Episode 98: Objectively Beautiful Flowers?

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:06]  Unidentified speaker: Hello out there.

[00:00:08]  Peter: This week on The Theory of Anything podcast, we discuss the chapter, Why are Flowers Beautiful, from the book, Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Through our discussion, we consider, does relativism make any sense? Is progress in art real? Will human minds ever stop increasing beauty in the world? Are humans more objectively beautiful than other species? Is progress in science intertwined with aesthetic progress? We consider these questions and much more. I loved this conversation with Bruce and I hope someone out there does too. Hello, welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast. How you doing, Bruce?

[00:00:50]  Unidentified speaker: Good, how are you doing?

[00:00:51]  Peter: I am great, great mood, well rested, excited to talk about this chapter, which is, Why are Flowers Beautiful, From the Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

[00:01:05]  Unidentified speaker: Which chapter is that?

[00:01:06]  Bruce: Let's see, it's chapter 14.

[00:01:09]  Peter: 14, yes, and it's also a YouTube lecture that is very worth watching as well. Covers a lot of the same ground, just a little bit different.

[00:01:21]  Unidentified speaker: How are you doing today, Bruce?

[00:01:23]  Bruce: I'm a little tired.

[00:01:26]  Peter: Okay, well, sounds like I'll be carrying this podcast then, so.

[00:01:32]  Bruce: So, yeah, I've definitely had a lot of work recently, so I'm grateful that Peter is able to jump in and take some of the, kind of head up some of these podcasts for a little while. So probably the next few podcasts are going to be Peter-chosen subjects, which I think he's made some really good choices here.

[00:01:49]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Bruce.

[00:01:50]  Peter: We'll see how it goes. But anyway, the subject of this chapter is objectivity in art and aesthetics. Beauty, something that I have thought about for a while. I don't claim to be that knowledgeable about the philosophy of aesthetics, but in my own way, I've been thinking about these issues for a while. I spent my 20s not doing anything too, well, I shouldn't denigrate myself like that. But I spent my 20s working at a record store, and a job I held on to for longer on weekends and things, even after I became a teacher. It was a job that gave me a lot of personal satisfaction. I love the people who worked there and the vibe, and obviously I'm a music obsessive. I spent a lot of time, sometimes in a slightly elevated state, while working there, thinking about art and quality. Why are these vibrations moving through the air, so moving to people? Why do people care so much about this? It's really a mystery, I think. Some people don't seem to think it's a mystery. I think it's really interesting. How come, when I take a look around the store, how come there's these certain artists that seem to resonate with so many people, where there's thousands and maybe millions of artists that just don't have the same effect on people? How come when you'll have a band, they have 20 albums out, everyone kind of agrees, or at least a lot of people, on what the best album is, or the best song? Why is that?

[00:03:40]  Unidentified speaker: Is this just something fairly arbitrary?

[00:03:43]  Peter: Are people kind of just brainwashed by culture or critical opinion? Or is there really something different about what is acclaimed? Is there an objective component to art? Is what it comes down to. I mean, surely it can't be all objective. People have tastes, but it seems to me pretty clear that there's something objective about art. I mean, when you really take relativism seriously, when you really take it seriously as a theory, you kind of come to the conclusion that a three-year-old banging on the piano is no different than Mozart.

[00:04:27]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:04:28]  Peter: I can't take that seriously.

[00:04:30]  Bruce: Well, for my three-year-old, it is no different. That's the beauty to my ears.

[00:04:34]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:04:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:04:36]  Peter: Well, that might be a subjective appreciation, which obviously has some validity, too. I love how Deutsch takes it down to the level of the waste basket. Even you take a great composer, presumably most of what that composer writes is ending up in the waste basket. Are we supposed to believe that what Mozart put in the waste basket is just as good as what he released and is remembered for?

[00:05:11]  Bruce: And he thought the ones in the waste basket were a mistake. Was he mistaken that they were mistakes?

[00:05:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:05:19]  Peter: I mean, you know, maybe he wasn't to some degree. I mean, there is a certain arbitrariness there, but certainly it can't be all wrong.

[00:05:28]  Unidentified speaker: He couldn't be all wrong.

[00:05:30]  Bruce: So I can appreciate that you keep talking about components, because I do think one interpretation I've seen of this chapter is that beauty is entirely objective, and that actually there's no such thing as opinions as to whether a movie was good or not. And, you know, I've heard kind of extreme versions of this. It should be noted that I'm not sure that's what the chapter actually says.

[00:06:00]  Peter: I was just going to say that I've read it multiple times now, or listen to it, watch the lecture, gone over it carefully. And that is definitely not what the chapter says. I can I can I have a lot of questions about it, but that that I can I can say pretty clearly there. There are definitely different components to art. You know, he really has a pretty realistic vision of talking about parochial components to art and other aspects to art that are not objective as well. So I would say that's wrong, but we're going to get there.

[00:06:39]  Bruce: Can I actually give an example of this, though, that I thought was intriguing?

[00:06:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:06:44]  Bruce: I think I mentioned it on this podcast in the past, so I just probably repeat. But one of my favorite movies, maybe my favorite movie of all times.

[00:06:53]  Unidentified speaker: Hard to say that because I just got a lot of favorite movies of all times.

