Episode 59: The Principle of Optimism (Round Table Discussion)

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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]  Peter: Hello, welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. We've got a big group today. This is a roundtable discussion on the principle of optimism.

Everyone wanna say hi real quick?

[00:00:23]  Unidentified speaker: Hello.

[00:00:25]  Unidentified speaker: Hi.

[00:00:26]  Unidentified speaker: Hello.

[00:00:26]  Unidentified speaker: Hi.

[00:00:27]  Unidentified speaker: Hello.

[00:00:27]  Unidentified speaker: Hello, everyone.

[00:00:28]  Peter: Anyway, I've got a bad case of imposter syndrome here. We've got some really smart people here, but this must be a low amplitude branch of the multiverse, is all I can say, because this is really, really exciting for me to talk to this many smart people. Deutsch's principle of optimism, as probably most people listening know, all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge, may sound a little trite to people.

I've tried to explain it to people, IRL, and yeah, I think trite is a good word for it. Maybe a bit like the whole live, laugh, love thing or something like that, which that in itself might not be such bad advice either. I think the wine moms might be right there.

It actually comes from James Joyce and rich literary history on that one. But anyway, optimism, fringy [possibly “cringy”] to a lot of people, as the kids would say. But the way Deutsch puts it, well, in his words, optimism is a cold, hard, far-reaching implication of rejecting irrationality, nothing else.

I think that's true. It's definitely something that I got from the beginning of infinity. And I think a lot of people here may agree or disagree.

We hope to explore different aspects of this. Is Deutsch talking more about an attitude or something like a law of physics? So we'll get into that.

[00:02:12]  Peter: First, I've got some introductions to do. We'll try to get this through this relatively quickly, I hope.

[00:02:20]  Bruce: It might take a half hour to do the introduction.

[00:02:22]  Peter: Well, I hope not quite that long. But I thought that I could briefly introduce each person. If each person could introduce themselves and then state what idea or podcast or lecture or whatever kind of initially hooked them on to David Deutsch and put them on that rabbit hole.

For me, I think I was pretty interested in the multiverse and putting out stuff on Facebook here and there. And then someone mentioned, well, you gotta check out David Deutsch. You gotta read this book, The Beginning of Infinity.

Before I read it, actually, I went to his Ted Talk on chemical scum that dream of distant quasars. And I mean, it just blew my mind. I still think it's the best lecture I've ever heard.

The environmental optimism in that lecture really was something I was interested in. But then he seemed to have a way of explaining optimism that wasn't just like an attitude towards life. It was something that was more like just a rational assertion about reality.

And I just found that every time I listened to that lecture, like new connections in my mind were made. I noticed new details that stood out to me. And still when I listen to it, I get that.

[00:03:58]  Peter: So for me, I think it was kind of the optimism that really drew me in to his worldview. And I'm still exploring that and learning from his stuff. Anyway, first up, we've got, this is in no particular order, Sam Kuypers.

He's got some serious credentials here who has written at least one paper with David Deutsch. And I'm sure he has all kinds of other scientific credentials that I wish I knew more about. The aspect of your work, Sam, I'd like to highlight is your work with the Oxford Karl Popper Society, which I think in my estimation is one of the best YouTube series I've seen.

I loved your interviews with David Friedman, Lee Smolin, Chiara Marletto, Björn Lomborg, just tons of amazing people. It seems like you haven't put out an episode in a while. Maybe it's not something you're doing, but Sam, do you want to say hi and state how you initially got introduced to David Deutsch?

[00:05:08]  Sam: Yeah, sure, we'll do. First of all, thanks for having me. It's great being here.

And thanks for the kind words. That's really heartening to hear that you enjoyed the series that we produced so much. Yeah, as you said, I'm not really working on it at the moment.

The Popper Society is in some kind of hibernation, but perhaps we will start it again at some point. But yeah, to the point of how I discovered Deutsch, I remember first hearing about him on Sam Harris' podcasts, which must be back in 2015 or so, where he spoke with Harris about AI. And the thing that struck me about that particular conversation, although it took me a while to pick up his book afterwards, is that he was one of the only people who was talking about AI or having an actual theory about computation and saying things that appeared novel from what I'd heard before about the same topic.

[00:06:07]  Sam: Like mostly people mentioned things about how AI was supposed to be this super intelligent thing and how we could conceive of minds that are far greater than ours. And there's lots of arguments that run in the opposite direction, which are arguments from universality, from computational universality, saying that your hardware is essentially the same as that of any other, the hardware of your mind or your brain rather is essentially the same as that of any other universal computer. So I just thought that was an extremely unique argument.

And then got into the books, it turned out that he said stuff relevant to my subject, namely physics. And then I became enamored with the multiverse. I did it.

So that's now one of my research areas. That's the main thing I work in in physics is foundations of quantum theory and the many worlds interpretation or rather Everettian quantum theory, as I think we should call it.

[00:07:13]  Peter: Thank you, Sam. Okay, next up here's we have Daniel Jordan, my friend. We've exchanged thousands of messages in the last five years, talked about our lives, being a parent.

He knows all my deepest secrets, but let's just keep those off the podcast, please. Smart as heck on epistemology, also an objectivist. So we're going to get a little different view.

So a follower of Ayn Rand, I hope you don't object to me characterizing you like that.

[00:07:55]  Unidentified speaker: That’s a follower.

[00:07:59]  Peter: Or however you want to put it.

[00:08:02]  Unidentified speaker: So Daniel, you want to say hi?

[00:08:05]  Daniel: Yes. So thanks for having me on, Peter. Yeah, as far as your question earlier about how I got interested in David Deutsch, it was obviously through you because, well, I know what it's like to discover a thinker that kind of blows your world apart and your optimism, well, your enthusiasm for Deutsch was really over the top and very infectious.

And so, of course, with a little bit of prodding, I eventually got into reading Deutsch. I'll have to admit openly that I've only done the audiobook version, which is a sad excuse compared to just reading the actual material where you're always going to get more out of it. So, at some point in time, I'm going to return to reading The Beginning of Infinity and Fabric of Reality in actual book form, because that will help me a great deal.

[00:09:06]  Daniel: But Deutsch, as far as my estimate of the man and his mind, I rate him very highly. Certainly the principle of optimism is one of those aspects of Deutsch, which is very attractive. I have an interest in the history of philosophy and ideas, and I think that even among intellectuals who take what they will explicitly advocate for a view of man that is pro-man or sounds optimistic, they are often times undercut by a view of reason that is, let's say, they don't view reason as fully efficacious with respect to man's life, to the role that it plays.

Whereas with David Deutsch, he's above all else, I think he's an advocate of reason. And that's what attracts me to him because I think that if somebody ever had any doubt of the efficacy of reason, it's going to seriously undercut their view of man, their view of the future. And that is what underpins pretty much every, let's say, theory of pessimism, as opposed to optimism.

[00:10:35]  Daniel: So yeah, Deutsch is an incredible mind, and there's not a lot of thinkers in the history of philosophy, original thinkers in philosophy that actually have such a pro-human aspect to their thinking. And that's something that I absolutely cherish, even if I disagree on other aspects of, let's say, Deutsch or Popper epistemology, but we don't have to get into that today because it's just kind of irrelevant. We get to the same basic place, which is cherishing reason, understanding the value of it to man, and that is what's going to lead you to come out on the side of optimism, I think, ultimately.

[00:11:24]  Peter: Well put, thank you, Daniel, I find that when we I know that Deutsch himself was influenced at least somewhat by Ayn Rand, if I'm not mistaken. And I know often that when we speak about epistemology or related issues, it seems that we're kind of using this different language to sort of express the same things. So yeah, we definitely there's definitely a lot of overlap, I think.

Thank you. Next up, Micah Redding, really nice to meet you. Micah has been a contributor here and there to the Facebook group that I started on David Deutsch.

I was kind of excited to realize that to check out his old podcast, which is I think it's just called Christian Transhumanism.

[00:12:16]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, Christian Transhumanist Podcast,

[00:12:19]  Peter: yes, yes, which is very, very, very cool podcast. I just listened to your interview, relistened, I should say, to your interview with Deutsch this morning, and I got a lot out of it.

Probably one of the better Deutsch interviews out there, I would say, and that's a big praise, because there's a lot of good ones. But, and then I loved also your interview on with Frank Tipler, who has called the, perhaps controversially, the original four-strander. And then I saw that you retweeted Bruce's podcast on, or the one we did a couple episodes ago on religion.

And so, you know, that's kind of how it goes. If you tweet our podcast out, you get to be on it, I think. Right, Bruce?

[00:13:09]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:13:10]  Peter: Anyway, but Micah, or Micah, maybe you'd like to say a little bit more about yourself.

[00:13:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think we can get…

[00:13:19]  Micah: It's Micah. My family has pronounced it all kinds of different ways, though. So I'm very used to that.

But yeah. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's great to participate in these conversations.

Yeah, so my kind of background, I guess, so I'm the executive director of the Christian Transhumanist Association, which is kind of an unusual thing for most people to hear about. And I've recently done a master's in philosophy of science and religion at University of Edinburgh and so dealt with some epistemology there and kind of history of ideas and so forth that relate to this. But I guess my introduction to Deutsch probably was actually through Tipler.

And there's such an overlap in their ideas. It's interesting. I don't know who influenced who, but yeah, I think that Tipler led me into Deutsch.

And I think in reading his work over the years and kind of revisiting it a number of times, what really I found compelling was the sense of optimism and then also the sense of an idea about what persons are and what personhood actually means. And that resonated with my background and my tradition. And it kind of, I felt, gives a sort of technical definition to an idea that has been understood in maybe a more metaphysical sense.

[00:15:06]  Micah: And so yeah, that's been my kind of my entry into this. And then I'm very interested in Deutsch's ideas about AGI and how that might relate to the human mind and so forth. So yeah, I'm interested in this from all kinds of angles.

And I guess that, you know, has gotten me very interested in Popperian epistemology and so forth. So yeah, it's great to be in this discussion.

[00:15:34]  Bruce: By the way, I would mention that he seems to be a decently large name amongst Mormon transhumanists. I went to lunch with the leaders of the Mormon transhumanists and they brought him up and talked about him. Like, oh yeah, I'm friends with him.

[00:15:50]  Micah: We're good friends going way back. It's kind of a to be in a kind of religion and transhumanism space is an unusual thing. And so we're all very conversant, you know, between different kind of strands of that.

[00:16:08]  Peter: Thank you, Micah. Next up, we have somewhat of a unknown for me. Main thing, Hervé Eulacia.

I'm sorry if I'm butchering your name, but he is smart as heck. That is that much I do know from his comments on the in the Facebook group. He's French, but please don't hold that against him.

He did reach out to me and said, I'm kind of trying to be a little bit snarky there, because he did reach out to me and say, ask if he was too snarky for the Facebook group, because he's French and I'm a West Coast American, and he just wanted to make sure that we could handle the snark, but I think we can. I've loved his contributions.

[00:17:06]  Bruce: I usually cry for a few minutes after each comment he makes to me.

[00:17:12]  Peter: Hervé, do you want to tell us how you got into Deutsch?

[00:17:15]  Hervé: Yes, for sure. I was born and raised in France and I now live in Montreal, Canada, so I'm trying to correct from being too French. It's a transition period for me.

I have a science background, but now I work in financial risk, so I had to put for a long time my science in the background. As many of you have guessed, I went into those books, those readings, starting with Roger Penrose, Douglas Hofstadter, Dawkins, all of which led to this, I don't know if anybody remembers about that, they were called The New Atheists, and all of it was a bit of a letdown, eventually. There was kind of a low-power optimism in all of this, it was even a bit pessimistic, I found.

And then randomly, I heard, I think a bit like Sam, I heard Sam Harris interview Deutsch, and I think he did two interviews with him at different intervals. But the first one, that was the first time actually that I heard Sam Harris being lost, or unable to come back, actually, from what Deutsch was saying. And I think it's Cam Peters, which I don't know if anybody knows him, Cam Peters, he said once that Deutsch was a bit of an acid test, and I clearly felt it with Sam Harris.

[00:18:49]  Hervé: And then again, a bit later, he also derailed Tyler Cowen, in an interview where Tyler Cowen was unable to, I guess, really understand what Deutsch was saying. So I felt, well, who's that guy? So I started looking into it, started reading his books, and discovered a new form for me, a new form of optimism, but one with a actually a very big engine, I would say, something really powerful, a lot of a oomph.

And then I had people who helped me understand whether they know it or not. And among them, it was Chiara Marletto for the knowledge aspect. I think she was a good read for that.

Sam here, whether he knows it or not, helped me a lot with the notions of time and many worlds. So thank you, Sam and Vaden and here and Ben with their podcasts were also a great help to help me understand a lot of details and Bruce, of course. And so far, yes, Deutsch has been a true, a very helpful thinker for me.

Especially on when you have to think about Polianism [Pollyannaism?], altruism, effective altruism, artificial intelligence, all the things that can be very popular these days. And his thinking is really a good test for these things and helps you maybe have a better grasp on those notions and how you can criticize them. That's it.

[00:20:34]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Hervé.

[00:20:37]  Unidentified speaker: Next up, we have…

[00:20:38]  Bruce: Can we pronounce your name, Hervé? How do you pronounce it?

[00:20:41]  Unidentified speaker: Hervé.

[00:20:41]  Hervé: Yeah, Hervé with an accent, because if you remove the accent, Hervé, it sounds like a sexually transmitted disease.

[00:20:50]  Unidentified speaker: Very cool.

[00:20:51]  Peter: And next up, another kind of dark horse for me, honestly. I mean, I don't know much about him other than his comments are just when I read what he says on Facebook, I kind of think, you know, maybe I'm not so crazy after all. He just expresses himself so well.

I don't know if he's a garbage man or a PhD, but he is a smart guy. Bill Rugolsky. Really nice to have you on here.

[00:21:21]  Bill: Thank you, Peter. I might perhaps be the old man of the group.

I'm 55.

My first encounter with David Deutsch was actually his 1985 paper. I have a yellowing copy somewhere that I'll find as I unpack my boxes in my new house from 1986. And I read that paper at the time and had a thought which I think has come to fruition.

