Episode 56: Rationality, Religion, and the Omega Point

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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: All right, welcome back to The Theory of Anything podcast. Today, we've got Peter. Hey, Peter.

[00:00:16]  Peter: Hello, Bruce. Nice to talk to you.

[00:00:18]  Bruce: And we have Lulie with us today. Hey, Lulie.

[00:00:21]  Unidentified speaker: Hey, how's it going?

[00:00:24]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:00:25]  Bruce: Lulie is actually going to interview me today. Peter and Lulie are gonna interview me today. This was her idea.

And she said, can I come on your podcast, and can I interview you and ask you some questions? Because I know that you're a religious person. I'm like, absolutely.

So she has come on the show, and we're really grateful to have her here. Guys, why don't you go ahead and ask me questions?

[00:00:46]  Lulie: Yeah, so just a bit of context about me for the listeners. So I grew up in an atheist household, and so I haven't actually heard that much about religion, much less about the Mormonism. So first of all, I guess you have mentioned to me that the Mormon religion is similar in some ways to the beginning of infinity and this David Deutsch type worldview.

And I was just so curious about what are the similarities.

[00:01:22]  Bruce: So let me actually give some of my background. So I used to be a religious blogger. So I grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we have long had a nickname Mormons.

They're actually no longer using that as a nickname, but I'm okay with that. In fact, I find it really hard not to use because I've been using it all my life. And so officially we are Latter-day Saints, not Mormons, but I will answer to Mormon just fine.

So I was on these Latter-day Saint blogs and I was a blogger. I actually started off on a doubting blog. I am obviously someone who's been kind of in a weird space religiously, and I'm really into science and reason and things like that.

But I wasn't comfortable there for various reasons. So I moved over to a kind of staunch believing blog actually helped restart it, even though they knew that I had some doubts and things like that. They didn't really care that much.

[00:02:24]  Bruce: And so I actually went out and found the most conservative believing Latter-day Saints I could that currently weren't comfortable on the sort of doubting liberal blogs that were out there. And kind of helped make sure that the more conservative believing voice had a blog also, and that there was a place that people could go to. While I was on that blog, I met a guy named Fire Tag, which that's not his real name, obviously, but that was his blog name.

And he is, so when you think of Mormonism, you think primarily of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but far and away, the vast majority of people who are associated in any way with what you would call Mormonism are members of a single church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But there's actually other churches that have broken off over the years. And the second largest one, although they're way smaller than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was one called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[00:03:21]  Lulie: Wait, sorry, are you saying that there was the Book of Mormon that was written and then a bunch of different things that were not just the Latter-day Saints? Wow, I had no idea.

[00:03:32]  Bruce: There's actually, I mean, like there's hundreds of them, but like the vast majority of them are tiny, tiny, tiny.

[00:03:39]  Peter: There's a really good book called, or I thought it was good. You might hate it, honestly, but the Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven, have you read that one, Bruce?

[00:03:51]  Bruce: No.

[00:03:52]  Peter: They go through the history. I found the history really interesting where all the different Mormonism groups kind of

[00:04:01]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:04:01]  Peter: [splinter?] off and a lot of it, I think, was maybe about polygamy.

[00:04:07]  Bruce: About polygamy, yeah. There's a number of splits over polygamy. So yeah, so you've got like, if you're familiar with like Jeff Warren's and the FLDS, that's the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

No relation other than back in history to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So that would be the polygamist group. And a lot of times people try to lump us all together.

And I mean, I guess I kind of get it. There's at least some shared history, but a lot of cases it's like over a hundred years ago, there's not a whole lot of recent shared history. All Christian religions have some shared history.

So we kind of fall into that category. So he was a member of this other group, which was at one point called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And then they renamed themselves the Community of Christ.

So they're kind of a more liberalized version of Mormonism. And in a lot of ways, they've kind of moved away from the unique beliefs that make a Mormon a Mormon. And they're almost more like just a standard liberal Christian church today.

And he was actually a little disturbed by that. He had grown up believing in more of these unique Latter-day Saint beliefs. And he was kind of disturbed that his church that he was a part of was starting to move away from that.

[00:05:22]  Bruce: And I got talking and he said, you know, I have this book I recommend to people that I think you would really like. And it was The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. So I read it and I just, I loved it.

I thought it was a great book. And I said, wow, that was a fantastic book. You were totally right.

And in fact, that ended up informing, like I'm always reading, trying to read up on stuff. I'm kind of a reader and I like researching things. And after I read David Deutsch's Fabric of Reality, I spent years reading related books, trying to understand those theories better.

And honestly trying to refute them. So I'm very critical of everything. And so I'm always trying to find criticisms and what are the best alternative theories.

So I spent quite a bit of time like trying to figure out what's the best alternative to many worlds, quantum physics. And that one probably took me four or five years before I was satisfied that David Deutsch actually had that one right. Started reading Karl Popper.

And then I would read David Deutsch mentioned Roger Penrose. And he said Roger Penrose is in Fabric of Reality, he mentions him and he starts to explain Roger Penrose's views and how they differ from his own. And he says Roger Penrose is obviously at odds with my worldview and if he's right, then what I'm saying here wouldn't be true.

[00:06:39]  Bruce: So I'm like, hey, David Deutsch has supplied me what the alternative view is. And so I went out and I read both of Roger Penrose's books, The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows, I forget the other one is called Shadows of the Mind, which are by the way, completely excellent books. I would dare say at this point, looking down backwards, I can dare say that he gets absolutely everything wrong and David Deutsch really feel like his theories really survived the criticism of Roger Penrose very, very well.

But I don't think I ever could have really understood David Deutsch's theories to the degree that I do now without really having read The Alternative, which was Roger Penrose, and trying to understand Roger Penrose argument in full. And I spent years going through his books and reading books that he had suggested and that David Deutsch had suggested. And only at some point started to realize, yeah, the Four Strands at least, those are really surviving criticism well.

So I actually think David Deutsch is onto something here. Now at this point, I didn't know anything about anyone else being interested in David Deutsch. I had not discovered the Deutsch fan community on Twitter.

I'm not even sure if they were around at the time. I'm not even sure Twitter was around at the time. So I started to blog about David Deutsch's Four Strands and Karl Popper's critical rationalism on religious blogs.

[00:08:09]  Bruce: I did it on both a doubting blog and on, so I was on both, and a believing blog, and I did both, and did this whole series on epistemology.

[00:08:18]  Unidentified speaker: Do these posts still exist? Have you cross-posted them?

[00:08:21]  Bruce: They still exist, yes.

[00:08:22]  Lulie: Oh my God. What are they? Have you cross-posted them to anywhere? Like, I feel like, oh my God, you've been holding out on me. You've got all of this stuff from the past.

[00:08:30]  Bruce: So I did cross post my epistemology, my religious epistemology posts on fourstrands.org until I lost that website. So that website, unfortunately, I don't think I've mentioned this on air before, but I have a sister who is dying of cancer. And so I went into a depression and I was struggling and Peter actually saved the show by offering to come on and start doing editing and things like that.

And unfortunately, I didn't keep up on the software for that blog and it got taken over by spammers and I lost it. So Lulie showed me-

[00:09:07]  Peter: Well, you're gonna get it back though, right?

[00:09:09]  Bruce: I'm still trying.

[00:09:10]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:09:11]  Bruce: Lulie showed me that a bunch is available on Web Archive. I can't seem to find all of it there. So I'm still trying to find out how much I can save from web through Web Archive.

I tried doing a download of everything, but it really only got like the first page, like using a tool. And I still haven't talked with my boss about restoring the website. He's actually, my boss is my host.

So I do everything bargain budget. So that was my way of trying to save money. So I'm still working on that.

And I'm gonna still try to get back as much as I can. I just downloaded a bunch of it that I was able to get off of Web Archive. And I'll probably eventually try to put it back up on Medium.

But yeah, I took a whole bunch of the epistemology ones. I figured the audience of fourstrands.org wasn't gonna be interested in my purely religious blogging. So I didn't put any of that there, but anything that was like some of both I would put there.

So yeah, I have a long history out there and actually had someone recently contact me on Facebook from the Facebook group that Peter runs. And he's like, I'm really curious about your past blogging. And he like sent me like this link to something that was out on Millennial Star, which was one of the Mormon blogs.

[00:10:27]  Bruce: And he's like, I'm like, oh, really? You're someone who's interested in David Deutsch and religion? And he's like, yeah, you know, I've actually found a number of people like that.

So I think that the reason why FireTag recommended it to me was because he knew that because of my Latter-day Saint background, that we would find something like David Deutsch's book super interesting because there's this heavy overlap between the philosophy of David Deutsch and the religious philosophy that Latter-day Saints have. Now I should probably explain though, there's not such a thing as a single set of religious thoughts with Latter-day Saints. It's probably, that's probably not true of any religion.

Religions tend to be a lot more diverse than people think. And the Latter-day Saint religion is particularly speculative. So there's a tradition of, while you don't bring it up in church because you want church to be mostly the stuff that everybody agrees upon, that it's perfectly acceptable to have your own theological speculations.

And there's a wide variety that are accepted as completely just fine. There are several lines of thought within Mormon thought that really drive towards, they call it God is Scientist. And vast majority of Mormons would know what that means, but most of them would probably understand it in a fairly traditional religious way.

[00:11:58]  Bruce: But there is a line of thought that tries to understand Mormonism in a purely scientific way. In fact, there's a group called the Mormon Transhumanists, and they're one of the largest groups of most active groups of transhumanists. And they have done quite a bit to try to merge transhumanism thought and Mormon thought together.

And it's not that hard to do because of the way Mormon religion works and a lot of the things that exist in our past. So for example, if you were to meet Mormon missionaries off the street, they're going to start with the simplest stuff. And there's just so much in Mormonism that is just not that different than any other Christian religion.

We are very, very traditionally Christian in so many ways. So they would probably start with mostly kind of basic Christian ideas, but they would probably mix in some of the things that are unique to Latter-day Saints, such as the Book of Mormon, which is usually a little bit shocking for people. And so they only want to give a little bit of the shock a little bit at a time, right?

[00:13:03]  Bruce: And so as you go along and as you start to associate with Mormons, you'll start to discover that, for example, they believe that the destiny of human beings is to become just like God, or to become gods. That maybe doesn't mean exactly what you think it means. But it's the idea that we can become just exactly like God, that we can grow and have eternal progression like Him.

They have this concept of eternal progression, which many Christian religions don't have.

They have this…

[00:13:35]  Unidentified speaker: Go ahead.

[00:13:35]  Lulie: So this already sounds very similar to the passage in the Socrates chapter of The Beginning of Infinity, when Socrates is being mind blown, and he's like, yes, we are like, so what you're saying is we can get to understand anything, and we are like gods. And the Hermes is something like, well, you know, kind of, but yeah, basically.

[00:14:01]  Bruce: Yes, it is a lot like that. And in fact, that is actually part of Christian tradition that kind of got lost that Mormons largely rediscovered. And they do it slightly differently.

It's not quite the same. But if you were to go back in time and you were to look at St. Athanasius or, you know, you can find all sorts of quotes from early Christians up through the first four centuries where they talk about God became man so that man could become God and things like that. So there is this thread within Christianity that kind of got downplayed and lost.

And Mormons kind of rediscovered it and reinvented it in their own way and it became a part of their religion.

[00:14:43]  Lulie: Do you happen to know whether there was this thread at all in Judaism or was it only when Jesus came on the scene?

[00:14:50]  Bruce: I do not know. I guess I can't... Obviously Christians use both Jewish scripture and the Christian scripture.

And certainly the passages that are suggestive of this idea of deification, as it's called, the idea of man becoming God, exist mostly in the New Testament. There is maybe a handful in the Old Testament. And to be perfectly honest, you can find almost any thread of thought you want amongst Jewish rabbis and ancient writings and the Talmud and things like that.

So it wouldn't surprise me if there was, in fact, that line of thought within Jewish thought at some point.

[00:15:28]  Peter: If I may interject one thing, everything you're saying makes a lot of sense to me in its own way. I, as someone who, like Lulie, came up, is more of a secular background, and I used to, for years, I was really into evolutionary psychology and humans are just another animal, but I kind of had this feeling that just something about that didn't quite sit right with me for a long time. Even though I am an atheist, still, of course, when I discovered David Deutsch, I almost think that's the single thing more than anything that really pulled me into the worldview, where I was just like, yes, this is right.

Humans are not just another animal. There's something fundamentally different about our species and our ability to create knowledge. I hear what you're saying.

They're about parallels between religion and Deutschianism.

[00:16:32]  Bruce: Yes. There's a number of other things like that. It's unique that Latter-day Saints see us as sort of creating a heaven through becoming.

It's what you become that is what matters. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. It's what you become in the long run.

They have lines of thought that are very universalistic. Nearly everybody is thought to eventually go to one of three heavens. For example, they believe in three heavens instead of a single heaven.

There's a lot of these ideas that, and this whole idea of God a scientist, that at some level it is taught, although it's never really explained very deeply, that God isn't a supernatural being per se, but that there is no such thing as the supernatural, that God is just a being of great knowledge, and because of that, that is what makes God God. Now, as I said, the vast majority of Mormons probably do not understand that in a transhumanist, Deutschian sort of way. They would understand it in a far more traditional sort of way.

But that idea is something that if I mention it in church, no one's going to bat an eye, because they're going to know exactly what I'm talking about, even if they maybe understand it somewhat differently than I do or something like that, right?

[00:17:47]  Lulie: Are you saying that it's against supernaturalism?

[00:17:51]  Bruce: It can be interpreted that way. Let's put it that way. That technically speaking, a Mormon would tell you, I don't actually believe in supernaturalism.

But if you actually sat down and talked with them, a lot of their beliefs probably come across very much like supernaturalism. So I think it's one of those things where it's this thought that exists as part of the theology, and then people interpret it in different ways. And that's essentially this idea of God as scientist.

Now, some of the Christian religions that really don't like Mormonism very much have kind of latched on to this idea, and then they're going to try to pitch to you, oh, Mormons, they're not really Christians at all because they actually believe God's some alien being out there, and he's not actually God at all. He's just this alien with lots of knowledge. Well, you're never going to hear it taught that way in a Mormon church, like ever.

[00:18:38]  Bruce: But they're latching on to this idea of God as scientist, which actually is an actual doctrine of the church, and they're kind of trying to take it to a place where it sounds weird so that you feel a little afraid of Mormons. They're not entirely wrong, I guess, is what I'm trying to say, is that there is this thread of thought within Mormonism that there just simply is no such thing ultimately as magic or the supernatural. It really boils down to God's greater knowledge.

[00:19:04]  Lulie: Right, that makes sense. Well, it's been a long time since I saw this episode, but there was this one South Park episode that had a bunch of the most easy-to-make-fun-of ideas in The Latter-day Saints, and I don't actually remember the details of them. But so is it the case that in the religion, you would say that each of those has a physical explanation for it, or would you just class God as not being supernatural in some way, or what's the argument that it's not supernatural?

[00:19:41]  Bruce: So it's never fully explained, right? It's one of those things that they talk about, and it's a part of the religious thought, but they don't necessarily try to work out every single detail, and a lot of it's left up to you to interpret and for you to speculate on yourself. So on the one hand, that's what I would say, a lot of the things that they make fun of in the South Park episode, like for all intents and purposes, we're talking about something that is effectively supernatural, right?

On the other hand, if you were to ask a Mormon, they would say, well, no, it's more like, you know, what's the old quote from Arthur C. Clarke about any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to us? They would probably tell you something like that, right?

They would say, once we actually understand it all, we're going to see that it's not actually supernatural. Yeah, for all intents and purposes, we treat it as supernatural today.

[00:20:34]  Lulie: Going back to in what way is the David Deutsch worldview similar to Mormonism? So you covered this, we are like gods or like we are, is it we are gods or we become gods or what's the specific thing?

[00:20:50]  Bruce: They will talk about humans as God in embryo. So it's the idea of growing up and maturing into being like god.

[00:20:56]  Lulie: Yeah, and then we also covered how it is, it says that humans are unique in the world. They are not just like other animals.

[00:21:07]  Bruce: That's correct.

[00:21:08]  Lulie: And are there other similarities between the Latter-day Saints' view? Is it, I don't know if I'm to call it Mormonism or Latter-day Saints or like what the language is.

[00:21:18]  Bruce: So the official term is Latter-day Saint, the unofficial term. And I will accept Mormonism just fine, so don't feel like I'm going to be offended or something. So I think that there's a number of things like that.

And then it depends a lot on how you choose to interpret it. So if I were to go talk with, so I subscribe to the Mormon Transhumanist group that's on Facebook. And I received their emails.

I've never really gone to any of their meetups. But I have like some of their books. I reviewed some of their books for the religious blog.

And I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to take this side of Mormonism and they're trying to take it to its logical conclusions. So they will actually interpret Mormonism. Well, it depends on the individual.

