Episode 111: Static vs Dynamic Societies

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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

[00:00:00]  Peter: 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?

[00:00:24]  Unidentified speaker: What are the alternatives to what Deutsch proposes?

[00:00:28]  Peter: 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]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast. Hey, Peter.

[00:00:50]  Unidentified speaker: Hey, Bruce, how are you today?

[00:00:52]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:00:53]  Bruce: 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 Deutsch's theories on static versus dynamic societies. Or why did it take so long to make progress?

[00:01:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:01:17]  Peter: Well, I'm excited to hear what you have to say about this. I have to say, this is probably an aspect of Deutsch'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 however long you put our defining our species, almost 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]  Unidentified speaker: Let me ask you something though.

[00:02:36]  Bruce: This is going to come up in my notes here. But let's say like 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.

[00:02:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:02:54]  Bruce: Maybe you want them to have your moral values, but not necessarily other types of values.

[00:03:00]  Peter: Yes and no, that might be complicated question right there.

[00:03:04]  Bruce: So, but this is where I'm coming at. Like 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, 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?

[00:03:27]  Peter: Well, I would, I would say quite unsuccessful.

[00:03:31]  Bruce: I would too.

[00:03:32]  Peter: You know, from, from 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, what they, 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, getting, and I, they, they always, they always emphasize that peer influence is a big thing. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of grain of truth to that, I think. I mean, you, we, you know, there's a reason why people talk about these generational divides. You know, you think about an immigrant that comes to our, this country. Chances are it's the, the, the children are going to adopt more of the values and speech, even the way they express themselves and their language and all that is, 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, I've just stopped looking at my kids like that. It's, it's a, 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, it's a two-way street.

[00:05:25]  Peter: 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, you know, they still haven't gotten me into any video games. But, and I still haven't gotten them into David Deutsch and Karl Popper either. When I talk about it.

[00:05:56]  Bruce: So even when you want to pass something along like...

[00:06:00]  Peter: Oh, they basically just cover their ears. And, you know, I think I remember when my son was a little younger, then he wouldn't say this quite like this right now. But I would, you know, I don't know, we'd be having some conflict. And I'd say, well, you know, knowledge is, our knowledge is finite, but our ignorance is infinite, or something.

[00:06:27]  Unidentified speaker: He'd say, “I don't give a you know what about what Karl Popper says.”

[00:06:32]  Peter: I'm not sure if there are any other 10-year-olds that quite expressed that sentiment, but.

[00:06:40]  Bruce: 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 solely by their peers or children are determined solely by their genes or something like that, that because children are universal explainers, that we shouldn't really expect that creative beings like children, would 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?

[00:07:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:07:19]  Peter: I mean, I think that even, I don't know if this is something that, well, this is something that David Deutsch emphasizes at least a little, that even 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.

[00:07:51]  Bruce: So if 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 “us” 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]  Unidentified speaker: And it's one of the things...

[00:08:15]  Peter: That's an interesting way to put it. I have to think about exactly how to answer that.

[00:08:24]  Bruce: So I think questions like this are super interesting, 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, and how to take the best parts of each, and how to improve upon the theories. I'm not going to really get into that too much today. I'm going to mostly just be steel-manning Deutsch's theory.

[00:08:52]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry, go ahead.

[00:08:53]  Peter: To be fair, I think he may be more talking about the society is static rather than the individual is static. So he probably wouldn't claim that 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.

[00:09:35]  Unidentified speaker: So that might be closer to what he would claim.

[00:09:37]  Bruce: I want to earmark what you just said, because we're going to be quoting directly from him. As we quote him, I want to see to what degree the way you just summarized his view is correct and to 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, is that he's probably the only one I've come across that is trying to explain this. Like, I don't, I don't know how many other people see this as something that is in need of explanation.

[00:10:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:10:22]  Bruce: And Deutsch sees it as something that is in need of explanation. I have come across others that to some degree see it as something in need of explanation.

[00:10:29]  Peter: So it's something people almost take for granted.

[00:10:32]  Unidentified speaker: It is.

[00:10:32]  Peter: It's like, it's such, it's so baked into our society now that things change and that, you know, people don't even know. It's like, you don't think about it.

