Episode 65: Causality, Time, and Free Will

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Transcript

[00:00:11]  Blue: Hello. Welcome to the theory of anything podcast. We’ve got Bruce and cameo here. How are you guys doing?

[00:00:18]  Red: Good. Excellent. Excited to be here. Yes.

[00:00:22]  Blue: Today we’re going to be talking about something, Bruce’s suggestion, of course, that is that I currently am at, you know, the Dunning Kruger curve of knowledge acquisition. I know it’s kind of a silly thing, but you know where you think you know, you know about something and then you learn a little more and you realize you don’t know anything. That’s where I am right at the bottom looking up, but I’m in a fortunate position because I’ve got Bruce and cameo to help me along here. Help me up the curve a little bit. You know, that’s what I love about this group that I started. I’ve got a lot of people who have joined and are far more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am and are willing to help me along. There was just most and most people, I just really appreciate how nice people are and generous about sharing their knowledge. There was one guy who kind of rage quit after accusing me of what was the acronym for explain it to me like I’m a five -year -old. Oh, yes. Anyway, but as far as I’m concerned, he actually had some pretty major misconceptions about Deutsch himself. So, you know, if people have that attitude, it’s best if they just leave, but that’s pretty rare actually in this community from what I’ve seen. Most people want to help others learn and, you know, I never feel bad about not understanding David Deutsch, you know, re -reading this chapter on causality and time. I don’t feel like I’m reading a pop physics book. It’s more of a something more like a scientific paper masquerading as a pop physics book, honestly.

[00:02:14]  Blue: And, you know, maybe this sounds a little heretical, but I actually don’t usually recommend people read David Deutsch to just who are just new to the multiverse and new to wanting to understand about these more out there theories. I mean, I just know for myself, I got a little bit more out of, as an introduction, Sean Carroll’s book and Max Teckmark’s book and some of the other pop physics books I’ve read. You know, not that this is a criticism of that book of reality. It’s just, to me, it’s just on another level, really. And I’m trying to get there, trying to understand. And I suspect it’ll take me the rest of my life.

[00:02:59]  Green: Brett Hall once jokingly suggested that we create a new unit that represents how much information you’re taking in per sentence and that we name it the Deutsch.

[00:03:11]  Blue: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a that’s that that rings true. I don’t feel bad for not understanding. But anyway, I know Bruce has a lot of thoughts on this area of time causality and the multiverse. And how these these are sort of intertwined ideas. I thought perhaps we could start by by asking, by me asking you a question or two about this chapter. And then we can move it, move in, move from there. So, you know, I admit that I’ve got a pretty rudimentary understanding of the multiverse. How I’m kind of thinking of it is just the whenever there’s interaction between a quantum event and something larger, which is, of course, basically all the time, the world sort of branches off into different different worlds. OK, so you can think of the world as that on a quantum level is as as time moves on, just a branching into, you know, most of these worlds are kind of not that much different, of course. That’s how I imagine it in my mind. But I kind of know enough that to know that that’s actually not quite right that time is is it works. This is more me applying my ideas of or my perception of the flow of time to the multiverse and other intuitions, I guess. It’s the reality is a little more complicated. So perhaps you could you could explain it to me like I’m five years old. OK,

[00:04:51]  Green: so I actually had this idea because for a podcast because of your Facebook page, someone was talking about this quoted from this chapter and it had been a while since I had revisited it. And I was thinking about how when I first read this chapter I had problems with it. And you can see it like I still have my book from way back when I first read it and I’ve got all my notes in the margins and I’m saying paradoxical things like that during this chapter. And as I mentioned in some of the episodes I spent years trying to work out what Deutsch was saying afterwards and I tried to find the best criticisms of what Deutsch was writing. And what I found for the most part was that Deutsch was spot on on almost everything he said. I would go to Penrose, who by the way if you think Deutsch’s pop physics book sounds like a paper, you should read Penrose’s where he includes the actual mathematical equations two or three per page. And then he jokes about how he loses half his audience with each equation. But I went on and I tried to find the best criticisms the best alternate opinions and for the most part I couldn’t find any good criticisms of Deutsch’s theories. That’s not true for this chapter. This chapter is one of the few I’ve mentioned some criticisms of the Omega point which is obviously one of the chapters of fabric of reality. So I guess I have offered some criticisms of that part of the theory, although I really like that theory just in terms of this is what we’re looking for even if this theory itself might not be right.

[00:06:27]  Green: But this chapter on time and causality and counterfactuals and things like that I found all sorts of really good criticisms of it. And so I have always had kind of mixed feelings. I do think he’s saying some really interesting things here about time, but I think he’s leading it towards a series of conclusions that I don’t think are tenable. So I actually wanted to kind of talk about that for the episode, some of the criticisms that I found of the things you’re saying. By the way, this is the one chapter that he recanted quite a bit. So I know he at least somewhat agrees with me that some of what he said didn’t, he no longer agrees with. And I actually have a quote from one of his papers where he admits this. So I think this chapter did contain a number of mistakes and I think that even he fully accepts that at this point and he’s trying to work out a different version of this, of these ideas.

[00:07:24]  Blue: It’d be helpful, Bruce, to, there’s a paragraph in here where he sums up the very end where he sums up what he’s saying in this chapter. Sure, I want to read that. Let me sum up the elements of the quantum concept of time. Time is not a sequence of moments, nor does it flow. Yet our intuitions about the properties of time are broadly true. Certain events are indeed causes and effects of one another. Relative to an observer, the future is indeed open and the past fixed and the possibilities do indeed become actualities. The reason why our traditional theories of time are nonsense is that they try to express these truth intuitions within the framework of a false classical physics. In quantum physics, they make sense because time was a quantum concept all along. We exist in multiple versions in universes called moments. Each version of us is not directly aware of the others but has evidence of their existence because physical laws link the contents of different universes. It is tempting to suppose that the moment of which we are aware is the only real one or is at least a little more real than the others but that is just solipsism. All moments are physically real. The whole of multiverse is physically real. Nothing else is.

[00:08:51]  Green: Yes, great summary. By the way, there’s a lot there that I would still say is correct but it’s woven in a way that I think leads to several misleading conclusions. I should also note that this is precisely why Saadia did four episodes on this podcast with me about the problems of physics and particularly the mysteries of time and she sees time as this unsolved problem. Obviously, Deutsch probably wouldn’t agree with her because as you just read from that summary, he feels that time isn’t a wholly unexplained thing. We know that all there is is the multiverse and a lot of the things that she raises as issues I think he sees as non -issues. However, he does seem to at least somewhat agree with her and let me see if I can find the quote. Here’s the quote. However, this is not quite how the multiverse works. A workable quantum theory of time which would also be the quantum theory of gravity which is the theory we don’t have has been a tantalizing and unattain goal theoretical physics for some time now but we know enough about it to know that though the laws of quantum physics are perfectly deterministic at the multiverse level they do not partition the multiverse in the matter of figure 11.6 into separate space times or into super snapshots of each other which entirely determines the others. On the one hand, he’s admitting that the existing theory does not fully have a theory of time which is I think Saadia’s point. On the other hand, he’s saying we’ve actually worked out quite a bit, right?

[00:10:26]  Green: And so there is a lot that I think he explains like he spends quite a bit of time on space time and that was actually what led to the argument on your board is one of the people commenting was taking issue with the fact that they were talking as if the quantum so some people were talking as if the quantum multiverse was a space time was still a block universe as they’re called where others were taking exception saying that no, that’s not the case that only Einstein’s theory was space time and was a block universe and then somebody else was arguing no, you’re all wrong Newton’s theory was also a block universe and so is quantum theory so they’re all block universes they’re all space time and I commented that they’re all arguing over a word which is I think a mistake people make almost constantly,

[00:11:19]  Red: right?

[00:11:21]  Green: And you know how what’s Wittgenstein?

[00:11:27]  Blue: Wittgenstein? Yeah,

[00:11:29]  Green: he had this idea that all philosophy was just disagreements over words and that none of it was meaningful and Popper took a really strong exception to that because he believes there’s real philosophical problems that can be solved here’s the thing though, they’re both right Wittgenstein is wrong that all philosophical problems are just pseudo problems

[00:11:53]  Blue: Popper did say that we should never argue about words though but he just doesn’t take it quite as far that there are actually, he doesn’t say that all philosophical problems And

[00:12:04]  Green: I’m fairly certain that the vast majority of philosophical problems are just pseudo problems precisely because people are arguing over words and philosophy is so rooted in trying to define things which is the essentialist error Now there are reasons to define things I’m not saying you shouldn’t I largely agree with Popper but I think that I could probably lay out a theory of words that’s based on Popper that expands a little bit beyond him about when it’s good to define things and when it’s bad to define things but this argument was in fact a pseudo problem and the reason why I’ll explain it is because the word space -time came up and was brought about or at least popularized by Einstein’s theory where space -time was this block universe where time was just a dimension and Newton’s theory while you can technically in retrospect think of it as space -time and that would be an accurate way to think of it time just simply played no actual physical role and you just use time the way you would normally intuitively think of time it didn’t have any physical consequences whereas that’s not true for Einstein’s theory So the concept of space -time did not really exist until Einstein and is intimately connected to his theory so when somebody says space -time they might mean Einstein’s theory or they might mean a concept that comes out of Einstein’s theory that could in theory be retroactively applied to Newton’s theory and by analogy could be sort of analogously applied to quantum theory and so you could call all of them having space -time or it might just refer to Einstein’s theory and we just figured out based on context of how the word was used

[00:13:49]  Red: this is also we’ve talked about this in the dogma episodes I think this is why people get really obsessed with the semantics because they internalize the portion of that that they’re aligning with anytime somebody’s arguing with any elements of that they’re taking it personally but everybody’s kind of talking about the same thing right

[00:14:14]  Green: it becomes frustrating because you have this giant argument over nothing so Deutsch throughout the book when he uses the word space -time I’ll give you a quote where he does he means specifically Einstein’s theory or anything before quantum physics so when he uses the term space -time he’s explicitly excluding quantum physics now it’s true that quantum physics even the many worlds version has something a lot like space -time that you could by analogy call space -time and Deutsch isn’t denying that he’s describing how the quantum version of space -time is different than the traditional classical physics version of space -time once you realize that’s what he’s saying it’s not that hard to figure out how he’s using the terms and that he’s saying something that’s you know make sense right is at least you can understand what he’s saying he’s not talking nonsense you

