Episode 111: Static vs Dynamic Societies

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Transcript

[00:00:00]  Blue: This week, on the Theory of Anything podcast, Bruce tries to get to the root on what a static society is. As usual, Bruce, an AGI nerd, strives to get to the heart, down to the level of machine learning, on what is the defining characteristic of a static versus dynamic society. Could this distinction turn into a testable theory? What are the alternatives to what Deutsch proposes? Also, what exactly is a culture of criticism? And on a foundational level, what is the Enlightenment? Hope someone enjoys this conversation as much as I did.

[00:00:47]  Red: Welcome to Theory of Anything podcast.

[00:00:49]  Blue: Hey, Peter. Hey, Bruce. How are you today?

[00:00:52]  Red: Good. You know, this is a topic I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, because I want to cover it in a lot of, I want it to be kind of an ongoing topic that we talk about. You know how like there’s certain topics we raise and then we bring them up over and over again? This is one of those. And it is, Deutsche’s theories on static versus dynamic societies. Or, why did it take so long to make progress?

[00:01:17]  Blue: Okay. Well, I’m excited to hear what you have to say about this. I have to say this is probably an aspect of Deutsche’s ideas that, on one hand, I found revelatory. It’s just not something I’d ever really thought about too much. But I also found 100 % convincing. So, maybe I’ll be less convinced after this podcast the way things sometimes go. But I found it. I mean, it really is something to ponder this idea that for 300,000 years or 2 million years, or ever long you put are defining our species, almost, you know, just children just expected, the parents just expected their children to just have the same life as they did, have the same values. And now we just live in such a different world. I mean, I look at my own kids and just think all the time, wonder all the time about what their lives will be like when they’re a middle -aged man like me.

[00:02:35]  Red: Let me ask you something though. This is going to come up in my notes here. But let’s say you probably don’t necessarily want your children to have exactly your ideas and values. Maybe you do want them to have your values. I guess it depends on how you define values. Maybe you want them to have your moral values but not necessarily other types of values.

[00:03:00]  Blue: Yes and

[00:03:01]  Red: no, that

[00:03:01]  Blue: might be complicated to

[00:03:02]  Red: your question

[00:03:03]  Blue: right there.

[00:03:05]  Red: But this is where I’m coming at. I think a lot of parents do want today, I mean, do want their children to be little versions of them, maybe for the best of possible reasons. They think this is the best way, you know, they want the best for their children and they think this is the best knowledge that they want to pass along. How successful are parents at this?

[00:03:28]  Blue: Well, I would say quite unsuccessful. I would too. You know, when you get into this, Steven Pinker’s blank slate and Judith Rich Harris’s work that we’ve kind of talked about on this podcast about making this case that children are mostly just controlled by their genes and all this and the twin studies and all this. This is what people who are into looking at children in this sort of analytical way which I have really come away from personally. It’s just something I’ve changed about myself in the last five years, mostly through reading David Deutsch, I guess. They always emphasize that peer influence is a big thing. You know, there’s a lot of grain of truth to that, I think. I mean, there’s a reason why people talk about these generational divides. You know, you think about an immigrant that comes to this country. Chances are the children are going to adopt more the values and speech, even the way they express themselves and their language and all that. It comes from peers so much, you know, arguably more than parents when you factor out the genetic influence. But, you know, I don’t know, I just stopped looking at my kids like that. It’s a complicated and dynamic relationship and I know that my children are getting to the age 13 and 16 where they have probably as much influence on me as I do on them. You know, it’s a two -way street. I’ve always taken the approach with my children where whatever they’re interested in, whether it’s magic, the gathering or mountain biking or whatever, I try to embrace that and just try to be interested in what they like and their ideas about the world. And,

[00:05:46]  Blue: you know, they still haven’t gotten me into any video games. And I still haven’t gotten them into David Deutsch and Karl Popper either when I talk about it. So even

[00:05:57]  Red: when you want to pass something along like

[00:06:00]  Blue: Popper Deutsch? Oh, they basically just cover their ears and just, you know, I remember when my son was a little younger and he wouldn’t say this quite like this right now, but I would, you know, I don’t know, we’d be having having some conflict and I’d say, well, you know, knowledge is our knowledge is finite, but our ignorance is infinite. There’s something he says, I don’t give a, you know, what

[00:06:29]  Red: about what Karl Popper says?

[00:06:33]  Blue: I forgot if there are any other 10 -year -olds that quite expressed that sentiment.

[00:06:40]  Red: Might we maybe summarize the point of view that you’ve taken away from David Deutsch? That’s somewhat contrary to the popular view that children are determined, you know, solely by their peers or children are determined solely by their genes or something like that. That because children are universal explainers that it’s, we shouldn’t really expect that creative beings like children we would be able to just write our ideas onto them and that they would just pick them up lockstep with us that that would maybe even be an impossibility because they’re universal explainers. Would that be a fair way to summarize the view that you’re expressing?

[00:07:19]  Unknown: Yeah,

[00:07:19]  Blue: I mean, I think that even, I don’t know if this is something that, well, this is something that Deutsch emphasizes at least a little, that even, you know, this idea that the growth of knowledge and creativity is fundamentally impossible to predict and control, whether in a society or an individual, I think too. I mean, that’s what growing up is. It’s the growth of knowledge and we can’t, you can’t predict how your kids are going to turn out. So if

[00:07:51]  Red: that’s true, then how is it that we successfully did it perfectly for 200,000 years according to Deutsch’s other theory, where we completely predicted what our children would be like, made them little less and kept them complete their creativity completely in check. It’s a contradiction in Deutsch’s views that I don’t think he ever fully resolves.

[00:08:14]  Blue: And it’s

[00:08:15]  Red: one of the things - No, that’s

[00:08:15]  Blue: an interesting way to put it. Hmm, I have to have to think about exactly how to answer that.

[00:08:24]  Red: So I think questions like this are super interesting, right? Because there’s no doubt that something happened for 200,000 years. But we should look at the various theories as to what happened and we should try to figure out how to synthesize them, what how to take the best parts of each and how to improve upon the theories. I’m not gonna really get into that too much today. I’m gonna mostly just be steel -amanting Deutsch’s theory. Sorry, go ahead. To be

[00:08:54]  Blue: fair, I think he may be more talking about the society as static rather than the individual as static. So he probably wouldn’t claim that, you know, 200,000 years ago parents could program their children to be exactly like them, which probably couldn’t happen. But the level of society, if society made some progress or something, it just wouldn’t stick because we didn’t have that mindset of - because these were authoritarian societies, essentially. We didn’t have that mindset of valuing error correction and change and rational memes. So that might be closer to what he would claim.

[00:09:38]  Red: Okay, I wanna earmark what you just said because we’re gonna be quoting directly from him. As we quote him, I wanna see to what degree the way you just summarized his view is correct into what degree you may have been off. Okay. Because it’s an interesting question, right? How did it happen? It’s far less obvious than it first appears. And this is actually what I really like about Deutsch’s theory, even if it turns out that his theory is not entirely correct, which almost by definition, it won’t be entirely correct, right? The fact is that he’s probably the only one I’ve come across that is trying to explain this. I don’t know how many other people see this as something that is in need of explanation.

[00:10:22]  Blue: Yeah.

[00:10:23]  Red: And Deutsch sees it as something that is in need of explanation. I have come across to others that, to some degree, see it as something in need of explanation. It’s something

[00:10:30]  Blue: people almost take for granted. It is. It seems like it’s so baked into our society now that things change and that people don’t even… It’s like, you don’t think about it.

