Episode 77: Counter Examples To Deutsch’s Theory of Knowledge?
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Transcript
[00:00:07] Blue: Welcome back to the 3 of Anything podcast. Hey, Peter, how’s it going? Hey, Bruce, doing great. We are going to continue our discussion about, I guess, just stuff related to Deutsch’s ideas about knowledge, his constructor theory of knowledge, that sort of thing. We’re probably going to do several more episodes about this. This one’s a little bit of a hash. I just, I found a bunch of interesting examples that I thought were worth bringing up. I thought they were cool. Maybe no one will agree with me. Let’s go ahead and I will kind of first do a recap of what we previously talked about. So, two episodes ago, we discussed Deutsch’s, what, how he defines or understands knowledge in the beginning of infinity, which we now know was the beginning of his constructor theory of knowledge. And we talked about how he uses an example of something that is not knowledge, which would be a genetic programming algorithm creating an algorithm that makes a robot walk, and how that example actually fits his properties of knowledge perfectly. So it is an example of adaptive information that causes itself to remain so. So why does it not count as knowledge? So we took a look at in the last episode, Deutsch’s constructive theory of knowledge to see if it had anything to help us understand why that would not be knowledge and the other examples that come from biological evolution and human knowledge do count. And I pointed out that the theory, the constructor theory of knowledge actually has several degrees of freedom in it. So that is places where it’s open to interpretation.
[00:01:49] Blue: So by utilizing those degrees of freedom, we can certainly rule out the walking robot algorithm example and declare it to not be knowledge if we want to. But I also showed that every single time we did that, if we held that criteria to declare it not knowledge consistent and then reapplied it to biological evolution and human ideas, then it very quickly started ruling out things that we would want to count as knowledge. So for example, if you want to rule out the walking robot algorithm on the grounds that it doesn’t last for hundreds or thousands of years. Well, guess what? Aircraft designs go out the window to because they don’t last that long either. So it puts us in an interesting spot because it’s difficult to come up with this properties of knowledge that he’s talking about and to eliminate what he wants to eliminate, but not eliminate what he wants to include, or at least defenders of the theory want to include. So I even conjectured that it might be impossible to come up with a consistent set of explicit properties of knowledge that allows, applies only to the two sources, biological evolution and human minds, without accidentally including something else. However, I also admitted that the two sources are special in some way, which is I think the main thing. And I think that’s what German and German German was originally getting at their their open ended searches is what they are. So it’s not really that they necessarily output something special, but that they’re special in how they’re able to search across a very wide landscape. So I understand why there is a desire to call only adapted information that comes through the two sources.
[00:03:31] Blue: Anytime I say the two sources, that’s the shorthand for Deutsche’s idea that there are two sources of knowledge and only two sources of knowledge, biological evolution and human minds. So anytime I say the two sources hypothesis, that’s what I’m actually referring to. So that was kind of what we’ve talked about up so so far. So today we’re going to cover some other interesting examples that are perhaps counter examples or at least examples of adapted information that that do seem to match. Deutsche’s current properties of knowledge, if you’re treating them as a criteria, but they aren’t from the two sources. And we’ve been using primarily the walking robot example, we’re going to look at some of these other examples. And I’m going to argue that these sources of whatever this is something similar to knowledge that’s outside the two sources are quite interesting in their own right. And I hope these examples will help you see why they seem quite interesting to me, right? Something that we wouldn’t want to leave out of our ultimate theory about knowledge. Even if we don’t want to call it knowledge, then we want to somehow show it has a relationship to knowledge. Okay.
[00:04:34] Red: Can I just tell a brief story before we get going here? Sure. So I was in preparation for this episode. Well, you know, I’ve been telling everyone what how great chat GPT is singing its praises, you know, I use it for cooking for, you know, playing these complicated games with my son, rather than looking through the rollbook. We just asked chat GPT so many uses for this thing, keep finding more and more like a lot of people do. But anyway, in preparation for this episode, I asked chat GPT, which chapter was it that in beginning of infinity, that David Deutsch talks about animal memes. Well, straight up without missing a beat, it told me, David Deutsch has never written a book called beginning of infinity. And if I want to learn about animals, I should go to the zoo. Nice. So would
[00:05:30] Blue: you say it was being disobedient? I don’t
[00:05:33] Red: know. It seemed a little salty
[00:05:36] Unknown: to me. Look,
[00:05:36] Red: it’s a true AGI now. It’s a true AGI. It was probably sick of me asking questions about David Deutsch or something. I don’t know. Well,
[00:05:46] Blue: you probably do overdo it. I mean, you are a big David Deutsch fan, so you’re probably like constantly hitting with David Deutsch questions. And it was really just its way of saying, dude, go get a life, you know.
[00:05:56] Red: Probably, yeah.
[00:05:59] Blue: Okay. Now, let me just say something here, though. I mean, I’ve been kind of going hard on this the last two episodes and I’m going to still, I mean, like that’s my job. But like, let me back off a little bit. Okay. And I did kind of do this in the past episodes. I pointed out that I’m making some assumptions here that may not be true. So for example, I’m treating, I’m treating Deutsch saying in beginning of infinity that knowledge is adaptive information that causes itself to remain so. I’m treating it like it’s like a all encompassing necessary and sufficient criteria for knowledge. Okay. Now, I’ve seen a lot of people who are fans of his theory of knowledge treated exactly that way. So I don’t feel like I’m entirely out and left field by doing that. But I don’t know that he’s ever said that’s what he was trying to do. You could always respond to me and maybe even appropriately by saying, okay, this is not, this is not supposed to be a necessary and sufficient criteria for knowledge. He’s just trying to give you a general idea of what he’s talking about. Okay. Now, here’s the thing though. I feel like that’s actually a good response. Although it doesn’t mean that my question is not valid. If I can take what he said so far about what is the properties of knowledge and I can show other things are included. That’s an interesting fact. And when I have done that with defenders of the theory in the past, they’ve been very quick to just kind of shut me down. Oh, no, that’s not knowledge, you know. So I feel like this is like a fair question.
[00:07:29] Blue: Even if I admit that maybe I’m a little unfairly assuming things about it that I don’t know if Deutsch would necessarily endorse or not. Maybe he would. Maybe he wouldn’t. Now, having said that, let me give a quote from Brett Hall that I think does kind of illustrate where I’m coming from. Okay. So a recent tweet from him, he says, this is a quote that he’s, I don’t know if this is like a real person. He’s quoting, but he’s like imagining somebody saying this. Philosophy is pointless. Don’t waste a minute on it. Just do science, math and code, practical things. And then he’s responding to that idea, which he believes is wrong. He says advice taken for decades by those now deep in the trenches of the AI, AGI thing. Fair enough, most philosophy is a dead end, but some is necessary. Some are slow to realize. And then in the next tweet, he says. So what is necessary? Popper is necessary. Without an understanding of what knowledge even is, how can it possibly be created? And how can it differ from information more generally? You’ll be stuck on the AI, AGI thing, like trying to discuss stars without understanding fusion. Now, this is kind of how I’ve been treating Deutsch’s theory of knowledge up to this point. And I don’t think I’m off base to have a vibe that this is how people that are fans of the theory look at it. That it is something fundamental about knowledge. It’s not just that he’s slapping the word knowledge on an interesting idea. That he’s actually discovering something important about what knowledge physically is. And he means that in the way that we would normally use that word knowledge.
[00:09:18] Blue: And it’s something that’s so important that it’s going to be because we didn’t understand what knowledge was. We can’t really research AI, AGI. That’s one of the main things that’s held up our ability to figure out AGI is because we didn’t know what knowledge physically was. And he never mentions Deutsch. He actually says Popper in this case. This really isn’t Popper’s theory. We know Popper had a completely different view on this than David Deutsch did. And this is clearly actually a reference to the constructor theory of knowledge, conceptually, what he’s talking about. And you know what? I’m not even saying I disagree with Brett here. Perhaps the fact that we don’t have a really good theory of knowledge is one of the main reasons why we can’t figure out AGI. Or maybe it’s vice versa. When we figure out AGI, we’ll understand the concept of knowledge better. Let’s be honest. The way we use the word knowledge today, it’s kind of vague as to what we mean. That’s why philosophers have debated it and talked about knowledge only exists in minds. And Carl Popper had to come up with the whole three worlds. I mean, like there’s a ton of history around this. Okay. So I’m not even saying I think Brett’s wrong. But clearly he is suggesting here that Deutsch has revealed something important about what knowledge physically is. And that the criteria we’re talking about represents a necessary and sufficient understanding of what criteria declare something to be knowledge or not. And what I’m trying to show is the criteria are at once from the examples going to use today. They’re at once too encompassing and not encompassing enough.