Some of them are probably far more traditional believers. But some of them will actually try to interpret Mormonism in terms of what the science might look like. What does God's science look like?

What is it that we were eventually going to discover? It comes across very similar to like the Omega Point, where they're trying to work out what is it that God is actually doing that allows God to be God, right? And another thing I would probably mention is you say what else is similar.

[00:22:33]  Bruce: I keep speaking of God in the singular, but Christianity has always had this idea of a triune God, the Trinity. And Mormonism has a version of the Trinity. We usually refer to it as the Godhead.

Growing up, we referred to it as the Trinity, but because there was a desire to maybe differentiate ourselves from traditional Christian creeds to some degree, they kind of started to downplay the term Trinity, although a Mormon still will know what you're talking about if you refer to the Mormon Trinity. And they instead used the term Godhead, which means divine nature. And it's usually understood to be made up of three different persons.

Both Mormonism and in other forms of Christianity, it's understand that you've got the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Now there's this whole giant thing with creeds and splits of Christianity over how you need to word that and what it's supposed to mean. And I don't want to get into any of that.

Let me just say that Mormons are what you would call social Trinitarians. So they still accept only one God, but they see that God is being made up by actual persons. And in fact, one might even say that if you really stop and think through Mormon doctrine to its logical conclusions, they're really not so much Trinitarians as they are infinitarians.

[00:23:53]  Bruce: So they imagine God can be made up of basically an infinity of different persons, all of which will have the same moral will and moral understanding, so they still are considered one God for all intents and purposes. But they're different people, right? The father and the son are not the same person.

They are distinct in terms of their personality, and in fact, even they tend to see them as physically distinct in Mormonism. That's one of the things that other Christians would disagree with us on, although it's sometimes unclear what they're trying to say because they use these creedal terms that don't have a lot of modern meaning. So I think that's another thing that is the idea that there's really no limit.

It's not that there's this one special being God. We're literally a part of that God, right? And anyone can be.

And this is where the universalism sort of comes in, right? That anyone can become part of this.

[00:24:47]  Lulie: This is almost sounding like non-dualism. It's sort of like the oneness with everyone, sort of, which is with God or something like that.

[00:24:56]  Bruce: Yes. So Mormons are, they believe in spirits. So I would say they are dualistic in important ways.

But yes, there is this unique way of looking at Christianity that Mormons have. And it's something that I've always found very fascinating. And I think that's one of the reasons why Mormons believe very heavily in education, right?

They've got [university name unclear], and they encourage people to go become highly educated.

And I think this is because even though in particulars, science and their religion are at odds with each other in some important ways today, they believe eventually that will be worked out, right? That's the way they would tend to see it. And so this is usually done so that there's incentive to still go out and study the sciences, and Mormons get very geeked out over science in a lot of cases because of that.

And this is actually why Fire Tag kind of brought it up to me. He was like a physicist that was Mormon and member of the Community of Christ. And he thought that this really was a possible way to look at certain types of Mormon doctrine, trying to use the theories of David Deutsch.

[00:26:10]  Lulie: Yeah, when I said non-dual, I meant in the same sense of non-dual awareness meditation, so that you are not fundamentally separate from other people or the world or awareness or something, rather than non-dual or dual in the sense of Christian material [unclear phrase].

[00:26:27]  Bruce: So Mormonism does not have a concept of you, there is no you, like say Buddhism would have. They believe very much strongly in there is a you, and that you is eternal, and it's going to eventually become part of God. But they do have a non-dualistic in the sense of the whole idea is they believe in an objective morality, right?

So they believe there is only one actual set of moral standards, whatever that turns out to be, we don't always claim to know what that is. And ultimately God would be perfectly moral. And so everyone who becomes like God has to develop moral knowledge as well as other types of knowledge.

And so they would all have a converging will because of that, moral will because of that. That's probably the best way I could explain it to secular people.

[00:27:17]  Lulie: So are people sort of pre-God, or are they sort of ever more becoming more God-like, or are they a fragment of God, or...?

[00:27:27]  Bruce: They're understood to be literally the children of God. So there's kind of physical nature, which many Mormons today do believe in evolution, some don't, but they might see that as not being part of God, although they believe God has a physical form, so they don't see it as evil or a problem, but they would say that the spirit, the internal spirit, that that is a child of God, and that's where our divine spark comes from, the soul, if you will.

[00:27:57]  Lulie: Are we children of God in the same way that Jesus is? So, like, Jesus is God, and so we are like that guy, or...?

[00:28:05]  Bruce: It's similar, but different. So Jesus is uniquely divine, and uniquely the child of God in a different sort of way because of the virgin birth. So they're fairly traditional on that front, that Jesus was uniquely divine.

[00:28:19]  Lulie: Okay, cool. So you mentioned that there were other, maybe, I don't know if it was little things that reminded you of Mormonism as you were reading The Fabric of Reality and, I don't know, perhaps The Beginning of Infinity. I wonder if you remember any of those other things that reminded you or seemed similar?

[00:28:37]  Bruce: The thing I really loved about The Fabric of Reality is David Deutsch starts off with these different theories and then he kind of just covers some really cool things like what would time travel be like, you know, kind of mind-blowing stuff. And he does all these different things and at the very end, in the final chapter, he describes how when you take all four of these strands and you combine them together, you wind up with something really kind of cool. And then he kind of lays out the Omega Point, his version of the Omega Point, which differs from Tipler's in some important ways.

And I found that really fascinating. It was almost like it was a non-fiction book that had like a twist ending. And when I got to that chapter, I thought, okay, now I see why Fire Tag was telling me to read this book.

He knew that that final chapter comes across so Mormon-like in so many ways that it kind of draws all these different threads together of theological threads and scientific threads and kind of twists them all together in an interesting way. And that was kind of where a lot of the aha moments for me came out. I thought, oh, this is really interesting.

[00:29:46]  Bruce: For one thing, I don't know very many scientists that have done something like this where they come up with this strongly optimistic worldview that's so typical of religion but not so typical of scientific worldviews. And so I guess that would be another one I would mention, is that extreme optimism that Deutsch has. And the fact that it stems from eternal progress, which is something that Mormons accept theologically, is that all problems can be solved.

I know he said that more in Beginning of Infinity, but that would be a thread from Beginning of Infinity that I think Mormons would really relate to.

[00:30:22]  Lulie: So I'm curious what feels inadequate about this sort of critical rationalist Deutschian worldview from the Mormon perspective of why is it not just an alternative to Mormonism?

[00:30:38]  Bruce: Well, that's an interesting question. I can answer that in a couple of different ways. So maybe let me first start with giving you maybe a somewhat more boring but technically correct answer.

So let's answer the question like, is the Deutschian viewpoint, is it a religion? I've told you in my opinion it is. And since I'm a religious person, I don't mean that as an insult at all.

I intend that as a compliment.

[00:31:05]  Lulie: Yeah, I'm grinning. In what sense is it a religion?

[00:31:09]  Bruce: So it has a lot of the things that make religions religions, right? A lot of the different ideas and philosophies that kind of you find within theology, the optimism, that man is special, that we have a destiny, things like that. And I think that that's a lot of what gets people excited when they read David Deutsch's books, right?

Is they actually have, they may not in their minds think of it as a spiritual experience, but I think that's exactly what they're having, right? It's something like a spiritual experience when they read David Deutsch's books and they come away with this idea of infinity. Oh, that's another one.

Mormons have a very big deal, all Christians do actually, about infinity and the importance of infinity. And it features prominently within all different Christian theologies. Well, obviously that's a huge thing within the Deutsch worldview.

[00:32:01]  Bruce: And I think that that is, when someone gets excited about David Deutsch's philosophies and theories, I think that they are reacting to a lot of the same things that get people excited about religion, this special place of man in the world, and the fact that we are different than the animals, and that we have a special destiny, things like that. Now, where would I say that view is inadequate compared to a religion? I think the boring answer is that while it's like a religion in terms of its belief, it's not currently like a religion in terms of its institutions.

And that churches are these complex memeplex institutions that have lots of stuff going on. That if you really think about it, we often treat religion like it's almost, yeah, the reason why someone believes in a religion is because they were raised in it. Well, the vast majority of people raised in religion don't go with that religion.

It's actually quite hard to pass your religious beliefs on to your children. And in fact, it's so hard that the vast, vast, vast majority of religions have gone out of existence at this point. The reason why it doesn't feel that way is because the religions that succeeded and that are still around and are still growing are the exception cases.

[00:33:23]  Bruce: They are the cases where they've got that right set of institutions and things that allow a religion to be successful. And there's actually scientific studies about this. And as someone who's interested in both religion and science, I've tried to read these studies.

And one of the ones that I've really liked was called Why Strict Churches Are Strong. It's a really interesting study. And what they do is they try to look at religion through an economic lens.

So it's a rational lens, but rational in the economic sense. Why is it that some religions prosper and grow and others just kind of disappear, where most disappear? What is it that causes that?

And their explanation is that if a religion is strict, and so what they mean by that is that the religion actually asks you to do things. So, for example, in the Mormon religion, famously we don't drink alcohol, we don't drink coffee or tea or use tobacco. Okay, we call that the word of wisdom.

But like all successful religions that are still around have things like that, that kind of define them as an identity, as a group. And the fact that they ask for things like that and that there's even an expectation that you will make that a part of your religious practice requires you to make sacrifices in your life, right? The fact that I choose not to drink alcohol, that's a sacrifice.

[00:34:47]  Bruce: And at the same time, it also creates a group identity that immediately when somebody sees that I don't drink alcohol, they go, Oh, are you religious? Yes. Oh, are you Mormon?

Yes. Right. And it kind of makes me stand out a little as a Mormon because I choose not to drink alcohol.

And the fact that there is this price that you have to pay, but it's made up in other ways, right?

[00:35:11]  Lulie: Yeah. Or just on that note, I've heard that one of the theories for why early Christianity spread in the first place was that it was, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Paul or one of the early guys, there was intolerance in the spreading of it. This guy, Bart Ehrman, wrote about the spreading of early Christianity and the fact that it was possible to, like so before, it used to be that you could kind of believe in lots of gods.

You could believe in the Jewish god and then also kind of dabble in paganism on the side. And then the followers of Jesus, you said, no, you have to believe that Jesus is the prophet and that you can't believe in these other gods. And so it sounds like in Mormonism, it's kind of continuing that thing where, no, like you actually do have to believe in the thing.

[00:36:10]  Bruce: Yes, yes. So the argument in why strict churches are strong is that because there is this sacrifice that takes place where you have to believe in certain things and you have to take part in certain practices and things like that, their argument is that solves the free rider problem. So you end up with people who are weaker in the faith and they don't believe in it as much.

It's not as interesting to them. They kind of fall away because it's just too much effort. And you end up with this community where you put a lot into it, but you also get a lot out of it because everybody in that community is putting a lot into it.

So you end up with this net positive. And so this is their argument, anyhow, and there have just been studies that have challenged this. And I think that this is probably a true, correct understanding of religion, but only to a degree.

There's like exception cases that are really important. Like one of them is that probably no church would be particularly successful if they were too intolerant, right? And so if they want to be able to try to get people who are weaker in the faith to slowly move into the more faithful side.

[00:37:15]  Bruce: So they've got to be accommodating into some degree of people who are weaker in the faith, and then they've got to kind of make a path into the more faithful side. This is one of the other studies. I don't have the name of that study handy, but it's challenged why strict churches are strong to some degree.

[00:37:30]  Lulie: And presumably if you were too intolerant, then you'd basically become a cult. You'd have this very much insider-outsider thing.

[00:37:38]  Bruce: That's correct. So you're trying to find a kind of maximum tension with the rest of the world that doesn't create a boundary too strong. And you want it to be porous and you want it to allow people in.

But you don't want to... Honestly, that's what a cult is, right? It's a religion where the boundary has become too strong.

And so now they've become elitist. They're often not even that interested in recruiting or conversions from the outside. And they start to need to cut you off from the rest of the world.

In Mormonism, we often talk about living in the world but not being part of the world, which is a fancy way of saying, okay, we're going to behave differently. We're going to have beliefs that are different than other people. But we're not trying to not be part of the world.

We're not trying to section ourselves off entirely. We want to have regular careers, live in peace with our non-Latter-day Saint neighbors. We want to be good neighbors.

And so you're not trying to be cult-like. You're trying to be a still out there into the world. This is often like in Christianity.

They often talk about a city cannot be set on a hill. This is from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. You imagine yourself as a light to the world or something along those lines.

[00:38:57]  Bruce: This is, I think, something that religions that are successful do well, is they find that right balance where you do have some sort of strictness.

There's a lot of desire for some members of religions. They like certain aspects of the religion that they grew up in. They love the fact that there's this strong, vibrant community.

They love the community. But maybe they're just not into the truth claims of that religion. Or maybe they even just politically disagree.

Religions tend to be very conservative politically, and they're very liberal. And so they really want to liberalize their religion. And they actually serve a really useful purpose.

They then become these internal critics where they raise issues. And this is what liberals have always been good at, is raising issues. And it creates something that we then have to improve upon and work on.

But a lot of times you wonder, why don't they just go join a liberal religion? There's a ton of them out there. If you don't like the Latter-day Saint religion because it's too conservative, there's this community of Christ that FireTag was a member of, that is completely liberalized and has left-wing beliefs now and isn't concerned about the truth claims really much at all.

And it's like, why don't these people go and join those? Well, they don't really make great religions. And they're usually not that great to be a part of.

[00:40:26]  Bruce: They haven't properly solved the free rider problem. And so they end up with these kind of communities that aren't that great. And really, these people often end up preferring to stay in the stricter, more conservative religion because they're just better religions in a lot of ways.

They fulfill that spiritual religious need better than a lot of these liberal religions do.

[00:40:46]  Lulie: And have a tighter community.

[00:40:48]  Bruce: Have a tighter community, right.

[00:40:49]  Peter: I would say for myself, as I've gotten a bit older, maybe I've gotten a little more conservative in that I think I kind of envy what Mormons, the sort of the prescription for life that, aside from the kinds of truth claims that you've mostly talked about, it could be thought of maybe as its own kind of truth claim, telling people how to live, which would be, you know, you have a lot of kids. Mormons are known for having a lot of kids. I wish I'd had two or three more, honestly.

I love kids and you sign them up for scouts and, you know, it tends to be very family and community oriented. As I've gotten older, I'm just much more sympathetic to that prescription for how to live.

[00:41:37]  Bruce: So let me put that into a critical rationalist way of looking at things. Religions have these theology, beliefs, practices. They've got this giant set of institutions that make them up and memes that make them up.

Well, if they're a successful religion, particularly like in America where there was no state religion, so you just had to compete, right? You really needed, if you were going to survive as a religion, you had to actually provide value to your adherents. And because of that, you're going to end up with this set of beliefs that actually is something that contains knowledge.

They're the ones that survive, the religions that didn't implement the better beliefs, they die out, right? And so you end up with this kind of knowledge-bearing traditions. Now, this is, politically, I see myself as a conservative, right?

And I am not a—I am very much a traditional conservative in so many ways. One thing that I think a critical, as a critical nationalist [possibly “rationalist”], I would say conservatives get one thing wrong, they try to sacralize tradition and you really shouldn't do that. And obviously religions are sacralizing their traditions.

[00:42:48]  Bruce: But I think a lot of these traditions are actually just really valuable. And a lot of times we, some of the traditions I think would be valuable to anybody, even if you could do them purely secularly. But a lot of times I think you almost have to have the beliefs to go with them to allow you to get it in your mind, this is an important tradition that I need to do.

Honestly, to moralize it to some degree. If I could use an example, Christian tradition involves this idea of no sex before marriage. Now, a lot of Christians do have sex before marriage.

It's probably not that abnormal amongst Christians today. But I don't think that was necessarily a bad tradition, right? It's something that actually has some real value.

But it's really hard to live in the modern world unless you are part of a community that accepts that as a moral rule. And you've got enough people in that community that are willing to live it. If you were just a Mormon on your own and you're trying to date non-Mormons, I mean, no one's going to be okay with that because there's going to be other expectations of the world around you.

[00:43:56]  Lulie: By the way, I just wanted to say it's really interesting that I've seen people who come from a more sex-positive promiscuous culture end up identifying as one of these new sexualities like demisexual or gray asexual, which basically, as far as I can tell, is trying to bring back some of that. No, I'm only attracted to someone who I have an emotional connection to or I am rarely sexually attracted to someone.

[00:44:27]  Peter: I've had that same thought before that a lot of this stuff is kind of a long way around to coming back actually sort of a more conservative view or something.

[00:44:38]  Bruce: Yes. And I guess what I'm trying to say is I think in a lot of cases, even if the tradition is something that people would benefit from, it may be very hard to hold on to it without a religious setting for it, right? And having it wired into the religion in some way, it may just not be possible to hold on to even some of the good traditions that actually do have value.

