Episode 137: Ray Scott Percival on Incurable Mind Viruses

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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]  Unidentified speaker: Hello out there.

[00:00:01]  Peter: This week on the Theory of Anything podcast, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ray Scott Percival. I think of Percival as the enigmatic renegade of critical rationalism. Certainly one of the most underrated public intellectuals I know of. He has been active in critical rationalist forums, conferences, academic journals since the 90s or before. He has written for Quillette. He was the editor of a book of critical responses to Steven Pinker. He made a documentary film called Liberty Loves Reason.

[00:00:41]  Unidentified speaker: Highly recommended.

[00:00:43]  Peter: And most significantly, he wrote a book called Myth of the Closed Mind, which is available on Amazon in all formats, including audio. We get more into that book's totally compelling thesis in the episode, but the basic idea is that humans care about truth. We are truth seekers. We create memes and the memes that are more true, have a competitive advantage in the war of ideas. Such a simple idea, but the implications of this are profound, and I get the feeling that Percival has spent a lifetime wrestling with them. This was one of my favorite interviews that we've done. Right up there with the David Deutsch interview from Episode 100, and I truly hope that others get something out of this too.

[00:01:46]  Unidentified speaker: Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast.

[00:01:49]  Peter: Today, exceptionally exciting episode, I think. It's been a long time coming. We've got Ray Scott Percival.

[00:02:01]  Unidentified speaker: How are you doing today, Ray?

[00:02:04]  Unidentified speaker: Just fine.

[00:02:06]  Unidentified speaker: Super fantastic, but I'm getting better, apparently.

[00:02:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, well, that's all any of us can do, right?

[00:02:14]  Peter: Error correction, just getting better.

[00:02:16]  Unidentified speaker: Just trying to get better every day.

[00:02:18]  Peter: That's life, right?

[00:02:20]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, so I'm just going to do a brief intro.

[00:02:23]  Peter: Ray, you are one of the, in my opinion, one of the most underrated public intellectuals out there. We've wanted you to have you on the podcast for so long, and I'm so happy this is finally working out. Probably you are one of the coolest dudes I've been introduced to since I read Beginning of Infinity, about five years ago. Of course, that led me after a little while into your book, your masterpiece, really, The Myth of the Closed Mind. It's something that has gotten inside my brain and that has, I've channeled you in many conversations. The idea, let me just briefly summarize what I take away from your book and then you can spend the rest of the podcast correcting my ideas. But I get the idea is that humans are essentially rational creatures. We make a lot of mistakes, yes, but the glass half full view of who we are as people is that we care about what's true. This is just how nature designed us.

[00:03:40]  Unidentified speaker: Your work seems to counter some of the many, many, many popular books stating that we have paleolithic minds unable to perceive reality for what it really is.

[00:03:55]  Peter: Sometimes it seems like this is an underlying theme of half the books out there. It's a sign of sophistication almost to people that this is that humans aren't that great, that intellectuals should be disparaging humanity, disparaging people. Maybe even this is the basis of entire academic disciplines, arguably. But again, this glass half full view of humans, to me indicates that even fanatics and zealots fundamentally care about truth. A provocative statement, but we're going to delve into that. So people join cults, but they also leave cults, arguably more frequently than they join. I think there's a lot of evidence for that. In one of your more humorous examples, that's really stuck with me, you say that no matter how motivated we are to believe that the moon is made out of cheese, no sane person could ever believe that. So when the Ministry of Love tortures Winston, in 1984, till he believes that two plus two equals five, this may not be quite believable. The most authoritarians in this world can do is make humans mouth the words, but there's something in our hearts that cares about what's true. So in this world where memes are flying around the planet, the speed of light in open and even closed societies, truth has a stickiness to it that lies do not. Yes, there are mind viruses, as Dawkins puts it, but these irrational memes are less likely to replicate than rational memes that withstand criticism.

[00:05:50]  Unidentified speaker: So when dogmatic ideas that require immunizing stratagems to uphold are actually at a disadvantage, believing true things does—not all the time, but maybe on average—make us more convincing to other people rather than less.

[00:06:10]  Peter: I think this is an idea, one of the things that I like about this idea is that it like a lot of Popperian ideas, assuming that that's the tradition that you come out of, that it really aligns with common sense, which is the primary characteristic of a rational meme. So I think you're putting out a rational meme into the world with your work. So I thank you for that Ray.

[00:06:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:06:40]  Ray: Well, Peter, that was a superb synopsis of my position. Thank you so much. I'm honored and moved by your praise, your very kind words about my book. One thing, just to point to something, a word you used.

[00:07:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:07:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:07:04]  Ray: Which is very interesting and relevant to the exposition of the thesis as a whole. When you said that I think that we are essentially rational.

[00:07:19]  Unidentified speaker: Now, you probably don't mean it.

[00:07:21]  Ray: You don't mean essential perhaps in the philosophical sense. But what I would have phrased it slightly differently, I would have said that we are robustly rational. So I'm not attributing any perfect essential core of rationality to human beings just because they are human beings, as in, you know, Aristotle's definition of the human beings being the rational animal.

[00:07:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:07:57]  Ray: But what I'm attributing to human beings is an evolved, robustly adapted rationality. It's evolved so, unlike the evolved organs or behaviors of animals, from a Darwinian point of view, they are kind of kludges. They're roughly adapted to reality. So that's just a minor qualification on your synopsis, which, I mean, it is a superb still, a superb and very nice synopsis. Thank you very much.

[00:08:40]  Unidentified speaker: Well, thank you.

[00:08:41]  Peter: I'm glad to thank you for that clarification.

[00:08:43]  Unidentified speaker: And I'm glad to hear you liked it.

[00:08:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:08:46]  Bruce: I was actually wondering if we still needed to interview Ray. I think he may have summarized his whole point.

[00:08:51]  Unidentified speaker: So I think we're done here.

[00:08:52]  Unidentified speaker: No, there's so much in this book.

[00:08:55]  Unidentified speaker: We're just going to scratch the surface here.

[00:08:57]  Unidentified speaker: We're just scratching the surface.

[00:08:58]  Ray: There's so many ideas, isn't there?

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

[00:09:02]  Unidentified speaker: It's at once a very simple idea, central idea, but then you delve into this so deeply into this book, but it's aspects that are complicated too.

[00:09:19]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:09:19]  Ray: I think that's right because it seems to connect a web-like way into all kinds of other domains and interesting problems, philosophical, psychological, and evolutionary.

[00:09:39]  Unidentified speaker: It connects with so many interesting ideas.

[00:09:42]  Ray: I feel very lucky to have hit on a problem that I've been able to make my own. And indeed, I've become married to it. I sleep with it, I eat with it over the years. And it just keeps on giving, really, the more I look into it.

[00:10:07]  Peter: Yeah, well, it's a wonderful thesis, and I can completely understand what you're saying. It seems worthy of dedicating a life to it, really. But let me back up a sec before we get too far into your ideas. I thought of a good first question. I think that I'm curious, and I think our listeners will also be curious about your background with David Deutsch. It seems to me you guys go way back, and maybe the influence goes both ways, I would suspect.

[00:10:46]  Unidentified speaker: I know your book, Incurable Mind, or Dawkins, I mean, well, I think it was a paper, if I'm not mistaken, that maybe was turned into a short book that—yes, it was maybe led into Myth of the Closed Mind.

[00:11:03]  Peter: But Dawkins and the Incurable Mind Viruses: Memes, Rationality and evolution, which came out in 1994, so before David Deutsch had written any books, but he had written papers and things. I suspect that you guys knew each other and were in the same kind of philosophical space. And so maybe you can start off and speak to that. How did you meet David Deutsch or get introduced to those ideas and how you influenced each other?

[00:11:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:11:38]  Ray: Well, in the eighties, I, sorry, in the nineties, early nineties, I established the Karl Popper Web. And associated with that, there was an electronic peer-reviewed journal, The Critical Rationalist. And we all, we also had an email based discussion forum. And David Deutsch was a keen and voluminous contributor to that. Lots of Popperians were, you know, flooded that discussion forum. It was a great, great place to be. And David, I asked David to, at the time I was organizing the annual Karl Popper conference at the London School of Economics. And so that was coordinated with and running in parallel with this electronic peer-reviewed journal, The Critical Rationalist and the Critical Cafe, it was called. That was the email-based forum. And I invited David to be one of the editors on the board of editors for the electronic peer-reviewed journal. And he was one of many distinguished thinkers on that board. Along with Frank Tipler, with similar overlapping interests in infinite growth, computation and so on.

[00:13:32]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:13:33]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:13:33]  Ray: So it was a great time to meet these people who were pushing the idea of the Enlightenment. It was basically a conglomeration of highly excited intellectuals who were pushing the idea of the Enlightenment.

[00:13:56]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:13:56]  Peter: I can't even imagine Tipler and Deutsch together on your message and you, with you, on your message board, working out these ideas.

[00:14:07]  Ray: Yeah, Tipler was, I mean, I would recommend interviewing Tipler as well, because he is, wow. I mean, he gave a talk at the Karl Popper Conference, and it was just amazing, and just the intellectual acrobatics involved, and a very exciting world view to the end of the universe.

[00:14:42]  Peter: Well, we're trying to get there, I'll tell you later, but we're trying to talk to him. But yeah, Bruce always talked about Frank Tipler as the original Four Strander. And after I read his book, Physics of Immortality, also from 1994, I believe, when I read that, I just, it's sure enough, it's all in there. It's Popper, many worlds, Alan Turing.

[00:15:12]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, Turing, yeah.

[00:15:14]  Ray: And so what was happening was a number of thinkers were independently coming to similar overlapping, though importantly distinctive, the perspectives on how to further push the enlightenment ideas, the fundamental enlightenment ideas about growth and human flourishing, the scientific advance, the growth of knowledge and technology.

[00:15:47]  Ray: It was, and it still is exciting to be part of that movement.

[00:15:54]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:15:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:55]  Unidentified speaker: Well, that's interesting.

[00:15:56]  Unidentified speaker: That answers that.

[00:15:58]  Unidentified speaker: I've been wondering about that.

