Special Edition: Theory of Anything Hosts David Deutsch

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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

[00:00:10]  Bruce: 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 OurKarlPopper.net. At the last minute, I found out that David Deutsch himself was attending the session. What follows is the result.

[00:00:27]  Sadia: 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 Deutsch 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, to Twitter, which is not such a common thing among people who are specialists in certain fields.

[00:01:27]  Sadia: 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 Four Strands, run by Bruce Nielson 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 a 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. 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 reality.

[00:02:23]  Sadia: We talk about reality, we even talk about multi-world 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 him help interview. All right.

[00:02:42]  Bruce: Thank you, Sadia. I'm Bruce Nielson, 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, believe it or not, 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 inability 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.

[00:03:38]  Bruce: I wanted to go back to school and get a master's degree in computer science, 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 also started a podcast, The Theory of Anything Podcast, which is loosely based on David Deutsch's Four Strands. And Sadia mentioned the Four Strands blog, fourstrands.org. I am the one kind of behind that that runs that and hosts that. And my co-host, Cameo, is also here. Cameo, do you want to do a quick introduction?

[00:04:19]  Cameo: Yes, I do. Hi, I'm Cameo Duran, 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 Popperland and his passion 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.

[00:04:55]  Attendee 1: Thank you. Thank you. 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 is because you need 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 ideas, and then that will lead to exponential growth. But then why didn't the static society get stuck completely? Maybe this is the question: before the Enlightenment, 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?

[00:06:13]  Attendee 1: Something like this. I don't know if this is a question.

[00:06:17]  David: 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 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 as a result, they made many mistakes.

[00:07:36]  David: 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 staticity. And then staticity sort of emerged out of that sometimes. But because staticity 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.

[00:08:47]  Attendee 1: Yeah, that was not what I got from the book so far. So it was a little bit different.

[00:08:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:08:56]  Attendee 2: Hi, David and everyone. My name is [name sounds like Pei Yuan; spelling uncertain] 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 on 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-error 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-error correction can take place? Is there a set of questions that a person can question himself 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 and exists like the space-time causality, for example, in physics.

[00:10:45]  Attendee 2: 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. So 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 everyday life. So my question to you is, what do you think is the most important thing to do for statisticians or a statistics researcher to help in the process of scientific discovery? And this kind of... What do 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]  David: Well, one can't prophesy, of course. To answer the last question first, because I think that's the easiest. Statistics is the interesting and useful branch of mathematics. And the 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. It is the part that is not creative but mechanical. So if we have a mass of statistics 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 Popper has taught us.

[00:13:32]  Attendee 2: 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 so much?

[00:13:52]  David: I think that's fundamentally impossible for the same reason that any piece of mathematics can't lead to discovery. The piece of mathematics isn't about the world unless you first have a theory that connects it to the world. Now, as I say, speaking of Popper, 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 Popper 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 Popper's philosophy. There is no such thing as a philosophical method or a self-improvement method or a psychological method.

[00:15:17]  David: It's all opportunistic. It's opportunistic problem-solving. However, you said maybe the theme of my book is all problem-solving. And maybe the theme of all Popper'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.

[00:16:11]  Unidentified speaker: So yeah, there is no method. It's all about creativity.

[00:16:15]  David: Yes. And now, what was your second question? I remember the third and first.

[00:16:21]  Attendee 2: The second question is about causality.

[00:16:24]  David: Oh, yes. Well, in what you would find if you looked at modern physics and modern philosophy, 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.

[00:17:40]  David: 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 explanations in terms of causes than it is in the prevailing mode of explanation. 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.

[00:18:39]  Sadia: So Ella, could I please, let me go with you next.

[00:18:42]  Attendee 3: 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 level of detail that is sufficient that we can implement it on a computer. And so my question is about the logic of how the minds manage to create knowledge 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 Darwin and Dawkins theory that the replicators are sort of the key explanation for why biological evolution manages to create knowledge. And so I'm interested 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 creating knowledge in human minds?

[00:19:40]  David: To some extent, that's a question of implementation. But I think, well, and I don't know how creativity works in the human mind. If I knew, 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, my guess is that that's not how the implementation works in the mind. There could be a logically equivalent implementation in terms of replicators. But the thing is, in the mind or in a computer, you could save memory space just by, rather than by having multiple copies, you just have one copy with a number. There are 10,000 of these, which is a bit like saying this thing is worth 10,000 of this other thing, which hasn't done the equivalent of replication. I should say, as I say in the book as well, that I don't think we understand biological evolution well enough either. Maybe one route towards AGI would be to do the equivalent of artificial biological evolution first.

[00:21:07]  David: It may or may not be a good route. Replicating a bird's wing was not the best route to artificial flight. Although the underlying theory is the route towards it, the underlying theory of how a bird's wing works is the way to make an airplane. So I doubt that it's replicators, I doubt that there are replicators in the brain.

[00:21:38]  Sadia: Great, thank you so much. Raiden, could you, you can please go ahead.

[00:21:44]  Attendee 4: Hi, I'm a PhD student at UBC 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 Popper's books. And so I guess I'm curious to know how you think about the difference between knowledge and information, and then also if you have any communication strategies that you could offer in terms of how to get people to realize that I'm trying to talk about something that's not information, when I say the word knowledge.