[00:15:13]  Blue: know just looking at this terminology section okay flow of time nonsense space -time seems like a meaningful concept but then he says space -time physics is at best an approximation

[00:15:29]  Green: yeah unless by space -time physics you mean quantum physics

[00:15:34]  Blue: okay okay so

[00:15:35]  Green: this is why there was a bunch of confusion over this and they started quoting from this chapter and things like that so I wanted to kind of talk about let’s maybe summarize Deutsch’s view and what he’s trying to pull from this because he’s trying to hit a lot of things right so he takes a look at what the like the Einstein version of space -time would look like and the key thing that you have to keep in mind with the block universe is that it already it all exists right it’s not like there’s moments unfolding that’s how we perceive it because we’re living inside of it but somewhere you know in a certain sense the physics is all there there’s it’s if you could see to the fourth dimension you would see that all time already exists and it’s fixed okay

[00:16:28]  Green: so Deutsch then uses this to try to show that this causes a problem for the concept of causality and this is where I think Deutsch is starting to get off the rails unfortunately it’s it’s not that there isn’t a legitimate problem here to solve probably philosophical problem but the way trying to solve it through a multiverse I don’t see how it could ever work and that this is what he’s trying to do so let me actually start with the the fact that he sees the flow of time as an illusion okay so he says to exist at all at a particular moment means to exist there forever our consciousness exists at all our waking moments admittedly different snapshots of the observer perceive different moments as now but that does not mean that the observer’s consciousness or any other moving or changing entity moves through time as the present moment is supposed to the various snapshots of the observer do not take it in turn or be to be in the present they do not take it in turn to be conscious of their present they are all conscious and subjectively they are all in the present objectively there is no present we do not experience time flowing a passing what we experience our differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions we interpret those differences correctly as evidence of the universe changes with time we also interpret them incorrectly as evidence that our consciousness or the present or or something moves through time okay

[00:17:55]  Green: first let me try to steelman what he’s saying because there is something to what he’s saying here and then let me explain why I have some concerns with the way the way he’s saying it okay so he’s taking exception to the idea that there could be a flow of time this is the thing I actually not sure I agree with him on because I think the phrase the flow of time is an emergent concept that properly describes what our experience is like and but he’s saying it’s just an illusion okay and his basis for saying it’s an illusion is because of this concept of the block universe that actually there’s not a single present with you in it and then you’re you’re moving forward all of those points in time already exist and as we’re going to see as he the chapter continues they exist in separate universes because time is just a different universe right and they’re all already there and for the you in that universe the present is now even the one in the future even the one in the past etc therefore there is no actual physical concept of present and that is therefore an illusion he’s arguing does that make sense so far

[00:19:03]  Blue: that makes sense so just to summarize when someone says that time is fundamental including you know I think some physicists hold this view as far as I know that what they are basically saying is that there’s something very meaningful about right now whereas Deutsch or others at least here who seems to be saying that the flow of time is nonsense that’s more of a perspective that says right now is not any more meaningful than 10 minutes ago or 10 million years ago

[00:19:42]  Green: so remember we were just talking about how different words come in different things in different contexts okay I’m not sure that when you hear physicists say time is fundamental that any of them are saying the same thing at all

[00:19:58]  Blue: interesting

[00:19:59]  Green: Saadia keeps bringing that up that’s how come you know about this because she puts it on the website every single time a different scientist says time is fundamental okay and I think to her it’s very similar to what you just said that there should be something special about the moment and that the normal way we would look at it Deutsch is the block universe is the normal is the currently accepted theory so Deutsch isn’t saying something that isn’t you know wholly accepted by physics at this point right but the things that she quotes from the different scientists when I actually go and read them I don’t think any of them are saying what she’s saying and so for instance she quotes Lee Cronin and as far as I can tell when he says time is fundamental what he means is is that you can look at physics in terms of his assembly theory and that time is fundamental to assembly theory I don’t think it’s got anything at all to do with the point she’s trying to make and I could give you other examples I don’t have them on the top of my head but I think each of the times she’s quoted a physicist none of them were actually agreeing at all they were not agreeing with her they were not agreeing with each other if that makes any sense it

[00:21:07]  Blue: does

[00:21:08]  Green: I’m a little unclear what that means it probably means something different for each scientist that they’ve got some idea that we don’t take care of time well in physics right that in Newton’s theory time was just you just used it like normally did it had no actual physical component in Einstein’s theory it became a new dimension so it was no different than space and then it thus was part of physics but we know Einstein’s theory is wrong in some way we know that there’s something not quite right about quantum physics and it doesn’t really fundamentally explain time either so I think that’s what Saadia means is that there should be a physics that describes exactly physically what time is and in fact Deutsch as from the quote I just made says yes that’s what the quantum theory of gravity is going to be it’s going to describe what time is so Deutsch isn’t even necessarily disagreeing with Saadia

[00:22:05]  Green: he’s admitting that we need a new theory and that it will wrap time up and then there’s the question of how is time going to be treated will it be treated as something basic that everything else emerges from or is it going to be treated as an emergent concept we don’t know we don’t have that theory today so we don’t know if time is going to end up in the theory of gravity as an emergent concept or as a fundamental concept Saadia is arguing for it needs to be a fundamental concept and you can go back and listen to her podcast that she did on on this podcast and she does a pretty good job of explaining her thinking on this let me just say though that Saadia’s theories are non testable theories right this is really not theories at all in the scientific sense these are more like descriptions of what she hopes it will turn out to be and based on her current intuitions and as we should kind of look at theories in that way we’re always interested in what’s the the best theory currently available that has survived the most has the highest empirical content and survived the most tests and that is quantum physics as of today okay yes there are problems and it’s just impossible to use your intuitions to know what the final theory is going to look like any intuitions you have like Saadia as to what that final theory is going to look like are pure conjecture right there’s almost never a particularly good reason to pick one over the other initially until you start to figure out how do I turn this into a testable conjecture

[00:23:43]  Blue: I hope this doesn’t take us down to tangent here but it does seem to me do you think that a popperian framework can ever be kind of used as a way to shut down people from just asking like provocative questions

[00:23:59]  Green: you know I could see how you could do that and I know Saadia has complained about that when she’s talking to popperians that they’ll say oh that’s not a best theory and they won’t even look at the conjecture because it’s quote at odds with the best theory well if you took that too far you could see how that could very quickly become you could never replace a current best theory even though it’s wrong because anything you try to replace it with is at odds with the best theory I think that’s dangerous anytime if you don’t have the patience to even look at a new theory because you believe it’s at odds with your best theory you’re not an empiricist you should always be open to the next theory could absolutely obliterate your current best theory even if it’s completely at odds that’s like your job so let me actually I have an analogy here that talking to Saadia on your page I came up with that I actually think is maybe helpful here science is like the halting problem okay so you’re familiar with the halting problem from hearing machines where it’s impossible to write a program that can detect if another program is going to halt or not

[00:25:15]  Green: in science you have a current best theory and it is irrational to accept that current best theory because if it has no competitors right so and it’s rational to assume that if that theory has survived the most tests and it has high empirical content and in the case of quantum physics we don’t even have a single counter example okay of an experiment that hasn’t matched quantum physics okay so given that there’s very we know quantum physics is the highest verisimilitude theory we currently have in physics there are no competitors to it string theories the best known competitor and nobody not even the deepest string theorist would tell you it’s a true competitor to quantum physics as of today right because string theory has no empirical content yet so based on that there’s there’s a certain sense in which it’s very very rational to draw conclusions from the highest verisimilitude theory why would it ever make sense to draw conclusions from a lower verisimilitude theory like something to think about that for a second could you ever be rational to draw conclusions from a lower verisimilitude theory if you have a higher one available okay think about that just for a second

[00:26:32]  Blue: well I mean maybe is a compelling bot experiment

[00:26:37]  Green: maybe as a compelling thought experiment but you would never want to go calculate an engineer an airplane based on some compelling version of Aristotle’s physics when you know you’ve got Newton’s physics or Einstein’s physics or quantum physics available to base your predictions on okay very fair point that’s a very good point so this is the definition of rationality from a paparian standpoint that it just makes rational sense to go with the highest verisimilitude theory the one that hasn’t been refuted yet the one that you know must be closest to the truth based on everything you know at this point okay now having said that you know that the thing that all there’s there’s no guarantee your theories correct fact in this case we know quantum physics is false so one of the main things that sorry I get into arguments over is that she’ll bring up and she’ll say look I’ve refuted quantum physics because of the problem of time and I’ll say you have great I already knew that because of the problem of gravity that was actually a much bigger problem

[00:27:44]  Green: and everybody knows quantum physics is false you’re only telling me something that I already know that absolutely everybody already knows right my interest in quantum physics and drawing conclusions from it doesn’t come the fact that I think it’s true it comes from the fact that it is the truest theory currently available now one of those implications is Church -Turing -Deutsch thesis now I’ve said over and over it could be wrong we could find out that when we get to quantum gravity that there’s a new type of computer we can build okay nobody’s denying that fact but if I want to sit down and say is it possible to build an AGI today the only rational thing for me to do is to look at the current best theory quantum physics look at the fact that Church -Turing -Deutsch flows directly from that theory it’s an implication of it and then say based on the current theory yes I should be able to build an AGI on a regular Turing machine and that is Dwight’s point Saudia wants to say instead look we know it’s false you don’t know that to which I say you’re right it’s false and we don’t know that but I already knew that that never had anything to do with my conclusion to begin with I was simply drawing conclusions based on what the current best available theory was and I’m admitting it could be false and that’s really kind of what Saiyan and I keep arguing over and there’s real no argument there right I never felt like she understands what I’m saying that we’re not arguing right it’s I’m agreeing with you it could be false and also it happens to be our best available theory and according to it we should be able to build an intelligence on a computer AGI should be possible so that is the nutshell of rationality now how do you fit that into conjectures well you have problems that exist right we know quantum physics doesn’t explain gravity we know that it has a kind of tentative view of time and it’s not very complete right it’s there’s many things that we know are problems now quantum physics interestingly doesn’t have what we would normally think of as a problem from a papyrian standpoint it has no counter examples ok most theories throughout history of time have had counter examples what popper calls a refutation although I’ve made it clear it really only refutes a combination of the theory plus the background knowledge so it’s not generally perceived as refuting the theory proper ok so when they find that I forget which planet Jupiter doesn’t follow the orbit that it’s it’s supposed to according to Newton’s theory the first thing they assume is that something about their theory of the number of planets is wrong not that Newton’s theory is wrong and then they did the same thing when Mercury was found not to follow the path that it was supposed to according to Newton they assumed oh we’re just missing some

