Episode 146: The Put Up or Shut Up Principle

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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.

[00:00:02]  Peter: This week on The Theory of Anything podcast, Bruce introduces his put up or shut up principle. This is the idea that we should want our theories to take on the burden of explanation as much as we can. This may be the central idea behind critical rationalism. We should strive to strengthen our theories by increasing the potential set of falsifiers. He contrasts this with folk epistemology. What I get is that Bruce is pointing out that we all, even critical rationalists, like to change the goal posts when we look at our own favorite pet theories. I especially love Bruce's modification of the golden rule here. Do unto other theories as we would have them do unto our theories. To me, this seems to link science and morality in such a satisfying way. We should strive to not have double standards if we care about moving towards truth. This also relates to what Bruce calls Popper's ratchet, or the assertion that we should always want to make our theories more testable, rather than engage in ad hoc saves or immunizing strategies. So in this context, maybe putting up is tightening the ratchet. I love Bruce's thoughts here on the put up or shut up principle, and I hope someone else gets something out of this too.

[00:01:45]  Unidentified speaker: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast.

[00:01:47]  Unidentified speaker: Hey, Peter.

[00:01:47]  Unidentified speaker: Hey, Bruce.

[00:01:48]  Peter: How are you today?

[00:01:50]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:01:50]  Bruce: We've got a very short episode today, painfully small episode today.

[00:01:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:01:55]  Bruce: But I wanted to, it was on my mind. I wanted to, I've brought this up. It's called the put up or shut up principle.

[00:02:02]  Unidentified speaker: I've mentioned it before.

[00:02:03]  Bruce: This isn't the first time I've mentioned it, but I wanted to do a short episode explaining it.

[00:02:08]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:02:08]  Bruce: Because I feel like it relates to past episodes we've done. It kind of fits into the train of thought of these past episodes, particularly the episode that we did on AGI that was about intellectual lift.

[00:02:20]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:02:21]  Peter: And this is your term, the put up or shut up principle?

[00:02:24]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:02:25]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:02:26]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:02:27]  Bruce: So in the AGI episode, we talked about the idea of intellectual lift. I actually think I mentioned it before that episode, but I dwelled on it a bit. The AGI episode was not about AGI. I'm sure everyone's going to think it's about that. It's really about epistemology and understanding the state of a critical discussion. And what does it mean to understand the state of a critical discussion? Specifically, the idea that you can be mistaken about the state of the critical discussion. And in fact, if two people disagree over the state of the critical discussion, then at best, one of them is mistaken and maybe both are. So, there's no other way, right? You can't have two people who disagree, who both are correct about the state of the critical discussion. That would be impossible, okay? So logically impossible. So they may well disagree, but it won't be over the state of the critical discussion. It will be on epistemological grounds. They have different epistemologies or something along those lines, okay? So, or they'll disagree because one of them is mistaken about the state of the critical discussion. Now, one of the things I kind of brought up in that episode, when I was trying to explain that concept, was this idea of intellectual lift. This idea that when a theory, you want your theory to have this biggest burden of explanation it can, because it creates intellectual lift that the other theory must now match, okay? So this means that in critical rationalism and correct epistemology, you're trying to take the burden of explanation on yourself.

[00:04:03]  Bruce: You're not trying to pass it over to the other guy, because that means that you've lost, okay? So I get it that not all critical rationalists understand this. And this is why I've argued that many critical rationalists are actually just doing folk epistemology, okay, so they don't understand this. Okay, but the idea is that in folk epistemology, the default epistemology that people fall back to when they don't know real epistemology is about refuting the opposing theory and offering yours as the sole survivor. Now, I know many people, even many critical rationalists, wrongly believe that this folk epistemology is Popper's epistemology. They'll say, isn't that just falsificationism? No, it's not, okay. They think that this is what falsificationism means. You have a bunch of theories, you refute all but one, and you adopt the survivor as if it was true. But creationists do exactly this with no epistemological training at all. This is default folk epistemological reasoning. So creationists will point to problems with Darwinian evolution, some of them real, some of them not. But they feel no need to make their own theory independently testable, that is to say, not ad hoc. And I've called this in the past the creationist fallacy. What really sets critical rationalism apart from folk epistemology is intellectual lift. That's my term, not Popper's. It's the idea that a good explanation takes the burden of explanation on itself, rather than forcing it on to the competing theory, like the creationist is trying to do.