[00:10:46]  Red: Okay. So this is all a pretty good introduction. Let me just kind of summarize quickly, though. Modern humans, they’ve been around for 200 to 300,000 years. The first hominids have been around from 2.5 to 4 million years. I just got these by Googling, so I don’t know how accurate they are, but that sounds about right from everything I’ve ever read.

[00:11:04]  Blue: Yeah.

[00:11:05]  Red: So we’re not sure of homosapiens. We’re the first universal explainers or not. In fact, I would guess probably not. So what I mean by that is there may have been universal explainers around before homosapiens, so before the 300,000 years ago. But for the sake of just making a conservative estimate, let’s assume homosapiens were the first universal explainers. That still means even if we take the more conservative of the numbers between 200 and 300,000 years, that means at least 200,000 years between the first universal explainers and the enlightenment where progress started to really explode. That’s a really long period of time. That’s a huge period of time, at least by Western standards, where things change so fast, right?

[00:11:51]  Blue: Yeah.

[00:11:51]  Red: Somehow something really happened during that period of time. So why did it take so long for universal explainers to figure out how to fully utilize their creativity? So David Deutsch offers one of the most comprehensive, I would say the most comprehensive attempts to answer this question. I’ve come up with other people who attempt to answer various aspects of this question, but I don’t think any of them are trying to comprehensively answer the question. So he coined terms like static society and irrational memes to explain what he thinks went wrong. Now, if you’re a long -time listener of the podcast, you know that I simply do not accept Deutsch at his word or really anyone at their word on anything. So I really wanted to know if there were any good competing theories to explain our long -time lack of rapid progress. I also wanted to know if there were any known refuting cases to Deutsch’s theory, because I always immediately try to find counter -examples to any theory I encounter. Also, let me admit that there’s something about this theory that just emotionally doesn’t sit well with me. Of course, emotions don’t mean anything, so this may mean nothing, but this is a surprisingly pessimistic theory coming from the normally optimistic Deutsch. So it’s not a theory that’s necessarily easy to like if that makes any sense, which doesn’t make it untrue, but just I’m going to have this natural reaction to, oh, I wonder if there’s like some alternative, right? I would have never thought of this as a pessimistic theory, but that’s interesting that you perceive it like that. Yeah. So just a few quotes from Deutsch to show what I mean here.

[00:13:30]  Red: Okay, so from his essay in the book Possible Minds, which by the way, he reads on YouTube. You can hear him reading this essay himself. It’s really cool. He says, for most of our species history, our ancestors were barely people. He then goes on to explain why he says that. It’s because he believes it isn’t possible that creative universal explainers could fail to make progress unless there was a systemic suppression of creativity in place. So here’s a quote now from him. Same essay. It would be a mistake to imagine an idyllic society of hunter -gatherers learning at the feet of their elders to recite the tribal lore by heart, being content despite their lives of suffering and grueling labor and despite expecting to die young and in agony of some nightmarish disease or parasite, because even if they could conceive of nothing better than such a life, those torments were the least of their troubles. Then later he says, but of course, the children weren’t just asked to ignore the enormous potential and conform faithfully to the image fixed by tradition. They were somehow trained to be psychologically unable to deviate from it. By now, it’s hard for us to even conceive of the kind of relentless, finely tuned oppression required to reliably extinguish in everyone the aspirations to progress and replace it with dread and revulsion at any novel behavior. So notice that Deutsch is talking about a complete success passing this along to your children. Absolute complete success, 100%. That’s why I say I do think there’s a contradiction inherent in Deutsch’s two views.

[00:15:21]  Red: Not necessarily an irreconcilable contradiction, but one that he’s never fully teased out why it used to be, according to one of his theories, that we were completely successful passing our main memes along to our children and making versions of ourselves that had this reliable revulsion to novel behavior. And then today he’s claiming that it’s almost impossible to pass such memes along to children. So I’ve never seen him really tease out why he has these two beliefs and how they could at least potentially be contradictions. So now I love Deutsch’s books because of how optimistic they are, but this really does seem scarily, scarily pessimistic to me. He’s literally saying that it was so easy to oppress creativity that for at least 200,000 years there wasn’t a single society that hadn’t successfully extinguished creativity. Okay, think about that for a second. So, and he’s right. That’s very difficult to fathom. And I agree that, if true, it seems pretty horrific. But consider what it says about creativity itself. Creativity is supposed to be the most powerful force in the universe. But every single human society for 200,000 years managed to suppress the most powerful force in the universe for 200,000 years.

[00:16:49]  Blue: Yeah. So keep in mind that according to Deutsch, creativity really only began to be unleashed after the Enlightenment, which I looked up dates 1685 according to Google, so late 17th century.

[00:17:04]  Red: So just barely, like this is really recent history. So creativity has only managed to escape systemic oppression according to this theory that was total and complete without exception for only the last 300 years out of 200,000. So let’s put this in perspective. Imagine a 24 -hour day representing the existence of universal explainers. Creativity was so weak that it was systemically stamped out for all but the last 2.2 minutes of that.

[00:17:33]  Blue: Well, he does emphasize that there have been other many Enlightenments. I don’t remember the exact words he uses. It’s many Enlightenments, yes. Presumably, obviously, the Greeks are the most prominent, but I can imagine that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of sparks of this kind of creativity on a societal level. I mean, I don’t know if he’s saying it quite as absolutely as you are.

[00:18:15]  Red: I will give the exact quote coming up, but what he specifically says is that every single society failed to utilize creativity or was wiped out.

[00:18:25]  Blue: Fair enough.

[00:18:26]  Red: So that is itself a suppression of creativity, right? So we have Athens that got wiped out by Sparta, right? So here you have a case where creativity just lost, like in the war between suppressing creativity and creativity for 200,000 years, even if there was a many Enlightenment, it lost the war every single time for 200,000 years. So imagine a football field representing the existence of universal explainers. Creativity was so weak that it was systematically stamped out for all but the last 5 inches. So this theory really doesn’t create in me a lot of confidence in the power of creativity, which is why it comes across to me as so pessimistic. Also consider this. It may not seem strange to talk about our long forgotten cavemen ancestors wandering around the world 200,000 years ago as barely human. So we sort of accept that as correct. But Deutsch isn’t just talking about them. He’s saying this of every human being prior to the Enlightenment. He’s saying it about every citizen of the Roman Empire, every reformer in the Renaissance, every figure in the Bible. So it’s a claim that, in my opinion, should be very, very, very difficult to believe without substantial attempts to first criticize it and fail to find competing theories. Now I’ve had this happen to me before and I’ve mentioned this on the podcast that I really, really, really did not like many worlds quantum physics. So I set out to find competing theories and counter examples to it. And I could not find even a single competing explanation for many worlds quantum physics, nor did there appear to be any counter examples to it that I could find. So I was shocked.

[00:20:14]  Red: When I read Deutsch’s book, I read his fabric of reality, his explanation of shadow photons, and I thought, oh, that’s cool. I can see why maybe he believes in many worlds quantum physics, but there’s no way there isn’t some alternate explanation that he’s just not explaining. And I’m so used to people having beliefs that they’re biased towards and they just don’t even bring up the strongest counter examples. And so I just assumed naturally that was what Deutsch was doing. So I set off and I spent considerable time over years teaching myself quantum computation. I was not bold enough to learn quantum physics directly, so I learned quantum computation because I have a computer science background. But that is basically doing quantum physics, but it’s easier math because you just use matrices. So it’s a little less intimidating. I taught that to myself. I worked it out. I read Roger Penrose trying to understand, since Roger Penrose is one of the strongest cosmologists that disagrees with David Deutsch on this. And I came away with the full -on realization that many worlds quantum physics really and truly was the sole explanation for quantum physics today. And I should clarify here, I’m emphasizing explanation in the word here. Loosely speaking, of course, Copenhagen and Bohem and quantum Darwinism and transactional interpretation, et cetera, could be roughly considered quote -unquote alternative explanations of quantum physics. But I’m a critical rationalist. I do not accept ad hoc explanations as valid explanations. And all of those are absolutely, without a doubt, ad hoc explanations. Actually, I should not include quantum Darwinism in that because I haven’t actually studied that one yet. But all the others I studied, they are ad hoc explanations, period end of story.

