Special Edition: Theory of Anything Hosts David Deutsch

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Transcript

[00:00:10]  Blue: I was asked to host a session at the 24 -hour Transcontinental Popperian Zoom meet -and -greet that was on January 9th, 2021, and it was organized by arccarlpopper.net. At the last minute, I found out that David Deutch himself was attending the session. What follows is the result.

[00:00:28]  Red: First of all, I want to welcome everybody. It’s kind of nice to see, I think this has been our largest session. Kind of wanted to start by introducing, I think most of us probably know David, but I wanted to just give a little bit of an intro to David by pointing out that, first of all, the age of enlightenment saw the rise of what some of us recognize as popperian tradition. While Popper’s work may not be that well known, the tradition he presented or talked about has been with us for a few centuries now. I think that David Deutch has done a wonderful job at bringing Popper’s work to people through his books, and he’s also encouraged a culture of sharing and criticism of ideas, and most of all by making himself accessible to social media. I think he’s pretty accessible, as some of us know through Twitter, which is not such a common thing among people who are specialists in certain fields. His work, optimism, and interactions have inspired a culture whereby people have come together to take Popper’s ideas to a new level. But this has led to groups such as Forrest Trans run by Bruce Nielsen and others. Individuals have been inspired to create podcasts, YouTube videos, and websites to encourage an open -ended growth of knowledge. David’s book opened me up to the ideas that impacted my life in more ways than I can mention in few words. My primary interest is in foundations of physics, and I’m also an educator. I find myself starting my physics class every year now for the last couple of years with a discussion with David’s TED talk on good explanations.

[00:02:12]  Red: And it’s interesting how that leads to all sorts of interesting discussions throughout the school year as we look into physics, and just overall the connection of physics and real, you know, we talk about reality, we even talk about multi -worse sometimes, and it really gets kids into it. So I really want to thank David for making himself available, and thanks a lot, David, for coming today. And I’m going to hand it over to Bruce now and let himself introduce.

[00:02:42]  Blue: Alright, thank you, Saadia. I’m Bruce Nielsen, and I think I was asked to help host this session because my experience is fairly typical of probably a lot of yours. So back in 2009, we don’t know that I was a religious blogger, and I had fellow religious bloggers suggest to me to read David Deutsch’s book, Fabric of Reality, and I was enthralled with it. So I started actually blogging about it and things like that. And I spent years actually trying to refute what was in his book and ended up reading a whole lot of different books that were related subjects, and eventually became very convinced of all four of the strands he mentions in Fabric of Reality because of my inability to refute them and ability to find good criticism of them that he hadn’t already responded to. And so eventually this even led to me going back to school. I wanted to study this more deeply. I wanted to go back to school and get a master’s degree in computer science to study computational theory and related subjects. And so this is something that really has ended up impacting my life quite a bit. Just in a lot of ways, starting off as a hobby and then eventually now maybe even eventually turning into a career change. So I’m also the, I started a podcast theory of anything podcast, which is loosely based on David Deutsch’s four strands. And Saadia mentioned the four strands blog, four strands.org. I’m the one kind of behind that that runs that and hosts that. And my co -host, Cammy, I was also here. Cammy, do you want to do a quick introduction?

[00:04:19]  Green: Yes, I do. Hi, I’m Cammy O’Doran, and I’m Bruce’s co -host on the theory of anything podcast. And everything I know about David Deutsch came from my involvement with Bruce. I think one of the first times Bruce and I had a conversation, it really quickly veered into the popper land and his passions around the four strands. And was the primary reason we started the podcast together, just because we really enjoyed discussing knowledge. And that’s why I’m here. Hi. Thank you.

[00:04:56]  Orange: Thank you for hosting this wonderful thing. I was here earlier also. It’s been great. So I was thinking a little bit something about the transition that you write about, like your explanation of why humankind was stuck in static societies has to do with irrational memes. But if that isn’t because you need that, the conception of anti -rational memes, because that’s the explanation for why this exponential growth didn’t happen. Because you don’t need to assume so much for it to happen. You just make people make small changes into their IDs, and then that will lead to exponential growth. But then that seems to why wasn’t the static society, why didn’t it get stuck completely? Like what if this is the question before the enlightenment, that the argument is something like the enlightenment could have happened earlier. But the enlightenment happened in a particular culture and wasn’t that culture different than the static culture that preceded it? Something like this. I don’t know if this question.

[00:06:17]  Purple: Yeah, there is a thing which maybe isn’t clear in my presentations. When we think about the enlightenment as distinct from what happened before, there’s a selection effect that we tend to think that what happened before was like the enlightenment except with static societies. But the thing is, long -lived static societies are rare. Not as rare as the enlightenment society, but still quite rare. Most societies, most cultures that have ever existed, have not survived very long at all. But because they haven’t, so back in prehistory, it may have happened and more often than a static culture evolving was simply a culture evolving which did change and then destroyed itself because its changes were not in the direction that would stabilize it. For example, they wouldn’t have had traditions of criticism, for example. So maybe they were changing and

[00:07:32]  Teal: as a result, they made many mistakes and as a result, they were unable to correct them and so they were killed by the neighboring tribe or they ran out of food and didn’t know what to do or whatever. So the sort of natural state of nature, if you can use that concept with humans, you can’t really, but the state that humans or pre -humans were in when creativity first evolved was maybe better described as just continual chaos and failure rather than

[00:08:11]  Purple: statisticity and then statisticity sort of emerged out of that sometimes. But because statisticity made the cultures last longer and grow more, those are the ones that we kind of see when we look back. We see the ancient Egyptian empire and that kind of thing and we don’t see the many failures that must have outnumbered that culture. Right. I don’t know if that answers your question. Maybe I’m missing something.

[00:08:48]  Orange: Yeah, that was not how I got from the book so far. So it was a little bit different.

[00:08:55]  Brown: Yeah. Hi David everyone. My name is Pei Yuan and thank you so much for coming. I think the reason I was being recommended to your book is that I was asking a person how to do research and then he recommended this book to me and from his understanding, the most important take from this book is maybe just for me, but it’s about self -arrow correction and I don’t know if you have, so the first question is do you have any advice to how this kind of self -arrow correction can take place? Is there a set of questions that a person can question themselves in his everyday life, for example, or in his own research? So this is my first question. My second question is I think in the end we as human in all sciences, what we’re trying to really understand is about causality, but the problem to me is that I’m not a theoretical physicist and I get a sense that my understanding of causality can be very naive and far from what actually is being considered as causality in the space time causality, for example, in physics. But I think at times I can see why things are not causal and are merely correlations, but I kind of find it really hard to give a definition of what is causality and in this scenario how can I, as a researcher, try to probe into these causal relations. This is my second question. My third question and this is the last question. Right now I am a grad student working in statistics and I think fundamentally it’s a problem of induction and that we’re trying to combat in our everyday life. So

[00:11:40]  Brown: my question to you is what do you think is the most important thing to do for statisticians or statistics researcher to help in the process of scientific discovery and what would you think would be the most important thing to do for a statistician in the next 50 years or 30 to 50?

[00:12:14]  Purple: Well, one can’t answer the last question first because I think

[00:12:20]  Pink: that’s the easiest. Statistics is an interesting and useful branch of mathematics and the

[00:12:29]  Purple: way it enters into science is that it enters only in what I call in my book the perspiration phase. That is, it is the last step in discovery.

[00:12:49]  Pink: It is the part that is not creative but mechanical. So if we have a mass of statistics

[00:12:58]  Purple: and use statistical theory to get an answer out of that, the answer was really created before the data were even collected and that part doesn’t involve statistics. So, you know, doing statistics one has to understand that this is a branch of mathematics and that it has nothing to do with creativity. Some people think that creativity is just extracting knowledge out of data but that is the opposite of what the truth is and as Papa has taught us.