[00:05:40]  Bruce: In critical rationalism, you strengthen your theory by increasing its potential falsifiers. Because then any competing theory, if its defenders follow no ad hoc rule, that is, must then explain the same set of observations. That's why increasing the set of potential falsifiers strengthens your theory. This is the whole point I was making in the AGI episode.

[00:06:05]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:06:06]  Bruce: So I think here again, and I know I pick on Brett Hall's Theory of Intelligence too much, but I think here again of his theory, and its claims that all humans' beings are equally intelligent. That it just comes down to time and interest. Now, in episodes 53 and 55, I asked the theory's defenders how they explained senility due to aging within their theory. And not one of them even tried to explain senility within their theory, because they lacked Popper's concept of falsifiability, which isn't about shooting down competing theories, but about increasing the class of potential falsifiers your theory can explain, and that your competitor must then also explain as well. So instead, because they had a misunderstanding of falsification and they were thinking more of the folk epistemology version of it, Brett's defenders treated Popper's epistemology as folk epistemology. They thought their job was to not explain senility in a non-ad hoc way within their theory, but to shoot down what they saw as the competing theory. This is all detailed in episodes 53 and 55, by the way.

[00:07:15]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:07:16]  Bruce: So when I asked, how do you explain senility within your theory? They all answered, well, IQ theory, some version of, well, IQ theory sucks as an explanation. And then started listing problems with it. Some legitimate and some not. And I've already, I had already told them by that point, in great detail, I might add, that I don't accept IQ theory either. So this wasn't even a half-hearted attempt to answer my actual question to them because I was not a defender of IQ theory. In short, what they did when given a question they couldn't deal with within their theory, is that they defaulted to simple whataboutisms. Because whataboutism, you never really think about this. Like think about in politics, how you try to ask a question of the other side and they switch to a whataboutism. Both sides do this, okay? A whataboutism is the misunderstanding of falsificationism. It's the idea that I don't have to answer your question, I just need to show that your theory is false and leave mine as the sole survivor. That's what a whataboutism is, okay? It's hard to miss that they simply did not want to discuss the answer to the question, because it was a, in all honesty, a powerful refuting case against their own theory. So there was no reason for them to discuss it. It would show their theory to be false. So they defaulted to whataboutisms. It's no accident that today's dysfunctional partisanship fixates on whataboutisms instead of offering real explanations. It's stuck in a false view that all you have to do to support your theory quote unquote is refute the alternative.

[00:08:55]  Bruce: No one had to teach today's partisans the folk epistemological version of falsification. They reason this way by default because it's folk epistemology. In fact, I think every discussion I've had, sorry, every disagreement I've had with the CritRat community comes down to this one misunderstanding. Consider the CritRat theory, theories that I don't accept as best theories, which I know is not the same as rejecting the theory. Okay, I just don't accept them as having no competitors. Okay, anarcho-capitalism, animals have no feelings. All humans are equally intelligent. All of an animal's knowledge is in its genes. There are only two sources of knowledge. Randomness doesn't exist, and it's really all pseudo-randomness and so on. All these theories share the same problem. Their defenders feel no weight to explain counter examples. Without fail, every theory quickly gets declared metaphysical or philosophical, so it never has to stick its neck out and risk an implication that might be refuted. This is why, as Michael Golding, himself a critical rationalist, a Deutschian critical rationalist put on Twitter, I'm quoting from off of his Twitter, those calling themselves Popperians are remarkably enough and quite paradoxically, in a certain sense, no less likely to be fanatics than anyone else. It's the epistemology itself that they're getting wrong. I want to develop a principle or criteria, if you prefer, that makes this mistake easier to catch. Okay, that's my purpose in what I'm calling the put up or shut up principle.