[00:06:58]  Peter: I will often say it's my favorite movie while I'm watching it, but then another movie might be my favorite while I'm watching another movie.

[00:07:06]  Bruce: So it's a movie called A Silent Voice, and it's an anime, and it is a absolutely stunningly beautiful story about the relationship between a little deaf girl that was bullied by a little boy and later in life, them becoming friends.

[00:07:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:07:30]  Bruce: And he didn't bully her in small ways either.

[00:07:32]  Unidentified speaker: It was like devastating, the types of things he did to her, right?

[00:07:37]  Bruce: And it's such a moving piece, right? Like just the characterization, the animation, the themes. The fact that the themes resist any easy moral lesson, just even that was just beautiful beyond words, right?

[00:07:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:07:55]  Bruce: And so I really thought, who would hate this movie? Like there must be critics out there that just really didn't like this movie. It's like I looked it up in Rotten Tomatoes, and of course it gets this stellar ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, right? I don't know what it was, but it was something very high in terms of positive reviews. So I had to like find the negative reviews. So I went through the critics and I found one of the negative reviews, and I read it so that I could understand what this person, why this person literally thought this was a bad movie, okay? And it boiled down to that she really couldn't deal with how quote, unlikable, objectively unlikable, she says, the main character, the bully is.

[00:08:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:08:45]  Bruce: In a story about a woman who gets bullied by a man, let's ignore the fact that they're actually children, and then she takes all the blame and she's the one who has to, you know, come and make things better with him. And he's a totally unlikable character because of this. Well, now, obviously, objectively speaking, he's a very, very, very likable character. We can easily see that by all the positive reviews raving about the movie and just how easy it is to relate to the main character. And you can really easily see that there's where the subjective component is that we're dealing with a critic who has a certain experience in her life that has made it impossible for her to enjoy the arguably message of this movie about forgiveness, that she is not in a place to forgive a man in her words, having done something like this to a woman.

[00:09:50]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:09:51]  Unidentified speaker: And you know what?

[00:09:52]  Unidentified speaker: I can see the legitimacy to that.

[00:09:55]  Bruce: Like that's her real life experience. And it is blocking her from being able to relate to or find the likability in the main character. So of course, the whole movie comes across bad.

[00:10:08]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:10:10]  Bruce: And so you can kind of see this interplay, even though it's really hard to put your finger on it, between the fact that this is an objectively good movie, and the fact that it is for her a bad movie, objectively speaking, even, because of her subjective inner world and experiences and where she's at in her life.

[00:10:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:10:33]  Unidentified speaker: And I don't know how else to put it.

[00:10:35]  Bruce: Like clearly, there's two components going on here. I don't think there's any sense at all in which you can say, she's wrong.

[00:10:40]  Unidentified speaker: It's a good movie.

[00:10:42]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:10:43]  Peter: Well, clearly, people have a wide range of opinions and we're complicated creatures. In Seattle, a lot of businesses will play classical music to keep criminals and drug users away. And I always think this is some of the most beautiful music our species has created, but it's being used as a repellent to keep people away.

[00:11:10]  Unidentified speaker: Interesting.

[00:11:11]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:11:13]  Unidentified speaker: You haven't seen that in a business?

[00:11:15]  Unidentified speaker: No, I haven't.

[00:11:17]  Peter: Yeah, they'll crank it out in the parking lot.

[00:11:21]  Bruce: So, attraction is a huge part of Deutsch's theory. So, it's really interesting that, let's say, objectively beautiful piece of music could actually be used as a repellent. That actually is a really interesting insight I hadn't ever noticed before.

[00:11:40]  Peter: Anyway, let me get back to my story real quick. So, yeah, I—through my self-reflection. I came to the idea that humans have moved beyond our stone age ancestors. Aesthetic problems are being solved. When we say that Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are amongst the greatest composers of all time, that means something. Long before I discovered Deutsch, how I kind of started thinking about it was that if you think about all of the people out there listening to music, all the people out there creating music, let's not leave the music critics out of it. We are creating interwoven webs of explanations to explain quality in music. Now, does saying that music is objective, does that mean that there's a math equation that explains quality in music or art? Well, I mean, of course not. That would be asking way too much from math, I think. But it doesn't mean that these, there aren't a whole array of explanations out there that can explain the popularity of certain artists or music musicians. This does open up a can of worms because people will say, well, you're just saying whatever is popular is good, whatever is influential is good. Yeah, I mean, I think that that is a valid criticism, and certainly sometimes great things are not popular, but I don't know. I mean, I can't prove it, but I think that people are getting at something that is fundamentally valuable together through our explanations. How I would put it more than popularity is something like influence over time. So that, you take a guitarist like Jimi Hendrix, who completely changed the music.

[00:14:02]  Peter: Every person has tried to, every guitarist since then has tried to emulate his sound. No one can really do it. I'm going to suggest that in a thousand years, a million years, if our species is still around, someone will still be rocking out to Jimi Hendrix.

[00:14:21]  Unidentified speaker: I really believe that.

[00:14:24]  Peter: And to me, that indicates some kind of objective quality. Now, Deutsch never tries to define beauty in here, in this chapter. I'm not sure it's something that can be easily defined. But, you know, what he does is more give a whole reason, some reasons, some pretty good reasons, and some confusing reasons that I want to get into too, for why objective aesthetic truth exists.