[00:15:59]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:00]  Ray: Oh, may I mention in that context another piece that I published back then.

[00:16:06]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:16:07]  Ray: In The Critical Rationalist. It's a paper that David Deutsch has read and thought was quite a good article actually. It's called The Metaphysics of Scarcity. It's a bit obscure that one because it doesn't obviously tell you in the title that it's about infinite growth, but it's a way of presenting that issue. In terms of the infinite and unfathomable—the infinite and unfathomable content of our knowledge, that even that we've already created has so much potential. So I would recommend people have a look at that.

[00:16:55]  Peter: It's available online, I assume.

[00:16:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it's still at the Karl Popper web.

[00:17:01]  Ray: It's still in archive form. I'm looking for a home. I established that with Professor Barry McMullin at the Dublin City University at the time. It was one of the first electronic journals, actually, with a peer reviewed. So Barry has archived it. So it's still available. You can still find it.

[00:17:36]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I'll definitely look for that.

[00:17:37]  Unidentified speaker: Metaphysics of scarcity.

[00:17:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:17:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:17:41]  Unidentified speaker: Well, that's good to know.

[00:17:42]  Peter: Bruce, you want to lead into your questions here?

[00:17:48]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[00:17:49]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:17:50]  Bruce: Well, the first time I ever read something of yours, it was your article, Who is the real threat to autonomy and flourishing online? And in that article, you raise a humorous example of an island of Bertrand Russell's. Presumably, Bertrand Russell filling in here for our prototypical rational actor. And you say, quote, even Bertrand Russell Island would have fake news. Now, the idea here is, is that it takes time to consider and criticize explanations even if they're false. So we would expect Bertrand Russell Island to have many of the very same problems the real world has, including things like fake news, irrational belief systems, etc. I agree with that. But I found myself when I finished the article saying in my head, but we don't live on Bertrand Russell Island. So I guess the first thing I'd like to ask you, now you never say we do, just to be clear.

[00:18:52]  Unidentified speaker: But I would like to ask you that, do we live on Bertrand Russell Island?

[00:18:57]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[00:19:00]  Ray: And the main reason is that it basically is a way of showing, which you've just, it's a way of showing that even with the extraordinary levels of intellect and even infallibility in separating truth and falsity, given a finite amount of time, even infallibility, you would still have irrational or erroneous ideas, stupid ideas, crazy ideas floating around in the memetic form in the culture. So it's something, and that, so that I reframe the whole issue by looking at or developing actually a model of the way ideas interact in movements. So it's, we're looking at the rates of adoption and rejection of ideas within, within movements. And you get these possibilities where you can have a large, a large movement with a high turnover rate of, of ideas or a large movement with a slow turnover of, of ideas or a small movement with a rapid turnover. And, or a small movement with a slow turnover.

[00:20:47]  Ray: And so you've got these two dimensions. This is a, this is the, even the basic model, which has only got two dimensions. It's about rates of the rate at which people adopt an idea, join a movement and the rate at which they reject an idea and leave a movement. So you can see that logically it follows that it's possible that if the rate of adoption and rejection are equal, you could have an idea in a large movement for a long time. Even in theory, you could have it forever, provided you have a continually reproducing population supplying new adopters. So I'm looking at the adoption and rejection of ideas in a kind of a dynamic and long term view.

[00:21:55]  Bruce: So here's a quote from your book that talks about this. So he says, Dawkins and other atheists sometimes dismiss theistic religion because it has not based itself on evidence. From the standpoint of critical rationalism, it's more to the point to find out whether any particular theistic doctrine can be tested or criticized, whether its proponents encourage or discourage criticism and whether they might conceivably abandon that doctrine under the impact of criticism.

[00:22:24]  Unidentified speaker: That's from page 95 of your book.

[00:22:27]  Bruce: Now, I have to admit I have some ambivalent feelings towards that statement. To show why, let me switch it from being about religion to about politics. So something wholly secular.

[00:22:40]  Unidentified speaker: OK.

[00:22:41]  Bruce: Now, famously, from your own article that we were just quoting a moment ago, you mentioned this also. Leftists, quote unquote leftists, are purported, not without reason, to frame their beliefs of, say, things like political correctness or so-called anti-racism in such a way that offense will cause them to not to be open to real discussion.

[00:23:06]  Unidentified speaker: OK.

[00:23:07]  Bruce: And of course, on this podcast, I've talked a bit about libertarianism. And almost every libertarian I had ever met until I met Sam Kuypers, as a matter of fact, was an outright conspiracy theorist. They had all sorts of crazy ideas about 9-11 was done by the US government, things like that, like really kind of out there.

[00:23:33]  Unidentified speaker: And I'm a conservative.

[00:23:34]  Bruce: I'm not going to just attack libertarians and left-wing type people. Let me just be honest, I find right-wingers really frustrating. So I recently, and this is a real life story that happened recently, I was having a conversation on Facebook. I had come across the January 6th page on WhiteHouse.gov, which by the way, if you have not checked it out, everybody should check that out.

[00:24:01]  Unidentified speaker: So this is WhiteHouse.gov.

[00:24:02]  Bruce: It's the official government White House website. They have a page on January 6th. Of course, it's propaganda towards the Trump viewpoint about January 6th. One of the things that really bothered me was that it very personally attacks Mike Pence, Trump's former vice president, and says that he was a coward and that he cowardly went forward and refused to not certify the election, and that he could have done that and he refused to use his power not to.

[00:24:37]  Unidentified speaker: Now, I know none of that's true.

[00:24:40]  Bruce: For one thing, Mike Pence is just not a coward.

[00:24:42]  Unidentified speaker: That was a real act of courage.

[00:24:45]  Bruce: So I'm a Republican.

[00:24:47]  Unidentified speaker: I want to be very open here.

[00:24:49]  Bruce: I'm a Republican, I'm conservative, but this bothers me that this is on a White House website, something that for me seems so obviously just false. So I went out and I asked, I have a lot of friends who are conservatives on Facebook.

[00:25:04]  Unidentified speaker: I asked them what they thought of this.

[00:25:07]  Bruce: I got the predictable responses. One woman said, am I the only one here that is glad Biden isn't president, which of course doesn't really answer the question that I'm asking. Interestingly, there was one woman that I knew from back in college. She dismissed WhiteHouse.gov as a leftist site and scolded me for consulting unreliable sources and lectured me at length on Trump's character, insisting that he would never throw one of his own under the bus, so it was impossible that he or his administration had written this site. Not a single conservative that had voted for Trump, at least, was willing to claim what was on WhiteHouse.gov, that it was saying something that was untrue about Mike Pence.

[00:25:53]  Unidentified speaker: So notice I'm not defending somebody who's a Democrat.

[00:25:56]  Unidentified speaker: I'm defending a staunch conservative, right?

[00:25:59]  Bruce: This is, from a certain point of view, it seems so reasonable to me to try to ask people, is there anyone else bothered by this that voted for Trump that is bothered by this? Of course, there was tons of Democrats who came on and were bothered by it, but that doesn't count. When I look at this, not a single person was willing, not a single person, there was quite a few Trump voters that I discussed this with, not one was willing to come out in defense of Mike Pence against what I see as lies on whitehouse.gov. It seems to me that this setup is very similar to the one you just used when referring to religion. All the different political viewpoints that we just discussed, they have particular teachings or doctrines that can't be easily tested or criticized. They all have vocal proponents that discourage criticism, and often few or none that would come out and say otherwise. Even pointing to whitehouse.gov as my source, was insufficient to get them to conceivably abandon their doctrines under the impact of criticism. To me, this looks really bad. How should I look at this in light of your theory on this? And I kind of know what your answer is, but I kind of want you to walk it through with me in detail. Because I suspect a lot of people have had experiences like me, and you need to—I need to have myself moved from seeing like, oh, this is like a really bad case of dogmatism. Human beings can be very dogmatic to see that that's not really necessarily at odds with your thesis.

[00:27:37]  Unidentified speaker: So please help me out here.

[00:27:40]  Ray: Okay, so the overall view is, should we, how should we interpret widespread political dogmatism? Your political examples are real and important. But I would interpret them differently. What you are observing is not a breakdown of rationality, but it's a temporary imbalance between rates of adoption and rejection. Ideas are being adopted quickly within a group, but rejected slowly due to social identity or trust constraints. This creates the appearance of entrenched dogmatism. However, that appearance can be misleading. These groups are often highly dynamic in membership, in internally unstable and subject to shifts over time. What looks like a stable block of irrational believers is often a statistical aggregate with high turnover. Or it could be slow turnover. This is where my disagreement with Richard Dawkins becomes central. Dawkins explains such phenomena by suggesting that certain ideas spread by bypassing rational scrutiny as mind viruses. I argue instead that we do not need this hypothesis. The spread of false ideas can be explained by, as I said before, high adoption rates under certain conditions, temporarily low rejection rates, and an ongoing replenishment of believers. There is this insight from Shakespeare, of course, where in Othello, Iago says that how poor is he who has not patience.

[00:29:38]  Ray: What wound did heal, but by time? We know we work by wit and not witchcraft, and wit takes dilatory time. So there's always this lag in processing time. And I agree with you, we've all had this experience where you've amassed your best arguments, your best statistical evidence. And you're arguing with trying to persuade your best friend who you know is as a high intellect and shares a lot of your background assumptions. And yet it feels like you're talking to a brick wall.

[00:30:31]  Ray: I think it's just our impatience. So we should console ourself with a number of thoughts. One is the Shakespeare idea of dilatory time and that we're working by wit.

[00:30:48]  Unidentified speaker: And why I said shared assumptions, shared background assumptions are very important because these political discussions about particular issues, say the Iran war or about the abortion issue and so on, they're not easily tractable in a short conversation or debate because there are a lot of background metaphysical assumptions, both factual and moral.