[00:30:38]  Green: thing of some body of gravity out there that we don’t know about our theory about what the solar system look like is wrong now in that case it turned out to actually be Newton’s theory that was wrong but the existence of a counter example does not ever in science cause scientists to say oh we’re going to abandon this theory it’s refuted ok so if you’re thinking of refutation in that way you’ve misunderstood the nature of refutation which is why I don’t like the term refutation because when I say a theory is refuted the first thing that comes to everybody’s mind is this is now a worthless theory and we need something else we must abandon it right and that just isn’t how science works like even a little bit ok because of this concept of verisimilitude based on all this you do want to make conjectures as to how you might go about solving the known problems now to do that you aren’t going to have that conjecture pop out of your mind fully formed as a competitor to the current theory so think about Einstein he had that moment is the greatest happiest moment of his life where he realized that the force of gravity could instead be thought of as bodies moving together and like if you’re in an elevator you don’t actually know if you’re weightless or if you’re falling and he had kind of had this thought and it led to a series of thoughts in his mind intuitions as to what physics might be like he then spent eight years working out what that must be by the way for those for when Deutsch talks about perspiration let me just point out that human creativity has considerable perspiration in it

[00:32:21]  Green: so eight years is a long time for Einstein to creatively come up with general relativity so he works very hard on this and out at the end of eight years pops out a true competitor to Newton’s theory and at that point the rest of the scientific field has to start thinking about it okay and when we do our episode on corroboration I’ll talk about kind of what happened from there and I don’t want to get too far down that road at this point but it’s completely acceptable that Einstein must have spent eight years dwelling on versions of his theory that weren’t yet competitors to Newton’s theory because they didn’t have empirical content yet or had very little empirical content and he must have at just at some level just had an intuition that if I keep going down this road I’m going to end up eventually with a true competitor to Newton’s theory and so he just kept working it out he kept solving problems he spent eight years trying to figure out how to fit it all together and then he was right he ended up with a theory that was better than Newton’s theory at the end.

[00:33:30]  Blue: When Einstein had this revelation about you know like I mean I don’t know exactly how it played out but what was going on in the in the elevator where you don’t feel like you’re moving if you had had I mean it doesn’t seem it seems like a pretty common thing if you had asked someone another physicist at the time why that was what do you think they would have said?

[00:33:52]  Green: Well I don’t think they would deny that Einstein was about that particular revelation everybody knows it right the idea that you could rethink gravity in terms of that probably would have seemed completely heretic seemed weird but they would have they would have at least immediately recognized it as a pretty valid problem. So here’s the thing because reality is right as paparians were realists there really is a reality out there it is whatever it is it is the way it is okay and it’s itself consistent.

[00:34:23]  Green: If you happen to be on a right path your theory can be developed into an empirical theory superior to the current empirical theory and so that is the goal of science is that we’re always trying to make a new empirical theory better than the last empirical theory okay so I’m emphasizing the word empirical because that means testable right that you can actually it can clash with actual experience okay now that must not be the case during the eight years Einstein’s theory in its more nascent form is not a better theory than Newton’s theory and yet he is just convinced that it’s going to be some day now if he happens to be right he will be able to develop it into a better theory if he’s wrong then he won’t be able to now I would know that this is exactly what happened to Einstein he had a theory of what improved improved theory of everything should look like and he spent years going down the path following his intuitions as to what that theory of everything should look like that would be the theory of quantum gravity and he completely failed to make any progress at all on the problem because his intuitions were wrong in that case whereas the first time his intuitions were right now I want to emphasize intuitions are not sources of truth not even a little bit they are sources of conjecture and so it’s completely legitimate for to use Saudi as the example for her to have an intuition time should be fundamental or have an intuition CTD should be wrong or to have an intuition novelty should be worked into the laws of physics but none of those are sources of truth those are just her making a conjecture and that’s it that there’s nothing else going on it’s now up to her to figure out can I turn this into an empirical theory and if she can if she her intuitions are wrong she’ll be unable to okay does that make sense that’s the halting problem so you never get to actually know and then you never know you never know if the reason why you couldn’t turn it into an empirical theory was because you were wrong or if the reason why you couldn’t turn into empirical theories because you just didn’t get creative enough you never get to know that for sure what you do get to do though is you get to see what other people come up with is theories and if those are empirical if they pass tests if they explain problems that the old theory had if they explain the success of the old theory that’s something that’s really important in science is cameo just mentioned that the new theory may be totally at odds with the old theory it’s from a certain point of view that’s true I think people tend to see Einstein’s theory as quote totally at odds with Newton’s theory but Einstein’s theory completely explains the success of Newton’s theories in that sense it subsumes Newton’s theory it shows why Newton’s theory was such a good theory right and that’s what we’re looking for in science is we want the new theory to be able to demonstrate why the old theory was so successful why it had so much truth to it and no by the same token though I think you could argue that the person going with the best theory is also playing the halting faced with the halting problem so I’m as opposed to Saudia I think you can build an AGI so I want to study what algorithms could be used to build intelligence now if Saudia’s intuitions are right then obviously I’m going to waste my time and because we need new physics before and I met this in the podcast when I’m talking with her about this we need new physics and I’m going to just be completely wasting my time trying to discover what the intelligence algorithm is because we really need to discover new physics first before it’s even possible to come up with the intelligence algorithm on the other hand the reason why I’ve decided to do this is because according to our best theory quantum physics CTD is true and CTD church during twice do it’s thesis says that we can do this on a computer so it’s rational for me to believe that there should be an algorithm that can do this even though I know as a fallible list that I’m basing this entirely just on the best theory which is rational for me to do but I know I could be wrong right does that all make sense and there’s still that there’s still that halting problem when I fail to find the intelligence algorithm that could be because I’m relying on a false theory or it could be because I just haven’t gotten creative enough and I don’t know what it is

[00:39:04]  Blue: everything you’re saying makes sense and I’m with you and I’m just I’m just waiting for this to loop back into the time here

[00:39:13]  Green: okay so let’s loop this back into time so I just read that quote from I’m going to take some exception to it now not too much yet okay but let me take one of the sentences that he writes to exist at all at a particular moment means to exist there forever isn’t that a false statement according to his own argument I mean even the fact he uses the word forever right that implies some sort of outward time that this block universe exists in and that if we could see that other time we would see that it’s there forever right the issue here is that it’s just there’s just no way to speak except using a sort of analogy of time and this is why I think his argument that the flow of time doesn’t make a total sense to me okay because and let me read this again we do not experience time flowing or passing what we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories and our past perceptions well now so me that sounds like a flow right you guys flow of new memories so I would say yes we absolutely there absolutely is a flow of time it’s an emergent concept that is a way that we talk about and the way we perceive and it’s it’s accurate right it’s not false it’s not an illusion it’s a proper description of what it feels like to live inside of a block universe from moment to moment right

[00:40:44]  Blue: yeah that’s an extremely compelling way of thinking of it it’s almost like the reality of abstractions is idea I mean it’s a real it’s real in the sense that it’s just a different level of abstraction is that what

[00:40:58]  Green: yes that is what I’m saying so right so on the one hand he’s still making a fair point about this concept of the block universe and from all my looking this up he’s accurate right Einstein’s theory is a block universe and honestly so is quantum physics so all our best theories say we live inside of a block universe that the future in the past in some sense already exists out there if we could somehow imagine stepping out of this looking at it in it from another dimension and they’re being a magic extra time out there we would see that it was there forever which is how I make sense of his statement right but all of that of course there is no way to step outside of it and time only exists in the sense of being inside that block universe and that time that exists inside that block universe it flows and the flowing is a real thing okay and so this is the part that I can accept about what he’s saying and also how I would look at it differently than him now why does this matter so let me move to another quote here what what bridge goes on to do is he tries to link this to determinism so both Einstein’s theory is deterministic and so is the many worlds version of quantum physics although the determinism of quantum physics is at the level of the multiverse not at the level of someone living inside of the universe okay from the point of view of someone living inside the universe the world is not deterministic it’s partially probabilistic it’s partially stochastic so but if you could see the whole multiverse you would see that it’s actually still deterministic now this determinism bothers people and it bothers Deutsch clearly or at least it did back when he was writing this chapter so he’s trying to use the multiverse the existence of the multiverse he’s trying to look at the fact that in a block universe that it’s hard to say what causality is because that whole universe exists so did something cause something else okay and he argues that if the block universe were true that there is no causation but then he says but that’s okay and because we don’t live in Einstein’s space time we live in quantum physics so he then tries to tie that to things like free will he tries to explain that free will is only possible in the multiverse this is the thing that he then later partially recanted okay so here’s a quote the determinism of physical laws about events in space time is like the predictability of a correctly interlocking jigsaw puzzle the laws of physics determine what happens at one moment from what happens at another just as the rules of the jigsaw puzzle determine the positions of some pieces from those others but just as with the jigsaw puzzle whether the events in different moments cause one another or not depends on how the moments got there we cannot tell by looking at a jigsaw puzzle whether it got there by being laid down one piece at a time but with space time we know that it does not make sense for one moment to be laid down after another but that would be the flow of time therefore we know that even though some events can be predicted from others no events in space time caused another let me stress again that this is all according to pre quantum physics in which everything that happens happens in space time notice how he’s using the word space time to mean specifically pre quantum physics even though you could use that term to include quantum physics what we are seeing is that space time is incompatible with the existence of cause and effect it is not that people are mistaken when they say that certain physical events are causes and effects of another it is just that the intuition is incompatible with the laws of space time physics but that is all right because space time physics is false now here’s the then from there he goes on and he works out a theory around how we can make sense of cause and effect in terms of quantum physics instead