[00:10:35]  Bruce: I'm trying to explain things in a way people can easily understand that helps you avoid falling into the folk epistemology version of falsificationism, which is just what about isms. Okay, here's the idea of the put up or shut up principle. You either put up a progressive theory that has all the testability of the previous theory and then some, or you shut up and you accept the other theory for now. It follows directly from Popper's falsificationism. I should probably note, it's not true that you can't then come up with your own conjectured alternative as long as you understand that you have to develop that alternative until it's progressively better than the current competitor. Then it's okay to maybe ignore this just long enough to research an alternative. But the Put Up or Shut Up principle really makes you realize you can't just ad hoc come up with a theory and then think you're done. Okay, you have this burden of lift, burden of explanation and intellectual lift that you must now lift with your theory. Okay, this is really what I'm trying to get at. So it follows directly, the Put Up or Shut Up principle falls directly from Popper's falsificationism. When correctly understood via the no ad hoc rule, it fits naturally with intellectual lift, and it's a natural consequence of what I've called Popper's ratchet. The idea is this, once someone offers an explanation, your goal is to progressively exceed it, not to poke holes in it and declare it refuted.

[00:12:08]  Bruce: Pointing out problems is useful if you're trying to improve a theory, but it only creates a direction towards your preferred theory, if and only if your preferred theory can explain everything the other one can plus more.

[00:12:27]  Bruce: This rethinks how most people, even most crit rats, understand so-called falsification. It may be a big enough rethink that to many, this may no longer look like Popper's epistemology. But throughout this podcast, I've shown by quoting Popper, this is exactly what Popper originally taught. Think about how, in Popper, there is no concept of offering a metaphysical theory as a competitor to a scientific one, and how later crit rats did away with this. Or think about how Popper insisted he never meant that you can refute a theory with an observation. He was just laying out the logical relationship between theory and evidence. Or how Popper insists that theories get stronger, the bolder and more falsifiable they become. Those are the theories we are supposed to prefer, not a pet theory that got declared metaphysical so it has no content. Okay, what I'm trying to get at here is that the whole of Popper militates towards exactly what I'm saying.

[00:13:26]  Peter: So can this be summarized as follow Popper's ratchet or shut up?

[00:13:33]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, I think it could be.

[00:13:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:13:35]  Bruce: It could be summarized that way. When Popper spoke of falsificationism, what he really had in mind were theories being progressive. Let me give some actual quotes. Quote, we regard one hypothesis as better than another if it fulfills the following three requirements. First, it must explain all the things the old hypothesis successfully explained. Second, it must avoid at least some of the errors of the old hypothesis. That is, it should, where possible, withstand some of the critical tests that the old hypothesis could not withstand. Third, it should explain things that could not be explained or predicted by the old hypothesis. This is therefore the criterion of scientific progress. This is from In a Better World. If I've offered a highly testable theory, you don't get to declare it refuted just because you found a criticism you subjectively think shows something is wrong with it. Then get to declare your wholly untestable theory, the quote, last remaining theory. This is the principle over which I disagree with the rest of the CritRat community, and nearly everyone else I've talked to online. What's really expected of a Critical Rationalist is to put up or shut up. To put up a theory at least as good as the one you're attacking, one with at least as much testable content or checkable content for non-empirical theories as the one you want to replace. This is just another way to state Popper's ratchet. In Critical Rationalism, you can only solve problems by increasing overall testable content.

[00:15:05]  Bruce: Because every theory, including auxiliary ones used to save a theory, must be independently testable. Consider my disagreements with Sadia that I've raised numerous times.

[00:15:14]  Unidentified speaker: I've had her on the show.