As I was reading it, I was thinking of Wigner's comment about Feynman. He's the second coming of Dirac, only this time human. And I thought, David Deutsch, he might be the third Dirac.

So that was 1986. And I read that paper with interest, especially when Penrose's 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind came along because it set the two up in stark opposition.

[00:22:24]  Unidentified speaker: This Turing-Deutsch thesis versus what Penrose was saying, essentially about consciousness.

[00:22:31]  Bill: And then it kind of fell off my radar. I graduated in 1990 and I had intended to be a theoretical physicist, but the environment was not all that great at that moment. Eventually, the supercollider was canceled and jobs went away and I ended up in finance.

So when 1995, I guess, this fabric of reality came around, I thought, wow, here's this Deutsch guy again. This just blew my mind. So I read the book, got to the last page, and then went back to the first page and read it again immediately.

And then went back to Barnes & Noble and bought every copy of the book that was there and started handing them out and created a discussion group of five or six folks. You know, your friends always love you when you show up and say, here's a book and you have to read it and there's going to be a quiz in two weeks.

[00:23:26]  Bruce: By the way, can you clarify which paper it is you're referring to from 1986?

[00:23:32]  Bill: The 1985 paper, that's the quantum computer paper.

[00:23:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:23:39]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:23:40]  Bill: And so that was terribly—at first I read it and I thought, oh, that's interesting.

It's obvious that Turing was being silly talking about classical computing devices, but it wasn't clear that it mattered. And Deutsch came along and explained exactly how it did matter. And so I read Fabric of Reality and really took hold of it.

I immediately went out and bought Conjectures and Refutations and the Open Society and its Enemies so I could delve into Popper. And started down that path. I'd say if there was one thing that gave me pause, even though I had an interest in interpretations of quantum mechanics, I have a whole stack of papers and books on interpretations of quantum mechanics preceding that, I still was not willing to buy into the ontology of the many worlds interpretation.

And it just kind of hung there for a while. I found it interesting but not compelling. Until Deutsch started to talk about fungibility, and then it all clicked for me.

It compacted the ontology sufficiently for me to say, OK, this makes sense. And that brings us pretty much to the present.

[00:25:04]  Peter: Thanks, Bill. That's a great story. Next up, Vaden Masrani.

I hope I'm not butchering that too much, but he's from the Increments podcast. And all I can say, if you don't listen to the Increments podcast, please reevaluate your life. I mean, just at least go and subscribe right now.

Check it out. I've learned so much from his discussions with Ben on there. And I love especially your series on conjectures and refutations.

And I went back and read after listening to each episode, I would read the chapter from conjectures and refutations or the essay from the book. And it helped me so much to delve a little deeper into Popper's ideas. Vaden, how did you get into Deutsch?

[00:26:07]  Vaden: Well, it's great to be here. And it's so nice to know that the little conversations Ben and I are having are reaching people and helping them work through the material themselves. So I got into Deutsch the way that I think a lot of people on this call have, which is via Sam Harris.

I kind of come from a new atheist background, and I'm always looking for kind of interesting new ways to view the world and to think through problems. And then so I just kind of went headfirst into beginning of infinity. And I think I was trying to think about this as other people are answering.

And I think for me, it wasn't so much any one particular idea, it's just like the sheer quantity of interesting things that were packed into those pages. It kind of felt for me like every other page, I was just being walloped by a totally new way to think about something that I thought I already understood. And what was interesting is that you can almost take each idea and understand it in isolation and it would serve you quite well.

[00:27:09]  Vaden: But then when you start bundling up all the ideas, you realize that he's building a completely coherent worldview, which challenges a lot of the dominant orthodoxies that we all kind of swim in unthinkingly, I guess. And so what happened to me was I ended up just kind of finding myself arguing with people around me about things like environmentalism and proportional representation and AI-doomerism and Bayesianism and anti-humanism. And it wasn't that I thought I am a Deutschian.

It's just that every time I would get into these arguments, I just kept having to return to beginning of infinity to see how Deutsch was thinking through it. And that just drew me further and further in. And then I started switching over to Popper.

And that happened maybe five or six years ago. And I still haven't reached the bottom of it. There just always seems to be more to understand, more to explore.

And it really does kind of sounds a little corny to say, but it really does feel like you're continuously at the beginning of infinity. And that's what I love about it so much, is it's just such a rich and interesting and dare I say fun worldview to explore. And it makes you a tiny bit of a contrarian.

[00:28:27]  Vaden: And I like the contrarianism. I like being a bit of a fly in the ointment whenever I can. And so for all those reasons, I've just been drawn into it.

And it's been just a great experience working through a lot of these ideas live on air with Ben and seeing how he thinks about it differently and just engaging with the ideas. Because that's one of the things that both Deutsch and Popper teaches is that you don't want to just passively receive ideas. You want to actively engage with them.

And I hope that's what we're going to do in this conversation today on the discussion of optimism. So I'm really looking forward to seeing where the discussion goes. I'm excited to be here.

[00:29:03]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Vaden.

[00:29:04]  Unidentified speaker: That was great.

[00:29:05]  Unidentified speaker: Bruce, do you want to...

[00:29:07]  Bruce: Okay, so should I go ahead and start?

[00:29:10]  Unidentified speaker: Please do.

[00:29:11]  Bruce: Okay. So let me actually give... So what I've done is I've collected a series of criticisms of the principle of optimism.

Now, it's not because I disagree with the principle of optimism. In fact, far from it. It is specifically the principle of optimism and the overall optimistic nature of Deutsch's worldview that attracted me to it.

And you might even say to me that's the most important aspect of his philosophy. But I naturally try to find the best criticisms I can of every theory. And I feel like that is an important...

From Popperian epistemology, that's an important part of trying to understand the theory, is to understand its problems and then to solve them. So I've made an attempt to go through and find the criticisms of the principle of optimism. And the intent here is to try to get a more nuanced view of it so that I understand it better.

And that was...

[00:30:12]  Peter: Bruce, can we just state very clearly the principle of optimism, all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

[00:30:20]  Bruce: Yes. Well, and a lot of things I'm going to ask about are actually the concept of all problems are soluble, which is not the same as the principle of optimism, but he ties them together. One's in chapter three of Beginning Infinity, one's in chapter nine.

He kind of references back to the ideas in chapter three when he's building his principle of optimism. So in a lot of times people take exception to that aspect that comes before it, a kind of precursor to it. So the thought occurred to me, the idea for this podcast actually came up a while back while I was listening to Brett Hall's Toecast, episode 82, he's doing an interview with David Deutsch and he has a chance to ask David Deutsch questions that's been on his mind and to try to get clarification.

And Brett asks a question about the relationship between undecidability and the idea that all problems are soluble. Now I won't go into all the details of the discussion. Definitely a worthwhile discussion.

Go actually look up that episode and listen to it. But here's, as best I can, quoting Brett, he says, Problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble. So this is him quoting that idea that's from chapter three of Beginning of Infinity, his phrasing of it.

[00:31:33]  Bruce: And then he says, and here I've heard over the years people push back against this, especially the second part, that problems are soluble. So this leads to a discussion, which I'm not going to include, about Gödel's argument and him and Deutsch discuss this. And then he has this line that he says, that I'm going to read, that really got me thinking.

So he says, one line of discussion I've often pursued here, correct me if I'm wrong. So when he's arguing with people over the idea that problems are inevitable, but that they're soluble, one argument that he often brings up is that says, but this vast class of undecidable and unprovable statements, which must vastly outnumber the provable statements, they are in a sense uninteresting because that's not what the claims of science, physics, for example, consist of. They can't possibly have any effect on our world.

They aren't going to help us solve problems, as you would say. Are they interesting in any way? Now, this really made me stop and think for a second.

[00:32:38]  Bruce: As someone who comes from a background in computer science and having studied computational theory a few times, I'm well aware that if we could solve the halting problem, if we could solve the problem of undecidability, that would be a super interesting result. That would be groundbreakingly interesting. If you were to look up in Wikipedia, there's a list of undecidable problems, and they actually keep lists of things that they've reduced to the halting problem.

They're problems that we wish we could solve, that we had an algorithm for, but we know it's impossible to make an algorithm to do. It includes things like deciding whether the Diophantine equation, I don't know if I pronounced that right, has a solution in integers, or if ray tracing determining if a ray beginning at a given position and direction eventually reaches a certain point or not. I mean, these aren't uninteresting problems that we're talking about.

That got me thinking, and I thought, okay, so why is Brett referencing interestingness here? Well, the reason why is because in David Deutsch's book Beginning of Infinity, he says, and I quote, I conjecture that in mathematics, as well as in science and philosophy, if the question is interesting, then the problem is soluble. And then later he says, inherently insoluble problems are inherently uninteresting.

[00:33:57]  Bruce: Given those quotes, it sort of made sense to me what Brett was trying to get at, right? He's reasonably, he's understanding that if undecidability is an insoluble problem, that it should also therefore be uninteresting. Now, Deutsch goes on to contradict him on that in the podcast.

He actually talks about, for example, how undecidability may factor, is interesting because it may factor into problems about physics. And I don't remember the exact examples that he uses, but he actually does point out that it could be quite interesting. So this got me thinking, what is actually the correct formulation of the idea of problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble?

I hear it with different caveats attached sometimes, sometimes with the interestingness, and sometimes with if not forbidden by the laws of physics, things like that. I wanted people's take on that. How would you look at this, first of all, anything you want to say about this?

And then really what I'm looking for is, what's the correct way to formulate this precursor to the principle of optimism?

[00:35:08]  Vaden: I'll chime in. Bruce, I'm maybe not going to answer your question directly, but I just had a side comment, and I'm maybe just looking for a bit more clarification. So I'm not totally convinced that inherently unsolvable problems are inherently uninteresting, and it's only because I'm thinking about how people become fascinated about paradoxes, say.

So like the paradox of who shaved the barber. You could argue that's inherently unsolvable problem, but yet people seem obsessed about it, and like Hofstadter wrote a book all about it. And so is it actually true to say that if something is intrinsically unsolvable, then people will just lose interest?

Because I kind of view the fascination with paradoxes as a bit of a counter example to that.

[00:35:56]  Unidentified speaker: Interesting.

[00:35:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:35:57]  Daniel: I think that when you're talking about paradoxes, if you're on a paradox, it often means you're very close to stumbling or solving an actual problem. Sometimes the paradox is not even there. It's just a way of reconceptualizing a problem.

So it's difficult for me to talk about whether these things are ultimately interesting or not, but I don't see that this is necessarily going to be a problem for the philosophic principle of optimism. You can come across certain aspects of reality that simply are and are unchangeable by the very nature of things. And perhaps there's certain things that we could never know.

There might be physical barriers to knowledge. There might be horizons to what we could test because we couldn't disprove a theory. And it puts it into this camp or category of, well, this is a problem we can't really decide whether it's true or false.

Deutsch is pretty explicit. Well, he is explicit about the fact that he says the problems themselves are soluble and they're interesting. But how many problems did people think we could never solve until we solve them?

And how could we know with certainty going into a problem whether it's solvable or not?

[00:37:31]  Bill: It occurs to me that the problem is not just the word interesting, but the word problem. If something is a mathematical theorem, for example, that produces a result that you don't like, let's say, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, is that a problem?

Is the fact that 2 is an even prime number a problem because I want all my primes to be odd? So whether something is a problem now, for something like the traveling salesman problem, you want to solve the problem, but you don't have an algorithm. You can then go look for approximate solutions, and that is a very rich vein to mine, and it has been mined extensively.

So finding an approximate solution, given that an exact solution is not possible, is an interesting problem, whereas banging your head against... Well, or you can go off and decide that the dragon you want to slay is P equals MP [possibly NP]. But there are different ways to take the result.

And to echo what Daniel was saying, are the laws of physics a problem? No, they constrain what's possible and what's impossible, and we operate within that framework. We might ask how the laws might be different, and that could be a productive line of inquiry.

But a fact itself is not necessarily a problem.

[00:39:08]  Vaden: Yeah, and I think you could actually go even further. I really like what you said in the sense that to learn that a problem is unsolvable is in some sense a solution to the problem, right?

[00:39:21]  Unidentified speaker: Absolutely.

[00:39:22]  Vaden: Like if you discover that you cannot find a linear time algorithm for the traveling salesman problem, well, then that just allows me to walk away and solve other problems and almost put that into the boxes as a solved problem. And so it's only those who insist on trying to get around a law of physics or a law of computation, it seems like it's a problem for them. But if you take a rational mindset, once you find out that something is impossible, like induction or perfect proportional representation, then that's when you change your tactics, change your approach and change the thing you're working on.

So it's only maybe a problem for the stubborn or the dogmatic, but not the open-minded and rational.

[00:40:00]  Hervé: I think it might be a question in me about when he's saying that every problem has a solution and that we can find the solutions to any potential problem that we see, is there maybe just a rhetorical element to it? Of him saying, well, he's going against a line of thought which says that whole realms are completely inaccessible to our thinking, and he's going against that. So maybe he's kind of pushing, forcing the trait here in a way, and it's another way of him saying that our repertoire of knowledge is potentially infinite, but that's another way of saying it, that maybe we should not be taking to meaning that every problem is soluble because it's actually not true and he knows that.

[00:40:58]  Vaden: Could I just chime in one more time? I'm painfully aware that I don't think we've actually answered the direct question that you asked us, Bruce, but I realized I actually forgot what the first criticism of the principle of optimism was. Would you mind just quickly summarizing what you extracted from the conversation from Brett Hall, just so it's kind of fresh in my mind?

[00:41:20]  Bruce: So first of all, it's not a criticism of the principle of optimism, but the precursor, problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble. So Brett is often encountering people who would say, no, that's just not true. Not all problems are soluble.

And then they'll use undecidability as an example as a problem that is not soluble. Because David Deutsch in his book says, I conjecture that in mathematics as well as in science philosophy, if the question is interesting, then the problem is soluble. Inherently insoluble problems are inherently uninteresting.