And so religion could be thought of then as carrying a lot of these positive traditions. Now, obviously, there's negative traditions too, and I don't want to act like I'm unaware of the negative side of religion. Religion definitely has a negative side.

I think that in a lot of cases, what Peter is kind of getting at, having lots of kids is kind of a really meaningful thing to do with your life, right? It's a very positive tradition. By the way, another one that I've noticed is another parallel between Latter-day Saints and Deutschians, is you talk to Deutschians and even though a lot of them aren't married and don't have kids, they'll talk about the need for more humans, right?

And that we don't... Never mind the whole zero population thing that's so popular secularly. They're like, against that, we need more knowledge creators in the world.

I think that that's another place where Mormons captured that tradition religiously, and it's something that was actually had some truth to it.

[00:45:57]  Lulie: I wonder whether, to any extent, the reason for these people not having kids is that the Deutschian philosophy doesn't appeal to women somehow? Like, it's a very sort of... I mean, I guess philosophy in general is very sort of male-dominated.

And so I'm wondering what types of features of Mormonism does appeal to women more, or like what kind of changes that the Deutschian philosophy could make that would make it more appealing?

[00:46:27]  Bruce: Well, I can answer that question. I don't know how you would apply it to Deutschian philosophy, but let me go ahead and answer the question. So, different religions appeal to different genders.

That's just a fact, right?

[00:46:38]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, is that true? I just thought you'd need... Okay, interesting.

[00:46:42]  Bruce: So, and now this one's gonna shock you when I tell you. So the first one won't shock you. The Muslim religion is very appealing to masculinity, and they have a much easier time keeping men involved in the religion than the women involved in the religion.

Christianity is exactly the opposite. It is very appealing to women, but it's not as appealing to men.

[00:47:05]  Unidentified speaker: Why is that?

[00:47:06]  Bruce: Well, there's a lot of unknowns around this. I mean, to be able to answer that question, I would have to scientifically explain to you why women are different than men. And there's no real easy answer to that question, in part because we're universal explainers.

And it may be culture. We don't know how genes and culture relate in a lot of cases. And I don't know if there is a great scientific answer to that question.

But we know that women find a lot of... So Brett Hall did a podcast where he tried to advance libertarianism as a belief. He talks about how seculars actually secretly still believe in the teachings of Jesus.

So he's looking at it in a negative sense. And Jesus' teachings about equality and everyone's equal before God. And a lot of these ideas that we need to help the poor and things like that.

And he was kind of trying to present that secular people are still actually imbibing this religious tradition. And in his mind, they shouldn't. Well, that religious tradition, that whole idea is very appealing to women for some reason.

[00:48:19]  Bruce: And the left also has more women than it does men for that exact reason. And the left is a philosophy that is a little more woman-dominated than male-dominated and kind of captures a lot of these same ideas that probably did come out of Christianity. And so I think that there's a lot of these traditions that just really work for women.

Now, I think on top of that, you've got this patriarchal side to Christianity. And this is just me, but I heavily suspect the patriarchal side of Christianity. And what I mean by that is only Catholic priests are always men, for example.

There's this male side, and they've got their theological reasons why they do that. They need to represent Christ. Christ was male.

But when it really comes down to it, I think that that is a tradition that allowed for more men to find Christian traditions appealing. And it kind of worked more for them, that they had these male figures that they could look up to as they were growing up inside of Christianity, things like that. And I don't know, and I understand the concern.

[00:49:27]  Bruce: I'm not trying to downplay it because it can lead to sexism because you only have male leaders and things like that. And that's something that comes up with Mormonism because they have similar sorts of traditions as with the Catholics on that. But I think these traditions actually were the successful ones precisely because it allowed a religion that probably wouldn't have appealed as much to men to become be able to hold on to more of their men.

And to this day, Mormons still have a harder time holding on to men than compared to women, right?

[00:49:58]  Unidentified speaker: Really?

[00:49:59]  Bruce: Yeah, and all Christian religions do. In fact, all the ones I know about do. There's so many Christian religions, I can never make a universally true statement about Christianity.

[00:50:08]  Lulie: Because when you think of Mormons, you think of the elders who come and knock on your door and you don't necessarily see the mass of women who are there. Or at least you as in me as in an atheist.

[00:50:21]  Bruce: Yes. So my wife served as a missionary, right? So there are quite a few women who serve missions, just like the elders that come and knock on your door.

[00:50:33]  Lulie: Yeah, although fewer of them do it.

[00:50:37]  Bruce: Fewer of them do it. There's not as much social pressure on the women to do it as the men. And it's typically seen as masculine duty that you need to serve a mission.

This is one of these things that has changed over time. And they've made a lot of changes recently. And for people who maybe a mission wouldn't work for, they often allow them to do a shorter mission, things like that, to try to accommodate people.

[00:51:05]  Unidentified speaker: Really?

[00:51:06]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:51:07]  Bruce: So there have been a lot of changes recently.

[00:51:08]  Unidentified speaker: Does that count?

[00:51:09]  Unidentified speaker: It does.

[00:51:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:51:13]  Lulie: Does it count in coolness points?

[00:51:15]  Bruce: It does not.

[00:51:20]  Lulie: I was also wondering, because you said that the Catholic Church has only male priests. And so I'm wondering whether Protestants, that there are more women Protestants than there are women Catholics proportionally.

[00:51:38]  Bruce: That's a good question. I don't know.

So the Protestants, some Protestant religions still have these patriarchal elements. And so you would probably expect them to be more similar to Catholics or Mormons or something like that. It would be interesting, like when you've got plenty of Protestant religions now that allow female priests, right?

How does that actually impact the proportion of males to females? And if it didn't impact it, what did they do instead that allowed them to try to compensate for that? There's probably more than one way to slay this beast, right?

So it's not like there's only one way to go about it. But my guess is that those traditions have been around for a long time, right? I suspect that those were knowledge-bearing traditions that were necessary for the cultures that these religions grew up in.

And really, honestly, they should only change slowly, right? They probably should change, but they should only change slowly. And they should be careful to figure out alternative traditions.

Mormonism, in their short history, a lot happened. They had to go through some fairly significant changes. Specifically, giving up polygamy was a huge, much bigger than you probably think.

Even though most Mormons weren't polygamists, that was such a huge part of the theology at the time. And it tied into the culture in ways that modern Mormons can't relate to today and aren't even aware of, right? If you actually go study the history.

[00:53:05]  Peter: Isn't it true that Brigham Young's wife never accepted polygamy as a, or not Brigham Young, but Joseph Smith's wife, never accepted polygamy and kind of founded her own branch of the church because of that after Joseph Smith died? Do I have that right?

[00:53:24]  Bruce: You do. It sort of depends on how you read her. Let me first finish answering the other question.

Mormonism took some of their lesser known, not as emphasized doctrines when polygamy went away, and they started emphasizing those instead. They actually had to, and so it's not like they made up new doctrines. They were doctrines that already existed, but they just weren't a huge part of the practice of the religion.

So one of the ones, I mentioned I don't drink alcohol, up until polygamy died out, that really wasn't a huge part of the religion. You can find it, and they talk about it, and it was always there, but Mormons would chew tobacco, and it wasn't that big of a deal, right? In some cases, famous Mormons would own bars or something like that back in that time period.

So it wasn't something that was really a part of the identity of Mormons. It was just something that was kind of a background doctrine that you can, you should try to live, but it's not that big of a deal if you don't. And it took on a totally different importance when polygamy went away, because now it had to carry a lot of the weight of the group identity and what makes us different from the outside world and things like that.

[00:54:38]  Bruce: And that surprises a lot of Mormons since you don't know your own history in a lot of cases. They're a little surprised that Brigham Young chewed tobacco or something like that, which it shouldn't surprise them because that was a different emphasis back then because they identified as a group using polygamy instead of the word of wisdom. And the leaders of the church were quite smart that they understood, okay, as we retire this practice, we're going to have to come up with a new emphasis on other practices.

And they picked that. They picked some other ones I could tell you about. But that led to a sort of new group identity that still had continuity with the old group identity.

And it was quite smart, right? And it worked fairly effectively and allowed Mormonism to thrive. Okay, getting back to your question about Emma Smith, the historical record is really split on this.

And it's really hard to know. Most people feel pretty safe that she wasn't real hip on polygamy. And that's based on the fact that she definitely had issues with some of the other wives and things like that.

[00:55:48]  Bruce: The truth is, though, is that there were at times she was accepting of it. To the point where she actually, two of Joseph Smith's wives actually, she gave them to him and said, here, take these two, I want you to take these two women as wives. And she later in life claimed that he never practiced polygamy.

And that was her official stance. And she didn't help start the RLDS, that FireTag’s religion is the one that was the non-polygamist one. But she did join it because she stayed out there.

They didn't have a Latter-day Saint religion where she lived because she didn't go over to Utah. So she ended up joining what today we would call the Community of Christ, the RLDS. And because officially she said that polygamy never happened, she fit in well with the RLDS who were against polygamy.

So it's really hard to know what she was thinking, to be perfectly honest.

[00:56:44]  Peter: Well, it's got to be kind of a hard thing for most women to accept. If suddenly your husband says, well, you know, let's bring in a couple more wives here and revelation from God.

[00:56:57]  Bruce: Right. So yeah, polygamy was a hard thing that was not very popular even at its height. The vast majority of Mormons did not practice it.

It was a giant sacrifice economically for a man. It was a giant sacrifice for the woman for obvious reasons. And that was kind of the tradition that allowed them to be very different than the outside world.

And it served its purpose well in terms of creating a group religious identity. But I think the vast majority of Mormons are really glad it's gone. They don't have any problem with the fact that Mormons in the past practiced it, but they don't want to ever see it come back again.

[00:57:36]  Peter: To be fair, it was practiced, I think, probably in most places in the world.

[00:57:41]  Unidentified speaker: It was.

[00:57:42]  Bruce: And in many ways, the Latter-day Saints Church has got to be one of the most anti-polygamist churches in the world today.

[00:57:52]  Unidentified speaker: Really?

[00:57:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:57:54]  Bruce: So that's one of the things that will get you excommunicated really fast.

[00:58:00]  Lulie: Wow, that must be so annoying that that reputation still kind of drags on.

[00:58:04]  Bruce: Well, firstly, historical reasons, because we did practice it. And a lot of our biggest heroes, religious heroes, were known polygamists and things like that. So we have kind of a split mind on that.

We accept it for the people in the past, but we do not practice it today. And there is zero expectation that we'll ever be practiced again.

[00:58:22]  Peter: And to be fair, there are still offshoots out there right now.

[00:58:26]  Bruce: If you want to practice it, you are a member of... you have to go start your own offshoot. That's how it works.

You got to go start your own church, your own religion. This is your own thing. You're not part of the Latter-day Saints Church anymore.

So, okay, let me actually get back to what Lulie was asking me, though. What does Deutschianism lack? I could probably tell you, in some ways, you guys, one of your main competitors is effective altruism.

I think effective altruism has actually captured some of these religious institutions better than the Deutschian movement has. So, this idea of sacrifice is huge in effective altruism. That's going to allow them to be more successful in a lot of ways, right?

[00:59:07]  Lulie: Do you think sacrifice in particular is necessary, or just some kind of strict rules that maybe don't feel like a sacrifice because you think, ah, yes, I'm doing the good thing?

[00:59:20]  Bruce: So, I'm using the word sacrifice in a religious sense, and it's not seen as a negative when it's used in a religious sense, right? Because that's exactly how a religious person would see sacrifice, a religious sacrifice, as I'm doing the good thing, right?

[00:59:36]  Lulie: It doesn't feel like sacrifice at the time. It just feels like a challenge. It's sort of like we don't feel like we are sacrificing to the laws of mathematics.

It's just those are the challenge that we have, and so it's really difficult. And so in order to do it, it is difficult. Or is there an element of personal sacrifice?

[00:59:56]  Bruce: There is always that element of personal sacrifice. Let's look at effective altruism as the example. They give up money.

They have their reasons for doing it. It may not feel like a sacrifice. It may feel like exactly the right thing for them to be doing.

But they could, in theory, go take that money, not give it up to charities, and they could use it to buy beer or whatever. I mean, there is an economic sacrifice that is going on. And I think that's what I really mean by it, is that there is something you're giving up, and then you feel like you're getting something better instead.

And they often define sacrifice religiously as giving up something good for something better. That element, though, is what solves the free rider problem. It is what allows...

It's important to the forming of a group identity of a boundary. You have to have a boundary between you and the outside world as a religion, whether I'm talking about a true religion like Latter-day Saints or a not-quite-religion-like effective altruism. They do have this important group identity and a boundary between them and the outside world.

[01:00:53]  Bruce: I would suggest that libertarians are the same way, right? I mean, whenever you talk to a libertarian, they'll almost always say, taxes are theft or something like that, which is guaranteed to cause a reaction to the outside world, but also identifies you as part of the in-group to another fellow libertarian. I actually think that is part of this idea of strict churches are strong, that it's the element that allows that group identity and allows you to be separated from the way the rest of the world is, but in a healthy, porous sort of way, right?

[01:01:29]  Lulie: Do you think that a religion requires coercion or internal coercion or some kind of forcing yourself to do something? Or do you think there could be a religion that is entirely based on non-coercive principles, such that if there are sacrifices, they're not really sacrifices in the sense that, yes, they are very strict, but you are fully into it?

[01:01:55]  Bruce: That's a really good question. I definitely think self-coercion discipline is a big part of religious tradition, and it's a big part of non-religious tradition. I do not know the answer to that question.

That's a really interesting question. Could you figure out a way to make the sacrifice really not feel like a sort of internal discipline? I think that's the goal, is that it becomes so much a part of your nature that it doesn't feel like a sacrifice anymore, that it's just a part of who you are.

But I also think that that's not the way human beings are. And if you tried to not have any discipline at all, at least with our current knowledge today, that would probably be hard to get the religion off the ground.

[01:02:38]  Lulie: Yes, a challenge, if you will. Because I'm thinking that the Deutsch worldview, with taking children seriously and this very non-coercive, non-authoritarian take, maybe there is this possible scope for something that has specific ideas, because certain things are true and certain things are false, but that doesn't have this coercive element to it.

[01:03:08]  Bruce: I think that is a challenge for you.

I think that's an interesting challenge. It really is.

[01:03:17]  Unidentified speaker: Go ahead.

[01:03:18]  Peter: I'm very curious about this idea of self-coercion that Lulie brought up. Maybe, Lulie, could you define that?

[01:03:28]  Lulie: Yeah, so I think that as Bruce was saying, current society and religions and basically everyone works by thinking that there are some things in life where you have to force yourself to do things that you don't want to do, or you have to push through the pain, or you have to make yourself go to work every day and so on. I think that this is always indicative of there is some kind of idea in you that is a criticism of the thing that you're going to do. And as a Popperian-Deutschian, I would say that there is always a possible solution to that internal conflict, and that you don't have to use coercion to get yourself to do these things.

You can think of yourself as consisting of multiple parts or sub-agents or different strands of your personality or whatever you want to call it. And if those are in conflict, instead of acting on that, then if you can resolve that internal conflict so that you are fully on board with the thing, that would be a better society or a better internal state. Now, I don't think that's always possible, just like in regular society we still have laws against committing crimes and so on.

[01:04:52]  Lulie: And so some people do want to coerce others, and then you do have to have law to prevent people from doing things that they might otherwise do. But the ideal for a liberal society is that we get to the point where we have so much knowledge that we don't need to resolve conflicts by force. Instead, we can resolve it by reason or by resolving the conflict that is present.

[01:05:19]  Peter: I find that to be a very compelling take. Can I just ask you one more question about that that hopefully won't take us down too much of a tangent? What is the definition of coercion to you?

That's another thing I've been a bit confused about. Is that too obvious?

[01:05:40]  Lulie: So again, to take a sort of Popperian frame on this, when you have two or more theories, and this can be intuitions, this can be subconscious theories, when you have two or more theories that are in conflict, that are still in conflict before you have to act. So in other words, you are acting on one when you still haven't resolved the criticisms from the other, and these two theories are still active.

So coercion is basically when you are forcing something through instead of resolving a disagreement. And you can resolve the disagreement in a kind of meta way by saying, okay, given we can't solve this disagreement in time, then what is an adequate solution to this? And you can do various different moves to try and resolve this conflict, but the particular conflict between these two ideas needs to get resolved at some point for coercion not to happen.

[01:06:47]  Peter: So they're like what Deutsch would, I think he calls them the implicit and explicit ideas. And so that can happen either internally or externally, this conflict between the ideas?

[01:06:59]  Lulie: Yes, and it could be between two explicit ideas. It could be between two inexplicit or subconscious ideas. It could be between an inexplicit idea and your explicit idea.

And so there can be conflicts between all of these things, just like there can be conflicts with a spouse. You can have the explicit conflict about, why didn't you turn off the lights? Or why didn't you do the dishes?