[00:22:25]  David: Yeah, the only communication strategy that works, apart from spending many years writing a book, is conversation. And you just get together with someone and try to overlap your problem situation, and then something happens. I think of knowledge as a species of information, and I've at various times used several different characterizations of what makes it different from other information. And my most recent choice is to say that knowledge is information with causal properties. There's causation arising again. So knowledge is that property of a computer program that makes it do something useful. And for example, you have a word processor, and the word processor is useful because it knows. It is the programmer, of course, 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 so on.

[00:24:01]  David: And there are different aspects of the context which have to be taken into account and so on. So knowledge is information with causal power. Also an interesting thing about it, 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 persuade them of. But then further, information and knowledge are extremely unusual abstractions, because they only exist when they're physically instantiated. And that's another confusing concept that I sometimes have to work hard to persuade people of—or rather, to get people to see what I'm even talking about, whether they agree or not. So yeah, 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.

[00:25:15]  David: What's more important is to have an interesting discussion.

[00:25:19]  Attendee 4: [Unclear] to hear that you struggled with it too.

[00:25:26]  Attendee 5: Yes, thank you. Thank you, David, for doing this. My question is about moral philosophy and moral truth. This is a topic you've touched before. I'm concerned about how the is–ought dichotomy is interpreted as often hopelessly nihilistic, that it condemns us to relativism. And the idea that if moral values can't be derived from facts, they can't be true because they don't refer to objective entities. So for many people who believe in moral truth, the dichotomy is often perceived as 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 are false. It's not a refutation. And in a sense, moral ideas cannot be refuted by mere facts any more than they can derive from them. And I find myself in, I think, the minority of people who believe that the is–ought dichotomy is true, but who also believe that it doesn't keep us from creating moral knowledge.

[00:26:27]  Attendee 5: And Popper described a position that he called critical dualism 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–ought dichotomy? How does it bear on your concept of moral truth? And does the concept of truth apply to moral propositions? Thank you.

[00:26:53]  David: Well, my opinion is it definitely does. And I agree with everything you said there. So that's basically my position as well. Popper, it's a bit hard to interpret on issues of objective morality because he doesn't really discuss that point. You can only infer Popper's position, as far as I know anyway. I haven't read everything he wrote. You can infer when he says, for example, that we can make moral progress, and also that 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. I like to use the argument that when people say that 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 un-Popperian point of view, because that's more like the Duhem–Quine view.

[00:28:14]  David: It's a bit arbitrary to say 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 irrelevant in all fields. Knowledge can never be deduced. So the ought–is distinction merely says that you can't deduce moral knowledge from scientific knowledge. But so what? You can't deduce scientific knowledge from anything. So you can't deduce moral knowledge. But we're not after deducing knowledge. And 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 the moral issues arise, because you've got to wonder what should I want?

[00:29:25]  David: When you're wondering what should I do next, 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, and therefore the ought–is distinction is not epistemologically relevant. It's not relevant to what kind of knowledge we can create.

[00:29:57]  Sadia: Actually, I had a question which was similar to that, if you guys don't mind me interjecting in there. My question was about, usually when I talk to people about that, one of the questions that's raised is that when it comes to science, we all, the laws of nature constrain everything. We don't have a choice in that. But the moral seems to be different. I guess one of the differences with morality is that even if we claim that we discover moral principles, then we still have a choice. We are not bound. It's as if they feel like there is something more concrete in science. Would you like to say something about perhaps, maybe you have any ideas about roots of morality in the sense of, do you tie it to... 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?

[00:30:55]  Sadia: Is there something at the back of your mind as to what are the roots of morality?

[00:31:00]  David: I think in general, it's not very helpful to think about what the roots of something are. Because when you find some roots, there's always going to be roots beneath that. And you'll never get to the bottom of it. So the foundations are sometimes useful, but not because they're underlying everything, but because they reveal something of the structure of things. I'm a 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 lose your income and so on. But when you make a mistake at the foundations of morality, the physical world will come for you much worse. So it's not really... And I'm not only talking about other people coming for you. Even if you were a person on a desert island who made moral mistakes, it would cause physical trouble for you.

[00:32:10]  David: You would make mistakes in your life, which might shorten it just from making a mistake in morality. So I don't think this distinction that morality is a matter of choice is true. Or at least it's no more a matter of choice than any other idea is a matter of choice. We choose and create our own ideas according to our values about what's true. But our values about what's true, even though they are completely changeable, are not at all arbitrary. Maybe the best example of this is pure mathematics. Some people are reduced to claiming that mathematics is arbitrary. Really mathematics is just the study of what mathematicians think it is clever or glorious or whatever to think about, which reduces mathematics to basically a study of human brains, mathematicians' brains or the brains of a community of mathematicians. But it's simply not true. Mathematics is the study of abstractions that actually exist and properties of them that exist and are independent of us.

[00:33:31]  David: We can choose which mathematical objects we think are interesting and worth trying to understand, but we can be mistaken and we can follow dead ends. I think in mathematics, it's also unusual to run into a brick wall like that. By the way, I think that running into a dead end and making large mistakes, unless they kill you, it's not all bad. In fact, it can be just as good as successfully discovering things, which the latter can leave you feeling empty. Whereas, as Popper says, if you're engaged with problems, even if you never solve them, then you're still having fun.

[00:34:24]  Bruce: I have one quick question, I hope is quick. 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 kept wondering why that was, because it seemed like it would be a valid theory about constructors in the same way, information theory is a valid theory about information, or computational theory is 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?