[00:22:08]  Red: So MWI is the only theory that doesn’t add additional unexplained but usually unobserved by theory phenomena to the theory to ad hoc adjustment. So MWI is an example of where I eventually was forced by my own findings to accept Deutsch’s arguments against my will. Will we find something similar in the case of Deutsch’s explanation for why creativity failed for so long? So I set out to find competing theories and find them I did. There are tons of them, in fact. This is quite a different situation than with MWI where there simply are no competing explanations. So we do not have competing explanations for why it’s, we do have competing explanations for why it’s so difficult to learn to fully utilize our creativity. Well, sort of we have competing explanations. Spoiler, most of Deutsch’s theory ends up checking out even in the light of the competing theories or to put it another way, the competing theories are less like total competing theories and more like tweaked versions of Deutsch’s theory. But honestly, I’ll take anything at this point that makes this even a teeny tiny bit less pessimistic. So I’m game if I can find anything that improves upon Deutsch’s theory and makes it a little less pessimistic. So each competing theory makes certain claims that are either identical to or at least compatible with Deutsch’s theory. So there seems to be a wide acceptance or at least lack of problems with much of his theory. But each theory challenges some aspect of his theory. In fact, I can’t think of any aspect of his theory that isn’t challenged by at least one of the other theories.

[00:23:48]  Red: So the result is this strange circumstance where the competing theories collectively seem to largely corroborate Deutsch’s theories, but with dissent on every single detail by at least one of the competitors. So my plan is to introduce both Deutsch’s theory in today’s episode and to eventually introduce the competing theories as part of our ongoing exploration of Popperian epistemology. So I’m not talking about a series here. Like a lot of times we’ll do a series and I’ll do three or four episodes in a row on one topic and we like do this massive deep dive in the topic. I don’t think that’s going to work in this case. There are so many competing theories that are adjacent to his theory in some way. Tons of really interesting stuff I’ve learned trying to find alternative explanations. So what I kind of have in mind is today we’re going to introduce Deutsch’s theory in detail in his own words. So kind of steel man it, if you will. And then in future episodes, not necessarily like the next episode or something like that, but just over creation of this podcast, I will slowly introduce reviews of books that offer at least partial explanations that might be different than Deutsch’s or might corroborate Deutsch’s in various ways. So that’s kind of what I have in mind. Just think of this as like we’re introducing a new topic that we’re going to explore over time like many of the topics that we’ve explored over time on this podcast. So besides that, this topic has obvious direct reference relevance to epistemology. So I believe that means it will have direct relevance to AGI because an understanding of what suppressed progress and or creativity would teach us something about creativity.

[00:25:33]  Red: Think of it this way, whatever started happening in the 17th century and didn’t happen before will turn out to be the core of creativity. Now Deutsch has already given us his answer to what he thinks this was a culture of criticism that in the 17th century we finally get a culture of criticism and thus progress begins to explode. Now if that turns out to be true an AGI nerd like me would want to spend his time teasing out what we even mean by a culture of criticism in deep detail since just simply saying quote -unquote a cultural criticism is too vague to be useful to an AGI nerd. I want to know what that really means. Now it seems appropriate that we cover Deutsch’s first. We’re going to steal Manit, we’re going to get it with quotes directly from him on his view of this theory. Then I will offer not a collection of criticisms that will be in future podcasts where we’ll criticize the theory but instead I’m going to offer a collection of questions that we should ask about his theory that seem like productive ways to go about attempting to criticize his theory as much as possible but with the intent to possibly corroborate it possibly improve on it hopefully improve on it and then if we fail to improve on it then we’ve corroborated it this is kind of just the way critical rationalism works we shouldn’t be afraid of attempts to criticize a theory that’s exactly what we should want to be able to corroborate the theory.

[00:27:02]  Red: So one note up front I’m going to be using the term creativity to mean what Deutsch means by that throughout this discussion which is he defines it in beginning of infinity as the human ability to be universal in their ability to create new explanations Now I’d note that I’ve got some issues personally with that definition of creativity because for example it means biological evolution isn’t creative because it creates no new explanations Now I feel Deutsch’s use of the term creativity is therefore problematic which is why I’ve kind of not used it the way he has and I think I’ve been able to see firsthand in a way that I’m sure he doesn’t get to see because he’s a famous figure how that definition has created mass confusion amongst many of his fans and seems to have in my opinion at least turned creativity as a word into an almost supernatural ability of human minds So for example, creativity must of necessity be a mechanical process since everything is a mechanical process according to the Church -Turing -Deutsch thesis but some Deutschians refuse to accept that at this point and they’re searching for I’ve seen them searching for a non -mechanical algorithm based on the idea that a mechanical algorithm is quote just perspiration Now that’s a complete impossibility according to the Church -Turing -Deutsch thesis so it’s a really a waste of time to be going down that path and I’ve also seen interesting proposals like one example I’ve seen is Lee Cronin’s assembly theory

[00:28:32]  Red: that really could shed light on how explanations are created algorithmically only to watch crit -rats immediately reject the theory not for any good technical reason but just because it makes creativity too mechanical or quote -unquote places limits on creativity so for now I am going to since we are trying to explain this in Deutsch’s own words I will use creativity to specifically mean the human ability to create new explanations but I’m just reminding people of my descent with that definition partial descent with that definition so Deutsch claims the following this is going to be first the summary of how at least my interpretation of his theory is best as I’m able to make sense of it so first universal explainers evolved because there was an amazing amount of fitness in being able to pass along memes efficiently via imitation not because creativity itself was valuable to fitness and because creativity evolved for the sake of memes it was also dominated by memes that selectively disabled that very same creativity so that the meme could transmit as faithfully as possible but once creativity evolved for imitation of memes the mental and physical machinery was in place to create infinite progress even though it wasn’t that wasn’t the purpose for which creativity had evolved furthermore even if a very few humans even rarely use their creativity to even just say improve their tools maybe even just by dumb luck initially and not intentionally then according to Deutsch we’d have seen an explosion of progress in tools but we don’t see that in the fossil record side note I hate the term fossil record but we’ll stick with it for now

[00:30:22]  Red: therefore it must be the case that our early human ancestors were systemically using their creativity to quash creativity they must have been entirely successful at it according to this theory because the only progress happening was so small that people fail to notice it this kind of makes sense if you are trying to quash creativity you’re still going to have some but it would have to be so small that nobody noticed it was an innovation and so that’s Deutsch’s explanation for why you do see progress over the years but it’s very very small progress he gives the example of if you were to go look back during an ancient era prehistory you would have to look across tens of thousands of years to be able to differentiate between one group of tools and another group of tools to where progress was made with the Romans it would be based in hundreds of years and with a modern car it would be a decade you could place it within a decade because progress is happening so much faster now so it’s not the progress wasn’t there but it had to be so small that nobody noticed it basically so that’s basically the summary of his theory I’m going to go into his own wording on each of these so we can talk about it let me admit that I find this theory both terrifying and chilling but also strangely difficult to criticize unless you buy Graham Hancock’s insane theories it’s sort of just a matter of a fact that rapid progress didn’t happen for the first 200,000 or more years and so it seems like Deutsch must be correct that something stopped progress