And then there's the actual thing that the disagreement is about, which is that they're not providing love or something, and that there's something under the surface that that's about. And so I'd say the same can apply with one person.

[01:07:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:07:39]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:07:39]  Peter: Thank you for that.

[01:07:41]  Bruce: So let me try to actually finish answering one of these questions then. What are other things that the Deutsch movement could maybe learn from religions?

And there's no good answer to that question, but obviously one thing is the idea of having a set of beliefs. I think Deutschians do have a set of beliefs. I don't think that they lack in this department.

There's no real evidence that the set of beliefs directly impacts the success of the religion. But I do think the reality is that if you don't have a set of beliefs that you really kind of have moralized, that like if you were to go look at, they did a study of, I want to say it was the Episcopalian religion, I think, which would be the Church of England in America. They looked at what was going on and they would talk to these kind of lay liberals and they would ask them, should you go to church?

And they would say, yeah, it's really good to go to church. I intend to go to church. And they would talk very positively about the need to go to church and how much they loved it when they went to church and things like that.

[01:08:45]  Bruce: But they didn't actually go to church. It was more of a theoretical than an actual practice. And I think one of the things that happens with religion is once they've moralized some of their beliefs, and these are things that you really, this is something that you should be doing, that it kind of switches in their mind from, in theory, I should go to the gym, and then it's really hard to actually do it, to this is something that I'm really going to do.

And then they go to the gym, right? And I think going to church is something like that, that you're going to find a stricter religion that actually has beliefs and actually places going to church as something that God wants you to do. This is a positive moral thing that they're more likely to actually do it.

And I think that's where beliefs do kind of play a role. And then I call this the message. So I jokingly call it the message from God.

But if you were, I think I've mentioned previously the idea of meaning memes, that we often say, oh, communism is a religion. Well, obviously communism is not a religion. It's got no beliefs in God at all.

And yet when somebody says that, you know what they mean. Is that there's something very similar between communism and religion. I call this concept meaning memes.

[01:09:58]  Bruce: So a meaning meme is the idea that there's these memeplexes or memes that people get into their mind and it becomes part of how they self-identify. And it always has some sort of moral message that this is the message from God, as I call it, where they're trying to bring this message to the world that needs to be heard. And it's important that they do because it has moral meaning.

And it helps people find meaning in their lives. It's also very dangerous. This is something that Peter and I have talked about quite a bit.

I think all meaning memes are inherently dangerous, but they're also the source of pretty much every good thing that's come in the world up to this point.

[01:10:33]  Unidentified speaker: What's dangerous about them?

[01:10:35]  Bruce: So this idea of the message that you've got something important to say to the world that you need to bring to the world, that's kind of the meme. You're trying to bring this set of beliefs to the world. It could very quickly, the very fact that you even have a message, that the world isn't accepting this message yet.

So for Deutschians, that might be the idea of infinity, is that there's this actual idea of infinity and there's really great things that could be used that are part of the message of Deutschianism. But you can very quickly see how it could become elitist. We have this message, whatever, and it very quickly can become, we're better than everybody else.

And I think religions, from what I've seen, they spend a lot of time trying to teach their members not to vilify non-members of the religion. And I think that's a necessary institution that has to exist. I think it's one of the things that's lacking in some of the more radical versions of leftism, is that they don't have that non-vilify message yet.

[01:11:35]  Bruce: Hopefully they'll pick it up at some point. It seems like religion spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to have this message you bring to the world, but not try to see the world as evil, because they aren't doing this thing that has this moral meaning that you think is important for the world to know about. And I think that that is something that is tough, right?

On the one hand, you actually do believe you've got something that's important. If I could pick on libertarians, I love libertarians. If I could pick on libertarians as an example of a meaning meme here, you've got these moral ideas that come out of economics that libertarians are very attracted to.

It's not that hard to go too far to find a libertarian that is condemning anyone who doesn't agree with them morally in really negative ways. It's because the very existence of the meaning meme has the potential to become elitist and dangerous. And you have to be constantly fighting against that and trying to turn it into more of a we try to persuade people rather than we try to out them for disagreeing with us.

[01:12:46]  Bruce: And I've noticed religions do spend a lot of time trying to keep themselves safe in that way. And religions that fail at this will become cults and will become dangerous. I also think that the other thing that I would mention is this idea of regular meetings or a gathering.

Religions have traditionally had churches where you meet together as a congregation physically. Or a concept of gathering. We're all going to gather in Israel or something like that.

And this is something Mormons have had a lot of both of those. And I think that this is a really important institution because if you just have a bunch of people who are kind of just out there, they tend to evaporate over time. Whereas if they can be part of a community and feel part of a community that they're physically neighbors with, then it's a lot harder for the meme to evaporate.

Now, this may be changing because of the Internet. I think we've seen a lot of meaning memes, some positive, some negative, some both, cropping up because you finally had people on the Internet who were geographically diverse coming together and forming groups online. So it may be that the Internet will allow to not have to have a physical gathering anymore.

But I think that physical gatherings are still really important. I know that you guys have had a number of physical gatherings, and I think that that's an important institution to build up.

[01:14:06]  Lulie: Do you think that you can have a happy life without meaning memes?

[01:14:13]  Bruce: That's an interesting question. So I would guess that the vast majority of humans that have lived didn't have meaning memes because if you're just trying to survive, you're probably not spending any time on your meaning memes very much. But I'm not sure that's an ideal way to live, where you're just trying to survive from day to day.

And I definitely think that as we've gained knowledge and we've overcome the need to make every single moment about survival, that the rise of meaning memes became increasingly important. I mean, like you can easily find studies on this and people who talk about this, the idea of a meaning crisis, the fact that modern societies, as they've become less religious, that they've had a meaning crisis. It's harder for them to find meaning.

And I think that I won't out anything, but let's just say that there are some powerful meaning memes out there right now that have some fairly negative influences that honestly almost every religion I know is safer than at this point. And I think that will change over time.

[01:15:17]  Peter: Do we have a meaning meme shaped gap then? Is that just kind of a different way of saying God shaped gap?

[01:15:24]  Bruce: So I can't say that every human is like this, but it sure seems to be common, at least in modern societies where you're not just trying to survive from day to day, that you need some way to actualize yourself. If you were to think about the Hierarchy of Needs, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, with self-actualization being at the top of the pyramid. Now, I know that as much as that theory gets used, it's actually a disproven theory.

But there are theories similar to it, so similar to a lay person, you may not even be able to tell the difference, that have actually survived a number of empirical tests. So I definitely think that there's something to the Hierarchy of Needs, even if it's technically incorrect. Even in real life, it's far more complicated than that.

But the idea that people need something to live for, something that gets them up in the morning, I think that that's just really common. I don't know if it's universal, but it sure is ubiquitous. And this is actually one of the things that I brought up to people.

[01:16:27]  Bruce: You had mentioned in one of your posts, Peter, the idea that humans seem to have this real need to see themselves as righteous compared to other people. And I said, that's what meaning memes are. Like all meaning memes have that potentially dangerous side where we're the righteous because we have this message, the truth, and everybody else is evil by comparison.

And it can run away fast and easy, right? And inside of an open society, it gets in check. And this is another thing I've brought up, is when people talk about the evils of religion, they're almost always really talking about the most evil things that religion has done.

They're almost always talking about pre-open societies or religions outside of open societies. Religion is dangerous because it's a meaning meme. It can run away really fast.

But inside of an open society where we have the Popperian filter in place, religions are forced to compete with other meaning memes and forced to compete with non-meaning memes and things like that. And religions inside of open society, even let me just give you the most obvious one. The Muslim religion inside of an open society versus outside of an open society, since they exist in large numbers in both inside and outside open societies today.

[01:17:41]  Bruce: I'm not even sure you should truly think of those as the same religion, right? They're very different in so many ways. Because being part of that open society allows the more positive things to come out and the negative things get filtered out.

And as long as you keep the open societies institutions working, I think that that Popperian filter will continue to filter out that negative side of meaning memes. And I think we benefit a lot from meaning memes precisely, even if even if the adherents are very dogmatic. I think we benefit from having that element because they often raise issues that are real and that we need to solve and problems that need to be resolved.

Now, here's the thing, though. I think that there is something. I hate to say this, and I hope I'm even wrong, but I've always felt like critical rationalism has a sort of side to it where it's maybe meaning meme destroying, where once you really imbibe the idea of fallibilism, it's very easy to start losing the meaning meme elements of a movement.

Again, I'll pick on libertarianism. I don't think it's an accident that there's a heavy libertarian element within the Deutsch movement, but I don't think critical rationalism allows a lot of the things that make libertarianism vibrant. I don't think it will survive criticism.

[01:19:03]  Bruce: I think that the moment you start to realize my traditions, the things I believe are really true, may not in fact be entirely true. They may only be partially true. That sometimes for some people, they just kind of lose interest.

So I do think that we do have to recognize the human need there. And I don't know how to handle it. And there's probably a really good way to handle it.

[01:19:27]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet.

[01:19:28]  Lulie: But I wonder to what extent that is, because people still have this dichotomy where either there is truth and I can have the truth, or there is no truth and therefore I can't have the truth. Whereas fallibilism says there is a truth, but you may not know what it is or that your understanding of it may constantly evolve. But then I would have thought that would fit again more into Mormonism, where it says that you are constantly improving or in Christianity in general, that you are constantly becoming more godlike or more godly or more closer to Christ or whatever.

[01:20:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:20:15]  Bruce: Let me give you a non-religious example that fits really well. Let's say you went to Greta Thunberg and you said, hey, you know what, I've got really good news, Greta. Turns out that it's trivially easy to put ash in the air and to stop the world from going extinct.

Yes, that's got some negatives. We might destroy the ocean if we do that. But that's so much better than going extinct like you're so worried about.

Do you think she would see this should be a positive message for her? Do you think it would be?

[01:20:44]  Unidentified speaker: No, that would be a big oof.

[01:20:47]  Bruce: Yes.

[01:20:48]  Lulie: And I wonder whether religions work, and specifically religions that refer to a god, works because that is something that is very difficult to falsify or very difficult to attack in this way. So there is this thing that is sort of solid and continuing.

[01:21:06]  Bruce: Right. I actually think what you just said is correct. I think all meaning memes suffer from this problem to various degrees.

And I think one of the hard things is trying to get around it. Right? If you were to look at...

I mean, like, does anybody seriously doubt the value of feminism at this point? And yet, it's not uncommon to not want to be around someone who's too feminist, in part because they have meaning-memized it in such a way that a lot of them are a little intolerable to be around. And if you were to come to them and try to look at positives, let's look at the positive things.

You know, maybe women have actually advanced more than you give them credit for. It's going to be a negative for them because they see their life meaning in a certain way, and it can't be challenged. And I think that that's always going to be the difficulty.

[01:21:59]  Bruce: And right now, if you really look at how open societies work, I think being dogmatic on something is like just ubiquitous and common, and open societies don't work despite that, but it's because of that that we've got people who are very passionate about their beliefs, which almost always have some truth to them, and they never actually see it in the fully true way. But because there is some truth to it, and because there are actual problems that come out of this, the Popperian filter lets the good parts through, and we actually make improvements largely because of their meaning memes, even if the meaning meme was false, technically speaking.

[01:22:38]  Lulie: Could you make meaning memes out of the idea that progress is always possible, that your ideas are always rife with errors, and that your whole thing is about finding those errors, making progress?

[01:22:53]  Bruce: I see no reason why you couldn't.

I see no reason why you couldn't.

I think that those are interesting challenges. How could you turn those things into something that functioned more? Really what we're talking about is there are many meaning memes out there.

Religion is just a small part of that. Probably they're not even the most important meaning memes. Probably politics is the most important meaning memes that exist today.

But I think religions have done this in a far more positive way than people give them credit for. I mean, religions have this long history of figuring out how to particularly inside of open societies to live with their neighbors and how to keep their religions from becoming dangerous and things like that. And I honestly think there's a lot of meaning memes out there that are more dangerous than religion today that are going to need to learn from religion and how to go about this in a more productive way inside of an open society before they're done.

So I think the idea of perfection and error correction would be a great basis for a meaning meme that would maybe hopefully reduce a lot of the negatives that come out of meaning memes. I kind of want to let Peter ask me the hard questions now about Supernatural.

[01:24:03]  Unidentified speaker: Go for it.

[01:24:03]  Unidentified speaker: Woo!

[01:24:07]  Peter: The question I had was about the difference between a religious claim and a more empirical claim that might be, or a metaphysical claim, I suppose, that might be more subject to critical rationalism. I mean, do you think it's appropriate to go after the kinds of religious claims that you've brought up using the tools of critical rationalism? Or is it more of a does not apply kind of a situation?

[01:24:41]  Bruce: Okay, that's a really hard question. And you also kind of asked me about, like, you mentioned in passing Joseph Smith, and he has these glasses and he received revelations through them. It sounds kind of weird to people.

[01:24:55]  Unidentified speaker: Should you?

[01:24:56]  Peter: Yeah, I'm not going to lie. It does sound a little weird.

[01:24:58]  Bruce: So, you know, to answer that question, let me go ahead. So people often ask me this. How do you reconcile your religious side to your rational side?

I usually tell them I don't. And it's not a very helpful answer, but it gets me past having to give a deeper answer that I know is going to require some time. And I'm in a soundbite situation where I don't have the time to get into it.

But in large measure, I kind of have two sides, a religious side and a rational side. And I accept that they're not in—that they're in tension with each other. And I don't think that this is an entirely abnormal thing for religious people to feel.

I think that it's quite normal, in fact, let me kind of lay out something though, that I think might help explain how religious people go about looking at it and how they try to deal with the supernatural side of their religion, while they're trying to also be a modern, educated rationalist. So let me give, let's start with a quote from, and unfortunately, this is to answer this question, I can't answer it fully. I can only kind of hint at what I'm getting at.

And it's going to probably take me 30 minutes to give you the answer. So bear with me for a second, okay? So here's a quote from Bertrand Russell.

[01:26:17]  Bruce: It's from his article, A Free Man's Worship. It says, even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforth must find a home.

That man is the product of causes which have no provision of the end they were achieving. That his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocation of atoms. That no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.

That all labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruin. All of these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. And then he goes on to say in the same thing, the world was not made for us.

However beautiful may be the things we crave, fate may nevertheless forbid them. Okay, now, since you guys are Deutschians, that quote probably bothers you for a lot of reasons, a lot of good reasons. But I would suggest that this is the current scientific worldview absent Deutschianism.

[01:27:40]  Bruce: That there's a couple other physicists like Julian Barbour, there's a few others that are... Freeman Dyson that have kind of bucked against this view. But this view is widely accepted within scientific communities.

Certainly prior to Deutsch, it was all of them, all scientists except maybe theistic scientists. And even post Deutsch, very few scientists accept Deutsch's theories at this point. They're really not widely accepted as the paradigm of scientific thinking at this point.

What Bertrand Russell is laying out is how the vast majority of atheist scientists see the universe and see the world. Now, this point of view, one of my favorite authors is H. P. Lovecraft.

And he's a horror author. He invented something called Cosmic Horror. And he loved science, but he felt it was very negative.

And he hated religion. And he would write about the hypocrites in religion and things like that. He had tons of his writings from the letters that he sent around.

Famously, he was pen pals with Robert E. Howard, the inventor of Conan, several other famous authors that H. P. Lovecraft kind of helped mentor because he was older than them at the time.

[01:28:55]  Bruce: He says, H. P. Lovecraft says, Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos at large. He actually, based on his understanding of science, created this whole new set of horror, this idea of Cosmic Horror.

And all his stories are actually analogies or metaphors for how he actually saw the world. Now this is a guy who was, by today's standards, we would say he was deeply anxious and depressed and mentally ill, right? And channeled that into his writings.

And even Karl Popper got into the act on this. Here's a quote from Karl Popper. The trivial truth is that the ultimate future of man, whatever fate may have in store for him, can be nothing more splendid than his ultimate extinction.

So what I want to do is, obviously, you guys have latched on to the Deutsch way of looking at science, which is a minority view by far at this point. The majority cosmology is really heat death today. Entropy is going to lead to heat death.

[01:30:03]  Bruce: It's not even a bad cosmology, scientifically speaking. It kind of does seem like it follows naturally from the second law of thermodynamics, which is why it's so widely believed. What I want you to do is, just for a second, think about what if you were a rationalist and you didn't have Deutsch's way of looking at things available to you, because you lived prior to that point, or what if you just bought heat death?

What if you just accepted heat death as a cosmology? Which parts of Deutsch's views are no longer valid? And so the first one, the most obvious one is, there's no infinity of progress, because all progress must at some point come to an end or reverse under heat death cosmology.

And the universe is not really explicable. We're universal explainers only in the sense that if we lived in a totally different cosmology than the one we actually live in, since we're for the moment assuming heat death, that we could theoretically explain everything. But since we don't, we won't.