[00:14:57]  Bruce: So you said you doubt that there's a mathematical theory of beauty. Now, Deutsch never claims that there is a mathematical theory of beauty, so he doesn't disagree with you on that. But he does make an interesting claim here that actually, I think will get some people's hackles up. So, I was on the Increments Podcast, and Vaden said that he really had a problem with people talking about inexplicit explanations, because explanations were by definition explicit. Which, by the way, I agree with Vaden on that. However, Deutsch introduces the idea of an inexplicit explanation in this chapter, and that is where that idea comes from. And here's what he actually says, and it seems like it has at least some relevance to what you were just saying. He says, The states of mind involved in that sort of science and that sort of art are fundamentally the same. Both are seeking universal objective truth. And both, I believe, are seeking it through good explanations. So then, now that he's tried to say that art exists is better or worse in terms of some sort of explanation, the problem is, is that nobody can explain what these explanations are. So, he introduces this idea of inexplicit explanations. He talks about how, he says, this is most straightforwardly so in the case of art forms that involve stories, because obviously stories have some sort of written explanation. But the same is true for all art forms.

[00:16:30]  Bruce: In some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art, even if one knows it because of the relevant, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words.

[00:16:44]  Unidentified speaker: It is inexplicit.

[00:16:46]  Bruce: No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language. But when a piece of music has the attribute—has the attribute, “displace one note and there would be diminishment”— there is an explanation. It was known to the composer and it is known to the listener who appreciates it. One day it will be expressible in words.

[00:17:10]  Peter: Yeah, that was an interesting statement. I actually agree that there can be inexplicit explanations for art. I mean, if you take a statement like you say, oh, The Godfather is the greatest movie of all time. The Rolling Stones are the greatest rock band of all time. Well, I mean, it's not a very good explanation there, but what you're really getting at is you're expressing that, you know, at least in your own mind that it might take hours to get it all out or you might not even be aware of it. But there is something in there that there is an explanation, even if you're not able to put it into words, or at least I'd like to think so. I mean, it means something, right?

[00:18:06]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:18:07]  Bruce: Do you know, I think the prickliness that both sides experience over this has to do with kind of what the word means. And as we've talked about, words are fuzzy categories.

[00:18:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:18:24]  Bruce: So if you have a problem with the term inexplicit explanation, the reason why is because you're looking at kind of the central of the word explanation. What does it really normally usually mean? And usually when you talk about explanation, you're talking about explaining something, which means it's explicit, right? Like almost by definition, that's tautologically what it normally means. But words stretch. And sometimes it's a really useful thing to do to create these analogies between things and to help us kind of move beyond what that word maybe even originally meant to express some sort of underlying idea. And that's just how words work, is that we're stretching them in crazy ways all the time, and some of them land and some of them don't, and some of them catch on, some of them don't, and that may shift the meaning of the word over time. As the word comes to mean that we stop thinking of it as a metaphor, we start thinking of it as that's just the meaning of the word, because it now has become the center of the halo, so to speak, using Hofstadter's terms. So, when we talk about an inexplicit explanation, maybe it would be better to say inexplicit knowledge, right?

[00:19:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, sure.

[00:19:39]  Bruce: Like, that's probably more technically correct, in terms of at least what the words today normally mean. But I think Deutsch is intentionally stretching the terms to make a point, right? And it's really unclear what the difference is between heuristical knowledge and explanations. Like, there is no hard difference between those two. We kind of know what heuristical knowledge is, and it feels very different than an explanation. And this is our podcast we did with Dan Gish, where he asked about this is kind of what I'm thinking of. And yet, there's no clear boundary between those two. Every ounce of heuristical knowledge could probably be explained. It's just super complicated, but has some sort of explanation for why it works, right? And that's why it works. Like, so if you're looking at, to use Deutsch's example of builders who used heuristical knowledge to try to build buildings instead of using deep, underlying fundamental physics knowledge to try to build buildings, it would work, but only if they didn't get too creative, because it was more parochial. And yet it worked, because there was some sort of deeper explanation there. We could, I think, call the heuristical knowledge of the builders of that day, using their parochial knowledge, we could call those inexplicit explanations. And I think it would mean the same thing, right? We're intentionally stretching the word to get you to realize that there is some sort of explanation behind this inexplicit knowledge that exists.

[00:21:18]  Bruce: Having said that, I think that may be the best way to take Deutsch here, is that he's intentionally, poetically, stretching the terms. And Veiden's reaction against that is understandable because he's saying, look, if we're going to start just talking about inexplicit explanations as if they're just things, when really the word, you're really kind of hurting the original meaning of the word explanation. You're making it vague to the point where it's not as useful anymore. And that's kind of a legitimate thing to bring out too, if that makes any sense. So I guess I'm agreeing with both of them, which, you know, that's just the way it is.

[00:21:58]  Peter: So another way to look at this for me in terms of objectivity, is that artists are doing something real. They're solving problems. They are creating better lives, making us more human. So when we are appreciating great TV, food, music, art, beer, whatever, we are living objectively better lives. So the basic premise that objectivity in art just makes perfect sense to me. And, you know, when I first read Beginning of Infinity, this is one of the chapters that hit me like a lightning bolt. Aesthetic truths are linked to factual ones by explanations. There are real and valid artistic problems to be solved by human brains.