[00:10:57] Blue: And they kind of capture something that’s very interesting as far as knowledge is concerned, but doesn’t really fit. It removes too many things. It includes too many things. It isn’t really what knowledge is the way we would normally think of that term, I mean. Okay. So let me give some examples of this. All right. So not all human ideas are what we would normally consider knowledge. Okay. So one of the things I’ve wondered is, does Deutsch’s constructive theory of knowledge, is it actually a theory of knowledge as we would normally think of that term? Or is it really more a theory of replicators? And what’s the difference between those two? That’s a fair question. So Vaden loves to use the example of astrology. Okay. Astrology is a human idea. It keeps itself replicated. It fits perfectly. And it’s even part of the two sources now. It fits perfectly into Deutsch’s constructive theory of knowledge. But like it would be weird to say astrology is knowledge. And I believe he’s actually like gone online and challenged Brett Hall and others to say, do you believe astrology is knowledge and gotten them to kind of say, oh, yeah, it is, you know, I guess it fits. But like it’s weird, right? I mean, is astrology really knowledge? Wait, I’m not sure I’m completely following.
[00:12:19] Red: What is his argument about astrology being knowledge? Astrology is a meme.
[00:12:23] Blue: Okay. It’s a meme that’s been quite successful at replicating itself. It replicates itself, yeah.
[00:12:27] Red: So it fits the constructor
[00:12:28] Blue: theory of knowledge, but it’s not what we would normally consider knowledge.
[00:12:33] Red: Okay. Well, it’s maybe a primitive form of knowledge. I mean, isn’t that where science came from astrology really? I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.
[00:12:43] Blue: Is that true? I didn’t even, I’ve never heard of that. I didn’t know like alchemy gave rise to chemistry. That’s certainly true.
[00:12:50] Red: I think that science, you could make this, it’s a pretty somewhat defensible claim at least that it came from making observations about the stars.
[00:13:01] Unknown: And
[00:13:01] Red: probably a lot of these guys had weird, supernatural ideas about the stars, maybe.
[00:13:09] Blue: Okay. So let’s go with what you’re saying, though. Okay. Because like it’s like, let’s just assume you’re right, because I don’t think it’s an unreasonable statement because so many strange ideas that today we would consider wrong, silly and not knowledge. Yeah. A
[00:13:23] Unknown: lot
[00:13:23] Blue: of times they were precursors to something that we would consider knowledge. Yeah. But I’m not sure every human idea could even fit into that example, right?
[00:13:34] Unknown: Like,
[00:13:34] Blue: would you really consider all the following knowledge, chain letters, pyramid schemes, humorous social network memes, jokes, right? I mean, all of those are replicators. All of those follow evolutionary epistemology. They’re all examples of adapted information that keep themselves to remain so.
[00:13:52] Unknown: Like,
[00:13:52] Blue: and they’re coming from human ideas. They’re human minds. So part of the two sources, hypothesis. And yet I don’t know many people that would consider a chain letter to be considered knowledge, right?
[00:14:04] Red: You have to look at a pretty broad big picture definition, I think, to get there. But yeah, I hear what you’re saying.
[00:14:11] Blue: So here’s why I think this kind of works, right? Is sorry. Let me restate that. Here’s why I think it fits into Deutsche’s theory.
[00:14:23] Unknown: And
[00:14:23] Blue: yet it isn’t really what we would normally consider knowledge. Astrology does replicate itself because it contains knowledge, but it is not itself knowledge. I think that would be a more clear way of saying this. So here you might say, well, yes, but it contains knowledge about how to replicate. And if that’s what you mean, that absolutely astrology contains knowledge about how to replicate. And that’s why it replicates. In fact, that’s going to be true of absolutely any replicator that keeps itself copying itself from human mind to mind. But saying, but understand what you’re really saying when you say that. Okay. And let’s be more explicit. So we understand what we’re saying. Saying astrology as a meme contains knowledge, how to exploit human psychology to get itself copied is nothing like saying astrology is knowledge. Those two statements don’t strike me as all that similar. Okay. And yes, you can confuse the two so that they seem more similar by not being as explicit, right? Being a bit more vague, but it seems like we ought to not do that. It seems like we ought to just be explicit. Is astrology actually knowledge or is it a meme that contains the knowledge on how to exploit humans to copy it? Okay. Now you start to see a relationship between astrology and knowledge, but it isn’t the same thing as being knowledge. This is why I wonder if which is the constructor theory of knowledge may not actually be a theory of knowledge at all. It may actually be a theory of replicators. Okay. Or something in between like I’m not sure, right?
[00:16:00] Blue: I don’t want to become overly dogmatic about an alternative view when I really feel like I’m mostly trying to work it out for myself at this point. Now, if the former way is a better way to put it, which I think it is, to say astrology contains knowledge how to exploit human psychology, I think that is a far more accurate statement. That’s why I kind of wonder if it really is a theory of replicators. Maybe not even a full theory of replicators because for example, the walking robot example, that algorithm was created by replicators. So you can’t even say it’s a theory of replicators. It leaves out certain replicators. Furthermore, a lot of human knowledge is not replicated. Okay. So let’s take the idea of trade secrets. Now a trade secret is this idea that knowledge is so valuable that you don’t want to replicate it. So you want to hold on to it, keep it a secret and not let anybody else know that you’ve got this secret. Okay. This still makes sense. If knowledge is useful, if knowledge gets copied because it’s useful, it may also not get copied because it’s useful. Okay. For the exact same reason. So imagine that somebody, let’s use Chiara Mileto’s example from her book, that somebody has invented an airplane. And they have this design of this airplane. And, but it gives them a competitive advantage. Okay. So they do not want anyone else to know how they make airplanes or how they use them or what they do. And they try to keep it. I don’t know how this would work in real life, but we’re just coming up with a hypothetical example to make a point. Okay.
[00:17:36] Blue: So are you prepared in this case to declare that aircraft recipe, not knowledge, because it wasn’t replicated? Okay. How far are you willing to go to follow along with what Dwight is saying and take these kind of counter examples and remove them from being knowledge and say, no, no, that is not knowledge. Right. Because it’s not being replicated. I mentioned that I had discussed this with someone who I was calling Henry. And he actually did declare trade secrets to not be knowledge. He said, oh yeah, trade secrets are not knowledge because they don’t get replicated. Yeah. Okay. I mean, like it’s just a word. So if for him, maybe the word knowledge means that, but like, I think most people would kind of tilt their head and go, what, are you serious? And I want to kind of pull that out here. Okay. Plus, if trade secrets aren’t knowledge because they’re not replicators, then what the heck are they? Okay. Surely there’s something of great interest that is a lot like knowledge, even if we’re not going to apply the word knowledge to it. So it still feels like there’s like kind of a fair question being asked here. Okay. So this brings up something kind of interesting. Under Deutsch’s constructor theory of knowledge, astrology is knowledge and a trade secret isn’t. Or could we maybe use the degrees of freedom that are in the theory to adjust that? Well, we could. And of course, this is the problem with degrees of freedom. So for example, Brett Hall in his episode 198, Bayesianism around minute number, minute eight, right around minute eight.
[00:19:12] Blue: He suggests that we might see a situation like this as still being a replicator by simply being a bit more vague on what counts as a replicator. So for example, he talks about a bridge embodying knowledge. Here’s the actual quote. The bridge itself contains the knowledge it really does. By the way, I agree with him on this. I’m not trying to argue that he’s wrong. And episode 198 of Bayesianism, I don’t think there’s anything in that episode that I actually disagree with. I felt like it left out some all the interesting questions I wanted to actually have answered. But like, I feel like he makes like fair points all the way through one of these days. We’ll like do an episode on that. That episode is I thought it was a good episode. What he seems to have in mind here is that knowledge starts as like firing in neurons in his brain and then it turns into he says cap taps on the keyboard and then pixels on a screen then becomes soundways in his podcast. Then it goes, you listen to it and it goes back to neural firing in the brain. Okay. So if we’re going to use, oh, by the way, he’s taking this from Deutsch, of course, beginning of infinity, page 86, the knowledge in us and in our sundials embodying the watch and in the mouse, right? So Deutsch has talked about how objects can embody knowledge like this, right? Well, this changes how I understand replicators. Okay. If we’re going to take, kind of make the concept replicator more vague and it’s just how we transmit knowledge, then you okay.