[00:10:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:10:47]  Bruce: 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]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:11:05]  Bruce: So we're not sure if homo sapiens were 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 homo sapiens, so before the 300,000 years ago. But for the sake of just making a conservative estimate, let's assume homo sapiens 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? That 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 longtime 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.

[00:12:39]  Bruce: 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 gonna have this natural reaction to, oh, I wonder if there's like some alternative, right?

[00:13:19]  Peter: I would have never thought of this as a pessimistic theory, but that's interesting that you perceive it like that.

[00:13:25]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:13:26]  Bruce: So just a few quotes from Deutsch to show what I mean here.

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

[00:13:30]  Bruce: 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.

[00:13:40]  Unidentified speaker: It's really cool.

[00:13:43]  Bruce: 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, they, 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.

[00:15:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:05]  Bruce: 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. 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 source 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.

[00:16:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:16:48]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:16:51]  Bruce: 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. 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.

[00:17:20]  Unidentified speaker: So, let's put this in perspective.

[00:17:21]  Bruce: 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]  Peter: Well, he does emphasize that there have been other mini-enlightenments. I don't remember the exact words he uses.

[00:17:41]  Unidentified speaker: It's mini-enlightenments, yes.

[00:17:44]  Peter: Presumably, and 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.

[00:18:14]  Bruce: 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]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:18:25]  Bruce: So that is itself a suppression of creativity, right?

[00:18:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:18:29]  Bruce: 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 mini-enlightenment, it lost the war every single time for 200,000 years.

[00:18:49]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:18:50]  Bruce: 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 five 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.

[00:19:09]  Unidentified speaker: Also consider this.

[00:19:11]  Bruce: 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.

[00:19:50]  Bruce: 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 World's 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 World's quantum physics, nor did there appear to be any counter examples to it that I could find.

[00:20:12]  Unidentified speaker: So I was shocked.

[00:20:13]  Bruce: Like I was really, when I read Deutsch's book, I read his, you know, in fabric of reality, his explanation of shadow photons.

[00:20:21]  Unidentified speaker: And I thought, oh, that's cool.

[00:20:22]  Bruce: I can see why maybe he believes in Many World's 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, right? 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 Bohm and quantum Darwinism and transactional interpretation, etc., 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.

[00:22:00]  Bruce: But all the others I studied, they are ad hoc explanations.

[00:22:04]  Unidentified speaker: Period.

[00:22:05]  Unidentified speaker: End of story.

[00:22:07]  Bruce: So MWI is the only theory that doesn't add additional unexplained, but usually unobserved by theory phenomena to the theory to ad hoc adjust it. 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.

[00:23:42]  Bruce: In fact, I can't think of any aspect of his theory that isn't challenged by at least one of the other theories. 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.

[00:24:11]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm not talking about a series here.

[00:24:13]  Bruce: 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 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. 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 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. 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.

[00:25:52]  Bruce: 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 culture of criticism is too vague to be useful to an AGI nerd. I want to know what that really means, okay? Now, it seems appropriate that we cover Deutsch's first. We're going to steel man it. 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, and possibly improve on it, okay?

[00:26:46]  Unidentified speaker: Hopefully improve on it, right?

[00:26:49]  Bruce: So and then, you know, 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. So one note upfront, 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 I've seen them searching for a non-mechanical algorithm, based on the idea that a mechanical algorithm is, quote, just perspiration.

[00:28:18]  Bruce: Now, that's a complete impossibility, according to the Church–Turing–Deutsch thesis. So it's 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, 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 dissent with that definition, partial dissent 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, as best as I'm able to make sense of it. So first, the 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.

[00:29:58]  Bruce: 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. 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 failed to notice it.

[00:30:42]  Unidentified speaker: This kind of makes sense.

[00:30:43]  Bruce: If you are trying to quash creativity, you're still going to have some, right? But it would have to be so small that nobody noticed it was an innovation, right? 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.

[00:31:30]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:31:31]  Bruce: So it's not that 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. I mean, unless you buy Graham Hancock's Insane Theories, it sort of is just a matter of a fact that rapid progress didn't happen for the first 200,000 or more years.