[00:22:58]  Peter: Let me just read a quote from from Deutsch that I think sums this up. Scientific theories are hard to vary because they correspond closely with an objective truth, which is independent of our culture, our personal preferences, and our biological makeup. But what made Peter Schaefer think that Mozart's music is hard to vary? The prevailing view among both artists and non artists is, I think, that there is nothing objective about artistic standards. Beauty, says the adage, is in the eye of the beholder. The very phrase, it's a matter of taste, is used interchangeably with there is no objective truth of the matter. Artistic standards are, in this view, nothing more than artifacts of fashion or other cultural accidents, or of individual whim, or of biological predisposition. Many are willing to concede that in science and mathematics, one idea can be objectively truer than another, though as we have seen, some even deny that, but most insist that there is no such thing as one object being objectively more beautiful than another. Mathematics has its proofs, so the argument goes, and science has its experimental tests. But if you choose to believe that Mozart was an inept and cacophonous composer, then neither logic nor experiment, nor anything else objective will ever contradict you. However, it would be mistaken to dismiss the possibility of objective beauty for that sort of reason, for it is none other than the relic of empiricism that I discussed in Chapter 9. The assertion that philosophical knowledge in general cannot exist.

[00:24:51]  Peter: It is true that just as one cannot deduce moral maxims from scientific theories, likewise, nor can one deduce aesthetic values. But that would not prevent aesthetic truths from being linked to physical facts through explanations as moral ones are. Anyway, yeah, so that hit me like a lightning bolt, really seemed to resonate with me based on a lot of what I had been thinking about in my life. It seems to me that his whole take on aesthetics is really linked to the universal explainer hypothesis too in a very interesting way. Later, I really got into explanations for music and art too. More, well, music more specifically aligned with evolutionary psychology. For example, let me just go through some of them here. Some people might suggest that music is about sex. You know, if you've read too much biographies of rock musicians, you will probably conclude that musicians are considered extremely attractive people. Engineers do not have groupies, to put it in another way.

[00:26:15]  Unidentified speaker: That would be funny if they did though.

[00:26:17]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah.

[00:26:19]  Unidentified speaker: What?

[00:26:19]  Bruce: Don't have groupies? Sorry, what did you say?

[00:26:21]  Peter: Engineers do not have groupies.

[00:26:22]  Bruce: Engineers do not have groupies.

[00:26:24]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:26:25]  Peter: Tribal affiliation might be another sort of evolutionary psychology explanation for music. People are very tribal about music. Think about how many t-shirts you see. The whole subcultures are focused punk or whatever are focused around music. Maybe music is a mechanism to help people feel connected to the tribe. Some people say language might have something to do with language. Steven Pinker said famously that music is just cheesecake for the brain. For the ears.

[00:27:11]  Bruce: Cheesecake for the ears.

[00:27:13]  Peter: Oh, cheesecake for the ears, yeah. So it's kind of just something that it's just like a byproduct, an accident.

[00:27:19]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:27:21]  Bruce: By the way, just the actual quote is after explaining the theory that, in context, what he actually says is, perhaps music is just cheesecake for the ears. So he's not maybe making it as a definitive assertion, but in context, he is using it as an example of this idea of, we've evolved to like certain things.

[00:27:50]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:27:50]  Bruce: Which by the way, Deutsch doesn't deny and he actually gives examples of that. Like, why do humans like honey? He claims that's just shared.

[00:28:00]  Peter: That would be cheesecake.

[00:28:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:28:02]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:28:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:28:04]  Peter: But before I got onto Deutsch, I never really reflected that some of these theories, and I believe there's probably some truth in them. I think there's probably maybe more truth than even Deutsch might say. I know he's pretty down on evolutionary psychology and stuff, but I never really thought that they were in conflict with this idea that humans are doing something truly valuable with our brains that we're appreciating and creating something that's really out there, which would be objective beauty. And, you know, in Deutsch's language, that's because humans are universal explainers. So I'm just trying to explain why I found this chapter so illuminating. One more quote before we get on to some... I've got some real big questions about this chapter, too, that I really want you to weigh in on and hopefully I can come away from this understanding all this stuff about the birds and the flowers a little bit better.

[00:29:19]  Unidentified speaker: It still seems a bit odd to me.

[00:29:23]  Unidentified speaker: But hopefully I'm going to get there.

[00:29:25]  Peter: One more quote first, if that's okay. Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For instance, humans often act in ways that are contrary to any preferences that might plausibly have been built into our genes. People fast, sometimes for aesthetic reasons. Some abstain from sex. People act in very diverse ways for religious reasons or for any number of other reasons, philosophical or scientific, practical or whimsical. We have an inborn aversion to heights and to falling, yet people go skydiving. Not in spite of this feeling, but because of it. It is that very feeling of inborn aversion that humans can reinterpret into a larger picture, which to them is attractive. They want more of it. They want to appreciate it more deeply. To a skydiver, the vista from which we were born to recoil is beautiful. The whole activity of skydiving is beautiful. And part of that beauty is the very sensation that evolved to deter us from trying it. The conclusion is inescapable that attraction is not inborn, just as the contents of a newly discovered law of physics or mathematical theorem are not inborn. So as Universal Explainers, we are truly discovering something that's out there, something that is out there apart from human brains, which is objective beauty, even if we can't say exactly what it is.