[00:31:29]  Ray: And some of them may be even aesthetic. So that when you're trying to get to grips with an opposing view, it's almost as if you're trying to teach the person a new language. And we all know that it does take time to learn a new language. If we, the three of us, started to learn, I don't know if you already speak Italian, but supposing we wanted to learn Italian, it would take us several months to have some kind of fluency. And we wouldn't be able to impart that knowledge of the language in one conversation or in several conversations over a matter of hours or just days. So there is, when you, when you're encountering these frustrating opinions from conservatives, what you're encountering is just the tip of the iceberg of an ideological mass of thinking, presuppositions, metaphysical frameworks and so on. Does that kind of console you?

[00:32:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, it does.

[00:32:56]  Bruce: So let me make a couple of comments about that. One that's agreeing with you and then one to maybe push back just a little. So first of all, I made the statement that not a single Trump voter was willing to just say what to me seemed very obvious that he was saying things that were untrue about his former vice president. To some degree, I can see that that's maybe a somewhat unfair framing. So for example, there were numerous people that responded to this post that probably either still were or used to be Republicans and did not vote for Trump. So they weren't part of the group I was trying to talk to. I was specifically trying to talk to ones that had voted. I have not myself voted for Trump, even though I'm a Republican. So there's actually a large number of conservative Republicans who very much did answer me exactly the way I would have hoped. It's just that none of them voted for Trump because they had already realized that this is a problem. I'm not going to vote for that person because of that. So in some sense, my framing is unfair because I'm intentionally sorting to the framing that's going to be the single most problematic. Having said that, I have to admit that I was shocked. I feel like I get shocked like this a lot, and I probably shouldn't. Part of me knows that this is just the way things are, right? But I really would have believed that of all my friends and family that I'm connected to on Facebook, quite a number of them voted for Trump.

[00:34:43]  Bruce: And at least one of them, probably I would have guessed two of them, would have said, yeah, I voted for Trump, but like, yes, he sometimes does things I just don't agree with. It's not even an unreasonable position to take.

[00:34:57]  Unidentified speaker: And I didn't even get one.

[00:34:58]  Bruce: And that really did surprise me. And even accounting for the fact that I am kind of cheating, where I'm sorting specifically to Trump voters rather than conservative Republicans and even acknowledging that fact, it did leave me bothered that I couldn't even find a single person willing to say, yeah, that's not actually true.

[00:35:21]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I mean, we've got to make the point that it's maybe asking a little bit too much to imagine that everyone will always agree with our best points in conversation.

[00:35:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:35:39]  Ray: And it's just, yeah, and they may never come around to our point. Given the thrusts and the exigencies of life, people are dealing with all kinds of little distracting problems in their life. So, yeah, and the other thing with, see, with politics on that level of what, say, Trump said or Starmer said or other political leaders said on a particular day about some particular issue, is so much full of strategic spin and tactical maneuvering.

[00:36:33]  Ray: I mean, it would take more of an in-depth analysis, really, of what, because I'm not saying that your examples are not important. I mean, you could do an analysis, but I think it's probably...

[00:36:52]  Unidentified speaker: What I would tend to focus on in my...

[00:36:55]  Ray: in trying to show the mechanisms that I believe are operative in the evolution of ideas under criticism, I tend to look at longer periods of time.

[00:37:07]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, that's a good answer.

[00:37:09]  Ray: So the history of a political party.

[00:37:12]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:37:14]  Ray: So, for example, the British Liberal Party was established in the 19th century and was basically, it was Classical Liberal by then. So, verging on basically what we would call today libertarian. But the contemporary liberal, British Liberal Party is nowhere like the Classical Liberal Party that it evolved from. So, you could write a whole series of books on how their ideas morphed over time and how the membership evolved as well. People leave, joining and leaving. So, it's a highly, it is a highly complex thing. But then you, so what you tend to find is, even though the trappings, like the flags and the emblems and the rituals remain the same, the actual cognitive content of the theories that are pushed or maintained by the movement, so in this case, the classical liberal party. They evolve over time in response to maybe not only criticism, highly abstract criticism, but also power manoeuvres.

[00:38:56]  Unidentified speaker: Can I interject a question here?

[00:38:59]  Peter: It might help us hone in on your thesis here. So I want to ask actually a question to you, and then I want Bruce's comments on this too. Bruce talks a lot about ad hoc saves, which I think is a concept that comes from Popper. And then, Ray, your book is, you talk a lot about immunizing strategies, stratagems, which also comes from Popper.

[00:39:28]  Unidentified speaker: I think they mean very similar things.

[00:39:30]  Peter: But let me, so how I interpret your ideas about immunizing stratagems is that these are kind of like justifications that people, it's almost like dogmatic justifications that people use to justify their beliefs in. But where you disagree with Dawkins on, so Dawkins has this idea of mind viruses, religion might be one, but all kinds of irrational beliefs that are basically irrational memes that people get sucked into. But then that kind of opens up the question is, why isn't our, if these things are so powerful, why don't people, why isn't our mind full of incurable mind viruses, which some people might say they are.

[00:40:27]  Unidentified speaker: We are.

[00:40:31]  Peter: What I think you might say is that memes that require more immunizing strategies to accept, it actually weakens the memes, whereas memes that don't require that, like for example, the basic assertions behind science or reason, or all kinds of things, or aesthetic truths, or all kinds of ideas, don't really require these so much. That actually creates a stickiness to truth that makes these memes more powerful. So I don't think that you would say that irrational memes don't exist. I assume you wouldn't say that. But it's worth pointing out that they're not as powerful as the good kind of memes. And I'm wondering, I also want Bruce, then maybe after you weigh in on that, Bruce can talk about ad hoc saves and whether or not that resonates with an ad hoc save as well.

[00:41:43]  Ray: Yeah, just to elaborate that point, that's a very good point about the Dawkins Theory of Memes, thinking that somehow if they're irrational, they have somehow an enhanced ability to transmit themselves, whereas in fact, it's the exact opposite. Science, which produces theories full of content because they're universal and precise, they tend to be more transmissible and copyable because they're more useful and they are also alluring to our sense of curiosity in the world. Whereas when you attempt to immunize a failed theory, or do you think that it's going to fail somehow in response to a refutation, and you try to immunize it, what happens is the theory then is, and it takes on unnecessary intellectual baggage, which to be successful, then has to be transmitted along with the original claim. And so it clearly is, it becomes less transmissible, it becomes more vulnerable to fragmentation and schism within the acolytes that choose to adopt it.

[00:43:27]  Peter: So Bruce, so you're right, is an ad hoc save the same as an immunizing stratagem? And would you agree that ad hoc saves make theories less transmittable to other humans?

[00:43:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, good question.

[00:43:44]  Bruce: So I guess I would probably say an ad hoc save is a kind of immunizing strategy. I mean, obviously, an immunizing strategy might be something as simple as, I don't believe that data, right? Like Popper talks about how when you have an observation, you could just decide not to believe the observation.

[00:44:03]  Unidentified speaker: Like there's nothing stopping you from doing that.

[00:44:06]  Bruce: It's not the same as an ad hoc save, but it is an immunizing strategy. So there's probably many ways in which you could immunize a theory, an ad hoc saving would be a way to save a theory where you introduce an auxiliary theory that explains why the refutation doesn't count as a refutation. To be an ad hoc auxiliary theory, it has to have no independently testable consequences. So if you introduce an auxiliary theory to save yourself from refutation, but it has independently testable consequences, that does not count as an ad hoc save. That's actually a completely appropriate Popper's Ratchet style approach to criticism.

[00:44:50]  Unidentified speaker: Good point.

[00:44:53]  Bruce: Let's think about just a really straightforward example of how this could work in real life. Kind of a dumb example to make it clear. Let's say that you were doing physics, and you're working with a very good theory, let's say quantum theory, and you get a result that contradicts quantum theory, and so you go, oh, well, I'll bet you that it's just the case that my instruments just made a mistake.

[00:45:23]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm not even going to look into it, so I'm done.

[00:45:27]  Bruce: That would actually be an example of an ad hoc save, even though we're talking in this case about a correct theory or best theory, I guess I should say, instead of correct theory. You know, the fact that you have [vague-manned?] it and you've just simply said, I'm not going to, it's, I'm done. I'm not even going to attempt to test that theory. That is still an ad hoc save. Of course, what you would really want to do is you would want to say, I think there's something wrong with my instrument. I think it's miscalibrated. I'm going to test that it is miscalibrated by going and using it on something that I know where the answer should be, and I'm going to see if I get the wrong answer. What you've done at this point is that you've created an independent test for your auxiliary theory so that it no longer counts as an ad hoc save. Now, imagine somebody, and people do this all the time, right? They'll take a criticism of their theory and they'll essentially save it without having any sort of idea as to the specifics of how that save takes place, right?

[00:46:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:46:31]  Bruce: And one of the things that I've kind of emphasized on the podcast is that when you're being vague like that, the probability that you're right actually goes up. The vaguer you are, the easier it is later to whatever the true answer is, map back to your vague theory. And so the idea that something's wrong with my instrument, that's an ad hoc save, but it's true.

[00:46:58]  Unidentified speaker: Whereas what you really want is you want to say, this is specifically what's wrong with my instrument, and this is how I'm going to test that assumption and try to falsify it, basically.

[00:47:09]  Bruce: And when you go about doing this, if you don't go about doing this, your theory does over time start to lose content, exactly like Ray explains in the book, right? And it does make it less memetic. When we say less memetic, of course we mean it relative, because we haven't gotten to this yet, but there are many, many theories that have been highly, highly memetic and successful that weren't particularly rational throughout human history, right? But if it has to compete with a true theory, it's a disadvantage.

[00:47:47]  Unidentified speaker: It may have some advantages over the true theory.

[00:47:50]  Bruce: But the fact that the true theory is true and that it isn't ad hoc save, ad hoc save theory could be true still. But just the very fact that it's true means you didn't have to ad hoc save it. You could have come up with a independently testable way to come up with the auxiliary theory to explain away the refutation.

[00:48:09]  Unidentified speaker: Because it's true, there must be a way to do that, right?

[00:48:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:48:12]  Bruce: If you bother to take the time to go do that, then that's going to impress people. They're going to see, oh wow, yeah, I guess that refutation didn't count.