[00:20:36] Blue: So that kind of shortens what counts as a replicator quite a bit, maybe down to microseconds in some cases. Okay. So here’s the thing though. Now imagine someone with a trade secret that isn’t about building something. Okay. Because we talked previously about maybe the constructor theory knowledge requires us that we actually construct something. Well, okay. So let’s say nothing ever gets, we talked about the airplane design. You build the airplane at that point, the airplane itself is a replicator, right? Do you see what I’m trying to say? But even that, it’s easy to come up with a counter example too, because we might imagine a trade secret that is something like say a technique that increases sales compared to your competitors by 200%. Okay. So now is that not knowledge? Because and for the sake of argument, you might say, well, it gets replicated to you teaching it to all the people in your company. Well, let’s say that you’re just a single sales person and you figured out this technique, you’re the top salesman and you don’t want anybody else to know what it is you’re doing that gets the top sales. Okay. So at this point, you’re not transmitting this knowledge anywhere. It stays in your brain and that’s it. Okay. So
[00:21:48] Red: what I was going to push back on is sounds like you’re kind of addressing now is that, you know, from in some sense, something being a trade secret could actually inhibit replication, since it’s, you know, a company has to be motivated to create this new kind of knowledge. And if they aren’t able to keep it secret, then they won’t have the motivation to do that. And so, you know, I don’t know on some larger level, it still seems to me that a trade secret could be knowledge. Is that kind of the perspective you’re addressing here? Well, I
[00:22:36] Blue: mean, I personally think trade secrets are absolutely an almost quintessential example of knowledge. What I’m really trying to show is that trade secrets aren’t strictly speaking replicators. And yet they are knowledge, right?
[00:22:47] Red: Okay. It helps them replicate within a company or something. Right. And that’s why I was
[00:22:53] Blue: trying to say, you know, what are we going to count as a replicator, right? I mean, like if it’s if the mere fact that I built the airplane means it got replicated. Okay, that’s fine. I’m just trying to get you to think more carefully about what you mean by replicator. Okay. So let’s say that now we take this one where the guy in the company, he has the knowledge himself to do the increased sales, but he doesn’t want to share it with anybody. So it’s not even spreading through the company. Okay. Well, you might still call it a replicator by simply saying, well, you know, it’s an idea and he has to enact it. And the act of enacting it is a replicator of the idea in his mind. Okay. All right. So okay, right? I mean, now, but now you’re weakening the concept of replicator even further right now. Anything that gets enacted once counts as a replicator. In doing that, what you’ve done is you’ve now opened up back to the charge. Well, okay, the walking robot algorithm, if it walks once it counts as a replicator,
[00:23:54] Unknown: right?
[00:23:55] Red: Yeah.
[00:23:55] Blue: I mean, are you willing to accept that also? Yeah. Okay. And you’re starting to see the problem is that there is this inconsistency with how it gets applied.
[00:24:05] Red: Okay.
[00:24:07] Blue: Now, meanwhile, while astrology is knowledge, the not the the constructor theory of knowledge declares the immune system when it’s creating antibody recipes to not count as knowledge. Now, I’ve got an actual quote from David Deutch coming up on this, but this is something that’s interesting that I just kind of wanted to bring up quickly. So I was talking to a defender of Deutch’s theory of knowledge, and I said to him, I was trying to explain to him the things I’m bringing out in this podcast, how it seems to me that there’s problems with the theory that need to be addressed. And I was raising these counter examples. And in context, what I actually said was, okay, you know what? I’ll accept that these counter examples aren’t knowledge. But like these counter examples, like, and we were talking about the immune system is one of them. And I think the reason why we were talking about the immune system was at the time, Deutch had just recently in an interview declared that the immune system didn’t create knowledge. Okay. So we were discussing, is that accurate or not? And I said, okay, you know what? I’ll accept it’s not knowledge, but it is something, right? It’s something interesting that it’s doing that is very much like knowledge. Okay. In fact, it fits all of Deutch’s criteria that he’s ever brought up at least so far perfectly. And this person who we’ll call James, he responded to me by saying this. He says, but I’ll hold you responsible to say what you find so special about adaptive information created by the immune system. It doesn’t seem special to me because the trial and error process of the immune system is 100 % deterministic.
[00:25:48] Blue: So the result is two and is thus a mechanical consequence. I see nothing, see therefore nothing special or relevant about this kind of adapted information. Now here’s what I find interesting about this response. Okay. There’s a number of interesting things about this response and I’m actually going to cover it again in a future podcast, specifically the fact that it’s kind of indirectly citing the whole perspiration versus inspiration argument that deserves its own podcast. Okay. But the thing that I want to call out here is this idea that what the immune system is creating, he’s admitting it’s creating adapted information here. Right. But it’s so unimportant and so non -special and so uninteresting that it doesn’t even deserve to be discussed. Okay. And I do think this is how I’ve seen defenders of the of Deutsche’s constructor theory of knowledge treat these examples where when I bring them up, even when I’m not trying to say they are knowledge and I’m just trying to say, look, there’s something. Okay. It’s just sort of like this is so uninteresting. Like I don’t, there’s no way that there’s anything interesting there for you to look into. Now, let me actually explain to you how the immune system works. Okay. I’m taking this from Dennis and Ray Noble, one of their papers. And it’s, it’s very interesting how it actually works. To me, it seems quite special and interesting. Okay. But first of all, before I do that, sorry, here’s the actual quote from David Deutsche. Okay. So Deutsche explicitly states in the, that the immune system should not, does not create knowledge. This is an interview with Eli tear around minute five.
[00:27:28] Blue: He says there are things happening in the human body like the immune system, which is also reacting to things doing one thing, stabilizing itself, doing another thing, changing levels of importance and so on. None of that is thinking. None of that is creating knowledge. Okay. By the way, note the attempt to set knowledge creation to exclusively be a kind of thinking, which isn’t really necessarily what his constructive theory of knowledge is about because it includes biological evolution, which is not a kind of thinking. Okay. But in any case, he definitively declares the immune system to not be knowledge here, which is why I was discussing this with James. Now the first
[00:28:06] Red: definition of knowledge that I ever recall really hearing from David Deutsche and I wish I could remember the source if this was one of the talks or the book was actually maybe the non -constructor theory definition of knowledge where he says knowledge is useful information which I thought was so cool because it just seems like such a sensible it just almost seems to cut down all of these philosophers talking about knowledge. What is it? Where is it? It’s just useful information. That’s all it is. It seems to me in that definition it’s far more the immune system is yeah, that’s knowledge. Useful information. Right. Yeah.
[00:29:04] Blue: Now having discussed this with David Deutsche directly, he definitely uses the word knowledge in a number of different ways and he told me so, right? Yeah. So perhaps he would even say yes, the immune system creates knowledge in a sense, right, but it’s not the constructor theory of knowledge sense. The problem is, is that it seems to me it is the constructor theory of knowledge sense. And I guess that’s why I’m getting hung up on it, right? So let me explain to you how the immune system actually creates knowledge. I shouldn’t say knowledge because that’s what we’re discussing, how it creates adapted information that’s useful. Okay, so Deutsche, as I just quoted, he explicitly states the immune system does not create knowledge, but how does the immune system actually work? Well, it works through recipes and replicators. It does. It directly involves and here’s the interesting thing, replication of DNA in cells, all right? So here is quoting from Dennis and Ray Noble, from their paper, was the watchmaker blind or was she one -eyed? It says, when the immune system is faced with a new antigen challenge, the mutation rate in the variable parts of the genome can be accelerated by as much as one million times. So far as known, these mutations all occur stochastically, which just means randomly, but the location in the genome is certainly not a matter of chance. The functionality in this case lies precisely in the specific targeting at the relevant part of the genome. The arrival of the antigen itself activates the hypermutation process and it’s binding to a successful antibody triggers proliferation of those cells that make it.
[00:30:45] Blue: What this mechanism achieves is the DNA sequence forming a template for the immunoglobin protein are held sufficiently constant for functionality to be retained. Okay. That was a lot of big words. Let me try to break it down. Okay. So let’s deconstruct what they just explained on how the immune system works compared to Deutsche’s constructor theory of knowledge. First, the arrival of the antigen itself activates the hypermutation process. So what they’re saying is that the antigen, the germ, activates a hypermutation process in DNA of the immune system cells. The immune system actually has a learning algorithm inside of its cells when it detects an antigen. It knows to start hypermutating DNA to try to find the right recipe to fight off the antigen. Okay. The mutation rate in the variable part of the genome can be accelerated as much as one million times. So we’re not talking about you know the stereotypical mutation where a cosmic ray hits your genes and it happens to create some sort of mutation or it’s a copying error or something like that. This is, the immune system says, oh no, we have an antigen. We better start mutating fast and it intentionally mutates itself to try to find the right recipe. Okay. So the genome intentionally hypermutates to find the right recipe for the antigen. Then they say in the paper, so far as is known the mutations all occur stochastically. So the cells randomly mutate to find the right variant. Okay. Then they say an antigen binding to a successful antibody triggers proliferation of those cells that make it.