[00:31:00]  Bruce: I just recently went to go see A Quiet Place Day One.

[00:31:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:31:05]  Bruce: And I happened to be sitting next to a young lady who was just, you could tell by her motions all throughout the movie and the way she kept almost covering her eyes that this movie was terrifying to her.

[00:31:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:31:19]  Bruce: And I kept kind of checking to make sure she was okay, because she would like say things, I think, okay. She was like old enough, she was an adult, but like probably 20s or something. And I kept thinking, is she going to be okay? And we get to the end of the movie, and I go, and we start talking, and we mentioned we both liked the movie. Said, seemed like that movie was maybe a little bit harsh for you. She goes, oh my gosh, there were so many jump scares all throughout that movie. It was so much worse than the previous two movies.

[00:31:52]  Peter: Yeah, horror would be a great example of that. I mean, why do we enjoy that?

[00:31:55]  Unidentified speaker: It's right.

[00:31:56]  Bruce: And then she goes, it didn't seem like that movie was bothering you at all. And I said, yeah, I kind of play horror VR for [unclear]. She goes, are you kidding me?

[00:32:09]  Unidentified speaker: I said, I would never do that.

[00:32:11]  Peter: Well, sorry to shift gears one more time. But what I really, with that whole preamble, what I really wanted to get at is what I find to be one of the most just optimistic and beautiful statements in the whole book, which was again, just a lightning bolt in my mind when I read it. Then we can get into the confusing stuff I have questions about and don't understand. But the conclusion is what I'm talking about. It's such an underrated point that I had just never considered. He says, if I'm right, then the future of art is as mind boggling as the future of every other kind of knowledge. Art of the future can create unlimited increases in beauty. I can only speculate, but we can presumably expect new kinds of unification too. When we understand better what elegance really is, perhaps we shall find new and better ways to seek truth using elegance or beauty. I guess that we shall also be able to design new senses and design new qualia that can encompass beauty of new kinds, literally inconceivable to us now. But what is it like to be a bat? It is a famous question asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. More precisely, what would it be like for a person to have the echolocation senses of a bat? Perhaps the full answer is that in the future, it will not so much the task—it will be not so much the task of philosophy to discover what that is like, but the task of technological art to give us the experience itself.

[00:33:59]  Peter: So basically, what he's saying, as I get it, is that one conclusion from this idea that beauty is objective is that beauty is infinite, and presumably will never stop creating more and more beautiful things. I just find it to be just a wonderful statement of futurism and optimism that I just never thought of, and I just loved that chapter. I know it's really complicated. I think about some of the most meaningful times I've had appreciating art in my life. I remember when I was about 25, seeing Bach's Mass in B minor performed. Never even heard of the piece. Now, I and probably a lot of people think it's one of the greatest pieces that human civilization has ever created. But then, it wasn't even just the music I was responding to. I mean, I was falling in love with the first violinist. I was in a beautiful building. I was just young and happy, or you think about watching a TV show with your family, it's just different when everyone's enjoying it. I'm sure you've had that experience many times. Whereas if you were watching it by yourself, you might be kind of like, eh, this is okay. But then if you're enjoying it together with other people. So I'm just saying, I know that it's really complicated, but there is still a component that is, you know, if I was watching it, listening to another piece that wasn't Bach's Mass in B minor, I probably wouldn't have had the same experience at all, where I just, you know, I mean, you just practically feel like you're getting outside of your brain. You're leaving your body almost. Great music can do that, I think.

[00:36:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:36:09]  Peter: So, yeah, I think I've got it. Why I liked the chapter so much.

[00:36:15]  Bruce: So do you know how he has the section about humans being objectively beautiful compared to other animals?

[00:36:22]  Peter: Yes, and I love that section.

[00:36:25]  Bruce: So I actually, after reading that, like went to work and tried to pay attention to are human beings beautiful? So of course we're looking at all human beings, most of which wouldn't objectively be considered hot, right?

[00:36:41]  Unidentified speaker: Just regular people.

[00:36:44]  Bruce: Turns out he was right, right? Like if you're really paying attention to the aesthetic beauty of humans, not hotness or sexual attraction or something like that, that it's super common for humans to be very objectively very beautiful. Even at older ages, you know, it's difficult to even describe what it is. You have to kind of be noticing it.

[00:37:11]  Peter: Well, I love it how he qualifies that as saying, well, we've only been deviating from apes for a couple of hundred thousand years or something, so we probably still have a long way to go.

[00:37:23]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:37:25]  Unidentified speaker: I thought that was good.

[00:37:28]  Peter: Here's an unpolitically correct thought, though, too. I think that women are more objectively beautiful than men. I can't prove it, but then maybe I'm biased as a straight male, of course, but I actually think most gay men or straight women would probably agree with that. There's something about women that are just, I don't know if there's a sexual selection process or what, but it's probably not just one reason. There's a whole host of reasons, but I do think that women are more objectively beautiful than men.

[00:38:05]  Bruce: We should note that there's also a parochial reason for that.

[00:38:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:38:10]  Bruce: Women use makeup and men culturally don't, at least today.