[00:45:00]  Green: I don’t think any of his arguments make sense I’m going to be honest quantum physics if the problem of causation exists in Einstein’s theory which I’m going to argue it doesn’t then it every bit as much exists in quantum physics and there is no way around that and there is no argument you can make that can change that fact and this is where I really kind of struggled with this aspect of this chapter okay and I can even give you examples of how thought experiments of how I know I’m right right because these are just really straightforward thought experience experiments that will kind of make the point clear so let me now read another quote from him he says in space time physics which is effectively all pre quantum physics starting with Newton the future is not open it is there with definite fixed contents just like the past and present if a particular moment in space time were open in any sense it would necessarily remain open when it became the present and the past for moments cannot change subjectively the future of a given observer can be said to be open from the observer’s viewpoint because one cannot measure or observe one’s own future but openness is that subjective sense in that subjective sense does not allow choices I’m going to emphasize that term if you want a ticket for last week’s lottery but have not yet found out whether you have won the outcome is still open from your point of view even though objectively it is fixed but subjectively or objectively you cannot change it no cause that causes that have not already

[00:46:39]  Green: affected it can do so any longer may say that sentence again because it’s important no causes that have not already affected it that not already affected it can do so any longer the common sense theory of free will says that last week while you still had the choice whether to buy a ticket or not the future was still objectively open and you really could have chosen any of two or more options but that is incompatible with space time so according to space time physics the openness of the future is an illusion and therefore causation and free will can only be no more than illusions as well to be in effect of some cause means to be affected by the cause by that cause to be changed by it thus when space time physics denies the reality of the flow of time it logically cannot accommodate common sense notions of cause and effect either for in the block universe nothing is changeable one part of space time can be no more change another part of the fixed three -dimensional object can change another okay

[00:47:39]  Green: then his attempt to get around this is to say and then talk about counterfactuals I should probably mention that that we talk about counterfactuals we say you know if cameo had made this choice her career would have been different okay and we know exactly what we mean and we understand these to be you know true or false statements and yet it’s hard to say what the statement of a counterfactual even means because it either did or didn’t happen right so he tries to get around this he tries to say we should understand counterfactuals in terms of the existence of other multiverse other universes in the multiverse so we say we could say we could imagine that if cameo had made this different choice that in those other universes where she made a different choice something else happened and let’s say cameo is now a millionaire so she makes this choice and in those other universes she’s not a millionaire and in the one where she made the choice she’s now a millionaire okay so he’s trying to work out that we can make sense of counterfactuals by using the multiverse and that based on that we can also make sense of causation because we can think of causation in terms of that choice made a difference into how the two branches of the multiverse took place okay and this even on the surface it seems kind of like a compelling argument alright you with me so far on the argument and then from there he kind of works out that this is what free will probably is so you with me so far

[00:49:10]  Blue: I’m hanging on can I ask you a question and maybe it might be a dumb one but it’s just what’s on my mind okay so I’m thinking about my childhood in Seattle and then let’s think about your childhood and I assume Utah we were in the same universe correct the same world

[00:49:38]  Green: I mean the puzzle pieces aligned that to put us in the same reality I mean that’s just common sense but then the future I mean these puzzle pieces are are are unaligned at least from our perception it just seems that the future is a lot different than the past from that perspective yes I mean the puzzle pieces there was an order to the puzzle pieces in the past that doesn’t is not as apparent in the future so yes and from our point of view as someone living inside the inside of a universe I think that’s a completely emergent an accurate emergent way to think of things and that’s why I have zero objection to the concept of flow of time nor zero and zero objection to the idea that the future is open and that it doesn’t exist yet sure I know that if I were an observer in a fake time looking at it for dimension but I’m not and no such person exists right it’s

[00:50:42]  Blue: unlikely to happen anytime soon yeah right so

[00:50:45]  Green: it’s it’s supposed to be impossible right at least according to the current laws of physics for someone to exist to exist inside of space time

[00:50:54]  Blue: okay so the flow of time is not actually nonsense it’s

[00:50:58]  Green: not

[00:50:59]  Blue: you would not you would not put it he he’s pretty clear about that he calls it nonsense or at least yes you disagree with that

[00:51:06]  Green: I disagree and and I explained that I the way he says you have this illusion because of this I simply call that the flow of time so I’ve relabeled what he’s saying is really going on the flow of time I’m done right

[00:51:22]  Green: I’m going to deconstruct which is argument now so let’s start with the idea of counterfactuals okay that we can understand we can only make sense of counterfactuals in terms of in terms of the multiverse now it is true you that the multiverse may help you kind of make sense of counterfactuals to some degree but we use counterfactuals that have nothing to do with the multiverse and at some point after reading the fabric of reality writing the fabric of reality which realize this and in the current introduction to the fabric of reality he admits that he’s changed his mind on this subject and in his constructor theory paper he mentions this he talks about he says this is that is part of a more general problem of counterfactual some counterfactual statements are simply undetermined as for instance in quines 1960 puzzle that if Caesar were in charge in the Korean war the statement he would have used nuclear weapons and he would have used catapults are both arguably true in such cases adding enough extra detail like and had been informed by modern weapons removes the ambiguity then he goes on to say I have previously suggested and he’s talking about in the fabric of reality in this chapter chapter 11 that this problem of counterfactuals is solved in the ever interpretation of quantum theory where positions like it would have happened can be understood as it happened in another universe however this only works for events that do happen somewhere in the multiverse such as the statistical fluctuations bring into such as a statistical fluctuation bring into existence a person with specified Caesar like attributes and causing everyone to regard him as a military commander it does not work for laws of physics for example the principle testability is doubly counterfactual

[00:53:10]  Green: so because of this he started to realize that there are meaningful counterfactual statements that can’t be explained in terms of another universe now he I don’t know if he was joking or not he suggests that you could work out short of working out the idea that Caesar somehow came into existence due to a quantum fluctuation the fact is that Caesar doesn’t exist in these other universes right and so when we say Caesar would have done this had he been in charge of the Korean War that may just not exist in another universe and yet it’s still an entirely viable counterfactual statement I would suggest this means that you don’t need the multiverse to make sense of counterfactual statements and that the multiverse actually doesn’t add anything other than maybe some comfort to some counterfactual statements that whatever counterfactual statements are that you don’t need the multiverse to make sense of them or for them to be a meaningful thing so that would be my first argument here and I think this part Deutsch seems to agree with me on now okay now based on that though there is there’s there’s something interesting about this

[00:54:23]  Green: counterfactuals is fundamental to constructor theory and he points out for example and Karen Marletto points out in her book for example that you can’t really understand the concept of a computer without understanding the concept of counterfactuals and she’s right okay I think the concept of counterfactuals will always be meaningful regardless of what physics turned out to be true I just don’t think the two have to have any connection at all and yes that does make a bit of a mystery about what do we mean when we say this would have happened had Caesar been in charge even if that never happened anywhere in the multiverse you know I let’s accept it as a legitimate mystery but I don’t think it poses any problem to understanding counterfactuals and how they relate to say what a computer is or how constructor theory works so I don’t think you actually have to in any way invoke the multiverse to be able to be able to make sense of counterfactuals so let me start with that as my starting point now let’s now take the concept of free will so if you have no free will and this is what Deutsche is arguing because we exist in space -time I would argue that that’s just as true if we exist in the multiverse now I was just listening to Sam Harris if you take a look at what he said about famously Sam Harris believes that free will is an illusion okay and famously people pit Deutsche as being at odds with Sam Harris on this because Deutsche quote believes in free will but if you actually pay attention there’s no actual disagreement going on here

[00:56:04]  Green: because Sam Harris is saying that if you look at it in terms of space -time then free will is an illusion and we just read that Deutsche agrees with him had space -time been real that it would be an illusion but Sam Harris goes one further he says okay let’s back up and assume it’s the multiverse some sort of quantum event randomly causes different universes to branch out that still doesn’t affect your free will right in fact it brings nothing to the table in terms of the kind of stereotypical way of thinking of free will so the libertarian view of free will is still just an illusion in the multiverse I don’t see how Deutsche could argue with that that is absolutely true because it still exists as a block universe it still exists it’s just happening across different universes let’s say though you want to take a strong stance that no there’s some difference here I don’t know what it would be because honestly my will is the fact that these universes are branching is entirely controlled by the laws of physics it’s not something that’s under my control at all so if there’s some universe where I make a choice and it goes one way in one universe and I make a different choice and it goes some other way in some other universe it was still the laws of physics that determined that and I still had no choice in it right because it’s still a block universe but do you see my argument here as to why I think you nothing really changes with quantum physics before I move on

[00:57:28]  Blue: well yeah it seems to me that the Deutsche and Harris are really it’s sort of a question of emphasis in a way I mean the Sam Harris in his arguments against free will I mean he says well yeah we live in a deterministic universe but the emphasizes that every thought comes from another thought and all this whereas Deutsche might also agree that yes we live in a deterministic universe happens to be a multiverse but it’s like you say it’s still still equally deterministic if not more so really but you know he just sort of but still the growth of knowledge is impossible to predict that humans as knowledge creators we don’t know where our knowledge will grow and if you call that free will it seems like a pretty good definition to me so

[00:58:24]  Green: okay so let’s let’s let’s take a look at that okay because you actually we’re going exactly where I was going to go with this so thank you so the issue here is the definition of free will or rather what we mean by free will now it shouldn’t be surprising that free will is a concept as a word is a concept vague and that we mean different things by it under different circumstances that shouldn’t surprise us even slightly now what Sam Harris is really saying so this is where it makes sense to define things not because we’re trying to find a word but because we’re trying to talk about what someone means okay so when Sam Harris says free will is an illusion he very specifically means everything is determined and that you have no control over it and if we reroll time and it plays out again it will always play out exactly the way it did before okay which is true whether we’re talking Einstein space time or a quantum multiverse and that concept of free will it does not exist and Deutsch is not arguing the point okay because Deutsch knows that’s true that concept of free will does not exist I don’t know if I should say it’s an illusion okay and I kind of take some issue with Sam Harris calling an illusion because when I think of illusions I think of something that does exist that this thing seems like it is but it isn’t