It was natural for Brett to assume that the idea that problems are inevitable but problems are soluble would imply that undecidability, the problem of undecidability must therefore be an uninteresting problem. And yet it seems to actually be quite an interesting problem. There's different ways you might go about this, right?

So in the interview, Deutsch points out that knowing that, saying similar to what you guys said, that knowing that something is undecidable, that might in some sense be your solution.

[00:42:31]  Vaden: That was what I was going to say, exactly.

[00:42:33]  Bruce: Or you could guess. So somebody used the example of P equals NP from computational theory. Well, the fact that we can't decide that, let's say that that is in fact an undecidable problem.

I don't think we know that for sure, but let's say that it is. We can still guess that P does not equal NP, and we could be right about it, right? So in this case, you just treat it as a scientific theory and you attempt to refute it.

You can't find refutations. So it doesn't really stop you from solving the problem just because it's undecidable. And yet there is something here.

Brett has misunderstood what problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble means because of the way things have been phrased. It's a reasonable misunderstanding. What I guess what I'm looking for is what's the correct way to understand problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble?

And I think your answers have been kind of partially dancing around what that might mean in different contexts.

[00:43:32]  Sam: Yeah, I would say that the thing which Deutsch probably finds important, which at any rate I find important, is that there's nothing which stops the growth of knowledge. There's no problem which when we encounter it will be the end of progress. And there's one sense in which interesting problems are always soluble.

There's nothing which will eventually lead to the end of the growth of knowledge. There's no problem which will be in the way of that.

[00:44:02]  Bruce: So if I had at the time I first heard this interview, if Brett was interviewing me, I think what I would have said is, well, actually there's two caveats, right? There's problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble. But in context, that would be so long as they're not forbidden by the laws of physics and also that they're interesting.

So I think I couldn't find this example, but I swear somewhere I found an example from Deutsch where he said the problem of how many hairs are on Caesar's head when he led this campaign may technically be insoluble, but who cares, right? It's completely uninteresting. So I guess I would have seen it at the time as there's two caveats there.

Am I wrong to think of it that way? Or is that an appropriate way to understand the full nuanced version of this statement?

[00:44:56]  Daniel: I think that makes sense to me, Bruce. That's an obvious horizon to our knowledge that we could never solve. We're never going to find an answer to that.

There's no way we could infer the number of hairs on Caesar's head.

[00:45:13]  Peter: Well, unless we simulate the entire universe in a quantum computer, right? Like a Frank Tipler kind of a thing or something. I mean, it might be possible.

[00:45:24]  Daniel: You know, let's put it this way. Maybe the way to think of it is that you have a context of knowledge, which is what it is, and you should always work to expand that context of knowledge, and you will find that some problems that you think are insoluble today, when you integrate some new facts about the world, you might come back to those problems and see them through entirely different contexts, different eyes, you might find that that problem is soluble. But if Deutsch is, you know, when you read his articles about the principle of optimism, I think the important thing to bear in mind is the full context of his writings.

It's not just these simple phrases divorced from the rest of the context, right? He is basically saying, you know, this progress is endless. And it's directly connected to human life.

It's not divorced from that. It's not focused on knowledge, which is just knowledge for its own sake. It's about acquiring knowledge to make things better for us.

[00:46:40]  Daniel: And so if you come across something that doesn't seem like it would even give you additional explanatory power or be valuable to you, you might want to use that in terms of guiding what you do find interesting. He's basically saying, I think, in essence, that if you come across a problem that is also seemingly unsolvable to you, or maybe he thinks it's unsolvable because of a law of physics, maybe he's saying that there's an element of this which shouldn't be interesting. I don't know.

Or maybe it's not going to be as interesting to a rational pursuit of other knowledge or other things that you could be interested in. But I do agree with him that what Sam said is that the point is the process itself is never going to end. You're always going to continue to find new things to continue to integrate into your context of knowledge.

You don't know where that's going to lead you. It's just never ending.

[00:47:43]  Bruce: So let me use an analogy here. Let's say that there's a problem that you can't solve, that you could solve if you could travel faster than the speed of light. Well, you can't travel faster than the speed of light, at least not according to our best current theories.

So I guess I did not understand the idea of problems are soluble to include something like I want to travel faster than the speed of light because that is in fact forbidden by the laws of physics. One might look at undecidability in the same way, in the sense that computational theory is an extension of physics. It's what the laws of physics allow you to compute.

Yes, it would be interesting if you could solve it. That would probably be very, very, very interesting if you could solve it. But it is in fact forbidden by the laws of physics, at least by our current understanding of the laws of physics.

I think that's how I probably would have tried to answer Brett if he had been interviewing me and asked me that question.

[00:48:41]  Daniel: Well, and it's also wishing against reality.

[00:48:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:48:44]  Daniel: Right? Because there's nothing rational about trying to leap beyond your context of knowledge and speculate on things that you can't know, or at least if your context of knowledge leads you to believe you couldn't know it, it's no longer science. It's becoming science fiction or fantasy, which is fine if we know that that's what we're doing.

And that could be interesting, but it's still not a soluble problem. So I don't know if that contradicts what Deutsch is saying about soluble problems being interesting, but maybe that interest itself has to be placed into a context.

[00:49:26]  Vaden: I just want to add one thing, which is that I think one of the strongest ways you can solve a problem is to end up with an impossibility result saying the problem is intrinsically not solvable. So for example, if my problem is I want to figure out how to make the square root of two a rational number, and I beat my head against a wall for 40 years trying to figure it out, and then someone shows that it actually can't be done. Well, that's a solution to the problem, right?

It's not a contradiction in what Deutsch is saying, that all problems are solvable, because he's not saying that anything you set your mind to, you will eventually do. The solution to the problem of how do you make the square root of two a rational number is that it can't be done. And this is, it seems to me, what both Popper and Deutsch are building upon with their claim that laws of physics are prohibitions, right?

They state what can't be done. So very often the solution to a problem will be a conclusive statement saying that for some reason or another it can't be solved. But that's a solution.

That's not a contradiction. That's a solution.

[00:50:31]  Micah: It seems to me that if we take that as the case, that learning that something is impossible then is a resolution to it, that it implies something like that thinking it was a problem in the first place has some kind of error built into it, has some kind of misconception. The desire for a certain mathematical fact to be true is flawed, maybe in an ethical way even. The desire to travel faster than the speed of light is flawed in some way.

It's not clear to me what that way is, but it raises the concern, which I think was voiced earlier, that some of what this principle of optimism is doing is actually rhetorical, and it carries a rhetorical weight that is maybe reaching beyond the actual kind of statements it's making about reality.

[00:51:42]  Bruce: Any final comments before I move on to my next question?

[00:51:45]  Vaden: One final comment, which is that I think it is irrational to pursue something which we now know is impossible, but I don't think it's irrational to pursue something before we know it's impossible. So trying to go faster than the speed of light before Einstein came around is, I think, a totally reasonable endeavor. It only becomes unreasonable after Einstein and after we know it can't be done.

So I just want to make a distinction between pursuing, say, a method by which we come up with a rational representation of the square root of 2. I think that's a totally reasonable thing to pursue when we don't have an impossibility result, but only after we have that impossibility result that it becomes, I think, irrational.

[00:52:23]  Hervé: And then maybe we could think, just to add final thought, like the principle of optimism and this problem with insoluble problems, we could think of a problem that has no possible answer, and that would be the reason why we're entirely wiped out. That would be maybe a reason to doubt the principle of optimism.

[00:52:51]  Bruce: Oh, interesting answer. Okay, I'm going to come back to that. That's a very interesting answer.

So many of you mentioned the interview of Sam Harris, where Sam Harris interviewed David Deutsch. So I'm going to take one of the criticisms that he raised, and then I'm going to try to steelman it. I feel like there's a legitimate hidden criticism here that maybe was used with examples that came across kind of cheesy, pun intended.

So first of all, in Chapter 3, Deutsch says, it is inevitable we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive and thrive, [by?] solving each problem as it comes up. And since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier.

So Sam Harris, kind of working from that idea, he says, as best as I can quote him, I'm trying to type quick as I'm listening to an audio, knowledge confers power without limit. This is Sam summarizing Deutsch's view, or is limited only by the laws of nature. And then he goes on to say anything that's not limited by the laws of nature is achievable with knowledge.

[00:54:03]  Bruce: And Deutsch says, yes, I call that the momentous dichotomy. So then Sam asks, how isn't this just a clever tautology similar to the ontological argument for the existence of God? And they actually discussed that for a little while.

But let me try to explain how I understand Sam's criticism here. He says, why might certain transformations of the material world be unachievable even in the presence of a complete knowledge? Merely by the contingency of technology or other parochial things, where you are, your geography, things like that.

We don't just have the necessary... Maybe we just don't have the necessary tools and everything on an island. He gives the example of someone with an appendicitis and you know how to give them an appendectomy, but it just so happens on an island where everything on the island has the consistency of soft cheese.

That was why I used my pun. Under these circumstances, even though you have the knowledge how to save the person, you're not going to, and the person is going to die. So he says, why mightn't every space we occupy not introduce a gap of that kind?

[00:55:14]  Bruce: And then he goes on to say, I'm still trying to just steelman Sam's position, the fishiness I was detecting is more a matter of emphasis. We could have a complete understanding of nature, yet contingent facts would preclude us to do anything with that knowledge. But that contingent fact then therefore just becomes one of the laws of nature.

So you might say, well, the reason why we couldn't save the guy with the appendectomy is because we didn't have the knowledge how to transform the atoms on the island into metal tools. Deutsch actually raises that or hints at that as part of his response. So it was in fact a limit of the laws of nature after all.

But isn't that just then become a circular argument or you're smuggling in something that really just makes this similar to the ontological argument? So Sam's point seems to be that there may be no difference than simply saying this, than simply saying all problems that aren't soluble are in some sense a limit of the laws of physics by tautology. So thoughts on that.

[00:56:26]  Bruce: Tell me what you think about Sam's criticism here as best as I can try to [steelman?] it. And so likewise, when Deutsch says inherently insoluble problems are inherently uninteresting, I can see how that might be true, but it might be thought of as a tautology. In fact, Mark [surname unclear] actually argued this or brought this up to me once.

You might say, look, it's the very fact that it's unsoluble that makes it uninteresting. But then this is just a tautology. Then all you're saying is, well, yeah, I mean, of course, if the problem is insoluble, it's in some sense uninteresting.

But that no longer, that statement no longer has content. I think Sam's arguing that these statements, could they be seen as just tautologies that don't have any actual content? Okay, there we go.

That's my setup.

[00:57:13]  Daniel: I have one critique that comes to mind. If you're saying anything of content that refers to reality, everything you say is tautological. Can anybody think of a piece of knowledge that is not tautological, like if I say that a triangle has three sides and that the internal angles add up to 180 degrees?

That's a tautology. Why is that a problem?

[00:57:42]  Bruce: I see what you're saying, but I don't think I would normally have called that a tautology. Usually when I'm using something of being a tautology, what I mean is I'm just defining it that way from the beginning. There's no particular reasoning behind it.

This is just the way I happen to be defining my terms.

[00:57:58]  Daniel: Well, I see what you're saying, but we know that Deutsch has his reasons for coming to that. It's a principle that he's derived from a host of observations and experience to say that. I can only say more from my point of view as an objectivist that there's something that we believe, or I would assume you'd have to believe if you were an objectivist, that all of the things that we produce that are valuable to human life are produced ultimately by human reason.

They're a product of knowledge. That's another way of saying, or a different aspect of what Deutsch is saying, I think. The problems are soluble.

Well, they're soluble by acquiring more knowledge. If you live on an island of cheese and you wanted to solve a certain problem that for some reason being on that island prohibits you from doing, it doesn't disprove the general principle which is derived from the full richness of reality. It's not a thought experiment that David Deutsch has set up in isolation from his total context of knowledge.

We don't live on islands of cheese. The thought experiment there I don't think disproves the principle which is that if he had to acquire some means of surviving on that island, he's only going to have one way of doing it which is through his reason. There's no other means available to them.

[00:59:44]  Bruce: Maybe I was a little bit sloppy how I tried to set that up. To be honest, it's a little hard to steelman Sam's argument.

[00:59:52]  Daniel: Sam's not doing you a favor there.

[00:59:56]  Bruce: I feel like there's a legitimate criticism here, but Sam... I might even be reading in things that Sam didn't even intend. I'm taking his words and then an idea is jumping into my head and maybe that's not even what Sam intended.

But I think what I understood Sam is getting at, if I were to get at the core of his criticism, it would be something like this. You're going to have problems that are insoluble. And it won't...

Yes, there is some sense in which if you had the right knowledge, it would be soluble. So using the example of the appendectomy, if you had a machine that allowed you to transform the atoms of the island into the necessary tools, you would then be able to solve the problem. So there's a certain sense in which the laws of physics don't ban you solving this problem in that if you had certain knowledge, you could solve the problem.

You just don't happen to have that knowledge. But I think what Sam's getting at is... And Deutsch almost really agrees with him on this, that the very fact that you're in that situation, you're not going to have the knowledge, right?

The knowledge could exist at some future point, but you're not discovering it before this guy's dying. Now, that's actually a fact of the laws of nature, right? It's not...

[01:01:21]  Bruce: There's a certain sense in which the laws of physics are saying this guy is now dead, and that is an insoluble problem now because the laws of physics are declaring it so. Granted, in a different circumstance, with different knowledge, that would no longer be the case. So I think what Sam is getting at is there's a certain sense in which the very fact that the problem is insoluble automatically makes it something the laws of physics or the laws of nature deny you.

Therefore, what is the actual content of this theory, of this statement, I think, is what Sam is asking.

[01:01:54]  Hervé: Maybe we could ask Sam about this at some point because I'm thinking if the guy dies, but if helping him is not a contradiction with the laws of physics, there exists a world in which the guy doesn't die.

[01:02:14]  Sam: That could be the case, but then that wouldn't necessarily solve the problem because that's always true. So it would always be true that some extremely unlikely event will of necessity happen somewhere in the Multiverse and it saves you, but that is not the same thing as being able to save the person on the island. That being said, I mean, it's still true.