[00:15:15]  Bruce: Her and I have this ongoing disagreement, okay, where she offers what she sees as a problem with our current theories. Almost always it's particularly Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis and because Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis is derivable from QM, it's always positioned as a problem with quantum mechanics. She always does this based on philosophical theories that she thinks are correct. For example, she's convinced that Church-Turing-Deutsch is, quote, reductionist. And since reductionism is incorrect, so to her that refutes Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis and also refutes quantum mechanics since Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis follows from quantum mechanics. So this alone is enough. This philosophical theory, this problem with reductionism is enough for her to declare both tried and true theories refuted. Likewise, it seems obvious to her that quantum mechanics and Church-Turing-Deutsch are wrong because, say, they can't explain qualia or because general intelligence has never been programmed. And she seems convinced her philosophical theories not only refute quantum mechanics and Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis, but also leave no doubt as to what the replacement theory that doesn't exist yet must look like. Yet, here's the thing, you will never see her offer a testable alternative to quantum mechanics or Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis. She can tell you exactly what she thinks a highly testable theory like quantum mechanics and Church-Turing-Deutsch is wrong. She can tell you why she thinks they're wrong and what she expects the future theory to look like.

[00:16:51]  Bruce: But she doesn't feel any responsibility to put up or shut up by offering her own testable alternatives, which is what I'm really waiting for her to offer. Now, this is just true of every single argument I've had with people that we've brought up on the show. Dennis Hackethal's theory of animal feelings. There's not even an attempt on his part. He'll tell you everything he thinks is wrong with the theory that animals have feelings. But he's not even trying to put up or shut up. He's in no way trying to make his theory testable. He's just trying to quote unquote refute the other theory. So does Brett Hall's belief about following Thomas Szasz that mental illness doesn't exist. So does every crit rat who believes in anarcho-capitalism, who can tell you exactly why every existing first past the post-democracy is quote coercive and quote must eventually be removed. But they have no idea how to actually implement their ANCAP utopia, okay? So we're talking about one theory that can be tested in that it can be implemented and we can try it, and a theory that is completely unimplementable because we have no idea how to implement it, okay? And yet they can still tell you, here's what's wrong with democracy and here's why it must therefore be removed and ANCAP is the sole surviving theory. I want to make it clear, every disagreement I have with the crit rat community is does boil down to the put up or shut up principle. The fact that they in no way believe that they offer, they need to offer a theory with actual content to be able to refute the competing theory.

[00:18:24]  Bruce: Once you abandon the put up or shut up principle, you're no longer doing science, you're not even being rational anymore. What do I mean by not even being rational? I have something specific in mind. So think of the put up or shut up principle through my analogy from the AGI episode between epistemology and jurisprudence. The put up or shut up rule, our principle, deserves to be either accepted or replaced by something better.

[00:18:50]  Unidentified speaker: I'm putting it out there.

[00:18:51]  Bruce: I'm saying, here's my conjecture, put up or shut up rule. If you disagree with it, you really need to not simply say, I disagree with it. You need to offer a better explanation that it has at least as much content as the put up or shut up rule.

[00:19:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:19:07]  Bruce: So for example, suppose you wanted to offer this idea as an alternative. So this is a common but false idea within critical rationalism. And the idea is this, once a theory is refuted, we abandon it entirely and any theory, even one without content, now counts as a better explanation. Essentially what I'm accusing the CritRat community of doing.

[00:19:30]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:19:31]  Bruce: I just gave several examples of CritRat theories that do follow this rule.

[00:19:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:19:36]  Bruce: So it's not in doubt that they do follow this rule to try to get their pet theories as best theories. Here's the question I would ask them.

[00:19:43]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:19:43]  Bruce: This is the [jurisprudence?] question. Would any of them sign off on this rule as a precedent that they intended to live by? I think that's incredibly doubtful. Still, imagine someone did. Let's think about the problems they just created for themselves. For example, consider a common CritRat alternative criteria to the Put Up or Shut Up principle. Namely, the principle of we should prefer theories that explain more. Whether or not that theory has any content. Let's call this the explains more criteria. The usual argument is that their non-empirical theory explains more than some testable alternative. Think here of Brett Hall's theory of intelligence, which they claimed explained more, but had no testable content, they claimed, versus the standard IQ theory, which explains very little, explains a little, but not very much. But it makes actual testable empirical claims that can be tested and falsified. Or think of Brett Hall's denial of mental illness, which is completely untestable, versus all the testable theories of different mental illnesses that exist.