[00:13:33]  Brown: Right, so yeah, I can see from your book that it can be kind of used as a tool to reject hypothesis but it seems that it is, do you think it’s likely that it can be used to discover hypothesis as well or maybe like not

[00:13:52]  Purple: so much? I think the same reason that any piece of mathematics can’t lead to discovery. The piece of mathematics isn’t about the world unless you have a theory that first have a theory that connects it to the world. Now, as I say, speaking of Papa that leads me to your first question. There is a very nice transcript on the internet somewhere of the lectures that or some of the lectures that Papa gave to his scientific method class in the LSE when he first joined the LSE and the first lecture, I think it’s the first lecture, begins with him saying I think I’m the only professor of scientific method in the British Empire and the first thing I want to say about this is that there is no such thing as scientific method and I think this applies equally well to other aspects of Papa’s philosophy. There is no such thing as a philosophical method or a self -improvement method or a psychological method. It’s all opportunistic. It’s opportunistic

[00:15:29]  Teal: you said maybe the theme of my book is all problem solving and maybe the theme of all Papa’s books is also problem solving but the thing is there is no method for that. There are various methods for avoiding doing that and it’s a good thing to try to escape from those methods if they are in one’s culture or in one’s psychology but that by itself doesn’t do anything positive. It merely frees one from the sabotage of those methods.

[00:16:13]  Brown: It’s all about creativity.

[00:16:16]  Purple: Yes and now what was your second question? I remember the third and first.

[00:16:22]  Brown: The second question is about causality.

[00:16:24]  Purple: Oh yes well in what you would find if you looked at modern physics and modern philosophy was what they say about causality is that they basically deny that there is such a thing. Most studies of the foundations of physics conclude falsely I think that because of the determinism of the laws of physics and the block universe and the block multiverse and whatever and because of the reversibility of the laws of motion in physics that they equally well predict the past from the future as well as the future from the past or almost anything from almost anything else that there is no room for causation in that picture and I think that there is it’s just that causation is a high level concept and there’s no mention of difference between liquids and solids or backwards and forwards in time either in fundamental physics and yet there are well developed physical theories of both of those things and causality hasn’t really been important in physics for maybe the last couple of hundred years but that’s not really very important. In constructor theory if I can plug that for a moment it’s much easier to frame a theory of or frame explanations in terms of causes than it is in the prevailing mode of explanation so I and in other fields than physics causation is important and attempts to eliminate causation and try to pretend that one can explain things like human behavior in a deterministic way are dead ends or worse so that’s my answer to the second question.

[00:18:40]  Red: So Ella could that please let me

[00:18:42]  Green: go with you next. Okay so David I’m very interested in artificial general intelligence which is to say I’m interested in trying to understand the mind and the way that the mind creates knowledge at a little at a level of detail that is sufficient that we can implement it on a computer and so my question is about the the logic of how the minds manage to create knowledge and and the extent to which it’s similar or different to biological evolution and the way that knowledge is created there so my question is do you think that replicators are involved in the way that the mind that minds manage to create knowledge? I think in biological evolution we know from from you know Darwin and Dawkins theory that the replicators are sort of the key explanation for for why biological evolution manages to create knowledge and so I’m interested in in whether you think that there’s something similar going on in the human mind some sort of pool of competing replicators or do you think that there’s some other process that’s responsible for for creating knowledge in human minds?

[00:19:40]  Purple: To some extent that’s a question of implementation um but I I think well and and I don’t know how the how creativity works in the human mind you know if if if I knew I’d be I’d be really working hard on that now if I had any kind of idea that I thought was halfway viable in regard to replicators um my guess is that there that that’s not how the implementation works in the mind that there could be a logically equivalent implementation in terms of replicators but the thing is in the mind or in a computer you could you could save memory space just by rather than by having multiple copies you just have one copy with a number you know this this there are 10 000 of these which is a bit like saying you know this this thing is worth 10 000 of this other thing which hasn’t done the equivalent of replication

[00:20:43]  Teal: I should say as I say in the book as well that I don’t think we understand biological evolution well enough either we we and maybe one route towards AGI would be to do biologically the equivalent of biological artificial biological evolution first it may or may not be a good route you know the the replicating a bird’s wing was not the best route to artificial flight and and so although the underlying theory is the route towards it the underlying theory of how a bird’s wing works is the is the way to make an aeroplane so I doubt that it it’s replicators I doubt that there are replicators in in the brain

[00:21:38]  Green: okay great thank you so much

[00:21:40]  Red: uh uh waden could you you can please go ahead hi

[00:21:45]  Gray: I’m a phd student at uvc in machine learning and I keep trying to get people to think about knowledge in my community and they keep confusing it with information and I have a very difficult time explaining to them that I’m trying to refer to something else without just pointing them to your books and poppers books and so I guess I’m curious to know uh how you think about the difference between knowledge and information and then also if you have any uh communication strategies um that you could offer in terms of how to uh get people to realize that I’m I’m trying to talk about something uh that’s not information I’m gonna say the word knowledge thanks

[00:22:25]  Purple: yeah the only communication strategy that that works apart from spending many years writing a book is is conversation and you just you just get together with someone and try to overlap your problem situation and then and then something happens um uh the the I think of knowledge as a species of of information um and I’ve at various times used several different characterizations of what makes it different from other information and my my most recent choice is is to say that knowledge is uh information with causal properties there’s causation arising again so um knowledge is is um that property of a computer program that makes it do something useful um and for example you know you have a word processor and the word processor is the processor is useful because it knows it it it has the programmer of course is who generated the knowledge but the programmer has put into the program knowledge of things like there are such things as words there are such things as letters and sentences there is such a thing as correct spelling and incorrect spelling and and so on and there are different aspects of the context which have to be taken into account and and and so on so um so knowledge is is uh information with causal power um also an interesting thing about it like both knowledge and information are very unusual they’re abstractions and many people don’t like to believe that abstractions even exist so that’s something you have to

[00:24:31]  Teal: persuade them of but but then uh further information and knowledge are extremely unusual abstractions because they only exist when they’re physically instantiated and that’s another confusing concept that that I sometimes have to have to uh work hard to persuade people or rather to to get people to

[00:24:56]  Purple: see what I’m even talking about whether they whether they agree or not what I’m even saying um so yeah I um I don’t know that I have anything better to say about how to persuade people of things I don’t know that it’s even a good idea to try to persuade people of things what’s what’s more important is to have an interesting discussion I’d

[00:25:20]  Green: like to hear that you start both

[00:25:21]  Gray: of it too

[00:25:21]  Red: all right um Polis uh would you like to go yes

[00:25:27]  Cyan: thank you thank you David for doing this um and my question is about moral philosophy and moral truth I’m I’m concerned I this is a topic you’ve touched before I’m concerned about how the is of the economy is interpreted as often hopelessly nihilistic that it condemns us to rat relativism and the idea that if moral values can’t can’t be derived from fact they can’t be true because they don’t refer to objective entities so for many people who believe in moral truth the economy is often perceived as a a deep problem and a deep mystery and to me that seems to be an error because the impossibility of deducing values from facts does not amount to a demonstration that they’re false it’s not a refutation and in a sense moral ideas can be refuted by mere facts anymore than they can the wrath of them and I find myself in the I think the minority of people who believe the is how the economy is true but who also believe that it doesn’t keep us from creating moral knowledge and proper described the position that he called critical journalism that I think that I interpret in this way and so my question is this I know that you’ve talked about the fact that morality is a form of knowledge and I wanted to ask you how do you understand the is of the economy how does it bear on your concept of moral truth and does the concept of truth apply to moral propositions thank you

[00:26:52]  Pink: well my opinion is it definitely does and I agree with everything you said there so that that’s basically my my position as well um popper uh it’s a bit hard to interpret on on issues of objective morality because