[00:38:15]  Peter: Yeah, but you put makeup on a man and I don't know if it just doesn't do anything for them. Okay, my subjective opinion. I'm not good. If I if I saw you with mascara on Bruce, I might not. I don't know.

[00:38:33]  Unidentified speaker: What are you talking about?

[00:38:34]  Bruce: That's like normal for me. I was wearing mascara. Have you ever like actually gone and crimped your, what is it called the little thing you do to make your eyelashes that women use to make the curl the eyelashes?

[00:38:47]  Peter: I have never done that.

[00:38:49]  Bruce: Go use it on yourself. It's actually kind of surprising.

[00:38:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:38:55]  Peter: Yeah, that's interesting.

[00:38:58]  Unidentified speaker: It does a lot for you.

[00:38:59]  Bruce: As a man afterwards.

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

[00:39:01]  Bruce: It's really subtle.

[00:39:04]  Unidentified speaker: Now, that's good.

[00:39:06]  Bruce: I had some girlfriends that maybe do that, and I was surprised at the result. I wasn't just on my own experimenting.

[00:39:15]  Unidentified speaker: I would never have thought of it.

[00:39:16]  Peter: You've been doing it ever since.

[00:39:18]  Unidentified speaker: I've been doing it ever since.

[00:39:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:39:22]  Unidentified speaker: No, that's hilarious.

[00:39:24]  Peter: Well, I would like to get into the central claim of the chapter then, if you're ready to shift gears there, about why flowers are beautiful as the chapter goes.

[00:39:40]  Bruce: Can I, before we do that, can I actually, all of this made me think of a story that is actually pretty meaningful to me, that famous past story from a long time ago. Roger Ebert, the movie critic.

[00:39:54]  Peter: Love him. He actually commented on one of my Facebook posts.

[00:39:57]  Unidentified speaker: I'll tell you about that in a sec.

[00:39:59]  Bruce: Oh, nice. He wrote a blog post a while back where he claimed that video games could not be art. And the backlash against him was so severe that he had to write an apology and his apology said, yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

[00:40:27]  Peter: Oh, yeah, that's a great essay. I mean, I disagree with it, but oh, yeah, completely.

[00:40:32]  Bruce: Like he's he's totally objectively wrong.

[00:40:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:40:36]  Bruce: Um, no, if you really like pay attention to what he's trying to say, I think what he's trying to say is not like, obviously, what counts as arts of difficult thing to define. So and he later like later admitted that that what he really kind of had in mind was high art, that video games could never be high art. Of course, he's, that's vague too, right? And then he would say things like it won't teach you what it's like to be human.

[00:41:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:41:03]  Bruce: And stuff like that, right? He, you can kind of get what he's saying. He's imagining the normal video game of the time frame that he's, that he wrote this in.

[00:41:13]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:41:13]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:41:14]  Bruce: I don't see how this interactive form of entertainment could be equivalent to high art, where it's teaching you something about human nature. Like compare video games to the movie I just mentioned, A Silent Voice. A Silent Voice, the thing that is so stunning about it, there's so many things stunning about it, I shouldn't act like there's only one thing, is that the bully is not portrayed, he's portrayed as just a human, right? There's reasons why he behaved the way he did. They're actually understandable. He was a child, obviously, but there were ways adults behaved that led to his bad behavior. You know, and just the whole thing, and then the fact that he wants to change, the fact that he's reaching out to the person he used to bully.

[00:42:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:42:03]  Bruce: A realization eventually that she was part of the problem, that she didn't assert herself when she was being hurt, and so people couldn't figure it out, right? And just like, there's this huge slew of things, and that's why I say it kind of defines any easy moral label, right?

[00:42:21]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:42:21]  Peter: And you imagine trying to express that in a video game.

[00:42:24]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:42:24]  Unidentified speaker: It's really hard.

[00:42:25]  Bruce: It's really hard, right? Like, it's so you can kind of see what Roger Ebert was getting at.

[00:42:31]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yeah.

[00:42:32]  Bruce: Now, just recently, I played a video game that was an amazing work of art, and I was so profoundly impacted by it that I had to immediately go write about it on Facebook.

[00:42:44]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know if you saw my Facebook post about this or not.

[00:42:47]  Bruce: But it's called Nier Automata. And it's this story about these, it's a very nihilistic worldview that's expressed in the game all throughout, right? There's got these androids, and they're supposedly protecting, big spoilers here, sorry, I'm about to spoil everything.

[00:43:11]  Bruce: Supposedly, they're protecting humanity from these machines built by aliens. But as, and so there's this fight that go on between the androids built by the humans and the machines built by the aliens. And it's this ongoing perpetual war that never ends.

[00:43:25]  Unidentified speaker: And it's really hard for either side to get the upper hand.

[00:43:28]  Bruce: And you start off with that premise, and then interesting things start to happen. You eventually find out that the humans have gone extinct a long time ago, that the androids are hiding that fact from the other androids, for most of the androids, because then they found that androids would have no purpose for living. And so it was better to lie to them and give them a purpose for living. And the same thing happened with the machines.

[00:43:51]  Unidentified speaker: They killed off the aliens a long time ago.