[00:59:55]  Blue: well he even goes a step further and the part of him the part of his thing that I really actually don’t agree with but is that he thinks that you can meditate and practice mindfulness and actually perceive that we don’t have free will I mean I haven’t really meditated very much but it’s that just seems like kind of nonsense to me honestly in

[01:00:21]  Green: the way that Sam Harris is defining free will free will does not exist and that’s follows directly from not only both of our best theories of physics but it follows directly from any theory of physics you can conceive

[01:00:37]  Blue: that’s a good distillation yeah

[01:00:40]  Green: and so if that’s what you actually mean by free will then yes it does not exist I don’t even think we should call an illusion because that implies that there was something that it could have been but it was just that it was just a completely logically incoherent concept to begin with we can dismiss it entirely if that’s what we mean by free will now doge then actually in the podcast Sam Harris is arguing with Daniel Dennett who believes that there is free will he doesn’t disagree with Sam Harris that that type of free will doesn’t exist he agrees it doesn’t he agrees it’s incoherent doge agrees that kind of free will is incoherent okay and doge and Dennett agree though that when we talk about free will we it’s not a complete meaningless statement we mean something and it means something that’s real so Daniel Dennett gives the example of did you sign this contract of your own free will okay whatever we mean by free will in that concept really probably has nothing at all to do with the kind of free will that Sam Harris says doesn’t exist we mean something different by free will in that context and what we mean in this context probably means were you being constrained by somebody else’s will and if you answer no yes I did this of my own free will that means this was this was my choice

[01:02:01]  Green: now the idea of your choice is not an unmeaningful concept just as the blow time is a meaningful concept from the point of view of a person living in space time the idea of a choice is equally meaningful from the point of view of a person living in space time yes we can make it seem really strange by imagining ourselves stepping outside of space time and there being some fake time out there and looking at it from a different dimension because it already exists at this point but the concept of you making a choice is an emergent concept just like the flow of time that is a perfectly meaningful concept from the point of view of an observer because what it really means is that nobody else was constraining you okay and that’s perfectly meaningful concept

[01:02:48]  Blue: and some people are more free than others someone living in North Korea has less freedom than someone in an open society so yeah freedom means something and if you want to call it free will I think it’s pretty valid

[01:03:09]  Green: okay so what we’ve now said is free will does not exist under certain understandings of free will and free will does exist under certain understandings of free will and really this should be uncontroversial okay when Sam and Dennett argue what they really argue over is whether or not what Dennett is arguing the concept that Dennett is arguing in favor of Sam Harris is not claiming it doesn’t exist he’s claiming we shouldn’t call it free will and that’s it they’re actually just arguing over a word and once you realize that the rest of the argument seems silly okay I

[01:03:48]  Blue: think you’ve distilled the argument very well

[01:03:51]  Green: okay now let me add one more on Deutsch is arguing that because we are knowledge creators and knowledge creation is unpredictable that there’s a certain other sense in which we have free will different than the Dennett sense okay though he’s not saying Dennett sense is wrong where we can create new choices and options for ourselves through creating new knowledge and this is unpredictable okay for some reason people really tie predictability and free will together and I’m a little unclear why but and I’m going to show you why in just a second okay um but uh so he’s saying this is what we could think of as free will now I want to suggest that if you define free will that way that free will is a real thing okay this is what we call compatibilist free will

[01:04:44]  Green: and it’s perfectly fine that Sam says I don’t want to call that free will because in Sam’s mind the word free will is just too strongly when he says the word free will too many people associate it not with the Deutsch version of free will which he agrees is true but more with the libertarian sense of free will that’s an incoherent concept okay so Sam Harris is really just saying I’m not going to call that free will because I think it’s misleading which is actually a fair point alright and Deutsch is saying well when we talk about free will I think that that when we’re not talking about the incoherent version of it I think that really we’re talking about the fact that we’re knowledge creators and we can make choices for ourselves and I think that’s a fair point too okay and if you wanted to find free will that way then I think yes free will exists

[01:05:38]  Green: now here’s where things get interesting Deutsch still wants to tie the his concept of free will to the concept of counterfactuals and he still wants to tie it if not directly to the multiverse like he used to in chapter 11 of fabric reality I found quotes from him where he still says I think we’re going to have to understand how these relate before we can fully understand how to build an AGI for example okay because he thinks that this is something that’s going to turn out to be relevant to understand how the multiverse relates to free will and how it relates to counterfactuals before we’re going to build a build an AGI he’s not claiming you need a multiverse necessarily anymore okay but he’s claiming that the concepts will relate I’m going to now give you a thought experiment that will prove that this is just simply not true and I brought this thought experiment up to various fans of David Deutsch and I can’t get them to take it seriously for some reason but I think this is just a lock solid thought experiment okay so according to Deutsch and according to Deutsch’s church touring Deutsch thesis we should be able to build an AGI on a computer that’s true right Deutsch is not contesting that furthermore he doesn’t think there’s any reason to believe that the brain uses quantum effects so he believes that it can even be a regular classical touring machine now he doesn’t know that for sure and my experiment won’t matter which way we go on this but even Deutsch accepts that we could in theory build an AGI on a regular touring machine okay um

[01:07:18]  Green: so so far I’m just sticking with something that’s just a pure implication from Deutsch’s theories so let’s say that we suddenly that in the future we have that knowledge and we build an AGI on a computer

[01:07:32]  Green: and let me even just go on a limb here like there’s a question of um do you have to build a build an AGI do you have to have an outside world I suspect you do I suspect that if you took a baby brain and you completely disconnected it from all sense it would simply never develop into a person to begin with okay I don’t know that for sure some people might say oh it might still learn to think and think about itself or something like that I don’t really know okay for the sake of argument just so that we’re satisfying everybody’s viewpoint let’s imagine that this AGI or maybe it’s a set of AGI’s exist inside of a virtual world okay so they have no contact with the outside world and the exist inside this virtual world but the virtual world is rich enough that if you need an outside world to be able to develop intelligence that it has what it needs to develop into a set of intelligences okay now we know this should be possible too because of CTD CTD says we can simulate whatever we need to so we can to whatever level of detail we need so whatever level detail we need of an outside world if any at all for an intelligence to develop is included in this simulation this is the point I’m trying to make okay now this simulation um is running and these intelligences develop inside and their knowledge prediction is from their point of view entirely unpredictable and they develop the in fact it’s even unpredictable from our point of view if I’m outside of I’m looking at this maybe one of the intelligences one of the people living inside the virtual world develop some new mathematical theorem or something that nobody in our world has ever created and now I see it I’ve got some way to view inside in the sake of this thought experiment and I see this equation I publish it and I go look my intelligence inside my world made kept with this really useful mathematical equation right or theorem and it’s completely unpredictable what knowledge that these uh these intelligences are going to create exactly like do it says we’re still exactly following do it’s theories okay this is pure for strandism still okay now imagine I run in the exact same program a second time but on a computer that is slower okay so the exact same world is going to unfold the exact same discoveries are going to take place because computers are entirely deterministic and the exact same discoveries will take place and the world will unfold in exactly the same way but it’s going to happen at a slower pace do I now have the ability to predict for the second computer on the slower computer what knowledge they’re going to create yes or no

[01:10:17]  Green: I’m gonna say I don’t know

[01:10:20]  Blue: I’m gonna say no but we’ll uh I I’m still digesting it so

[01:10:26]  Green: people try to say no people try to say no you can’t predict it but let me make this clear Turing machines are entirely and computers are entirely deterministic okay this is the exact same computer with the exact same inputs they’re running on a deterministic machine

[01:10:43]  Blue: okay

[01:10:44]  Green: can you predict what’s going to happen on the slower of the two computers

[01:10:50]  Blue: well you would need another another Turing machine to predict what’s on what’s going to happen on the first Turing machine right you have to

[01:11:01]  Green: right okay we have to

[01:11:02]  Blue: okay in

[01:11:04]  Green: this world that you do right you’ve got the faster world and you’ve got slower but other than that mechanical

[01:11:08]  Blue: okay so

[01:11:10]  Green: you’re looking you’re looking at the faster world you see them invent this new mathematical theorem it was not predictable you now know that in two days the slower computer’s going to invent the same mathematical theorem okay is there any way around that being true that you can think of

[01:11:27]  Blue: no

[01:11:28]  Green: no okay I brought this up and I had somebody say what if there’s an error okay well first of all you’ve now introduced the idea that knowledge creation and free will require errors which is very strange thing for you to introduce but we can just tweak the experiment we can say these are really good computers and most computers are really good even today and they rarely if ever have hardware errors that would affect the outcome of a program and even if over a long enough period if they’ll have an hardware error this thought experiment’s going to stop before the first error takes place which is a very reasonable thing for me to say about the thought experiment okay based on this and I can keep doing this anything you come up with that you try to make them differentiate I’m going to because it’s reasonable for me to do so I’m going to remove that possibility from the thought experiment I’m going to make sure that it is impossible that these two worlds diverge okay

[01:12:27]  Green: this is absolutely what follows from force trans theory there is no way around it it is a lock solid impossible to get around implication of knowledge creation of free will and guess what it does not matter that it’s in a multiverse because computers are programmed to not have branches in a multiverse right there they are doing the exact same thing in every version of the multiverse from the moment they start running because they have the error correction necessary to not differentiate there are no random events in the computer that would take place that would cause them to start branching okay if they did we’d call that an error all right I’ve already said this all happens before the first error takes place so it does not matter that they’re in a multiverse the multiverse plays zero role now here’s where things get interesting from the point of view of a person living inside this virtual world they have free will and it’s it’s the Deutsche kind of free will they they can have great knowledge they can make new choices for themselves and they’re they nobody can predict nobody inside that world even on the slower computer nobody inside that world can predict the creation of knowledge I can because I live outside the computer and I have a version of it that’s faster that’s running okay but as far as the people inside that world are concerned even if they’re on the slower of the two computers knowledge creation is zero predictable okay and they effectively have free will exactly in the sense that Deutsche claims free will exists