[00:27:12]  Purple: he doesn’t really discuss that point you you can only infer popper’s position as far as far as I know anyway I haven’t read that everything he wrote um uh you can infer when he says for example that we can make moral progress then and and also that that uh there is there is such a thing as making progress in philosophy generally that he certainly rejects the position that science is the only thing one can make progress in um I I like to use the argument that that when people say that

[00:27:50]  Pink: there’s a difference between the possibility of progress in morality and in science in that in science we have this method of experiment that can take us forward and in philosophy we don’t well I think that’s an an un -popperian point of view because because uh that that that’s more like the duem coin view that it’s it’s a bit arbitrary to say

[00:28:17]  Teal: that scientific knowledge is possible if at the same time you’re going to take that critique of moral knowledge seriously because the same critique that the deniers of moral knowledge take seriously has been used by many people to deny that scientific knowledge is possible and all knowledge is conjectural the fact that you can’t deduce it from anything is is irrelevant in all fields knowledge can never be deduced so the ought is um a distinction merely says that you can’t deduce moral knowledge from scientific knowledge but so what uh you can’t deduce scientific knowledge from anything so you can’t deduce moral knowledge but we’re not after deducing knowledge and uh what what we’re after is solving problems and there have to be moral problems as soon as you have a creative entity that is solving problems then um

[00:29:16]  Pink: moral issues arrive arise because you’ve you’ve got to wonder what what should I want what when when you are when you’re wondering what should I do next um you you can’t gaze into your navel and find what you want about everything you’ve got to think about what you want and criticize it and create knowledge about it so I think one can take a completely uniform view of all those fields um and uh and therefore the ought is distinction as it is not epistemologically relevant it’s it’s not relevant to what kind of knowledge we can create

[00:29:57]  Red: um actually I had a question which was similar to that if you guys don’t mind uh me interjecting in there um my question was about uh you know usually when I talk to people about that um one of the question that’s raised is that when it comes to science uh we all uh you know the laws of nature constrain everything like we don’t have a choice in that but but the moral uh moral seems to be different I guess one of the difference between morality is that even if we claim that we discover moral principles then we still have a choice we’re not bound it’s as if they feel like there is something more concrete in science uh would you like to say something about perhaps maybe you have any ideas about roots of morality uh in the sense of uh do you tie it to um I’ve listened to your discussion with Sam Harris it doesn’t seem like you tie it to anything to do with neuroscience but do you think about it is there something in the back of your mind uh as to what are the roots of morality I

[00:31:00]  Pink: I think in general it’s it’s it’s not very helpful to think about what the roots of something are um because when you find some roots there are always going to be roots beneath that and and you’ll never get to the bottom of it so uh the foundations are sometimes useful but but not because not because they’re underlying everything but because they they reveal something of of of the structure of things um uh the when you you know I’m I’m I’m the theoretical physicist I work on the foundations of physics when you make a terrible mistake at the foundations of physics you may get ridiculed and you may uh lose your income and uh and so on but when you make a mistake of the foundations of morality the physical world will come for you much worse so it’s it’s not it’s not really and I’m not only talking about other people coming from for for you even if you were a person on a desert island who made moral mistakes it would cause physical trouble for you you would you would um uh make mistakes in your life which might shorten it um just from making a mistake in morality so I don’t think this this distinction that that morality is a matter of choice is true or at least

[00:32:28]  Teal: it’s no more a matter of choice than any other ideas a matter of choice we we choose and create our own ideas according to our values about what what’s true but our values about what’s true even though they are completely changeable are not at all arbitrary it’s it’s like it’s maybe the best example of this is pure mathematics some people are reduced to claiming that mathematics

[00:32:54]  Pink: is arbitrary it’s just a really mathematics is just the study of math what mathematicians think it is um

[00:33:04]  Purple: uh clever or glorious or whatever to think about uh which makes reduces mathematics to basically a study of of human brains mathematicians brains or the the brains of a community of mathematicians but it’s

[00:33:20]  Pink: simply not true mathematics is the study of abstractions that are that uh actually exist and properties of them that exist and are independent of us we can choose which mathematical objects we think are interesting uh

[00:33:37]  Purple: and and worth trying to understand but uh we can be mistaken and we can we can uh follow dead ends um I think in mathematics it’s also unusual to run into a brick wall like that and uh by the way I I think that running into a dead end and making large mistakes unless they kill you um it’s uh it’s not all bad uh in fact it can be just as good as successfully discovering things which the latter can can um can leave you feeling empty um uh whereas as papa says if you’re engaged with problems even if you never solve them then you’re still having fun

[00:34:25]  Blue: I I have one quick question I hope is quick I I enjoyed reading your constructor theory paper you made a very big deal in that paper though about it underpinning the rest of physics and I I kept wondering why that was because it seemed like it would be a valid theory about constructors in the same way you know information theory is a valid theory about information or computational theories a valid theory about computation without the claim that it underpins all of physics so what was the motivation there to say that and is that an absolutely necessary motivation or would it still be a good theory without that

[00:34:59]  Pink: uh well I guess that that no particular motivation is ever essential um but um the reason I think the constructor theory could standard it’s on by itself but rather like philosophy if there were no applications to anything else then it would be useless it would just be a piece of mathematics uh the reason I think it’s important that it underlies many areas of physics is just that I think it does underlie them I I I think that there are several areas of physics where progress has been stalled because of the assumption that the prevailing mode of explanation namely initial conditions and laws of motion is the only legitimate form that that it’s kind of without ever being stated explicitly it’s it’s taken for granted that a valid explanation in physics has to be of that form and yet already in existing physics there are explanations which are of of the constructor theoretic form instead and cannot be expressed in terms of initial conditions for source of motion and that is kind of shrugged off because because people think it’s not legitimate so in thermodynamics that there are explanations that seem to directly conflict with explanations in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion and the the usual that the conventional response to that is to say that basically to say oh well a thermodynamics isn’t really true it’s just an approximation

[00:36:44]  Pink: scheme and and at root these quantities like work and heat and the laws of thermodynamics are are are not actually true but that’s just a prejudice and and my feeling is that in in that area and in many other areas such as theory of computation and in areas of physics where initial conditions and laws of motion approach has been successful I think in all those areas there is scope for making progress via constructor theory if constructor theory is true uh and not and probably not if it isn’t and we’ll find out if it’s true but by only by trying to make such progress using it

[00:37:31]  Blue: thank you um I wanted to give Dworkash a chance to ask a question he wasn’t able to through his interface raised his hand and he did it about this point so are you still there and can you ask your question

[00:37:42]  Gold: yeah I’m here thanks uh hey David I’m a big fan I just wanted to ask you um this is my view but I just want to play devil’s advocate here and I because I don’t have a rebuttal to this argument which is uh there’s a Bayesian critique of uh popper which is that verification and disconfirmation both reveal information about a theory and that um while popper can deal with disconfirmation there’s no way to integrate uh evidence that verifies a theory and that’s like Bayes is backwards compatible with popper uh in that it can be integrate verifying and disconfirming evidence it just weighs disconfirming evidence higher and updates heavier based on that so how would you deal with that criticism

[00:38:21]  Pink: um there there I think the the um the context in which that criticism arises I think contains mistakes uh first of all the context is that that there is some data uh or information which we receive and then we have to make sense of it either by refuting a theory or by confirming a theory or whatever but but we start off with data that just isn’t true as we have learned from popper um so in in that respect the the whole picture of science and of thinking generally that that underlies that critique is just wrong

[00:39:07]  Pink: secondly so that that’s you know like where science is coming from then there’s where science is going to so um this this uh uh critique suggests that what we’re trying to do that the thing that the where science is going to is getting justified beliefs that that that uh you know what we really want to do is to make is to make the probability that we assign or the credence that we have for true theories should go up we we need some method that will make the credence of true theories go up and then they say well popper first of all popper seems to only have a method that makes credences go down so you know how how can that possibly be a picture of science well the science is problem -based and the way it proceeds is by conjecture and after it has problems and conjectures it has criticism criticisms and none of that appears in the Bayesian picture so of course they’re going to think that popperian the popperian view of science doesn’t adequately represent science but what has really happened is that their picture of science which is basically empiricism and doctivism some kind of that is just wrong brute and branch false brute and branch

