Episode 44: Clarifying David Deutsch’s Views of “Knowledge”
- Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
- This transcript was generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor.
- Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes. Please check against the actual podcast.
- Speakers are denoted as color names.
Transcript
[00:00:11] Blue: Welcome to the theory anything podcast. Hey guys, how’s it going?
[00:00:15] Red: I’m
[00:00:16] Blue: good. Good morning. Good morning. So we’re doing an emergency podcast today. We had a different plan for what we were going to do, but there’s a bit of a story as to how this one came about. I was talking with Bart, who by the way is going to probably be joining us if you can in some upcoming episodes. But he and I have been talking about knowledge creation for quite a while and the potential difference between Campbell’s ideas and Deutch’s ideas. Is it just a linguistic difference or is it an actual difference of opinion? So, Deutch on, David Deutch on Twitter said something that really sounded like it was a difference of opinion. So I actually sent him a message and asked him. And it was really hard to explain stuff through text. And you know, here I am like working. It’s during my working day. And he suddenly goes, do I just talk online right now for a second on zoom, or on a Skype. And I’m suddenly like fanboying. Oh my gosh. So I’m like freaking out. I didn’t have any way of recording it because cameo does the recordings. I didn’t want to lose the chance to ask him questions because I actually wanted to get an answer to my questions as to his opinion on this. So I had to just take notes. So this podcast is going to be about me describing which is unfortunate. It would have been better if I could have recorded it. But me describing my conversation with him where I got a chance to ask him some of the questions that we’ve had from our past podcast episodes. Now, keep in mind, I didn’t have the questions prepared.
[00:02:08] Blue: It was really hard to figure out on the fly how to give him good examples of say burns theory, things like that. So I concentrated on the stuff that he was more familiar with so I kind of didn’t talk very much about animal intelligence I’ll tell you what he did say about that. But I concentrated more on AI knowledge creation. And I felt like I got some really good answers on that front. And so that’s what I’m really going to talk about. And then I have right after I’m done with him, I immediately start thinking of, oh, I should have asked this, oh, I should have asked that. So now that I know, I mean, like I had no idea that this world famous scientist was just this accessible. Right. So I guess I had kind of heard rumors but I just didn’t believe it. So I think what we should probably do is invite him to the show and actually record it and collect all our questions in advance that we can ask intelligent questions.
[00:03:07] Red: Be prepared and have notes and be ready for it. Right.
[00:03:12] Blue: Yes.
[00:03:13] Red: So
[00:03:14] Blue: I think we’ll try to do that but let me let’s talk about because he really answered one of the questions well that we had made a guess back in episode 38 I had said that I thought I’d now figured out what he was really trying to say. Um, or it was actually maybe episode 39 but anyhow and one of those episodes when we’re talking about animal intelligence. I had found a quote from David Doge that talked about it really left me with the impression that when he talks about, like, knowledge creation, he really means that which is created by an open ended knowledge creation process. This turns out to be really close to the truth. I have a bit of a tweak from that that’s maybe makes the answer better than what I had thought, but it comes really close to being exactly that. So, I’m of the opinion now people can form their own opinions and of course I’m interpreting so I understand that, you know maybe I’m misinterpreting him or something. But I’m of the opinion that the difference is primarily linguistic but there is at least one legitimate difference between his view and Campbell’s view. So let me take you through what we talked about. So first of all, he was not familiar with Donald camp. I’m not too surprised about that. Doge has obviously been a huge fan of Carl Popper but he’s by his own admission never read all Carl Popper’s books. He’s not a scholar of Popper. You know, like say Danny Fred Frederick who I before he passed away I chatted with on on Facebook.
[00:04:54] Blue: Actually, just a shout out to my friend Andrew Crenshaw who I don’t think listens to the show but he’s on Facebook and he’s someone who’s looking to do become a PhD in poppers philosophy and he just knows tons of stuff like he can just quote stuff like you wouldn’t believe you know these these people who have really kind of become scholars of Popper and on the Facebook group, there’s a number of poppers actual students that are, you know, are still alive that will talk about Popper and some of them are really deep scholars of Popper. That isn’t who do it is or is even trying to be right that’s no knock at all. It just isn’t who he is. So it’s not too surprising that he hadn’t really heard of Donald Campbell or had any familiarity with Donald Campbell’s theory. Now of course this puts me in a difficult position, where I have to now try to explain it really briefly off the cuff. And I didn’t know how to do that so I did I did the best I could and he had actually listened to a little bit of our podcast interestingly enough. So when he came on, he goes yeah I was listening to a little bit of your podcast. Since we were discussing things I’d send him some links. He’s and he says I really liked what you had to say about, you know, when Carl Popper was talking about the evolution of things similar to an autopilot. He like totally agree with me that what Carl Popper really meant to say was that evolution that the software in the mind evolves separate from the physical hardware.
[00:06:29] Blue: And he says yeah, you’re totally right that just you know we got this culture where now we think in terms of software and software was around back in poppers day but it wouldn’t have been part of the culture he wouldn’t have had the lingo or the cultural memes necessary to really just say, look what we’re talking about here is evolution of software in the mind. And that was why Popper was struggling with like an autopilot and things like that so I thought that was pretty cool. And then he right away, right off the bat, he goes, look, the real truth is that anytime I use a word anytime anyone uses a word that we use it differently in different circumstances it doesn’t always mean the same thing. And I don’t even think it could be any other way, I think that when you use a word you, you’ve got this context and you made it in one context like this and you made it in a different context like that and then use the example of creativity so in his book. He uses the word creativity which he defines as let me read it. So I get exactly the capacity to create new explanations. So that’s that’s maybe a really interesting albeit albeit non standard understanding of the word creativity I mean you think about when we talk about, you know, someone who’s a creative artist, a lot of their knowledge is implicit. They don’t necessarily do it based on explanations. So this this definition of creativity. It may exclude art from being creative to some degree I don’t think that’s entirely true because we do use explanations as part of our art.
[00:08:09] Blue: But we don’t use it’s not solely explanations a lot of it is just you practice you gain a skill, almost every skill.
[00:08:17] Red: I’m going to disagree with you, I think, I think that you could use that explanation to say that art is explaining things using typically non verbal means. And, and that the art of that the act of making art or creating art is exactly explanation. It just happens to be non non verbal or non spoken explanation. It’s interpretation.
[00:08:53] Blue: So let me let me clarify I’m not talking about the meaning of art. I’m talking about the creation of art. There’s this idea of implicit knowledge versus explicit knowledge, an explanation is explicit. That’s what an explanation really is that’s pretty much what we mean by explanation. But we have implicit knowledge to the which is almost like a tacit explanation it’s not a true straightforward I can explain this to you. If I go out and I ride a bike. I learned to ride this bike, and I gain a skill, and it exists somewhere inside my brain. When I first start to ride the bike. I literally have to explain to myself, oh, I’m, I got to turn here I’m supposed to do this under this circumstance or maybe driving cars a better example. But at some point, it just, you don’t even think about it anymore, it just sort of becomes part of the implicit knowledge in your brain on how to move your body. And there’s still error correction going on but it’s not even conscious anymore at this point. I don’t think it would be right to call that explanatory knowledge that just isn’t what we mean by explanatory knowledge it’s it’s a different kind of knowledge there’s many kinds of knowledge. There’s heuristic knowledge, which is something totally different that is not explanatory knowledge, and there’s probably relationships between all the different kinds of knowledge so trying to say this one’s definitely explanatory this one definitely isn’t probably doesn’t work. Bart has argued with me numerous times that heuristic knowledge is a kind of explanatory knowledge and I kind of agree with him.