[01:14:03]  Green: and notice that this can happen that the Deutsche version of free will can exist even in a circumstance where there is no multiverse okay and that follows directly from for strands theory from Deutsche’s theories there is not a single thing I have changed in the slightest these are lock solid implications of his own theories

[01:14:24]  Blue: and he would he would just to be clear he at least the Deutsche today would agree

[01:14:28]  Green: yes and he couldn’t disagree there would be no way for him to disagree right because these are implications of his theories now based on this I can draw a conclusion this is why you’ll hear me say the multiverse plays no role in free will now the only way around that would be if something like Saudia’s theories were true where we find out that for strands theory is wrong okay that’s what it would take right for me to be wrong in this conclusion it’s a conclusion based on the assumption that the theories are right which is always how we draw conclusions right if Saudia’s theories that all of physics is wrong and we’re going to have brand new ideas that take us in a totally different direction then of course everything I just said was out the window okay but we’re part of our thought experiment is assuming Deutsche is correct there’s more here though

[01:15:20]  Green: Deutsche just argued we just read that he argued that in the block universe there are no cause and effects that is not true that cannot be true because there are cause and effects that that concept of cause and effects inside this virtual world is still a meaningful concept even though it does not exist inside of a multiverse so it must be that he’s wrong that cause and effect do not exist and are just an illusion if there’s a block universe now I would argue that we need to understand cause and effect also as an emergent concept just like the flow of time and just like free will and that they are emergent concepts that we use to explain things from the point of view an observer inside of the universe and that in from that point of view there are completely meaningful thing and that the only reason why they seem like an illusion is because you are imagining a scenario that never happens could never happen physically where somebody has stepped outside that universe and can see that it all now exists in advance and he’s watching with a fake time it happening but you know what even then I don’t see how that’s different than us watching these people living inside this virtual computer right we can’t predict them right if the only way we can predict them is by running forward in time and then going back and running again and then we can predict I’ve suggested that we call this retradiction retradiction is predicting backwards that what we really do is we never predict in the first place we never actually predict the creation of knowledge of novel knowledge what we actually do is we predict the second creation of knowledge

[01:17:04]  Green: and I want to point something else out too from the point of view of the people living inside this world we may from our viewpoint point say well we’ve got a version of let’s name one of the AIs Bob okay we have a version of Bob running on one computer and we have a version of Bob running on another computer those two computers aren’t running at the same speed so one version of Bob is from our point of view now on year three and one version of Bob in the other computer is now on year two okay but eventually Bob on year two is going to catch up to exactly where Bob is at year three it’s just that his computer is a bit slower from Bob’s point of view there’s only one Bob this is exactly what the multiverse is like okay we there’s always in you could all you could think of it as there’s always an infinity of universes that are all identical and then they branch and they’re not identical once they branch but at any given moment there’s always an infinity that are also identical and to ask the question which is the real you is no more meaningful than to ask which is the real Bob inside this multiverse for all intents and purposes Bob exists in a multiverse of two identical universes that are exactly identical so we might as well just think of them as a single universe

[01:18:20]  Blue: okay

[01:18:21]  Green: does that make sense so far

[01:18:23]  Blue: I’m hanging on

[01:18:24]  Green: so so the

[01:18:26]  Blue: knowledge creation is a lot like free will in that it is deterministic that we you know it can’t predict it or at least can’t easily predict it because if we had if we could predict it we would already have that knowledge so from that perspective it’s a kind of a wrong concept

[01:18:53]  Green: so it depends on what you mean by predictability if what you mean by predictability is predictable the first time knowledge creation is 100 % non predictable Steven Wolfram has a theory around this as to why that is it actually is fairly simple it’s that the universe runs at its speed so for me to simulate our universe would require the entire first of all require an entire universe a computer size the size of the universe to do and probably larger than the universe to be able to do and then it would still run at the laws of physics so you cannot actually build something that’s going to predict the regular world out there running because your computer exists within the world so imagine let’s use the same thought experiment we’re on the faster computer and Bob invents a computer that he’s going to simulate his virtual world on okay um first of all this may be physically impossible for Bob because by definition his world must have less memory available than the one that he’s running on but let’s get around that let’s imagine that there’s virtual memory that exists and we’re going to intentionally increase the memory as Bob does this so that he’s able to make a simulation inside of his simulation so Bob has figured out what the starting point for his world was maybe he’s figured out he lives inside of a virtual world and he decides to simulate his own world okay could Bob run his computer forward in time and find out what’s going to happen in his world would that be physically possible to happen before it happens in his world

[01:20:36]  Green: unless we like intentionally gave his simulation more clicks of our computer it would be impossible because he is living inside of a computer that has its computing power so his simulated computer must by definition have less computing power than was available to his world does that make sense yeah

[01:20:57]  Blue: and then you know who’s going to make sure this other computer works properly and is predicting this knowledge properly you would almost need like another level of computers and people working on that so I guess the take home point from this thought experience is that it sort of does make sense to say that knowledge creation is unpredictable yes

[01:21:20]  Green: it does and we get that for free right there is just no way around that we don’t need anything special we don’t need Sabine what’s her name’s paper where she tries to imagine you know some set of deterministic numbers that can’t be predicted it’s completely unnecessary Steven Wolfram is correctly understood this knowledge creation is unpredictable period end of story if by predictable you mean the first the first time it happens yes we can imagine predicting it in the case of two computers somebody on the outside some and one of the two computers being slower but for the people in that computer knowledge creation is still unpredictable

[01:22:01]  Blue: I mean we would almost need like an infinite regress of Laplace’s demons yes

[01:22:07]  Green: but let’s let’s try to get around it without the infinite regress okay so let’s say that I’ve got these two computers running and I decide I’m going to now allow them to communicate now remember Bob and world one is at your three and Bob and world two is at your two and I suddenly announced to both of them hey I’m your creator and I’m giving you access to communicate with each other okay this is exactly the same as David Deutch’s description of time travel what actually think through what actually happens now okay so Bob in world three sorry Bob and world one he’s at your three and let’s say Bob in his world that he got a divorce six months ago so he goes and he tells Bob and world two who’s still married I got a divorce and here is why will Bob and world two be forced to get a divorce or will he have free will not to stop and think about this because now we’re really getting into what free will actually is

[01:23:15]  Red: or does he even have the opportunity to understand why the other him got a divorce and realize maybe he doesn’t want a divorce and he wants to do different things

[01:23:26]  Green: let’s let’s say he does that okay so based on Bob’s programming he receives this news that he’s going to make this mistake and it’s going to end in a divorce so he decides to not make the mistake Bob in world two has free will the fact that and why is that we’ll why why is it even though these are deterministic worlds why is it that world two now diverges is it will it will diverge he now gets to make a different choice and world two will no longer be the same as world three from the moment I open up communication between them why would that be and how do we explain this there’s nothing actually magic about it it still follows directly from theory it may sound a little magical but it’s not in the slightest magical

[01:24:10]  Blue: it’s it’s a very compelling thought experiment I need to spend some time hey I’ll give you the

[01:24:17]  Green: answer okay the inputs are now different a deterministic function will give a different output if you if the inputs are different right so the moment you open up communication that’s exactly identical to saying that world two is no longer has the same original inputs as world one so we would expect them to start to diverge even though they run on a deterministic computer in fact that will happen even if I don’t put them in communication let’s say that I just simply start communicating with both of them my communication with both of them will be slightly different so the moment I start to communicate with them we would expect both of those worlds to start to diverge a little even though they’re running on a deterministic computer because the inputs are now different for each of them you could make the argument they wouldn’t be different if I kept them exactly the same but like that’s physically impossible for me to do I’m going to do things at slightly different times you know there’s going to be slight differences that are going to exist and those will lead to an unpredictable change in the way world two unfolds the moment I start not having the only reason why they were following exactly the same path before was because I kept them entirely sealed off from the outside world and that they couldn’t communicate with each other the moment they can start to communicate with the outside world their inputs change and now we expect them to start to diverge and now collectively they will be unpredictable from that point forward even to me even to me on the outside this is actually so there’s several things we’ve now covered first of all the idea that

[01:26:00]  Green: in space time there’s no cause and effect that can’t be true because these are completely deterministic worlds that have no multiverse and yet they have cause and effects the fact that we need that for free will cannot be true unless you want to argue that for some magic reason even though these people feel like they have free will that they actually don’t in which case you’re right back to Sam Harris again and that’s going to be just as true for us if we were to have somebody who could step outside of our universe and our space time

[01:26:30]  Blue: okay

[01:26:30]  Green: so free will just simply has nothing to do with the laws of physics because it’s it’s since it’s something free will in the Deutchian sense follows from having the right kind of algorithm the creative algorithm being an AGI or being a general intelligence and that will be true and you can run it on a computer and a computer is divorced from physics because it’s a different layer of abstraction so physics plays no role in free will period end of story free will is a computational concept that you does not matter what the laws of physics actually are well when I say that I mean barring them being something totally strange like Saudi wants them to be I just mean whether it’s Einstein space time or quantum physics it will not make it slice bit of difference and there’s no reason to believe quantum gravity is going to make the slightest difference either all right because these wheels still work just because we discovered new laws of physics right so if you can write an AGI on a turning machine under Saudi’s physics you can’t write an AGI on a turning machine until you understand the correct laws of physics under this version matter what the laws of physics turn out to be we’re already saying as part of the thought experiment that an AGI is possible so it will not matter what laws of physics we find from that point forward it will still be the case that free will was a computational concept that was an emergent concept now remember emergent concepts are less real right this is one of the

[01:27:57]  Green: things which is really trying to explain is that reductionism is wrong that there is no fundamentality towards our world being more real than the world of this virtual world right the fact that free will is an emergent concept that doesn’t make it a less important concept the fact and whether we should call it free while not still an open discussion but I’m going with the Deutsch version of it okay there is no need to study the multiverse there is no need to understand what the laws of physics are there’s no need to work out a multiverse theory of causality those might be interesting things to do in their own right but they will not even slightly not even a little bit not even an iota inform you on AGI free will our free will our concept of causality etc. I should probably note that physics has no concept of causality this is something that physicists are well aware of and your physicists listening to this program you probably mad that I didn’t say this prior to this point on the laws of physics have no concept of causality and the causality is forward and backwards right it’s you can in theory reverse the laws of physics and the forces work the same way both back and forwards that’s not true for a computer by the way computers are not reversible unless they’re intentionally reversible computer which is very very very hard to engineer computers can’t be reversed so once you get to a certain state in a program you can’t say well back up this many steps and do that again the information to do that’s lost at that point okay so