[00:20:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:20:57]  Bruce: So, treat explains more as a precedent, that explains more principle as a precedent. A theory that explains more, yet takes no risks and accommodates any data, now under this precedent, beats one that boldly takes an empirical risk, but doesn't explain very much yet. Now, nearly every crit that I know, invokes the explains more principle, but only to defend their pet theories. None of them would accept it as a precedent, they must live by, and none would accept a communist making the same argument, because communism has incredible amounts of, quote, explaining more, but it would can fit any data, okay? Nor would they apply it to a low content, shallow explanation that they take to be true. So this is why I keep bringing up the idea of smoking causes cancer, or oranges prevent scurvy. Okay, these theories have almost no explanatory power, just a little tiny bit, they're about as shallow as they can be, okay? And yet, despite not explaining more, no self-respected crit rat would ever consider smoking causes cancer a false theory. So, I mean, they're very inconsistent. It's not an accident, they're inconsistent with how they apply the explains more criteria, because the explains more criteria does not work consistently. So all you can do with it is you can choose to apply it when it's in your favor, and you can choose to ignore it when it's not, and that's all they do with it.

[00:22:27]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:22:28]  Bruce: They should not turn against theories that, nor should they. So theories that explain more without being testable are purely ad hoc and dime a dozen. They can be had for the asking, that's why the explains more criteria is just wrong.

[00:22:44]  Unidentified speaker: Now, you can fix it.

[00:22:45]  Bruce: You could say explains more, but in a non ad hoc way.

[00:22:48]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:22:49]  Bruce: There are ways that you could take the explains more criteria and turn it into one that actually works, okay, without being falsified. This is what I mean by abandonment of rationality, though. In each case, people that do this are really arguing for their preferred theory, dressed up as a refutation of a rival, to basically making a surface resemblance to Popper's epistemology, using reasoning that they would never, never, never accept if the shoe were on the other foot. In other words, they cannot live by their own rational precedents. And that, to me, is what rationality is really about. Holding yourself to arguments that set precedents, you can accept even if the other side gets to utilize them. In short, epistemology follows the golden rule. The golden rule is, therefore, all things whatsoever you would that others should do to your theories, do ye even so to them, for this is Popper's epistemology. That's Matthew 7.12, my own translation. So, more famously, we might say, do unto others theories as you would have them do unto yours, or just don't have a double standard. That's really what I'm saying, okay? Isn't this really just falsificationism applied to epistemology? So, yes, I know Popper said his epistemology can't be falsified. And if you take and that is true if you take falsification to solely mean empirical falsification, as Popper usually did. But his epistemology can itself be falsified in a sense, okay? Consider this rule. By the way, I was just reading Briskman's book and he goes over exactly this example, which I think is excellent.

[00:24:36]  Bruce: Okay, so consider this, but it comes from Popper, but Briskman puts it in a more clear form. Consider this rule. A theory is not rational unless it is justified as correct. Now, this rule, no theory can survive it, including the rule itself as a theory, because nothing can be justified as correct. So consider this rule instead. A theory is rational unless it has been refuted. This is a rule that does not self-undermine. So it does not have the problem of the previous rule, okay? We already have a reason now to prefer the second rule. Can we still find a reason to reject the second rule, that is to refute it? Sure, we might point out, as I've just spent this entire podcast pointing out, that a theory that has no content because it is ad hoc is now considered rational. Are we okay with that? We might be if it's our own pet theory, but there's no way we're going to accept it if it's someone else's theory. Creationists now get to consider their theory rational, okay? So we adjust the rule. We make the rule instead, a theory is rational unless it has been refuted, but only so long as it is not ad hoc and has real content that can be tested. This new rule clearly improves on the previous version. Okay, we've refuted the previous version. Notice how we make progress by refuting the previous theory and then creating a new version that doesn't suffer from the same problems or flaws. Now, yes, this is not empirical falsification, but it sure seems rather analogous to it. So in summary, the put-up-or-shut-up principle is a standard for rational criticism.