So Bruce, I'm not sure to what extent you agree with this, but it's still true that if you had the knowledge, you could save the person on the island.

[01:02:50]  Unidentified speaker: Totally.

[01:02:51]  Sam: And the knowledge includes knowledge of, for example, how to transform the atoms on the island and how to perform the surgery, et cetera.

[01:03:00]  Bruce: I don't see Sam disagreeing with that either, by the way. It seems to me like he's actually agreeing that that is the case.

[01:03:06]  Bill: It seems to me that a more general formulation of what Sam is saying is that Deutsch's formulation is implicitly assuming that the binding constraint is knowledge and not resources in attempting to solve any particular instance, some parochial problem. So one might look at the... If a supernova explodes and we have the knowledge of how to save life from a supernova, but we have neither the resources or time, which is itself a resource, to construct a solution, and that comes back to the laws of physics.

We have certain reaction rates in order to build whatever shield we're going to build and so forth, then we're going to lose. But that's... So in that case, it's the resources that are available within a given timeframe that constrain our ability to solve the problem.

I do think that Sam's example is pretty awful. I would simply take the guy's leg, break it off, and use his bone, which I'd snap in a spiral break in order to make a knife with which I'd cut out his appendix while, you know, tying off, clamping off his leg. Done.

[01:04:31]  Sam: If you're ingenious enough that you can actually solve this particular issue, I mean, you know, I wouldn't endorse that particular method.

[01:04:45]  Hervé: Why not break out of your own leg [unclear phrase], buddy?

[01:04:47]  Unidentified speaker: Well, maybe so.

[01:04:49]  Sam: Or maybe there's an animal and I can break its legs and then use their bones as tools for the surgery or something. Also, it comes to mind that before we solve the problem, we don't know whether it can be solved. So either we find, like in the case of the undecidability issue, a proof that we can't have an algorithm, for example, in the undecidability case, to solve the problem,

[01:05:20]  Unidentified speaker: or we just have a solution and then we know that there was a solution.

[01:05:26]  Sam: So there's also this aspect of if you preemptively have a theory that says that the problem isn't soluble, then it tends to be a very bad explanation. It tends to be a very generic explanation,

[01:05:40]  Unidentified speaker: which is almost certainly something you can just ignore because of that.

[01:05:47]  Unidentified speaker: So this example of the island is a little bit artificial in that sense.

[01:05:52]  Sam: Like we don't actually know the details of the island. We don't know what resources there are. I feel like Harris would keep making it so that the island is...

He would keep saying, maybe I can use an animal. He would say, oh, but there are no animals on this particular island. Right.

[01:06:10]  Bruce: He's definitely trying to find a thought experiment to make a point with.

[01:06:15]  Sam: Which is artificially constrained by him. He's kind of just like in these trolley problems where we ask questions about which lever should we pull the lever if we kill fewer people or whatever. There's always the assumption that we can't turn on whoever has set up the trolley problem and make sure that he never does that again, for example.

We're kind of in a very constrained world where we're taking, as a given, certain facts about the situation. But very often those things which you assume about the situation are unnecessarily constraining, and the real world isn't like that. For example, the real world isn't like this island.

There's no reason to assume that the kinds of things we want to solve in hospitals, the kinds of diseases that we want to eradicate, are constrained in the way that Harris wants this surgery on the island to be constrained.

[01:07:12]  Bruce: I'm not even sure there's an actual island in the world that has everything as the consistency of soft cheese, right? I mean, this is clearly going out of its way to be a thought experiment that uses an almost outrightly silly example.

[01:07:27]  Daniel: If you're trying to disprove a principle that's derived from reality as it is, and then assert that, well, if reality really wasn't like that, then would what you're saying be true? Well, you could do that endlessly.

[01:07:42]  Sam: Yeah, and in some sense, that's the content of the theory. It's like our world is not like Harris's example. So it could have been that the world was like Harris's example.

It logically could have been, but it's a bad explanation. And some of the content of the dichotomy resides there. It resides in the difference between this artificial world and the real world, with its complexity and with its attribute that it allows us to solve the things that we are interested in.

[01:08:16]  Micah: Yeah, I think the point about resources is actually significant. Deutsch makes a great effort to demonstrate that virtually anywhere in the universe, there are sufficient resources to do these sorts of things with maybe one possible exception in a supernova or something like this.

Even in the case of thinking you need particular materials and so forth, he addresses this by kind of redefining resources in terms of knowledge. So he talks about having wealth, which I think is correct, right? The amount of resources you have is a property of the knowledge you have about how to use what is available, basically.

But yeah, it does seem to be contingent on the kind of cosmos we find ourselves in. And so it's not a strictly logical statement. It actually is, in some sense, an observational statement about the universe.

[01:09:30]  Vaden: I just want to chime in. So I think I understand maybe the emotional undercurrent of Sam Harris' critique, which is something like, well, no matter what happens on the island, us Deutschians can just define the outcome as being either some law of physics, which says that you don't have enough resources at that particular time, or we just make our definition of knowledge so expansive as to explain whatever happens.

[01:10:01]  Bruce: I think that's exactly what he's saying.

[01:10:03]  Vaden: And that's what the ontological argument for the existence of God is trying to do. But the reason why I don't think that is a terribly valid critique, well, twofold. One is that I think in this artificial world that Sam has concocted, it is the case that the person just didn't have enough knowledge to solve the problem and then everybody presumably dies.

But I don't think the principle of optimism is terribly interesting in specific instances as much as it is interesting when you're dealing with entire classes of problems, like the problem of poverty or reducing war or something of that matter.

Because where I think the content of the principle of optimism lies is that it basically gives us a stopping criterion. It says, work on this problem until either you solve it or you learn that it can't be solved. But until you reach one of these two states, there's still discoveries to be made.

[01:11:04]  Vaden: And furthermore, if I was on this island and I had a ruptured appendix, I would hope that the person who's trying to save me has the principle of optimism just running in their head constantly, right? Because that's the person who's going to tirelessly keep trying to figure out new and interesting ways to save my life. And so that's why I don't think it is a tautology, because I think a tautology is something where by definition, you can't derive any interesting conclusions from it.

So A equals A is a tautology because you gain nothing from that statement is empty. But all triangles have angles which sum to 180 degrees is not a tautology, because one, it wasn't obvious before we discovered that fact that that fact was in fact true. And two, it leads to interesting questions like under what conditions is that not the case.

So when you move from Euclidean geometry to non Euclidean geometry, all of a sudden that breaks. So the statement that all angles in a triangle sum to 180 leads to more interesting questions. Similarly, the statement that all problems are soluble unless you meet the law of physics also leads to actionable, interesting conclusions.

[01:12:19]  Vaden: For example, maybe I just cut off this guy's leg and use his bone as a knife. Well, that could actually work. And that's probably something which wouldn't have occurred to somebody who doesn't have the principle of optimism running in their head as they're trying to save this person's life.

So for those reasons, first, I think that it's most interesting when you apply it to universal problems, like problems that aren't tied to a specific scenario, but hold more universally. And two, it leads to different actions. Someone who's thinking about this will act differently in the world.

And that's why it has so much force.

[01:12:53]  Bruce: OK, thank you. That was actually a really good answer that I think leads into my next question. Also, Sam bringing up, you know, the world isn't like this.

So first of all, when I heard this interview, the thought that actually leapt into my mind at the time was that the idea of problems, all problems are soluble. So first of all, like I said, I understood that as having certain caveats, unless the laws of physics forbid it. And there are certain uninteresting problems that wouldn't be soluble, but they would be uninteresting.

So I wouldn't care anyhow. But I think I also understood that concept and the principle of optimism as applying to the societal level, not necessarily to individuals. Now, to what Vaden just said, I would want an individual to have that in their head, that all problems are soluble.

I would want them to not give up on trying to solve problems. I think there's a great deal of benefit of believing all problems are soluble even if you're trying to maybe falsely apply it to individuals. But it does seem like even in context, when Deutsch describes this in his books, he doesn't seem to be applying it to individuals.

[01:14:08]  Bruce: He seems to be talking about how could our society overcome its problems as they develop. Now, maybe I'm out of the night [unclear phrase] there. Maybe I was wrong to think of it that way, and I actually would love to get people's feedback on that, but I think that's how I would have answered Sam.

I would have said, Sam, you're trying to apply this to individuals, and there was never even an intent to do that in the first place. Yes, there are problems individuals have that might turn out to be insoluble within a certain time frame. People's thoughts on that.

Is this a possible answer to Sam, or am I wrong?

[01:14:44]  Vaden: I totally think that's an answer to Sam. Yeah, Deutsch is not saying that every problem will inevitably be solved in all circumstances, just that in principle, it's solvable unless there's some physical reason why it's not. But yeah, there's nothing that's like a naive optimism that says anything you set your mind to, you will inevitably do, because reality isn't set up to be nice to us.

It's just a stopping criterion that says, keep going until one of these two conditions are met.

[01:15:13]  Sam: Yeah, well, in a way, it does apply to individuals as well. I mean, it applies to problems, and individuals are the people who solve problems. I mean, at the end of the day, if you say there's some kind of societal progress, then you can point to the person who solves the problem.

[01:15:31]  Unidentified speaker: But the way in which it's phrased doesn't really refer to people, it just refers to the problems.

[01:15:36]  Unidentified speaker: It just refers to things independent of the specific individuals that live today, for example.

[01:15:43]  Unidentified speaker: It refers to knowledge and the problems it can solve.

[01:15:51]  Sam: In a sense, people are kind of abstracted away. We are the beings that solve the problems, but the fact of the matter is that there are problems and that knowledge would solve the problem.

[01:16:02]  Peter: It seems like we're talking a lot about the principle of optimism as a sort of a theoretical thing, but Deutsch seems to also advocate optimism as really an attitude towards life. At least that's what I get. I'm pretty sure he's not just talking about a sunny disposition in a very superficial way, but he is talking about a view of humans and our relationship to this world.

How do others see this relationship between the theory that problems are soluble and human life, I guess?

[01:16:48]  Bill: I think what Vaden just said is excellent and very pithy, which is that the principle of optimism is really a stopping criterion. I think another way to recast that that would make it seem more precise is to think of it not at the epistemological level, but at the methodological level. It's saying, continue trying, as Vaden said, continue trying to solve a problem until you find out that either you can't solve it or you have a solution in hand, or maybe you've discovered that there's an adjacent problem, which is the problem that you've clarified your position and now you want to solve a different problem.

So all those possibilities are present, but I find this a lot in philosophy. It's part of the problem I have with postmodern critiques, for example, is that they're occurring at epistemological level when really they should be occurring at a methodological level. And that was something that Popper clarified over and over and over again, seemingly to no avail amongst mainstream philosophers.

[01:17:59]  Daniel: I'm just curious if this reminds you guys, is this another way of recasting it? Does anybody know the serenity prayer? God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

[01:18:18]  Unidentified speaker: I can see the connection.

[01:18:20]  Unidentified speaker: That rings true.

[01:18:23]  Micah: I think Deutsch has actually referenced that. I couldn't point to it, but I think so, which implies a certain... Yeah, it's not just a statement about the world.

It's sort of a statement about how we should orient ourselves to the world. And that's the kind of... to the point Peter was bringing up, the idea of this is supposed to be an attitude about how you approach life, something like this.

I think that is implied. I was looking through Deutsch's chapter on optimism and beginning of infinity, and he uses a number of times he used the word expectation, which seems to be adding something to this idea about optimism. So for example, he talks about the Kennedy's moon landing mission, and he says something about the obstacles there.

None of that prevented rational people from forming the expectation that the mission could succeed. He's kind of hedging it, but it seems like he feels like expectation is actually something key here. There's a sort of load-bearing attitude in our expectation about the problems that we're actually tackling.

So I like the idea of the methodological and so forth, but I feel like he actually is implying something about an attitude towards the world that goes beyond those things.

[01:19:55]  Bruce: By the way, just when I mentioned my possible solution to Sam that it applies to societies, let me actually give a quote from David Deutsch that is why I thought that. From page 193 of Beginning of Infinity, he says, But if progress ever depended on violating a law of physics, the problems are soluble, this phrase, the problems are soluble would be false. I took that as not referring to individuals, but not my personal problems, but the problems that we as a society as a whole are facing because it's about progress, not about me trying to solve my personal individual problem necessarily.

[01:20:38]  Unidentified speaker: But the laws of physics also don't refer necessarily to you.

[01:20:44]  Unidentified speaker: It doesn't say that we can't record this podcast.

[01:20:48]  Unidentified speaker: There's no law of physics stating that today at 7:45 p.m.

[01:20:56]  Sam: it will be impossible to record this podcast, just as a law of physics. So in that sense, you again get the individual ability to solve problems back, just because there's no good explanation for why, at least generically, why that should be the case.

[01:21:15]  Bruce: Yes. No, I would agree. Good point.

Okay, let me talk about just... Lee Cronin has something he made called Assembly Theory. And I don't see his Assembly Theory as in any way at odds with Deutsch's theories.

And if somebody does think it is, bring that up. But at least in my very limited knowledge of Assembly Theory, what I have seen seems like it actually ties quite well into Deutsch's theories. Now, as I understand Assembly Theory, and I may not understand it right, it seems to say that knowledge and complexity can be thought of as a kind of search process.

There's a fabulously large number of possible configurations, I think he uses for atoms, I think he uses that it's 10 to the 23rd number of universes worth, and most of them are not useful. So to find the useful ones requires a search through this assembly space, using an evolutionary search, basically. I've made a similar argument in my podcast in the past.

[01:22:20]  Bruce: So what he really says then, and this is why he emphasizes time so much, is by the way, why Sadia likes what he says so much, because she emphasizes the mystery of time quite a bit, is that basically is that one of the laws of physics, one of the limits the laws of physics place on us, is that it takes a minimum amount of time to reach certain places in assembly space, basically reach a certain piece of knowledge. You have to know about Einstein's physics before certain types of problems can be solved, things like that. Again, this is my understanding.

If somebody understands assembly theory differently than me, speak up. This is just what I came away with from the minimal amount of listening to him. The path to that knowledge may be winding and indirect.