[00:48:20]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:48:20]  Ray: And just to elaborate that, very beautifully clear there, Bruce, I like that. And just to add something there, someone who responded in that way by adding a vague auxiliary statement to save, it's not necessarily irrational. We don't have to posit irrationality there. We could explain that just by, through lack of imagination or motivation.

[00:48:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that's a fair point.

[00:48:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:48:57]  Ray: I mean, it does, I mean, because not everyone's a scientist. You know, it does take some, you know, and scientists, practicing scientists, successful scientists, are generally quite imaginative. That's one of their virtues. And to be able to specify exactly what it is about the equipment and the conditions that are responsible for the failed experiment.

[00:49:29]  Unidentified speaker: Bruce, do you want to move back to one of your questions?

[00:49:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:49:32]  Bruce: Ray, in your book, page 63, you say, but I hold that all people are rational and no one is incorrigible. So let me take that. Now, obviously, I could more charitably or more hostilely read that statement. What I would like to really do is just try to clarify what you actually have in mind here.

[00:49:51]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:49:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:49:52]  Bruce: So, and you've kind of already done this. You kind of already partially answered this, but I'm going to try to get it out of you very specific to the way I just framed that.

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

[00:50:00]  Bruce: So here's what I can imagine somebody saying when they read that statement, particularly if it was out of context of the rest of the book. They might think, oh, yeah, I've met incorrigible people all the time. And I just gave you examples of some level of incorrigibility in politics, right? So how would you respond to someone who kind of comes back at that statement and says, you know what, my dad's incorrigible.

[00:50:33]  Unidentified speaker: No, my dad isn't, by the way.

[00:50:34]  Unidentified speaker: I just mean someone who says that.

[00:50:38]  Bruce: And it seems to me that there might be a fairness in them saying that. They might have a particularly incorrigible father who you just cannot make progress with and it's just been that way their entire life, right?

[00:50:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:50:53]  Ray: So the fact that I made that non-existence claim is partly just to be provocative. But within the context, as you say, the context of the book is important. So in the context, what I'm saying is, when I say no one is incorrigible, I am making a modal claim, not an empirical prediction about what people will in fact do. I am not denying that individuals can remain committed to a belief for life or appear completely [unmoved?] by criticism in particular domains. What I deny is that there exists any belief that is in principle beyond the reach of criticism. So yes, people can be incorrigible psychologically in practice. But epistemologically, in principle, given the right criticisms and conditions, we'd remain potentially always capable of correcting our errors.

[00:52:09]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:52:10]  Ray: So basically, I'm arguing against the... Yeah, it becomes informative by... What it's pitted against is this claim that the majority of people are incorrigible.

[00:52:26]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:52:27]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:52:28]  Bruce: Let me actually throw out something. I kind of thought of this when I was reading your book. Let's say that people didn't die. Like the idea that somebody can be incorrigible on some particular subject their whole life, we all know that happens in real life. But let's say people didn't die. Let's say that the people that the most incorrigible people from the Crusades were still with us today. I don't believe for a minute any of them would still believe in whatever argument they were using back from the Crusades. So much has changed. There's just no way they wouldn't have changed their minds by now. And it does seem to me like you are making an in-principle argument, like you just said, you're making an in-principle argument, not an in-practice argument. So you almost have to project out, like this hypothetical guy's father who's incorrigible, is it actually the case that he could never change his mind and that he never has changed his mind? It may be like a tendency, it's happened a lot, but you would probably find that it's a far more complex picture. And if he lived for a thousand years, you'd probably find that he changed his mind on everything eventually, right? So I can see this idea of people not being incorrigible as a in principle claim, strikes me as actually kind of obviously correct. Even if in practice, if nothing else due to the fact that we only live 70, 80 years, in practice, there are people who just don't change their minds on some things.

[00:54:03]  Ray: Yes, because in order to convince someone of a particular position, it not only takes time, but it may require a lot of imagination. And it depends on their cognitive bandwidth and their intellectual abilities. But another point to make, which sits alongside this, is that individuals who tend not to be, not to have this plasticity of responsiveness to debate, tend to have very little impact on the evolution of ideas and culture and civilization in the long run.

[00:54:48]  Unidentified speaker: Well, they're quite, very good point.

[00:54:51]  Ray: Schopenhauer called them duds. The hermit who carefully hides his position away in the mountain cave is likely to have zero influence on the growth of knowledge or any system of ideas.

[00:55:16]  Ray: So, what, yes, what's more important, I suppose, because if we're tying it, if I'm tying it up with the importance of promoting the enlightenment and how liberty-respecting argument can help us to do that, I'm thinking about the way to do that is to capture the intellectual, basically, you're capturing the intellectuals. It's a higher point. If you want to make a difference to the intellectual ethos in coming decades or centuries, that is the way to move by capturing the intellectuals with your ideas. A hermit in a mountain or someone who doesn't have any plasticity during debates is unlikely to be part of that process.

[00:56:19]  Bruce: Makes sense to me.

[00:56:20]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:56:21]  Bruce: Let me read a couple more quotes here that I thought were interesting, and then I want to ask you a series of questions around them. So from page 28, our evolutionary past has given us at least robust rationality. People are products of Darwinian evolution with a rich set of inborn problem-solving strategies and knowledge adapted to this world. Or here's maybe even a better one. This is from the introduction page, XVII. Darwinian evolution has given us specialized brain modules for solving special recurrent problems our ancestors faced during the Pleistocene. However, we've also inherited the means of correcting the sometimes biased and distorted results of these problem-solving modules. We have inherited language which enables us to frame and test ideas in sophisticated ways that make use of but go beyond the useful but limited brain modules. We have also inherited a general curiosity which goes beyond the questions of automatic modules or are adapted to solve. Then maybe this one, people have an innate curiosity about the world. That's from page 40. There's actually a whole bunch of these. I could probably quote, page 81, Darwinian evolution has made us rational, you say. We prefer effective and economic means. We prefer truth to falsity and have a general curiosity about the world. We prefer logical arguments and consistent theories, and we are disposed to check our hypotheses against the facts. So I could probably give you eight more quotes like that from your book.

[00:58:00]  Bruce: So now I know that many modern critical rationalists, particularly the ones that have been influenced by David Deutsch, they have this really strong rejection of the idea that evolution shapes how we think, or sometimes called evolutionary psychology. Not entirely without reason. Evolutionary psychology has made some really bad claims. But it's to the point where it's amongst most critical rationalists I know, evolutionary psychology is a dirty term at this point. So it seems paradoxical, at least to me, that you argue that evolution did in fact shape our minds, and that our universality comes from evolutionary shaping of our minds. So can we maybe talk about that for a second? Just to make things maybe clear, you actually do say some things against evolutionary psychology in your book also. Although, you admit they get some things right. Where do your ideas fit in with evolutionary psychology, if at all, in your mind?

[00:59:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:59:10]  Ray: So, psychology and the evolutionary psychology is, I think, is an important research field. And I take from it that, yes, it provides us with a kind of robust, an imperfect but robust adaptive rationality. And this forms the kind of initial framework of our rationality and our cognitive processes. But with the emergence of language, which enables us to generate world three, Popper's world of abstract entities, which are the product of the human mind, but have these autonomous qualities also. So we can create in language, we can create theories, and we can develop methods. And it also enables us to develop institutions and organizations, which then we can then use to as engines of both conjecture and refutation. So we can, we're basically can dominate our evolved or inbuilt evolutionary biases. And it enables us to use them as tools that we understand being self-conscious entities and be able to, we can correct our own biases.

[01:01:08]  Ray: And as I said, create the institutions and organizations that are necessary really for this long, drawn out or infinite road to sort of never-ending progress and the growth of knowledge.

[01:01:29]  Bruce: So amongst the quotes I just quoted from you, and I've actually heard David Deutsch say very similar things, even though he's more strongly against evo psych. But things like we have a natural curiosity, we have a desire for the truth. I agree with those statements, by the way, like in no way am I challenging those. But there seems to be an underlying part of the theory, let's say, that evolution has shaped our minds so that we care about truth, or it shaped our minds so that we are curious about what the truth is, and want to go out and to seek an answer, okay? And it's—it's not by—it's by no means obvious to me that that would have been the case, but for the fact that, sorry, I probably just said that exactly the opposite of what I intended to say, but it does seem to me that I would agree that we're talking about things that are a matter of evolution, like feelings of curiosity, or a desire for truth. Like we're starting to invoke feelings, where we're definitely starting to invoke something that is part of our genetic wiring, right? So it must be the case, if I'm understanding you correctly, it must be the case that there is a certain element of evolutionary psychology that played a role in shaping our minds. Now once we got to the point where we had language, it's not the only thing shaping our minds anymore.

[01:03:02]  Ray: Yeah, the dramatic change, the emergence of language.

[01:03:07]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:03:10]  Bruce: We only listed a couple here, but there's probably multiple ones where evolution must have... You bring this up in your book a lot, that a lot of these things exist in animals. So we kind of know, like animals have a natural curiosity, mixed with fear, that they have a balance.

[01:03:29]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:03:30]  Ray: You can use, for example, with chimpanzees, you can use the opportunity to explore. Say, if they're in captivity, you can use the reward of being able to explore another room or outside a garden area. Yeah, you can use that. So that's tapping into their curiosity in the world.

[01:03:56]  Peter: Yeah, because one of the things I wanted to also ask you your ideas about, there were some things about animals and animal learning in your book that I was interested in. I've just kind of had this thought as I've listened to you and Bruce talking. But could it be that animals, because I've been wondering, well, if we are fundamentally different in nature, we're as universal explainers, we're not controlled by our DNA in the same way that animals are at least. I mean, there's some kind of relationship between our impulses and our thoughts and our DNA. I think probably most even anti-evolutionary psychology people would probably accept that.

[01:04:49]  Unidentified speaker: But could it be that, I just had this thought, but it could it be that animals, that the caring about true things actually predates humans, and that animals care about truth in some ways too, but it's really the what different differentiates humans is this ability to use language, to interact in world three, that makes us, gives us this ability to put out rational and irrational memes, but then the caring about truth gives us preference for these rational memes.