[00:32:12]  Red: furthermore, while most of that time was not part of the historical record keep in mind that writing has only been around since about 3,500 BC again according to google what do we find what we do find in the historical record often does match Deutsch’s theories for example the inquisition or any of various famous oppressions and it’s not like there was some long history in the historical record of freedom of speech that we can point to in human societies and what little we do know about freedom of speech since writing was invented shows that every human society prior to maybe Athens did outlaw freedom of speech based on what we have of the historical record and my source there is Jacob McNagama McNagama and his book Free Speech a History from Socrates to Social Media so he, Jacob McNagama he says that the first occurrence of free speech in the historical record was Athens and he also says that even that’s somewhat questionable because the Athenians did not have a consistent track record of freedom of speech either so it kind of waxed and waned they’re the ones who killed Socrates for saying things that they didn’t like I mean there was an up and down with the Athenians but at least you can find in the historical record an attempt at freedom of speech where you really can’t find it anywhere else according to his research

[00:33:47]  Red: so Deutsch explains it like this in the possible minds essay he says that is why I say that prehistoric people at least were barely people both before and after becoming perfectly human both physiologically and in their mental potential they were monstrously inhuman in the actual content of their thoughts I’m not referring to their crimes or even their cruelty as such those are all too human so note he is specifically saying I’m not saying that the thing that made them inhuman compared to us was that they were extra cruel that’s not what he’s talking about nor could mere cruelty have reduced progress that effectively things like the thumb screw and the steak for the glory of the lord were for reigning in the few deviants who had somehow escaped mental standardization which would normally have taken effect long before they were in danger of inventing heresies ok so again notice that he is talking about a complete success passing your memes along to your children ok

[00:34:55]  Red: from the earliest day of thinking onward children must have been conicopias of creative ideas and paragons of critical thought otherwise as I said they could not have learned language or other complex culture but of course they weren’t just asked to ignore their enormous potential and conform faithfully to the image fixed by tradition they were somehow trained to be psychologically unable to deviate from it by now it’s hard for us to even conceive of the kind of relentless, finely tuned oppression required to reliably extinguish in everyone the aspiration to progress and replace it with dread and revulsion of any novel behavior in such a culture there can have been no morality other than conformity and obedience no other identity than one status in a hierarchy no mechanism of cooperation other than punishment and reward so everyone had the same aspiration in life to avoid the punishments and get the rewards in a typical generation no one invented anything because no one aspired to anything new because everyone had already despaired of improvements being possible not only was there no technological innovation or theoretical discovery there were no new world views styles of art or interests that could have inspired those by the time individuals grew up they had in effect been reduced to AIs programmed with the exquisite skills necessary to enact that static culture and to inflict on the next generation their inability to even consider doing otherwise

[00:36:33]  Red: so a side note about this essay, Possible Minds Essay as I mentioned on YouTube you can find Deutsch reading it himself it’s excellent you should absolutely go look it up and listen to it if you haven’t already if you’re listening to this podcast there’s a good chance you already have listened to it Deutsch in this essay really lets loose with his truest most inner feelings about what he sees as the horrors of the past he also in this article ties his overall theory to other theories that he later became famous or arguably infamous for such as you can see that taking children seriously angle being invoked throughout the article you can see the AI versus AGI theory being invoked his distaste for the past and for non -western cultures is present his belief that humans suffered so immensely in the past he even introduces the disobedience criteria where he believes that AI are defined by their obedience and AGI are defined by their disobedience he even works in an attack on traditional schools as being a remnant of our static society here’s the quote indeed I expect that any testing in the process of creating an AGI risks being counterproductive even immoral just as in the education of humans so this is by the way why crit rats often consider tests in school or even school itself to be immoral is because of some of the things that Deutsch says here so many of his ideas and theories some of his better ones and some of his more questionable ones all get synthesized together into this excellent little article which is what I think makes it so interesting

[00:38:09]  Red: so let’s now go through what he actually says mostly from beginning of infinity I think there’s a great deal of similarity obviously between the possible minds article in the beginning of infinity because I do think they came out somewhat near each other I’m not sure how far apart I think possible minds came later but maybe I’m wrong so I’d have to go look that up to be sure so so first of all he claimed that creativity evolved to replicate memes not to innovate so from beginning infinity page 4 412 412

[00:38:40]  Red: thus as I as so often happened in the history of universality the human capacity for universal explanation did not evolve to have a universal function it evolves simply to increase the volume of memetic information that our ancestors could acquire and the speed and actor accuracy which they could and the speed and accuracy with which they could acquire it but since the easiest way for evolution to do that was to give us a universal ability to explain through creativity that is what it did this epistemological fact provides the reason for the evolution of human creativity and therefore the human species in the first place on page 411 he says a person acquiring a meme faces the same logical challenge as a scientist both must discover a hidden explanation from the former it is the idea in the minds of other people for the later a regularity or law of nature neither person has access direct access to this explanation but both have access to evidence with which explanations can be tested the observed behavior of people who hold the meme and physical phenomena conforming to the law is what he means by evidence what replicates human means is creativity and creativity was used while it was evolving to replicate memes in other words it was used to acquire existing knowledge not to create new knowledge but the mechanism to do both things is identical and so in acquiring the ability to do the former we automatically became able to do the later it was a momentous example of reach which made possible everything that is uniquely human

[00:40:21]  Red: in on the topic of how creativity evolved pages 412 to 413 he says it must have happened something like this in early pre -human society there were only very simple memes the kind that apes now have though perhaps with a wider repertoire of copyable element elementary behavior those memes were about practical things like how to get food that was otherwise inaccessible the value of such knowledge must have been high so this created a ready made niche for any adaption that would reduce the effort required to replicate memes creativity was the ultimate adaption to fill this niche as it as it increased further adaptions co -evolved such as an increase in memory capacity to store more memes finer motor control and specialized brain structures for dealing with language as a result the meme bandwidth the amount of mnemonic information that could be passed from each generation to the next increased to memes also became more complex and sophisticated just a reminder we covered this in our episodes on Deutch’s views on animal and Pompers views also on animal intelligence I recall that Deutch has this idea that he took from Richard Byrne I would argue somewhat of a misunderstanding of Richard Byrne’s theory that but this part’s correct animals that apes chimps I think it actually was that they have these memes they pass along very complex memes that help them be able to get thorns out of thistle so you know thistles out of food so that they can eat the food they would you know rub it against their face in their chin and it would cause it to come out and it would squash it very complicated stuff that couldn’t possibly have been encoded in the genes so chimps and apes have these complex memes knowledge outside the genes by the way by definition

[00:42:15]  Red: that they pass along from generation to generation but Deutch argues that the way they pass along this is just by probabilistic memes and without any sort of explanatory content and so that puts a very hard limitation on how far the memes can go there’s certain simple things that you can he’s arguing can do through probabilistic means but at some point what you really need is the ability to try to have an explanation of what the other person is thinking and then you can do far more complex memes and so this is what he’s really talking about this evolution from eight memes into human memes that involved explanation and how creativity was the ultimate adaption to fill this niche

[00:42:58]  Red: so how could memes possibly suppress creative being beings so he writes how do memes know how to achieve all such complex reproducible effects on the ideas and behavior of human beings they contain that knowledge implicitly how did they come by that knowledge it evolved the meme exists at any instance in many very variant forms and those are subject to selection in favor of faithful replication for every long -lived meme in a static society millions of variants of it will have fallen by the wayside because they lack that tiny extra piece of information that extra degree of ruthless efficiency in preventing rivals from being thought of or acted upon that slight advantage in psychological leverage or whatever it took to make it spread through the population better than its rivals and once it was prevalent to get it copied and enacted just with just those extra degrees of fidelity if ever a variant happened to be a little better at inducing behavior with those replicating properties it soon became prevalent as soon as it did there were again many variants of that variant which were again subject to the same evolutionary pressure the successive versions of the meme accumulated knowledge that enabled them to more ever more reliably to inflict their characteristic style of damage on their human victims that’s from page 382 and 383