[00:32:26] Blue: So what they’re saying here is if the antibody binds to an antigen that signals the cells that made that antibody to replicate those cells and therefore their DNA proliferate compared to the cells that weren’t successful. Note how this is specifically DNA replicating genes replicating depending on what you mean by genes replicating in cells. So it is a recipe replicating as per constructor theory. David Deutch is constructor theory of knowledge. This fits completely perfectly to Deutch’s constructor theory of knowledge. Okay. And by doing this the successful cells will outproduce the unsuccessful variants and that’s how your body knows to produce that antibody to take out the antigen. Okay. So the immune system literally uses DNA and genes as the substrate through that through it and it does not the only difference is that it doesn’t do it through sex cells. It does it within the life of a single organism and it doesn’t pass it to the offspring of that organism. Okay. So why does this not count as knowledge? So let’s compare it to the criteria or properties of knowledge that Herve had came up with that everybody agreed was a good summary of David Deutch’s constructor theory of knowledge. It is capable of enabling its own preservation via replicators even. Yes the antigen binding to a successful antibody triggers the proliferation of those cells that make it. That is exact match to the first criteria. It can be copied from one embodiment to another without changing its properties. That’s literally how the immune system works. Okay. Number three it can enable transformations and retain the ability to cause them again without a doubt. That’s exactly what’s going on. Okay.
[00:34:12] Blue: I do not see why the immune system doesn’t count as knowledge creation when it literally uses DNA in the genome. It’s literally a replicator. It’s literally a recipe. It literally causes a transformation even in the sense of a construction. I don’t think there is any chance you will come up with a set of properties of criteria that eliminate the immune system as counting as knowledge without basically eliminating all of biological evolution. Okay. Because it is physically doing exactly the same things and outputting the same thing as biological evolution does. It just does it in a much shorter time scale so that it can find an antibody within the lifetime of the organism, which makes sense if you didn’t have a system that could create knowledge in real time like this inside the lifetime of the organism, then you would be at the mercy of every single antigen that didn’t exist prior to your birth, right? So it makes perfect sense that evolution would learn to self -mutate within the lifetime of an organism to be able to do this. It’s really hard to see how you could ever declare the immune system as not creating knowledge without basically eliminating all of Darwinian evolution because of this. Short of insisting on something like it must pass through sex cells to the next generation to count as knowledge, which, okay, you know what, that’s fine. If you want to actually state that explicitly, I’m okay with that. I think that then makes the theory quite a bit more clear, but unless you’re willing to go that far, the immune system should count as knowledge. Okay, that is, it creates exactly what we think of when we think of the constructor theory of knowledge.
[00:35:47] Blue: So I hope people can see why this example makes me feel so skeptical of the two sources hypothesis. The immune system does create knowledge under the current constructor theory of knowledge the way it’s currently presented and understood.
[00:36:00] Red: Has David Deutsch ever addressed Ray Noble’s ideas which could be considered sort of a modern day Lomarchism almost because I have not seen
[00:36:15] Blue: him do that.
[00:36:16] Red: No. Deutsch comes down pretty hard on Lomarchism. I mean it’s mentioned a lot at the beginning of infinity. I don’t think he was as I thought was just pretty uncontroversial that it’s not taken seriously anymore, but it sounds like it, well from speaking to a lot from you and a lot of other followers around David Deutsch maybe I shouldn’t say followers but people associated with his ideas seem to take this Ray Noble stuff pretty seriously.
[00:36:54] Blue: So okay, let’s do an aside, not all attempt off the cuff. I won’t do a great job with this because it wasn’t what I was planning to talk about. So here’s the thing what do you even mean by Lomarchism to begin with? Because there are certain if you think of Lomarchism in kind of its original inception like clearly it’s wrong.
[00:37:19] Red: The reason I use that term specifically was just because I know in the Ray Noble debate with Richard Dawkins which is an excellent debate but he even says Lomarchism is back. So here’s
[00:37:37] Blue: the thing though the idea of Lomarchism is a somewhat vague idea and so it has long this is not something new with Denison Ray Noble it isn’t. You weren’t part of the podcast back when we talked about the Baldwin effect did you ever listen to the episode where we talked about the Baldwin effect?
[00:37:57] Red: I did I can’t quite remember what it is though.
[00:38:00] Blue: So the Baldwin effect is this idea that one of the things that fans of David Deutsch bring up a lot when they’re trying to explain why they think like animals are just automatons that don’t have feelings is they’ll show like animals doing automatic movements right? Dennis Hackathol has got a giant collection of white swans he’s collected of animals doing things that don’t make sense because this automatic movement’s been triggered and David Deutsch has referenced this to the idea that you can take in one of the interviews that you can take a squirrel and you can give it food and put it on cement and the squirrel will actually go through the motions of trying to dig into the cement even though nothing has happened it will try to bury the nut and then it will try to use its nose to put the dirt back over it I
[00:38:49] Red: see my dog doing things like that all the time So
[00:38:52] Blue: they have this idea that this somehow proves that the animal is just a robot
[00:38:58] Red: Now
[00:38:59] Blue: the Baldwin effect points, so there’s a problem that the Baldwin effect needs to solve the problem is that under neo -Darwinian evolution it’s theoretically impossible to explain how these automatic movements came about on their own because the automatic movements like the movement of a squirrel trying to dig by itself would have no survival value the movement of a squirrel trying to cover the nut with dirt would have no survival value So this whole little sequence that it does that’s this set of automatic movements like Dennis Halkofal is assuming somehow neo -Darwinian evolution just evolved this even though this is exactly an example of what a creationist would point to and say look how did this ever come to be when every single individual movement has no survival value therefore you cannot explain this using neo -Darwinian evolution Well now turns out that’s not true but you do have to understand neo -Darwinian evolution in a somewhat more broad way than the way people used to think of it okay so Baldwin who’s I think was early 20th century so this is a long time ago 100 years ago
[00:40:14] Blue: Baldwin was a scientist who came up with an explanation of how to explain how these automatic movements came to be and to reconcile them with neo -Darwinian evolution I guess at the time it wasn’t I’m not even sure the term neo -Darwinian evolution existed in the early 20th century but reconcile with Darwinian evolution I should probably be saying so what he pointed out is that animals can create knowledge in real time in their lifetime through learning algorithms okay so they go out and they you would have an animal some ancestor to the squirrel that would go out and would figure out on its own using its own learning algorithms that if it buried a nut and it went through a series of movements that that had survival value and then that passed as a meme to all the members of that species okay so the original progenitors had to have figured it out on their own through their own knowledge creation once that exists as part of the environment then it makes sense that each individual automatic movement has survival value so if one of these animals that’s in this population suddenly gets an automatic movement to say try to bury or the nut even though that’s not by itself has any survival value within the environment of this set of memes that exist amongst the animals that now has survival value and therefore over time this learned maneuver that exists as a meme gets put into the genes of the animal and thus the automatic movement comes to be okay that’s actually how they believe this ever happens in the first place which to my mind actually is undermining to the whole argument that the Deutschians are trying to use here although maybe not it’s vague it shows that there’s something missing from their argument at a minimum now what does this have to do with lamarckianism people immediately started to recognize that this was very close to a form of lamarckianism and if you go look up the Baldwin effect which is what this is called it is often
[00:42:20] Blue: today like go look on Wikipedia or something you will very quickly start to come across people the statement that this is a form of lamarckianism okay what is this actually lamarckism well no it’s not really the original lamarckism that’s discredited okay it does have a vibe similar to it and I think that’s why people invoke it here is clearly we’re no longer talking about kind of the original Darwinian understanding of how evolution works we’re starting to think a little bit more deeply about it that there is this sort of you have to understand the survival value in terms of not just a set of genes but also the environment that exists which might include whatever is learned as memes within the life of the animals okay and if you want to call this lamarckism great if you don’t want to call it lamarckism then don’t
[00:43:20] Blue: they’re invoking the fact that it’s in some way vaguely analogous to lamarckism I think and I guess I see Ray and Dennis Noble in the same way yes their theory is that we have vastly overestimated the value of gene informatics and that in reality evolution exists in a giant hierarchy it’s not just evolution of genes this is exactly what Popper and Campbell said you know way back in the 60s or the 70s and this was an idea that that’s existed for a long time that when you actually look into Darwinian evolution you do have to understand it as this universal Darwinism that it exists in this giant hierarchy of knowledge creating algorithms that exist all throughout nature all throughout and it’s not just genes and I do think that Ray and Dennis Noble are at least correct that Neo Darwinian evolution has overemphasized gene informatics and therefore I kind of agree with them to some degree there now I do wonder though if maybe they’ve gone too far where I mean don’t we basically know that gene informatics if it’s not the only form of evolution it sure is in some ways one of the single most interesting and somehow it must be related to the universality of the biological evolution process so I guess I fall somewhere in between right it’s yes I think Neo Darwinian evolution is ultimately wrong but I think it’s wrong in only the sense that we’re going to have a new theory that encompasses it subsumes it and still explains why it was such a successful theory and I don’t think it’s going to truly