[00:10:22] Blue: The problem the reason why I can’t accept that is because at that point the word explanatory knowledge means all kinds of knowledge and it ruins the distinction that makes the term not useful anymore. So a lot of times, you’re trying to protect the term not because you particularly care about the term is just you wanted to have some sort of meaning and it can’t mean everything. Right. So when I think of explanatory knowledge I, I’m thinking of a subset of knowledge. And I think a painter skill isn’t something that you is theoretical you don’t teach a painter. Most of their skill, theoretically, you teach it by having them do it until the brushstrokes come easily it’s like a riding a bike. Right. Now they do teach theoretical knowledge for art, there is theoretical knowledge for art. But if I were to go out and ever to learn all the theoretical knowledge for art that exists all the explanatory knowledge for art. I would still be a terrible artist. In fact it wouldn’t help me much at all, until I actually go and start practicing with it, and gain that implicit knowledge of how to move my arm with the paintbrush and what colors look the best under the right circumstance and things like that stuff that I may not even be able to explain to somebody else. Or even if I tried I may explain it completely wrong because I don’t understand it myself, in terms of an explanation. It’s kind of the old thing about trying to explain to someone how to tie your shoes, you know, it’s, you may know very well how to do it but it is tough to explain. And that was what I was getting at.
[00:11:51] Blue: I don’t think art is primarily explanatory theoretical knowledge, if that makes sense, I think it’s primarily implicit knowledge that you gain from practice. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I have three artists, children. I’ll go ask them what they think, but I would expect that it’d be really tough to explain to people this is how you’d be a good artist.
[00:12:13] Red: Yeah.
[00:12:15] Blue: And that’s really what I was trying to get at is, it’s just not theoretical knowledge I’m kind of equating explanatory knowledge with theoretical knowledge. Okay, okay, I can get behind that. Okay, I agree with you though that art is explaining something like it wouldn’t. A lot of times you may not even be aware what it’s explaining I think it often captures this idea of implicit knowledge. But when you have really good art it evokes something in you and sometimes you have to really stop and think, what is it that it’s invoking in me and then you have to make up an explanation that you didn’t have you’re feeling something but you didn’t have the explanation yet. In some cases you may explain it and go wow I now I get why this is evoking something in me. So, anyhow, that was kind of an aside and maybe that’s a bad example. Let me use the example he used. He said, you know when I use the term creativity for biological evolution. I’m using it in a different way it’s a it’s a slightly different definition than when I use it, referring to human knowledge, because biological evolution is not explanatory knowledge. And we’ve actually brought this up in the past on the podcast so it was really interesting that he brought that up we had discussed that fact in the past and he’s well aware that that’s the case that if you’re trying to hold to a single definition of creativity, as the ability to create better explanations, you couldn’t claim that biological evolution is creative. And yet he clearly calls biological evolution creative. But when he does that he’s using a slightly different definition of creativity he’s not trying to be consistent.
[00:13:53] Blue: He’s relying on the context of circumstances what I would how I would say it that’s not what he said. And I think that makes perfect sense. Right is that we shouldn’t expect that the word always has exactly the same definition. Now, why is this important. This is really what I was claiming way back in the AI episode the AI and knowledge creation episode episode episode 25, the one on universal Darwinism, Campbell’s theory, basically. So, David Deutch says, I’ve explained enough of Campbell’s theory to him. He goes, Yeah, you know, you know, let’s say I have like a robot lawnmower, and by trial and error, it creates a kind of model of your lawn so it knows how to mow your lawn says I have no problem calling that knowledge says, Sure, that is it’s a comes out of a trial error process. It’s a kind of knowledge. Sure, I’ve got no problem using the word in that way. So, to me that kind of answers the question. He is not necessarily trying to say anything at odds with Campbell’s theory. It’s just a matter of how you happen to use the word knowledge and I’ve mentioned that several times in past podcasts and sounds like he completely agrees with that. Now here’s where things get interesting though. He’s so he went on and he said, Okay, and then he started to give me the example of perspiration versus inspiration, he says but that you know the trial error for AI, it just tries lots of different things so it’s just perspiration, whereas with humans, you know it’s inspiration. I said, you know, I, I’m not sure I can buy that argument I mean like I’m not saying it’s wrong.
[00:15:27] Blue: But like how do I know that human creativity doesn’t use perspiration for you know, I don’t know what the algorithm is in my head for one thing it may be doing all sorts of perspiration. Secondly, I forgot to say these so here are two things I wish I had said but I didn’t get to say biological evolution has overwhelming perspiration I mean like it tries all sorts of things right over billions and billions of years and, you know, billions of tries and things like that so I have a hard time understanding how biological creativity isn’t a form of perspiration. And then there’s just the fact that if you really look at human creativity. I mean, Einstein didn’t have some flash of inspiration in a vacuum. He put in a lot of perspiration of learning stuff first, not knowing what was going to be relevant and what wasn’t. And a lot of it was just happenstance he, for example, happened to know about Remy and geometry, non non Euclidean geometry, which most people probably didn’t know he went to some lecture, and had learned about it. And when he started to work on his problem realized Oh this, I can use that to model what I’m trying to get at with my theory and he hadn’t happened to have known about that. He wouldn’t have been capable of coming up with his theory so there’s this huge perspiration element that exists with human creativity to. So George kind of accepted that criticism. And we started talking about something else. And then he came back and he goes, I got a better way of explaining this. And this is this is the this is the brilliant thing he said that really, I found the most useful.
[00:16:58] Blue: He goes, you got to think of it in terms of the problem that to understand popper it’s about problems always starts with problems. AI doesn’t have problems and I didn’t know somebody met by that at first because of course it does have a problem that’s working on. He goes what I mean is that the problems determined by a human, the human decides here’s the problem that you’re going to work on, and then it just trial and error try stuff that’s what I mean by perspiration. It doesn’t have the creative aspect where you have some sort of contradiction of ideas, and you decide how you’re going to go about working in a contradiction of ideas you decide what problem you’re even going to work on in the first place. And that’s the creative side to him, from what I can understand. And AI does not have that at all, which is by the way, completely true. He’s, he’s nailed an important difference between poppers epistemology and Campbell’s theory that I hadn’t really fully noticed I’d been calling it open ended versus non open ended, which doesn’t really capture it as well as what he’s saying, but it’s clearly related. It’s this ability to change which problem you’re working on. And so then, then he explained a lot of things he said these before but now I understood them in better context he said yeah you know I was talking with the AI guy. Demi Hassibus, I guess he’s friends with I don’t know if I pronounced that name correctly or not.