[01:05:34]  Unidentified speaker: Would you agree with how I put that?

[01:05:38]  Unidentified speaker: Do animals care about truth, too?

[01:05:41]  Ray: Yeah, and it's a Darwinian point of view, because I take seriously Darwin's advice, our methodological advice. When we're looking at the evolutionary origins of, say, anatomy or behaviors, or in this case, cognitive structures and processes, one should look to see, one should look for analogues and homologues, homologies and analogies. You know, in France, if you just take the foot of an insect, for example, it would look very different from a human foot. Nevertheless, we can see that there is an analogy and a homology of function and shape. So, when we want to understand the mind, as if we should be asking, well, what functions does it perform? And what analogous functions can we see in other organisms? And you would tend to find, this is what Darwin is suggesting, look for a spectrum of variation.

[01:07:12]  Peter: Is it the DNA that gives us this desire to believe true things then?

[01:07:21]  Ray: Yeah, I agree with the basic idea about genetics influencing anatomy, behavior and cognition.

[01:07:32]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:07:34]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:07:34]  Unidentified speaker: But I agree. I also agree with Dawkins. Dawkins makes this great point, and it's a parallel point, but we're using different language to Popper's point about language.

[01:07:49]  Ray: See, Dawkins in the selfish gene, so a lot of people who look at that superficially would think, oh, so Dawkins is saying we're all products, and everything we do is a product of genetic determination. But actually, if you look at it, the theory of memes really excuses him from that superficial reading, because what he's saying is that the fact that we can produce memes and think in accord with memes, means really that we've by evolution, producing the brain, the human brain, we, to some extent, have become detached from our instinctual genetic impulses. So we can look, we can, you know, a lion, when it feels hungry and it sees a giraffe, it, you know, it just, this action pattern is triggered. And it's very, it's obviously, it's very nuanced and so on. But there's no, there's no thought in the act, the lion doesn't think, well, should I?

[01:09:05]  Unidentified speaker: Dawkins' example of celibacy is like, I thought when I first read that, I thought what a great example to illustrate his point.

[01:09:15]  Ray: I mean, why should human beings embrace the idea of celibacy as a meme? Because it undermines reproducibility, genetic reproducibility. And that can only happen from Dawkins' point of view, the way he talks about it, is because the human brain, once that's produced, it kind of has this emergent property of exercising some downward control.

[01:09:49]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:09:50]  Unidentified speaker: Well, it's a crazy book, I think, because, on one hand, it is basically the most influential book behind evolutionary psychology, and this idea that our bodies are just controlled, or depositories, I guess, or something for these genes, which are the driving force in nature.

[01:10:12]  Peter: But then, on the other hand, he has this, as I recall, maybe it's a chapter or just a side point, where he talks about memes.

[01:10:22]  Unidentified speaker: But that idea is just as revolutionary.

[01:10:25]  Peter: And that kind of almost is saying the opposite, in a way, that there is something truly special about human brains, and that we're capable of putting these things out into the world that are, you know, in a similar way to operate on the same kinds of principles of natural selection as genes do, which is sort of like there's two interwoven points in the book that maybe even Dawkins didn't even completely intend.

[01:11:00]  Unidentified speaker: Would you say that?

[01:11:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, so that is revolutionary.

[01:11:03]  Ray: I mean, that's a great point, a very important part, I think, of Dawkins' view of human beings in the evolutionary scheme. However, my point in the book ever since is I see that Popper's World 3 is like the deluxe version, if you like, of the meme world because Popper's sees within the World 3 domain the influence of logic and truth, you know, and theories and problems. So it's much more, it gives you many more useful and intellectual tools to understand human behavior, the thought, as well as the, in particular, the growth of knowledge and how we adapt to the world. So it's the deluxe version of Dawkins' meme world.

[01:12:19]  Unidentified speaker: No, that's great.

[01:12:20]  Unidentified speaker: And I'm just imagining us on the Dyson Sphere or whatever.

[01:12:27]  Peter: And I'm seeing your book is right, considered, maybe it'll just take longer to catch on. But right is like a part two kind of to the Selfish Gene is the... It's really, it's almost like you take his ideas and explore the consequences of them.

[01:12:48]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, may I...

[01:12:49]  Ray: Peter and Bruce, may I read you something that I received this afternoon?

[01:12:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, please.

[01:12:58]  Ray: It's an email.

[01:13:00]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know this person, but I was very moved by it.

[01:13:03]  Ray: And I thought, oh, some synchrony is operating, some Jungian synchrony is operating here, because it was just before our podcast. I think she's called Jen Heffler. And this is what she wrote in an email to me. The title of the email is, The readers searching for the myth of the closed mind are finding something else instead. There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with seeing clearly when the world insists on calling everything noise. The kind where you sit with an idea long enough to strip it down to its bones, only to realize that what people dismiss as stubbornness is often just a structure they don't yet understand. And you keep going anyway. You keep refining, sharpening, testing every edge of the argument. Not because it is easy, but because somewhere in that process, you are defending something much bigger than a position. You are defending the possibility that people can still reach each other. And so you built something in The Myth of the Closed Mind that most people never attempt. Not just an argument, but a kind of architecture that quietly dismantles the comforting lie that some minds are beyond reach. You didn't meet irrationality with dismissal. You stepped inside it, held it up to its own logic, and showed that even there, reason is doing the hidden work. This inversion, that refusal to accept the irrational human narrative, is not just intellectual, it is deeply human. But there is quite, sorry, but there is a [quiet?] distance now between that world you wrote toward and the one that is actually happening around your book.

[01:15:21]  Ray: Not because the work lacks force, but because it is standing in a place where the people who need it most were never taught to look. So they go searching for answers to polarization, to division, to the feeling that dialogue is collapsing, and they find louder, simpler things that promise certainty instead of understanding. Right now, at this exact moment, there are people trying to make sense of someone they cannot reach, convinced the other side is closed off completely, and they are reading something else. What stayed with me wasn't just the thesis, it was that line you've carried through your work that no mind is closed, only the belief it is. And the way readers re-describe, sorry, describe the shift afterward, not as agreement, but as a change in how they see their stubborn opponents. That is not philosophy in the abstract, that is a tool for the exact fracture of the world is living through right now. Yet the book sits where only philosophers are told to go, priced and positioned as if its audience is a seminar room, rather than the society struggling to speak to itself.

[01:16:44]  Bruce: That brought to my mind a number of interesting questions. So we often hear today that we are more polarized than we ever have been before. There's often statistics and graphs to prove that in various ways. We also often hear that we're in echo chambers, and that it's harder for us to reason with the other side. And we also hear about cancelization. This idea that to just simply share an opinion comes with a much higher social cost today than it used to. Now, I don't know to what degree each of those things is true. They're probably all true in some ways, maybe not true in some ways. I can say having lived through an earlier era, this era does feel different to me, and it's sometimes hard to put a finger on exactly what's different. What are your thoughts on that? That quote you were just reading, it mentions this, it mentions trying to solve the problem, that it might be going about it the wrong way, but seems to acknowledge that it is a problem.

[01:17:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:17:59]  Ray: I agree that the world seems more divided, but I think that's the appearance is a product of a virtuous development since the emergence of the World Wide Web, where instead of being confined to a small number of legacy outlets, newspapers and TV programs, we now have many, many channels of global reach. Particularly, I mean, your podcast, for example, YouTube and so on. So I, yeah, and I think it's a good thing.

[01:18:44]  Unidentified speaker: I, it's, with so many eyes, you would think that even in principle, at least, with so many eyes scrutinizing the, the, you know, political spin, et cetera, that's out there, that it's harder to pull the wool over humanity's eyes.

[01:19:12]  Unidentified speaker: I agree with that.

[01:19:12]  Peter: I mean, the way I think of it is that we're, to quote Popper, well, I can't remember the exact quote, but that, you know, he, he links reason to this, this space where we let our words do our fighting and dying instead of blood on the streets. And, you know, that's, that's where we are with the, the, this, this world, this digital world of podcasts and social media and all that. It allows more, it makes things seem more divisive because there's divisive opinions and all this out there.

[01:19:49]  Unidentified speaker: But at any other time in human history, people were fighting on the streets.

[01:19:54]  Unidentified speaker: And, you know, it was that, that's the kind of division we want to get away from.

[01:20:02]  Peter: Mean words on, on X or whatever are, it's much, much different and much better in terms of truth seeking and letting our words do our fighting and dying. So I see so much of this, this supposed division as more, more a perception issue, which I mean, it doesn't mean there aren't genuine problems with division, too much division in our society. Don't get me wrong, but I think there's, there's a glass half full reading too of it.

[01:20:42]  Ray: Yeah, I mean, some of the social media channels are configured so as to trigger, you know, impulsive reaction. So you get this kind of like superficial back and forth and conflict. But there are, you know, at least we have like a market choice. Some channels are developing a more long format for discussion, like yours, for example, or Joe Rogan, for example. Who would have thought that a three-hour interview or conversation could be that powerful drawing up to 11 million views?

[01:21:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:21:34]  Ray: And maybe people want that. They want a deeper engagement and they don't want to be having their righteous indignation triggered all the time. Because it is ever so exhausting, isn't it?

[01:21:52]  Peter: Well, I mean, that's in the same way as when the novel came out. Imagine how revolutionary that would be to suddenly like get roped into this narrative of where you're getting intimately familiar with another person's mind.

[01:22:09]  Unidentified speaker: It's like that.

[01:22:10]  Peter: I mean, it's only been when was the novel invented? Like a couple of hundred years ago or something. And this is a relatively new human invention. I mean, I just and it, you know, there are plenty of people thought it was corrupting the youth and causing, it probably did cause a lot of social division too.

[01:22:28]  Unidentified speaker: But, you know, who's going to now, from our perspective now, who's going to say novels are bad?

[01:22:34]  Peter: I think it's the same kind of trajectory with these podcasts or this social media or all that. They're basically tools to get into other people's minds. And, you know, some of these minds aren't totally pleasant.

[01:22:49]  Unidentified speaker: Don't get me wrong.