[00:45:13] Blue: Michael Levine’s work I think has shown over and over again that the cells exist with their own kind of learning algorithms that are their own mini version of evolutionary epistemology and I think we have underestimated the role of all these different levels of evolution that exist and how that probably has allowed I don’t know how yet but has somehow allowed the problem of open -endedness to be solved and one of the I suspect one of the reasons why we can’t solve the problem open -endedness today is because we’ve been misled by the current Neo Darwinian evolutionary theory we’ve thought too much in terms of evolution of the genes and that’s it and we haven’t really thought about the true evolutionary environment that exists out there in the real world that exists in the giant Cambalian hierarchy Cambal put it as a hierarchy I think when Ray and Dennis Noble would say it’s not even a hierarchy it’s like this giant cycle of interacting evolutionary processes and it’s more complicated than a simple hierarchy that Cambal had in mind and because that it’s actually this giant cycle yes it’s got a much stronger and the Marqist feel to it than people have believed for the last hundred or so years but I don’t think it’s actually Lamarckism I think that it’s still not really the original Lamarckism it’s more like something kind of analogous to Lamarckism but that’s it does that make any sense? That does and one thing I noticed in that debate I mentioned earlier you know Richard Dawkins who as far as I know invented Neo Darwinism in the selfish gene
[00:47:05] Red: seemed quite open to the idea I mean he didn’t quite agree with I’m not saying he agreed with Dennis or Ray Noble but he seemed quite open to the idea that Lamarckism could make its way back into science somehow you
[00:47:20] Blue: know let’s actually define Lamarckism a little bit more carefully to understand the term gets invoked in two ways at least one is the original idea that evolution takes place because the giraffe goes out and it stretches its neck and then the neck becomes a little bit longer and then it somehow passes that to the next generation okay that’s the discredited version of Lamarckism but I think Lamarckism also gets invoked for any kind of teleological evolution any time evolution has a purpose then it feels a little Lamarckist to us okay now let’s look at the immune system example of course there’s an exact theological theological purpose going on here right the reason why the immune system starts hyper mutating is because it’s been designed to recognize oh I better start doing an evolutionary algorithm now because I’m in a situation where the genes that have been passed to me are insufficient and so of course it’s a form of evolution that’s
[00:48:29] Blue: very purposeful right and so if all you mean by Lamarckism is purpose driven evolution then yeah Lamarckism is a real thing and it has always been a real thing but I don’t think that’s really what the word originally meant I think that that is an adaption it’s an evolution on the word if that makes any sense right the fact that the original discredited Lamarckism was purpose driven caused us to reimagine the word Lamarckism to refer to any kind of purpose driven evolution even a kind that’s compatible with our current theory of evolution and I think that’s where the tripping up comes right is yes Lamarckism’s made a comeback but in a mutated form that’s not really the same as what it originally was and if we’re really being honest this new version really isn’t incompatible with what we thought we knew about Darwinian evolution it’s forcing us to understand it better to make it more explicit to understand its process is better to understand how purpose can originate into the evolutionary process without there being an ultimate designer and if that’s all you mean by Lamarckism then yes Lamarckism has made a comeback
[00:49:44] Red: probably controversially though right I mean not everyone accepts this
[00:49:49] Blue: well you know honestly I don’t think there’s I think it’s not yes maybe controversially but it shouldn’t be the immune system is without a doubt a purpose driven form of evolution so if you don’t think that there’s any purpose driven forms of evolution then I think that your theory is refuted by the existence of the immune system and I think that’s kind of the end of the story whether you want to call it Lamarckism or not that’s a different question
[00:50:20] Red: got it okay
[00:50:22] Blue: what would a more encompassing theory of knowledge look like okay if we weren’t looking at just these special kinds of replicators that come from the two sources I think what we would want is we’d want to be able to have this theory explain what trade secrets are okay if they’re not knowledge that’s fine but how do they relate to knowledge why are they so much like knowledge okay I would expect it to explain what the walking robot algorithm is not to just simply try to declare it unspecial or uninteresting or something along those lines but instead say this is what it is and this is how it relates to knowledge okay I would expect it to explain what the immune system is doing okay how it is related to the constructor theory of knowledge and how what it outputs is similar to but not quite the same as knowledge okay so let me throw some other counter examples out here now uh examples I should say and I think each of them is kind of ones I’ve grabbed that got me thinking more deeply about this I’m offering it up to other people to get them thinking more deeply about it okay now here’s one that I thought was super interesting Deutsch actually
[00:51:31] Blue: said told me when I had a chance to talk to him that he doesn’t think all human ideas are knowledge and he gave me this example of how they came up with the gravitational constant and how he he didn’t feel that that was knowledge creation because it was actually implied by other theories that already existed okay based on that he actually says in his interview with Eli tear at about minute 10 he says so Eli has been giving him examples of things that create knowledge and David Deutsch has been saying you know I don’t think that’s actually knowledge creation and the immune system was one of the examples but he’s but he was giving several examples and then he gives this exact Eli tear gives this example he says who
[00:52:11] Red: is this Eli tear he’s just someone who
[00:52:13] Blue: did an interview with David Deutsch if you want to look it up type Eli tear T Y E R and David Deutsch and you’ll quickly find this interview okay
[00:52:23] Red: I’ll look for that
[00:52:24] Blue: and it’s he said a lot of really interesting things in this interview so it’s actually worth looking up okay so Eli says this what about just playing out logic like I start with a set of premises and there is implicit in those premises a set of conclusions I might not start out knowing the conclusions of some logical premise but if I sit down and think and write it out on a piece of paper I’m I’m like this is this mathematical proof is actually kind of surprising to me but it turns out this is the case I knew all the pieces all along to derive that knowledge but I actually needed to sit down and derive it and and at the end it seems like I have new knowledge okay so this is the example he kind of throws out to David Deutsch to see how David Deutsch is going to respond now I want you to think about this example for a second like think about geometry or really any mathematical knowledge okay think about computational theory okay granted it can be thought of as a form of physics but it can also be thought of as more like a mathematical theory where you’re trying to work out the implications of the fact that a Turing machine is universal and you try to come up with the set of different types of algorithms P and P things like the NP complete things like that okay
[00:53:45] Blue: to you sorry you like here is really saying is it is all of that not knowledge to you okay like if I work out theorems for geometry and they all flow directly from the axioms does like every single thing I discover about geometry from that point forward because it all is really just derivable from the axioms is that not knowledge is every single time we make advances in computational theory and discover something new using computational theory is that not knowledge because it was something we just derived the proof and it was all sitting there part of the premises but we just didn’t know right and is that discovery not knowledge okay and here’s how David Deutsch answers that question it’s a good example because I also think that isn’t knowledge either but that looks much more like a simulacrum simulacrum of knowledge that the previous example that Eli had raised then the previous examples that Eli had raised okay now I was a little surprised he said this although I really like the term simulacrum of knowledge and I’ve latched on to it a little bit so just to put this in perspective though why it surprises me he said that suppose somebody finally came up with a proof that in computational theory P equals NP okay don’t need to know what that exactly that means but that would be like a gigantic breakthrough in our knowledge to know that right this huge breakthrough in knowledge Deutsch is literally claiming it is not knowledge creation if it’s something that was just derivable from the premises okay
[00:55:27] Blue: now on the one hand I kind of understand where he’s coming from it does feel a little different hey this is all just part of the premises on the other hand you just have to think about every single advanced knowledge we’ve had in mathematical systems and we’re kind of declaring it all not knowledge and that seems a little weird to me okay but I love this idea of a simulacrum of knowledge so Deutsch is at least admitting that there is something knowledge like being created there but he doesn’t consider it to be the same as knowledge and I’m going to come back to this phrase a simulacrum of knowledge in a future podcast where I think something interesting can be derived from it but let’s move on for the moment now let’s also take the idea that all of an animal’s knowledge is in its genes now from the way I’m talking you can pretty much tell I don’t really think that’s correct but let’s let’s go with this just for a second so all of an animal’s knowledge is in a genes what is meant by that under the constructor theory of knowledge since the constructor theory of knowledge doesn’t allow for animals to create knowledge in the life of an animal because the only two sources of knowledge is biological evolution in the genes and human ideas so by fiat up front we’re declaring that all an animal’s knowledge has to be in its genes it cannot create any new knowledge in its lifetime okay now animals adapt their behavior very via a special kind of learning algorithm and I mentioned in a past podcast Leslie valiant who’s a big name in machine learning he calls this echarithms
[00:56:59] Blue: now on page seven of his book he says the primary purpose of the echarithms is to change the circuits of the organism so they will behave better in the environment in the future to produce a better outcome of the owner that’s on page seven of his book which is probably approximately correct so an echarithm is intentionally defined in such a way as to capture two kinds of learning on page seven these echarithms have been of two kinds those that operate in the individual organisms interacting with their environment and those that operate via genetic changes over many generations so notice that Leslie valiant is intentionally defining echarithms so that it encompasses both what David Deutch considers a kind of knowledge the knowledge created by Darwinian evolution but he’s trying to show that the learning of an animal in its lifetime is analogous to that he’s trying to show that there is this learning that takes place now I happen to know that David Deutch doesn’t actually deny that animals learn okay typically this is kind of stated in such a way as it’s kind of downplayed of its importance but I don’t think there’s any denial that animals do in their lifetime learn things okay and that they do form adapted information in their nervous system that isn’t part of their genes so Leslie valiant sees that there’s some kind of definitive commonality between these two kinds of learning and that you can actually think of them as a single class now it’s interesting that this is a machine learning expert who invented the the probably approximately correct model of machine learning which is underlies all of machine learning or a significant portion of it anyhow