[00:18:22] Blue: And he says, yeah you know I’ll know that it’s real intelligence when Alpha go decides it doesn’t want to play go anymore and it wants to go do something else instead, you know it can actually pick its problem at that point. And Demi’s like, oh yeah totally agree with you on that, you know. And I do think that this is a good way of trying to explain what is wrong with current AI and, and what is something that’s missing from Campbell’s theory that poppers theory has. Poppers theory has this idea of contradictions that lead to that become problems you select which problems are going to work on. That is itself a creative process. So I totally buy into that and I think that is a really big difference. Now, in defense of Campbell’s theory on this front. I don’t know that Campbell is trying to entirely take poppers theory and apply it to other things I think his interest was in finding an umbrella that many different things fell under including poppers theory. Right so poppers theory has additional elements that Campbell’s doesn’t, but it doesn’t lack any of the elements that Campbell’s have so it’s one’s a super set one’s a subset. Now here’s where things kind of get interesting and this is where I did not think of any of this at the time or I would have asked him more questions about this is biological creativity, an example of picking your own problem. Stop and think about that for a second. What do you think what would be your kind of off the cuff answer to that question.
[00:19:57] Green: I think yes probably is my answer. Okay,
[00:20:00] Blue: tell me why you think that would be a good answer.
[00:20:02] Green: It just seems like all the capabilities and traits that animals and people humans have evolved. It seems somehow to be aware of a problem and being able to go oh I’m in this environment. I need to have better eyesight or I don’t know.
[00:20:20] Blue: You’re thinking exactly what I was thinking. I think there is a sense in which we could say that biological evolution chooses its problems. And it’s exactly what you’re talking about biological evolution isn’t optimizing a single thing.
[00:20:36] Unknown: The next thing is that’s probably how we normally think of it.
[00:20:39] Blue: It in fact it actually is and I’ll explain to second what I mean by that, but it’s going to create wings as a type of locomotion and try that out right and that may lead to better survival value. It is in another sense, always working on exactly the same problem and this is why I think this is difficult to say what the correct answer is the problem it’s always working on is the ability to replicate the genes. Right, everything biological evolution ever ever does is always because the thing that’s successful is always because it replicated the genes better compared to its competitors. So you could make the case biological creativity does not have this element by concentrating on one level that it’s always optimizing a single problem replication of genes. Or you could go one level down. And you could say oh yeah it absolutely is showing this ability to pick its own problems by looking at the myriad of different ways that animals create survival they’re not all in direct competition with each other they pick different survival strategies. They may be in non competition with each other you know, particularly if it’s two animals looking on the opposite side of the world in different climates, they may have zero competition with each other. So, I actually think that that’s an interesting question and one that needs a better answer. It’s too easy to make either answer at this point. We need to understand how that concept of picking your problem applies to biological creativity in some better way than we currently understand it to get a more definitive answer on this topic. Now, given that, at least we can see how it’s related.
[00:22:20] Blue: So, let’s let’s take the stance for a moment that biological creativity and poppers epistemology, both have this element of picking your own problem. Campbell’s blind variation and selective retention does not have that element. Now, like I said, you could think of it as it’s an umbrella. He’s trying to say, look, I’m looking at all blind variation selection processes. And I’m looking at the fact that they solve problems, and therefore in my mind they create a certain kind of knowledge and do it just saying he can accept that that’s a valid word for a trial and error process, like Campbell’s concentrating on. But, don’t you saying, yeah, but it’s not it’s not the same. Yes, you can call that knowledge and there’s nothing wrong with that and he’s making a valid point, but it’s not the same as being able to pick your own problem. And that would be what do it is calling knowledge that’s what he’s calling creativity. Okay, to kind of use that term. So we might therefore have a difference between Campbell’s theory and possibly. Obviously there’s a difference between Campbell’s theory and poppers theory but there may even be a difference between the commonalities between biological evolution Darwin’s theory and poppers theory and Campbell’s theory. So this is something that’s an interesting idea for further research or thought. So I wanted to call that out. Now, here’s a question for you. Are animals creative in this sense, can animals pick their own problems.
[00:23:48] Red: Not sure. I’m not sure that it’s an interesting question. I mean, to
[00:23:54] Blue: assert somewhat, maybe, I don’t know that it’s a tough question isn’t it. So, what makes it tougher is this idea that you can always claim that the quote the knowledge was in the genes so let’s clarify what we mean by that now. If you’re thinking of, if you’re do it and you’re thinking of biological evolution as being a kind of picking your own problem and therefore creative. And you say the knowledge is in the genes what you really mean is the open ended knowledge creation where you pick your own problem happened at the gene level, and the animals don’t have that that’s what he’s claiming. Okay, it’s not that they in no sense have knowledge or can create knowledge of course they have trial and error learning they can just like an AI they can create models of things or whatever right. He’s not denying any of that in fact he even went so far as to say, what animals do is amazing compared to what our current ai’s do something that I called out several times. He says, look we have no idea how animals are really going about doing this because we just don’t understand the algorithm they’d be using they’re clearly way more open ended or general on how they, you know, go about doing things compared to our current ai’s. So I thought it was interesting that he brought that out, since I’ve mentioned that several times. But I think it by saying all the knowledge is in the genes, by which you really mean the creative aspect of choosing of a problem was in the genes. That might be a true statement. It could be. But I don’t think it’s clear. I don’t think it’s clearly a true statement.
[00:25:27] Blue: If we were to use the example of the dolphin that saw the band smoking and went off and got milk from the mother, and then swam back and put a puff of milk out so that it could join in smoking with the man. You could always make some sort of explanation. Oh well, that problem was actually chosen in the genes because of and you can always come up with some ad hoc explanation for why that is quote knowledge in the genes. But boy, we’re talking about a choice of a problem that really seems entirely outside of the ancestral environment of the dolphin, right. I would have a hard time saying that this isn’t a kind of creativity. I don’t know, right without being able to find it better. It’s really hard to say. And then I gave David Deutch the example of Alex the parrot, where Alex the parrot can actually count right understands the concept of numbers, where the way we know that is an animal can can seem to learn the concept of numbers through trial and error if you give it for and it learns, oh four of this type of item, I’m going to answer for right. And by trial and error it could seem to have knowledge of numbers. And you know, if a dog has knowledge of numbers most likely that’s all it’s doing. Alex the parrot could be given novel items and say there’s four of these items, and there’s two of one kind that it’s never seen before in its life and two of another kind. That requires the abstraction of numbers, right, what seems to you.
[00:27:04] Blue: Again, this seems like it’s a problem completely outside its ancestral environment, you know who knows though right maybe they come with a pre program concept of numbers for some reason, and it wasn’t actually I don’t believe that I think parents in general do not have a concept of numbers and Alex was taught the concept of numbers. I think there’s probably good evidence of that this isn’t something that we have to guess out we could probably perform experiments to determine if parents normally have a concept of numbers and I suspect the answer is going to be no they don’t they got no concept of numbers, but you can always make the case because animals they’re hard to test it’s hard to replicate the conditions, as I talked about in the animal episodes, you can always make the case it’s just a coincidence, you can always come up with some sort of ad hoc saying, and you might be right. Right, it’s a tough thing to be sure. So, I think this one’s an open question, right. Clearly, though, animals don’t have open ended creativity. So, even if Alex the parent really did learn numbers, which I suspect he did. Alex the parents never going to start composing new, new kinds of poetry, or music, or invent rocket engines. Right, I mean there’s, there is clearly a limit to a creative bound that exists on animals. And I think this is why do it really is hesitant to see animals as being created, and I can totally see where he’s coming from on this, the very fact that they have this bound. Really seems like it may be calls into question, is it really creativity, you know, clearly it can’t be creativity in the full human sense.
