborah Mayo's book was really eye-opening in this regard also. And I don't feel like I quite get it all yet. So I've been really kind of shy about talking about Bayesianism when I don't feel like I understand it.

[01:19:34]  Unidentified speaker: But I'm getting there.

[01:19:35]  Bruce: And I do think that at least I'm convinced at this point that maybe calling it conjecture and refutation wasn't the best way to call it.

[01:19:44]  Unidentified speaker: I think a lot of Deutschians would feel comfortable with that.

[01:19:46]  Unidentified speaker: They'd say, well, it should have been conjecture and criticism.

[01:19:48]  Bruce: But then they try to be really vague about what they mean by criticism. Where I think Popper had in mind this idea of objective criticisms, criticisms that anyone can go check, rather than, well, I feel that we do better under anarcho-capitalism because, you know, you have these very vague criticisms and theories that you use that require all sorts of prophecies that just don't even, are just, they work as beliefs, they don't work as best theories, right? And I think that Bayesianism, sorry, what I'm trying to say is, I think that Popper, some of this confusion comes from the fact that Popper would always say, refutation, when really he meant something more like criticism. And he does have this idea that he developed. Well, if it's metaphysical theory, then you can criticize it.

[01:20:43]  Unidentified speaker: But then that becomes very confusing to people.

[01:20:45]  Bruce: They think it just means you can vaguely criticize it. Where what he really meant is that there are really better criticisms that exist. Some criticisms are very objective, and some are very subjective.

[01:20:55]  Unidentified speaker: They're just gut feelings and beliefs.

[01:20:58]  Bruce: And that there is a drive towards trying to get your theories over the line to where they can be objectively criticized, that they could be reformulated so they can be. And that is a huge part of Popper's thinking. But I don't think people who read Popper come away feeling like he ever said that. And you have to tease out the little quotes here and there, which I've done on the podcast, to be able to see, yes, that was what Popper really meant all along. So, and I think one of them is that the word refutations is not the best word, right? It's, it's, there are so many different ways to objectively criticize a theory that really wouldn't intuitively feel like you're refuting the theory.

[01:21:41]  Peter: Well, Bruce, I don't want to keep beating a dead horse here. I think I've hit all the points that I would like to hit here. I'm extremely happy with how this has turned out. This has probably been one of my favorite episodes, one of my favorite, just, conversations in life.

[01:22:00]  Bruce: Can I give two quotes from Popper from that, from the—I just thought these were really good. I've introduced the falsification criteria in order to distinguish science from what is not science, because something isn't science, however, does not mean that it's meaningless. Keep in mind that he's doing this in terms of talking about God.

[01:22:18]  Unidentified speaker: We stand naked before God.

[01:22:19]  Bruce: In a sense, it's quite all right. It would be sad if in this field, only the learned and clever people, the Pharisees and the scribes in the Christian formula, would be those who arrive.

[01:22:29]  Unidentified speaker: I think you already quoted that.

[01:22:30]  Bruce: But then further down the page, he says, if a man can keep up his courage under the worst conditions, that would be an argument for God. That's the modified Pascal's Wager that I was kind of hinting at, that I need to tease out a lot better to explain what I mean. But that, I think, is where belief in God does enter back into the picture for a rational person, right? Is that there are cases where it just makes sense. For Tolstoy, it just made sense for him to believe in God. It almost doesn't matter if he was right or not, because it was what worked for him. And in that sense, it could be said to be rational.

[01:23:12]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:23:14]  Peter: Well, I thought his, you know, the other statement he said in here, he brings up, I think, several times, honestly, in the interview as the best summation of his philosophy could also be a conception of faith that actually makes some sense to me. I mean, the idea of faith is not something that has ever rang true for me, but he says several times the road to wisdom, while it is plain and simple, to err and err and err, but less and less and less.

[01:23:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:23:53]  Peter: If that's faith, then I guess I can get behind that.

[01:23:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:23:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:58]  Peter: Well, thank you, Bruce.

[01:23:59]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you so much.

[01:24:00]  Peter: And I hope that you have a better week this coming week.

[01:24:06]  Unidentified speaker: And thank you.

[01:24:07]  Unidentified speaker: This was an excellent idea for an episode.

[01:24:09]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you for putting this together.

[01:24:20]  Unidentified speaker: Hello again.

[01:24:22]  Peter: If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielsen01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:25:05]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.