[00:58:44] Blue: and he’s actually deriving the same thing that animal experts have been saying for quite a while now so animal experts entirely independent of valiant who’s in computer science have actually discovered the same thing so here’s Richard Byrne from the thinking ape on page 52 he says instrumental conditioning so actually let me back up and explain this people are really familiar with his idea that animals have something called classical conditioning so it’s the typical way as Pavlov’s dog where you ring the bell and then you feed the dog and over after a while it starts to realize that ringing the bell means it’s about to get fed so it’s it’s mouth salivates okay and this is a kind of learning algorithm that animals have okay what I think people don’t realize though is that classical conditioning actually has a stronger form that experts in animal experts don’t call classical conditioning a layman like me would still call it classical conditioning but it’s called instrumental conditioning or sometimes it’s called trial and error learning Byrne actually uses both terms and says that they’re equivalent to animal experts okay now the term trial and error learning the problem is that all learning is trial and error so when I say that it seems to cause people confusion but these are just terms that the animal experts have come up with on their own they’re not epistemologists they’ve said well we’ve got animals have classical conditioning and then they have this thing called instrumental conditioning or trial and error learning here is what it is defined as instrumental conditioning has been likened to evolution by natural selection like natural selection it is an automatic process by which behavior patterns with beneficial consequences are selectively increased in frequency
[01:00:26] Blue: amount the many time many types of behavior produced by the animal among the many types of behavior produced by animal the mechanism is quite different in the two cases when he’s talking about instrumental conditioning versus biological evolution the mechanism is quite different in the two cases however in instrumental conditioning reinforcement increases the probability of advantage advantageous responses to what the animal perceives in the world unhelpful responses become extinct but the animal lives on natural selection by comparison is more drastic and slower to produce change since whole individual animal survivor die and the selection effect on the genes is therefore much less efficient okay now notice that he’s immediately seeing that there’s some sort of analogy between how an animal learns through this instrumental conditioning or trial and error learning and how biological evolution through natural selection works the difference is this the animal has an action it does and let’s say it decides to eat something and then it gets some sort of reinforcement either it gets sick or it finds that it keeps it alive and it likes the taste
[01:01:47] Blue: instrumental conditioning is really just classical conditioning but it’s based around the animal’s own actions it’s own curious actions that it goes out and uses to explore the world and as it receives this feedback it then realizes oh I should eat that kind of food that food is good because it didn’t make me sick or it gets sick and it says I should not eat that food and it won’t eat that food again okay and what it’s doing is it’s causing it’s um it causes its behaviors to either increase if they’re if they cause the organism to survive and thrive or to go extinct its behaviors to go extinct if it causes the organism to feel sick or to get hurt or something unpleasant okay by doing that you have a form of natural selection that takes place within the life of the animal and the animal learns within its lifetime okay there’s just no way around the fact that there’s a really obvious evolutionary epistemology connection between what animals do through their learning algorithms and what takes place in biological evolution so the rapid change of behavior in response to a changing environment that is through learning that is um a survival advantage because then the animal doesn’t have to die to figure out it shouldn’t be eating this item or it should be eating this item okay this is how animals learn this is how animals create knowledge within their lifetime um
[01:03:16] Blue: so also I note here that this is a form of the idea of letting your ideas die in your place only in this case instead of it being a strict idea it’s kind of more like the animals behaviors die out or increase depending on whether they provide survival value or not but this is an exciting parallel that paparians should be interested in where and and by the way pauper was interested in this parallel and he talks about it quite a bit in his books okay um now once you realize animal learning is a kind of of evolutionary epistemology and it’s something that is analogous to natural selection it does call into question this whole idea that all of an animal’s knowledge is in the genes and let me give you a very specific example I use this example on the increments podcast which I’m sure will be out before this episode ever comes out so but let me repeat it okay so
[01:04:13] Blue: some birds have knowledge I think I may have used this example in our animal intelligence episodes I can’t recall now some birds have knowledge in their mating knowledge in their genes of a mating song so in that case if you pull the baby bird away and raise it away from its parents it will still know its mating song because it never has to be taught it by its parents never has to hear it from its parents to learn it because the genes actually encode for that mating song that’s a very direct example of that knowledge existing in the animals genes okay however that’s not how all birds do it like many birds they have to actually learn the mating song from their parents okay now they do have genes that help them learn the mating song help them kind of have a preference through their attention for one type of song over another so what they’ll find in that case is that the bird if you separate it from its parents it never learns the song because the knowledge of that song does not exist in its genes okay however if it learns if it hears the song even once it seems to retain that song take a lot of interest in it and then it will actually practice the song over time through trial and error and learn to perfect the mating song okay
[01:05:30] Blue: um and they’ve actually been able to like teach the mating song to the bird backwards by playing the song backwards and it learns that one instead so they know it’s not in the genes because it can actually learn the song backwards but they can’t get the bird to learn a different bird’s mating song because it’s not similar enough to what the genes find have changed the bird to find interesting whereas learning the song backwards is similar enough okay so now we have first was an example of where the knowledge of the is directly in the genes now we have this example where the knowledge really isn’t in the genes but the genes help it learn the knowledge okay now here’s where things get really interesting Richard Dawkins in an interview he said that there’s also birds that have no preset mating song and instead what they do is they just start to sing a song and they just try out different notes and they’ll suddenly notice through their objective sense of beauty that certain notes go together better and that make a better song and through trial and error it will actually compose its own song and if the song is really beautiful then it attracts the female birds and so basically what happens is the bird uses its own creativity to try to come up with a mating song and it tries to impress the females by making it the most creative mating song now here’s also Dawkins points out that these songs of these birds compose humans find them beautiful so this fits directly with Deutch’s idea of objective beauty where it crosses species so the birds are actually using their sense of aesthetics that they have to try to come up with a mating song and they compose their own creatively okay now it seems weird to take all three of these examples and try to collapse them down and say that all of them are examples of a bird having all its knowledge in its genes
[01:07:31] Blue: you’re collapsing three very different things and treating them as if they’re a single thing when really these are very distinct different kinds of mating songs and very distinct different kinds of where the knowledge comes from the last one in particular where the bird creatively creates the song I don’t think it makes any sense at all to claim that that was knowledge in its genes can I
[01:07:56] Red: just interject one thing there is a documentary on Netflix that I have got to recommend to you it’s called Dancing with the Birds it is one of the most fascinating documentaries I’ve ever seen it’s all about these not just songs but dances and elaborate basically they are performing swan lake for these mating rituals what these birds do it just blew my mind I had no idea the extent to it to say it’s not creative is a little stretched anyway
[01:08:33] Blue: there are other examples of this too there are certain birds where they have to build a little piece of artwork to try to impress the females oh
[01:08:42] Red: yeah that was the other thing they get into that too the artwork
[01:08:47] Blue: basically the females are going to mate with the most creative of the birds they are going to judge the birds creative output to decide this is the most fit one because it has the highest creativity
[01:08:59] Red: the best is the female will go over and inspect it they kind of say no right right okay
[01:09:07] Blue: so now another one that has come up that I think is an interesting example is again Dennis Hackathall who I think uses a lot of great examples that I can then use as counter examples in the do explain podcast he he’s a defender of the two sources theory of knowledge and he wants to explain how animals don’t create knowledge in their lifetime so he uses this example of a dog playing Jenga to me this is not a very good this is an example of how animals actually do create knowledge in their lifetime because clearly there can’t be any evolutionary pressure for a dog to know how to play Jenga and for that to be encoded in its genes so Dennis feels a need to try to explain this away so he tries to do this through a kind of vague explanation that the knowledge was in this genes because it had these instincts okay so