[00:28:46] Blue: So is it doesn’t make sense to call creativity. Now, however, let me point out that that’s also true for biological evolution which he does cause call creativity, sometimes biological evolution is clearly very open ended on the problems that can select and then try to solve. But I don’t think we will ever see biological evolution create rockets to go to the moon, right that way there is a clear boundary on biological evolution also it’s much further out than a dolphins intelligence or creativity. It’s a much larger boundary. Yeah, there’s clearly a boundary on them on biological evolution also it can’t do anything absolutely anything is possible for it. There’s limits to what it can do what those limits are we don’t really entirely understand, but it has limits I think most of us would accept that it has limits. So, even with this further definition of creativity, and accepting that there is somewhat of a difference between human creativity and biological creativity. I think there’s still a lot of open questions here and I think that’s probably the most I can intelligently say at this time is that we need to understand this concept of creativity and I feel like the idea of picking your own problems is a really interesting way to maybe go about trying to explore these thoughts further. And that’s probably the most I can say at this point I’m going to I’ve got to give it more thought myself as to how you might be able to utilize this. Now, by the way, when I brought up Alex parrot. Knowing numbers.
[00:30:17] Blue: He didn’t like contradict me or anything, but I could complete and he was like oh yeah that’s interesting, but I could totally tell from the look on his face that he was thoroughly skeptical of that. So, I don’t think it changed his mind in the slightest, and I asked him if he was aware, like I said I read some of Burns books. And he says well I’ve read two of burns papers but I’ve never read any of his books so you know you already know more than me about burns theory because you’ve read his books. And again this is another thing that’s tough like how in the world do I explain burns theory to him in a few words, right I mean like I don’t have a ton of time, he’s undoubtedly a busy person. Sure, I mean
[00:30:59] Red: it took us for three episodes to talk to talk through burns for if
[00:31:05] Blue: you count the last one. Yeah. Yeah. And that was my attempt to summarize right and I’m trying very hard to really help people understand what burns theory and viewpoint are and it’s, it’s not the easiest to explain. So I tried to explain to him well insights about building models and he’d say well I mean like all animals build models it’s like okay that’s true. I didn’t know how to explain it well to him that’s one of the ones where if I were to bring him back. I might be able to figure out how to summarize it a little bit better, but I think realistically. He would have to have enough interest to go read Burns books and there’s no reason why he should have that interest right. And then it would be really interesting to see what he thought at that point. And maybe he would have legitimate criticisms that I haven’t thought of right I mean like, I’m seriously interested in. If David Deutsch read Burns books, what would he think of them. And what would he say about those, would it to some degree changes mind, would it not change his mind and would he have reasons for why it didn’t change his mind. Things maybe that burn hasn’t thought of. Um, these are interesting questions and you know maybe hopefully someday he’ll read Burns books and we’ll find out but he may never right it just may not be an area of interest for him and just not where he’s going to spend his time. That’s totally legitimate, like completely legitimate.
[00:32:25] Blue: And I actually we talked about that we talked about the fact that I feel like no matter how much I read, I’m barely scratching the surface and he goes yeah you got to think about poppers statement that we’re kind of all equal in our infinite ignorance. There’s just always just too much to learn there’s just always always too much to learn. So you’re totally going to be ignorant on many, many, many, many subjects, and there’s no way around that. Um, so it’s no knock on David Deutsch that he doesn’t want to understand that theory better. It maybe he’s looked into it enough and he thinks he understands enough and maybe he’s even right. Maybe, you know, I’m buying into berms theories to too much. You know, that’s a possibility. So, but because of that, I think it would be tough to ask him detailed questions about berms theories that would be unfair to some degree. Because berms theories aren’t simple, you have to actually understand his methodology, why he believes what he does, why you know how he went about experimenting, coming up with these things. It’s not a simple subject it’s something that you have to take the time to actually go understand. Let me use an analogy here that has been bouncing around in my mind, you know, growing up religious back in the camera and I have talked about this in the podcast, back in the 70s and 80s. I grew up in an environment where evolution was wrong. I was actually at one point told by my parents, you know, science has it wrong about evolution. You know, you’re a kid, you believe it. It’s not like you don’t know what evolution is.
[00:34:01] Blue: Richard Dawkins often says the reason why people don’t buy evolution is because they’re not educated about it. We’ve done studies on this, you can go to Christians who do not believe in evolution or religious people not just Christians that do not believe in evolution and you can quiz them on evolution, and they absolutely do understand the theory when you do a study on it. They are not ignorant of the theory that is just not the case. So knowing the theory is insufficient to convince people that think it’s wrong, that it’s right. That is not, does not work in a plain and simple. Now as someone who came from that environment, and then eventually changed my mind. What is it that changed my mind. Well I can tell you what it is that changed my mind. As I started to read about it on my own, whatever I was taught in class, never was sufficient to convince me of anything. They’re going over it too fast. They explained the theory well, but explain the theory does not change your mind. It just doesn’t right it’s totally insufficient to change your mind. But when I actually since I love science and I’m reading about science, I would read about the problems that that evolution solved, and how they went about using evolution to solve these problems. And this makes perfect sense now that I understand Popper’s epistemology. You have to really understand problem space you have to understand the history of problems that led to the theory to really get why the theory is important. And you would read about I would read about stuff.
[00:35:29] Blue: And they would give this example of how there’s this sort of situation you know the whale has these things that look like legs that used to be legs but they’ve after feed through evolution and they’re not needed anymore. So they don’t actually show up but then you can still see it in the bones or you know that’s just one example, right. And you can see there’s this problem you can see how evolution solves the problem. Now, when you have the first problem and you’re told the first solution, it is not convincing. It’s not even slightly convincing. Okay, and the reason why I think is because it’s really easy to come up with an alternative explanation at that point and this is, this is why corroboration, the preparing concept of corroboration is such an important concept. I know some paparians don’t believe in poppers concept of corroboration. But it’s a totally important concept the idea that we need to stress test our theories as best as we can. And every time a theory comes out positive that does in some sense strengthen the theory. Okay, that’s why some paparians don’t buy poppers corroboration is because they can’t buy the idea that a theory can ever be strengthened. They only see it as you refute them and that’s it. And you never make the theory stronger. It just is not true. And actually David Deutsch in the lunar podcast, lunar society podcast recently talked about this he was asked, you know, if you actually get more tests and more convincing tests, doesn’t that change the epistemic status. And he goes yeah it does, because it makes it harder to come up with a good alternative explanation. And that is exactly the right answer.