[00:35:00]  David: Well, I guess that no particular motivation is ever essential. But the reason, I think constructor theory could stand 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. The reason I think it's important that it underlies many areas of physics is just that I think it does underlie them. 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. Without ever being stated explicitly, 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 the constructor-theoretic form instead and cannot be expressed in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion.

[00:36:17]  David: And that is kind of shrugged off because people think it's not legitimate. So in thermodynamics, there are explanations that seem to directly conflict with explanations in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion. And the usual, the conventional response to that is basically to say, oh well, thermodynamics isn't really true. It's just an approximation scheme. And at root, these quantities like work and heat and the laws of thermodynamics are not actually true. But that's just a prejudice. And my feeling is that 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. And probably not if it isn't. And we'll find out if it's true, but only by trying to make such progress using it.

[00:37:31]  David: Thank you.

[00:37:32]  Bruce: I wanted to give Dwarkesh a chance to ask a question. He wasn't able to, through his interface, raise his hand, and he did it about this point. So are you still there? Can you ask your question?

[00:37:42]  Dwarkesh: Yeah, I'm here. Thanks. Hey, David, I'm a big fan. I just wanted to ask you, this isn't my view, but I just want to play devil's advocate here, because I don't have a good rebuttal to this argument, which is there's a Bayesian critique of Popper, which is that verification and disconfirmation both reveal information about a theory, and that while Popper can deal with disconfirmation, there's no way to integrate evidence that verifies a theory. And so Bayes is backwards compatible with Popper, in that it can 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?

[00:38:24]  David: I think the context in which that criticism arises, I think contains mistakes. First of all, the context is that there is some data 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 we start off with data. That just isn't true, as we have learned from Popper. So in that respect, the whole picture of science and of thinking generally, that underlies that critique, is just wrong. Secondly, so that's where science is coming from. Then there's where science is going to. So this critique suggests that what we're trying to do, where science is going to, is getting justified beliefs. That what we really want to do is to make the probability that we assign or the credence that we have for true theories should go up. We need some method that will make the credence of true theories go up.

[00:39:44]  David: 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 can that possibly be a picture of science? Well, the answer is that science, from beginning to end, doesn't resemble that picture. So science is problem-based, and the way it proceeds is by conjecture. And after it has problems and conjectures, it has criticisms. And none of that appears in the Bayesian picture. So of course they're going to think that 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, inductivism, something of that kind, is just false root and branch.

[00:40:42]  Sadia: All right, thank you. Mike?

[00:40:45]  Mike: Yes. Hi, everyone. Hi, David. So I was wanting to ask you about modes of explanation and knowing how important they are to kind of structuring some of your work. And Bruce just brought up constructor theory, which I think you might describe as its own mode of explanation. And I was trying to particularly link it to computation. So I have your shorthand. If you can't program it, you haven't understood it. I was wondering if you follow that. Is inventing a new mode of explanation, is that synonymous with inventing like a new type of algorithm? Is the link to computation and explanation, can it be kind of forged in that way? But you don't have to speak specifically just to that.

[00:41:30]  David: I'm reluctant to reduce things to algorithms. I think that usually sucks the creativity out of the picture and makes it wrong. So I'm trying to think whether this maxim, if you can't program it, you haven't understood it, which is really a bit of a paraphrase of Feynman, whether this applies to everything or just theories about how information works in the world, and in particular AGI and so on. So if you can't program an algorithm, you haven't understood it. If you can't program any kind of information process, then you haven't understood it. If you can't, say you have a process of how stars work, a theory about how stars work, then it's also true, I'm thinking out loud here, then it's also true that if you can't program that, you haven't understood it. But that doesn't mean programming the motion of every molecule in the star. It means programming the features of the theory, of your explanatory theory that your theory says explain the star.

[00:42:55]  David: So it's those that you have to be able to program. But finding out what those are is not a matter of programming anything. It's a matter of creativity and problem solving. So my tentative answer is that that maxim doesn't apply to everything. It doesn't apply to creating the knowledge to do that.

[00:43:20]  Sadia: And Mark, would you like to go next?

[00:43:25]  Mark: Yes. So yeah, thanks for doing this so much. It's really an honor to talk to you. Of all the things that we can assign objectivity to in life, I feel like the hardest one for me personally is aesthetics. So for instance, I find the cave paintings of like Altamira and Lascaux to be beautiful. But the reason I do is because of how old they are. It's humankind speaking to us from 30,000 years ago, trying to survive the harsh ice ages. And I feel like if someone painted the state rotunda the same way with the bison and everything, said it was a masterpiece, I'd probably want to slap them in the face and say, I don't find it very beautiful. So I don't know. I'm ascribing aesthetic value to the cave paintings of Lascaux because of the romantic notion of humankind painting them so many years ago, maybe being the first. What are they trying to say, if they're trying to say anything else at all?

[00:44:25]  Mark: Is it fair to ascribe aesthetic value to that for reasons like that? Or should we just judge it for just how it looks? Without considering the environment, who did it, and what they were trying to say? If that makes sense.

[00:44:37]  David: Yes, I think to some extent, this is just a matter of the fact that language and terminology aren't, 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 terminology that slides over from one area to an adjacent area and so on. So a mathematician can describe an equation as beautiful. A person can describe someone's mind as beautiful. And they mean something by that. They mean something objective by that. But it is not the same thing as what we mean 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 some partisans getting shot? How do you separate the beauty of the fact that he's captured, by the way, a very ugly situation so well?