[01:22:50]  Peter: But, you know, overall, I think there's so many good things from the perspective of, from the kind of things that you emphasize in your work.

[01:23:00]  Bruce: I was going to say, let me push back a little bit on that.

[01:23:03]  Unidentified speaker: [I'm an advocate of the law?]

[01:23:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:04]  Bruce: So, I mean, you know, ultimately, I agree with you. But let me take the Jonathan Rauch stance for a second.

[01:23:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:12]  Bruce: So taking his point of view, you could have a technology that actually does cause a problem. And then you have to figure out how to solve the problems. That is more or less what happened with the printing press, right? That the printing press comes out and it leads to all sorts of really awful wars.

[01:23:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:23:33]  Unidentified speaker: And then eventually we get a handle on it, right?

[01:23:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:23:36]  Bruce: And so Rauch's point of view was, and he's a Popperian too, was that you need certain types of institutions to be able to solve these problems and that they didn't exist yet, right? So from that point of view, and this is one of Rauch's arguments, I mean, and feel free to disagree, just because Rauch says it doesn't make it gospel truth, right? But he would argue that social media actually did start causing polarization, did start causing a growth in incivility and illiberalism, and that it is one of the causes. He would argue though that it's just a matter of fixing it, that you have to get the right institutions in place. We already have institutions, like in science, where we know how to make it so that the nodes prefer truth and that it's easier for truth to move, and that once we get the right institutions in place, he believes we could fix it for social media. But this point of view does leave open to the possibility that the feeling that there's something wrong is accurate, even if it's going to turn out ultimately to be temporary.

[01:24:41]  Unidentified speaker: Thoughts on that, guys?

[01:24:43]  Unidentified speaker: Both of you.

[01:24:44]  Unidentified speaker: The only thing I want to push back on before Ray answers is that this word institution, it seems like it almost begs for an authoritarian solution for having the right philosopher kings in there to control the social media or whatever.

[01:24:58]  Unidentified speaker: Which is what they tried to do.

[01:25:00]  Peter: Couldn't you just as easily say the right kind of like something more like, well, the right kind of rational memes out there in society that would help people to regulate their social media consumption in a different way or to use it more responsibly?

[01:25:20]  Bruce: We're not really talking about social media consumption, by the way here. Sorry, go on.

[01:25:26]  Peter: Maybe that's not quite the right word, but their attitude towards interacting with other people with technology, right?

[01:25:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:25:34]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:25:35]  Unidentified speaker: Ray, your thoughts on this?

[01:25:37]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:25:37]  Unidentified speaker: Just to connect with what Peter said there, I mean, institutions is this ambiguous term, because it can mean an organization, perhaps a ministry of truth.

[01:25:57]  Ray: Yeah, it can mean that, but institution can also mean something more like, like the institution of having a podcast. It's a way, just a general way of doing something, the formatted way of behaving or interacting or coordinating human beings, in this case, is in debate over ideas.

[01:26:24]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:26:25]  Ray: So it could mean institution or institutions in that sense, rather than a ministry of truth.

[01:26:35]  Bruce: So if you think about how this actually played out in real, I know we're getting a little bit off the beaten path here, but the way this actually played out in real life, social media had a conscience around this, and they didn't want to be responsible for the spread of hatred and things like that. They initially tried to do the ministry of truth approach. They decided what was true and what wasn't, and they tried to shut down and ban people who were saying untrue things.

[01:27:03]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yeah.

[01:27:03]  Unidentified speaker: I mean...

[01:27:04]  Bruce: And there was massive backlash against that, and it really hurt them. What they do today is also an institution, though, and that's community notes, where you can still say whatever you want. I mean, like, maybe you can't say anything you want. They do ban, like, let's say, racial slurs or something like that.

[01:27:25]  Unidentified speaker: That's not really what we're talking about here.

[01:27:27]  Bruce: You can make factual claims that you want, but people can then go out and they have a mechanism by which they can put factual clarification and then your claim, let's say for the sake of argument that it's false, still can pass around. You're not banned, you're not shut down from saying what you want to say, but it now must pass with the community notes that have the truth attached to it. I think that's really what we're talking about here, is you got to find the right institutions that aren't the overbearing ministry of truth, but that allow the... This would be Rauch's viewpoint anyhow, that allow the truth to have the advantage, so that you're not stopping anybody's freedom of speech, but you are setting it up so that it's just easier for the truth to have an advantage.

[01:28:19]  Unidentified speaker: Do we object to that or see that as problematic?

[01:28:24]  Ray: Yeah, and as I proposed in that article I wrote for Quillette...

[01:28:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yes...

[01:28:33]  Ray: .that you mentioned, what I was proposing was the crucial thing is to keep the market of ideas open to new entrants. Do not allow the current corporations that have those channels, for example, you know, Google, YouTube or Spotify, et cetera, to have any kind of special exclusive relationship with government that allows them to subtly suppress the arrival of new entrants into the world of competing ideas. That's the crucial thing. Of course, you can never be perfect, but that's the most that we can do, I think.

[01:29:30]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:29:31]  Bruce: I would like to move to the question that I'm actually most burning to ask you. It probably is a series of questions. So David Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity, he's argued for this idea of a static society. So according to Deutsch's theory from Beginning of Infinity, humans were stuck in stasis without improvement for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions of years, but at least hundreds of thousands of years. Because according to David Deutsch, memes captured our minds and caused us to use our creativity to suppress creativity itself. On this podcast, this is actually one of the main topics we come back to over and over again. I've been out reading other books trying to get related theories or even competing theories with Deutsch's theory. Then I will do a summary of the book and then talk about what their competing or alternative or maybe complementary theories are. One of the things though that I did have come to though, is even if some of the particulars of Deutsch's theory may turn out to be wrong, and I think maybe even have turned out to be wrong. For example, just an example of where I think he is wrong. He talks about static societies having a dread of innovation. There's overwhelming evidence that just isn't the case, that they would very quickly adopt. And when they do, even like there's still static societies that are around, when they see cool new things, they think that's awesome, right? But the overall theory that he puts forward, I don't think any of the competing theories really refuted or replace it.

[01:31:07]  Bruce: I think you're almost stuck with some version of Deutsch's theory as more or less correct, even if some of the details are wrong. I think it's just a fact that we were stuck in static societies, and somehow, it must be that memes were involved in suppressing the growth of knowledge for a long time. When I look at that at a very high level, you might make the case that this is a counter example to your theory. So let me try to steel man that. I don't really buy this argument I'm about to make, but let me try to steel man someone who might say this.

[01:31:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:31:48]  Bruce: They might say something like, hey, Ray, you're saying that there's nobody who's incorrigible and there's everybody. There's no permanently closed minds, not in principle that the truth has an advantage.

[01:32:02]  Unidentified speaker: You're saying all these things.

[01:32:04]  Bruce: But then how do you explain the fact that memes held us, irrational memes held us in our creativity in check for hundreds of thousands of years? Isn't that like a straightforward example of the fact that we were in fact, at least for hundreds of thousands of years, we were effectively all of us, all humans were closed minded. How would you respond to that? Of course, I'm steelmanning this and I'm making it far worse than it actually is. What I really want to know is, how do you see Deutsch's theory is interacting with yours, is my real question.

[01:32:38]  Ray: Yeah, it's something I've thought about for some time. It's a very interesting problem to think about, and it's difficult to pin down exactly when, one of the things that's difficult to pin down is exactly when growth, cognitive growth really got going. I mean, language is important. The emergence of language is important.

[01:33:11]  Ray: So, some of the things I would bring into consideration of the lack of institutions for criticism, high social costs of dissent, poor mechanisms of knowledge preservation. I mean, we only had, we're writing and some mathematics was already developed by the Sumerians, 5,000 years ago, four to 5,000 years ago. But the writing was mainly for accounting purposes, and not really for cosmological theorizing. Although there is the story of Gilgamesh, which in a way, I suppose, presupposes a cosmology.

[01:34:05]  Unidentified speaker: It depends on how far back we're looking.

[01:34:07]  Ray: I mean, I think Deutsch mentions a period of something like maybe 2 million years where we were just using the same ax or the same tools.

[01:34:25]  Ray: No, there's another period, there's another event that archaeologists discovered. And this cognitive archaeologist called Steven Mithen has talked about very interestingly. But 35,000 years ago, there seems to have been a cognitive explosion in our ability to fuse the output of what evolutionary psychologists call, in some departments of psychology, to have this idea that we have modalities or cognitive modules that have not completely exclusive but predominantly specialized functions to perform. For example, our perceptual module to form a 3D image from the information on our retina. So, but apparently we were on Steven Mithen's view, we were basically controlled by these, you know, roughly coordinated separate modules, cognitive modules until about 35,000 years ago. But then there was this, somehow, there was a mutation that allowed the modules to interact more and come under a more overarching control. And then we have the flourishing of cave art and all kinds of sculptures. And so that's something to take into account.

[01:36:24]  Unidentified speaker: I'm just laying on the table various things, events or ideas that really have to be taken account of in answering this question.

[01:36:39]  Ray: I am still inclined to Popper's view that the Enlightenment began with the ancient Greeks, and in particular with Thales, and the establishment of the institution of criticizing the leader of a school of philosophy. So the institution of criticizing the teacher, that you must, to belong to the school, you must be able to produce your own views and directly challenge the leader. Because before that, these schools tended to be, consist of a leader who propounded a view, and then their acolytes just try to reproduce faithfully the leader's position. So what do you think about that, Bruce?

[01:37:49]  Unidentified speaker: So that's a good question.

[01:37:50]  Bruce: So let me actually just kind of think this through out loud just for a second. And this is something I've been giving a lot of thought to, and that's why we've been doing multiple podcasts on it. So David Deutsch really tries to situate the explosion of growth at the Enlightenment. And I'm not sure if that's true or not. I'm not saying it's false, like this isn't something I'm well enough studied that I feel like I can have a strong opinion on yet.

[01:38:15]  Unidentified speaker: But it does.

[01:38:16]  Bruce: And then he would put the Greeks as a mini-enlightenment that died out rather than the start of the Enlightenment. He means the Dutch-British Enlightenment is the beginning of the Enlightenment that comes centuries later.