[00:37:04] Blue: When you have a single problem with evolution and you get it resolved, it doesn’t convince you of anything. The second one doesn’t convince you of anything. The 10th one doesn’t convince you of anything. By the 100th one, you know that there’s not a good alternative explanation anymore. But until you actually reach the 100th problem that evolution solves, you are not convinced by it. And that’s really how it works as each corroboration happens, your alternative explanations that you’re using in your mind. You start to understand the weakness that there really are just not very good alternative explanations that you can work with. And at that point it kind of falls away and you go okay I can accept this now in defense of the Christians that have a problem with evolution I’ve never had a problem with people having a problem with evolution let me let me say that. Okay, that if somebody tells me they don’t believe in evolution I’m not going to try to talk them out of that right it’s, I’ll tell them what I believe, and if they ask me why I’ll explain it to them. But it, I don’t really feel any particular need to say oh you’re wrong or something like that. Right, I know there are people who do feel that way, even there’s Christians who fill that way. I might point them to Francis Collins book, the language of God, which he is a atheist turned Christian devout Christian, who was in charge of the human genome project wrote a book defending evolution to Christians. I might suggest that book to them, or something along those lines, and then you know let them just decide for themselves. The thing that I think needs to be
[00:38:37] Blue: understood though is that I’ve talked to many people who are pro evolution, who have not reached the hundred problem either, and have never really earned the knowledge for themselves. And as much as they do believe in evolution as much as I believe they are correct on that. They are really ignorant of the theory of evolution, as much as sometimes even more so than someone who doesn’t believe in evolution. When you, for example, a Christian might bring up a counter example to evolution they might say, Bart translated this whippetail I don’t remember what it’s actually called in English but it’s, it’s, there are certain things that exist that we don’t know how neo Darwinian evolution could have formed it. We don’t have a good theory for how it could have formed because there are two things that have to exist, and each one individually would not be useful on its own. It’s like this tail that whips on single celled animals I’ll have to look it up and give a better example in a future podcast. And there is no current known like France Collins mentions there there is no current known answer to some of these questions. They are in a certain sense, but no not in a certain sense, they are popperian refutations that’s precisely what they are. Now you have to understand that a popperian refutation does not mean the theory is false that that’s a misunderstanding of popper common misunderstanding of popper. But evolution has preparing refutations that exist. It would be natural for someone who believed in evolution to believe someday we’re going to understand it and I think they’re right. I think that there is an explanation that exists that we just don’t have yet.
[00:40:14] Blue: That’s going to explain why this how this evolved and how it’s still consistent with neo Darwinian evolution. But a Christian is at least aware that there are problems and a lot of people I’ve talked to who are pro evolution, really and truly don’t understand that there are problems that need to be worked on now of course there’s problems, every theory has problems that isn’t. People misunderstand the importance of this and how it fits into things. Okay, the issue with Darwinian evolution is that it has no competitor. It doesn’t matter if it has problems or not. It doesn’t have a competitor and a scientific competitor and one that’s an actual good explanation. This is the real reason why we embrace Darwinian evolution, it’s got nothing to do with it does or doesn’t have problems. It’s got nothing to do with, you know, we’ve corroborated it you can’t corroborate something as true you can’t right that’s just not what corroboration means to really understand why we should embrace evolution you have to understand poppers epistemology and the vast majority of people I’ve talked to who believe in evolution and just learned about in school, they haven’t earned that knowledge for themselves, and they’re in essence believing on it in with faith, just like a Christian might believing against it with faith. Okay, I don’t know if this makes sense or not. Yeah.
[00:41:34] Blue: Now, this is a tough thing, though, because it does mean that to really understand a theory, you really do have to put some effort into it, right you have to understand the problem space now I think in some cases, you don’t necessarily have to reach the hundred problem in why it’s such a good theory, but like quantum mechanics and many worlds, I was able to find a single problem that allowed me to move from I can’t buy many worlds to oh my gosh it might be true. And it took a little bit more than that I had to then go look at the alternative explanations it took me a while to seek those out. But sometimes there’s like the one problem that’s so good that you can use the one problem. And if you can really get people understand that problem and how this theory solves that problem, it will be very convincing, right. And I think that does happen. Definitely for quantum mechanics by the way for anyone who wants the one problem go look up the elixir vitamin bomb experiment. That is the one that for me really made me realize I’ve got to start taking that theory seriously. Because there was there was just no other way. The math for it is so simple. It’s not that hard to understand you can actually walk through the math for yourself will do it for a podcast sometime. And you can actually understand the theory at theoretical mathematical level using a very simple thought experiment, and you can immediately see that there is no way to explain this without referencing many worlds as of today. So it does depend on what the theory is and what its problem space looks like.
[00:43:19] Blue: Okay, but I think it always does come down to you’re not convinced until you’ve see it solve problems and you understand the problems it solves. And you really have to understand that problem space before you get the theory. So this is all kind of a larger side. And it’s somewhat of a setup for a future podcast episode that we’re going to do. So let me go back to my conversation with David Deutsch. At this point and the way this ties into the conversation with David Deutsch is, we shouldn’t expect that David Deutsch is necessarily going to immediately have answers to a competing theory like burns theory. He would need to go through that problem space and understand the problems understand how it solves the problems before it’s going to be at all convincing. And that takes time and with burns theory. It’s a particularly tough one it’s more like evolution than like quantum mechanics. The, the problems are always a little bit vague they’re always a little bit fuzzy. I mean we talked about this we talked about and cameo was very skeptical of some of the examples that I used. And you should be skeptical of them every single individual example that burn uses, you should be highly skeptical of it’s only after you read the 101 that you start to realize burn might be on to something. And you start to say, you know what, I’m kind of feeling stupid with all my little alternative explanations that they just aren’t working as a coherent theory anymore. And that’s how I feel about burns theory, I feel like, until you read his example after example I gave several examples in the podcast to try to give a feel for that.
[00:44:58] Blue: He gives even more in the books, right, until you’ve gone through enough of those examples, and you’ve gone through enough of his methodology and really checked them out, and you understand the problems that it solves. You don’t really understand burns theory, and it’s very easy to come up with an off the cuff. Oh, this is probably this. You’ll feel comfortable with that. So I do think this is one where I wouldn’t expect that unless you’ve actually gone and done the homework that it’s going to seem like you can just make a really simple answer. Does that make sense to understand what I’m trying to say here.
[00:45:31] Red: Yeah, and it, it also means that that we may not never get a really great answer from do it about this particular question because like you say he might not. If he doesn’t have interest and that’s a lot of problem space work to do just to be able to refute. You know, somebody’s competing theory.
[00:45:53] Blue: That’s right. But I think that I think this is a tough one. And you know what, even after we’ve gone through this I’ve now read two of Burns books and read a couple of his papers. I’ve explained it to you guys. It’s clear at this point that I’m favoring burns theory but even then I still feel a certain degree of skepticism towards his theories. And I think burn fills a certain degree of skepticism towards his theories. Right. It’s, it’s the best theory he’s got at this point. But we really are dealing with a particularly difficult to test space when we’re talking about animal intelligence. So I think that there is room to feel comfortable with an alternative explanation. Still, if that makes any sense, maybe shrinking room. And I suspect that we’re on our path to eventually the alternative theories are just going to die. But I don’t know that for sure. Right, it could be that there’s something we’re missing. But I don’t blame anybody for being skeptical of Burns theories. Let me just put it that way. I feel like I totally get skepticism of Burns theories at this point. Just as I get skepticism of evolution from most people who haven’t yet gone through the, the problem space well enough, I completely understand why evolution, honestly, on the surface sounds like a completely bafflingly stupid theory. It really does. And it just really goes against our intuitions on a lot of ways. If you weren’t raised with it, it should cause you to feel skeptical. And that’s why people were so skeptical of it for years on both sides, left and right were originally really skeptical of Darwinian evolution.
[00:47:32] Blue: And it had to win very slowly people over as it continued to become a better and better explanatory theory, and it was more and more clear, there’s no alternative theory available. And that’s why it eventually won the day. And at this point, even most religious people accept biological evolution vast majority of religious people I know accept biological evolution in one form or another. But that’s a very slow it has to it took it takes maybe centuries. How long has it been since Darwin, I don’t know, it’s been a long time. Yeah, and while
[00:48:03] Red: 300 400 years.