Kenneth O. Stanley talks about this in terms of novelty search. But the knowledge may exist out there.

You may be able to reach it, but physics may place a time limit on you. That's something that I feel like seems like is one of the emphasis that Lee Cronin brings up quite a bit. Let me use this.

[01:23:30]  Bruce: Sam made the point about Sam Harris's example being unrealistic, and the universe isn't that way. But let me try to now give a more realistic example, since I agree Sam's example isn't the best. Sam Harris's example isn't the best.

There's two Sams that I'm talking about here. Imagine something like this. A piece of the sun kicks itself out.

It's hurtling towards Earth, and it's going to destroy all life on Earth. That would be an interesting and insoluble problem. And the reason why is not because it's insoluble ultimately.

Like, if we had the right knowledge, that would be a soluble problem. But because we don't currently have the knowledge, there's just no physical way, it would literally violate the laws of physics, to find that knowledge within the space required for the two hours for this piece of the Sun to roast the Earth and kill everybody. So this would be then a more realistic example.

And if you really think about this in terms of many worlds, this is something that does happen, right? I mean, like, there's some version of us that started this podcast and part way through we received an alert that we're all going to die because the Sun just kicked a piece of itself at us. And there just isn't time to actually resolve the problem.

[01:24:54]  Bruce: Maybe comment on this. And maybe we can start with Sam, because this is a more maybe realistic version. Well, maybe it's not.

If it's not, Sam Kuypers, as the physicists tell me. But this seems like it would be a more realistic version of Sam Harris' criticism.

[01:25:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, so that we can't solve the problem in time.

[01:25:15]  Unidentified speaker: I suppose it could happen.

[01:25:16]  Sam: I mean, it could also say more improbable things, which, as I said previously, would also have to be true, such as all the air molecules in the room collide with one another and [spontaneously?] combust, and we can't finish the podcast either.

That is very unlikely, but must happen somewhere in the multiverse, I'm sorry to say. Yeah, somehow that doesn't really seem like an issue to me.

[01:25:48]  Bruce: Okay, let me just point out that this doesn't actually go against... If we're nuancing the idea that all problems are soluble unless they're forbidden by the laws of physics, this isn't really breaking that rule. This isn't a counter example per se, but it does cause you to really sharply focus on what it means.

[01:26:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it is still true that you could solve the problem if you had the knowledge, for example.

[01:26:13]  Bruce: Yes, it is still true you could solve the problem if you had the knowledge, absolutely.

[01:26:18]  Daniel: I thought of another concrete example for what you're trying to do right now, Bruce, which is even less extraordinary. I mean, it's not just knowledge that we need, but we need capital, we need resources. Like if somebody was just trying to solve the problem of producing abundant and clean energy, the knowledge of building nuclear fission reactors in and of itself is insufficient without the knowledge of the engineers, the contractors, and it wouldn't be possible without the resources to build it.

We might think of resources in a sense of, well, of course we have the resources here on the planet, but the limiting factor to the resources is actually also it's knowledge based, it's reason based, it's our capacity to master nature because nature isn't giving us any resources apart from that which we can bring under our own control through our own effort, which is multiplied by our capacity to reason and to solve these problems. You might find that there are problems that seem to be insoluble given certain restraints, but I think the essence of the principle of optimism is to say that if they're solvable, they're going to be solved by reason. And as you said, it's not that your example doesn't present an issue for it, it's just a good way to outline and focus on what are the limitations.

[01:28:06]  Daniel: There's lots of potential limitations given certain time constraints, but the way past any of those constraints is more knowledge and there's no other way to do it.

[01:28:19]  Bruce: By the way, all this talk reminds me of Neville’s On the Beach, the book about the end of the world where we've set off a nuclear bomb and there's a nuclear fallout that's coming to Australia. I don't know if anybody has ever seen that movie or read the book. It's a famous book.

But they're setting up a potentially realistic scenario where it's literally impossible to save humanity and it follows the last group of humanity as they are waiting for the end, basically. A very scary book, very pessimistic book too.

[01:28:54]  Vaden: I wanted to chime in because I think we can actually make a stronger critique than you're making, Bruce, and that was what I was thinking about last night. You're kind of imagining a parochial situation where there's just not enough time or knowledge to solve it and we all die. But I think a worse thing that could happen is that we actually discover an evil law of physics.

A law of physics which says something like, I'll just make one up, obviously, who the hell knows if it's true or not, but something like all conscious life eventually has to go out. Or if that seems implausible, maybe take the heat death of the universe, which I know you've talked about on the podcast before, and I know that's potentially contentious science. But if we just assume that that's true, then I think so Deutsch has his momentous dichotomy and Parfit has his repugnant conclusion, and you could call it a calamitous explanation or something, where it's a law of physics which inevitably says we all have to die or suffer.

[01:29:58]  Vaden: I think in that circumstance, we would just have to bite the bullet here and say, yes, that is going to happen. But I think of this as kind of interesting because the flip side of the principle of optimism coin is that if we do discover such a law of physics, which is evil, then there is no room at all for optimism anymore. It's just radical pessimism, nihilism and acceptance.

Whereas if you had never heard of the principle of optimism and you discover such a law, then perhaps you could still have some sort of optimism in that circumstance. So I guess I'm curious to kind of do this worst case analysis with the panel and see what they think about the outcome where we discover a law of physics, which we wish we hadn't discovered.

[01:30:54]  Bruce: So I was actually going to raise heat death for exactly the purpose that you just did. So thank you for doing that for me. In fact, let me actually do a quote from David Deutsch related to that before people answer your question.

This is in Beginning of Infinity. Part of the quote will come from page 450 and part from 324. Is there a bound on the number of computational steps that a computer can execute during the lifetime of a universe?

If there is, then physics will also impose a bound on the amount of knowledge that can be created. Knowledge creation being a form of computation. If progress cannot continue indefinitely, bad philosophy will inevitably come again into ascendancy for it will be true.

So Deutsch, and then in that context, particularly the first quote, which was on page 450, he does bring up the fact that if heat death were true, then it would be wrong. The principle of optimism would be wrong.

[01:31:50]  Vaden: But would it be wrong? I think it wouldn't be wrong at all. It would be just acknowledging the other side of the coin, which is that if there's a law of physics, there's nothing you can do about it.

But that's baked into the principle of optimism, isn't it? So in the article that was circulated by Peter, Deutsch kind of conflates the two. So he says, what I call the principle of optimism is that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge.

And then two sentences later, he says, I've argued that there's no limitation other than the laws of nature on our ability to eliminate evils by creating knowledge. So yes, there's a distinction between the two, but he does kind of use them in conjunction with each other.

[01:32:32]  Hervé: Hold on. Yes, just because it just reminded me that Lee Cronin and his assembly theory, dancing around David Deutsch, reminded me of the podcast of Vaden and Ben about David Chapman rediscovering Popper slowly. That was for those who listened to the podcast about David Chapman, but just a mention of Cronin there.

But I wanted to say that I think I still see this principle of optimism as a moral principle more than anything. I see this as our duty to understand that nothing is forbidden if it's not forbidden by the laws of physics, our duty is to understand that we can scale our knowledge and the reach of our knowledge and that we need to do it as fast as possible, knowing that indeed we may be too slow and then we may get wiped out because we were too slow, but at least we did all we could to get there as fast as possible, but we failed.

But that's more like how I see it, really like a moral principle more than anything else.

[01:33:43]  Daniel: I do agree with Hervé that there's a huge ethical part of the theory, but I just wanted to comment on the idea that there could be, let's say, an evil law. Let's say that from a certain human perspective, the second law of thermodynamics is an evil law because we discover, well, it might lead to the heat death of the Universe or whatever. But is that evil?

Because if the Universe didn't work that way, I don't think that we would be here either. I don't see how we'd be getting our energy from the Sun. I mean, I don't even know if there would be Suns.

I'm not that knowledgeable about physics, but it seems to me that that same evil principle also makes our life and everything that we love and value possible.

[01:34:31]  Sam: It would be evil in the sense of there being a problem that couldn't be solved. So it would be something which, regardless of the amount of knowledge that we would have, we could not get rid of it. We could not get rid of the problem later.

[01:34:47]  Bruce: Vaden had commented it wouldn't necessarily violate the idea that all problems are soluble except for those denied by the laws of physics. He's right about that. But it would be a violation of the principle of optimism in terms of there is an evil that we can't get rid of.

[01:35:00]  Daniel: Is it evil if the same fact gave rise to our life as we know it? And will also be the cause of our, well, maybe not our death because we might be long gone, but say the universe's or conscious life or some such thing. So I'm just saying, to me, I just don't know if I see it that way.

To me, that's not positive enough.

[01:35:24]  Vaden: Yeah, I agree that the word evil might be strong. It's maybe important just to add that Deutsch essentially defines evil as anything that causes human suffering or reduces our possibility to flourish. And so under that definition, say a volcano would be evil, but under the more kind of common sense, like Hitler's evil definition, then a volcano perhaps wouldn't be.

But I think it does make sense to define evil in this context as just that which causes suffering or reduces possibilities of human flourishing, in which case the second law of thermodynamics, while it brought human flourishing into existence, would also be able to be described as evil in the sense that it would cause suffering after it's brought people into existence.

[01:36:06]  Bruce: It might be helpful here to make a distinction between the second law of thermodynamics and heat death. I know people tend to equate those, but heat death is a specific cosmology that makes assumptions that may or may not be true about the second law of thermodynamics. So, like, the omega point did not violate the second law of thermodynamics at all, but it also didn't have heat death.

So it's really heat death that would be the evil, not the second law of thermodynamics.

[01:36:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:36:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, and there's many other cosmologies that also don't have a heat death, like there is the cosmology of Barbour, which doesn't have a heat death, which is a completely relational cosmology.

[01:36:49]  Unidentified speaker: And Barbour’s theory, the only thing that would matter would be the ratios between different energies, like between work and heat, say.

[01:36:58]  Sam: So you could basically endlessly perform work. You could do useful tasks, even though entropy would be increasing as well.

[01:37:09]  Bruce: So his theory, he actually calls extropy.

[01:37:13]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, in his theory, he has something which...

[01:37:15]  Unidentified speaker: His basic argument is that if you think of the universe as a box, then you would get something like a heat death from the second law of thermodynamics just because the box is thermalizing.

[01:37:31]  Unidentified speaker: But the universe isn't a box, it's an open system.

[01:37:34]  Unidentified speaker: It's infinitely large and this changes the whole setting.

[01:37:40]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not intimately familiar with how the rest of the argument goes, but he makes a compelling case.

[01:37:49]  Bruce: All right. Any other questions or comments on that?

[01:37:53]  Vaden: Yeah, a question maybe for you, Bruce, because in the conversation where you talked about heat death, I may have been misreading you, but it sounded like if it was true, it would really bum you out. That was part of the impression.

[01:38:07]  Unidentified speaker: It would definitely bum me out.

[01:38:08]  Vaden: Because I don't find that at all.

And this might just be my new atheist training, that just the fact that the movie is going to end doesn't mean that I'm not enjoying the movie while I'm watching it. But it seems like...

[01:38:19]  Unidentified speaker: Can you say that at the end of the movie?

[01:38:20]  Vaden: Well, at the end of the movie, I may want it to go on. But just the fact that something is finite doesn't reduce the importance of the thing or the meaning I extract from the thing. And I think Hitch somewhere talks about the only thing worse than knowing that the party is going to go on after you leave is knowing that the party is never going to end and you have to stay forever.

And so I think there's negatives on both sides. But I'm just curious to know a bit, Bruce, why it would bum you out so much and if that is related at all to your views on the principle of optimism.

[01:39:00]  Bruce: Okay, so let me take the quote that I just quoted from David Deutsch. Is there a bound on the number of computational steps that a computer can execute during the lifetime of a universe? If there is, then physics will also impose a bound on the amount of knowledge that can be created.

Knowledge creation being a form of computation. And then the second quote, if progress cannot continue indefinitely, bad philosophy will inevitably come again into ascendancy, for it will be true. So that seems like both of those follow naturally from there being a bound on progress, which is what we're talking about if we're assuming that heat death cosmology is true.

So I'm taking this from the standpoint of it bums me out that there's literally a bound on progress. It's not just that my life is bounded because then I could use the argument that Vaden just used, but literally there is a bound on progress because knowledge creation does not go on to infinity. It stops at some point, which also means that there are in fact really interesting problems that are basically every interesting problem will become insoluble at some point.

You can solve them up to a point, but there is absolutely a limit to what you can actually solve because you're going to run out of computation. You're going to run out of knowledge growth. Progress must come to an end.

[01:40:23]  Bruce: It is like literally now declared by the laws of physics that progress must come to an end. It's really that thought that bums me out.

[01:40:31]  Sam: And also meaning that there's parts of the world that we will never understand as a consequence.

[01:40:35]  Bruce: Yes. So it's not explicable. The universe is for the most part inexplicable because you just can't grow the knowledge necessary.

[01:40:42]  Micah: Yeah, I just, Bruce, in the episode where you did talk about the omega point, you made an interesting comment about the role of suffering in this kind of situation, right? Where if we are doomed to the heat death, if knowledge creation is finite, it's not simply that our knowledge creation comes to an end. It's actually that everything we gain will be slowly and painfully lost.

So there is no, in this kind of a cosmology, there is no positive experience that is not met with a negative, that is not also increasing the amount of suffering. And I thought that was a really, I don't know if I quite stated that correctly, but I thought that was a really profound point.

[01:41:31]  Bruce: You did. And now here I'm making an extrapolation that you could argue with, right? So I was trying to hold to a more solid answer to Vaden's question.

So take it as, first of all, there's the statement that if heat death's true, then we know for sure that knowledge creation must come to an end and progress must come to an end. Then there's a second extrapolation that is a little more challengeable, which is that every good thing must now be inverted with something worse, right? Now you could challenge that.

You could say everybody commits suicide on a certain date or the big rip actually happens, and so you never actually reach the second half of the bad side. So I wasn't going to emphasize that second half. I think that one's a little more speculative.

But I think the first part is not speculative, heat death, if it's true. If we're starting with the assumption it's true, then it absolutely means knowledge creation comes to an end and progress becomes impossible at some point.