[00:46:00]  David: How do you separate that from beauty in the sense that if the same skill and insight had been used to describe an orange harvesting festival, it could also describe that as beautiful, but there'd be a different kind of beauty being described there. I think there is such a thing as artistic beauty, which is often mixed with other values that we want to put into an object. And maybe we shouldn't get hung up on whether that is really beauty. It's kind of essentialism to ask that. The thing is that there are many features of an object that are desirable, and the cave paintings are desirable in one sense and are clearly rubbish in another sense. And there's nothing wrong with that. If somebody was interested in understanding the distinction there more deeply, then they would probably find themselves inventing a more refined terminology for it.

[00:47:18]  David: Rather than say, is this really beautiful? They would say, there is a thing that we want. It is this. I'm going to explain it. And the cave painting has that, has heaps of that. And there's this other thing which we want in a different context, which the people who did the cave painting also wanted, but weren't very good at achieving. And if somebody was spending their life on teasing out that distinction very finely, then they'd probably invent a more fine terminology.

[00:47:57]  Jesse: Hey, David. I have a question that might be somewhat personal, but have a lot of implications in a lot of people's lives. And I know Luli's talked about this, and it revolves around just romantic relationships, personal relationships, and the whole dichotomy of genes versus memes. We need society to procreate now. We don't have, you know, we don't live an infinite life. We know immortality is 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 the best explanations that we have in our lives. But how do you think about that in terms of children and education, whether or not to have a family or be in a relationship or just work on 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]  David: I don't think it's a good idea to try and save the world in the sense of subordinating one's own values to what one thinks the world's values are. So maybe the world needs a larger population. My guess is that it does. In other words, that that would be a good thing, that 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 a bad idea to subordinate one's own life to that objective. Yeah. I don't think it's even, for example, a good idea in my own life to try to publicise my own ideas. I do it to some extent, but I don't subordinate it to the fun of actually trying to solve problems. [Editorial note: wording as transcribed in both recordings. This appears reversed; the surrounding answer prioritizes solving problems and personal values over publicity.]

[00:50:11]  David: Some of the problems are only of interest to me, some are of interest to me and half a dozen other people in the world, and some are of interest to more people. But the way I would choose what to do is try to meet my own values. And to the extent that my own values include having preferences about how the world is, then meeting my values would include trying to make the world better. 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.

[00:50:54]  Jesse: Yeah, I guess that answers a little bit of it. And then it's just like being young, a big part of culture in general and society is just finding a significant other or a partner. And there's the whole debate against polyamory or to have a committed monogamous relationship. And that drives a lot of culture.

[00:51:20]  David: Yeah, well, different people find answers in different ways. And they have extremely different problem situations.

[00:51:28]  Jesse: And I guess from the context of the beginning of infinity, of what was actually useful. It was useful to make more people, and to do that, people had families to do that in a kind of divide and conquer kind of sense, whether they knew it or not, right? People kind of, when they team up, they can do, they're more than the sum of their parts.

[00:51:50]  David: Yes, although there are many ways of teaming up. And each of them has better and worse ways of doing it. So, you know, you form a society, you form friends, you form families, and all of those can involve mistakes in how to do it. And we've got here by people making progress with that. But, you know, for most of history, they didn't make progress.

[00:52:24]  Sadia: All right. Tracy, you want to go next? Tracy?

[00:52:28]  Tracy: Sure. Hi. Hi. So, I'm hoping this is just more of a fun, lighthearted question, maybe. But on Thursday, I woke up, I had a dream that I had gotten the opportunity to meet you, David. And the very next day, I find out that suddenly there's this opportunity to meet you at the Zoom meeting. Exciting for me. 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]  David: So, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by quantum prediction, but predicting the growth of knowledge is inherently impossible. And there's no reason to think that quantum effects might be implicated in the human brain. And the idea that quantum theory has kind of mystical, that it justifies various traditional mystical ideas, always comes from mistakes about quantum theory. It doesn't come, the real world doesn't implement those. So I think there wasn't a connection in that, you know, I would guess that there wasn't a connection in that respect. Maybe that's a boring reply, but my guess is that's the truth of it.

[00:54:03]  Tracy: That's a good point, thank you.

[00:54:07]  Bruce: All right, Ms. Rob, I don't know if I pronounced that right.

[00:54:09]  Attendee (replication question): You can hear me? Yes. 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 sciences. So around 2010, like people started to realize that there are a lot of studies that [cannot] 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 by experiment, then afterwards give an explanation how this process might happen in the mind. But the prioritizing replication seems to miss the point that we can replicate, say, Newtonian laws infinite many times, but they're not actual explanation of how the world works around us.

[00:55:23]  Attendee (replication question): I just wanted to know how you see this, what you can say about methodology of psychological studies.

[00:55:34]  David: Yeah, I entirely agree. And I think the replication crisis in psychology and related fields, 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 it wrong, and the fact that it's not replicated is 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 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 something can be replicated in psychology, then it's not really psychology.

[00:57:08]  David: For example, people do wonderful work creating optical illusions and explaining why they work. And they work in psychology departments, many of these people, but that's not psychology. 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 stem from that that you might ask then after the built-in interpretations of sensory data. There is also further interpretation that happens 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 and there has to be a model of those. And there I would say that replicating them on a computer might be a useful thing to do with those explanatory theories. So if you can't program it, you haven't understood it might be relevant there.