[00:32:06]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:32:06]  Bruce: And so it seems like Deutsch must be correct that something stopped progress. 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 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. I mean, based on what we have of the historical record. And my source there is Jacob Mchangama and his book Free Speech, A History from Socrates to Social Media. So Jacob Mchangama, 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. 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.

[00:33:59]  Bruce: 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. Okay, 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, okay? Nor could mere cruelty have reduced progress that effectively. Things like the thumb screw and the stake 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. Okay, so again, notice that he is talking about a complete success passing your memes along to your children, okay? From the earliest day of thinking onward, children must have been cornucopias 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.

[00:35:34]  Bruce: In such a culture, there can have been no morality other than conformity and obedience, no other identity than one's 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 worldviews, 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. So a side note about this essay, Possible Minds Essay, as I mentioned, on YouTube you can find Deutsch reading it himself.

[00:36:40]  Unidentified speaker: It's excellent.

[00:36:41]  Bruce: 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 the 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. So let's now go through what he actually says, mostly from Beginning of Infinity.

[00:38:13]  Bruce: I think there's a great deal of similarity, obviously, between the Possible Minds article and 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 first of all, he claimed that creativity evolved to replicate memes, not to innovate. So from Beginning of Infinity, page 412, 412. Thus, as has so often happened in the history of universality, the human capacity for universal explanation did not evolve to have a universal function. It evolved simply to increase the volume of memetic information that our ancestors could acquire, 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 latter, regularity or law of nature. Neither person has 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 the physical phenomena conforming to the law.

[00:39:50]  Unidentified speaker: That is what he means by evidence.

[00:39:52]  Bruce: What replicates human memes 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 latter. It was a momentous example of reach, which made possible everything that is uniquely human. 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 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 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 memetic information that could be passed from each generation to the next, increased too. Memes also became more complex and sophisticated. Just a reminder, we covered this in our episodes on Deutsch's views on and Popper's views also on animal intelligence. Recall that Deutsch has this idea that he took from Richard Byrne.

[00:41:35]  Bruce: I would argue somewhat of a misunderstanding of Richard Byrne's theory. That, but this part is 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 thistles—so, thistles out of food so that they can eat the food. They would, you know, rub it against their face and 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, that they pass along from generation to generation. But Deutsch 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 ape memes into human memes that involve explanation and how creativity was the ultimate adaption to fill this niche. So how could memes possibly suppress creative 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.

[00:43:14]  Unidentified speaker: How did they come by that knowledge?

[00:43:15]  Unidentified speaker: It evolved.

[00:43:16]  Bruce: The meme exists at any instance in many variant forms. And those are subject to selection in favor of faithful replication. For every long-lived meme of a static society, millions of variants of it will have fallen by the wayside because they lacked 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 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. All right, 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 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.

[00:45:06]  Bruce: 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 get replaced by a better meme, okay?

[00:45:17]  Peter: And that's an anti-rational meme.

[00:45:19]  Bruce: So 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 Deutsch introduces the idea of a static society on page 380. 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 more than a couple of lifetimes has ever undergone change rapid enough for people to notice. But while a society lasted, all important areas of life seemed changeless to the participants. Meaning, sorry, I took that out of context. But while a static society lasted, all important areas of life seemed 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, societies changing on a time scale unnoticed by the inhabitants. Before we can understand our usual dynamic sort of society, we must understand the usual static sort. He goes on, these quotes will come from page 388 and 381. For a society to be static, all of its memes must be unchanging or changing too slowly to be noticed.

[00:46:49]  Bruce: For instance, consider an isolated, primitive society that has, for whatever reason, remained almost unchanged for many generations.

[00:46:56]  Unidentified speaker: Why?

[00:46:57]  Bruce: Quite possibly no one in society even wanted it to change 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 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 competing in people's minds with other ideas about how to make life better, most of them presumably false. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that this particular true idea happens to be believed and spreads through the society. Then the society will have been changed. It may not have changed very much, but this was merely 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.

[00:48:31]  Bruce: And the result is an exponentially increasing revolutionary force transforming every aspect of the society. So, because we don't see that, that's why he's concluding that it must be that that did not happen. 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 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 podcasts. 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, okay?