[01:42:30]  Vaden: I guess the at some point is doing a lot of work for me. Like if it's 13 billion years from now, I just have a tough time getting too animated about it, to be totally frank. But this might just be my parochial timescales that I'm dealing with.

[01:42:46]  Daniel: I think philosophically it's kind of irrelevant because we all are going to die. And it doesn't reduce our happiness in the here and now.

[01:42:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, exactly.

[01:42:58]  Micah: So as a transhumanist, I might probably disagree with that.

[01:43:02]  Sam: Yeah, it seems like a bad thing that we're going to die. [I’d prefer?] that not to be the case.

[01:43:08]  Daniel: The laws of physics that made your life possible are the same thing that are going to probably take you out at some point. I'm just saying that insofar as our ability, our capacity to deal with reality, if we discover something about reality that we dislike, I don't think it undercuts the basic premise that life is good, right? I mean, you're sad to lose it because life is good.

[01:43:35]  Sam: I was about to say, yeah, if it wasn't good, then it wouldn't be the problem. So a good thing has to end, that seems bad.

[01:43:42]  Hervé: Yeah, but there's life ending, but there's also other stuff ending, like love also ends. And the fact that it ends does not diminish, like you have a love story with someone, even if you're immortal, even if technology allows you to live forever. It may be that relationships also still end.

And I think you come back to that question of things ending, but still having value though they end.

[01:44:15]  Vaden: Yeah, and I want to tweak what Sam just said, because I don't think the claim is that good things must inevitably end. I think it's that if a good thing ends, that doesn't make it not a good thing. The fact that good things end isn't necessarily enough to make that good thing no longer a good thing.

[01:44:33]  Sam: Yeah, I think in the context of the heat, it's just that if everything eventually has to end, that seems horrible. If all life is doomed to end, and the growth of knowledge stops, then that's a bad thing. And also just on the issue of mortality, it's given that life is good, it is nice, it should be longer, and I don't see why it should ever be a finite length.

Given that we can keep extending it, given that there's no law of nature that a life can't continue on forever, it seems like a travesty that we have to die.

[01:45:13]  Vaden: I mean, I agree, I would prefer not to die, for sure.

[01:45:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:45:17]  Vaden: I'm not pro-mortality, for sure.

[01:45:19]  Sam: The way I think is that some people do disagree about this, so I wanted to be sure that that wasn't the argument.

[01:45:25]  Vaden: One thing I could see happening is if we grant everyone everlasting immortality, that people will still die, but it will always be by suicide. And so even there, I think that if you grant people immortality, you'd still have people choosing to end the good thing on their own volition. I wouldn't expect to see just an unlimited, infinite amount of people, but who knows?

[01:45:51]  Unidentified speaker: Of course, I'm just speculating.

[01:45:54]  Sam: Well, I mean, in that case, imagine someone living in the far future and they're immortal. It seems more likely that they would want to, say, freeze themselves in time, like maybe their computer program is living on some very hard to destroy hardware. In that case, it seems more likely that they would freeze themselves for some duration.

So whatever is bothering them in the present is resolved rather than killing themselves, which has a much more severe impact on utility.

[01:46:27]  Unidentified speaker: Fair point.

[01:46:27]  Unidentified speaker: Fair point.

[01:46:27]  Bruce: So Greg Egan wrote a book that I liked called Diaspora, where the final chapter of the book, you find out that the great ancient race, that basically they had finished living life, that they had reached the end where they had done everything they cared to do, and so therefore they had all terminated themselves at some point, not like all at once. So I thought that was an interesting ending to the book that kind of is what we're talking about. It was a fictional take on that.

Vaden's question to me was about my subjective state. Why does it bum me out? I actually think Sam's done a pretty good job of describing why it does.

Like, if heat death is true, I do think that's a pretty big bad thing. Okay, so the summary of principal optimism is all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Now, somebody challenged me on this.

I think it was Mark [surname unclear], but don't quote me on that, and my apologies to him if it wasn't him. The challenge was something like this, that sometimes individuals have positive economic payouts that benefit themselves at the expense of others. This is why greed and selfishness exist in the first place, because crime does in fact sometimes actually pay.

[01:47:43]  Bruce: This is why people are sometimes evil. You might even say evil has a sort of logic all to its own. Based on that, then, the challenge was, is it really the case that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge?

Aren't some evils in some legitimate sense caused by people behaving badly because it benefits them?

[01:48:05]  Sam: Well, we don't have the knowledge to make them behave differently.

[01:48:07]  Bruce: Okay, that seems like a fair answer.

[01:48:10]  Vaden: To that, I would add that that's what we said about the history of all mental health illnesses too, right? Until we figure out how to treat them. I totally agree with Sam that it's a question of neuroscience and pharmacological care and whatever future technology we have that improves upon the current tools we use.

[01:48:31]  Unidentified speaker: I actually don't agree with that.

[01:48:33]  Vaden: Oh, okay, nice. Please elaborate, especially if I mischaracterize your position.

[01:48:40]  Sam: I don't necessarily... I mean, it could be what you said. I don't necessarily have that in mind.

For example, it could be that we are able to make people behave more productively by changing economic incentives. That would be one way in which we could change behavior. Like, maybe the people who are now committing crimes would really prefer to set up businesses, but it's too hard for them specifically to set up a business because of red tape.

And we could have fewer criminals if there were less red tape. That's the kind of thing I had in mind when I said that we don't know how to change their behavior currently. But that's not to say I disagree necessarily with what you said.

That's not the thing I had in mind specifically.

[01:49:25]  Vaden: Totally. Yeah, fair point. I believe there's a role for improving economic incentives and also anti-psychotics, for example.

[01:49:35]  Bruce: Let me ask this question a little bit more straightforwardly, though. So the statement is all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Now, in this case, we can imagine that there are certain criminals that exist that are going to disappear as knowledge grows.

In fact, that seems like a very reasonable thing to assume in terms of economics. If nothing else, our knowledge will increase on how to catch criminals, and therefore there will be fewer criminals because the economic incentive eventually asymptotically goes to zero. Okay, but is that really the same as saying all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge?

[01:50:11]  Micah: So there's a way of analyzing it from the criminal's perspective, which I think Deutsch would say then the problem from the criminal perspective is that the criminal has insufficient ethical knowledge to understand that this action doesn't make sense.

[01:50:32]  Bruce: Does the action make sense? Let's assume that the reason why crime exists is because it actually does make sense, given that person's actual current knowledge state that they live in.

[01:50:44]  Micah: But Deutsch has made the claim that ethical principles actually impose severe constraints, so that if you were to behave unethically, that it actually imposes an epistemological consequence on you that is undesirable. And so he made the statement that if you were on a desert island, you will face, you know, you have resource constraints or whatever that you need to tackle. You need to understand the laws of nature so that you don't do something stupid in regard to the laws of nature.

You also need to understand ethical laws because you need to understand not to do something unethical. So he's, which I think is an interesting statement. I would love for him to explain more.

But he seems to feel that that there are actually ethical consequences that are immediate. That someone even in the absence of other people would actually experience.

[01:51:51]  Hervé: And we say that he strongly believes from what I understand that ethics and such also beauty are built in. They are objective and they're emergent properties of the laws of physics.

[01:52:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think that's correct.

[01:52:12]  Hervé: So from there, it makes sense. I mean, what he says about evils being caused by a lack of knowledge, because if knowledge were absolutely all discovered, then we can assume that most ethics would have emerged or everything would have emerged and everything would be more, would be less criminal or less evil or maybe not in absolute terms, but since he strongly believes in that built-in nature of beauty, built-in nature of ethics, I think it makes sense.

[01:52:52]  Bruce: All right, Peter, go ahead and ask your questions.

[01:52:54]  Peter: Okay, actually, I'm just going to combine two of my questions into one here because I think they're kind of interrelated. First, it seems like Deutsch's take on optimism is quite interwoven with his criticism of the precautionary principle, which I agree with, but then I also have found in life quite good to try to mitigate risk and to basically live a cautious life. What is the difference between being cautious and following the precautionary principle?

And two, my other kind of I think interrelated question, Deutsch's ideas on optimism also seem to be related to the idea that good guys will most likely create knowledge faster than the bad guys. How do we know that's true? I mean, I think it probably is, but it seems like something at least a lot of people have doubts on.

[01:54:03]  Unidentified speaker: And how would you explain that to someone?

[01:54:06]  Vaden: Yeah, well, I think the question about being cautious and how that compares to the precautionary principle is an interesting one. And to me, the big distinction is that the precautionary principle basically encourages people not to try things because the outcomes could be bad, so it's best not to try it in the first place. And that's very different than trying something cautiously, right?

Or trying something knowing full well that what you're about to do may have unintended consequences which you haven't foreseen, and therefore it's best to make your change, but do it, dare I say, incrementally. And so I see the significant difference between the precautionary principle and cautiousness is like the... Was it Peter Thiel's zero to one?

The big jump is whether or not you try in the first place, and then once you've made that step, then it's, I think, very appropriate to try things cautiously, depending, of course, on what it is you're trying and what the potential negative outcomes could be.

[01:55:12]  Bill: Deutsch has repeatedly made the point, I think most recently in the AI Risk Talk, that we know that stasis is bad. If we stay in the constant state, eventually some unforeseen risk is going to get us. So he's always made the point that we need to race ahead and acquire as much knowledge and as much wealth in terms of wealth being the ability to enact transforms and having the resources to do that as quickly as possible.

One of his go-to examples is the case of uranium. In 1900, uranium was just a metal that people didn't have very much use for. Then it became an existential risk.

Then we decided to limit our use of it. Now CO2 is the existential risk, and we really should be using our uranium to mitigate the CO2 risk. We don't know what we should not be doing.

What's on the table at the moment is research in AI, which seems an even more generic problem of banning the tire because someone might rob a bank in a car. There is always going to be this question with the precautionary principle of what to slow down or what to ban because things are going to come at us out of left field. So unless we have an explanation, a detailed explanation of why we should not do something, then we should assume that we should continue to grow our knowledge.

[01:56:57]  Bill: So a good example would be gain of function. So should we engage in gain of function? Well, it would be great to learn about how viruses work, but maybe we shouldn't be doing it at biosafety level two.

So if we know that we can't convince everyone to take adequate safety precautions, then we might have a moratorium on it. If we can move into a regime where people take adequate safety precautions, then the knowledge would be very good to acquire.

[01:57:29]  Bruce: I'm wondering how... That's really well stated. I'm really curious what other people think of what he just said.

So when I have been discussing things online with other Deutschians, there's definitely a really strong stance against the precautionary principle, although it seems like we're sometimes schizophrenic over what we mean by that. Bill, the way he just described that, he is understanding it as it's actually okay to put a moratorium on things in some circumstances, just not forever. Do other people have a problem with that or is that something that most of you would agree with?

[01:58:09]  Hervé: I think as long as the brake that you put is a rational decision or at best as we know, it's a rational decision and not something that's completely irrational as it is most of the time, then we can afford to take it slow knowing that Deutsch very much insists on speed. So that's how I understand it.

[01:58:34]  Vaden: Yeah, I mean, I have no problem with that. Obviously, it depends on what it is we're saying we should put the moratorium on. But yeah, I don't know if like active research into improving chemical weapons would be a good thing, for example.

And I think you could easily view this as just a form of knowledge that certain areas of inquiry will more than likely lead to negative outcomes and therefore it makes sense to regulate them. Of course, this can go too far and I'm not advocating. We do this willy-nilly and I'm always much more in favor of open exploration and research, etc.

But I wouldn't want to be naively saying that every single thing that people choose to research should inevitably be allowed to proceed. I think it's easy to come up with examples where we want to pull the brakes. And so I see no problem with that.

And I also don't see that it is inconsistent with Deutsch's worldview. I think he would and I would just view that as a kind of institutional or cultural knowledge.

[01:59:44]  Peter: Okay. And how about the... Why are we so convinced that good guys are...

Wouldn't good guys be more likely to follow the precautionary principle than bad guys?

[01:59:56]  Hervé: I’m always tempted when he says that the good guys are faster and increase their knowledge faster than the bad guys. I always want to tie back to the fun criterion.

In a way, and because those guys, those bad guys, I think the way he describes them, sometimes are people who are not in alignment with others. They're not sufficiently aligned to get good collaboration, access to resources, access to whatever. So it's a bit like when he describes the fun criterion of being a state in which your explicit and explicit [possibly “inexplicit”] knowledge are in alignment, that no idea is thwarting another, your kind of state of flow.

It's easy from there to maybe think, which is, I don't know, it's not a very solid theory, I think, but it's to think that bad guys may suffer from various alignment problems that may be a handicap. Thank you.

[02:00:57]  Micah: Yeah, I think that's the implicit idea. I was thinking about, Deutsch is toyed with the idea that ethics is about shutting down the growth of knowledge or rather the inverse, that what is unethical is that which inhibits the growth of knowledge. And Tipler had a similar idea, which was something like, evil is the violent suppression of ideas rather than to address them on the idea level, something like that.

And so there is, I think, this concept that if you are an evil person, then you are inevitably at some level involved in suppressing ideas, and so you are going to be suppressing the growth of knowledge. An example of that might be that criminals need, if they want to coordinate, they need to actually have trust among their criminal organization. And yet they are going to be acting in an untrustworthy way towards the larger society.

And so there has to be this disparity between the kinds of ways they encourage ethical behavior internally versus the kinds of ways they encourage ethical, unethical behavior externally. Something like this. And that disparity requires some kind of authoritarianism at some level, some kind of way of shutting down the spread of, for example, empathy between the people internally, internal to your criminal organization and the people you're robbing, something like that.

[02:02:49]  Micah: So you've got to impede people's ability to grow in knowledge and particularly ethical knowledge. And that is ultimately going to have knock-on consequences for your epistemology as a whole. I think that's the idea there.

[02:03:04]  Vaden: I have a question for the panel if people aren't running out of steam.

[02:03:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, please.