[01:38:29]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:38:30]  Bruce: I guess I'm not sure I agree with him on that. I can see a case for it. I can see why he's picking that as the starting point. But it seems to me that there's actually a decent amount of growth of knowledge that starts way back at the Greeks.

[01:38:45]  Unidentified speaker: And it's imperfect.

[01:38:46]  Bruce: The part of the problem is, is that the Greeks come up with this idea of criticism and freedom of speech. But like, it's more like an ideal. They're certainly not living it in a way that even we would find acceptable, right? Like Athens did not have freedom of speech. They killed Socrates. They did not have what we would consider freedom of speech today. But they've got this idea of it, that then continues as a thread through a whole bunch of societies afterwards. Particularly, it would get lost for a while, would come back, they'd rediscover it. But like the Romans, the Romans had an idea of freedom of speech. They only apply it to rich people. But like, and of course, only men, right? But it's, they have a concept of freedom of speech. And you can find this that it seems like it takes a while for them to figure out, oh, how, how, because there's a danger with, or at least there's a perceived danger with freedom of speech, the same one that we're worried about with our ministries of truth that we were just talking about. And they're not sure how to implement freedom of speech and how far you can go with that. And so every society tries like a different approach to it, and they have different people that are allowed to have it and not allowed to have it. And it seems like there's a kind of very slow struggle. And based on that, I think I would buy more your argument, or rather Popper's argument, that the Enlightenment actually predates what we call the Enlightenment.

[01:40:21]  Unidentified speaker: And it really does go back to the Greeks.

[01:40:23]  Bruce: And there is, in fact, a continuous chain.

[01:40:25]  Peter: One small point about that is that the Greek philosophy is all over the Bible. So, you know, from a certain perspective, maybe Christianity is a very fallible, imperfect outgrowth of Greek philosophy as well.

[01:40:41]  Unidentified speaker: And that is, it's more continuous.

[01:40:45]  Peter: This larger Enlightenment is more continuous from Greek philosophy, maybe before, to, through Christianity, to the Enlightenment and science and all this.

[01:40:57]  Unidentified speaker: Just putting that out there.

[01:40:59]  Ray: Yeah, that is a very good point, Peter, because even in the, in Islam, that had thinkers who imbibed the marvellous, you know, wonderful thought from their point of view, they discovered Aristotle and they really, they really loved Aristotle. So that, as you're right, so the Greek thinking was permeating the Abrahamic religions. And we also, with the Romans, there are serious works that show that there was science, science continued through the Roman period, you know, along the lines of, you know, Archimedes, but it may be more on the, more on the, on the side of technology as opposed to pure science. But nevertheless, it was there. And I would point to, again, to my, I keep coming back to this idea of patience, I mean, the Shakespearean point about patience, that we should be far more forgiving, or take a kinder look on how long it takes for the scientific ethos and the enlightenment ethos to fully blossom and may take, you know, if it restarted again, it may be something that just does take centuries to fully blossom and to really get up some pace. I mean, Deutsch is absolutely correct that in the 19th century, it really did get an accelerated boost.

[01:42:59]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:43:00]  Unidentified speaker: So here's, let me see if I can figure out how to phrase this next question here.

[01:43:08]  Bruce: Why didn't our natural ability to reason? Why didn't it break us out of stasis sooner? So if we're starting, even if we're starting the Enlightenment as far back as the Greeks, then you're still effectively have 200,000 years of stasis, right?

[01:43:26]  Unidentified speaker: And that's the best estimate, like could be longer than that.

[01:43:31]  Bruce: Why didn't our ability to reason? So my first question is, why didn't our ability to reason break us out of it? And you've kind of answered that question. There may be more to it than that. It may be that there's institutions, things like that, that are required. But it's still something that it's a little haunting. I mean, it's easy to say, well, it's because there were memes that suppressed people. Okay, why didn't we use our creativity to work around those? Why didn't somebody use their creativity to work around those? I mean, whatever answer you give, it seems like you can always come up with a counter answer as to how creativity could have been allowed you to work around that problem. And yet, it just didn't for 200,000 years.

[01:44:20]  Unidentified speaker: Thoughts on that?

[01:44:21]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:44:22]  Ray: I mean, it's just that we're looking, again, we ought to be [too kind of?] on that slow rate, the initial slow rate. Because even processes that eventually become, you know, with logarithmic growth, it can be very slow, very slow for a long period, and then you get this amazing acceleration. I mean, we're looking, today we have so many institutions and organizations and methodologies that together in synergy are producing new ideas, new technology, new scientific insights. It's such a rapid rate, because they're all working together now. But from that point of view, if you look back, it's actually rather strange to imagine that our ancestors 200,000 years ago could have put it together in 50 years or even 100 years.

[01:45:44]  Ray: Maybe we've become spoiled by our richness.

[01:45:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:45:52]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:45:53]  Bruce: Let me invert my question now. Let's just take Deutsch's view seriously for a moment. Even if we're disagreeing with it in some particulars, we seem to be mostly agreeing with it. Part of this theory is that memes kept us stuck in static societies for 200,000 years. Yet, he would be the first to say, and he does say this in his book, that we have a natural curiosity. Part of his theory is that we evolved our creativity to be able to replicate memes, but that the memes favored replicating irrational memes with fidelity, whereas rational memes have to change all the time. From his point of view, he makes it sound very natural that we're stuck for 200,000 years because our creativity was actually evolved for the purpose of replicating memes, not for the purpose of innovation. And so we used our creativity to be able to understand memes. You have to have creativity to be able to figure out what is this person intending. And so memes can't actually spread. Human-sized memes, like animal memes, are smaller. They can be done through pure imitation. But human memes cannot be done through pure imitation. This is Deutsch's argument of beginning of infinity. And so instead, we had to develop creativity to be able to expand those, have these expanded memes that could be moved between minds. So he treats it like it's sort of obvious that because those memes, our creativity evolved to replicate memes, it made sense that these memes were able to suppress our creativity to break the memes down.

[01:47:47]  Ray: And I guess what he's getting from Dawkins? I think this is, yeah.

[01:47:53]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:47:53]  Bruce: Here's the thing though. Here's the thing that's always bothered me about this part of his theory. I don't think I've expressed this on the podcast before, but it's something that I will probably bring up in a future podcast. He talks about things like human beings have an inborn ability or inborn desire for curiosity. And you just talked about how apparently you can use as a reward mechanism for animals, curiosity as a reward mechanism. Okay, so I don't think it's in doubt that humans have an inborn curiosity. And he talks about humans having this inborn desire for the truth and to be innovative and things like that. If we really were stuck for 200,000 years in a static society, where our creativity was really just to perpetuate irrational memes, and that was why it evolved. How did we ever evolve a desire to go know the truth?

[01:48:48]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:48:49]  Bruce: How did we ever evolve, you know, intellectual curiosity, maybe a curiosity beyond just wanting to know what's over the horizon there?

[01:48:58]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:48:59]  Bruce: And it seems like there's a tension here in in Deutsch's theory, that's a legitimate tension, right? That on the one hand, we know we were in static societies for 200,000 years. On the other hand, we basically know that we were creative beings, as you pointed out, rational beings, and that there were, we somehow evolved use of rationality. And it seems to have existed for a very long time because it's a part of our evolutionary psychology at this point. It can't be something that only started evolving in the 19th century, because that wouldn't be enough time for us to have actually evolved anything. Okay, so what in the world were we doing with our rationality? Now, I know the Deutsch answer is we were using it to suppress creativity. That's always just been a sort of an answer that just doesn't make entire sense to me, because then you can just say, well, why didn't you use your creativity to not suppress creativity? We must have had a long period of time of both using rationality to evolve this robust rational mind, and yet it doesn't seem like there's lots of signs that we were being robustly rational during that time period. Thus, we have a paradox of some sort where we need evolutionary psychology to explain why our minds are well adapted for rationality, and yet we can't identify a time period where that evolution took place because we were mostly static.

[01:50:32]  Unidentified speaker: This is my question.

[01:50:35]  Unidentified speaker: With regard to, you said something about the science that rational, the rational, what was it, the rational memes that need to change faster.

[01:50:50]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:50:51]  Ray: Irrational. Yeah, this is an important point with regard to that I make in the book and also in the Dawkins and Incurable Mind Viruses. I point out that if you look at science, there's two aspects to it. So, there are the theories themselves which, yes, they change more rapidly than in a non-scientific ethos. But the method, or method, methodologies, they are more robust in terms of sort of longevity that Dawkins refers to. So there's a tension there that obviously the ideas are changing more rapidly. So you might say in some sense, they are, I was thinking about this today, you might say, well, in some sense then, that they are less transmissible. But no, the reason why, the reason why that doesn't have to be the case is because the history of science, it also have a history, you see, science has this history of the problems that it's gone through in order to get this current set of theories. And that carefully curates and transmits the older theories that we have. So even theories that failed in some sense, are copied and more transmittable within a scientific ethos, or more critical ethos. So I thought of that today about the importance of the history of science, but I haven't actually carefully tailored it, or I've not fitted it into my theory yet.

[01:53:15]  Unidentified speaker: But you're talking about, yeah, the other thing.

[01:53:19]  Ray: So we're full of questions, and I'm full of questions. I mean, the other one that keeps coming back to me is, what about this period, which it seemed to be very sudden, according to archaeologists, 35,000 years ago, this cognitive explosion, how does that fit into the-

[01:53:41]  Unidentified speaker: That's a very good question.

[01:53:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:53:44]  Ray: I mean-

[01:53:46]  Bruce: So, okay, let's explore that just for a second.

[01:53:50]  Unidentified speaker: Is it-

[01:53:50]  Bruce: we often talk about modern humans being around for 200,000 years. Does that mean that the cognitive explosion of 35,000 years ago has to be memetic? Or could there possibly be a biological difference that we just don't understand at this point?

[01:54:07]  Ray: Excellent question. Yeah, so that's the one- that's where if we delved into that, we'd have to- we have to make that distinction as we were going- as we went into that.