[00:48:05] Blue: Yeah, I mean it’s dark. So it, it, we should expect it to take that long, I guess is what I’m saying we should be understanding of people skepticism of even good theories. It takes a while for it to sink in, it does. And if firms theories correct, it will take a while for it to sink in but it will eventually sink in. At this point, I don’t think we’re anywhere near Darwin’s love, right I mean I think we’re way earlier in the process with burns theory than we are with Darwin’s theory. So you know we owe David Deutsch, at least another 100 years before, you know, he’s really in any reasonable denial of a theory that’s correct if that makes any sense. He at this point, we should accept that burns theory could be wrong for reasons we just don’t understand yet. And we should keep an open mind towards that idea. Okay, now getting back to my conversation with David Deutsch. So I felt like this boundary line that he talked about with picking your own problems was this really ingenious boundary line, and it really got me thinking. So now he brought up Alpha go now I probably would have. If he hadn’t, because it’s a really good example we’re talking about Alpha go invented a whole new style of gameplay. I would be hard pressed to not call that a form of creativity. But clearly it’s not creativity in the way do it is using the term, because Alpha go is solving exactly one problem, and a human picked the problem. And it’s doing it through what he calls perspiration just playing billions of games with itself. Furthermore, the creative aspect of Alpha go.
[00:49:40] Blue: And I told this so now he’s aware of this really comes from the fact that it’s optimizes the problem differently than the human work because of the way the math works right into some degree that even the creative aspect of Alpha go really came from the fact that the humans gave it a fitness function that is different than the one humans were using they didn’t realize that was what they were doing, but that was what they were doing. So, from the Deutsch viewpoint, the creative aspect came from the human. So I can completely see where he’s coming from, right to, to say oh the creative aspect of Alpha go actually came from the programmer. Once you understand that he means in terms of picking the problem that is accurate now, right. Clearly, that’s accurate now. Is this the best way to define creativity. I’m not sure it is. Okay, but it is the way he’s defining it. And I can see that he’s right for the way he’s defining it. Even in the case of opera. Okay. Um, so we talked about that he thought that was interesting by the way that it was a matter of how it optimized basically what it comes down to from our Alpha go episode is that it optimized humans optimize by how much they win and Alpha go optimizes that it wins. And it turns out that that’s an ingenious different way to play the game that improves upon how every human is played before. Okay, so I see therefore. Deutsche’s real concern with AI is really this problem space thing that ai’s that the problems are all determined by the human.
[00:51:16] Blue: I can see that that means that Campbell’s theory is not identical to poppers I never thought it was. But now I have a really obvious distinction that has been made between poppers theory, possibly even between the connection between Darwinian communism and poppers theory and Campbell’s theory. This doesn’t mean Campbell’s theories wrong. This doesn’t mean Campbell’s theory isn’t valuable. But it’s something important to understand about Campbell’s theory that that he’s taking he’s he’s abstracting out part of evolutionary theory not necessarily all of it. Not even necessarily the most important parts. Now, do it points out, and this is from the conversation that even human knowledge is not always creative in the sense that he’s using the term. So he gave me an example that I never heard before. He said that Newton didn’t know what the gravitational constant was, because he didn’t know what the size of the earth was back then. So somebody worked it out later. And what he instead did is he knew what the combination of two values were I don’t remember what the two values were. And then somebody later worked out what the size of the earth was and then they were able to work out from that what the gravitational constant was. In George’s opinion. You know, let’s not call this, you know, we don’t want to say that isn’t knowledge of course it’s knowledge in the lesser sense, right, of course that we would want to call that a growth of scientific knowledge. But it’s not creative knowledge is not knowledge in the sense do it is interested in. And this is actually his point right this is more the perspiration as he calls it.
[00:52:49] Blue: I still don’t think that’s the best way to do it I think it’s got more to do with the problem space. The creative problem came from Newton, this other guy just took the theory and then said well now that I can figure out this I can figure out that right now I would argue that’s still a problem that’s still a human picking a problem so I think there’s maybe a little bit of fuzziness whether we would call it whether we call this creative or not under dutch’s definition, but dutch does not see this as creative this is not what he means. And I think it’s always important to understand what is the person trying to say, not did they pick the right word, right. We always are just grasping at words to use to try to have an idea in our mind and we’re grasping at the words to use to try to explain ourselves, and we just pick a word we have to we have to pick a word that’s close enough. And then we have to kind of hope people will be charitable in trying to read us and understand us and that they’re going to try to understand what the point was. So in his opinion then a lot of human knowledge isn’t creative that a lot of it the creativity pre exists that knowledge already existed. So, this is an interesting point though is if you say want to say AI doesn’t create knowledge, human knowledge isn’t knowledge either in many many cases, and this is this was a dutch’s point to me.
[00:54:04] Blue: Now okay we talked about animal intelligence and burns theory I really do wish that he would get interested in that because I’m really curious what his answer would be to that. Now, we talked about so I’m almost done actually but we talked about what is it that creates what how do why do humans have creativity. Now one of dutch’s theories that he mentioned in his book is that humans may not be born universal explainers that they may need to pick up a meme first that what they come equipped to pick up means. And then once they pick up certain means, then they become universal explainers. Now, this makes a distinction that I think you could argue you could say well is a something that is an algorithm that is potentially universal explainer is it doesn’t make sense to not call it a universal explainer. I think it depends on what you mean. Let me make a defense, though, of this idea. There are Kate their real life cases of humans being raised without language raised by monkeys or raised by wolves and that that actually happened has happened in real life at least once. Or just they had neglectful parents. There was some well meaning parents once where they didn’t want their child that they were deaf they didn’t want their child their child could hear. So they wanted a child to learn normal language. So they did not interact with the child will sign language thinking that would hinder their ability to learn spoken language. And instead they try to put them in front of a TV which is a completely wrong way to teach child language has to be interactive. So the child learn no language at all.
[00:55:39] Blue: And they were effectively severely mentally challenged by the time the scientists came into you know the doctors and scientists came in to try to save the day. And from sitting and talking with the scientists, they, their intelligence changed from mentally challenged to almost normal intelligence, as they started to pick up language. So one of the things that I’ve wondered about is if the meme that you have to pick up to be a universal explainer is itself language. And I, yeah, so I brought that up to David Deutsch and I asked him about that. And he goes, Well, I’m in no position to argue with that theory. I’m also in no position to agree with that. He says, you know, that’s an interesting idea that could be. And then he goes, he goes, Daniel Everett, the linguist, he believes that I’m like, I’ve never heard of Daniel Everett so I’m like looking him up online. And he goes, Yeah, Daniel Everett believes that homo erectus evolved language first before speech. And that was what led to, you know, kind of the explosion of intelligence what we might say. So language being the ability to represent things symbolically. So I’m going to have to go maybe read up about Daniel Everett’s theories now but that sounds really interesting sounds very similar to my completely wild speculation that language might be the meme you have to learn to be a universal explainer. My thinking on this is, is there’s a book called. I’ll have to look up the name of the book there’s a book about a man who never learned language. And he was deaf. He existed he came from Spanish speaking country and was brought to America.