[00:26:17]  Bruce: If you want to reject a theory, you must offer an alternative that explains everything the existing theory explains, avoids at least some of its failures, and predicts or explains something new. This is not an arbitrary rule. It's exactly what Popper laid out as the criteria for a better hypothesis. It rules out folk epistemology, particularly the creationist fallacy, where you poke holes in a rival theory and declare it refuted, while offering nothing testable in return as the competing theory. Pointing out problems of the theory only points in the direction of your preferred theory, if and only if your theory has everything the previous theory had and then some. A rational argument sets a precedent that you were willing to live by, one that you would accept even if your opponent gets to use it against you. The explains more defense, what about isms and untestable metaphysical alternatives all fail this test. No one invoking them would accept the same move from the other side. This is what I'm trying to get at with this idea of the put up or shut up principle. I'm going to use this going forward. We'll say, okay, does this survive the put up or shut up principle?

[00:27:24]  Unidentified speaker: And I think it very quickly gets you to rethink, not in terms of, well, here's what I think is wrong with your theory, which just does not work.

[00:27:34]  Bruce: Like, that is the creationist fallacy, guys, it is, okay? Yes, I understand that's what falsification means to you. It's the wrong way to think of falsification. Falsification is actually about making your theories more falsifiable, because that increases the strength of your theory, but doing it in a non-ad hoc way. That is the true understanding of falsificationism. It's not about you, what about ism?

[00:28:01]  Unidentified speaker: Everything, okay?

[00:28:02]  Unidentified speaker: It just isn't.

[00:28:04]  Bruce: One of those is rational and one of those isn't. And the Put Up or Shut Up principle is my way of trying to encapsulate that idea and to say, look, does this actually survive the Put Up or Shut Up principle or are we off base here? And that's what I want to argue in this particular episode.

[00:28:18]  Unidentified speaker: So thank you.

[00:28:19]  Bruce: I'm actually done now.

[00:28:21]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:21]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I love that.

[00:28:22]  Peter: And I love that connection you made between the Golden Rule and your principle and reason. I think more generally, that's something that I've been really interested in lately, is that this assertion that, you know, so much of science and reason is also interwoven with morality, it seems to me. And it's about, you know, central to rationality is treating people in a certain way as, you know, following the Golden Rule and interpreting them charitably. And you know, this might be a way to get an ought from an is. You know, it is that it's really, really interesting to me. You know, people think of it, science is something like mechanical, that's more algorithmic, that's not like about a moral attitude towards life. But I think I really question that.

[00:29:33]  Bruce: So yeah, I was intentionally trying to tie it to, you know, moral theories, right? And trying to show that there is a connection here. So I'm glad you caught that. What we're really talking about, of course, is not having double standards, right? That the rules about treating people the same way you would treat yourself, not having double standards. But that's what epistemology is about, too. Really, you're going to find that's what law, jurisprudence is about. That's what you're going to find. It's a thread that runs through everything, right?

[00:30:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:30:11]  Bruce: In surprising ways. So it's why we have this idea of human rights. And it really is a more expansive idea than it first appears, and it runs through all sorts of things. So I'm glad you caught that. So thank you.

[00:30:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:30:28]  Unidentified speaker: Imagine it—

[00:30:29]  Peter: To put it another way, imagine if your moral law was, don't listen to other people and just be a hypocrite all the time. Well, I don't think you would be participating in rational discussions.

[00:30:43]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:30:44]  Peter: I mean, you would not be on this path of moving closer to truth in this world. You would have taken yourself out of that. So I think it, you know, to me, that does indicate just how, like I said, interwoven moral attitude towards other people is with reason.

[00:31:09]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:31:09]  Peter: So anyway, we could probably do a whole podcast on that.

[00:31:12]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, we could.

[00:31:13]  Unidentified speaker: I—actually, I want to eventually do podcasts on moral reasoning because I actually think it's a very difficult subject, but I think it goes exactly the way I was going to go exactly the way you just did.

[00:31:23]  Bruce: You brought up, let's earmark this one, you brought up the idea that maybe you can get an ought from an is.

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

[00:31:29]  Bruce: I actually think that's true.

[00:31:31]  Unidentified speaker: I do too.