[01:10:10] Blue: what he tries to say is he says okay it’s this combination of the dog has knowledge in its genes via an instinct in this case the instinct is to follow a pack leader he says and then he imagines that this is somehow a clever Hans trick so the dog has this knowledge in its genes to follow a pack leader and then the human is the one who knows how to actually play Jenga and the dog is figuring out how to play Jenga by looking at the human’s face and figuring out what to do based on what the human’s face is telling it to do okay now I should probably point out that the video he points to as an example of this it has right on it a video of a cat playing Jenga that is not looking at its owner’s face and it is just playing Jenga right for fun and even tries to cheat at one point so I feel like this whole example kind of undermines his point to some degree but here’s where things get interesting what Dennis is really trying to say is that the dog came genetically equipped to read the face of the owner’s from the face of the owner the movements necessary to not knock down a Jenga tower okay there seems to be a willingness on the part of the defenders of the two sources hypothesis to vaguely point to any instinct an animal has incited as if that somehow just explains everything now the obvious counter example here would be that if I scolded my dog go build a airplane and it somehow went and build an airplane because I was scolding it it would make very little sense to claim that it was just following its pack instincts to obey me as the pack leader right I mean there’s something more going on here if it’s doing something that we wouldn’t have expected it to be able to have evolutionary pressure to do so there’s no real attempt to ever to determine why the dog has this ability to read Jenga moves from the owner’s face in the first place given that there is no evolutionary pressure to do that and it’s actually worse than that okay can you really explain Jenga moves as a kind of clever Hans trick you can explain the clever Hans trick because all it had to learn to do was to read that the owner was smiling so it stopped tapping its foot that’s clearly something that could fit within just regular trial and error learning for an animal okay but in this case here’s the challenge I guess I would issue to Dennis on this go try to actually make an algorithm that plays Jenga by doing nothing but watching your face Dennis okay I don’t think that’s even physically possible because the face doesn’t contain the necessary information like if Dennis is looking at a tower and his robot is trying to play Jenga there’s no way that through just a visual feed of his face it’s going to understand how to play Jenga
[01:12:54] Blue: that’s physically impossible as far as I can tell so there’s like this giant disconnect explanation gap between how he’s trying to explain it through instinct and just the reality which is the dog learned to play Jenga within its lifetime and of course it did it basically learned to play Jenga the same way you and I would learn to play Jenga now I’ve seen this other places where defenders of Deutsche’s two sources hypothesis will just simply invoke instinct like it’s somehow an answer so here is a defender of Deutsche’s two hypothesis theory and here’s what they said to me on facebook we were talking about if animals can have goals or not and he said animals don’t have goals they have instinct again you are confusing things humans can do with how animals behave having a goal means seeing the end state of something that is not realized yet using goals in any serious way when talking about what humans do versus animals is simply crazy so I asked him how he knows this and he says they animals are not able to do anything that requires the ability to create an abstract plan involving several steps now when he said that of course I knew I had already and I pointed him to my podcast where I actually talk about this at length what Richard Byrne says about this so here is the example that’s from my podcast let me repeat it this is Supina the orangutan and one of my favorite examples so Supina the orangutan
[01:14:31] Blue: as I’m giving you this example ask yourself if animals have goals or not okay seems to me that we got a really straightforward example of an animal having a goal here so the goal is that Supina the orangutan has seen people wash clothes and it looked fun so she wanted to go wash clothes
[01:14:50] Blue: here’s the problem though she wasn’t allowed to do that so the soap in the laundry being washed is on a camp dock and she knows that the staff that is washing the clothes are afraid of her so she knows if she can get near them they’ll run away or they’ll jump into the river and swim away okay but there’s also a guard protecting them and she’s afraid of the guard so she has a problem she has a goal she wants to wash these clothes but she’s got a set of problems that she needs to solve to be able to do that here is the solution that Supina creatively comes up with to achieve her goal using honestly what seems to me a rather complex plan not human level complex but quite complex so Supina first steals a canoe full of water by untying it okay she stops and she goes and she checks to see if the guard is still there and seeing if the guard is still there she then continues she then rocks the canoe to get the water out of the canoe she reorients the canoe and propels it forward when she arrives at the dock having now crossed the river to the dock the staff jumps into the water like she knew they were to escape she then goes about using the soap that they left behind to clean the laundry she rubs the soap the wet clothing she uses a brush with the soap she scrubs the clothes with the brush she rings the wet clothes etc okay now
[01:16:18] Blue: this is such an interesting example because it’s a rather it’s obvious she had a goal she wanted to wash the soap and laundry and this is a rather complex plan that she’s come up with furthermore she’s never seen a human do this before you can’t claim that this is just simple imitation because there has she has never seen a human being decide to go wash clothes by doing this particular set of actions to be able to do it furthermore the set of actions they’re not just random I mean there they’re so obviously set up to solve a problem okay and you have to she had to understand how each action connected to the next action to be able to solve the problem that she wanted set of problems that she wanted to solve okay
[01:17:01] Blue: this really does show some really flexible intelligence and it also shows an example of animal creativity she again I want to emphasize this particular chain of events no human goes around stealing boats so they can go wash clothes right she’s never seen another being or animal or ape or anything do this before she came up with it herself okay now she has seen the individual movements she’s seen humans use boats she’s seen humans untied boats she’s seen humans rock boats to get the water out I don’t know how many times probably not hundreds but she’s seen it a few times okay and just having seen those imitate those individual movements it was enough for her to figure out how to put them into a sort of program an algorithm where if I do this one then this one then this one then this one it will solve my problem without ever having to try it once try it by chance herself she figured it out in her head and it was obviously aimed at solving a goal okay so this does require that we see animals as having a certain level of understanding okay this is why Byrne says regular animal learning versus instrumental conditioning or trial and error learning can’t explain what’s going on and why he believes that some animals including orangutans have this extra level of intelligence that he calls insight okay so the animal must actually understand the chain of events well enough to understand how to chain them together into something totally novel to solve a goal solve problems to achieve a goal this is why Byrne considers the the animals with insight as having a and this is a quote from Byrne a deep shrewder discerning kind of understanding okay now reason why I’m emphasizing the word understanding is because again David Deutch has said animals don’t understand things and his one of his interviews he was challenged by interviewer is saying dogs understand things and he says I don’t think they do well I don’t know if dogs do or not but subpoena the orangutan clearly does
[01:19:02] Blue: and this is a form of animal intelligence and it goes without saying that the animals do not evolve behavior to wash clothes nor to use boats to sneak past guards so I don’t see how to see this as anything except animal creativity plain and simple I think the only thing you could possibly do to try to explain this away is you could call it a coincidence that the animal by chance happened to untie the boat by chance happened to go check the guard by chance happened to rock the boat to get the water out by chance happened to go across the river unless you’re prepared to explain the whole thing as a coincidence we do have an example here of animals having goals having creativity and coming up with knowledge that’s entirely outside the genes okay now there is one last example I really want to cover and I think it’s probably one of the most important examples and it creates the most massive problems for the constructor theory of knowledge and but I think it deserves its own podcast so I’m not going to go into it this time and that’s animal memes I think that one of the reasons why I want to cover that in detail is because David Deutsch writes a lot about animal memes in beginning of infinity and I want to cover like I want to actually be able to quote him go through what he says and kind of talk them through why he believes they’re not knowledge and why I feel that they actually do fit the constructor theory of knowledge quite well
[01:20:24] Blue: let me just kind of summarize my this at this point though so these examples are meant to get you to really stop and think they don’t say individually anything definitive and I’m not really trying to say they are our knowledge I mean I call them knowledge but that’s like just for convenience right it’s the word itself is meaningless what I’m really trying to get out here is that they offer insights that you really get you thinking about you think about them in terms of the constructor theory of knowledge and it forces you to really think harder about the constructor theory of knowledge knowing all these counter examples leaves me with the impression that the properties of knowledge that David Deutsch currently talks about either in his book beginning of infinity or Chiara Milletto talks about in her book the science of can and can’t they do not seem like they are both necessary and sufficient set of properties to define knowledge and they even leave me with the impression particularly the immune system example that there may be no necessary and sufficient set of properties that you can come up with that will define knowledge and somehow only keep it to the two sources because there are so many other sources of this simulacrum of knowledge that exist out there that are so similar to knowledge and in fact indistinguishable from knowledge that I honestly wonder why we’re trying to reserve the word and not include them and then at the same time
[01:21:56] Blue: I want us to think a little more carefully about what knowledge means right the the astrology example the antibodies example why are those not knowledge how do they relate to knowledge if they’re not knowledge and I want us to really acknowledge these are interesting examples like what the immune system is doing what an animal is doing when it comes up with a creative plan what an animal is doing when it creates a creative song you know to try to dismiss those as up that’s nothing right I think understanding what’s going on there is related to the question of AGI and I think that if your theory of knowledge excludes those so you don’t even think about them anymore that that will be a hindrance to you trying to figure out what AGI is not a help at that point I