In fact, there's an infinity of things to explain, and there's only a finite number of ticks of computation that exist in the universe before heat death happens. We will basically explain nearly nothing before we're done. Morality, justice is not real.

When Hitler killed somebody, death is the end. Hitler actually did enjoy victory over them. There is no actual justice there.

[01:31:23]  Bruce: Morality becomes parochial. This one I have to explain a little. But if someday all is going to reverse, and all our knowledge is going to disappear as we start to approach heat death, there will be a long period where morality will no longer hold survival value.

So morality as a meme will go out of existence, and because you can only survive via immoral means, really you would have to say, it's not that morality is completely unobjective, but it's parochial. Something is temporary, and there will be a much longer period where it just doesn't apply. You can't really make a better future under heat death.

You can do it temporarily, and you can do it kind of subjectively based on whatever parochial moral wisdom you think you have at that point. But ultimately, it will be based on values that will disappear at some point. And if you do make a better future, it just means that there's that much more suffering and horror when now suddenly a larger group that has learned way more has to lose it all.

And there's no immortality, even if you could work out how to avoid death for say a trillion years. A trillion is infinitely closer to zero than it is to infinity. So we often talk about, if I could live a billion years, I'm immortal, except you're really not.

[01:32:37]  Bruce: That's just a way of speaking, right? It's an analogy that's not actually true. And sure, you could make up meaning for your life any way you wish, but if you actually lived long enough, which you might, if the transhumanists turn out to be right and we can get past death, which a heat death universe doesn't stop you from doing, you actually will live long enough to see everything that you lived for come undone at some point when heat death is reached.

[01:33:00]  Peter: Can I just, so what I hear you saying, which is I think extremely interesting way to put it, but if heat death is real, which I think maybe is controversial in the physics.

[01:33:14]  Bruce: Deutsch definitely doesn't believe in it.

[01:33:15]  Unidentified speaker: Yes,

[01:33:16]  Unidentified speaker: it's widely accepted.

[01:33:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:33:18]  Peter: And that has sort of a direct implication to morality, basically.

[01:33:22]  Bruce: It does.

[01:33:22]  Peter: It means that it's completely subjective or parochial.

[01:33:28]  Bruce: It's parochial. It's not really subjective. It's parochial.

[01:33:31]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:33:32]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:33:32]  Bruce: So keep in mind that this is what the vast majority of rational atheists have believed throughout time. It's science when put in this light, which is the light that most of them accepted in. Even today, most rational atheists accept in, is deeply pessimistic.

It's a profoundly pessimistic viewpoint. This is why, so going back to H. P. Lovecraft quotes, he tried to talk about morality in terms of how him with his scientific worldview looked at morality.

He said, in a cosmos without absolute values, we have to rely on the relative values affecting our daily sense of comfort, pleasure, and emotional satisfaction. What gives us relative painlessness and contentment, we may arbitrarily call good or vice versa. Then he goes on to say, now what gives one person or race or age relative painlessness and contentment often disagree sharply on the psychological side from what gives these boons to another person or race or age.

Therefore, good is relative and variable quality depending on ancestry, chronology, geography, nationality, and individual temperament. Now, let me assure you that because Lovecraft, you can guess this just from that quote, he was a deeply racist individual. He was basing it on his understanding of science and the pessimistic nature that he understood it to be holding.

[01:34:54]  Bruce: Now, you're probably all familiar with Leo Tolstoy. He's another person who, here's an author, but he's part of the elite circles in Russia. And he really, that circle that he ran in, they were non-religious.

They may participate in religion just for the sake of the public, but they don't really believe in it. He explains this in A Confession, which is an excellent read, by the way. And so he talks about his existential crisis, where he reached a point where, because of his scientific worldview that he accepted and how pessimistic it seemed to him, how it started to destroy his life now.

So let me just read a little bit about this and kind of explain his viewpoint. The question can be put like this, why do I live? Why do I wish for anything or do anything or express another way?

Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me? I was finally forced to conclude that my questions were the only legitimate ones serving the basis for all branches of knowledge and that the fault did not lie with me and my questions, but with science if it had the pretensions to answer these questions. The answer given was none other than the one that I had already given myself.

What is the meaning of my life? It has none. Or what will come of my life?

[01:36:10]  Bruce: Nothing. Or why does everything there is exist and why do I exist? Because it does.

So he started to have this thought and in his book he says, I imagine that, you know, here he is. He's one of the most famous authors to ever live, right? He's like, I could be like a hundred times more famous and my legacy could last a hundred times longer and yet it still would be nothing.

It would all disappear in a finite amount of time and it's gonna be gone. And it just doesn't matter how successful I am, okay? And he likened it to a story that he gives of a man himself in this case running through the forest and a beast is chasing him.

And to hide from the beast that's trying to kill him, he jumps into a well. And he's hanging from, you know, weeds or something in this well and the beast is up above trying to kill him. And he sees that underneath in the bottom of the well is a dragon that's trying to eat him.

And he's stuck in between the beast at the top and the dragon at the bottom. And his arms are starting to give out. He's starting to lose strength.

[01:37:13]  Bruce: And he sees that there's these little mice chewing on the weeds and that it's just a matter of time now before the weeds are going to get cut and he's going to fall to that dragon beneath. Oh, but it happens to be that there's some honey right there and he can lick it and honey's pretty pleasurable. He saw people as telling him, when he would go around and try to talk with people, he'd say, how do you look at this in his elite circle?

They would say, well, just enjoy the honey. And he would basically say, I don't see how to enjoy the honey. And so this is him trying to explain that.

He says, the delusions of joy of my life had formerly stifled my fear of the dragon, no longer deceived me. No matter how many times I'm told you cannot understand the meaning of life, do not think about it but live. I cannot do so because I've already done it for too long.

Now I cannot help seeing day and night chasing me and leading to my death. This is all I can see because it is the only truth. All the rest is a lie.

[01:38:07]  Bruce: Those two drops of honey, which more than anything all else diverted my eyes from the cruel truth, my love for my family and my writings, which I called art, I no longer found sweet. It was quite dreadful. And so in order to escape from this horror, I wanted to kill myself.

I wanted a horror [unclear phrase] of what lay ahead of me and knew that this horror was worse than my present position, but I could neither drive it away nor patiently await the end. So Tolstoy found himself in this situation where he took his understanding of the cosmology of science based on the best theories that were available to him at the time. And he tried to, he followed them to what he felt was their logical conclusions, and it destroyed his life now, right?

There was no way for him to get joy out of life given what he thought was actually true. Now, I don't actually find his solution to the problem very convincing, and I have a friend who suggested the book to me, and she's like, I really didn't like his answer. He does eventually get more involved with religion of the peasants, and then he has issues with that, and it's interesting kind of where the story goes from there, because he found much to criticize within religion as well.

[01:39:21]  Bruce: And Tolstoy famously criticized religion quite a bit, but he also practiced it, and came to at least believe parts of it. So what's going on here is there's a Catholic Jesuit named Teilhard de Chardin. I don't know if I pronounced that right.

And he wrote a book called The Phenomenon of Man, and he was a scientist, a very, very, very good scientist. One of the ones that helped discover, as the Peking Man, it helped really turn evolution into an important scientific theory and the existence of hominids and things like that. And while being this Catholic priest, at a time when the Catholic Church did not accept evolution, they do today, but they didn't back then.

So he found himself in a lot of tension with the Catholic Church over this. And in his book, which he wasn't allowed to publish in his lifetime, so he arranged to have it published after he died because the Catholic Church wouldn't allow him to, and he didn't intend to go against them. He wanted to follow what they said, so he just arranged for it to be published after he died.

[01:40:20]  Bruce: He says, Our minds, by the very fact of being able to discern infinite horizons ahead, it is only able to move by the hope of achieving through something of itself, a supreme consummation without which it would rightly feel itself to be stunted, frustrated, and cheated. A total death, an unscalable wall on which consciousness would crash and then forever disappear are thus incompossible with the mechanisms of conscious activity, which would immediately break its mainspring. Either nature is closed to our demand for futurity, in which case thought, thought the fruit of millions of years of effort is stifled, stillborn, is a self-abortive and absurd universe, or else an open exists [unclear wording].

Man will never take a step in a direction he knows to be blocked. There lies precisely the ill that caused our disquiet. Having got so far, what is the minimum requirement to be fulfilled before we can say that the road ahead to us is open?

That is the only one, but it is everything. It is that we should be assured that the space and chances to fulfill ourselves [wording incomplete], that is to say, to progress till we arrive at the utmost limits of ourselves. So you've got these ideas, you've got this tension that exists, that science is widely understood to be deeply, deeply pessimistic, and that is accepted by almost everyone at the time.

[01:41:41]  Bruce: And it's very hard to see how to get around it, given what we think we understand about the scientific worldview. Now, it's interesting, you guys probably are familiar with Michael Shermer, who's the famous skeptic from Scientific American. He actually took that role over from Martin Gardner, who, by the way, was a theist.

So I actually want to show some differences between their approaches. But they were the writer that kind of wrote about the pseudoscience and took skepticism of it. And that was kind of what they were famous for.

Both of them were. Both Martin Gardner and Michael Shermer. So Michael Shermer, quoting Christopher Hitchens, says, to the old theistic question, why is there something rather than nothing?

We can counterpose the findings of Lawrence Krauss and others about the foreseeable heat death of the universe. So the question can and must be rephrased, why will our belief in something soon be replaced with nothing? It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progress and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo, and we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.

[01:42:49]  Bruce: And then he goes on to say after this quote, this is Michael Shermer now talking, the dialectical usefulness of clear logic coupled with elegant prose layered on top of the usual dollop of data cannot be overstated and should be considered by scientists as the instrument of persuasion in the battle of ideas. Now, when I read this, I honestly don't see how he doesn't see that this argument isn't what he thinks it is. So he's arguing literally against the existence of God, existence of anything that's religious in nature, by trying to say, look, the real truth is, is that there's no infinity, there's no eternal progress, we're all going to go into non-existence, and it basically lays out the pessimistic scientific worldview as a way of trying to disprove to religious people that they should no longer believe in their religions.

This doesn't seem like a good argument to me. Just at an emotional level, you might as well at this point, if you're a religious person, you're going to go, wow, if that's what you believe, then I'm glad I don't agree with you. Even if you're right, I'm glad I don't agree with you.

Even if you're completely right, I'm glad I'm delusional, in fact. And this, I think, is, I'm trying to emphasize here the degree to which the scientific community has imbibed this pessimism. Religion, in many ways, has been, through the years, through the ages, the carrier of optimism.

[01:44:15]  Bruce: And there wasn't really a non-supernaturalistic way to look at optimism prior to, say, David Deutsch's time. That was one of the things that really grabbed my interest in David Deutsch, is that here's an actual scientist, atheist scientist, who's trying to figure out a way to use science to get to optimism instead of the normal pessimistic way that people look at science. And by the way, in a sort of imagined response to Michael Shermer, Teilhard de Chardin says of why heat death is so awful, perhaps anything would be better than a long drawn-out senility.

Heat death really is an almost you can't imagine something worse than it type of situation if it's actually true. Now, Martin Gardner, he wrote a book where he tried to explain why in part, he's tried to explain a lot of his different philosophical beliefs. But one of them he tried to explain was why do I believe in an afterlife?

Why do I believe there's a God? Things like that. And he did not take a scientific, critical, rationalist, Popperian worldview to be able to get to that.

Because honestly, at least for the time period he was living in, that was impossible. Instead, he kind of took the approach that I'm kind of suggesting here. So, quoting GK.

[01:45:36]  Bruce: Chesterton, so first of all, quoting GK. Chesterton, he points out that this isn't actually a problem unique to science. You might think, oh, it used to be that everybody believed in an afterlife and then science came and ruined it by telling us about the truth.

And certainly that is one of the ways science presents itself to the world. But in fact, Chesterton points out that materialism was always something that every single human being in the history of the world had to contend with. He says, the materialism of things is on the face of things.

It does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything.

So it's not really specifically science that is the pessimism. There's this materialistic world view that has always existed at the same time as the religious world view. And then he goes on, so Martin Gardner goes on to say, if we take seriously our hopes that justice will be done with respect to our lives, so we must posit an afterlife.

[01:46:37]  Bruce: And if there's an afterlife, there must be a God who is good enough and powerful enough to provide it. If we want to make our beliefs consistent with the demands of our moral nature, we must posit God and immortality. And if we have faith, we do more than recognize them as posits.

We also believe them to be true. And then, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, he says, our passions, our endeavors have something ridiculous and mocking if we come to such a hasty end. The point that Martin Gardner is trying to make is he's actually reversing the way we normally think of this.

So, a lot of times you will hear people ask, do you need religion for morality? Obviously, this could be a very offensive question because, obviously, atheists are moral people. A lot of atheists I know get very defensive about this question.

What he's really saying is that you've reversed the cause and effect, that what really is going on is religion comes from morality. Morality is something that we all believe. We believe it's real, we believe it's objective, it's a part of the human world, it's a part of our hopes, our aspirations, it's a part of who we are.

[01:47:42]  Bruce: Religion is what you get when you take it seriously as a theory, but you don't have any other way to show that it could be objective and non-parochial. So you end up with really honestly supernatural beliefs. And that's really in many ways where religion comes from.

It's this need for humans to kind of put a finger on the scale and say, you know what, I'm not sure I do accept the pessimistic worldview that I see presented before me. I think maybe life is better than it seems. And then you look at religions in this sense, they're different theories about how that could be true.

And a lot of the things that people make fun about them, they're probably all true. Sometimes the answers come across as silly. And yet I can't help but feel this alignment with the fact that they are willing to just say, okay, you know what, if heat death is actually the way it is, if things are really as bad as you say they are, then yeah, I'm bucking reality.

I do not care. I'm going to be optimistic anyhow. I relate strongly to that viewpoint.

[01:48:47]  Bruce: And this is actually how I navigate the supernatural side of religion with the not so much, with the my rationalist and reason side. So the thing that kind of comes out of this though is this idea of truth is not a good thing. So again, this is Lovecraft, since most atheist scientists will never admit to this.

Lovecraft actually realized if we take this scientific view as we currently understand it seriously, what we're really saying is, is that the truth isn't good. The truth and goodness are not aligned. It says, the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each strain in their own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but someday the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into a peace and safety of a new dark age. Now remember, Lovecraft's anti-religious, so he's not saying the same thing some of these religious people I’m quoting like Martin Gardner, but he's accepting the pessimistic worldview and that informs his horror.

[01:50:03]  Bruce: I think that this is kind of the starting point though, is if it is actually the case that the world is as pessimistic as many scientists believe it to be, even today still continue to believe it to be, I'm not sure you can say religion is a bad thing, even if it's completely false. In fact, it might even be the case, given that worldview, that religion is good for humankind precisely because it is false. And that would have to be the starting point for any actual discussion on the subject.

Now, I've never seen an atheist actually start at that point. Like Richard Dawkins, he'll admit to the survival value of the God meme. He says, the survival value of the God meme in the meme pool result from its great psychological appeal, provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence.

It suggests that injustice in the world may be rectified in the next, the everlasting arms hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies, which like a doctor's placebo is nevertheless effective for being imaginary. Then he goes on, but then he says in his introduction to the book, be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from our biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish.

[01:51:28]  Bruce: Let us understand that our own selfish genes, what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their design, something that no other species has ever inspired to do. It's hard to even figure out what Dawkins is trying to say, given that he does in fact believe in heat death, and that he should be looking at morality as parochial. It's hard to even know what to make of that statement in terms of his own worldview.

And yet I don't really doubt that he very seriously believes in what he's saying, and that it's a meaningful moral statement to him. So, Deutsch in his book Fabric of Reality, he talks about the Omega Point, and I know you wanted to ask me about the Omega Point. So it might make sense to try to explain the history of the Omega Point.

And the fact is that the history of the Omega Point is primarily religious. Yes, it's science. It was a serious scientific attempt, very special in many ways.

And I'll actually talk about my criticisms of it. I have a number of very strong criticisms of it. But I also feel like Tipler should be acknowledged for his genius for recognizing lots of things that no one had noticed before.

[01:52:39]  Peter: Well, it's kind of a weird theory because it kind of... I think probably most people who hear about it interpret it as something that's religious because he's known as a Christian physicist. But it also can make sense in just a very materialist kind of interpretation too.

At least his... Can I just give you like a five sentence overview of what I think it is? And then you can tell me how wrong I am here.

I haven't read his book. I'm just getting this from YouTube videos basically. But so it's the end of the universe.

We're nearing the heat death of the universe. Substantiation of knowledge or information has sort of grown. We've gone sort of beyond the Dyson sphere or whatever.

It's literally taking over the universe. As part of that, descendants, however you want to put it, decide to bring back all former humans according to their DNA. So all possible combinations of DNA are created.