[00:31:32]  Bruce: So it's not obvious how to do it. And I admit that there's a real serious problem there that Hume was raising.

[00:31:39]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[00:31:40]  Bruce: And I've never been entirely satisfied with Deutsch's solution to that problem. I think it's like part of the answer, maybe. Like I'm not entirely against Deutsch's solution.

[00:31:51]  Unidentified speaker: But—

[00:31:52]  Unidentified speaker: Refresh my memory.

[00:31:53]  Peter: What's Deutsch's solution?

[00:31:54]  Bruce: Well, he would say like this. He would say, oh, you're just trying to justify moral rules.

[00:31:59]  Unidentified speaker: You can't justify anything.

[00:32:00]  Unidentified speaker: Everything's a conjecture.

[00:32:02]  Bruce: So what you do is you make conjectures and then moral rules may just be part of your conjecture. I think that's all true. And I think that that's very enlightening in many ways. But it doesn't, I feel like it's an intentional, doesn't answer the original question that was being raised, which was really something more like this.

[00:32:20]  Unidentified speaker: If I were to take a conjecture in physics, conjecture in physics will involve some sort of explanation, right?

[00:32:28]  Bruce: I mean, that's Deutsch's whole thing, is that knowledge is explanations.

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

[00:32:34]  Bruce: And so we're seeking good explanations. We want an explanation of what physics is and how it behaves and things like that. The reason why people bring up like Hume's guillotine is because moral rules seem to defy any explanation. And when you come up with what you think is a moral rule, there's almost always a counter example to it, which in any other area of knowledge, we would consider a falsification, right? We would say, oh, we just found a counter example. In other words, our rule led to a contradiction.

[00:33:06]  Unidentified speaker: Therefore, the rule is wrong.

[00:33:09]  Bruce: And moral philosophers are trying to deal with that problem. The fact that there doesn't appear to be any moral rules that aren't self-contradictory. And does that mean therefore that morality doesn't exist? Deutsch's answer isn't getting to the heart of the question that they're asking. It's instead kind of surfacely going above it and changing subjects. To an interesting subject, I might add, that might actually, I might be able to take what he is suggesting, tie it to some other ideas and get to a better answer. But like in my mind, he's kind of changing subjects. He's not really giving a true answer to the real dilemma that they were trying to solve. I don't know, does that make sense?

[00:33:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:33:55]  Peter: Well, I mean, what I kind of get from that is related, sort of another way of putting Popper's, what I would think of as Popper's idea about moral laws is that, you know, you can't like, it's more of an interwoven web of explanation that would support a moral law or an aesthetic truth or whatever, that you can't, you know, it's not like you can point to one, you know, a math equation or something that's going to, that you're going to get. I mean, if someone is looking for a math equation to support a moral law, it's probably just the wrong level of explanation.

[00:34:42]  Peter: What would more support a correct moral law would be, you know, something, a whole, something more like a novel than a math equation or something, you know,

[00:34:59]  Bruce: I'm sure if Ivan would hear, he would say, it's because morality is all subjective anyhow.

[00:35:03]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, I don't understand that point,

[00:35:05]  Bruce: well, I'm not really satisfied with that answer. I feel like it leads to its own set of contradictions and problems. Let me just say that I kind of agree that every moral theory out there has problems. And so, let's at least admit that much, right? That we don't have an internally consistent set of moral theory. I think you could make moral subjectivism consistent, but only if you adopted certain attitudes that like Ivan never would, right? Like ones that really would strike us as pretty bad. Otherwise, I think it automatically falls into contradictions. So I don't think there's an easy way out of the fact that morality is very difficult to explain and without leading to contradictions. I do think there's a way out of it. I have an idea in my mind how to solve the problem.

[00:35:57]  Peter: Or it could be just the moral theories that are controversial, lead to contradictions because, and that's why they're controversial. But the ones that, I mean, plenty of people have moral, there's a whole universe of moral theories that aren't really controversial. I mean, you don't beat your children. I mean, is that controversial amongst rational people?

[00:36:25]  Unidentified speaker: Well, actually, that might be a bad example because people could say, you don't beat your children for no reason.