[00:57:24] Blue: And so he didn’t have when I say didn’t have any language I don’t know what that means. I mean maybe he did have some language in some sense, but he certainly didn’t have it in the way you would normally think you could not talk with him about stuff. And the person who wrote the book interacted with him a lot was a scientist interact with him a lot and wrote writes this book about him. A person who does not have language is not a universal explainer right there’s clearly not going to be able to comprehend anything like a universal explainer. Obviously this is a trick the way I’m saying this because if they learn language then they can, because they got the potential to be a universal explainer. And that’s why I’ve wondered I mean and we don’t represent things necessarily in spoken language in our minds but sometimes we do. And I think that the ability to understand language allows us to conceptualize concepts into a word. And then we can think in terms of that concept easily because now we have a word for it we’ve got a single single symbolic representation that we can point to that now means that to us. I think it’s also why people have such a hard time understanding that words have multiple meanings in different contexts is because they’re so used to using that word represent a certain concept that they can’t they have a really tough time buying this word in a different context has a different meaning and Douglas Hofstetter gives a really good example of this, which I think I’ve used in the past podcast, where he says, What does the word grow me.
[00:58:54] Blue: And when you ask someone who’s an English speaker, what does the word grow mean. You know they say it means to change in size to be larger. And almost everyone would say that. And he say, Well, yes, but sometimes it means just to change in size, not necessarily larger, and people will deny it. They’ll say no absolutely not the word grow does not mean to change in size but not necessarily larger. And so he’ll suddenly quote Alice Wonderland she you know ate the mushroom and she grew smaller and smaller and smaller, and then the person’s like in shock. Like they understand exactly what that sentence means they’ve used sentences like that multiple times, and it’s never struck them that the word grow has a completely different meaning in some contexts. And I think that’s why people end up dipping into essentialism is because it’s really hard to break yourself out of the fact that words don’t have meanings that we use a word as a marker for something else in our mind a concept, but they’re actually differentiable that every word out there has multiple meanings in different contexts. Hofstra actually go so far as to claim that every word has hundreds of meanings that when you go to a dictionary, and it gives you five different definitions that it’s misleading you on all the different subtle definitions that word actually has. So
[01:00:11] Red: my family actually has a game that we play. That’s a word definition game, it doesn’t have, like, you know, at any physical manifestation of the game but we sit and somebody picks a word and then, you know and this is in big groups like 12 people 15 people. Everybody takes turns defining the word, trying to come up with another definition that nobody else has used yet. Yeah, and it’s fascinating because some words that, I mean, there are almost any word that you can come up with, especially, you know, words like grow that that are our adverbs or adjectives, modifying words to have just unbelievable amounts of meanings that are accepted amongst people. And so it’s a fun game just to think of how many ways you can think of the same word in different contexts.
[01:01:09] Blue: Yes. And then Douglas Hofstra’s point is that it’s a growing list that we have a word, it has a meaning. We then find a new analogous situation that’s close enough to the previous situation, and we reapply the word and now that word has a new meaning. And then from that point we can jump to a new definition and eventually you can end up with a completely definition definition than the original meaning. And that now this word possibly has all those meanings or possibly lost some of its original meanings. It’s very fascinating because language has this evolutionary context because of that every every child and parent has been able to talk with each other. And yet you go enough generations back and they can’t talk it, you know, if you could take someone from today and then go back in time, you know, a thousand years, you wouldn’t be able to understand each other, even if you’re speaking the same language. They would sound like completely different language. Old English sounds like Welch or something to me, right? It’s not even recognizable as English to me. By the way, when I say Old English, that’s very different than say Shakespeare’s English. Some people might think that’s Old English, but that’s actually considered modern English. We’re talking about something further back in time. I had an English teacher who actually played Old English for us. It is literally a foreign language because the language had changed so much. And then she showed us something in between modern English, Shakespeare, and Old English, and you could, it was weird. You could make out what the person was saying sort of because it was just close enough to modern English. And yet it clearly wasn’t modern English.
[01:02:41] Blue: It was something else, right? So Old English you couldn’t understand at all. In between, you could understand if you concentrated really hard, but it was clearly different words, but the words were close enough you could make out what they were saying. And then you had modern English with Shakespeare, which a lot of us can understand. A lot of us can understand even modern English because it’s changed so much in Shakespeare’s time. But the words have meanings very similar or the same as we use them today, even if they sometimes use words that we don’t use anymore. So anyhow, I thought all that was kind of fascinating. I wanted to pursue the idea that language is what creates universal explainers. But I don’t know how. We’ll have to do a podcast on Hofstetter’s theory, because I think that’s probably one of the most interesting theories I’ve heard where he makes that case. He believes that there’s this connection between language and what he calls analogy. I feel like that’s misleading, because what we’re really talking about is abstraction. The fact that we can abstract concepts, and then we will make what we use a word for it is the sign that we’re able to abstract things he gives one of the examples he uses as a desktop. A desktop, I’m sitting in front of a desk right now a physical desktop, a desktop has a certain meaning. Then suddenly computers get invented with pointing click with mouse with a mouse, and we take the word desktop. There’s not that much in common between a computer desktop and a real desktop.
[01:04:13] Blue: But there was enough that when people started talking about a computer desktop, you got the analogy immediately, and you were able to start using that computer desktop using your knowledge of a physical desktop. You could reapply the knowledge that you’d learned about physical desktops, and you didn’t have, you didn’t require as much instruction, because you would pick up on the analogy, and you would figure out, Oh, this is what I have to actually do to do things on this virtual desktop. And that’s, that’s what humans do, right, that’s, that is kind of our creative element that it’s interesting to use knowledge and abstract it and then use it on a new circumstance what we’re doing there I don’t know that that would be if I knew it would be a GI.
[01:04:57] Red: It’s interesting to to see sometimes how quickly we lose the in the analogous item. I’m thinking of the, I saw something that a kid had said, Oh, look, they, they 3D printed the, the save button. And really, it was just a disk hard disk from back in the 80s. The kid hadn’t seen the disk before doesn’t really understand what why the save icon looks like a disk.
[01:05:31] Blue: Right,
[01:05:32] Red: right, right, right. And then only gets says, Oh, well, how cool someone would print out the save icon. Right. You know,
[01:05:43] Blue: that is an interesting point. And he Hofstetter gives tons of examples of words that we’ve lost the original meaning. He talks about like the word handsome, that’s actually a combination of hand and some. It’s hard to even figure out how the original words relate to the current word. I don’t even know. Right. We’ve completely lost whatever the connection was and I think he explains what it actually is but it’s, it’s not something I know, in any case. And there’s a lot of words like that and he talks about how it, there’s actually degrees, there are some words where we use the word. And if we really stop and think about it, we can figure out what the original analogy was, because the words that make up that word are close enough to words we still use, that we can say, Oh, you know, I can see that this word originally meant this and they were combining two words. And there’s other cases where we just use the word we don’t even know what the original meaning was we’ve lost it entirely. The word is just itself now at this point. And then there’s others where we think of it as an analogy like we, we, we, there are many words that are analogies that we don’t think of as analogies. If I were to talk about having a higher IQ, or, you know, the idea of up being good and down being bad. That’s clearly an analogy if you really stop and think about it, because, but you don’t stop and think about it. To you, up is good and down is bad. That’s just the way it is. Right. That’s, that’s the way we use terms. That’s what the terms mean. Right.