It's like sort of a resurrection thing. And because we're moving the speed of light, time is no longer a factor. So we're living eternally in a kind of paradise.

[01:54:12]  Bruce: That's a pretty good summary.

[01:54:14]  Peter: Does that sound sort of right? Okay, well, that's good. But one question I have is why does this even have to happen at the end of the universe?

What's the relationship between that? I mean, it seems to me that could happen without the heat death of the universe.

[01:54:30]  Bruce: So heat death would be that not happening. So the Omega Point posits that heat death is the wrong cosmology. It's an opposing cosmology to heat death.

So let me explain kind of the difference because there's a really simple difference here. So there's this idea of the second law of thermodynamics, which is the idea that entropy must always grow. Chaos must always grow.

So heat death is if you've got nothing else to look at, if you like, you take something and it's in a box and you spend its energy, eventually it all turns into heat, then the energy is still there, it doesn't disappear, but it's all the same. And to be able to use energy, you have to have a heat sink. You have to be able to have like a hot sun and a cold earth, and you have to be able to move energy between them.

Once everything is evened out, the energy becomes useless and you can't use it anymore. So heat death would be that the amount of entropy or chaos reaches where everything is exactly equal everywhere. It's literally impossible to build a clock because nothing—you know, everything changes.

Time ceases to exist in heat death. This is something people don't know. Time from a physics viewpoint is usually based on the ability to build a clock.

If you can't build a clock, you've got no time. So once heat death is reached, there's no life. Life is completely impossible.

[01:55:55]  Bruce: You've just got a lot of nothing, basically.

[01:55:57]  Peter: So the information, in this sense, is something that's pushing back against heat death, then?

[01:56:05]  Bruce: So not exactly. If you were to look at our life on Earth today, one of the theories, and it's actually a pretty good theory, is that the reason why life exists is to increase the rate at which heat death is reached, increase the rate at which we create entropy. Because remember that you can't actually push back against entropy.

No matter what you do, you will always create greater disorder than you create order. Those two can never be more than balanced, and they will always be in favor of the entropy. So life itself is not in any way defying or going against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

That's a misunderstanding. It's one that Christians, like anti-evolutionist Christians, have latched onto. Evolution defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

It's just not true, right? Life creates disorder faster than if it's not there, because that's just the natural part of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Here's the loophole.

And until you realize that there is a loophole, it's really hard to see around the concept of heat death. So Freeman Dyson is actually the one I think, at least I know of, was the first to really mention the existence of the loophole. So it's true that you have to always have an increase of entropy, but it doesn't necessarily have to even out.

[01:57:24]  Bruce: It doesn't have to necessarily reach heat death. It could be that you could, in theory, have an infinite growth towards entropy, that chaos grows forever, allowing you to have a world of order forever. Now, how would you do this?

Well, there's not a lot of known mechanisms within physics that allow you to do this. In fact, it's really hard to come up with a mechanism that allows you to take advantage of this loophole, which is why most scientists don't accept that the loophole can be exploited. They mostly just accept heat death today, for good reason.

And this is one of the things that Peter, you and I have talked about. A lot of times you read something from Dawkins and it's so pessimistic, and you say, why does he have to be so pessimistic? And I said, look, you're missing the point.

His worldview is inherently pessimistic. He's just talking the truth as he understands it, right? He doesn't accept Deutsch's views.

So of course it's pessimistic. So the idea that you could somehow, you can't work around entropy, but you can grow it to infinity. But how do you do that?

What's the mechanism by which you do that? Well, there wasn't a known mechanism. So Freeman Dyson came up with a possibility, and it was this idea that you could, life would go out and as the universe expanded, it would create these, it would create little pockets of order.

[01:58:42]  Bruce: And then what it would do is it would wait for a billion years until its heat was different from the heat around it. And then it could do a few computations, you know, and then it would stop and it would wait another billion years. And it would increase the number of years, very similar to Deutsch's dark energy model that's in Beginning of Infinity, except that there's no dark energy in this model.

And so he tried to work up a way that life could continue forever. And it didn't work for a number of reasons. At least that's my understanding.

Dyson, he was the first to really try to work out and publish how could life survive forever. There was a lot of problems with the way he tried to go about it. I just quoted Teilhard de Chardin.

He's actually the one that came up with the term Omega Point. He had his own Omega Point theory, but it was based in evolutionary theory because he was an evolutionary biologist rather than a physicist. He had this idea, and some of the ideas informed Frank Tipler, including taking the term Omega Point.

[01:59:49]  Bruce: For example, he had this idea of us taking control of evolution. He imagined with man coming into existence that we would start, here's the quote, yet when the first spark of thought appeared on the earth, life found it had brought into the world a power capable of criticizing it and judging it. Very interesting idea.

Then he has this idea that man is going to replace, he says, we've given too little thought to the question of what medical and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection should we suppress them. So he doesn't imagine natural selection ever coming to an end, but it won't be about genes anymore, right? It will turn into something else that we will decide how it is developed and how things evolve.

And he even coined a term, the Noosphere, spelled N-O-O-Sphere, which is actually still used today, and it refers to exactly what ended up coming into being. Remember, this guy lived quite a while ago, so this was actually quite prescient of him. The internet, the idea of this world of information and memes that man lives inside of and how it will grow and it will take over and the idea that memes will become more important to evolution than the word meme didn't exist back in his time.

[02:01:08]  Bruce: But that memes will become more important to evolution than genes and that genes won't play a big role at some point. This is part of his theory where he's trying to reconcile his religion with science. And he had this idea of us evolving into an omega point where we evolve forever and move towards perfection forever.

Now, he had a bunch of other ideas in his evolutionary theory, this idea of radial energy and things that aren't accepted today. They were a kind of teleology for evolution that evolution had a direction which isn't generally accepted in evolution today. And yet, I think a charitable reading of him would be more like human beings will create this, right?

And we know that we do, like we decide how wolves are going to evolve. We decide how humans are going to evolve. And we decide whether we like what evolution has given us or if we're going to go beyond that and do something different because we prefer it.

And that's what morality is. So he had this idea that evolution could be directed and towards an omega point. And to him, omega point was this concept of God, but it was also this concept of humans becoming this omega point.

So Tipler picked up on this idea, but his is a physics theory instead of a biological theory. Although it uses natural selection. It uses all four of the strands.

[02:02:42]  Bruce: Tipler is actually the original four-strander. Before I talk about Tipler, I've got to admit Tipler is a bit of a nutter, and this just can't be avoided. So for instance, in his book, The Physics of Christianity, he writes about, he tries to explain the virgin birth of Christ by suggesting that Christ was an XX chromosome male, which would be a male without a Y chromosome, but with the Y chromosome having copied itself, inserted itself into the X chromosome so that he would still appear as if he was an XY male.

XX males exist in real life. They would be genetically a woman, but due to the way things develop, they develop the primary characteristics of a male instead. They're typically smaller, they look more feminine, things like that, but they would be biologically a male.

So he tries to work out, what he's trying to do is he's trying to work out how Mary, the mother of Jesus, could have had parthenogenesis so that a virgin birth was possible. Now, why would he go through so much trouble? Well, it's because Tipler does not believe in the supernatural.

He is today a Christian. A lot of his books were written when he wasn't, but he is today a Christian. But he does accept the existence of miracles, but miracles in his mind are improbable outcomes, not supernatural outcomes.

[02:04:08]  Bruce: He doesn't believe in the supernatural at all. So if he's going to, as a Christian, believe in the virgin birth, then he needs to by golly work out a biological theory for how the virgin birth could happen that does not require any sort of reference to the supernatural. And a huge part of his books is working out how to test his theories.

So he talks about how to get the Turin Shroud, which is the Shroud of Christ, or at least the Catholics believe it's the Shroud of Christ. That's pretty debatable whether it's actually the Shroud of Christ. And he wants to test the DNA to see if there's an XX male that had left DNA on the shroud.

In fact, in the book, I don't fully understand it, but he explains what tests were done and why he thinks that this is correct, things like that. And this is actually, I mean, there's some worse ones, right? I mean, like he really just goes to weird lengths.

And I don't really believe any of his theories, right? I think that the need for an XX male, it's pretty out there, right? And I don't really think if we were to go and to do a full experiment with this, we would find that this is even true.

[02:05:20]  Bruce: Even assuming the shroud even existed at the time of Christ, which I don't think it did. Here's the thing I have to give him some credit for. And I actually do stand by this.

I don't think we should judge theories based on how nutty they are. I think we should judge them based on their testability. And Tipler does try to make every single one of his theories, all of them testable.

Because of this, I do consider it to be complete cockapoo. I don't think any of it's true, but it's the right kind. It's the kind where you take seriously, you don't try to immunize your theories from testing and criticism.

You try to figure out how to formulate them in an empirical way. Because of that, I don't really believe he, even though I do think he's a nutter, I think he's an okay kind of nutter. He's the kind that is a scientist at heart.

And we just shouldn't judge theories based on how weird they sound. We should judge them based on whether they actually survive testing or not. I fully expect his theories to not survive testing.

Here's something else that's interesting. While Tipler did start life as a Christian, he quickly gave it up and became an atheist because he couldn't figure out how to reconcile his scientific worldview with his Christian beliefs. So he became a full-on atheist, obviously one that still had some interests in religious type thought.

[02:06:41]  Bruce: But in his 1986 book, which with co-author John Barrow, who's well-known, very respected physicist also, called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Tipler at that point is an ex-Christian and he's an atheist. And this is the book in which both of these authors for the first time unveiled the Omega Point theory. So when the Omega Point theory was actually released for the first time, it was by an atheist, right?

The atheist Tipler, not the Christian Tipler. And yet you can see why it would take someone with a religious background like Tipler that very clearly knows quite a bit about theology, just from his writings, I can tell he does, to probably be the right kind of atheist to decide, I'm gonna see if there's some way to get around the pessimistic nature of science. So I don't think you can entirely divorce religion from the Omega Point theory because of that.

I think it was informed by a man who had religious desires, if not religious beliefs, if that makes any sense. Then in his 1994 book, The Physics of Immortality, he says he's still an atheist. Now in the book, he goes to great lengths to try to work out how the Omega Point could be synchronized with religious belief, including Christian beliefs.

[02:08:01]  Bruce: But he says, he has a chapter called Why I'm Not a Christian. And he states in here, he says, let me state here that I am at present forced to consider myself an atheist in the literal sense that I am not a theist. I do not yet even believe in the Omega Point.

If the Omega Point Theory is confirmed, I shall then consider myself a theist. So even in the Physics of Immortality, which is the 1994 book, which was the one that Deutsch read that then informed his 1995 book, The Fabric of Reality. Even in that book, Tipler is still seeing himself as an atheist.

However, notice that he says forced, which really I think shows where Tipler's coming from. He doesn't want to be an atheist. He wants to figure out how to come up with a scientific worldview that's not pessimistic.

And in his view, if science can allow for the human aspirations that we've been talking about, that I've been quoting from Martin Gardner and Teilhard de Chardin, if it can allow for that, in his mind, that's God, right? It's not a supernaturalistic God. It's one that's completely consistent with a materialistic, mechanistic, scientific worldview.

And that's really what he's striving for. Now, here's the thing. And this is why I think he sometimes gets into really nutty things.

[02:09:20]  Bruce: By the way, in his chapter, Why I'm Not a Christian in Physics of Immortality, he talks about how the resurrection of Jesus could be much easier explained as a mass delusion, rather than an actual empirical observation, just to show that he was not a Christian at the time. Even though his theory went on to have observations that did not match the predictions, specifically that the universe is not collapsing, it's expanding, which is then why Deutsch abandoned the Omega point theory. Even though that happened, by the time he writes his next book, which is The Physics of Christianity, he is clearly at this point turned back to religion and theology, whereas in the physics of immortality, he's hoping that there's a God, what he calls a God.

In the physics of Christianity, he's now fully sold to it, which is why I think he now comes across kind of a nuttier. He's now trying to work out how can Christian theology be reconciled with science, which is not an easy task.

[02:10:21]  Peter: That's a very helpful chronology. I had been wondering how that worked out. And wait, can you repeat one more time, why did Deutsch reject the theory?

[02:10:34]  Bruce: So the universe has been observed to be expanding rather than contracting. At the time of the Omega Point Theory, they didn't know whether it was going to expand forever or if it was gonna contract. So one of his predictions was, he gives a series of actual physical predictions of what we should expect to find about top quarks and things like that, that are required for the universe to contract.

And they did not work out that way because the universe is in fact expanding.

[02:11:02]  Peter: I see. But he still believes in the theory, right? He kind of rescued it.

[02:11:09]  Bruce: I'll get to that in a second. So let's talk about Deutsch's criticisms of the Omega Point. Deutsch is a full-on proponent of the Omega Point in 1995.

However, he does offer some criticisms of Tipler's theory. One of the main ones is, is that he's really uncomfortable with the idea of referring to the Omega Point as God. Deutsch says, in Fabric of Reality, he says that Tipler refers to the advanced society in the Omega Point as God.

These people who are very advanced that live into the far future in the Omega Point, he refers to that society as God. Okay, notice the somewhat parallels with Mormon doctrine there. However, if you actually read Tipler, he never actually says this.

So this criticism is actually somewhat inaccurate. What Tipler actually says is that the people living inside the Omega Point aren't God, although it's their knowledge that is forming the Omega Point and the Omega Point at the limit of infinity is God. Now, how do I explain that?

It's a mathematical point, Deutsch does talk about this, that he refers to the Omega Point as the limit at infinity. Tipler sees that as something distinct from the knowledge created by the individuals inside of time. This is this point of infinity where all knowledge is finally gained, but only at infinity.

[02:12:26]  Bruce: And that limit, that is what he sees as God. He sees it as having all power and all knowledge and things like this. That it's consistent with the religious aspirations that exist in most religions.

And Deutsch actually confirms this. He says, if we actually reach infinity, then it's true that we would have all knowledge and there even be a sense in which we have all power, but it wouldn't actually be the kind of God that answers prayers. But Tipler even responds to that, right?

He has this theory he's worked out about how it could respond to prayers, but basically it sounds a little nutty, but it's basically the Omega Point is—quantum physics is time reversible. So he's worked, so the future determines the past as much as the past determines the future in quantum physics. Okay, that's true by the way.

So that's not just Tipler being nutty. So he's imagining that the omega point is the destiny of the universe, and therefore it influences itself into existence, which is what, if you knew, like if I roll a 20-sided die and I roll a 20, and I see that it's a 20, but it's hidden underneath. So you don't know.

Because you don't know, you have to treat it with probability theory. So you would say there's only a one in 20 chance of rolling a 20. I've already seen it.

[02:13:50]  Bruce: I know what the future holds. So for me, the odds of it being a 20 are one, one in one. He sees miracles and God is interacting with people in the same light.

That this future omega point is at infinity, that we never actually reach inside of time, influences us to always form the omega point because it already exists somewhere out there. Remember, this is something that we've been discussing on your board. The future already exists under quantum physics, right?

It already exists. So if the omega point exists, then it is having a pull on what's happening today. That's how he sees it as God and as interacting with us.

That it is the destiny of the universe and the universe will end up at it. Then he works out all these theories, the eternal life postulate, trying to prove that it will happen. He's doing his best, right?

So this would be, so this is one of the main things that Deutsch and him disagreed over, because Deutsch doesn't see it as God at all. Whereas Tipler sees it as God, and Deutsch seems to have somewhat misunderstood Tipler on that. Deutsch also argued that we have no way of knowing that they would choose to resurrect us.

[02:15:04]  Bruce: Whereas Tipler says they will resurrect us. Deutsch uses the analogy of just because we can build a mile high tower doesn't mean we will. People who lived in the past may have guessed that people with our level of knowledge would automatically choose to build a mile high tower.

But in reality, we just lost interest in that sort of thing and we would never do it because it's not practical. Tipler is actually quite good on the theology side. I mean, this is a guy who's really thought about this.

It really impresses me, even though I've got some really nasty criticisms that I need to lay out. He actually impresses me quite a bit with how hard he's thought about this. Here's the thing though.

Deutsch's criticism never made sense to me. If the Omega Point, we live in a multiverse, this is something that Tipler accepts, right? It's an integral part of his Omega Point theory.

If any Omega Point in any part of the multiverse decides to start resurrecting people, then everyone will be resurrected. Death becomes literally just a problem to be solved. It's not something that the laws of physics deny us.

[02:16:08]  Bruce: So someone with the knowledge will at some point gain the knowledge how to resurrect people. And Deutsch gives a pretty good example of where you create a virtual reality simulation of the entire universe or in fact, the entire multiverse, and you just resurrect everybody. So Deutsch is arguing they may not choose to do that.

That's not right, right? Someone, anything that is possible will happen in the multiverse. So someone will do it.