[00:36:31]  Unidentified speaker: How about that one?

[00:36:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I—

[00:36:33]  Unidentified speaker: Or, you know, that wouldn't really be that controversial?

[00:36:37]  Unidentified speaker: Or—or, um...

[00:36:39]  Unidentified speaker: So I think you're raising—so I think you're raising a completely valid thing.

[00:36:43]  Bruce: The fact that there's—there's clearly some sort of objective element to morality, where morality actually improves, right? If it's purely subjective, then you can't improve it.

[00:36:53]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:36:54]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, that's—yeah, so it's—

[00:36:56]  Bruce: So let me just say something, that subjective morality and objective morality aren't directly—aren't directly competitors. Like a belief in objective morality might include a subjective element, say.

[00:37:07]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:37:08]  Bruce: So you can't necessarily declare them entirely at odds with each other. But I think in general, we take them to be at odds with each other. That usually we're talking about subjective morality in the sense of there's no objective elements at all. So any moral rule is as good as any other versus an objective view, which would say there is at least some sort of objective. The objective view might include subjective elements, but it's claiming that there is something more than subjective elements. Does that make sense? So that's why I do take the objective view, which does not in my mind reject entirely the subjective view. Clearly, there are some subjective elements to almost everything. I think the fact that morality improves means that there is something there to this idea of objective morality. What is it is a harder thing to say.

[00:38:01]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:38:02]  Bruce: And it's, where am I trying to go with this? It's, it—we probably need to make a separation between a moral rule and a moral theory. Those might be the same thing, but like what I kind of have in mind, a moral rule would be, don't beat your kids for no reason.

[00:38:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, that'd be a moral rule.

[00:38:21]  Bruce: I think about moral theory, I'm kind of thinking of consequentialism or utilitarianism or like, there's different theories of morality that exist out there. None of those are internally consistent, as far as I'm aware. All of them have problems.

[00:38:38]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:38:39]  Bruce: I don't know about moral rules. Moral rules have got a very similar problem where you have to keep adding qualifiers. It's almost always possible to find some sort of exception case. I don't know if you can always do that. You're probably right that there are some moral rules that nobody would doubt at this point, right?

[00:38:55]  Unidentified speaker: Well, you just don't talk about them.

[00:38:57]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:38:57]  Unidentified speaker: Because—because they're so well accepted, right?

[00:39:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, yeah.

[00:39:01]  Unidentified speaker: But—but I, when I said moral theories have problems, I really meant more like consequential.

[00:39:06]  Bruce: By the way, I think consequential—consequentialism is great. Like, I think that's at least the best of the moral theories I'm aware of. I don't think it's an entirely internally consistent theory, though.

[00:39:16]  Unidentified speaker: I think it still has contradictions in it that haven't been worked out.

[00:39:20]  Bruce: I had somebody suggest to me, I forget what it was called, but it was an evolutionary theory of morality. It's a different name than that. I'll have to go look it up. And they said, there's no contradictions in that. He's actually right. But that's a totally different kind of moral theory. It's not trying to explain morality, why you should be moral. It's trying to explain why morality evolved in the first place. And yes, I would agree you can explain that without contradiction as of today. But now you're solving a different problem than the one I was trying to solve. So it doesn't really help me. So it's still a legitimate problem. It's just, it's one that's far more solvable. So it tries to understand morality in terms of the social dynamics, why it evolved, why it's helpful within societies. I have no doubt we can explain morality in that way, right? But that doesn't really explain why you should be moral in the first place. In fact, it doesn't even touch the question of why you should be moral in the first place, which is really what like something like consequentialism is trying to explain. It doesn't fully succeed, in my opinion.

[00:40:28]  Peter: Okay, well, I think that's why we'll never run out of things to talk about, because every time we talk, we talk about one thing and then come up with five more things to discuss. So I look forward to speaking to you next week, Bruce.

[00:40:47]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:40:48]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[00:40:48]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you very much.

[00:40:49]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:40:49]  Unidentified speaker: Bye bye.

[00:40:57]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch theory of knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at bnielson01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[00:41:41]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.