[01:07:17] Blue: And yet there’s clearly some sort of analogy there way back in the past. And you can still pick it out. You can still understand will actually up isn’t actually good and down isn’t actually bad but I can see how those relate to the concepts. You know, actually, because I’ve played this that word game I told you about a whole lot up is a word that has more meanings in how we use it, then it’s baffling the myriad ways we use the word up.
[01:07:48] Red: Yeah, and, and, and only a very small percentage of them are have anything to do with like rising or, or, right, or height, or we, it is a very conceptual word within our language, it’s a fascinating word. Yes.
[01:08:07] Blue: All right. Well, that’s actually the end of my conversation with David Deutsch. I wish I had recorded it. I think the main conclusion I would take away from this would be first of all, the concept of creativity as he understands as he not understands that as he uses the term in some circumstances is about selecting your own problem.
[01:08:29] Unknown: I
[01:08:29] Blue: think that I think that’s brilliant. By the way, that’s I think that’s a really strong clarifying factor. And I feel like we’ve kind of resolved that we’ve been asking this question for episodes now is David Deutsch disagreeing with with Campbell, or is he simply using different lingo. The answer is using different lingo. I feel like we know that now. It’s not that there isn’t a valid distinction to be made there is, but Campbell’s theory the idea of trial and error creating knowledge is fine that is a completely valid way of speaking. The fact that Popper and Campbell use the terms in that way does not in any way say anything about Deutsch being right or wrong he’s just using a different lingo. He’s simply concentrating on what he’s interested in, which is this element of creativity of switching the problem, being able to switch one’s problem. That’s what he’s looking at. When he talks about the knowledge is in the genes. That’s not if by knowledge you mean the information it is not in the genes vast majority of information from an animal or from an AI comes from its trial and error process. What he really means is all the creative elements the choosing of the problem came before that trial and error process it wasn’t part of it, completely valid, completely valid makes perfect sense to me. So I was glad to get that cleared up. It’ll be interesting to I mean I know I have tons of other questions I wish I could ask him. We’re going to have to collect those I know that Tracy and I have been talking forever about my questions around heat death.
[01:10:07] Unknown: I
[01:10:07] Blue: really want to ask him questions about heat, heat death in more detail. I would have to figure out how to be able to get that down to a compact set of questions and that’s a little harder than it first sounds, but I think I could. So I really like to collect a bunch of those questions and then invite him on the show and then, like, have a discussion with him. Why does he not believe in heat death. How is he looking at that. I understand some of his theory but there’s, I have many questions about how he’s conceptualizing things.
[01:10:34] Unknown: You
[01:10:35] Blue: know, I just as an example, his main explanation for why he doesn’t accept heat death comes from computational universality, and I do not understand the argument I think I understand what he’s trying to say. I think I can even put it in a very convincing way, but it doesn’t seem like a valid argument to me and I always feel like I’m missing something. And the other one that is, and I’ve talked to other people who are fans of David Deutsch and I’ve, and I’ve had multiple people say I didn’t get that argument either so I don’t think I’m the only one who feels like I don’t get that argument. And the other one that comes up is, it’s not super clear why he rejected the Omega point theory now I’ve rejected make a point theory for other reasons than the ones he gives. He says because the universe is growing he rejects the Omega point theory. I don’t see why that would count as a projection of the make a point theory. And the reason why I say that is because Frank tipler who is the one who created the mega point theory. He has given a very good answer to that namely that we can choose to not let the universe grow that we’ve got theories that allow us to decide we won’t let the universe grow, which means that our intelligence and our knowledge creation will determine if the universe grows or not you can’t just reference that as a refutation of the mega point theory. Now there’s other problems with make a point theory that I feel are really making a problematic theory. I just don’t think that happens to be one of them.
[01:11:57] Blue: So I’ve really been curious about why he rejected that theory and I’m sure he’s got deeper reasons for why he did, and probably just didn’t want to go into it in his book. So he referenced kind of the more popular reason the, the fact that the universe is growing that at least throws some doubt on the theory which I think it does. So, I know I’ve got a lot of questions like that so maybe we’ll have to collect those together and do a future episode and see if we can get him to come on the show and try to ask him some get get some more answers like this because I feel like it’s clarified a ton, right I’ve been struggling with a lot of these topics. What do I really mean I think he means this. And you just ask him and he goes oh yeah this is what I mean, you know, it’s way faster
[01:12:39] Green: to do that.
[01:12:42] Blue: So, anyhow, that is our episode for the day.
[01:12:46] Red: Well that was fun. It was great. I’m glad you got that opportunity really cool. Yeah,
[01:12:52] Green: very cool. Also, just a happenstance. Since we were talking about Darwin earlier it actually happens to be International Darwin Day today. So how are you sure? International Darwin Day yeah for real.
[01:13:05] Blue: Awesome. Well, I don’t doubt that Darwin was one of the great minds right this his theory was a groundbreaking change in the way we thought of things, and go so much deeper than merely to explain animals, right I mean like there’s just, we’ve seen how it got reapplied to poppers theory what it meant with poppers theory. I think it’s one of the strongest reach theories we’ve ever seen. Right it’s an amazing theory. I read what we’ll have to do an episode sometime on Leslie valiant Oh, I actually talked with George about that it was really brief. But we were talking about the fact that Darwin’s theory is of is an incomplete theory. Most people don’t know that right most people think of Darwin’s theory is this complete theory. But Leslie valiant, who’s a big name in AI just pointed out that we don’t know how to turn it into an algorithm. So we don’t really understand it. And so he, Leslie valiant kind of pioneered this field called computational Darwinism. And it’s, it’s trying to find what is the computational algorithm that Darwinian evolution is doing. The fact that we don’t know it’s kind of a big deal. Right, it’s one of the reasons why I feel like it’s so easy to have doubts about theory. If you haven’t solved the 100 problem. It’s really easy to have doubts about theory because the theory is so in precise in so many ways. And valiant talks about how it doesn’t even seem like it’s, it’s tractable says every theory we’ve tried to come up with that would be similar is completely intractable, even for billions of years it’s intractable.
[01:14:38] Blue: It says what we really need is we need to find this algorithm that is equivalent to Darwin’s theory that’s tractable. And says we don’t know what it is. It’s just an incomplete theory at this point. David Deutsche and I were talking about that and I brought up Leslie valiant and I don’t know if you knew what Leslie valiant was but I said oh yeah Leslie valiant in his book talks about that and probably approximately correct that it’s just an incomplete theory. And I’ve actually talked with people where I’ve said well Darwin Darwinism is an incomplete theory. And I’ve had people go oh no it’s not I’ve had people who are fans of David Deutsche say that to me who are giant fans of David Deutsche, not realizing that David Deutsche said the same thing in his book. He talks about how Darwinian evolution is this incomplete theory that I have to go find the exact reference but he really does say that he’s one of the scientists who helped me realize that it wasn’t incomplete theory. And yet, even though it’s this incomplete theory is this powerful reach right sometimes you don’t have to have all the details for that explanation to immediately start being powerful. And I think that’s a good example with Darwinian evolution. All right. Well, thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you everybody next time. All right, bye bye. The theory of anything podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutsche’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects.
[01:16:13] Blue: If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player, or you can Google the theory of anything podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system and giving us a five star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that. The first is via our podcast host site anchor. Just go to anchor.fm -4 -strands -s -t -r -a -n -d -s. There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you want to make a one time donation, go to our blog which is four strands.org. There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you.
Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor. Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes; please verify against the actual podcast.