[00:49:49]  Peter: 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.

[00:50:04]  Unidentified speaker: He does mention that.

[00:50:05]  Peter: That's kind of related to what you're saying, maybe?

[00:50:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:50:09]  Bruce: Okay, so what I'm trying to get at 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]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:50:23]  Bruce: 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 the critical rationalist way, you have to actually consider the possibility that knowledge sometimes creates suffering, okay? However, obviously knowledge in many cases reduces suffering, and presumably that's the norm, okay? So I think I can understand why people usually don't even consider this idea. Okay, so how can creativity be suppressed? Page 381, Deutsch says, But in a 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 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, Deutsch wants to ask, how could this actually happen, right? Because it seems like the normal case would be rapidly changing societies. So, Deutsch considers the idea of taboos. Since they can't specify every single thing that might lead to improvements, taboos seem insufficient as a 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.

[00:51:59]  Bruce: 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.

[00:52:30]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:52:31]  Bruce: 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 seeking 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. Now, this might sound 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, at least so far, is really not a very good explanation on its own.

[00:53:33]  Unidentified speaker: So let me explain why.

[00:53:34]  Bruce: And by the way, Deutsch seems to agree with me on that. So I'm not actually going against Deutsch 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 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. There you 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]  Bruce: 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. 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 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 the lack of critical sophistication in society would leave people vulnerable to false and harmful ideas, for which their taboos did not protect them.

[00:56:39]  Bruce: 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 attempting any further earthly improvements was pointless. Many went 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 false, 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. Continuing, quoting Deutsch, 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.

[00:58:12]  Unidentified speaker: That's the Athens.

[00:58:13]  Bruce: 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 ceased 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 societies' 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.

[00:59:18]  Unidentified speaker: Wait, wait, wait, what?

[00:59:19]  Bruce: 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?

[00:59:36]  Unidentified speaker: But I digress.

[00:59:37]  Bruce: 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, its 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 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 false starts, may at last have made it practical to escape from eternity into infinity.

[01:01:09]  Bruce: So, as you pointed out, the theory is pretty compelling. How might we go about criticizing, or better yet, testing, Deutsch's theory? 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]  Peter: Guilty as charged.

[01:01:32]  Bruce: 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 biased 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.

[01:01:51]  Unidentified speaker: Just, I wanted to clarify that point.

[01:01:53]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:01:54]  Bruce: 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?

[01:02:17]  Unidentified speaker: But, here's the thing.

[01:02:18]  Bruce: 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 human beings bound for so long.

[01:02:48]  Unidentified speaker: So, this is an exercise worth taking.

[01:02:50]  Bruce: Let's attempt to come up with the best ways to test Deutsch'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. So 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 Deutsch'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, okay? 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. Okay, 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 Deutsch's, offering how we would go about testing Deutsch's theory and subjecting it to the severest tests and criticisms. Now, I've argued that whether or not a theory can be error corrected in past podcasts, whether or not theory can 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 Deutsch's theory, not at a vague untestable level, but require you to make it specific enough that it can be tested.

[01:04:21]  Bruce: 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. Okay, 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 Deutsch's theory. Okay, keep in mind, I'm not going to give you answers to any of these.

[01:05:07]  Unidentified speaker: These are just questions.

[01:05:08]  Bruce: Some of these are maybe really hard to believe.

[01:05:11]  Unidentified speaker: I'm just coming up with the best list I can.

[01:05:13]  Unidentified speaker: Some of them maybe not.

[01:05:14]  Unidentified speaker: Some of them may be pretty good.

[01:05:15]  Bruce: Okay, so first of all, were static societies as horrific as Deutsch claims? Did 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 Deutsch's theory? Or would it be irrelevant? I'm just asking that as a question.

[01:06:08]  Unidentified speaker: OK, next question.

[01:06:10]  Bruce: 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'm 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, realistically turn into an empirical question, even without a full theory of mind. Number three, Deutsch places a culture of criticism 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, CritRats will simply claim that if we found such a society, like Athens, that those were, quote, [mini-enlightenments?] 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 Deutsch's theory?

[01:07:48]  Unidentified speaker: That's my question.