[00:40:42]  Red: all right thank you um mike

[00:40:44]  Gray: uh yes hi everyone hi david um so i i was uh wanting to ask you about modes of explanation and knowing how important they are to um kind of structuring some of your um some of your work and uh bruce just brought up constructor theory which i think you might describe as its own mode of explanation and um i was trying to particularly link it to computation so um i have your your shorthand if you can’t program it you haven’t understood it i was wondering if you follow that um is inventing a new mode of explanation is that synonymous with um inventing like a new type of algorithm is the is the link to computation and explanation can it be kind of forged in that way or but um but not yet don’t you don’t speak specifically just to that so

[00:41:29]  Pink: uh i’m reluctant to reduce things to algorithms uh i think that usually sucks the creativity out of the picture uh and and uh makes it wrong uh so um uh the i’m trying to think whether this maxim if you can’t program it you haven’t understood it which which uh is really a bit of a paraphrase of Feynman uh uh whether this applies to everything or just theories about how information works in the world uh and in particular agi and and so on so if if you can’t program an algorithm you haven’t understood it if you can’t program any kind of information process

[00:42:17]  Purple: then you haven’t understood it um if if you if you can’t say say you have a process of um how stars work a theory about how stars work then it’s also true i’m thinking out loud here then it’s it’s it’s also true that if you can’t program that you

[00:42:36]  Pink: haven’t understood it but that doesn’t mean programming every the motion of every molecule in the star it it means programming

[00:42:45]  Purple: the things that the features of the theory of your explanatory theory that your theory says uh explain the star so it’s those that you have to be able to program but finding out what those

[00:43:02]  Pink: are is not a matter of programming anything it’s a matter of creativity and problem solving so uh my tentative answer is that that that maxim doesn’t apply to

[00:43:14]  Purple: everything doesn’t apply to um to creating the knowledge to do that

[00:43:20]  Red: and uh mark would you like to go next

[00:43:23]  Gray: yes you can hear me i think so

[00:43:25]  Red: yeah

[00:43:26]  Gray: um so yeah thanks for doing this so much it’s really an honor on um to talk to you but uh i find that all the things that we have something that we can assign objectivity to in life i feel like the hardest one for me personally is aesthetics so for instance i like i find the k paintings of like altamira and lasco to be beautiful but that the reason i do is is because of how old they are and it’s it’s humankind speaking to us from 30 000 years ago trying to survive the harsh the harsh ice ages and i feel like if someone painted the state rotunda the same way with the bison’s and everything said it was a masterpiece i’d probably want to slap them in the face and say i don’t find that very beautiful so i don’t know me ascribing aesthetic value to the k paintings of lasco because of the romantic notion of humankind painting them so many years ago and maybe the first and then what are they trying to say if they’re trying to say anything else at all is it fair to describe the aesthetic value to that for reasons like that or should we just judge it for just how it looks and it shouldn’t be the environment who did it and what they were trying to say if that makes sense

[00:44:37]  Pink: yes i think to some extent this is just a matter of of the fact that that um language and terminology uh aren’t

[00:44:50]  Teal: we don’t have an absolutely exact language to describe everything we want to talk about so often we use metaphors and often we use uh terminology that slides over from one area to an adjacent area and so on so a mathematician can describe an equation as beautiful um a person can describe someone’s mind as beautiful and and they mean something by that they mean something objective by that but it is not the same thing as what we what we mean uh when we describe say a piece of music as beautiful or a sculpture as beautiful and even with those things we may describe a painting as beautiful because it is very apt in a certain situation like i don’t know how do you judge Goya’s painting of of some partisans getting shot um how do you separate the the beauty of the fact that he’s captured by the way a very ugly situation so well how do you separate that from beauty in the in the sense that if the same skill and insight had been used to describe uh an orange harvesting festival um it it it uh could also describe that as beautiful but there’d be a different kind of beauty being described there I think there is there is such a thing as artistic beauty which which is often mixed with other values that we want to put into an object um and um maybe we shouldn’t get hung up on whether that is really beauty as kind of essentialism to to uh ask that the thing is that there are many um features of an object that are desirable and um the the cave paintings are

[00:46:54]  Pink: desirable in

[00:46:55]  Purple: one sense and are clearly rubbish in another sense um and there’s nothing wrong with that if if if we some if somebody wanted to if

[00:47:06]  Pink: somebody was interested in understanding the distinction there more deeply then they would probably find themselves inventing a more refined

[00:47:16]  Purple: terminology for it they they would rather than say is this really beautiful they would say there is a thing that we want it is this you know I’m going to explain it and the cave painting has that has heaps of that and

[00:47:32]  Pink: there’s this other thing which we we want in a different context which which which uh the people who did the cave

[00:47:39]  Teal: painting also wanted but weren’t very good at achieving

[00:47:42]  Pink: and you know if somebody was spending their life on teasing out that distinction very finely then they’d probably invent a a more fine

[00:47:53]  Purple: technology.

[00:47:56]  Red: Jesse?

[00:47:57]  Gold: Hey David, I have a question that might be somewhat personal personal but have a lot of implications in a lot of people’s lives and I know Lily’s talked about this uh and uh so it revolves around just uh romantic relationships personal relationships uh and the whole the economy of of genes versus memes of we need society to procreate now we don’t have uh you know we don’t live an infinite life we know immortality is uh possible in some sense but I guess there is a sense of like we want to create these best the best memes that we can we want to create best the best explanations that we have in our lives but uh how do you think about that in terms of children and education whether or not to to have a family or be in a relationship or just work on uh you know things like constructor theory and agi and life extension or biotech or just really curious to see how you think about all those ideas

[00:49:02]  Pink: uh I I don’t think it’s a good idea to to uh try and save the world in the in the sense of um uh subordinating one’s own uh values to what one thinks the world’s values are so maybe the world needs a larger population um I I my guess is that it does the in other words that that would be a good thing um that the the world as a whole would thrive better if it had more people in it but to and other people of course think that the world would thrive better if it had fewer people in it I think in both cases it’s it’s it’s a bad idea to subordinate one’s own life to that objective yeah I I I don’t think it’s even for example a good idea in my own life to try to publicize my own ideas I do it to some extent but I don’t subordinate it to to the fun of actually um trying to solve problems and some of the problems of only of interest to me and some are interest to me and like half a dozen other people in the world and some are interested of interest to more people but but the way I would choose what to do is uh try to meet my own values and to the extent that my own values include having preferences about how the world is then uh then that the meeting my values would include trying to make the world better

[00:50:43]  Teal: but but trying to make the world better as an overarching principle for how to make personal decisions I think is a mistake I don’t know if that’s your question yeah

[00:50:55]  Gold: I guess that that answer is a little bit of it and then it’s just like being young a big part of culture in general in society is just finding uh you know a significant other or partner and there’s the whole debate against uh polyamory and uh or to have a committed monogamous relationship and uh that is uh you know it drives a lot of culture

[00:51:19]  Pink: yeah well different people find answers in different ways and they they have extremely different problem situations and I guess it

[00:51:29]  Gold: from the context of the beginning of infinity of uh like what was actually useful it was useful to make more people and to do that people create uh had families to do that and it kind of divide and conquer kind of sense whether they knew it or not right people kind of uh when they team up they can do they’re more than the sum of their parts

[00:51:51]  Pink: yes although there there are there are many ways of teaming up and each of them has has better and worse ways of doing it yeah so you know you form a society you form friends you form families and all of those can involve uh mistakes in how to do it and uh and we’ve we’ve got here by by people making progress with that but but you know for most of history they didn’t make progress yeah all