[00:58:29]  David: But as I think you hint, I think the real trouble with psychology and related fields is scientism 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 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.

[00:59:16]  Attendee 6: All right, David. Thanks for doing this. You had mentioned earlier, I'm speaking from Jerusalem, Israel. You had 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 is apparently the first Popper piece of writing that was translated into Hebrew. I know you're from Haifa, so I thought you might get a kick out of that. Anyway, my question is, in your first chapter in your book, in your theory on explanation, I've always wondered, I always got the feeling as you step through the phases leading up to the breakthrough method 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 Popper's. I would normally bring this up, but I know this is a Popper-oriented group.

[01:00:23]  Attendee 6: 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 Popper's theory of explanation?

[01:00:37]  David: So I privately and personally think that it is Popper's theory. I'm not a historian of science, and I'm not really interested in who had what idea. But I see, for example, the first chapter of The Beginning of Infinity is just a small explanatory footnote to Popper's 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 only interested in what the truth is. And on the other hand, at the other extreme, if someone comes along and says, that's exactly what Popper said, and even your footnote is in a footnote of Popper on page 483. Well, again, I don't care. 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.

[01:01:56]  David: I can't prove that from his writings, and I know that, for example, David Miller thinks that that's not entirely true. Again, I'm sorry if it sounds dismissive to keep saying I don't care, but it's not what I'm interested in.

[01:02:13]  Attendee 6: Thanks. Thank you.

[01:02:15]  Sadia: Dennis.

[01:02:16]  Dennis: Hey, guys, can you hear me?

[01:02:17]  Sadia: Yes.

[01:02:18]  Dennis: Great. Hey, David, it's Dennis. Earlier you mentioned in response to Ella, Ella was asking about self-replicating ideas in the mind, and 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 exist, and in that way one could save a lot of memory. 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 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 replicator-based explanation can currently explain, for example, memories, how people evolve, why some ideas survive in the mind and not others.

[01:03:20]  Dennis: 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 “chosen” in scare quotes, to do so as well. Most of the criticism of this Neo-Darwinian theory of the mind, if you want to call it that, that 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 fossil thing, which I believe you've brought up before in defense of the multiverse.

[01:04:13]  Dennis: So, like, people might claim that we don't need dinosaurs. We don't need to claim that dinosaurs really existed to explain fossils, even though that is already a 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 off the rails, we could claim that many, instead of claiming that many dinosaurs existed, we could claim that there was a single dinosaur that had a quantity value that determined how many fossils it left behind. 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.

[01:05:05]  Dennis: So, in a way, I agree that dinosaurs need not have existed for the same reason that no theory need necessarily be true. And so, that applies to self-replicating ideas of the mind as well. But what I'd really be interested in is a refutation, like an argument why replicators can't play a role in how the mind works. Can you think of such an argument?

[01:05:28]  David: No. And I did say that I don't know how any of that works. And maybe you're right that maybe it's the fact that I learned programming a long time ago, and my formative programming years were in an era where memory was expensive, and it was worth spending time thinking of more efficient ways of storing the data. And now memory is extremely cheap, and 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. So having said that, I think your comparison with the dinosaur theory is a bit unfair. If your problem is that you want to make an artificial fossil, it would not be a good idea to start by making dinosaurs. You need to take the shortcut that's available and make an artificial fossil that way. And again, if you want to explain how the fossil got there, that would be a terrible way of approaching that problem.

[01:06:53]  David: But if you want to make an artificial fossil, then going via dinosaurs is far too inefficient. But since I don't know how it works, I can't really pontificate about how to do it. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

[01:07:13]  Moderator (identity uncertain): [Next caller’s name is unclear.]

[01:07:14]  Attendee 7: Hi guys, how's it going? Thanks to Sadia and Bruce for putting this event on and for David for answering questions. So my question was about, well, the explanation of how creativity works or just what creativity is and just critical rationalism in general seems to contradict certain commonly held assumptions, which are effectively just statements that people are mechanical. And, you know, for example, operant conditioning, which is that 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 rewards and punishments. So that when dealing with problems in psychology, like maybe addiction 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.

[01:08:21]  Attendee 7: I think the original question actually I had about specifically about addiction and making choices was sort of answered already when you were speaking about, you know, just creating the best moral theories and so on. But I was maybe wondering if you could say something about incentives and disincentives and how valuable the work done in behavioral economics is and whether it's just fundamentally based on faulty assumptions and there is not much use to it, or it's just maybe contingently useful based on the cultural ideas at a given time or something like that.

[01:09:00]  David: Yeah, so I have to recognize that lots of things in the world do not involve creativity, and such things can be analyzed in terms that would be dehumanizing if applied to things that do involve creativity. And economics, for example, is a field where the important issues are dominated by creativity, but not totally exhaustively described by creative processes. There are other processes as well. And if you're looking at an area of the economy where not much creativity is being used because people find the setup basically satisfactory, and what they want is a mechanical way of getting through to various things, then you can find an algorithm that sets the prices in those situations. You know, like when there's a shortage of some raw material, then you can work out at least the 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.

[01:10:18]  David: And similarly, if there are things that happen in the human mind, in the human brain, I should say, that aren't creative, like optical illusions and that kind of thing, and if they feed into the problem that you have, which is partly about creativity and partly not, then that might be helpful. I'm not going to say that it isn't helpful, but I say that whenever creativity touches on something, it changes it profoundly, and it really becomes the most important thing to try to understand in regard to that field. Rewards and punishments are an abomination, really, in anything to do with humans, because they are trying to forcibly change a human situation which had involved some creativity to one that doesn't. And that is just bad. I wonder, you know, it's like these purported cures for gayness and so on, by giving gay people electric shocks, and if people want to be treated like that, they are making a mistake.