[01:54:20]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:54:22]  Ray: Yeah, good point, Bruce.

[01:54:24]  Bruce: So, it seems like there's actually a series of jumps that do take place. And you point out that there's one 35,000 years ago, we don't understand what that one is.

[01:54:36]  Unidentified speaker: There's this sudden explosion.

[01:54:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:54:38]  Bruce: Obviously, the printing press is a sort of sudden explosion, right?

[01:54:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:54:44]  Bruce: The tradition of criticism from the Greeks is a sudden explosion.

[01:54:49]  Unidentified speaker: Excellent.

[01:54:50]  Bruce: I think that there's a sort of moral explosion that takes place around Christianity, Tom Dominion's theory. We could probably identify a number of these that actually happened prior to the official enlightenment. And I have wondered if, even if we don't fully understand what, like, I don't know how well we understand each of these explosions. Like, we have very vague theories around, my theory around the one from 35,000 years ago is incredibly vague.

[01:55:16]  Unidentified speaker: I don't even know what we know about it at this point.

[01:55:19]  Bruce: It seems like there may be like a series of breakthroughs that have to take place. Or you just don't get enough escape velocity with new ideas, which may mean that we weren't really being suppressed by, I'm sure we were suppressed by irrational memes.

[01:55:39]  Unidentified speaker: I don't really mean to challenge it outright.

[01:55:42]  Bruce: But like maybe that wasn't the main cause or it wasn't the only cause.

[01:55:48]  Ray: I would want to push back a bit against that active, this idea that the memes were actively suppressing our innovation. It's just that we didn't have the enhancing structures or available.

[01:56:09]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, one of the things was, if we hadn't developed language enough to use it to describe our new axe, you know, our new chiseling tool to our family or friends, the rest of the tribe, I mean, how could they really be transmitted?

[01:56:36]  Unidentified speaker: But that's not an active suppression.

[01:56:38]  Ray: That's just we don't have the means of documenting what we've improved. I mean, a lot of technological or tool development, even in the 19th century and beyond, was undocumented. A lot of it occurred just because of, through ordinary workmen who developed their own adaptive ways of using the tools that they were handed. But they didn't make any documentation, which then they published. But I mean, but that eventually happened because we eventually developed engineering societies, the British Standard Institute and so on.

[01:57:31]  Unidentified speaker: So, yeah, that makes sense.

[01:57:34]  Unidentified speaker: I think there's a massive, massive developments on there.

[01:57:37]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, it's so requiring so many different kinds of supportive attitudes and ethos and other institutions and organizations and society.

[01:57:49]  Ray: So no wonder, you know, that our ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago, didn't—took ages to develop a new hand axe.

[01:58:02]  Unidentified speaker: It's not, it's not, from that point of view, it's just, I suppose it's like, depends on your kind of point of view, how slow they were, I mean, were they unwarranted, [their slowness on the top?]?

[01:58:19]  Bruce: I could almost imagine a series of innovations in hand axes, but absolutely all of them die with the inventor, or something along those lines, right? Yeah, the transmission mechanism is just so bad during the time we're living in little tribes and we're all fighting each other.

[01:58:37]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, so you don't have to posit the active suppression by memes.

[01:58:42]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, interesting.

[01:58:43]  Bruce: By the way, I Googled when was language invented right now because of what we were just talking about. It looks like many researchers claim that it was invented between 150 and 200,000 years ago, which would align with anatomically modern humans. But some scholars have argued for the flowering of art and language that you just mentioned about 40,000, 50,000 years ago.

[01:59:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, 35,000.

[01:59:14]  Bruce: Well, this would have come before the 35,000.

[01:59:18]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:59:19]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:59:20]  Bruce: But that language was actually invented 50,000 years ago, complex language was actually invented 50,000 years ago, and was the precursor to the period you were mentioning. So that's an interesting thing.

[01:59:35]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:59:35]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, this is just Google.

[01:59:37]  Bruce: But if there was no language for 150,000 of the 200,000 years, it seems to me like that almost is the answer to my question, right? I guess I was assuming, most researchers believe they did have complex language prior to that point.

[01:59:53]  Bruce: So, but if there wasn't, if it turns out that it was a more modern invention, then that almost by itself explains why there was no progress for 150,000 years.

[02:00:06]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:00:06]  Unidentified speaker: No means of documenting advances.

[02:00:10]  Ray: Then I would also point, just for interest as well on that, to Steven Mithen's book which he published recently. And this is truly a really interesting theory. It's kind of like out of the blue. It's called the Singing Neanderthals. And the theory is that language actually, you know how some modern commentators or theorists try to present music as some kind of language. Well, this theory puts it on its head or reverses that. So that language actually evolved, language evolved from music, the music of Neanderthals humming to each other.

[02:01:15]  Unidentified speaker: Wow, that is something I've been really interested in.

[02:01:19]  Peter: I mean, this is like a lifelong passion for me about why these mysterious frequencies, vibrations traveling through the air affect us so much and so universally.

[02:01:32]  Unidentified speaker: I think it's just such an interesting issue.

[02:01:34]  Peter: But I had never heard that.

[02:01:36]  Peter: So it's almost like you're saying that it's not that the language comes from music almost.

[02:01:44]  Unidentified speaker: Is that what you're thinking?

[02:01:46]  Unidentified speaker: This is the theory.

[02:01:48]  Unidentified speaker: I had not.

[02:01:48]  Ray: Yeah, and it really taps into, because I do composition myself, and I love music. It's been very important throughout my life. And it taps into what Schopenhauer said about music. He said of all the arts, sculpture, painting, et cetera, music is the one that penetrates to us, to our innermost being, the intimate, almost the secret level of our being.

[02:02:25]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's absolutely true.

[02:02:26]  Unidentified speaker: It's the way that doesn't, and no other art form does that.

[02:02:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:02:30]  Unidentified speaker: And it's so true.

[02:02:32]  Ray: And but then the question is, why does it do that? Well, maybe it's because, you know, originally, we communicated our emotions and passions and love and so on to one another. Our ancestors did that through humming, you know.

[02:02:52]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, wow.

[02:02:53]  Unidentified speaker: Somehow that makes sense.

[02:02:54]  Unidentified speaker: I had never thought about that.

[02:02:56]  Unidentified speaker: That is amazing.

[02:02:56]  Peter: You know, because if you really ask people, you know, what art has gotten you through the toughest times in your life, I think about nine out of 10 people would probably say music.

[02:03:08]  Peter: That would be the most common thing, more than almost anything else.

[02:03:14]  Peter: I mean, maybe religion and some, but still, like music is so interwoven with religion as well, though, too.

[02:03:24]  Peter: Yeah, so I, you know, there's so many other ideas about, well, maybe it's about sex, maybe it's about tribal initiation.

[02:03:36]  Peter: Steven Pinker says it's cheesecake for your ears.

[02:03:39]  Peter: So it's just an evolutionary accident, in a sense, that the language thing, you've just put that in a way that really makes sense.

[02:03:50]  Unidentified speaker: I like that a lot.

[02:03:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, maybe at the core, it's a bit like a lullaby from one's [mother?].

[02:03:58]  Unidentified speaker: So the alpha males—okay, so the alpha males started kind of humming, could hum before language, could hum a nice melody or something, and get all the ladies that way, and that kind of evolved into language.

[02:04:13]  Ray: Yeah, and it's still true today, you know, that's how to allure the ladies, isn't it?

[02:04:19]  Unidentified speaker: Oh yeah, without a guitar, I mean, Jimmy Page or whatever would just be like a kind of a nerdy guy that women would be, you put that guitar in front of him and he's playing those Led Zeppelin riffs, it's another, the most attractive, suddenly becomes the most attractive man, you know, around, I mean, to the point where women are literally lining up for him, and, you know, he's not the only one.

[02:04:46]  Peter: Philosophers don't get that kind of attention, do they?

[02:04:50]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I mean, you do, you only, you do like that.

[02:04:53]  Unidentified speaker: I have, yeah, I have, I'll tell you another time.

[02:05:00]  Ray: Yeah, I've had some good adventures.

[02:05:02]  Unidentified speaker: I'll bet you have, I'll bet you have, okay.

[02:05:06]  Unidentified speaker: All right, so we've gone well over two hours now.

[02:05:11]  Unidentified speaker: Bruce, do you have any?

[02:05:13]  Bruce: I don't, that was my burning questions.

[02:05:16]  Bruce: So I guess I would just, you know, is there anything else that you would like to, since this is a topic of interest to me, is there anything else you would like to share as far as how you think your theory interacts with Deutsch's Theory of Static Societies?

[02:05:30]  Bruce: And maybe we've already covered it all and that's fine.

[02:05:33]  Ray: Yeah, well, perhaps for a future podcast, I am, by the way, I'm very grateful for your putting to me the questions for the podcast. And to keep my mind stimulated. It's great. And one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is my view of, and it's going to be critical, but in a supportive way, I think, of this notion of hard to vary, David Deutsch's notion of hard to vary as a hallmark of a gem of scientific advance.

[02:06:24]  Peter: Well, Ray, this has been awesome.

[02:06:30]  Peter: I've got enough questions for another two podcasts, so we're going to have to have you on for part two.

[02:06:37]  Unidentified speaker: But this has been amazing.

[02:06:38]  Peter: Your ideas are so important.

[02:06:40]  Peter: I'm so just humbled and just, this is a wild ride.

[02:06:45]  Peter: And I just feel so grateful for this opportunity to try to do anything I can to try to get your ideas out there to other people.

[02:06:55]  Peter: And I really, I just love what you do.

[02:06:58]  Ray: Thank you so much. Thanks, guys.

[02:07:01]  Unidentified speaker: Take care.

[02:07:02]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:07:02]  Ray: I enjoyed it.

[02:07:10]  Unidentified speaker: Hello again.

[02:07:11]  Peter: If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes.

[02:07:21]  Peter: As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper, Deutsch, Theory of Knowledge.

[02:07:27]  Peter: We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together.

[02:07:31]  Peter: So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence.

[02:07:40]  Peter: Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielson01.

[02:07:46]  Peter: Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[02:07:54]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.