[00:52:25]  Red: right okay Tracy you want to go next uh Tracy sure

[00:52:29]  Green: hi hi so I’m hoping this is just more a fun white hearted question maybe but um on Thursday I woke up uh I had a dream that I had gotten the opportunity to meet you David um in the very next day I find out that suddenly there’s this opportunity to meet you at the zoom meeting uh exciting for me um it kind of strange so maybe the fun part could you maybe speak to the human brain regarding its potential for quantum prediction maybe or just the idea of quantum prediction in general

[00:53:07]  Pink: so I’m not entirely sure what you mean by quantum prediction but predicting the growth of knowledge is inherently impossible and um there’s no reason to think that quantum effects might be implicated in the human brain and um the idea that quantum theory has kind of mystical that it justifies various um traditional mystical ideas always comes from mistakes about quantum theory it doesn’t come the real world doesn’t implement those so um I I think there wasn’t a connection in that you know I would I would guess that there wasn’t a connection in that respect um maybe that’s um maybe that’s a boring reply but I my guess is that’s the truth of it

[00:54:05]  Green: it’s a reply thank you

[00:54:07]  Blue: all right miss Rob I don’t know if I pronounced that right you

[00:54:10]  Orange: can hear me yes hi hi everyone and nice to meet you David so I just wanted to ask about replication crisis especially in psychology and in general too like in life in life sciences so around 2010 like people started to realize that there are a lot of studies that can be replicated and so people started to implement many standards of like data sharing and open code and stuff like that and there was also emphasis on importance of replication studies like studies that repeat the experiment as closely as possible to the original study so there is a sense that if a study is replicated then it must be true and less emphasis on mechanism like by mechanism I mean explanatory theory they establish a link and by experiment then afterwards give an explanation how this process might happen in the mind and but they prioritize application seems to miss the point that we can replicate say Newtonian laws infinite many times but they are not actual explanation of how the world works around us I just wanted to know how you see this how what what you can say about methodology of like psychological studies

[00:55:34]  Pink: yeah I entirely agree and I think the the replication crisis in psychology and related fields as you as you have just said I think it’s the wrong way to think about it the replication crisis is a small facet of what goes wrong when you apply scientism to psychology and anything that involves knowledge anything that involves human knowledge if you try to study it as if it were physics you will be doing scientism you will get and the the fact that it’s not replicated is is almost it’s almost a positive feature of a theory because it’s at least saying that the explanatory part of the psychological theory which was kind of unstated

[00:56:45]  Teal: and taken for granted and implicit and denied and so on that that thing existed that there was an explanation there and that’s why the explanation can be falsified by an experiment if if something can be replicated in psychology then it’s not really psychology for example people do wonderful work creating optical illusions and explaining why they work and they work in psychology

[00:57:21]  Pink: departments many of these people but that’s not psychology that that is a study of the human visual system and how the information is processed but that information is not being processed by a creative process there are other kinds of things that that stem from that that you you you might ask then

[00:57:46]  Teal: after the after the built -in interpretations of sensory data there is also there is further interpretation happens

[00:57:57]  Pink: which can be creative and which also affects how we perceive things and you can form theories about those but those theories have to be explanatory

[00:58:10]  Teal: and there has to be a model of those and there I would say that that replicating them on a computer would be it might be a useful thing to do with those explanatory theories so you know if you can’t program it you haven’t understood it might be relevant there but as I think you hint I think the real trouble with psychology and related fields is that is scientism and and a lack of and even a denigration and deliberate avoidance of explanatory theories this was explicit in the case of behaviorism but behaviorism has kind of been rejected but the aspect of behaviorism that that tries that says that one should not have explanatory theories but rather one should have massive data which is replicated that is still there and that’s what really needs to be reformed all right David thanks for

[00:59:18]  Teal: doing this you had mentioned earlier I’m speaking from Jerusalem Israel you’d mentioned earlier the popper lecture and later paper on the non -existence of scientific method so I just thought you might get a kick out of this volume that I found literally lying next to a dumpster from 1958 which would is apparently the first popper piece of writing that was translated into Hebrew I know you’re from Aifa so I thought you might get a kick out of that anyway my question is in your in your first chapter in your book and your theory on explanation I’ve always wondered I always got the feeling as you step through this the phases leading up to the the the breakthrough method that we that we have today which is of course one step in the long chain I’ve always wondered how you see the relationship between that theory and poppers I would normally bring this up but I know this is a popper oriented group so I was just wondering if you saw that theory as a corrective as completely 100 compatible with and just another way of looking at it or how do you see it relating to poppers theories and theory of explanation

[01:00:36]  Pink: thanks so I privately and personally think that it is poppers theory I’m not a historian of science and I’m not really interested in who had what idea but I I see for example the first chapter of the beginning of infinity is just a a small explanatory footnote to poppers epistemology and if somebody comes along and says no it’s not you know popper thought something completely different I don’t care I’m I’m I’m only interested in what the truth is and on the other hand at the other extreme if if someone comes along and says that’s exactly what popper said and and even your footnote is in a footnote of popper on page 483 well again I don’t care I I I’m I am trying to understand the world and I’m interested in what’s true and that’s attributing it to popper is merely a matter of kind of academic courtesy so I think that popper had an entirely explanatory conception of science I can’t prove that from from his writings and I know that for example David Miller thinks that that’s not entirely true um again I I’m sorry if it sounds dismissive to keep saying I don’t care but that it’s not what I’m interested in thanks thank you Dennis hey

[01:02:17]  Indigo: guys can you hear me yes great hey David it’s Dennis I have you earlier you mentioned um in response to Ella Ella was asking about self -replicating ideas in a mind and um your response was that it wouldn’t be really if I understood you correctly it wouldn’t really be efficient in terms of memory because instead one could have a quantity field of sorts on ideas that would encode how many instances of an idea and exist and then that way one could save a lot of memory and but I want to take a moment to defend the theory if I may as it happens Ella has thought of the same thing when we when we first started discussing this theory now I suppose the quantity field would be denotationally equivalent to having replicators on the surface but the structure of the implementation would be wholly different and I think one would lose a lot of explanatory power by removing replicators because one would need to come up with separate explanations for everything that the uh the replicator based explanation can currently explain for example example memories how people evolved with some ideas surviving the mind not others and so I’m not sure just because a programmer would prefer to use quantities instead of replicators that that means that biological evolution would have chosen I say chose me and scare quotes to do so as well

[01:03:33]  Indigo: most of the criticism of this near Darwinian theory of the mind if you want to call it that but I’ve heard so far is along those lines that we don’t need replicators and that we could replace them with something else and if I understood you correctly your criticism is along the same lines but the epistemological problem that I see with that is we could say that for any theory right I mean even hard to vary ones we could think of ways to replace key components of them even if usually that means that they become easier to vary as a result and I think that’s what happens when we drop replicators the problem reminds me a little bit of the the fossil thing which I believe you’ve brought it before in defense of the multi -parse so like people might claim that we don’t need dinosaur we don’t need to claim that dinosaurs really existed to explain fossils even though that is already hard to vary explanation we could simply come up with other ways fossils may have come about that don’t involve the existence of dinosaurs and then denotationally I suppose those theories are the same or at least similar because the output of the theories the dinosaur fossils are the same or going a bit

[01:04:41]  Indigo: off the rails like we could we could claim that many instead of claiming that many dinosaurs exist so we could claim that there was a single dinosaur that had a quantity value that determined how many fossils are left behind us right so I guess the problem is that this won’t convince the advocates of the past existence of dinosaurs rightly I think because they would want to know why dinosaurs couldn’t have existed not why they need not have existed so in a way I agree that dinosaurs need not have existed for the same reason that no theory need necessarily true and so that applies to self replicating ideas in the mind as well but what I’d really be interested in is a reputation like what an argument right why replicators can’t play a role in how the mind works can you think of such an argument