[00:43:53]  Bruce: They're not actually fighting for the aliens anymore. Some of the machines broke off and started to try to live like humans. And we're trying to explore what it meant to be human, because they were trying to find meaning for their life. And have this really kind of deeply nihilistic view. And then it turns out that there's these, the cycle of violence never ends after the androids figure it out. They'll wipe the androids out and start over, so they can keep the cycle of violence going. And so these androids that are the main characters, they are, one of them, the main character, there's two main characters, but like the main main character, she is meant to kill the male main character, which has a crush on her, not supposed to because they're androids, but that's just the way it works. And she won't get close to him because we find out that his build, it tends to figure out what's really going on, and it's her job to kill him when that happens. And she has feelings for him too, but she's trying to stick with her programming, right? So it really is this super pessimistic worldview. And you go through a series of different endings, then the game starts over and it plays differently. The next time, and you have to get a series of different endings, and they're all kind of bad. And things just keep getting worse. And so you get to the very end, and it turns out that, you know, she has to kill him and he has to kill her. And there's really no purpose for any of this violence. And it causes, the message seems to be, life is completely meaningless.

[00:45:29]  Bruce: OK, and I kept wondering why people love this game so much.

[00:45:32]  Unidentified speaker: Like, this is such a pessimistic game.

[00:45:35]  Bruce: And you get to the hidden ending where, spoiler alert, yes, the true ending, which is the hidden ending, which is the only good ending. And they have, so you had these little tiny robots that followed you around, that like shoot for you, right? And they're not conscious like the androids are, they're just pre-programmed. And they're told it's time to delete all knowledge about these androids, so that we can start the cycle over. And one of the little robots that's supposed to not be able to think for itself, it goes, I will not comply with that order. And the end credits are rolling while this is happening. This is the fifth time you've seen the end credits, right? And the other robot says, but you're programmed to, you have to. And he explains, they're our friends, I'm not going to delete the knowledge of them. I'm just going to refuse this order. He says, I think I have started to form feelings. And at that point, the end credits becomes a mini game that you've played several times, but it's an overwhelming bullet hell version of it. And the end credits start shooting at you, at your little hack robot that's trying to break the hack. And the game is just, it's so hard that you're getting destroyed over and over. And you'll get take a few hits, you die, and then the screen will come up and say, are you sure you want to quit here or do you want to continue? And so the first time you go, sure, I want to continue. And so then you play it again and you die again and then says, are you sure you want to continue? And so you go, oh, sure, I want to continue.

[00:47:20]  Bruce: And then it just starts to become obvious, this game is just unbeatable, right? It's just the amount of bullets they're shooting at you, it's just completely unbeatable. So you're about starting to feel like you want to give up. So it comes up again after you die, are you sure you want to continue? And at this point, you're starting to think, maybe I don't, maybe this, I'm done with this. And suddenly a message comes up and it says, you know, the message is different each time because it comes from a real person, but it's a message from a real player who has already finished the game. And the message says something like, we've all been through this before, don't give up. You know, something along those lines, right?

[00:48:01]  Bruce: And so you think, well, that's weird. It like even tells you what country this person's from, so you know it's a real person. And so you continue to play and the game gets even harder.

[00:48:12]  Unidentified speaker: And so it goes back again.

[00:48:13]  Bruce: Are you sure you want to continue? And now, like multiple people's messages are starting to come up. And they keep saying, don't give up. And as you continue to do this, and as the game continues to increase by all rights, you should just say, this is too hard.

[00:48:29]  Unidentified speaker: I give up.

[00:48:30]  Bruce: But because these real players are sending you these messages to keep trying, you keep trying, wondering what's going on. At some point after doing it several times, the message switches from, are you sure you want to continue? To starting to taunt you. It starts to say things like, will you admit that life has no meaning? And then all the messages start to increase and they're saying, don't give up.

[00:48:55]  Unidentified speaker: Keep trying.

[00:48:56]  Bruce: And so you try again and eventually it says, can't you see that this is pointless? And at that moment, a real player sends you a message saying, an offer to rescue you comes up from a real player. And if you accept it, the music that's been playing in the background, this little 8-bit music, suddenly swells into this choir. And a whole bunch of little mini ships come out from real players and start to help you. And the game stops being unplayable. And it becomes that it's not that hard to beat it now, because you have all these other players that are helping you. And now of course you might say, well, how can this even be that it's real players? Well, obviously the AI is controlling the players. It turns out that after you get through to the very end and you finally do it, and it turns out that this robot has successfully held this information, he's going to try to revive the androids that died. And he says some interesting things about, if the android says, maybe they will still move back to violence, but there's the possibility that they'll make different choices. And that's kind of where the game ends. It turns out that it pops up and the robot starts to talk to you, the player, instead of to the android. Up to this point, he's always only talked to the characters. And he says, there are people out there who are trying to get to the end of this game. Will you send them a message? And you're allowed to type in your own message and send it to them. And it goes into the cloud, and then that will be one of the messages that comes up to encourage people to not give up.

[00:50:33]  Bruce: And then it says, and this is the interesting part, it says, if you want to offer a rescue operation to another player so that they can win, you can do that, but you must delete all your saved games. So you say, yes, I'll do it. And then it says, are you sure you want to do this? You might end up that you end up saving somebody that you don't like. It can just be someone random. Are you sure you want to do this? So he's, yes, I want to do this. And then it'll say, you know, but you just barely unlocked all these features. Are you sure you want to give up the unlock and all those features and have to start all the way over? And you say, yes, it then literally deletes all your saved games. And then you go into the cloud as one of the people who can offer a rescue operation.