And if it's not someone in our Omega Point in our universe, it'll be someone in a different Omega Point in a different universe, and will be resurrected there instead. So if death is really just a problem to be solved, and it's not something that... Overcoming death is not something that is denied by the laws of physics, and knowledge growth is going to go to infinity, then resurrection is a given.

Like, it literally goes to one. Okay, and I actually think Tipler is right about that and Deutsch is wrong about that. Okay, so then in the beginning of infinity, this is where he starts to split with, against the Omega Point.

He argues the Omega Point theory doesn't match observation because the universe is expanding. Now, this is, and then so he suggests the dark energy model instead, right? Which is that we use the dark energy of the universe and we collect the energy from that and that will allow us to do an infinite number of computations.

[02:17:23]  Bruce: So, Deutsch's criticism here doesn't make sense to me either. It does, to a degree. Like, if I didn't know what Tipler had written, it would be a very reasonable criticism.

But Tipler has, like, already responded to it. So here's what Tipler says. Responding to Deutsch and others that have criticized him on this, he says, Tipler has adjusted his argument to argue that humans can utilize, quote, the mechanism of creation-destruction of baryon number by electroweak quantum tunneling to power starships.

Now, that part, I don't know what Deutsch thinks of that. Like, does Deutsch have a criticism of that, that this is a possible source of energy that we could use? It's dangerous because it's also an infinite source of destruction.

But you could, like, it would be a source of energy much larger than anything that we've ever come across before. Much more powerful and ubiquitous than, say, nuclear energy. So, again, it's the creation-destruction of baryon number by electroweak quantum tunneling.

I don't even know what that means. In his book, The Physics of Immortality, he uses that as a theory for how we might power starships to colonize the entire universe, which is a necessary part of the omega point. You have to actually have life spread out, take all the matter of the universe and turn all of it into life at some point.

[02:18:49]  Bruce: And then you have to collapse the universe with basically the entire universe is one giant computer full of life. So he hadn't considered the fact that that process, so he says, that that process would cause the universe to collapse into a singularity. So even though the universe is expanding, and we have an observation of that, once life has the ability to use this process to create power, he's arguing that it will, and that that will change the cosmology of the universe back into a collapsing universe.

Now David Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity, he makes a big point out of the fact that you can't choose, you can't decide the cosmology of a star without considering what life chooses to do. So I don't understand his criticism of Tipler on this. He may have a legitimate criticism, but he doesn't mention what it is.

He simply says, the observation show the universe is expanding so we can discount the omega point. No, you can't, right? If there's any way to collapse the universe, and if humans have, you know, men people have a choice over it, and they're going to choose to do it to power their starships or power their cultures or their societies, then you can't just use an observation like that to discount the omega point.

[02:20:02]  Bruce: Now, having said that, let me just say that this feels a lot like an ad hoc save. I mean, it is an ad hoc save. Sure, you have these observations.

They don't work out. So then you say, oh, but it could be that life is going to choose that. That's a completely valid point, but you need your own new testable explanation, or this is no longer a scientific empirical theory.

And this is where I would probably start my criticisms of Tipler. I don't actually buy any of Deutsch's criticisms of Tipler. I think Deutsch's criticisms of Tipler are wrong.

Let me give you my criticisms of Tipler, which I think are all correct and are valid criticisms of the omega point. So one of them that really bothers me and that I would love to sit with Tipler and just ask him to explain this to me because it just makes so little sense to me. He argues that if the universe expands forever, unitarity will be violated.

Well, unitarity is a necessary part of the laws of physics. So it's similar to the conservation laws. He's saying in layman's terms, if the universe expands forever, then conservation laws will be violated.

[02:21:11]  Bruce: And that's impossible under the laws of physics. So he argues that there will be an event that if the universe expands forever, there'll be an event horizon where information is lost and therefore information is not concerned [conserved?]. So the universe in Tipler's mind needs life to keep the laws of physics consistent.

We're going to cause the collapse of the universe because if we didn't, the laws of physics would become inconsistent. This just blows my mind. This has got to be one of the worst arguments I've ever heard ever.

To say that you need life to keep the laws of physics consistent, what would happen in a universe that doesn't have life? There's got to be, in the multiverse, universes that don't have life. Are the laws just as consistent there?

Or what about a universe where there is life and then the sun projects off a piece of itself at Earth, and we're the only life in the entire universe, let's say, and it roasts us alive? Like, under many worlds' quantum physics, this happens constantly to us, right, in some portion of the multiverse. Would those just have inconsistent physics?

It doesn't even make sense to me. Now, Tipler does try to address this a little. He tries to argue that mathematical reality is ultimate reality, something that Sadia would hate, and I somewhat agree with her on this one, and that physical reality is a subset of it.

[02:22:33]  Bruce: So what does he base this on? Well, he bases it on basically a tautology. He says, we define existence in terms of conscious beings and a reality without conscious beings therefore doesn't physically exist, because physical existence means you've got a conscious being in that universe that can observe it.

Otherwise, for all intents and purposes, it's a mathematical reality, but it's not a physical reality. This seems like a word game to me. So then he has to address the question, well, wait a minute, did the universe exist prior to life existing on Earth?

So he immediately uses the little trick of, well, the omega point is a person and it's observing itself, and so therefore it existed. It's like, oh my gosh, it's like this is such bad arguments, Tipler. And so this would be my criticisms of Tipler's omega point and why you won't hear me advocating for it as a theory.

I will advocate for it more as a theology than as a theory, more as an idea of what we want than as a theory that actually follows from science. And so at this point, I think that these are actually pretty good criticisms and I don't know how Tipler would respond to them. Here's the thing though.

[02:23:48]  Bruce: I mentioned that I think Tipler is actually quite ingenious and he's actually a really decent theologian. So he has given a lot of thought to what would it take for science to allow, think of it like this. What type of special universe would we need to be able to fulfill the optimism of David Deutsch?

Which is, by the way, exactly equivalent to the religious aspirations of every religious person that's ever lived, right? Since religion is the carrier of optimism during periods where we didn't have a good scientific theory to allow it. What would it take?

And he's trying to work that out. He's trying to work out. And the Omega Point is an ingenious way of doing that.

Because as the universe switches, what you do is you... So imagine the suns all start to burn out. So this would be heat death to most scientific theories.

The suns all go out. Then you got to wait for the black holes to all evaporate. But eventually this is the first big step to where life becomes...

The universe becomes uninhabitable. Tipler points out that life, even if they can't communicate, that they will start to move matter together so that certain parts of the universe collapse faster than other parts of the universe. And when you do that, that creates heat, and that is a source of energy.

[02:25:03]  Bruce: In fact, it's a gigantic source of energy that just dwarfs suns. Then you do that for a while and then heat death starts to arrive. So life, even if it can't communicate, will start to collect the matter the other direction.

And it will cause you to have another source of energy. And you can basically do that trick forever. And entropy goes to infinity and you have found your loophole on entropy.

By the way, your computers keep growing, right? Moore's law never ends in a Tiplerian cosmology. Your computers double in speed forever.

And the number of computations just constantly dwarfs. Like any problem you have that's intractable today, you just wait a little while and your computers can now do them tractably. It doesn't violate computational theory, an intractable algorithm will forever be intractable, but its usefulness will start to become tractable.

So think about like you want to write an algorithm that plays chess well, that's intractable. So you would say, okay, that's intractable. But you know what?

It's intractable today, but it's finite. So there will be an Omega Point computer in the future, if the Omega Point were real. There would be a computer at some point that has enough computing power that it can solve chess.

[02:26:17]  Bruce: It will no longer be considered intractable. All finite problems, which would be all of them, at some point, the computing power dwarfs it. And even though the algorithm may be an intractable algorithm, it just won't be a big deal, because nothing is intractable to the Omega Point, is how David Deutsch put this.

And this is a huge part of how the Omega Point works. He also works out what you would need to get out of certain kinds of hell. So this is a religious term, but I think it's an appropriate term.

So one of the things he works out is how do you get out of eternal return? So there's this idea of eternal returns, and I forget who it was, famous scientist that came up with it. If you have a set number of pieces of matter, atoms in a set amount of space, then those atoms must at some point repeat.

So let's say you had a box, and you have matter inside this box. Every single, over infinity, every single combination of that matter will happen. Including turning into an apple, you know, or whatever.

You've got a bunch of gas, and it will happen to turn into an apple, right, just by chance. And every single combination will happen. And then that will happen in a finite amount of time, and then it will all repeat.

[02:27:32]  Bruce: Well, if you were a life being living inside this box, you would live forever in a sense, because you'd have an infinite number of computations, but it would be hell, right? You would not be able to progress forever. You would eventually reach some point where everything would repeat.

So he wants to work out a cosmology that not just overcomes entropy, but overcomes a lot of these other philosophical objections that people have come up with over the years. And it turns out it does, right? If you've got this infinite growth of knowledge inside of an infinitely growing computer that keeps getting more and more ticks, etc.

then there is no repeating, right? You do not have the problem of eternal returns anymore, okay? So you've escaped that hell.

Try to escape... And he works out several others like this. Try to escape all of them is really hard.

It's really, really hard. Try to escape entropy alone is really hard. Try to escape all of the hells is even harder.

And yet Omega Point escaped all of them. Basically, he demonstrates. So David Deutsch lays out his dark energy model as an alternative.

[02:28:40]  Bruce: Well, the dark energy model doesn't escape all these hells. In fact, it doesn't even suggest, it's not even suggestive of how you could use it to have eternal life. So one of the things that happens if you have a slowing computer, which is the dark energy model, instead of an increasing computer, imagine something like the opposite of Moore's law, where every single year your computers are half the speed.

That's the dark energy model. Yes, you could probably have an infinite number of computations using that model, but you would have slower and slower computers constantly, and so you would be harder and harder to solve your problems. In fact, it would eventually reach a point, based on my understanding of physics, where it would just become impossible to solve your problems.

So for example, one of the ones that came up in one of the books that I read is they said, look, you get quantum fluctuations that are just weird, and most of them are microscopic and they happen really rarely, and so you're never going to actually see one in your lifetime, most likely. But there's always this chance that quantum fluctuations happen and something weird happens. A black hole forms in the center of the earth and kills everybody, or you turn into a frog.

[02:29:51]  Bruce: Just weird quantum fluctuations just take place sometimes, even though they're super, super rare. Over the lifetime of a human, or even the lifetime of a human civilization so far, you would probably see something like none of these, okay, because they're so rare. But if you were trying to live forever, and your computing power were cutting in half every single year, the number of quantum fluctuations would eventually grow to the point where you could not keep up with them.

So when one of your experiential seconds requires a billion years in real time, and then the next second requires two billion years in real time, etc. forever, eventually quantum fluctuations dominate, and they're the only thing that matter. And it would be impossible to keep life living in such a state.

I don't know how you can overcome that with the dark energy model. So I don't actually think the dark energy model works as an actual source of life forever that's equivalent to the omega point. On top of that, the dark energy model, if it does work, it's based on a theory that doesn't exist today, because we don't have a theory of dark energy.

It is, under critical rationalism, a theory to be considered like this really needs to be an actual empirical theory today. You have an actual explanation today. You don't get to count hopes of a future theory as your theory, which is what Roger Penrose falls into.

[02:31:12]  Bruce: He's got this hope of a future theory that is going to say these different things about quantum physics and things like that. That's not a reasonable, rational, scientific worldview. And yet that's kind of what we're doing with the dark energy model.

Now, I understand why Deutsch did this, though. Deutsch is really more taking the stance, this is just a problem to be solved. And maybe it will be dark energy, maybe it will be a Omega Point.

When you hear him in interviews, he doesn't actually rule the Omega Point entirely out. I think he almost had to in a book. Somebody asked him, what about what Tipler said?

And he goes, yeah, that's a possibility. And so he seems a little more open in interviews. But he's kind of just taking the stance, problems are soluble.

The problem with that, though, is that the concept problems are soluble, your universe has to first allow that problem to be solved. And it's not clear that our universe does. And if it's the laws of physics that say you can't do it, then you can't do it, right?

It doesn't matter about this whole idea of problems are soluble. And in a lot of ways, that's what heat death is. It's scientists saying our physics say this is an insoluble problem.

[02:32:21]  Bruce: Now, maybe they're wrong, maybe Deutsch is right. But it would be, it was a lot more helpful when you had an actual scientific testable theory that you could point to like the omega point. And we really kind of don't have that today.

We've got a lot of ideas on how you might go about it. But I don't think we've got a good consistent cosmology that we can point to and say this is how you exploit the loophole that life can live forever.

[02:32:44]  Peter: So just to summarize Deutsch's position. So he recognizes that there's a contradiction between the heat death of the universe and something like the principle of optimism. He sees something like the omega point theory, if not exactly that, as a way to sort of get around the heat death of the universe.

Would you say that's fair? Whereas Deutsch isn't exactly an advocate of Tipler's theory, but he's maybe sort of a sympathizer?

[02:33:24]  Bruce: You might say that Deutsch believes we're going to find something equivalent to the omega point. And so I think that's a hard thing to do. Now, I actually mentioned this on a Tweet thread, and Deutsch responded to me, and he said, there are many great new theories here that have been discovered recently.

And I'm like, wait, what are they? What are they? Come back to the thread.

I'm like, tell me, I want to research them. So I know this is something that's still on his mind, right? When you write a book, he wants the book to be optimistic, and I'm kind of giving you the more realistic view.

We don't yet have what that replacement theory is, but Deutsch is very optimistic we're going to have one, even if it doesn't exist yet today. That does, to some degree, violate the concept of critical rationalism. And I'm not sure I have a problem with that, right?

What I'm really kind of laying out is that there is a sort of faith-based nature to being alive. You have to kind of start your life each day with, I can make the world a better place, that my aspirations aren't completely meaningless. And we should put our thumb on that scale towards, we're going to work this out.

This is a problem we can solve. And yes, maybe you could argue that's supernaturalism today. Or maybe not, I don't know.

[02:34:47]  Bruce: I think that there's a grayer area than we first give it credit for. Because supernaturalism in religion is really not so much, I want to believe in magic, as I want human aspirations to be meaningful. And that's a good thing, right?

It makes sense that they're going to try to come up with things. And if they don't have a good scientific theory, then they're going to supplement it with a little supernaturalism. Even if it's not a desirable thing.

And I think that that's the way a lot of religious people, Latter-day Saints in particular, would look at supernaturalism. Let me make another point here. I think supernatural belief is way more common than people think, right?

It's not solely the domain of religion. So if I were to talk about Amit Goswami, who's a famous physicist who appeared in What the Bleep Do We Know? He has written whole books about how quantum physics makes the observer the center.

[02:35:41]  Bruce: And he's worked out all these things based on quantum physics. And he's not the only one I've come across. There are YouTube videos that come across to very legitimate scientists who have said the observer is the center of reality, and this is part of quantum physics, and by observing we make things real, and maybe this future, like one of them actually worked out that our future progenitors were observing us through history, and that was what brought us into reality, which is really kind of the omega point theory, but a kind of more primitive version of it, the backwards causality.

Here's the problem. All of that is based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, and MWI ruins it, right? If you want to make the observer the center of reality, MWI just destroys it.

It destroys quite a number of things that physicists accept today.

[02:36:32]  Peter: It seems like what you were saying before, it almost makes it sound like Tipler believes in many worlds, but also finds a way to make observers the center of reality.

[02:36:42]  Bruce: Oh, it's not, yeah.

[02:36:44]  Unidentified speaker: Is that fair?

[02:36:45]  Bruce: It's not based on quantum physics anymore. It's based on the, I guess it is, it's based on the time reversal of quantum physics, whereas they're trying to make it the observation in quantum physics, something totally different. Unrelated, right?

[02:37:01]  Peter: I see.

[02:37:02]  Bruce: If you were to talk to most physicists today, they reject MWI. And because they do, they very commonly believe in non-locality. Sadia accepts non-locality because of that.

Many worlds—[incomplete phrase]—so she accepts non-locality. When she helped me interview Chiara, she asked all sorts of questions about non-locality, because that's part of her way of looking at the universe. Let me just say that that's exactly equivalent to believing in the supernatural.

Non-locality is not part of many worlds, quantum physics, which is our only actual explanation of quantum physics. Almost every physicist today believes in non-locality because they accept a supernaturalistic worldview of quantum physics, rather than a scientific worldview of quantum physics. Now, they don't know that.

They would never say it that way. They might even be offended by me saying that. But it's the truth that they've filled in the gaps and their unwillingness to accept many worlds.

They've instead filled in the gaps with really honestly supernaturalistic explanations, because they didn't know what else to do. They mostly just sort of don't talk about it too much. So if I were to say, let's take Martin Gardner.

He's the skeptic who believed in God that I was quoting. If heat death’s really the truth of the universe, then Martin Gardner is a supernaturalist, because he believes there's going to be a life after death, and there is no life after death. But guess what?