[01:22:39] Red: think that’s a that’s a really compelling point but just so our audience doesn’t get the wrong impression please correct me if I’m wrong but you know it sounds like you’re poking all these theories in in Deutsche’s ideas about poking what did I just say poking all these holes holes and in Deutsche’s ideas about knowledge but it still seems to me big picture you would fundamentally agree there is something special about the kind of knowledge that human beings create that could you know get us to the moon and the moon and and deduce what happened at the beginning of the universe and all this absolutely
[01:23:26] Blue: absolutely okay now you say it’s not the same and then of course I have to ask what do you mean by that okay
[01:23:33] Red: of course like
[01:23:34] Blue: okay so let’s let’s say I’ve used this example elsewhere let’s say that a group of creative scientists come up with an antibody to stop the plague or something okay or let’s say the immune system comes up with the exact same antibody if what you mean by they’re not the same in this case I’m saying yeah they are physically exactly the same yes they are the same
[01:23:57] Red: okay
[01:23:58] Blue: so yes if what you mean by knowledge is that it’s adaptive information that keeps itself instantiated I suspect animals create knowledge every bit as much as humans do however that statement is very misleading and I think that’s what you’re getting at right humans when they create knowledge they’re able to do it to a degree and to an extent that animals clearly can animals are clearly capped in their knowledge creating abilities and one of the things I really liked about burns books is that he makes the case that you really have two levels of animal knowledge creation animal learning you’ve got kind of the regular kind of animal that just does it through instrumental conditioning or trial and error learning where it just randomly tries stuff and then it learns what works and what doesn’t and then you’ve got this second kind of animal the animals with insight where like subpoena the orangutan they can actually try out ideas in their head and they can try to string together different actions to accomplish goals okay and yet both of them still clearly have some sort of cap so it’s like you got two jumps in universality and then you got the third jump with humans where suddenly it’s like the Turing machine it’s now everything in many ways knowing that animals are creating knowledge but that they have a cap that’s really important to whatever is going on with AGI keep in mind that we don’t even understand what animal the animal learning algorithm we don’t even know what that is it’s something amazingly better than what we’re currently doing with our machine learning so if you really want to understand AGI
[01:25:42] Blue: one of the questions you should be asking yourself is what is it that makes humans able to not have a bound on what type of knowledge it can create in its lifetime whereas all animals have a bound and there’s even two types with different bounds but they’re both bound, bounded what’s the difference between those like in some sense that is a way of going about trying to research AGI if you have in your mind that animals don’t create knowledge in their lifetime and that all their knowledge is in their genes you don’t even know to ask that question because you think that there’s exactly one jump and it just takes place and there’s only knowledge through Darwinian evolution and there’s only knowledge through human minds and there’s nothing interesting about asking well wait a minute what can apes do that humans can do and what can humans do that apes can’t do
[01:26:39] Blue: and to know that that’s worth asking that they’ve got some sort of really amazing knowledge creation algorithm but and yet it’s still bounded that really is related to the research of AGI which is why I am emphasizing this like as my interest in AGI exist understanding animal learning is actually a step towards understanding AGI because there has to be some sort of little tiny gap that took place that leapt from you know subpoena the orangutan to humans I think Doge has pointed out that it has to be less than a few megs right it’s like some tiny amount of difference in the genes that made the whole difference so it’s got to be something pretty small I also want to say this well I don’t think there’s a physical difference in knowledge created by animals and knowledge created by humans I do think there’s a drastic difference in the search capabilities this is something I haven’t detailed much so I don’t know if it will
[01:27:39] Blue: make sense to the audience yet but I think when we talk about evolutionary epistemology it’s always a kind of search you’re always searching through possible solutions to some sort of problem or set of problems and animals have a very limited search base and all machine learning algorithms have a very limited search base and for whatever is going on there are two search algorithms biological evolution and human minds that have this giant search space and seem to progress through that search base at a rate way beyond anything we would have guessed was possible and what is it that they’re doing my guess is that they’re constraining they’re pruning the search tree in some really interesting way that we don’t currently understand and that’s why humans can include in their knowledge creation going to the moon where an animal can’t is because that exists within their search space they’re able to jump through different problems and different solutions in some way that is so constrained that they can get all the way to traveling to the moon where an animal just could never do that whether we’re talking about biological evolution or animal learning algorithms neither could ever get an animal to the moon would be my guess honestly I don’t know that for sure we can almost imagine a science fiction story of some animal where there’s these selection pressures that cause it to learn to get to the moon but it’s still just an animal but I doubt it you give a dog a trillion trillion years it’s not going to figure out how to divert an asteroid that’s heading towards earth seems unlikely
[01:29:24] Blue: I have one more kind of appendix statement I want to make when I was talking to Henry about trade secrets he actually did say that he didn’t consider trade secrets to be knowledge he made an argument that I want to bring up and I want to address in case anybody else has this in their mind I want to explain why it’s not in my opinion a valid argument so when I brought this up he said well if you’re going to count trade secrets as knowledge then you’re bringing the idea of a knowing subject back into the theory of knowledge and that’s exactly what we’re trying to get rid of so here’s a quote from Chiara that seems to be what he intended in her book she says knowledge is defined entirely via counterfactuals it is information that is capable of remaining instantiated in physical systems unlike most definitions of knowledge the good thing about this one is that it does not depend on their being and knowing subject this is one of the main things that Popper was trying to accomplish with his three worlds and this is one of the main things that seems to have motivated Chiara and David to come up with their constructive theory of knowledge was to try to define knowledge so that it is not defined when I say defined I don’t mean like definition of a word I mean like what properties exist for knowledge that create the set of knowledge right of what we call knowledge
[01:30:50] Blue: they really wanted it to be defined in terms of what it physically was so that there was no reference to a knowing subject and if you don’t know anything about philosophy there’s this long standing debate among philosophers about how knowledge requires a knowing subject it requires that there’s a person that knows it that if the knowledge exists in a book and there’s not a knowing subject then it’s just a collection of ink on a page it’s not knowledge anymore and Popper wanted to show that that just wasn’t true right and that knowledge actually exists objectively it doesn’t require just a subjective experience in the mind so I understand why Henry is making this argument to me but I feel like he’s fundamentally misunderstood the argument here
[01:31:36] Blue: the criteria in question that we’re discussing when he brings this up is stated as capable of enabling its own preservation now I never adapted that we did discuss whether it needs to include replicators or not but neither of us is actually adding to this theory of knowledge anything about a knowing subject I think what he’s confused over is that I’m giving him an example of with trade secrets of knowledge that is only contained within one human mind and therefore is a knowing subject so I think that that makes him uncomfortable because he wants this theory of knowledge to not be about knowing subjects here’s the problem though he’s confusing the defining of the term of knowledge or the properties of knowledge in terms of a knowing subject versus including a knowing subject as one possible instantiation of knowledge okay so I’m surprised he didn’t actually see the difference between this I tried to explain this to him and he was quite adamant that I was misunderstanding but I don’t think I was it this actually seems like a significant failure to me in the way he’s he’s reading the constructive theory of knowledge because a knowing subject is the quintessential example of knowledge if human beings create ideas in their mind that is what we mean by knowledge right the fact that whether it gets replicated or not doesn’t matter if you have a trade secret
[01:33:10] Blue: that trade secret is a kind of knowledge even if it’s only in your head right I mean I opened the possibility that maybe we could think of it as not being only in your head if you have to enact it or something like that but let’s stick with it just the basics here that the idea of the trade secret is only in your head yes it still counts as knowledge I think the issue here is that neither of us neither Henry or I are defining knowledge in terms of knowing subjects but mine includes a knowing subject and his he’s trying to exclude knowing subjects and I think that’s just an outright mistake right because a human having knowledge in their head that is a kind of knowledge the constructive theory of knowledge doesn’t rule that out it just simply doesn’t define it in terms of the knowing subject that’s really what we’re trying to do here is define it so that the knowing subjects not part of the definition not rule out knowing subjects as being a kind of knowledge so anyhow that would be my appendix to this and my response to that criticism any questions I think actually I’m done
[01:34:17] Red: I know another great episode and I’ve enjoyed listening to your thoughts and thank you Bruce look forward to next time
[01:34:27] Blue: alright thank you very much 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 Deutch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects if you’re enjoying this podcast please give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts this can usually be done right inside your podcast player or you can Google the theory of anything podcast Apple or something like that some players have their own rating system and giving us a five star rating on any rating system would be helpful if you enjoy a particular episode please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out if you are interested in financially supporting the podcast we have two ways to do that the first is via our podcast host site anchor just go to anchor.fm 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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