[02:03:10]  Vaden: So we've been talking a lot about optimism, but I'd love to talk about its ugly stepsisters, pessimism and cynicism a little bit. And in particular, I'm curious to know what people's thoughts are in terms of what is the difference between pessimism and cynicism. And the second question, and one that I'm maybe slightly even more interested in is, what's the relationship between cynicism and skepticism?

Because obviously skepticism is a good thing. Cynicism is a bad thing, but they seem quite related. And I think there's a methodological component of this as well, in the sense that if I'm talking or debating or conversing with somebody and they're asking all sorts of interesting skeptical questions, it's a lot of fun.

But then if the conversation proceeds a little bit and then you realize that you're actually talking to just a cynic who is going to hate on any answer you give and it doesn't really even matter what you say because they'll inevitably find something wrong with it. That's the point where I typically just step away from the conversation, but it's hard to tell at first. I'm curious what people's either opinions are from a philosophical perspective or just a personal perspective, telling the difference between cynicism and skepticism and how these relates to pessimism and optimism overall.

[02:04:34]  Bill: I think, I don't really like the word skepticism because the connotation I think has evolved from more neutral to negative more in line with cynicism. I think what's important is to have a critical stance. We want people who have a critical stance, but that means you're engaged in a process and in a dialogue and a discussion, whereas skepticism or cynicism is basically standing on the sidelines and taking pot shots or something.

And I'm reminded of Deutsch's paper on experimental tests, which highlights the point that you can throw tomatoes at someone's theory, but if you don't show up with an alternative explanation, it's all you're doing. So criticisms are helpful and can accumulate and lead us to have a list of new problems, but it's much less interesting and productive than someone showing up with an alternative that might lead to a clarification or a synthesis.

[02:05:58]  Hervé: Yes, to me, the difference between cynicism and optimism is that optimism can be seen as a moral duty more than anything else, not really like a perception or a judgment call on what the situation is, but as a moral duty, as a way to behave yourself in the world, really. And cynicism is, for me, it's just a flatline renouncement. So that's about how I see this.

Cynicism is just a call to inaction, basically.

[02:06:35]  Vaden: Some people would regard skepticism as a moral duty as well. I'm thinking particularly of Michael Shermer in Skeptic Magazine, and I had my year and a half skeptic phase where I was quite critical of alternative medicines and stuff.

[02:06:49]  Hervé: Skepticism, yes, but cynicism, no.

[02:06:52]  Vaden: Yeah, nice.

[02:06:53]  Bruce: So cynicism, to me, this is kind of an epistemological difference. So Vaden, you gave the example of the cynic, how they're not really fun to talk to, whereas the skeptic might be, even though they might on the surface initially appear to be no different. So it comes down to, is the person actually trying to make progress, solve problems?

Are they trying to understand? Are they trying to understand, or do they already have their mind made up about a certain theory? In this case with the cynic, maybe the theory is that the whole world sucks and there's just no way to get around that fact or something along those lines.

Once you sort of detect that the person is not really that interested in the overall critical discussion, they just want to be critical because of whatever their underlying theory is that makes them want to be that way. I think that's the point where you start to realize, this isn't that interesting.

[02:07:58]  Vaden: Totally, just to add to that, the answer that I kind of drew it for myself [unclear phrase] that I'm not totally sold on is that both cynicism and skepticism, they're both critical, but the cynic is deploying criticism as a means of destruction, to destroy, to unbuild, to tear down. Whereas the skeptic is using criticism as a tool of construction, to try to poke holes, not to destroy the theory, but to test its weak spots and hopefully try to improve it, exactly. And it's like, you can see this distinction manifest itself so clearly in the difference between critical rationalism and critical studies.

Completely different means of deploying criticism where the latter is just about hating on every philosophy that's not its own, but I wouldn't characterize critical rationalism that way. But yeah, they're both deploying criticism just for different means and different ends.

[02:08:55]  Peter: Well, here's a related question. Why is pessimism and cynicism so attractive to people? At least where I live, it seems like about 95% of the people I know think the world is gonna end and we're not any better off than our ancestors and progress is an illusion, yada yada.

Like even scientists, you think a scientist would be the most likely to be optimistic. They're all about solving problems but oftentimes they're the least optimistic. They think that cynicism and pessimism are basically supported by science.

At least that perception is out there. And why is this? Why is it so attractive?

[02:09:48]  Hervé: To me, it takes a lot of effort to be an optimist. A lot of effort, a lot of learning, a lot of thinking. And I think being a pessimist is really like the lazy way.

[02:10:01]  Vaden: Oh, yeah, I was gonna say, my answer might irk some people in the audience. I don't know, but I think evolutionary psychology gives a bit of a lens into this in the sense that the person who is preparing for the worst all the time, that obviously confers evolutionary benefit. It's obvious how that would.

But the optimist, it's less clear. And so it does make sense that evolution would inculcate into us a pessimistic bent, which is overcomable, but it's difficult. I think it's such a fascinating problem why pessimism and cynicism is kind of the default, and it's hard to be optimistic.

Like it could have been the case that optimism was the default and it's hard to be pessimistic, but I think for evolutionary reasons it wouldn't have conferred as much survival benefit. So that's, I know that evolutionary psychology isn't a huge area of interest for very many Deutschians or they think it's flat out wrong, but I do think it offers a lens into that question.

[02:11:00]  Bruce: So I think that Vaden's answer is an answer at a certain level of explanation, that one that's talking about evolution, but there's got to be a more proximate explanation, right? As to even if I'm accepting, which by the way, Vaden, I do, but even if I'm accepting evolutionary psychology in a case like this, why is it at an individual level people choose to be pessimistic? Even if it's their genes or evolution that primed them for that, they still have their own reasons.

[02:11:35]  Vaden: But do you think they're choosing? I don't think it's a choice. I think it's an outlook that they don't even realize they have an alternative outlook available to them.

[02:11:43]  Bruce: So I think the word choice, you can make it disappear depending on how you wanna define it. Even if you don't wanna define it as a choice, there's something appealing about it that leads them there. And one of the things that I've wondered about is it does seem like it makes a really, pessimism makes a really easy meaning meme.

If you're looking at Greta Thunberg, is she getting something out of going around being a world-class pessimist? She absolutely is. And that was why in my episode on religion, I said, do you think she would take it as good news if somebody explained to her why we're not actually in danger of having the world end from climate change?

She wouldn't, right? There's some really very obvious positive benefits she's getting out of her life. And I'm not just talking about being famous or something like that, although that might be the case.

Even if you're a complete unknown, you get certain positive benefits emotionally inside over feeling like you are the hero that's trying to stop this great apocalypse from coming. And I think that's an easy, appealing way to find meaning in one's life.

[02:12:52]  Micah: So I think there's something both more proximate and kind of more pervasive happening, which is, if pessimism maybe is a response to sort of getting burned, like you try something and maybe it backfires, it not only fails, but actually like brings about worse consequences, then pessimism would be a kind of natural response and a sort of way of protecting yourself from getting hurt again, right? If you tried to climb up a hill and instead you fell down and broke a bone, well, now you're gonna be more pessimistic about your ability to climb hills and maybe you develop a strong pessimism about that. And I think this has happened to our society because going into the 20th century, we had a lot of philosophies of optimism and those philosophies kind of drove a lot of the catastrophes of the 20th century.

The World Wars and the Cold War and so forth seemed to be the consequences of optimism. So I think for a lot of intellectual people, a lot of people who've kind of reflected on that culturally, pessimism is the way that we avoid those kinds of disasters. And so I think from that kind of perspective, optimism may be a naive optimism, but a kind of optimism has a lot to answer for a lot of people.

I think that's where large portions of our society are at.

[02:14:46]  Unidentified speaker: Are you saying that that's reasonable or that that's just a description of where people are at?

[02:14:53]  Micah: I'm just saying that's a description. I think that's how it works in our culture to a large extent. I don't think it's reasonable, but I think the reason it's not reasonable is because we actually have to tackle at a deeper way what kinds of optimism makes sense.

Some of the optimism that we had going into the 20th century was an irrational form of optimism that did need to be rejected. We just need to disentangle those things.

[02:15:24]  Vaden: There are a lot of, say, optimism charlatans on offer. All of the self-help gurus and the various people that the Decoding the Gurus podcast takes down. To add to what Micah just said, you could imagine someone who is maybe pessimistic for a bit, then has a change of heart and reaches towards one of the many different forms of optimism on offer, and then finds it's rather vacuous and doesn't accomplish too much, and then back to the disparaging pessimism.

But not only that, but it might leave someone with the impression that all optimisms are equally vacuous. And so you just want to add that not all optimistic philosophies are equal. And so if they haven't discovered Deutschian optimism and just the robust approach of Deutsch and Popper, they may have found an optimism that doesn't offer nearly as much.

[02:16:24]  Sam: Yeah. On the other hand, to get back to the previous point that was made, the idea that it's somehow in one's self-interest to be more pessimistic because people can get something out of it. The opposite also seems to hold.

If you are a more optimistic kind of person, then that can also be a great benefit to you, for example, economically. I imagine that many people who founded companies were optimistic. So for me, that argument doesn't quite work.

Like there's something extra that's necessary there to explain the prevalence of pessimism. And I don't quite know what it is. It's a little bit mysterious to me.

To some extent, it has to do with the general anxiety people feel towards the Enlightenment. That still seems to be a widespread sentiment that people have. They wouldn't put it like that, but at the heart of it, there is some kind of resistance still to Enlightenment institutions and Enlightenment thinking.

[02:17:33]  Vaden: That's a really fascinating point. And it made me realize that there are the Greta Thunbergs out there for sure. Let's call them radical pessimists.

But then I think there's a lot of people for whom they'll see an article about how climate change is destroying the world or what have you, and they won't really read it. They won't internalize it too much, but they will maybe like it or reshare it a little bit. And it's almost just like unconscious pessimism, which in any one individual person you might not be able to detect, but you can detect it at a cultural or societal level based on what memes tend to go viral quite rapidly through a meme pool.

And that is a really deep and interesting question. Why do people have this unconscious passive form of pessimism, which they might not even know they have? It's just more in what kinds of news they gravitate towards or what kind of memes they will recirculate without...

[02:18:40]  Bruce: There's a performative aspect to it.

[02:18:43]  Vaden: Oh, for sure. Absolutely. Great point.

[02:18:45]  Bill: I think that pessimism is very directly related to what we've discussed, which is a lack of knowledge, that the type of people who have a pessimistic mindset or feel good in their pessimism are using that as an comforting salve over their lack of agency to change that state. And so it's comforting to them to take their own parochial problems and universalize that and say, well, the world is going to hell in a hand basket anyway. This is the human condition.

This is the type of thing that Hoffer wrote about in The True Believer and the books that followed. And was much discussed at mid-century by Popper and others. Bronowski.

It seems to be being rediscovered now 70 years later. This whole discussion around what is the psychological state that results in people's desire for a pessimistic outlook, a nihilistic outlook or a collectivist outlook. They're trying to hide from themselves.

And so it is a problem, I think, that we can cure by imparting knowledge to people and knowledge provides agency.

[02:20:16]  Vaden: Bill, your comments just made me reflect on the fact that there's an interesting parallel between optimism and action and pessimism and inaction. So if you take a very extremely pessimistic outlook that the world is always out to get you, then what's the point of trying to do anything, right? Because you'll always be thwarted.

Whereas if you take an optimistic outlook that problems can be solved, but you actually have to go out there and do it, then that encourages action. And so you could even just imagine a population that differs only in their willingness to act or not act. And so people who are naturally lazy or perhaps just don't want to do very much might just gravitate towards a philosophy which allows them to justify that.

And conversely, those who tend to start companies, like Sam said, and go out there and actually try to improve their position in the world and the world around them, they might gravitate towards more of an optimistic mindset. So I guess I just want to make the point that it might not be philosophy first and then action second. It might be a person's innate disposition to act or not act, then leading to them finding a philosophy which can justify that.

[02:21:38]  Sam: It could be, but it's also partly just in the culture. My favorite example of this is, have you seen the Tinder Swindler by chance?

[02:21:48]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, is that the Netflix documentary?

[02:21:51]  Sam: Yes.

[02:21:51]  Unidentified speaker: What's it called again?

[02:21:53]  Unidentified speaker: Did you say it again?

[02:21:54]  Sam: The Tinder Swindler. I always have a slightly hard time pronouncing it, but I hope I pronounced it right.

[02:21:59]  Vaden: A con man who uses Tinder to con people.

[02:22:03]  Sam: Yes. And so, spoiler warning for people who haven't seen it, that there is a part in the documentary where this person is found out, and there are news articles about him. One of his victims, someone who thinks that he is her boyfriend, reads one of these articles and then concludes that her boyfriend is actually trying to swindle a lot of money and has already done so and received something to the sum of a couple of tens of thousands of euros from her.

The person in question is Dutch, which is relevant later on. What she decides to do is that she has knowledge of retail. She used to work in retail and she knows that this guy has an enormous amount of very expensive brand clothing, which she tries to get her hands on.

So she sticks with him throughout this whole ordeal. Saying, well, you can still trust me, the media is turning against you, people seem to be finding out about your past, but obviously they're lying. Then at some point he hands her these expensive clothes to sell so that he can still have some kind of cash income, because obviously his source of money has disappeared.

[02:23:33]  Sam: The nice thing about this particular kind of ingenious act of getting back the money somehow is that at some point this woman says, well, you know, how am I going to swindle the Tinder Swindler? She actually is in this very creative mindset where she wants to go out and solve the problem. As I said, this person is Dutch.

I think that is an incredibly Dutch thing to do. I have other admittedly, you could say, their hearsay stories about this kind of thing, but it strikes me as an incredibly Dutch thing. And it's something that seems to be in the culture, that people want to go out and solve these kinds of problems.

So that's another aspect of this. I mean, again, I'm not sure if I have a complete theory of why these kinds of attitudes are part of the culture. Again, it could have something to do with the fact that the Enlightenment basically began in the Netherlands and that this has left traces in the culture till this day.

But yeah, there's something about these philosophies, how they spread and how people respond to them and respond to problems in general that is influenced by their culture and by the extent to which their society has integrated the values of the Enlightenment.