[00:44:31]  Red: alright so just to summarize what we just read there he’s really arguing that the memes themselves were what did the oppression right that if you have these static societies that a meme the memes that will survive are the ones that are the best at getting themselves copied with complete fidelity which would mean that these memes the ones that survive would be the ones that are the best at turning off human creativity so that they instead will cause the human to copy the meme with complete fidelity if they didn’t have that nature then by definition the meme would not exist for very long because it would quickly get improved upon and it would get replaced by a better meme okay and that’s an anti -rational meme yes he calls it an irrational meme because they disabled the ability to criticize and improve upon them he can contrast this with rational memes that survive because they’re actually true so he says another way of stating the problem is that people think and try to improve upon their ideas which entails changing them a long -lived meme is an idea that runs that gauntlet again and again and survives how is that possible the post enlightenment west is the only society in history that for most for more than a couple of lifetimes has ever undergone change rapid enough for people to notice but while a society lasted all important ideas areas of life seem changeless to the participants

[00:46:04]  Red: meaning sorry I took that out of context but while a static society lasted all important areas of life seem changeless to the participants they could expect to die under the much the same moral values personal lifestyles conceptual framework technology and pattern of economic production as they were born under and of the changes that did occur few were for the better I call such societies static societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants before we can understand our usual dynamic sort of society we must understand the usual static sort he goes on on page this these quotes will come from page 388 and 381 for society to be static all of its memes must be unchanging or changing too slowly to be noticed for instance consider an isolated primitive society that has for whatever reason remained almost unchanged for many generations why? quite possibly no one in society even wanted it to change

[00:47:02]  Red: because they can conceive of no other way of life nevertheless its members are not immune from pain, hunger, grief, fear or any other form of physical and mental suffering they try to think of ideas to alleviate some of their suffering some of those ideas are original and occasionally one of them would actually help it need be only a small tentative improvement a way of hunting or growing food with slightly less effort or of making slightly better tools a better way of recording debts or laws a subtle change in the relationship between husband and wife or between parent and child a slightly different attitude towards the society’s rulers or gods what will happen next the person with that idea must well may well want to tell other people those who believe the idea will see that it could make life a little less nasty brutish and short they will tell their families and friends and they theirs this idea will be complete can be competing in people’s minds with other ideas about how to make life better most of them presumably faults but suppose for the sake of argument this particular true idea happens to be believed and spreads to the society then the society will have been changed it may not have changed very much but this was merely the the change caused by a single person thinking of a single idea so multiply all that by the number of thinking minds in the society and by a lifetime’s worth of thoughts in each of them and let this continue for only a few generations and the result is an exponentially increasing revolutionary force transforming every aspect of that of the society

[00:48:39]  Red: so because we obviously because we don’t see that that’s why he’s concluding that it must be that that did not happen ok so just related to this he takes a stance on knowledge’s relationship to suffering so page 385 countless human beings hoping through lifetimes and for generations for their suffering to be relieved not only failed to make progress in realizing any such hopes they largely failed to even try to make any or even to think about trying if they do see an opportunity they reject it the spirit of creativity with which they are born is systematically extinguished in them before it can ever create anything new now one one thing that Deutsch does not consider and honestly should have considered is the Lovecraftian idea that perhaps knowledge in some cases increases suffering now maybe you don’t take that idea seriously right and I think that’s part of the problem is that nobody takes that idea seriously right I brought this up in past podcast obviously I’m a huge fan of Lovecraft that’s why I bring him up but I want you to consider that even if you don’t take the idea seriously you should ok he does mention the theory that he sees it as false but that some people might hold that knowledge or creativity was developed to manipulate other people he does mention that that’s kind of related to what you’re saying maybe yes ok so what I’m trying to get out here is even if the Lovecraftian idea is quote obviously false you should always take an idea like this seriously enough to refute it right

[00:50:22]  Blue: ok

[00:50:23]  Red: so it does no good to simply point to where knowledge does reduce suffering as that is just counting white swans if you want to do this in a critical rationalist way you have to actually consider the possibility that knowledge is sometimes creates suffering ok however obviously knowledge in many cases reduces suffering and presumably that’s the norm ok so I think I can understand why people usually don’t even consider this idea

[00:50:54]  Red: ok so how can creativity be suppressed page 381 Dwight says but in the static society that beginning of infinity never happens despite the fact that I have assumed nothing other than that people try to improve their lives and that they cannot transmit their and that they cannot transmit their ideas perfectly and that information subject to variation selection evolves I have entirely failed to imagine a static society in this story this is the story of how somebody just by chance tries to improve one little thing and how if every human in the society did that you would have a transforming society not a static society so Dwight wants to ask how could this actually happen right because it seems like the normal case would be rapidly changing societies so Dwight considers the idea of taboos since they can’t specify every single thing that might lead to improvements taboos seem insufficient as a mean means of oppressing creativity so page 381 he says what is really needed from the point of view of the selfish meme is a way to disable creativity without killing the host the primary method of oppression of creativity is always and can only be to disable the source of new ideas namely human creativity itself so static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties that ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing society are never thought of in the first place notice again he is saying the parents were 100 % successful at moving their ideas along to their children okay so page 382 how is this done the sort of thing that happens is that people growing up in such a society acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else that amounts to ridding themselves of distinctive attributes and sinking only conformity with the society’s constitutive memes they not only enact those memes they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them so not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience piety and devotion to duty their members sense of their own self is invested in the same standard people know no others so they feel pride and shame and form all their aspirations and opinions by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society’s memes

[00:53:19]  Red: now this might sound to like if you’re listening to this good chance you read beginning of infinity you’ve probably read it you probably thought yeah that seems all pretty obvious let me suggest that this really least so far is really not a very good explanation on its own so let me explain why and by the way do it seems to agree with me on that so I’m not actually going against do it on this this is a transition to the next thing he’s going to say so you might ask the question like this okay but given the enormous benefits of fitness to fitness that creativity if

[00:53:52]  Red: not just used to imitate memes can be wouldn’t any creative society have enormous advantages to fitness I mean obviously they would right and wouldn’t that result in vertical transmission of memes that is parents to children that’s one of the main ways you’ve got horizontal transmission within a society and then you’ve got vertical transmission okay and it’s one of the main ways that memes get transmitted is from parent to child in other words if even just by chance a single society or even just a single family happened upon the idea that innovation is a good thing an idea that seems rather testable I might add then that creativity meme should out meme all other memes thanks to that society’s members surviving better so they can pass that meme along to their children so imagine if sometime in 200,000 years I cannot overstate how big of a period of time that is if only just by chance one father decided you know what I value innovation over conformity or heck maybe in 200,000 years a single mother in a patriarchal society might decide don’t let your father know but I favor innovation over conformity

[00:55:07]  Red: okay it’s mind blowing that for 200,000 years no matter how good humans were at teaching conformity to their children that they just failed to happen at least once just by chance that there was didn’t come up with this idea and there was suddenly an explosion of progress for that one family okay and if they’re using their creativity they could even use their creativity to figure out how to have an explosion of progress but somehow tie it to the memes of the society like people do that all the time right so how does how does Deutsch explain this problem and he does he actually addresses to some degree the problem I just outlined I’m trying to make it as graphic as I can because I want you to understand that there is a problem there that Deutsch’s theory must solve and it’s a big big big problem okay so this is what Deutsch says about it page 384 a static size society involves in a sense consists of a relentless struggle to prevent knowledge from growing but there is more to it than that for there is no reason to expect that a rapidly spreading idea if one did happen to arise in a static society would be true or useful that is another aspect missing from my story of the static society above I assumed that the change would be for the better it might not have been especially as as the lack of critical sophistication the society would leave people vulnerable to faults and harmful ideas from which their taboos did not protect them for instance when the black death plague destabilized the static societies of Europe in the 14th century the new ideas for plague prevention that spread best were extremely bad ones many people decided that this was the end of the world and that therefore