[01:11:43]  David: I don't care if it works or not. It works in quotes. I'm wondering how would you cure... If you thought that an S&M fetish was bad for you, and you had one, you thought it was bad for you, what kind of conditioning would you expect to cure that? Like, you know, being given electric shocks.

[01:12:11]  Bruce: Thank you. Karl?

[01:12:13]  Karl: Yeah. 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?

[01:12:40]  David: Yes, I think not much is known about this. I think there are some tiny clues in various places. And I think that maybe the main thing is, I think there is, since we know so little about this, I think there is room for a range of views that can all be considered reasonable, depending on where one is coming from. One can rule out, I think, the extremes, like thinking that, on the one hand, thinking that we should respect the wishes of trees, is very close to being untenable philosophically because of what we know factually. And at the other extreme, I think that it is wrong to adopt a position of 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 think that is different from saying that there is a good reason for adopting that view.

[01:14:15]  David: But in between those extremes, there's a huge range of positions that I think are reasonable.

[01:14:22]  Karl: But would you say that this is a mild form of the precautionary principle, that in the absence of knowledge, we should try not to...?

[01:14:31]  David: No. [Unclear phrase about using the precautionary principle.] I think it's more that what we should do in the face of ignorance. In the face of ignorance, the first thing is to be tolerant of multiple views. And the precautionary principle precisely isn't. So, you know, I would say be tolerant of multiple views about this. You said about evidence, that a tiny piece of evidence in regard to dogs. Dogs look like they have feelings. More than similar other animals do. And 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 can easily think of ways that might not be right. But beggars can't be choosers. I think we have touches of evidence that maybe some animals have some element of qualia.

[01:15:56]  David: But if this counts as anecdotal evidence or something, there is strong anecdotal evidence the other way as well. If you look at animals like chimpanzees that look as though they have feelings. In other experiments, it's fairly clear that they do not have an idea of what's going on, that they're just behaving mechanically.

[01:16:29]  Karl: But you tentatively reject the notion of like philosophical zombie dogs, I guess.

[01:16:38]  David: Yes, because that's one of these all-purpose explanations that could be used about anything. 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.

[01:16:59]  Bruce: All right. Thank you, Karl. Cameron.

[01:17:03]  Cameron: Hi, David, can you hear me? My question is sort of around my trouble reconciling sort of Popperianism, Deutschianism with behavioral genetics, namely that it seems to conflict with universal computation. So I think you've noted that your position is that the mind is not a blank slate. So we have inborn genetic knowledge. But importantly, that can be overwritten. Examples such as fasting, celibacy and skydiving and suicide. So in my understanding of the behavioural genetics literature is that 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. 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 adopted children being similar to their biological parents and not similar to their adopted parents.

[01:18:16]  Cameron: I think Robert Plomin describes genes influencing behaviour as describing what is rather than what can be, which I think aligns with one of your comments around the amount that genes influence our behaviour is itself a product or function of culture. But I think you've also noted that, I think your position is that genetic knowledge or genetic influences is probably easy to be overridden and probably happens early on. So I have trouble reconciling that with, I suppose the fact of the adopted children being sort of systematically similar to their biological parents, their particular biological parents. And it seems to me that genetic influences do have a very large influence over what currently is. So, yeah, if you just want to react to that.

[01:19:15]  David: Yes, I think that the experiments on twin studies and sibling studies and so on, correlations between behaviors of genetically similar and environmentally similar, none of those experiments addresses the issue. Put it in computer terms: none addresses the issue of where is the code located that is responsible for those similarities and differences? And where did that code come from? Given that, as you just mentioned, given that the degree of genetic influence on behavior is itself determined by culture, that alone means that you can't do a behavioral experiment to distinguish cultural from genetic behaviors. Sorry, you've got to be very careful in talking about these things. You can't do a behavioral experiment to distinguish between differences between different people's genetic or cultural knowledge. And so, in regard to this issue, I would just reject the relevance of all those experiments.

[01:20:53]  David: I think there is a very strong argument, as you just said also, that genetic behaviors, again, the differences between genetic behaviors of different humans are relatively easy to override. I don't mean that one can override them oneself just by waking up one morning and deciding to. On the contrary, that might be very hard. But for example, memes, either rational or antirational memes, can just not override, but just replace genetic behaviors systematically, because they have evolved the knowledge of how to do so. And there are cultures where people are more or less careful about dying. And it's not to say that someone in that culture, or someone in a different culture, could change that setting at will. But on the other hand, I think it provides a very strong argument for saying that if that is a problem that one has, it is soluble. One can alter one's inborn tendencies in the same way that one can alter any other idea that one has that affects one's behaviour.

[01:22:28]  David: One can have a habit of writing with one's right hand, and then if one's right hand becomes paralysed from some illness, one can learn to use the left hand. And one can't do that overnight, but one can do it, and one can do it arbitrarily well, and there are ways of doing it faster or slower, and there are always ways of improving those ways and so on. I think that the genetic explanations, or one can always form genetic explanations, I think they are, in regard to behaviors that are changeable, those explanations are dehumanizing and false. All right, Bart.