[01:29:32]  Green: that is maybe one difference between us where we live in a reversible essentially we live inside a reversible universe and the people in the virtual world don’t but that shouldn’t make any difference either because according to this thought experiment it must be the case that free will causality all those things are completely divorced from that this means causality is an emergent concept it’s a useful emergent concept it’s very important to the concept of explanations right that we work we work out explanations based on causality but the concept of causality causality is not related to the concept of physics and we shouldn’t look for causality in physics we should understand them as being emergent concepts

[01:30:15]  Blue: okay just to summarize we live in a deterministic universe the multiverse many worlds interpretation seems to if anything support this idea knowledge creation is inherently unpredictable which I think your thought experiment captured very well what Deutsch is wrong about in this chapter at least or was wrong about maybe is that the flow of time does actually make some sense it’s not nonsense whether many worlds is not as maybe nothing to do with that space time is real or is not

[01:31:04]  Green: well it depends on what you mean by space time if you mean it’s a theory then obviously it has to be false because we know it’s a theory to be not true and we expect many worlds to be a more true account of it but if you use space time to mean many worlds quantum physics which you could you know to it’s got it’s own version of space time then it’s free thing

[01:31:25]  Blue: okay and then free will is well if you again depends on how you define it but there’s I think you’ve made the case there’s some pretty reasonable ways to define free will that you can meaningful talk about humans having it I think I agree with that but none of this necessarily is dependent on the multiverse so that’s kind of like where Deutsch himself seems to feel he got it wrong and fabric fabric of reality is trying to tie it into the many worlds

[01:32:01]  Green: yes I think I think we’re trying to figure out if there’s a relationship and what I’m trying to say is we actually already know there’s no relationship you just have to understand that that is already already an implication of his own theories so I that I don’t think he’s caught yet or if he has he hasn’t published anything about it so but I do think this thought experiment makes it quite simple I’ve maybe we can talk about I brought since I have brought it up what are things that people have suggested to me as ways to get around it and let me maybe try to steal my nature their arguments and explain why they’re wrong so

[01:32:38]  Blue: one

[01:32:39]  Green: of them was it’s a mystery we don’t know why but those two worlds even though they run on a terministic computer would diverge I’ve had people argue that my answer to that would be you have now entirely left the theory behind you you’re violating entirely you’re basically saying I’m no longer accepting the four strands theories okay so that’s if that were to be true we would have a mystery to solve that would mean that everything we thought we knew about physics and about computation is wrong

[01:33:13]  Green: so that one I can discard on those grounds I had somebody argue to me that an error might take place and that maybe errors are necessary for divergence you’ve now introduced the idea that that it’s impossible to have free will without errors I don’t even see how this makes sense I could I could just simulate an error on a machine because everything’s simulatable so if I need an error to have free will then I would simulate an error and then I would redo the thought experiment complete with the with a deterministic simulation of errors and nothing would change in my thought experiment okay plus I can always just change the thought experiment to say well you know errors like that don’t happen very often they don’t happen probably within years so let’s only run the thought experiment until the first error happens and everything I said is still true so it does not change the thought experiment in the slight slightest and it doesn’t change any of the conclusions in the slightest I had one person argue to me that that I was assuming too much because real people in the real world were fungible because their minds were fungible and I mentioned this in one of the previous podcasts and that I wasn’t taking that into consideration now first of all that is a thorough misunderstanding of the concept of fungibility it the person who said this very clearly did not understand quantum physics or understand how it what fungibility role plays in it at all okay because it does not bring a thing to the table here

[01:34:46]  Green: this as I mentioned they were taking their hopes and dreams and they were stuffing it into a superstition that they were calling fungibility and really not much else was going on so that the he they were saying the minds existing in the two two different computers were were might as well be the same no no no or were fungible what’s that what what they were saying was nonsense so it’s unclear what the point was right

[01:35:14]  Blue: okay

[01:35:15]  Green: so so they were saying you don’t know this and then they were trying to reference what they thought was a mystery the fungibility of minds so the let’s let’s try to take the thought experiment seriously even though I’m pretty sure it was nonsense okay let’s say that you had to have fungibility using quantum physics to have a mind well one of the implications there is that you can’t run an AGI on a normal machine that it’s going to require a quantum computer but that’s an unbreakable implication of that statement if we take it seriously okay so I would just at that point redo the thought experiment because I’m always willing to change the thought experiment to match things like this and I’d say okay these are now quantum computers and quantum computers are still deterministic and so now we can write these minds and these AGI’s that are on quantum computers because now you’re claiming we need a quantum computer for some reason you’re not specifying why it’s just a mystery that we need a quantum computer to be able to run a mind to create an AGI so I’ve got two of these two computers one slower than the other everything else stays the same it does not change a thing to try to reference quantum physics or fungibility or anything else okay they weren’t even worried about the implications they were just trying to find some way to say oh you’ve missed something and they weren’t trying to think it through is the honest truth okay furthermore this shouldn’t make any difference anyhow because in theory we can we can simulate a quantum computer on a regular regular computer

[01:36:49]  Green: so now in terms of tractability this would never work in real life right it’s you would need an awfully large computer to be able to do this but this is just a thought experiment so we’re going to imagine an infinite size universe and we’re going to make an infinite sized computer and how large it needs to be it can be finite but it needs to be large enough that I can simulate a quantum computer that’s large enough to run these virtual worlds and now I’m going to take these two large classical Turing machines and they’re going to be simulating you know two large enough quantum Turing machines and they’re going to create these people now again this all follows from Deutsches Theories there are lock hard implications so if we need fungibility in quantum physics for some reason I can still do this on a Turing machine I just need a large enough Turing machine and then you could say well it’s really slow okay and then it runs long enough that you know that eventually from the point of view of the person living inside the computer it doesn’t matter how slow or fast the computer runs they experience their life as they experience their life right from their moment to moment and so nothing changes that there is not a thing that changes by referencing quantum physics by demanding that you need quantum physics to run mines by referencing fungibility nothing changes in the in the thought experiment by doing this I actually brought this up with Kiarra Morletto and her answer was I don’t remember so I might get it a little bit wrong that well we don’t know for sure

[01:38:25]  Green: ultimately the laws of physics will determine if it’s possible to do an experiment like this okay that’s exactly identical to saying universality isn’t actually true which is an abandonment of part of the basics of force trans theory now again that would be a true statement right anytime you want to say well something in the existing theory is false you get to claim the thought experiment what isn’t going to work okay but the whole point of thought experiment was to see if you could what happened if you took the force trans theory seriously and you didn’t violate any of the theories okay so that doesn’t work either there is no way around this thought experiment as long as you’re taking force trans theory seriously there just is no way around it this is a lock solid undeniable implication of force trans theory in its current form at least and so based on that now again maybe force trans theory is wrong that could be true in which case every conclusion I’ve given you is false

[01:39:24]  Green: but or it could be false I should say it still might be true depending on what’s different about this new version of this theory we’re imagining the problem is and this gets back to the discussion about me and Saadia we can only really work on what we currently have theories of yes I can vaguely reference there might be some other theory that I don’t have today and that I can’t tell you what it is because I don’t have it today and under this theory that I can’t describe to you it’s going to turn out to be that you can only build an AGI inside a virtual world in such a way that they’re completely unpredictable and they can’t both work which would imply you can’t build them on a toy machine by the way or really even build them on a quantum computer it would imply that you need something else entirely because a toy machine can simulate a quantum computer so yes you can reference that to me which is what Saadia is doing and yes I won’t deny that’s a possibility but that was never my point to begin with my point was what are the implications of the current theory this is one of them it is that there should be no connection between free will and physics oh

[01:40:32]  Blue: that’s a that’s a compelling way of putting it no no connection wow okay that’s you’ve made your case well

[01:40:44]  Green: okay so that’s really what I wanted to cover today I usually try to find some things that I agree with the person I’m disagreeing with over so I feel like we’re completely leaving out most of what Deutsch actually says and that’s fine because I was trying to concentrate on what I thought we could was the interesting divergence however he does a pretty interesting job of describing what time would look like in quantum theory and there’s actually a lot there and and if you understand him as saying the flow of time is not real from a certain point of view not from Bruce’s way of defining the flow of time I still think what he’s saying is true

[01:41:27]  Blue: now

[01:41:27]  Green: and I do feel like there’s maybe a legitimate mystery to understand why we feel the way we do about causality when it has to be largely divorced from physics right it’s physics is only tangentially connected to it in that you need physics to create these sorts of universes but and from a certain point of view yes there’s no causality in a block universe another point of view there is because causality is really something about somebody living inside that block time and what the world is like to them and it’s an emergent concept that comes from it by the way since causality is closely linked to explanations this may be a hint about AGI that explanations are themselves a type of computation that makes sense AGIs have to run as a computation and that there are a computational concept that we can work out there is such a thing as the computational description of what an explanation is which means we should have a theory of explanations there should be a theory of explanations I know Deutsch has resisted that a little I don’t think he strongly resists it but he said well since explanations can you know anything can work as an explanation you have to always be open to what can work as an explanation you can’t say an explanation is this and it’s not that because somebody might surprise you an example this is the halting problem is that we had Hilbert who tried to say hey we’re going to someday have a mathematics that