[02:25:05]  Peter: I have a quote from Deutsch that I think relates to some of what's been said here. People seem to like the idea that they are living in a time of momentous challenge where the stakes are exactly like or analogous to what the stakes were in the Second World War, where it was good against evil, where if evil wins, it is the end of civilization. And therefore fighting against that is glorious and worthwhile.

It gives meaning to life. And so the more you can talk in terms of these hyperboles, the more life seems worthwhile. It's as if making rapid, quiet, peaceful progress, which is what's actually going on all the time right now, is not exciting enough for people when they are in political mode.

[02:25:48]  Bruce: It's what I call meaning memes.

[02:25:50]  Unidentified speaker: Meaning memes.

[02:25:51]  Vaden: It's what I call effective altruism.

[02:25:52]  Unidentified speaker: [Shots fired?]

[02:25:57]  Bruce: Does anybody have any final thoughts?

[02:25:59]  Sam: I guess I'm still trying to think about your thought experiment of what would happen if a piece of the sun hit the earth. But you tell me if you still want to go back there.

[02:26:10]  Bruce: Well, I think that that doesn't really necessarily go against the concept. I mean, what that means is that in that circumstances, it is against the laws of physics to be able to save humanity at that point because the knowledge necessary to do so exists outside the timeframe that is possible under assembly theory to create the knowledge in time.

I don't necessarily see that as meaning that the principle of optimism isn't true or even that all problems are soluble with the right caveats isn't true. The question that I guess I would have is, does this make it maybe dangerously close to a tautology? And if not, why not?

And I feel like we kind of answered that question. Like it didn't come out as a direct answer, but like if I go back and I think about what people were saying, there's clearly more to it than a mere tautology, right? And so, but I think it's difficult to nuance it.

It's difficult to explain why is this not just a tautology?

[02:27:21]  Vaden: One comment on that is that it's important to recognize, I think everyone on this panel will agree that Deutsch's principle of optimism is not a scientific claim. It's not falsifiable. It's a metaphysical claim, right?

And so when Sam Harris points out these examples, he's kind of trying to highlight that this principle can't really be falsified. But that's okay because it's not trying to make a falsifiable prediction. It's a metaphysical lens.

And under that rubric, you want to analyze it in terms of does this lens give you new insights into problems? Does it allow you to make progress? How does it compare to other forms of metaphysical principles?

Does it have any internal contradictions of these kinds of analyses? And so I think part of Sam Harris' critique is he's looking at it as a scientific principle and trying to show that it's not falsifiable when it's not pretending to be a scientific principle. And we all know it's not falsifiable, and we need to analyze it using a different toolkit.

[02:28:24]  Sam: But that would contradict what we said earlier, namely that the heat death of the universe would be something that contradicts the principle of optimism.

[02:28:34]  Vaden: Well, I didn't say that earlier. In fact, I said that that wouldn't contradict the principle because the principle acknowledges that you can have laws of physics which cause harm, right? So I don't think that contradicts the principle.

[02:28:45]  Sam: Yeah, I think it contradicts. I mean, there's, so again, there's different phrasings of the principle of optimism, but the important thing in my mind anyway is that scientific progress doesn't have anything which is a fundamental hindrance. There are no bounds on scientific progress.

[02:29:04]  Bruce: So this is exactly why I actually asked about to have this panel. It's because I think it does come down to how you actually formulate them. And I was trying to figure out what is the best formulation.

[02:29:14]  Sam: I, the thing I care about is, are there bounds in scientific progress? And if the heat death of the universe were true, if that were a true theory, then there would be. So in that sense, it would be the reputation [refutation?] of optimism, at least how I understand it.

So there is a sense in which it's related to physics. And it would be, yeah, so it would be testable in that sense.

[02:29:45]  Bruce: And then consider the principle of optimism as Deutsch is doing it, not necessarily how Vaden is doing it. Vaden has an interesting take here. I'm not trying to downplay that, but he calls it all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Well, if heat death, if we're starting with the assumption heat death's true, that's an evil that is not caused by insufficient knowledge. So I would say that it does violate the way Deutsch understands the principle of optimism. Now, Vaden's saying you could rephrase it a little bit, and maybe it's not as bad as it first appears.

And that's kind of a fair point, Vaden.

[02:30:18]  Vaden: Well, so just to make it clear, so I'm not the one doing the rephrasing. I'm referring to the first paragraph of the article that Peter shared, where he talks about the principle of optimism. And then to clarify, he says two sentences later that he argues there's no limitation on knowledge growth except for laws of nature.

[02:30:36]  Bruce: Yes, that is not violated. You're right.

[02:30:38]  Vaden: Yeah, so if you are allowed to say that a law of nature, there exists a law of nature that, say, causes everyone to suffer, then that would be consistent with what I take his argument to be. But I take Sam's point that he also in Beginning of Infinity defines the principle of optimism isolated from his later statements about limits to knowledge growth. But it seems like we want to be careful not to just blithely assume that all laws of nature are going to be favourable for us, right?

Which is kind of what he's verging on, because if you're going to say other than the laws of nature, you have to bite the bullet that there could be a law of nature that we really wish we didn't discover, but that possibility is there.

[02:31:20]  Unidentified speaker: [Brief phrase unclear.]

[02:31:21]  Unidentified speaker: I agree.

[02:31:23]  Sam: So I think that would still be allowed. It could still be that there's a law of physics which says that every Tuesday morning we all get a good kicking or something. As long as it doesn't impose bounds on the growth of knowledge.

That would be a law of physics, a very weird one. It's unclear why I'm proposing it, but let's say that it is a law. This particular law of everyone is physically assaulted on Tuesday morning doesn't impose bounds the way that the heat death of the universe does.

[02:31:59]  Bruce: So let me go back to answering Sam's question to me. I'm understanding the principle of optimism in the sense of all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. And I'm relating that to all problems are soluble secondarily, but accepting Vaden's point here.

The fact that the sun, it's in some part of the multiverse, is about to break off and kill us all. That is an evil that is not caused by insufficient knowledge in a sense, right? But I don't feel like that's really what was intended, because we could, in theory, get to the point where our knowledge would allow us to deflect even the sun.

So this is not the same as heat death in this case, where heat death is actually a hard limit by the laws of physics that you cannot overcome with any amount of knowledge that you can actually generate, because it's actually placing a limit on the amount of knowledge you could generate. So I do see this as different, right? There's a legitimate point here.

[02:33:01]  Bruce: It would be easy to understand the principle of optimism as saying that the sun will never kick a piece of itself out at us and we will die. Okay, that would be a false understanding of the principle of optimism. Or it's easy to imagine taking it as it means that there can be no such thing as heat death or something along those lines.

There's different ways to interpret it, but they're not all the same and they have different implications. And some of them are probably true interpretations, and some of them are probably false interpretations.

[02:33:33]  Sam: Yes, the way that I understood your question is basically that there are these kinds of things, like basically random events, such as the sun kicking out a piece of itself that hurtles towards the earth and then kills everyone, that are all happening constantly. Another would be there's a supernova going off that we can't see coming until it's already too late, it's like mere seconds away, and then the supernova has hit us, and that these things are going on constantly seems like a thing which we cannot prevent in principle, that it's not possible to make completely sure there's no event either known or unknown that doesn't end up killing us [wording as spoken], and that this is somehow an impediment to the growth of knowledge.

[02:34:24]  Vaden: Trivial example, but I'm curious, because we have a physicist on the panel, but isn't it the case that we could discover some supermassive black hole that we are within the event horizon of? It's just far enough away that we haven't noticed it. And if that's the case, then there is no escaping that fact?

Is that a possible discovery we could make?

[02:34:46]  Sam: I think that's possible, although I imagine that we would see significant deformation around the black hole. So the black hole kind of warps the space around it, and that's one of the ways in which we could notice it, I imagine. But you know, a supernova is bad enough.

A supernova could definitely happen, and we really couldn't see it coming because the particles are heading towards us at 99.9% the speed of light. So we could only see it mere seconds or something like that before the explosion kills us all.

[02:35:25]  Bruce: So let me restate what I was trying to get at one more time here. I feel like maybe I've been a little bit too sloppy in saying it. Something like heat death is a hard...

If it were true, it places an actual limit on the growth of knowledge, and knowledge cannot save you from it. But that is not true for the sun kicking itself at you. Yes, it's true that in that case, that part of the multiverse is going to die, but it doesn't really change the fact that we can use knowledge to stop the sun from killing us.

Okay, so there's something interesting there still being said by the theory, even if you accept that in that case, that part of the multiverse is going to die. Whereas if you're accepting heat death, you're no longer saying something interesting.

[02:36:12]  Sam: The problem that you're addressing is, or the thing you're criticizing here could be that all problems are soluble, because you have an instance of a problem that seems to not be soluble. And that was the stronger version I had in mind. That the growth of knowledge is still safeguarded, but it does seem like there are certain problems which we cannot solve.

On the flip side of that, these events are very, very rare, so they will affect some of our instances in the multiverse, but not all of them. So even though they kill some of us, some of the time, they leave most of our versions of us, I should say, alive. And yeah, I think that's part of the solution here.

That it's not a problem that we can solve with 100% certainty. We can never be sure that the supernova isn't going to hit us, but those events are somewhat random and unlikely to happen. So they will leave most of the versions of us alive.

[02:37:21]  Bruce: By the way, Greg Egan's book, Diaspora, that I mentioned before, is specifically about the supernova event. So one of the things that he's making the point is that you can survive such an event if you have the right knowledge.

[02:37:34]  Bill: I was just wondering whether we might be able to cleave off this question of the heat death of whether knowledge can grow indefinitely or it has some very large but finite limit from the moral or ethical or methodological principle of optimism that Vaden seemed to lay out earlier, which is we try to solve problems until we either find a solution, which seems to me is a question of purpose that conscious creatures can have, regardless of whether the universe comes to an end or not. And I could play a video game that allows for a potentially infinite score, or I could have knowledge that there's a finite score that's very, very difficult to reach. I might still explore that video game endlessly and learn new things and delight in it and find purpose in it, even though it's finite.

So I'm wondering if we could separate those two things and think of the principle of optimism, perhaps in a strong form and a weak form, the strong form being what Sam was saying, that it cuts off the infinite growth of knowledge, but the weak form would be the methodological principle that we try to solve problems.

[02:39:02]  Bruce: I can accept that. That makes sense to me.

[02:39:06]  Vaden: I love that. I've only ever really interpreted the principle of optimism in the latter sense. But maybe it's because the difference between actual infinity and a number that's so large that I'm never going to reach it doesn't make a big difference in my life too much.

But I take your point that if you're interested in the stronger problem, is it actually infinite or not, then the latter question obviously matters quite a lot. I like your distinction quite a bit, Bill.

[02:39:36]  Sam: Just to give a brief argument for why you should care in that case, as we said before, it would mean that some parts of the universe will forever be unexplainable. That there will be problems which will never be solved, which can never be solved. And that directly implies that some aspects of the universe cannot be known by anyone.

So that's reintroducing the supernatural.

[02:40:06]  Vaden: No, I don't think it is at all. I think it's much more analogous to the resolution of the question, how do we make the square root of two rational? Well, the way we solve that problem is to recognize that there's not a solution and a solution is impossible.

And that's the solution. And then we move on to something else. So I don't think it's a supernatural.

I think it's just accepting what we accept in other domains, that sometimes the solution to a problem is an impossibility result. And you have to take the solution in whatever form it manifests itself. I think it's very different than making a claim about supernatural.

Because if we do make that claim in the case of, say, the heat death, if that's shown to be true, then that's a physical principle. That's the analogous result to the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2.

[02:40:52]  Bill: Sam, I want to say I agree with you, but I'm wondering if this is of a kind with the methodological problem in critical rationalism of ruling out all logical possible theories and only looking at those that are actually on the pitch, as it were. Yes, there will be things that will never be explained, but are those the problems that we're trying to solve? And it seems to me that the heat death of the universe doesn't rule out solving the actual problems that we're trying to solve now, even though there will be an infinity of problems that we will never solve.

[02:41:38]  Sam: I think it would clash with the way that we understand philosophy of science, because philosophy of science works because it doesn't have an end. It's a cycle. And if you say at some point the cycle has to stop just because the universe comes to an end, then that clashes with the way that we understand philosophy of science.

[02:41:59]  Bruce: I agree with Sam on this for what it's worth. I think that the way Deutsch actually explains his theories in his books, there is absolutely an assumption of infinity going on. That's why he calls it beginning of infinity.

So I think that at least the way he is formulating his philosophies, that there is absolutely the assumption of infinity and heat death would be counter to that.

[02:42:23]  Hervé: Yeah, I just wanted to tie back to the speed question, I guess, because to me, it's always very present in whatever he's saying about optimism, is that if we can solve, for instance, if heat death were to happen, this is not something that we can solve and that will happen no matter what we do. But anything happening in the interval that could terminate us could be solvable if we acquire knowledge fast enough. And so that's where I come back to the speed, where we always insist on this, where we need to maximize the speed at which we discover knowledge, because otherwise we might be extinguished long before heat death.

[02:43:05]  Bruce: All right. Any final thoughts before we end this?

[02:43:09]  Vaden: Only that we should do more panels, because this was a lot of fun.

[02:43:13]  Bruce: Yeah, it was fun.

[02:43:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, this was great.

[02:43:14]  Bruce: And we probably will do more panels, because this was really helpful to hear other people's opinions on what I saw as a really important but somewhat difficult to understand set of concepts. And getting other people's insights has been very helpful to me.

[02:43:31]  Vaden: Yeah, it's really interesting to see how the subtle differences and how we think about things that Deutsch has written. And you can gain a lot from just teasing out the subtleties there, so that's great.

[02:43:43]  Bruce: Thank you, everybody, for joining us. And it's been a pleasure.

[02:43:49]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you so much, everyone.

[02:43:50]  Unidentified speaker: That was wonderful.

[02:43:51]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:43:52]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:43:52]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:43:53]  Unidentified speaker: Bye-bye.

[02:43:53]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:43:54]  Unidentified speaker: Have a great day.

[02:43:55]  Unidentified speaker: Bye, guys.

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