[01:23:18]  Bart: Thank you, David. Thank you, Bruce and Sadia. Actually, tomorrow is my birthday, so I guess this must be one of the most original birthday presents to get to ask you a question. My question is the following. Is our society open enough for us to, at one point, refute justificationism in favor 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]  David: Well, happy birthday. I think, you know, if we're to be rigorous doctrinaire Popperians, that's a joke, then we shouldn't ask, is society rational enough to accept critical rationalism? We should ask, is society 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 perhaps there's a better view of it that is different from our view, and so on. So 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 when we notice that some things are going backwards, it's natural and good that we should focus a bit on those, rather than go on about how well things are going. We should be focused on problems, and things going backwards in some respects is a problem, and deserves having creativity devoted to it.

[01:25:13]  David: But overall, the big picture is that there's enormous progress being made at a rate that's unprecedented in history. So yes, I think there is such progress. I think that society can, although it may not. People on the whole may make the wrong decisions, and everything may go wrong. But it is possible for things to go right, and I think at present they still are going right on the whole. So I'm optimistic.

[01:25:51]  Bruce: All right, thank you. And then final question, Aaron.

[01:25:55]  Aaron: Oh, wow. Thanks so much. I read an interview where you described being messy and untidy in 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?

[01:26:21]  David: I think I was going through a phase of experimenting with the Mac OS and noticing how pre-thought-out and sophisticated the model was, because it is nothing compared with today's. And also it's not just the Mac that nowadays it has those things. And I think nowadays I'm pretty sloppy in my management of my computer as well. So I'm sloppy in all ways. And what's more, I think, if I can make a personal self-criticism, I think I'm too sloppy in most ways. There's some kind of irrationality there. But being very sloppy compared with the norm 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 for the reasons that I said in that interview long ago. The reason is that imposing a structure is a theory and it includes inexplicit theories. And if one takes a view on that that's too rigid, then one is putting a strain on the possible new ways of thinking about that that one can explore.

[01:28:04]  Bruce: All right, thank you. David Deutsch, thank you very much for joining us. 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 the Karl Popper Meet and Greet.

[01:28:19]  Sadia: Thank you very much. Just wondering, by the way, did you had anything to do with writing the script for Pickle Rick, for Rick and Morty by any chance?

[01:28:30]  Unidentified speaker: No, I wish I had.

[01:28:32]  Sadia: And someday, not today, but someday I wouldn't mind asking you 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?

[01:28:46]  Unidentified speaker: The consistency of cheese, yeah.

[01:28:50]  Sadia: Some other time, just wanted to leave you with that.

[01:28:53]  David: Yeah, maybe if you do this again next year, you can invite the author of that episode, because whoever the author or authors were, they got that amazingly right. It's like a manifesto for human creativity.

[01:29:11]  Bruce: All right, thank you everybody.

[01:29:13]  Sadia: Bye, thank you.

[01:29:17]  Bruce: Thank you.

[01:29:18]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you Bruce and Sadia for running this too.

[01:29:20]  Bruce: Yes, thank you.

[01:29:21]  Unidentified speaker: Thanks for your time.

[01:29:22]  Bruce: Thank you. Before the show officially began, we had a chance to interact with David Deutsch and ask him some questions. I include his answers here.

[01:29:32]  David: I've seen people coming on TV and saying how they were inspired by Richard Dawkins, and then they say, well, yes, evolution is the survival of the fittest, and so on. They just haven't got it. And EO. Wilson 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, Dawkins hasn't got it. So I don't know what the magic thing is that makes progress. But 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.

[01:30:19]  Sadia: And I agree with you because one of the things I've realized is it's almost like you have to even go into psychology of it too. It isn't just enough for the ideas to be available. If people are not willing, it seems like somehow people are either oblivious or I don't know if they're not interested in 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. I don't know. I really do struggle with that too. But despite having said that, I think that at least those of us who are willing, who are constantly struggling, it really does help to have those ideas. I mean, we might have gotten there in a while, but most of us, I mean, we have limited lifespans, unfortunately, so it helps anything else.

[01:31:14]  Bruce: I 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 as like survival of the replicator that replicates the best, you can kind of see how it still fits, right? And so I think that part of it is just, it's hard to get away from the memes that exist in a culture. If evolution is about survival of the fittest, you can kind of see how, even if you understand Dawkins, that's still true. So you still use that term, even though it's misleading.

[01:31:47]  David: Yeah, well, Darwin used it. Right. But I don't know, you can't see into people's minds, but I suspect that in many cases, when people say survival of the fittest, they are imagining animals fighting it out.

[01:32:02]  Bruce: Yes, I think you're right. I think we have this big mingling in our minds of different ideas, and we don't really differentiate them that well. So I think you're right.

[01:32:14]  David: But ideas also have power and they illuminate people. And, you know, there is progress. There really is.

[01:32:21]  Bruce: Yeah, I agree.

[01:32:24]  Sadia: It's kind of interesting, too, that when you look into the theory of evolution, too, 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 not recognize that there is something there. Like, we have seen organisms 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.

[01:32:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, some people would like to deny it.

[01:33:02]  Sadia: Sorry, sorry, go ahead.

[01:33:03]  David: Sorry, sorry. Some people would like to deny that there's progress for various reasons, psychological, political and so on. Once you deny that there's progress, you have a sort of an automatic take on a number of things that you have to be ignorant about if you don't take that view. And so it's kind of comforting. It's kind of pessimism. There's a certain comfort in pessimism.