[00:56:58]  Red: attempting any further earthly improvements was pointless many went out out to kill Jews or witches many crowded together in churches and monasteries to pray thus unwittingly facilitating the spread of the disease which was carried by fleas a cult called the flagellants arose whose members devoted their lives to flogging themselves and to preventing preaching all the above measures in order to prove to God that their children were sorry all these ideas were functionally harmful as well as factually faults and were even suppressed by the authorities in their drive to return to stasis or were eventually suppressed by the authorities page 385 thus ironically there is much truth in the typical static society fear that any change is more likely to do harm than good a static society is indeed in constant danger of being harmed or destroyed by a newly arising dysfunctional meme

[00:57:57]  Red: continuing since the sustained exponential growth of knowledge has unmistakable effects we can deduce without historical research that every society on earth before the current western civilization has either been static or has been destroyed within a few generations that’s the Athens the golden age of Athens and Florence are examples of the latter but there may have been many others this directly contradicts the widely held belief that individuals in primitive societies were happy in a way that has not been possible since that they were unconstrained by social convention and other imperatives of civilization and hence were able to achieve self expression and fulfillment of their needs and desires but primitive societies including tribes of hunter -gatherers must all have been static societies because if ever one cease to be static it would soon not cease to be primitive or else destroy itself by losing its distinctive knowledge in the latter case the growth of knowledge would still be inhibited by the raw violence which would immediately replace the static society’s institutions for once violence is mediating change they will typically not be for the better since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness ironically creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire wait wait wait what I thought creativity wasn’t evolved for the purpose and for that purpose and was never used until 1685 AD to try to innovate so how could we possibly have evolved a natural need and desire to create knowledge if we weren’t supposed to be using it to create knowledge but I digress let me go back and read that again ironically creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire and static societies however primitive unnaturally suppress it from the point of view of every individual in a society it’s creative suppressing mechanisms are catastrophically harmful every static society must leave its members chronically balked in their attempts to achieve anything positive for themselves as people or indeed anything at all other than their meme mandated behaviors it can perpetuate itself only by suppressing its members self -expression and breaking their spirits and its memes are exquisitely adapted to doing this that was page 386 and 387 page 416 the horror of static societies can now be seen as a hideous practical joke that the universe played on the human species our creativity while evolved in order to increase the amount of knowledge that we could use and which would immediately have been capable of producing an endless stream of useful innovations as well was from the outset prevented from doing so by the very knowledge the memes that the creative that that creativity preserved the strivings of individuals to better themselves were from the outset perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their efforts to exactly the opposite end to thwart all attempts at improvement to keep sentient beings locked in a crude suffering state for eternity only the enlightenment hundreds of thousands of years later and after who knows how many fault starts may at last have made it practical to escape from eternity into infinity

[01:01:08]  Red: so as you pointed out the theory is pretty compelling

[01:01:12]  Blue: yeah how

[01:01:14]  Red: might we go about criticizing or better yet testing which is theory

[01:01:18]  Blue: yeah

[01:01:18]  Red: so my experience is that people do not put their preferred ideas to the test also that people in general prefer to simply hear a theory and then use their gut feelings to decide if they agree or disagree

[01:01:30]  Blue: guilty is charged

[01:01:32]  Red: so now I mean of course if we believe something it’s because it is the theory that survived criticism the best not because we were in any way irrational or bias in what criticism we sought out I mean the other guy the guy we disagree with he’s the one that never puts his ideas to the test just just I want to clarify that point so for the moment let’s assume we’re talking not about ourselves personally because we do put our pet theories to the test for sure but we are talking about the other guy so we know the other guy isn’t very good at self criticizing his ideas if he identifies with them it seems intuitively obvious to us that this should be the case except for ourselves of course but we’re different right but here’s the thing it isn’t clear why this should be the case doesn’t it seem pretty reasonable that you’d want to severely criticize your own theories if only to error correct them as much as possible or better yet to improve their content so why does the other guy have such a hard time properly criticizing his own pet theories in fact if we knew the answer to that question it would help us tease out just why static societies held creative creative human beings bound for so long so this is an exercise worth taking let’s attempt to come up with a best ways to test duet’s theory and thereby subject it to the severest criticisms possible allowing us to refute it or replace it with a better theory or corroborate it

[01:03:05]  Red: so let’s take a moment if you’re listening to this podcast at home and stop the podcast for a second and try this exercise write down the best ways you can think of to test duet’s theory and put it to the severest tests see how well your list compares to mine and if your list is better than mine send it in as I want to know what you came up with ok now it’s possible that maybe some of you in the audience you thought something like this you know this theory is so good I can’t think of any way to realistically test it or maybe you even thought something like this there is no way you can test a philosophical theory like this

[01:03:45]  Red: ok so if you thought one of those then I asked you to consider carefully the list I’m about to give you in which I go about testing duet’s offering how we would go about testing duet’s theory and subjecting it to the severest tests and criticisms now I’ve argued that whether or not a theory could be error corrected is a past podcast whether or not a theory could be error corrected is a factor of how you choose to formulate the theory I’m going to give you a list of questions that require you to think carefully about the details of duet’s theory not as a vague at a vague untestable level but that require you to make it specific enough that it can be tested I feel like the following list really makes clear my point about how if you really want to test your theory it isn’t as hard as it first sounds the trick is to simply make the theory specific enough that the theory starts to have implications that that is the content of the theory that can be tested

[01:04:40]  Red: ok so note keep in mind that making a theory testable also means that it can be corroborated and improved and those are not bad things we should want our theories to be testable and not desire to make them philosophical as a way to immunize our theories now here are my list of questions that I came up with as I tried to think about how would I go about testing or criticizing duet’s theory ok keep in mind I’m not going to give you answers to any of these these are just questions some of these are maybe really hard to believe I’m just coming up with the best list I can some of them maybe not some of them may be pretty good ok so first of all were static societies as horrific as duet’s claims did

[01:05:23]  Red: everyone in those societies suffer from depression, anxiety and post -traumatic stress disorder for example so this is an empirical question that we can potentially find an answer to what if we found that static societies had no higher incidence of mental illness than modern societies perhaps we’d have to make some sort of adjustment for the fact that we have drugs and they didn’t or something along those lines but let’s just say we have some way of calculating that this might be hard to calculate but it’s not impossible to calculate right this is an empirical question that we could theoretically test if we found that static societies had no higher incidence of mental illness than modern societies based on whatever adjustments we decide are appropriate would that refute duet’s theory or would it be irrelevant I’m just asking that as a question ok next question would a member of a static society beat modern people in open societies in any feasible measure again this seems like it’s an empirical question suppose we found that members of static societies sincerely felt they lived highly meaningful lives or even thought of themselves as happy now I know crit rats attack the idea that we can study happiness via self report and insist that we have to have a full theory of mind first before such a study would be scientifically quote valid but I would note that my own personal experience is that I am in fact happy when I think I’m happy and I am in fact unhappy when I think I’m not in fact those are almost exactly by definition what I mean by happy and unhappy so at least for myself self report seems to be pretty accurate so maybe it’s accurate for other people as well so I think this is one that we could based on self report

[01:07:01]  Red: realistically turn into an empirical question even without a full theory of mind