[01:07:49]  Bruce: Question four, related to that, what if creativity was disabled, not so much due to irrational memes via violence and oppression, but instead due to, say, people actually preferring such culture of their own free will? 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 and 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 Deutsch's theory? Or is that irrelevant, because the main driver of Deutsch's theory is mental conformity?

[01:08:36]  Unidentified speaker: That's my question.

[01:08:38]  Unidentified speaker: Question five.

[01:08:39]  Bruce: Also related, what if a culture of criticism is necessary but an insufficient criteria for the Enlightenment? Suppose, for example, this is just an example, you need 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 precede the scientific method. And in fact, Popper says that. Like, I got a quote from Popper somewhere where he does say something like that.

[01:09:10]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:09:11]  Bruce: 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 just for a moment that the scientific, in other words, in the West, the Scientific Revolution came first, and the culture of criticism came second. Pretend the Scientific Revolution must precede a culture of criticism. What would that mean for Deutsch's theories?

[01:09:38]  Unidentified speaker: Would it refute it?

[01:09:39]  Bruce: Would it modify it? What are other proposed necessary criteria? I'm going with this idea that maybe you need the scientific method.

[01:09:47]  Unidentified speaker: I'm just making that up.

[01:09:48]  Bruce: I don't know if I even agree with that or not.

[01:09:50]  Peter: Maybe a technology like the printing press or something like that.

[01:09:53]  Bruce: Yeah, actually, that's one I'm going to put in the future question.

[01:09:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:09:57]  Bruce: So what are other necessary criteria for an Enlightenment? Can you come up with any and could we test those?

[01:10:04]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:10:04]  Bruce: 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 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 precede the Scientific Revolution at least by a century, or 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 et cetera, right? Is that what we mean by culture of criticism?

[01:11:22]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not even sure.

[01:11:24]  Bruce: Okay, the issue here is that it isn't fully clear what does or doesn't count as a culture of criticism.

[01:11:30]  Unidentified speaker: I'm an AGI nerd.

[01:11:31]  Bruce: I wanna 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. And 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.

[01:11:51]  Unidentified speaker: And I would tend to agree.

[01:11:53]  Unidentified speaker: But this leads to a potential problem.

[01:11:56]  Bruce: 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, 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 definitively less static than the ones that did not create science. 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.

[01:12:51]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:12:51]  Bruce: If we do, would that refute Deutsch's theory?

[01:12:56]  Unidentified speaker: So, question number seven.

[01:12:58]  Bruce: Deutsch 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 contain, 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 Deutsch'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.

[01:14:22]  Unidentified speaker: They just died.

[01:14:24]  Bruce: The 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 that societies were 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, speaking of necessary requirements for the enlightenment, other than a culture of criticism, where does the invention of writing fit in? Or the invention of movable type? Here's what I have in mind here.

[01:15:55]  Bruce: Let's say, even if you have a culture of 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 keep in mind, history means the start of writing.

[01:16:11]  Unidentified speaker: That's like the definition of history, right?

[01:16:13]  Unidentified speaker: Prehistory would be before writing.

[01:16:15]  Bruce: But we don't know about them because there was no writing to preserve knowledge of them. Okay, but Deutsch already addressed this criticism, right? Because if there were such societies, we'd 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 culture of criticism doesn't do that much prior to the invention of writing?

[01:16:48]  Unidentified speaker: Again, this seems a little farfetched to me.

[01:16:51]  Bruce: 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.

[01:17:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:17:03]  Bruce: But we're considering every possibility, so let's throw it out there.

[01:17:05]  Unidentified speaker: Number 10.

[01:17:07]  Bruce: Let's repeat question number 9, 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, the two centuries before the invention 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?

[01:17:37]  Unidentified speaker: Well, why?

[01:17:38]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:17:39]  Bruce: How does that even fit into this whole static society, dynamic society, dynamic that's part of Deutsch's theory? It seems like we ought to be able to test the things I just mentioned. What happens when a society has movable type? Do you see some sort of start towards criticism?

[01:18:02]  Unidentified speaker: Does it fail?

[01:18:03]  Unidentified speaker: Why does it fail?

[01:18:04]  Bruce: Why did it fail for so long, for two centuries, between movable type and the enlightenment to bring us out of static societies?