[01:43:09]  Green: shows that everything we can prove everything is true and then we had Godel come along and do his proof which is the same as the halting problem that’s why I keep saying the halting problem but I should be saying Godel’s theorem and he showed through his theorem that that was impossible well the way he showed that was by using math in a totally new way that was outside the way math normally got used and yet it still worked as an explanation so this leaves a bit of a mystery as to what an explanation is and yet explanations have to be computational concepts a computational concept so there should be a theory of explanation and actually think that’s if you want to study AGI I think that’s probably the starting point is to try to figure out what is an explanation I’ve mentioned a few times that there is a type of machine learning called explanation based learning and that first of all that’s really interesting since explanations are the basis for for computation for universal explainers according to the current theory anyhow it makes sense that we would that explanation based learning should be a very productive branch but it hasn’t been it’s really just been dwarfed in its successes compared to just the regular probabilistic neural nets which is what creates GPT chat and all the huge breakthroughs had nothing to do with explanation based learning which is by the way one of the ways I know they must be on the wrong path towards AGI there’s probably a lot of interesting progress that could be made in the area of explanation based learning if we could refine the concept of an explanation

[01:44:54]  Green: but nobody really knows that right this is a case where if you’re a machine learning person and you’re studying machine intelligence or artificial intelligence using force -trans theory I just gave you a hint of where to go look like what you should be researching right but nobody knows that that’s not something that has cross -pollinated enough yet so I think that’s an example of how force -trans theories should be able to inform artificial intelligence research at least by narrowing where you need to go do your search

[01:45:31]  Blue: it seems to me Dwight’s definition of an explanation is quite far -reaching I mean I can see why he would be hesitant to try to put a definition on that as far as I can tell I

[01:45:47]  Green: have no idea how you do it if I were to define an explanation for you today what I would actually do is I would define it exactly the way that Judea Pearl defines causality I would use a graph and I would work out causalities because that’s the only thing that I can currently think of when I think of explanations is when I try to say okay this explains that I almost immediately my mind goes to causalities and there’s already a theory of how to model causality so that’s what I would try to use right it’s maybe all wrong but that’s about as far as I can get it at this point I’ve been wanting to get that thought experiment out there because I feel like it enlightens so much about this that people are stumbling over and it just sort of cuts it all away and you start to realize free will has a limit in what it can mean it has a limit in how it can be connected to physics it immediately reduces the search if that makes any sense

[01:46:50]  Blue: it’s kind of a riff on Laplace’s demon right I’m kind of taking in a bit of another direction so

[01:46:59]  Green: Laplace’s demon is correct right in a deterministic universe in theory that would be correct the reason why Laplace’s demon doesn’t work is because of Wolfram’s theory that whatever you’re going to use to make the prediction has to exist within your universe and therefore has to be slower than your universe okay the reason why I was able to get away with it with the virtual worlds is because they’re both simulations and I exist on the outside the key thing here is that this whole thought experiment only works as long as I never communicate with the people inside the virtual world so that they don’t know about me and so that they can’t communicate

[01:47:40]  Green: with each other and everything stays the same it has to be closed right has to be entirely closed off the moment there’s any extra input from the outside world things will diverge so you might imagine the thought experiment like this so let’s say that you get to year 100 with both these thought experiments and then the Bob in world one discovers he lives inside of a computer and he even happens to figure out that if he by doing certain things he can determine something about the outside world okay I don’t know how you would do that from inside a computer but like maybe you could imagine that he figured out that this in his simulation is actually tied to the registers in the CPU and so he somehow has discovered that he didn’t know before that he actually has this this ability to know something about the outside world okay so he starts to take measurements about the outside world well of course that’s now a new input so we’ll start to diverge from this point they can’t be the same anymore this is actually one of the main things about just our own brains right is we try to imagine oh no I’m a deterministic now my brain is deterministic that means I have no free will and there was even a story a science fiction writer wrote where you had this device and if you if you tried to anytime you tried to push the button it would light up before you pushed the button so that you knew it had figured out what your intention was before you did it and so everybody realizes they have no free will and they get depressed that first of all if I suspect we could make such a device it wouldn’t be that hard I

[01:49:24]  Blue: well I think it’s more than a science fiction story they’ve actually performed experience experiments like that right like

[01:49:30]  Green: yes

[01:49:31]  Blue: neuroscience

[01:49:32]  Green: yes I think he was basing it on that he was trying to make everybody get a chance to experience it

[01:49:37]  Blue: yeah

[01:49:38]  Green: and first of all wouldn’t be that hard let’s say you had this device had a little MRI device in it and it’s scanning your brain and it detects you’re about to touch it so it lights up that didn’t impinge on my free will in any way right and so okay so you say okay so actually this device would not in any way make me feel like I don’t have free will if you understood it so now you say well what the device is really doing is it’s running your brain algorithm and it’s figuring out what you’re going to do before you do it okay and it’s a little bit faster than you well that’s not possible because the inputs of that device and the inputs to me are not the same okay if you made an exact clone of me and you put that person in the world they immediately they were me up until the clone took place but from that point forward we’re two different people and we start to diverge because our inputs are different this all follows from determinism so there was never an issue here that that device is either yes you can make it and it’s no big deal or no you can’t make it it’s a physical impossibility those are the two possible outcome there are no other outcomes possible under current theory right so a lot of these things that people are worried about they’re just nothing they’re just literally nothing to worry about

[01:50:56]  Green: there are implications though but sam harris makes a big deal out of the fact that the concept of dessert doesn’t make sense he’s right about that so one of our concepts desserts the idea that you punish people because they quote deserve it um punishment does make sense there there’s there’s arguments to be made that uh good arguments correct arguments that even if we’re all deterministic that you still have to have penalties this is what daniel denning argues okay because the system doesn’t work without them but the concept of desserts is wrong according to four strands theory and that is the part of free will that i think people have a hard time giving up on and this is actually something that i’ve noticed right is when people try to cite the dutch version of free will they’ll say it’s because i’m a knowledge creator and i’m unpredictable and knowledge creation is unpredictable i can make new choices for myself none of that will bring back desserts as a coherent concept

[01:52:03]  Green: and it’s easy to use the thought experiment i just gave to show why right is that’s all true for these beings living inside this virtual world and yet from a certain point of view they’re just a program that’s unfolding right there’s there’s no libertarian free choice going on and so therefore they deserve it so the concept of dessert is what we’re starting to lose because the implications of science is causing us to realize our penal system has this giant thread of desserts in it and desserts is an incoherent concept and we’re moving it and it’s taking a long time and it will be centuries before it’s totally gone i suspect but i think we will eventually end up with a penal system it will still be a penal system but it will be built built around built without the concept of people deserving things i actually think that’ll be a better world i don’t think that’s a negative like at all there’ll still be consequences for actions that people are worried there’ll be no consequences for actions that will still be there like that will never go away right

[01:53:05]  Blue: yeah

[01:53:06]  Green: but i don’t know what that would be like like i’d be guessing what the future is going to look like right but you could imagine some future where when we put people in jail that we make their lives as comfortable as possible until we have a way to cure them you know or something along those lines

[01:53:22]  Blue: in some ways it’s kind of similar how we look at animals i mean you kind of sometimes you got to put down a pit bull or something but you don’t really blame the pit bull so i mean it could be seen as a sort of a dehumanizing thing i guess from that perspective and you could look at it look at it both ways

[01:53:43]  Green: so and there’s there’s other interesting things that do come from this it’s the fact that we’re slowly starting to accept that people with certain disabilities shouldn’t be held responsible quote responsible for their actions now of course by that what we mean is they don’t deserve anything but we still give them consequences for their actions it’s just a very different attitude towards it

[01:54:07]  Blue: yeah

[01:54:08]  Green: remember when you said maybe we’re all disabled in our own way that’s yeah yeah

[01:54:14]  Blue: well i think i think it’s the being in education that for various reasons we’ve moved pretty far in that direction and there may be some pluses and minuses there i’ll say that

[01:54:27]  Green: it’s something we’re going to have to work out over time right i mean like there’s there’s a lot of things that i just don’t know how this is going to play out it doesn’t sound negative to me though i’ve seen people get scared over these things and it seems to me that the fears of the deterministic nightmare that Chiara writes about or even the fact that Deutsche wrote chapter 11 of of Fabrica reality was all based around fears of free will disappearing and trying to salvage it specifically the incoherent version of free will disappearing and trying to salvage the parts of it that they like and really i just don’t think it’s going to work right it’s there yes we can talk about compatible free will but it’s exactly it’s exactly and no more of the Deutsche version it does not carry any it doesn’t carry the same moral implications of the non -compatible version of free will and if what you’re trying to do is save those which is what i think people are trying to do i think you’re wasting your time i think you have i think you’ve gone an impossible task to save the non -compatible version of free will

[01:55:41]  Green: yeah even yeah i think people who are trying to salvage parts of it would admit that the non -compatible version isn’t real but they’re still trying to salvage dessert they’re still trying to salvage you have to be seen as responsible for your action in the sense of you get a dessert if you do something wrong that’s what we’re going to lose right you there is no way to salvage that part that is part of the the incoherent version of free will we need to start concentrating on the coherent version of free will maybe we should stop calling it free will maybe sam harris is right maybe we should just call it will right we have wills this this suggestion from douglas hoffstander as he said i thought free will i call it will

[01:56:25]  Blue: uh -huh that makes a heck of a lot of sense yeah

[01:56:29]  Green: so it captures a different the word free will so strongly is associated with the incoherent version that yes i can say did you sign this of your own free will and choice maybe we should just say did you sign this of your own will and choice because now we’re not even indirectly hinting at the incoherent version right so i don’t know but this is this is all language doesn’t matter what we call it it does it does matter from a political standpoint if the word free will is dragging philosophical baggage that we don’t need we should get rid of it but from a certain point of view they’re just labels right it’s it’s the concept that matters not the word

[01:57:11]  Blue: okay well thank you for everything bruce that was real nice

[01:57:14]  Red: that last and might have been a better end than the other end

[01:57:18]  Green: okay cut out the previous end and put this new end in the theory of anything podcast could use your help we have a small but loyal audience and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well to the best of our knowledge we’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of david doich’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects if you’re enjoying this podcast please give us a five -star rating on apple podcast this can usually be done right inside your podcast player or you can google the theory of anything podcast apple or something like that some players have their own rating system and giving us a five star rating on any rating system would be helpful if you enjoy a particular episode please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on facebook or other social media to help get the word out if you are interested in financially supporting the podcast we have two ways to do that the first is via our podcast host site anchor just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands f o u r dash s t r a n d s there’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations if you want to make a one -time donation go to our blog which is four strands dot org there is a donation button there that uses paypal thank you

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