[01:07:08]  Red: number three do it places a culture of criticism as the as what overcame static societies and created the enlightenment is that correct this is a potentially empirical question as well let’s say we found static societies that had a culture of criticism would that finding such a society refute his theory now I suspect here crits will simply claim that if we found such a society like Athens that those were quote many enlightenment that got wiped out but what if we found a culture of criticism that did not get wiped out but also failed to progress would that refute do it’s theory that’s my question question four related to that what if creativity was disabled not so much due to irrational means via violence and oppression but instead due to say people actually preferring such culture of their own free will this has a potentially in pure this is a potentially empirical question we would want to take a look at the levels of violence in static societies compared to open societies this is a somewhat difficult question because open societies have more knowledge so they can catch crime in violence easier so we’d expect some drop due to just that but let’s say we found that there were static societies that had levels of violence not much worse than open societies would that refute do it’s theory or is that irrelevant because the main driver of do it’s theory is mental conformity that’s my question for question five also related what if a culture of criticism is necessary but not but an insufficient criteria for the enlightenment suppose for example this is just an example you need not not only a culture of criticism for an enlightenment but also say the scientific method is also needed now again I suspect crit rats here will argue and I’ve had them argue to me that a culture of criticism must proceed the scientific method and in fact

[01:09:06]  Red: Popper says that like I got a quote from Popper somewhere where he does say something like that but which came first in the West the scientific revolution was the 15th to the 17th century ending with Newton whereas the enlightenment is usually dated to the 18th and 19th centuries so pretend the scientific pretend just for a moment in other words in the West the scientific revolution came first and the culture of criticism came second pretend the scientific revolution must proceed a culture of criticism what would that mean for Dorch’s theories would it refute it would it modify it what are other proposed necessary criteria I’m going with this idea that maybe you need the scientific method I’m just making that up I don’t know if I even agree with that or not

[01:09:50]  Blue: maybe a technology like the printing press or something like that

[01:09:54]  Red: yeah actually that’s what I’m gonna put in the future question

[01:09:56]  Blue: okay

[01:09:57]  Red: so what are other necessary criteria for an enlightenment can you come up with any and could we test those alright now one might argue here on this one a little aside that the enlightenment really trickled in over a much longer period of time rather than dating it exactly to to the 18th and 19th centuries so let’s accept that as a possible theory that actually seems pretty reasonable to me then my question would be this on this question what counts as a culture of criticism for example the Renaissance is dated from the 15th century to the 17th century so it started a century before the scientific revolution so if we could count the Renaissance as the start of the culture of criticism then the culture of criticism does proceed the scientific revolution at least by a century or you know a bit they overlap the Renaissance surely included a fairly significant amount of criticism going around around religion and was often but not always violent so would it make sense to count that as a culture of criticism that gave rise to the scientific revolution rather than the enlightenment being the start of the culture of criticism and if we were to go with that how comfortable would you be with that idea given that the Renaissance did have a lot of criticism but seemingly about religion and still there was a lot of violence and etc right is that what we mean by culture of criticism like I’m not even sure

[01:11:25]  Red: okay the issue here is that it isn’t fully clear what does or doesn’t count as a culture of criticism I’m an AGI nerd I want to know exactly what counts as a culture of criticism so I can go program it right one could rightly argue that we do not today yet have a true culture of criticism in fact Deutsch argues that we are still largely a static society in transition to being a dynamic one an idea he got from Popper by the way and I would tend to agree but this leads to a potential problem if even we today are not a true culture of criticism yet and if a culture of criticism actually started in countries in Europe prior to the official enlightenment in societies that seem to us very static they didn’t change very fast does this sort of become doesn’t this sort of become a self -fulfilling prophecy if a society discovers science we can always just claim that society must have had some level of culture of criticism what we really want to see is that the society that created science were definitive the society or societies that created science were definitively less static than the ones that did not create science okay so again this seems like we now have an empirical question we can realistically hope to find an answer to because now we just need to find as a refuting case any society with a better culture of criticism than the culture that discovered science at the same period of time okay if we do would that refute Deutch’s theory

[01:12:56]  Red: so question number seven Deutch argued that static societies weren’t all bad and in fact were a lot better than no society at all or total anarchy static memes contained because static memes contained actual knowledge that helped those societies flourish compared to animals and compared to each other so he gave the example of the black plague we already read that quote as a time where static memes broke down and new variations came up most of which were actually worse than what the static society had culturally so this leads to an interesting potentially testable question what if static societies were enforced not so much via violence and oppression and suppression but from the fact that societies that weren’t static were highly likely to go extinct this may seem impossible at first but this is related to the question of the scientific method what I’m asking is this what if you need certain kinds of knowledge prior to the enlightenment because it’s required to escape the local minima of being a static society this could serve as an alternative theory of Deutch’s theory that creativity evolved to repress creativity to be the most creative at repressing creativity imagine if static societies didn’t consist so much of people creatively repressing creativity but just people that were less creative because the more creative ones tended to die not even killed by their societies they just died nature killed them right this one seems a bit harder to test and to be honest it seems rather far fetched to me but let’s still add it to the list of alternative theories to consider number eight suppose static societies were neither always violent nor that they were were

[01:14:44]  Red: neither always violent nor that there were other conditions necessary for enlightenment might there be other explanations for why we stayed in stasis for so long what I have in mind here probably isn’t very testable because it’s too vague right now to be testable and you can only test specific theories not vague theories so we would need a specific proposal to make it testable but I was thinking about something like this what if there is some negative aspect to enlightenment that makes stasis seem truly preferable now I don’t have in mind the appearance of preferability obviously every static society thought their society was preferable to a dynamic society I mean if there actually is something preferable to static societies what if there is actually something preferable to static societies if there is what could that possibly be so this is the Lovecraftian hypothesis which is why I kind of earmarked it before I admit this seems very far fetched but it seems like we could at least try to propose alternatives here if we had a specific proposal it might even be testable number nine

[01:15:45]  Red: speaking of necessary requirements for the enlightenment other than a cultural criticism where does the invention of writing fit in or the invention of movable type here’s what I have in mind here let’s say even if you have a cultural criticism that the innovations just can’t make it very far without at least having writing so maybe there are millions of cultures of criticism prior to history prior to writing but we keep in mind history means the start of writing that’s like the definition of history right prehistory would be before writing but we don’t know about them because there was no writing to preserve knowledge of them but Deutsch already addressed this criticism because if there were such societies would see their innovations in the fossil record ergo such societies can’t have existed so I’m adding one more possible wrinkle what if such societies did exist but without writing the innovations naturally got lost very quickly and thus can’t make an impact on the fossil record what if writing is very difficult to invent and thus a cultural criticism doesn’t do that much prior to the invention of writing again this seems a little far fetched to me worse it seems untestable specifically since it specifically requires us finding out what happened to the ancients prior to writing which is the only place where we can have evidence in the first place okay but we’re considering every possibility so let’s throw it out there number ten let’s repeat question number nine only this time with the invention of movable type except now it is testable movable type was invented in 1450 in Europe and in 1040 in China that’s two centuries before in Europe two centuries before the invention of the of the enlightenment itself and supposedly the invention of culture of criticism but didn’t movable type famously lead to tons of open written criticism on nearly everything leading to violence and wars rather than enlightenment well why right how does that even fit into this whole static society