[01:18:12]  Unidentified speaker: Or maybe it didn't fail.

[01:18:15]  Bruce: 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.

[01:18:43]  Unidentified speaker: Or would it?

[01:18:44]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:18:45]  Unidentified speaker: That's why I'm asking the question.

[01:18:46]  Bruce: 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.

[01:19:00]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:19:01]  Bruce: Or maybe that's true of the Renaissance, and therefore that criticism is what started the beginning of infinity, which would mean a culture of criticism did precede the Scientific Revolution. So, final thoughts here. So this last is a pretty good example of why I don't think Deutsch'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 Deutsch'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 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 Deutsch'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 Deutsch's theory with an improved version for all of them, I don't think we would end up doing away with the essence of Deutsch's theory. So I think at most we would end up with a tweaked and improved version. So I don't think Deutsch's theory is going anywhere anytime soon.

[01:20:37]  Bruce: But I would love to find out that maybe our ancestors weren't as bad off as Deutsch 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 Deutsch's theory by looking at what really are testable questions now.

[01:21:12]  Peter: Just a few sort of random thoughts I had while you were speaking. First, this idea of arguing from first principles, like where you're not really 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 Deutsch's argument be defended more from that perspective?

[01:21:48]  Bruce: Well, that is how he defends it, right?

[01:21:50]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:21:51]  Unidentified speaker: Isn't that foundationalism though?

[01:21:52]  Bruce: Isn't that something that's normally considered at odds with Popper's epistemology?

[01:21:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:21:59]  Peter: So what I keep thinking about this quote from Popper where he says, a rationalist, I know I've quoted this so many times on podcast, 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 Deutsch is that that is, and Popper is that that's the enlightenment, however 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 in, you know, even in the Renaissance and the Neo, you know, people were, it's all based on the same sort of the Reformation and all this kind of came out of this 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 do our fighting and dying, rather than blood in the streets. And, you know, I'm obviously we're still in a, in a transition. But I don't know that to me, that feels more like a first principle, I guess, as much as something that can be defended more empirically.

[01:23:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:23:44]  Bruce: So to some degree, I'd have to agree with you. That was why I said I don't really think Deutsch'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 Deutsch's theory. I would love to see if somebody could come up with something that completely replaced Deutsch's theory, but I don't think it exists, right?

[01:24:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:24:23]  Bruce: So the fact is, is that you do have 200,000 years of no progress.

[01:24:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:24:27]  Bruce: And it's such a long period of time, something has to explain it. Let's just play with this idea that the scientific revolution is necessary and that it actually has to precede a culture of criticism.

[01:24:42]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:24:44]  Bruce: 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, 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, 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 rats, they completely reject it, even though it is absolutely what Popper is talking about. They reject that aspect of Popper. And I've wondered if that isn't an example of how static societies happened. 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.

[01:26:25]  Unidentified speaker: Now, I don't know.

[01:26:26]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:26:26]  Bruce: I'm not even sure I buy this argument myself. 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, is that creativity was far too often a negative. Deutsch hints at this possibility, right? 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 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.

[01:27:33]  Unidentified speaker: Is this better or worse?

[01:27:34]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:27:34]  Bruce: Like, it's still 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 Deutsch's theory, is sort of a warmed over version of Deutsch's theory. It just simply takes a look at 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, Deutsch'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 Deutsch'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 Deutsch's theory.

[01:28:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:28:47]  Unidentified speaker: Well, this has been great, Bruce.

[01:28:49]  Peter: I think that it makes me very proud to be on a podcast where we're not just promoting a worldview, but wrestling with these ideas. In fact, naturally, on some of these bumble dates, I go on, the podcast comes up, I got to try to make myself seem like an interesting person.

[01:29:18]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:29:20]  Peter: 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.

[01:29:34]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:29:34]  Peter: But anyway, just for myself, it makes me proud that we're not just promoting a worldview, but really trying to live critical rationalism here. Very, very imperfectly. And so I thank you, Bruce, and I'll look forward to next time.

[01:29:56]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:29:56]  Unidentified speaker: Talk to you later.

[01:30:04]  Peter: 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, 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.

[01:30:48]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.