[01:33:34]  Sadia: Interestingly, I feel the same thing in evolutionary biology too. I think sometimes some people have had such a reaction to the whole, because so far many religions have recognized the significance of humans as humans. Like my background, I used to be a Muslim, but we were always told that all the angels bowed down to the humans. So God made something and then Satan turned against God, saying, “Why? I have been worshipping you.” So it seems like a lot of reaction nowadays, in a reaction to religion, some ideas have been ditched, which I think is such a shame.

[01:34:16]  David: All, like Popper says that all science begins with mysticism. And I think philosophy began with religion. And what began with religion means is that religion was groping towards some truth, attained some truth, some falsehood, and usually tried to suppress criticism. And I think maybe the atheist movement should give a little ground here and realize that doing better than religion is not synonymous with denying everything that every religion says, because that's like starting from year zero.

[01:35:05]  Sadia: Yeah, it almost kind of becomes the same sort of thing that you see in different religion, where people, to give themselves credence, 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?

[01:35:22]  David: Yes, 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.

[01:35:37]  Bruce: Interesting.

[01:35:37]  Attendee 8: It reminds me of the Brexit debate. I was rewatching the video of Dominic Cummings explaining why Leave won the vote. And he said, everyone in this room, I guess predominantly leftists, he was saying, vastly overvalue the rightness of being on the opposite side of the racists, like Nigel Farage and all these guys. So being on the opposite side of someone who is wrong is not the right way to think about it.

[01:36:07]  David: Oh, yeah.

[01:36:08]  Attendee 8: By the way, David, I have a somewhat random question for you, as long as you're here. Did you have any expectations about what would happen when you first published the beginning of infinity?

[01:36:19]  David: Well, I was hoping that people would buy it. Yeah, well, one thing I thought at the time, with beginning of infinity, I ended up 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. It took almost 10 years to write, as did Fabric of Reality. But with Fabric of Reality, I finished it in my own time, and beginning of infinity, it was a bit rushed. And so I was thinking that it wasn't as good. And although many people criticize it in many ways, few people said it wasn't as good. So, you know, go figure.

[01:37:18]  Bruce: It actually seems to, beginning of infinity seems to be the more popular of the two books from what I've seen. Personally, I'm a fabric reality fan. I read fabric reality two years before beginning of infinity came out. So I was anxious when it came out. I'm curious, what was the chapter that you didn't get to do?

[01:37:38]  David: I don't know what it would have been called, but it was about scientism and related issues. A few paragraphs of that chapter got into the chapter on choices. You know, the working out how many people go into the museum and come out, and then you form the theory that people are being spontaneously created and destroyed. And that idea, that was from the other chapter. But I had been planning a long chapter on scientism. I now think that scientism deserves a whole book, and I am not the person to write it. So maybe that never would have been written.

[01:38:18]  Sadia: It's interesting you say that because my first experience when I broke away, I don't want to say broke away from religion. For me, it was a very natural progression when I recognized one day that I was an atheist. But I felt kind of almost isolated, a little bit of an isolation in my own community because I was just so weird in that way. But I started looking for other places, and there were a lot of atheist groups and free thinkers, and they call themselves those types of people. And when I joined them, I kind of almost felt like I was going to some sort of religious place. I really wanted to be with people where I could just literally talk 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—or when I read it—that clicked right away, that unfortunately either you have that or the other end where you're just not allowed to ask certain questions.

[01:39:22]  Bruce: Yeah, the shutting down of criticism.

[01:39:25]  Attendee 8: Yes. I was going to say, David, it's been fun meeting some new people. I'm currently visiting Austin, Texas right now. So I know you've got a little bit of history there. And it's funny to see how, or maybe funny is the wrong word, but it's very interesting to note how the knowledge-based view of the world changes the discussion, the whole shape of certain kinds of discussions that otherwise would be maybe people-focused, like classes of people and scientists up here and all these sorts of things, or just asking questions about where knowledge is created, where conflicts are happening, where disagreements are happening, simplifies so many things to the point where people will ask like, my favorite recent thing is that somebody will ask me for 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 what's the problem?

[01:40:20]  Attendee 8: And then you can kind of just ask a few questions and see, okay, well, I can think a little bit about disagreements. Those kinds of questions you’ve asked. And 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—is, he said, “Whenever I talk to Carlos…” And I always tell him, “You’re effectively talking to David indirectly, in some way.”

[01:40:50]  Unidentified speaker: Run your David module.

[01:40:54]  Attendee 8: Yeah. He says: The problem is unchanged, and yet I feel so much better. And the analogy that I gave him was that he was like someone who had to build a spaceship, and he was currently in the desert. And he had just been transported to a beautiful high-tech facility with all sorts of tools around. 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, it becomes just about what knowledge is lacking, what discussion do I need to have, how can I take this person who I thought might disagree with me, 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 efforts and the creative possibilities here.

[01:41:54]  Attendee 8: And so he just seems to have 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]  David: Maybe you're describing the transition to optimism. 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 what's standing between you and the good outcome is a lack of knowledge and you need to create knowledge. And 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, the famous thing that Lenin is supposed to have said. Just a very accurate description of a whole class of worldviews. Who whom. And you've got to get rid of who whom. If you get rid of it in politics, that's like getting rid of who should rule and so on. And presumably from what you've just said in relationship things, you get away from who whom and you turn towards what actually is the problem.

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