[01:17:44]  Red: dynamic society dynamic that’s part of Deutsche’s theory you know and it seems like we ought to be able to test the things I just mentioned you know what happens when a society has movable type do you see some sort of start towards criticism does it fail why does it fail why did it fail for so long for two centuries between movable type and the enlightenment to get bring us out of static societies or maybe it didn’t fail so related to the movable type and the renaissance is it actually true that the beginning of infinity started with the enlightenment here’s what I have in mind here let’s say we looked at technological progress on a graph would we see the enlightenment as the beginning of exponential growth or would we see it well into exponential growth but at an inflection point where it finally became visible within a lifetime so even exponential growth starts off pretty small it might not seem that different from a static society at first or would it I don’t know that’s why I’m asking the question if you can wrap your mind around this idea maybe the beginning of infinity actually did start with movable type it was only two centuries before so maybe there was an explosion exponential growth of knowledge but it’s just that you’re at the very beginning of the curve or maybe that’s true of the renaissance and therefore that criticism is what started the beginning of infinity which would mean a cultural criticism did proceed the scientific revolution

[01:19:13]  Red: so final thoughts here so this last is a pretty good example of why I don’t think Deutch’s theory even if we refute it quote unquote refute it is really going anywhere let’s say that we found that the real beginning of infinity started with Athens we’ll go back as far as we can meaning there has been exponential growth ever since Athens but even exponential growth starts slow so it just wasn’t obvious yet so first this is a bit hard to believe I admit but let’s just pretend we have a nice graph that shows this convincingly based on whatever measures we all accept wouldn’t that still mean Deutch’s theory was needed to explain the first 200,000 years of human history so at best this would be a tweak on his theory not a demolishing of it or let’s say the beginning of infinity requires writing

[01:20:04]  Red: to be invented first but then we can just ask why did it take 200,000 years to invent writing and we’re right back to some admittedly slightly less harsh version of Deutch’s theory I have to admit even if all of these problems turned out to be true in some way and we had to refute and replace Deutch’s theory with an improved version for all of them I don’t think we would end up doing away with the essence of Deutch’s theory so I think at most would end up with a tweaked and improved version so I don’t think Deutch’s theory is going anywhere anytime soon but I would love to find out that maybe our ancestors weren’t as bad off as Deutch thinks they are even if just a little bit or I’d love to find that it was mostly due to forces that are difficult to overcome i.e. hard to invent writing rather than merely because creativity is such an easy thing to suppress so completely in any case we’ve now come up with quite a few ways to test and or corroborate or better yet hopefully improve upon Deutch’s theory by looking at what really are testable questions now

[01:21:11]  Blue: just a few sort of random thoughts I had while you were speaking first this idea of like arguing from first principles like where you’re not really like making claims about history that can be rigorously tested but you’re just sort of taking it back to what makes sense at a core level I mean could Deutch’s argument be defended more from that perspective?

[01:21:49]  Red: Well that is how he defends it right? Isn’t that foundationalism though? Isn’t that something that’s normally considered at odds with Popper’s epistemology?

[01:21:59]  Blue: So I keep thinking about this quote from Popper where he says a rationalist I know I’ve quoted this so many times but this is one of my favorite he says a rationalist as I use the word is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps by certain cases by compromise rather than violence he is a man that would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation threats, or even persuasive propaganda. So I mean in my view what I get from Deutch is that that is and Popper is that that’s the enlightenment whoever you want to put that very broadly defined and you know I think it makes sense to think of the enlightenment as going back to Greco -Roman civilization you know it’s all kind of one continuous thing and you know even in the renaissance and the new you know people were it’s all based on the same sort of the reformation and all this kind of came out of this as fallibly and imperfectly and taking two steps forward and one step back as embracing this idea the central idea that we should let our words and our ideas to our fighting and dying rather than blood in the streets and you know I’m obviously we’re still in a transition but I don’t know to me that feels more like a first principle I guess as much as something that can be defended more empirically yeah.

[01:23:45]  Red: So to some degree I’d have to agree with you that was why I said I don’t really think Deutch’s theory is going anywhere I don’t see I have concerns with first principle arguments I think you can strongly fool yourself with first principle arguments but I think the right way to deal with the first principle argument is to offer alternatives and I have offered some alternatives here but I don’t think any of them are strong enough to truly displace Deutch’s theory I would love to see if somebody could come up with something that completely replaced Deutch’s theory but I don’t think it exists so the fact is is that you do have 200,000 years of no progress it’s such a long period of time something has to explain it let’s say let’s just play with this idea that the scientific revolution is necessary and that it actually has to proceed a culture of criticism science is clearly going to be harder to discover than the idea that you should criticize each other right one of those seems like it’s really easy and the other seems like it’s quite a bit harder to discover right so you might make a case something like this you might say look it’s not really just that you have to discover this idea that you should criticize your ideas and and you should not use violence to settle your differences you should

[01:25:18]  Red: but if you discover that prior to the invention of science it just isn’t a big enough change it’s actually far harder to make progress with criticism than the discovery of science where the types of criticisms narrow to the ones that really matter okay that’s I’ve argued that that’s what science really is science and Popper’s epistemology is really about narrowing your criticisms to the ones that matter so you have to you can’t simply discover the idea of criticism you have to discover that certain criticisms matter and certain ones don’t now this is an idea that is not a popular idea when I have raised it with crit routes they completely rejected even though it is absolutely what Popper is talking about they reject that aspect of Popper okay and I’ve wondered if that isn’t an example of how static societies happened right not so much because there wasn’t a culture of criticism per se but because there are certain ideas that are really counterintuitive that you have to wrap your mind around to be able to make rapid progress now I don’t know I don’t know like I’m not even sure I buy this argument myself okay but let’s pretend just for the sake of argument because we’re trying to look at what an alternative theory would look like okay so let’s pretend like that’s the truth you could then understand how you could have static societies for so long even though they weren’t actually all of them suppressing creativity all the time and they weren’t completely successful at suppressing creativity the real truth is that creativity was far too often a negative which hints at this possibility right

[01:27:04]  Red: until you figure out this idea that certain types of criticisms matter more the objective criticisms versus the subjective criticisms you could then have an explanation for why we were stuck for 200,000 years that does isn’t nearly so pessimistic about how weak creativity really was okay instead it paints creativity as too broad right that you have to learn to narrow your creativity to specific things is this better or worse I don’t know like it’s still a 200,000 years it still shows a sort of flaw in creativity it makes our ancestors look way more human like way more human this idea that they’re barely people like it’s gone if this were actually true and yet it seems to me that this theory I’m proposing even though I’m really emphasizing how it’s different than Deutch’s theory is sort of a warmed over version of Deutch’s theory it just it simply takes a look at scientific scientific rapid progress as coming from science rather than specifically a culture of criticism okay but those two are so obviously related right so I don’t know and even as I say this it’s not maybe the most believable theory like Deutch’s theory somehow seems more believable to me so but I’m trying to put that out there that there may be like a different something it has to be somewhat similar to Deutch’s because we have to explain the same things but it may be that it creates a very different feeling or interpretation once we understand what really happened that’s a possibility that we would want to look at and yet it still really seems to me like it’s very similar to Deutch’s theory

[01:28:46]  Blue: okay well this has been great Bruce I think that it makes me very proud to be on a podcast where we’re not just um promoting a world view but wrestling with these ideas ideas in fact I naturally on some of these bumble dates I go on the podcast comes up I gotta try to you know make myself seem like an interesting person I don’t know but I’m careful to stipulate oh but I’m not in a cult this isn’t cultish we’re criticizing our best ideas here maybe it still makes me sound pretty weird I don’t know but anyway just for myself it makes me proud that we’re not just promoting a world view but really trying to trying to live critical rationalism here yeah very imperfectly and so I thank you Bruce and I’ll look forward to next time

[01:29:56]  Red: all right talk to you later

[01:30:04]  Blue: hello again 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 Deutch theory of knowledge we believe David Deutch’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 B Nielsen 01 also please consider joining the Facebook group the many worlds of David Deutch where Bruce and I first started connecting thank you

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