[01:05:28]  Pink: no and and I did say that I don’t know how any of that works and and and maybe you’re right that that maybe it’s the fact that I learned programming a long time ago and and my formative programming years were in an era where memory was expensive and it was worth spending time you know thinking of more efficient ways of storing the data and now memory is extremely cheap and it’s it’s usually not worth doing that and as you say one of the things you gain when you have a redundant representation of something is you get much more flexibility in explanatory power right so uh having said that I think your comparison with the dinosaur theory is is a bit unfair the the um uh if your problem is that you want to make an artificial fossil it would not be a good idea to start by making dinosaurs uh you need to take the shortcut that’s available and making artificial fossil that way uh and again it it if you want to explain how the fossil got there that would be a terrible way of approaching that problem but if you want to make an artificial fossil then going via dinosaurs is far too inefficient but you know since I don’t know how it works I can’t really pontificate about how to do it uh you know let a thousand flowers bloom

[01:07:09]  Magenta: got it

[01:07:11]  Olive: okay

[01:07:11]  Blue: thank you park gleason

[01:07:15]  Olive: hi guys how’s it going um thanks to uh sadia and bruce for putting this event on and for david’s for answering questions um so my question was about uh well you know the explanation of how creativity works or just what creativity is and just critical rationalism in general seems to contradict certain commonly held assumptions uh which are effectively just statements that people are mechanical and um you know for example operant conditioning which is that uh learning and just alterations to human thought or the thought of people more generally and their behavior is best achieved using like a framework of uh rewards and punishments so that uh when dealing with problems in psychology like maybe addiction um and other you know it seems to get a lot of uses within psychology and then in behavioral economics as well in the form of incentives and disincentives to do certain things um I think the original question I actually had about specifically about addiction and making choices was sort of answered already when you were speaking about you know just uh creating the best moral theories and so on but I was maybe uh wondering if you could say something about incentives and disincentives and how valuable the work done on in behavioral economics is and whether it’s just fundamentally based on uh faulty assumptions and there is not much use to it or it’s just maybe contingently useful based on uh the cultural ideas at a given time or uh something like that

[01:08:59]  Pink: uh yeah uh so I I have to recognize that the lots of things in the world do not involve creativity and such things can be analyzed in terms that would be dehumanizing if if uh applied to things that do involve creativity and uh economics for example is is a field where it’s sort of the important issues are dominated by creativity but not in not totally exhaustively described by by uh creative processes there are other processes as well and in in uh if you’re looking at an area of the economy where where uh not much creativity has been used because people find the the setup basically satisfactory and what they want is a mechanical way of getting through to various things then you can

[01:09:58]  Teal: find an algorithm that sets the prices in those situations uh you know like when there’s when

[01:10:04]  Pink: there’s a shortage of some raw material then you can work out uh how how at least a first idea of how you can set the price although someone else might think of a better idea and already you haven’t modeled that uh and similarly if there are things that happen in the human mind in the human brain i should say that aren’t creative uh like we have optical illusions and and that kind of thing and if they feed into the problem that you have which is partly about creativity and partly not uh then that might be helpful i’m not going to say that isn’t helpful but i say that it’s it’s it’s whenever creativity touches on something it changes it profoundly and it really becomes the most important thing to to try to understand in regard to that field um rewards and punishments are are uh uh an abomination really in anything to do with humans because they are uh trying to forcibly change a human situation which had involved some creativity to one that doesn’t and that is just bad um i i i wonder you know it’s like it’s like these these purported cures for

[01:11:30]  Teal: for gayness and and so on uh by giving gay people electric shocks and and uh if if people want to be treated like that they are making a mistake uh i don’t care if it works or not it works in quotes you know i’m wondering how how would you cure if you thought that an s and m fetish was bad for you and you had one you thought it was bad for you what kind of conditioning would you would would you expect to cure that like you know being given

[01:12:08]  Pink: electric shocks

[01:12:09]  Olive: thank you

[01:12:11]  Pink: thank you

[01:12:12]  Blue: um carl

[01:12:13]  Cyan: yeah hey David thanks for doing this it’s been really fun so i remember you saying in an interview that whether animals suffer or not is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one and i definitely agree so i’m just curious to hear if you found any convincing arguments for either side of that issue and if you haven’t how do you think we morally should treat the issue of like whether animals suffer or not

[01:12:39]  Pink: um yes i think not much is known about about this uh i think there are some tiny clues in various places um and i think that maybe the main thing is i i think there is since we know so little about this i think there is room for a a range of views that that can all be considered reasonable depending on where one is coming from um the the one can rule out i think uh the extremes like like um thinking that on the one hand thinking that um that we should respect the the wishes of trees um is is very close to being uh being untenable philosophically because of what we know factually and at the other extreme i i think that it is is um um wrong to adopt a position of um principled callousness and trying to abolish for example all laws about animal cruelty and whatever on the grounds that there’s no evidence that anyone is suffering when there’s animal cruelty there is no evidence but i i think the the that is different from saying that there is a

[01:14:11]  Teal: good reason for adopting that view but in between those extremes there’s a huge range of positions that that i think are reasonable but

[01:14:22]  Cyan: would you say that this is a mind form of the precautionary principle that in the absence of knowledge we should like no well i think

[01:14:32]  Pink: that once you’d use the precautionary principle i i think it’s it’s more that what we should do in the face of ignorance in the face of ignorance we should be first thing is to be tolerant of of multiple views and the precautionary principle precisely isn’t so uh you know i would say be be tolerant of multiple views about this um you said about evidence that a tiny piece of evidence in in in regard to dogs um dogs um look like they have feelings more than uh similar other animals do um and um we know that this is because they have been subjected to artificial selection for precisely the attribute of looking as though they have feelings now i’m not sure that looking as though you have feelings can be done without having them this is a very weak argument i i can easily think of ways that that might not be right but but uh you know beggars can’t be choosers i i think we have touches of evidence that maybe some animals have some element of um uh uh qualia but there is there you know if this is kind of counts as anecdotal evidence or something that there is strong anecdotal evidence the other way as well that if you

[01:16:06]  Teal: look at animals like chimpanzees that that look as though they have feelings that in other experiments um it’s fairly clear that they they do not uh uh they do not have an idea of what’s going on that they’re just behaving mechanically experiments were uh but

[01:16:30]  Cyan: you tentatively reject the notion of uh like philosophical zombie dogs than i guess

[01:16:35]  Pink: yes that that i would uh yes because that that’s um that’s one of these all -purpose explanations that could be used about anything uh i i can imagine a theory with a physical zombie Jupiter where Jupiter doesn’t exist but only looks as though it does so that’s a whole class of explanations that have to be rejected on principle all

[01:16:59]  Blue: right

[01:17:00]  Pink: thank you carl cameron

[01:17:02]  Magenta: uh hi david can hear me yes thanks uh my my question is in a sort of around my trouble reconciling sort of copyrightism torturism with um behavioural genetics um namely that it seems to conflict with uh universal computation um so i think you’ve noted that your position is that the mind is not a blank slate you know so we have inborn genetic knowledge and but importantly that can be overwritten or overwritten um examples such as fasting and celibacy and skydiving and suicide um but so in my understanding of the behavioural genetics literature is that um genes seem to predict many behaviours i think a lot of people in that field may say explain which i think you have issued with but um and over the last 50 years the main evidence of that is around identical twins versus fraternal twins identical twins being more similar siblings being more similar than adopted siblings and and adopted children being similar to their biological parents and not similar to uh their adopted parents i think robert robert plomin describes um genes and influencing behaviour as describes uh what is rather than what can be which i think aligns with one of your comments around the amount of the amount that genes influence our behaviour is itself a product or function of of culture um uh but i think you’ve also noted that i think your position is that genetic knowledge or genetic influences uh is probably easy to be overwritten and probably happens early on um so i have trouble reconciling that with i suppose the fact of the adopted children being sort of