[02:38:31]  Bruce: That's also true for Deutsch and Tipler. If heat death really is the death of the universe, then those beliefs are actually supernatural too. Obviously, they don't believe it to be supernatural, but what if it were actually true?

I think this is why Richard Dawkins, I quoted Richard Dawkins, I don't know how you make sense of his morality given his worldview with heat death. I believe his morality is a supernatural belief today, right? He has to just on faith accept that morality means something, even though his worldview doesn't allow for it.

So when I get back to Mormon supernaturalistic beliefs, I see it in that light. I start with the assumption that supernaturalism is something we want to get rid of, it's bad in that sense, but we all start with it and it's really hard to get rid of it. You only do it a little at a time.

And let me give you an example of this. So I was once in a group of fans of David Deutsch, and we were talking about consciousness and determinism. And two of the guys talking were very concerned about how to reconcile their feelings of free will and consciousness with the deterministic nature of a Turing machine.

[02:39:43]  Bruce: And both of these are podcasters, people who have said a lot about David Deutsch on their podcasts and things like that. And so they were very concerned about this. So one of them wrote an article, and he says, quote, the problem in a nutshell is that creativity is unpredictable in principle.

Computer programs, on the other hand, are completely predictable. Okay, that's not a true statement. It does not follow from our theories.

There's nothing in our theories that creativity has to be unpredictable in every single possible sense. Somebody suggested to this person, they said, okay, that's not actually right. So he tried to correct it, and he said, well, the problem in a nutshell is that creativity is not predetermined, but computer programs, on the other hand, are completely deterministic.

Okay, well, that's not right either. There's computer programs are completely deterministic. That's true, but creativity is also predetermined.

In a worldview of the multiverse, the future already exists, it is already predetermined. They're stepping outside of the Four Strands to try to find a more comforting way to look at free will. And it's understandable.

Chiara Marletto spends a page or two on the deterministic nightmare, because it bothers her too, that some of the implications of Four Strandism are maybe a little concerning, and she wants to work out some way to reconcile with those. That's all these guys are doing, right? It's understandable that they would want to work something out.

[02:41:10]  Bruce: So I started to give them a thought experiment to help them understand how to reconcile these things. And I said, suppose you had some AIs, AGI's living in a virtual world, and then you had the same world on a different computer, but the computer is slower. It's true that whatever creative knowledge they come up with, you could then predict it on the second computer, because that second computer is going to predict exactly the same things in exactly the same ways that have already happened on the faster of the two computers, because the computer is deterministic, right?

That is, the Turing machine is deterministic. That is part of the theory, and there's no way around that, because the quantum computer is also deterministic. It's true you could predict what the second one's doing, but you could never actually predict what the first one's going to do.

And as long as you don't allow any communication, the people inside that world can't predict what knowledge is going to be created. So when we talk about knowledge being created, being unpredictable, we don't mean retrodict. Yes, you can retrodict knowledge.

By the way, Deutsch has admitted this in an interview. He talks about retrodiction versus prediction. Your mistake is that you're confusing retrodiction with prediction.

[02:42:25]  Bruce: And knowledge is unpredictable in the sense that it can't be predicted the first time, but it can be predicted numerous times the second time. In fact, going to school and learning knowledge is all about trying to get you to make the same discoveries as the first person in your mind. And we're retrodicting that you're going to be able to.

It's very predictable that we can get you to, if you will follow what they're doing in class and do your best, that you'll be able to create this knowledge in your mind for yourself. So it's a very good thing that we can retrodict the creation of knowledge, but we can't predict the creation of knowledge. Okay, after I give this explanation, in my mind solves the whole deterministic nightmare.

I just have zero concern with the deterministic nightmare because of this. They were not accepting it, right? And they're like, no, that is not right.

And they say, they wouldn't even take, I said, why don't you try the thought experiment I'm giving you? Like, actually think it through, explain to me how it could be otherwise. And they would touch the thought experiment [wording uncertain].

They would not even respond and acknowledge I had made it. And then they started talking about, well, computers can have errors. And errors would then cause unpredictable things.

[02:43:40]  Bruce: I'm like, okay, look, just change the thought experiment to be, sure, a computer might have an error, but they're really rare. And we can make them as rare as we want them to be under the laws of physics. So let's have, let's say we've got two computers that are going to have no error for a very long period of time.

Make the thought experiment about that. You're going to have exactly the same problem. There's no way around the problem if you're going to insist on retrodiction being something that is, you know, [deterministic?] machines are retrodictable, period, end of story.

There is no way around this problem. You are wasting your time as long as you're adhering to the Four Strands. And then immediately one of them responds, and he goes, No, I don't think you know that.

Because quantum physics is fungible, and that means that minds are fungible. And so that means that we don't know how that's all going to work. And when we understand consciousness, then we're going to find that the fungibility does something with it.

Okay, at this point, I suddenly realized, just as people will try to pour all their supernatural beliefs into quantum physics, quantum physics becomes quantum magic, right? They were doing exactly the same thing with fungibility. If you actually understand the fungibility of quantum physics, it's got zero to do with this, and it cannot save you in the slightest from this problem.

[02:44:58]  Bruce: If we ever do one on quantum physics, I'll explain how it actually works and how it fits in with quantum physics and why Deutsch used fungibility as the basis. So in essence, these people were engaging in supernaturalism. They were finding some mysterious part of Four Strands' theories that they didn't fully understand, and they were pouring their hopes and dreams into it, exactly like a religious person does.

And I just think that supernaturalism in this sense is just way more common. And maybe we should just be way more open to it. And I kind of backed off at that point.

I sort of realized, oh, this is something they're not ready to talk about or try to work through. I'm going to just let them believe what they want. And I'm not going to keep trying to convince them.

I would probably be damaging if I continue to try to push on this. I do think that this is just way more common, right? And your own supernatural ideas never seem weird to you.

They always seem weird to everybody else, if that makes any sense. If you were to take Deutschians and put them in front of other people and have them try to explain how fungibility and consciousness relate, it would seem really weird and for very good reason because it actually is a supernatural belief. But to them, maybe this seems reasonable.

[02:46:14]  Bruce: And I think that this is really kind of what I'm getting at. We try very hard. We always put our thumb on the scale of human aspirations.

And we're trying very hard. To them, this sounded nightmarish. And so they weren't ready to accept my answer, which wasn't good enough for them yet.

By the way, Sabine What's-her-name, the famous YouTuber that's a physicist, she wrote a whole paper on how free will could be real and basically what it boiled down to is that you had an inaccessible pseudo-random seed that deterministically creates random numbers, but they're not really random because they're deterministic, but they're completely unpredictable because of that. You don't need any of this to try to work out the lack of predictability and knowledge creation. But to her, this was the best she could do.

I would submit that that paper is entirely supernaturalistic, right? She just doesn't have enough science yet, she hasn't understood Deutsch's theories well enough to realize there's an easier solution. So she's trying her best to come up with this weird idea of all of this containing pseudo-random seeds, this is my words, but this is pretty much what she was saying.

[02:47:24]  Bruce: And it's just an unnecessary thing. By the way, Karl Popper, his article of Clouds and Clocks is basically him trying to work out how life isn't deterministic because he disliked the implications of determinism, even though the laws of physics are deterministic. And so that whole article is, in my opinion, supernaturalistic.

He's trying to come up with... Now, it did lead to something good. It led to the propensity theory of probability, which was his way of trying to get around it.

But the principle theory of probability doesn't really solve the problems he's trying to solve. He thought it did, but it really boiled down to life is unpredictable, which, yes, it is. That is absolutely true.

I went to a Popper conference, and I was presenting the Popper Without Refutation. The guy before me was arguing that there was no way for a computer to be intelligent, and he was using Popper's arguments. I happen to know amongst critical rational circles on Facebook, the ones that are like students of Popper and such, they're really against the idea of an AGI because of what Popper said.

I would present that that's supernaturalism. They've got concerns about AGI that haven't been resolved yet, and so they're going to be in denial of it based on what really are supernatural beliefs at the moment. But maybe it would be better to think of them as conjectures.

[02:48:50]  Bruce: They're trying to conjecture some solution. They don't have a good scientific one at the moment, so they kind of put the thumb on the scale in favor of what is comforting to them at this point. One of the things I really got out of Deutsch is he took all these things that had always seemed so pessimistic about science to me, and he really said they may not be so pessimistic if you take them together.

Individually, they come across pessimistic, but if you take all four of the strands and you roll them together, you come up with something totally different. And it's way more optimistic. And it's exactly the special kind of universe that religious people have aspirations for, which is why I think the Deutschians aren't particularly negative towards religion.

They, to some degree, the religious people are their allies for optimism. And no, they're not religious themselves, and they reject supernatural claims of religion. But they're not really there to go get in your face over it, because these are the allies, right?

[02:49:51]  Unidentified speaker: I think they know it.

[02:49:52]  Peter: I've definitely noticed that too, yeah.

[02:49:54]  Bruce: And I would say that Deutsch's beliefs are a kind of religion, right? He's got the right idea, though. He's got the same idea as Tipler.

He's going in a somewhat different direction than Tipler. But he understands the importance of finding a scientific way to fulfill the aspirations of the infinite horizon that broke Leo Tolstoy, that he, as Tolstoy put it, I didn't find this quote, but I know it's in there. What we need is a relationship with infinity.

If we don't have a relationship with infinity, things are pretty bad. It's really hard to make meaning out of life if you don't have a relationship with infinity. So, Deutsch is putting that relationship with infinity back in and saying, yes, there's actually a scientific way to go about this.

And even though I don't have all the answers worked out entirely, I believe there's going to be. And that's kind of where we're coming from. So now let me get back to Joseph Smith and his magic spectacles.

First of all, let me say that I had never in my entire life heard about Joseph Smith and his magic spectacles in church. We did talk about Joseph Smith receiving revelations through something called the Urim and Thummim. And that's what a non-Mormon calls the magic spectacles to try to make fun of Mormons.

[02:51:07]  Bruce: But they never mention it in church. So Urim and Thummim is a Jewish concept that's in Hebrew scripture. These stones that you receive revelation from.

Now, there's different ideas as to what they were. Joseph Smith had his own idea. He described them as kind of clear crystals that you could look through and you could receive revelation by looking through them.

You didn't put them on your head like glasses. They were something that appeared that were as part of a breastplate. This is how it is in the Bible also, that they have them kind of in the breastplate.

And then there's different traditions. Your average liberal Bible scholar would say it was just a randomized device that you would basically you would roll the dice and it would come up with. One of the theories is that it basically just said guilty or not guilty.

And so they would use a random device to determine if you were guilty or not guilty. And we know that ancient civilizations didn't understand randomness and probability theory. So they often used probability as a means of trying to communicate with God.

[02:52:06]  Bruce: But more recent, like by more recent New Testament times, they saw it as you would stand before the priest and the light of God would come out of it and it would reveal things to you. That's kind of more similar to what Joseph Smith had in mind. And so we look at these and it's really easy to just say, that's just weird.

I mean, sure, it's just weird. Okay, let me now make a case for each of these. So first of all, if you actually believe in the religion, it won't seem weird to you.

It's just a part of what you accept, right? That God can communicate however he wants. And sure, God can use the Urim and Thummim to do that.

He did in the Old Testament. By the way, the reason why people who don't like Mormons refer to it as magic spectacles is because they refer to it as a Urim and Thummim. That's something that they accept.

And so they need to make sure they describe it in such a way that it sounds stupid, but doesn't make them sound stupid. So they go to great lengths to try to reinterpret it. For example, so let's just take a completely atheistic view of Urim and Thummim.

[02:53:14]  Bruce: In fact, let's even take the view that it's just a random device. Okay, it's a die, you roll, and it's an eight ball, magic eight ball, and it gives you an answer to your question. Could this be stupider?

Maybe as a modern person, it just seems so stupid. You just can't even believe that this could ever have been a part of a religion in the first place. You'd be wrong, because as it turns out, that's a knowledge-bearing tradition.

And I have a book that talks about this. Let's say that you are out and you're at war, and so you decide to use your randomized die, Urim and Thummim or burn entrails or whatever it is your religion does to try to determine when you should attack, because you want to know what God's going to tell you to do. Turns out, randomly attacking is one of the single best strategies you can ever imagine in war.

And so that tradition would grow up and would be provide survival value because it's a knowledge-bearing tradition. It's not so weird once you think of it that way. So some of the others we think about, like you try to see if someone's a witch or if they're guilty by seeing if they float in water, you know, and that you put your hand in the hot water.

[02:54:28]  Bruce: The Bible has one of these that you want to know if your spouse cheated on you. So you give them this mixture, and if they're guilty, it kills them. And if they're not guilty, it makes them more fruitful and they'll have children more easily.

Okay, from our modern viewpoint, sure, that just seems so bizarre. These were really useful traditions. Basically, the priest understands what's going on.

They understand that the real purpose is to get the person to confess. And so they have this boiling water, and then what they generally do is they don't boil the water, the oil too much. And so you can actually easily put your hand into it, and it's not going to be a problem.

But nobody else knows that except for the priest. So they come in, and if you're an innocent person, then at the time you would have believed in God, you would have believed God could have protected you from boiling oil. So you wouldn't really have any concerns.

So you'd come in and you put your hand in the boiling water. You've seen other people do it, and they've survived. And so you put it in, and then they go, OK, God says you're not guilty.

Or maybe you are guilty. So you come in and you're just terrified. You're going to burn your hand off.

[02:55:36]  Bruce: God's going to make you burn your hand off. And so based on that culture that exists at that point in time, they end up getting a lot of really useful confessions. And it actually works as a way of trying to find out who's guilty and who isn't.

And yeah, it wouldn't work today, right? If I were to go do it, because we live in a different culture. It would be completely different today.

But for the culture that these traditions grew up in, they were actually knowledge-bearing traditions that were effective and contained survival value. The idea of looking into a crystal to try to receive revelation. OK, if you're an atheist, you want to look at that in a non-weird way.

Think of it as a form of meditation. OK, revelation is you're trying to talk with your inner self. You're trying to understand things better.

You're trying to access that subconscious. OK, looking into crystals or fire or whatever, that's a normal part of even secular meditation practice today. There's not necessarily anything weird about it when you look at it that way.

The thing that you won't be able to accept is that God's actually independently doing something with it. But I don't think you can say that it's actually bad or unuseful or not knowledge-bearing. It's still a useful tradition that the religions have picked up and is a part of that religion.

[02:56:57]  Bruce: So that would actually be how I would suggest looking at it. So W. B.

Yeats, this is a quote from him.

[02:57:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[02:57:04]  Bruce: So this is very definitely not a scientific worldview.

And in the book that I have, The Celtic Twilight, it's a set of stories about supernatural things happening that he took from people. They believed in them. We wouldn't believe in them today.

And when explaining his point of view, he says this. He says, it's better doubtless to believe so much unreason and a little truth than to deny, for denial's sake, truth and unreason alike. For when we do this, we have not even a rush candle to guide our steps, and we must fumble our way into the great emptiness.

And after all, can we come to so great evil if we keep a little fire on the hearths in our souls and welcome with open hand whatever excellence [unclear word] come to warm, whether it be man or phantom, and to not say too fiercely, be ye gone? So he's expressing this idea, and it's bad epistemology, I admit, that, look, I'm not going to just throw out all the supernatural beliefs, even though I know probably most of them are false, because some of them might turn out to be true. And it is at least, and especially in light of what I'm saying about it's okay for us to put the thumb on the scale of we are in favor of looking at the world in terms of human aspirations, I think that's what he's getting at.

[02:58:24]  Bruce: You know what? I'm not saying I think that all these supernatural stories are completely true, but I'm not discounting them either. Right?

There may be some explanation that we don't have yet. And if those are true, if some of them are true, if it turns out something like the omega point is true, then let me ask you a really honest question. Who was closer to the truth on the things that matter?

Was it Richard Dawkins, the atheist, or was it a religious person? I would submit it's the religious person. They didn't kick out infinity just because at the time that was the best theory is that there was no infinity.

We'll actually find out that religious people were far closer to the truth, if Deutsch's views are correct, than any of the atheists that existed at the time of Deutsch. I think that's what Yeats is really saying is, look, I'm not prepared to kick out all the supernatural beliefs because who knows, maybe some of them will turn out to be true. I would rather accept a bunch of falsehoods and the truth that really mattered than kick out the truth that really mattered because I was just trying to make sure I only had true beliefs.

Because, as H. P. Lovecraft put it, the truth isn't necessarily good. If the truth is good, then that's what we're after.

[02:59:39]  Bruce: But if the truth is that heat death’s the end of the universe, I don't think it matters that much whether we have the truth or not. Scientists don't have any real advantage over religion in this case. So that would be my final thought.

[02:59:52]  Peter: Well, thank you for that. I'm still an atheist, but I can't say you're wrong.

[03:00:00]  Bruce: Well, I hope that at least it can show why I have an appreciation for religion.

[03:00:05]  Peter: I think you've done that well.

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