[01:18:58]  Pink: systematically

[01:18:58]  Magenta: similar to their biological parents their particular biological parents and it seems to me that genetic influences do have a very um large influence over what currently is um so yeah if you just want to react to that

[01:19:13]  Pink: uh yeah so i think that the um uh experiments on twin studies and sibling studies and so on correlations between behaviours of uh genetically similar and environmentally similar none of those experiments addresses the issue uh what i could say is addresses the issue of put it in computer terms where is the code located that is responsible for those similarities and differences and where did that code come from um given that that as you just mentioned given given that the um degree of genetic influence on behaviour is itself determined by culture that alone means that you you can’t do an experiment to uh distinguish um uh cultural from from you can’t do a behavioural experiment to distinguish cultural from genetic behaviours oh sorry you’ve got to be very careful in talking about these things you can’t do a behavioural experiment to distinguish between differences between different people’s genetic or cultural knowledge

[01:20:40]  Pink: and so i i in regard to this issue i would um uh just reject the relevance of all those experiments um the i i think there is a very strong argument as you just said also that um genetic behaviours that again the differences between genetic behaviours of different humans are relatively easy to override i i don’t mean that one can override them oneself just by waking up one morning and deciding to um on the contrary that might be very hard but but um uh for example uh memes either rational or anti -rational memes can just not override but just replace um genetic behaviours systematically because they have evolved the knowledge of how to do so and uh there are cultures where um people are more or less careful about dying and um it’s not to say that that someone in that culture or someone in a different culture could change that setting at will but on the other hand it is i think it provides a very strong argument for saying that if that is a problem that one has it is soluble one can one can alter one’s inborn tendencies in the same way that one can alter any other idea that one has that that affects one’s behaviour one can have a habit of writing with one’s right hand and then if one’s right hand becomes paralyzed but from some illness one can learn to use the left hand um and one can’t do that overnight but one can one can do it and one can do it arbitrarily arbitrarily well and there are ways of doing it faster or slower and there are always ways of improving those ways and so on right i i think that the genetic explanations or well one can always form genetic explanations i think they are in in in regard to um behaviours that are changeable they are those explanations are are dehumanizing and and false all

[01:23:16]  Blue: right Bart

[01:23:16]  Cyan: hi uh thank you David thank you uh Bruce and Saria actually tomorrow is my birthday so i guess this must be one of the most original birthday presents uh to get to ask you a question um my question is the following um is our society open enough for us to at one point refute justificationism in favour of critical rationalism collectively enough and what do we have to imagine as kind of acceleration effects on the growth of knowledge when that happens

[01:23:49]  Pink: well uh happy birthday thank you uh i think uh you know if we’re if we’re to be um uh rigorous doctrinaire popperians that’s a joke um then then we shouldn’t ask is society rational enough to accept critical rationalism it’s we should ask is society uh capable of making progress because we don’t know that critical rationalism is true we don’t know that what we think of as critical rationalism really is critical rationalism as uh perhaps there’s a better view of it that is different view and so on so the the question should be is society capable of making progress and i think it obviously is it is making enormous progress the things that worry us about uh when we notice that some things are going backwards uh it’s it’s um natural and good that we should focus a bit on those rather than go on you know go on about how well things are going we should be focused on problems and and things going backwards in some respects is a problem and deserves having creativity devoted to it but overall the big picture is that there’s enormous progress being made at uh a rate that’s unprecedented in history so um yes i i think there is such progress i i think that that uh society can although it may not you know people on the whole may make the wrong decisions and everything may go wrong um but it is possible for things to go right and i think at present they still are going right on the whole um so i’m optimistic all

[01:25:52]  Blue: right thank you and then final question erin

[01:25:54]  Gold: oh wow um thanks so much you i read an interview where you described being messy and untidy in your kind of um your home but being very rigorously organized on your laptop and i couldn’t follow what the distinction was why is it orderly in one domain and not in the other

[01:26:23]  Pink: i think i was going through a phase of of experimenting with the mac os and noticing how what what um how pre -thought out and sophisticated the model was because it is nothing compared with today’s and also it’s it’s not just the mac that nowadays it has those things i think there isn’t a and i think nowadays i i’m i’m pretty sloppy in my management of of my computer as well so i’m sloppy in all ways and what’s more i think uh if i can make a personal self criticism i i think i’m too sloppy in most ways um there’s some kind of irrationality there but being very sloppy compared with the norm uh on a computer or in one’s mind or in one’s home or in one’s office and all those things is useful for most people most of the time um uh for the reasons that i imposing a structure is a theory and uh one it includes inexplicit theories and if one takes a view on

[01:27:52]  Teal: that that’s too rigid then one is uh putting a strain on uh the possible new ways of thinking about that that one can explore

[01:28:04]  Blue: all right thank you uh david doge thank you very much for joining us i i know i really enjoyed this i can tell this has just been a fun chat for most of us so thank you for showing up for um the carl popper meet and greet thank you very

[01:28:20]  Red: much thank you david uh just wondering by the way did you had anything to do with writing the script for uh pickle rick for rick and morty by me no

[01:28:31]  Pink: i wish i had someday

[01:28:33]  Red: not today but someday i wouldn’t mind uh asking you that what if pickle rick found himself on earth which suddenly transformed into a planet made of cheese you think you’d be able to survive the

[01:28:47]  Blue: consistency of cheese yeah the consistency of cheese

[01:28:50]  Red: some other time just wanted to leave you with that yeah maybe

[01:28:54]  Pink: if you do this again next year you can invite the author of that episode because uh whoever the author or authors were uh they got that amazingly right it’s it’s like a it’s like a manifesto for for human creativity all

[01:29:10]  Blue: right thank you everybody hi

[01:29:14]  Red: thank

[01:29:14]  Green: you thank you

[01:29:16]  Gold: thank you thank you

[01:29:18]  Green: thank you bruce and maria for writing this too yes thank you thanks for your advice

[01:29:23]  Gold: thank you

[01:29:24]  Red: all right before

[01:29:25]  Blue: the show officially began we had a chance to interact with david deutch and ask him some questions i include his answers here

[01:29:32]  Pink: see people i’ve seen people

[01:29:35]  Purple: coming on tv and saying how they were inspired by richard dorkin’s and and then then they say well yes evolution is the survival of the fittest and and and so on and they they they just they haven’t got it and uh you know eo wilson hasn’t hasn’t got it i mean from our point of view maybe from his point of view we haven’t got it from his point of view uh dorkin’s hasn’t got it so i i don’t know what the magic thing is that makes progress no but if if a lot of young people are interested in ideas then there’s going to be progress even if one doesn’t notice it from one’s own point of view

[01:30:18]  Red: and and i agree with you because one of the things i realize is it’s almost like you have to even go into psychology if it’s too it isn’t just enough for the ideas to be available uh if people are not willing it seems like somehow people are either oblivious or i don’t know if they’re not interested then why they cling to certain things sometimes i wonder if they could even just look at themselves like almost like turn back on themselves and see why certain thoughts and ideas are coming or i i don’t know i i really do struggle with that too uh but despite having said that i think that at least those of us who are willing who are constantly struggling it really does help uh to have those ideas um you know i mean we might have gotten there in a while but most of us i mean we have limited life spans unfortunately so it helps anything i

[01:31:14]  Blue: think it takes a while right i mean and there’s so many ways to phrase things like even survival of the fittest if you think of that is like survival of the replicator that replicates the best yeah you can kind of see how it still fits right yes and so it’s i think that part of it is just it’s hard to get away from the memes that exist in a culture if evolution’s about survival of the fittest you can kind of see how even if you understand dockins that’s still true so you still use that term even though it’s misleading

[01:31:47]  Purple: yeah well Darwin used it right but but i i don’t know you know you can’t see into people’s minds but i i suspect that in many cases when people say survival of the fittest they are imagining animals fighting it out yes

[01:32:03]  Blue: i i think you’re right i think i think we have this big mingling in our minds of different ideas and we don’t really differentiate them that that well so i think you’re right um but

[01:32:15]  Teal: but ideas also have power and they illuminate people and you know there’s there is progress there really is yeah i agree i think

[01:32:23]  Red: it’s kind of interesting too that when you look into the theory of evolution too uh i mean of course you know they would say that there isn’t any directionality in evolution it’s not like things are going towards more complexity well first of all there isn’t a you know a definition of complexity that everybody agrees to but it’s kind of hard to turn away and and not recognize that there is something there like we have seen organism becoming more complex and it kind of goes hand in hand with the whole thing of recognizing why some people somehow think that there is no progress in ideas uh yeah sorry sorry go ahead

[01:33:03]  Purple: sorry sorry uh some people would like to deny that there’s progress for various reasons psychological political and so on uh and once you deny that there’s progress you have a sort of an automatic take on a number of things that that you have to be ignorant about in in if you don’t take that view and so it’s kind of comforting it’s kind of comfort comfort there’s pessimism there’s a certain comfort in pessimism

[01:33:33]  Blue: right

[01:33:34]  Red: interestingly i feel the same thing uh in evolutionary biology too i think sometimes some people have had such a reaction to the whole because so far many religions have recognized uh the the significance of humans you know as humans uh like my background i used to be a muslim but we were always told that all the angels bowed down to the human you know so god made something and then faking a turn against god because you know why i have been worshiping you so so it seems like a lot of reaction nowadays in in a reaction to religion some ideas have been reached which i think

[01:34:15]  Purple: yeah uh all uh like papa says that that uh all science begins with mysticism and i think philosophy you know began with religion and uh there’s it and what began with religion means is that religion was groping towards some truth attained some truth some falsehood and usually try to suppress criticism yeah uh so and i think you know maybe the atheist movement should should give a little ground here and and uh realize that that doing better than religion is not synonymous with denying everything that every religion says because that’s like starting from year zero yeah it

[01:35:06]  Red: almost kind of becomes the same sort of thing that you see in different religion where people to give themselves freedom they sometimes feel freedom they feel like they have to put somebody else down because otherwise how are they going to convince their kids to stick to their religion and not think about something else yes well

[01:35:24]  Purple: you’re still allowed to deny some aspects or many aspects of the opposing view but if you try to deny all aspects of the opposing view you will definitely go wrong and um interesting uh

[01:35:38]  Navy: reminds me of the uh brexit debate i was re -watching the video at dominant clinics explaining why i leave one to vote and he said uh everyone in this room i guess predominantly leftist uh he was saying vastly overvalue the um the rightness of being on the opposite side of the racists like Nigel Tharaj and all and all these guys said being on the opposite side of someone who is wrong is not the right way to think about it

[01:36:07]  Pink: oh yeah by

[01:36:08]  Navy: the way uh david i have the uh somewhat random question for you as long as you’re here um what did you have any expectations about what would happen when you first uh published the beginning of infinity

[01:36:19]  Purple: um well i was hoping that people would buy it um yeah well um uh one thing i thought at the time i with beginning of infinity i i ended up um finishing it under a deadline and it wasn’t as polished as i was hoping it would be and i had to leave out an entire chapter that i had planned uh in order to you know it took it took uh almost 10 years to write as did the fabric of reality but with the fabric of reality i finished it in my own time and beginning infinity it was it was uh a bit rushed and so i was thinking that it wasn’t as good and um although many people criticize it in many ways um few people said it wasn’t as good so you know go figure

[01:37:18]  Blue: it actually seems to beginning infinity seems to be the more popular of the two books from what i from what i’ve seen yes personally i’m a fabric of reality fan i actually i i read fabric reality two years before beginning infinity came out so i was anxious uh when it came out i’m curious what was the chapter that you didn’t get to do

[01:37:36]  Purple: uh i don’t know what it would have been called but it was about scientism and related issues oh a few paragraphs of that chapter got into uh the chapter on choices um uh you know the working out how many people go go into the museum and come out and then you you form the theory that people are being spontaneously created and destroyed and that that idea that was from the other chapter but i had been planning a long chapter on scientism i i now think that scientism deserves a whole book and i am not the person to write it so uh maybe that never would have been written

[01:38:19]  Red: it’s interesting you say that because my first experience when i broke away um i i i don’t want to say broke away from religion for me was a very natural progression when i recognized one day that i was an atheist but um i felt kind of almost isolated uh in a little bit of an isolation in my own community uh because i was just so weird in that way but i i started looking for other places and there were a lot of atheist groups and free thinkers and you know they called themselves those types and when i joined them i i kind of almost felt like i was going to some sort of a religious place uh like i really wanted to be with people where i could just literally talk we you know without saying oh you’re not allowed to ask this question but i didn’t find that and that kind of made me realize when i heard you talk about scientism where i read i’m like that clicked right away that unfortunately either you have that or the other end where you’re just not allowed to ask certain questions that depending down on criticism yes i’m

[01:39:27]  Navy: gonna say um david it’s been fun meeting some new people um i’m currently visiting austin texas right now so i know you’ve got a little bit of history there uh and um it’s funny to see how or maybe funny is the wrong word but uh it’s very interesting to note how the knowledge -based view of the world changes the discussion the whole shape of certain kind of discussions that otherwise would be maybe people focused like classes of people and um scientists up here and all these sorts of things or um just asking questions about where knowledge is created where um conflicts are happening where disagreements are happening simplify so many things and to the point where people will ask like my favorite recent thing is that somebody will ask me for um relationship advice or something and i’ll give them the same caveat that you always do is i don’t know that much about relationships but now what’s the problem and then you can kind of just ask a few questions and see okay well you know i can think a little bit about disagreements um so and you know kinds of questions you’ve asked and um i i’m constantly surprised that there’s always something to be said it may not be incredibly relevant but what my friend told me and i didn’t really expect this would happen um as he said um whenever i talk to carlos and you know i always tell him you’re effectively talking to david indirectly but uh in some way and uh but whatever i said uh he says the problem is unchanged

[01:41:01]  Navy: and yet i feel so much better and the analogy that i gave him was that um he was like someone who had to build a spaceship uh and he was currently in the desert and uh he had just been transported to a beautiful high -tech facility with all sorts of tools around uh he hasn’t built the spaceship yet but suddenly the situation of surrounding the problem is now totally different whereas it might have been this person doesn’t like me that’s you know it’s it becomes just about what is uh what what knowledge is lacking or you know what discussion do i need to have how can i uh take this person who i thought might disagree with me and that could be a problem and who i might try to lie to or otherwise try to get something and say oh well how can i just make the problem an objective thing we can both try to solve and double our our efforts and the creative possibilities here and so he just seems to um had that view that things become so much easier once you have this view of knowledge even if you haven’t directly solved the problem

[01:42:03]  Purple: maybe you’re describing the transition to optimism um if you think about what’s going wrong in terms of a lack of knowledge then in a certain although you still don’t know what that knowledge is in a certain sense you know that that what’s standing between you and and uh the the good outcome is a lack of knowledge and you want you need to create knowledge and that that puts a that already puts an optimistic spin on things even before you solve anything whereas if you think of things in terms of people then everything becomes who whom you know famous thing that Lenin is supposed to have said just a very accurate description of a whole class of world views who whom and you’ve got to get rid of who whom um if you get rid of it in politics that’s that’s like getting rid of who should rule and and so on and presumably what from what you’ve just said in in relationship things uh you get away from who whom and you you you turn towards well what actually is the problem the

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