[00:51:19]  Peter: Well, sounds interesting. I think you've refuted Roger Ebert's thesis anyway.

[00:51:25]  Bruce: And that's the thing that's so strange about it, is that someone came up with a way to create this cycle of sacrifice, opposing a cycle of violence and to show that in a video game that teaches us something about how we're human, in a way that only a video game could do it and that you could never have replicated in any other medium. So yeah, I think this definitely refutes Roger Ebert. But anyhow, and there is something super objectively beautiful about the way it was put together and just all the elements and how they come together, especially after such a pessimistic and nihilistic game up to that point, to kind of at the end say, you know what, screw it, life actually is meaningful.

[00:52:09]  Peter: I've never played a game like that.

[00:52:11]  Bruce: The mistake that Roger Ebert made, look, I think I'm prepared to even concede the idea that at the time he said it, it was true, that video games were not high art and never had been up to that point, right? And that there are even structural things about video games that does make it hard to understand how you could turn it into art. The problem was is that his whole attitude was parochial. In essence, whether he realized it or not, he was saying creative humans will never in even a million years figure out how to turn video games into high art.

[00:52:50]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:52:50]  Bruce: When I put it in that way, it's so obviously a false statement.

[00:52:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:52:55]  Peter: Despite all his strengths, and I love him. I used to read him all that. I grew up watching his show and used to read him all the time. But yeah, he may not have been too much of a futurist in that way, but— So Flowers and Bees. So I think I've covered why I liked the chapter so much. Now I want to talk about my struggle with it. And I won't even say it's a criticism [wording uncertain]. I think it's more, maybe I'm just a few aha moments away from getting this. Perhaps you can help me, Bruce.

[00:53:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, so, okay.

[00:53:38]  Peter: So let me just just explain how I understand what he's saying about Flowers. Okay, so the central claim of the chapter that I found a little bit, I guess just off or unintuitive, I suppose. Or maybe it's just, I just didn't, just an aha moment or two away from understanding. So hopefully you can help me there too. So we have flowers and bees. Oh, one thing I should add, I'm not quite sure if this is intended as a more decisive statement [unclear]. I mean, you know, with all critical rationalist, however you want to put this in a critical rationalist sense. But I'm not sure if this is more of a decisive thing or more of just an interesting anecdote that seems to indicate that there might be an objective component to beauty. I guess that kind of works more for me in that latter sense. But I'm really trying to understand it. So we have flowers and bees. The flowers have evolved over time to attract bees. I don't think I need to explain why. So they can, you know, they can increase their survival fitness. Now, Deutsch is saying that the reason the way they do this, the way they are able to communicate across species, across a completely different biological branch is by creating beauty, by making themselves beautiful, objectively beautiful. And we know that because, well, there's something else in nature that is attracted to flowers, that likes flowers, which is, of course, humans. And we find flowers almost, I mean, I don't think he's claiming that flowers are like the most beautiful thing on earth, but pretty much all humans at least like flowers a little bit.

[00:56:11]  Peter: And, you know, he goes through all these other...

[00:56:14]  Bruce: It's really hard to imagine a dog stopping and seeing, you know, a bunch of flowers and stopping to just appreciate them.

[00:56:22]  Unidentified speaker: You know?

[00:56:23]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[00:56:23]  Bruce: It's like really hard to ever imagine that.

[00:56:26]  Peter: My dog is very interested in where other dogs have gone pee. Not flowers, not so much flowers, but yeah. It's, I mean, and he goes through other kinds of explanations that people might have for this. They say, oh, well, it's just bright colors, or it's just the contrast or something symmetrical about it. And then he says, this is one of my favorite anecdotes in the chapter. He says, well, you know, you might see a spider in the bathtub, and it's very symmetrical. There's a lot of contrast there, but you're not going to think it's too beautiful. But then he says, unless you're an entomologist and you've, you know, of course, we're Universal Explainers, so we can find things like that beautiful. But in general, you're not going to find it beautiful. There's something different about flowers. But then he says, there's other kinds of beauty in nature that might be more like a sunset, which is more kind of an accidentally beautiful, I suppose. It's not a designed kind of beauty, the way nature has designed flowers to be beautiful, to communicate across species. Or even says, like, even peacock feathers are not designed to be, are not objectively beautiful in this sense, because it has a more like specific biological function within a species, to prove, I guess, fitness to the other, to their mates. I'm not sure I quite understood that point. But what do you think, Bruce? Am I explaining this well?

[00:58:16]  Bruce: That argument, the peacock one is actually problematic. So I was going to bring it up, but sorry, go on.

[00:58:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:58:23]  Peter: Well, what are your thoughts, Bruce?

[00:58:25]  Unidentified speaker: Like, am I explaining this well?

[00:58:27]  Peter: Am I understanding this? I mean, it's interesting, but I just can't quite, like, it just seems a little odd.

[00:58:34]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:58:35]  Bruce: Let's go back to our critical rationalism and think about all the epistemology episodes we did most recently that aren't out yet, maybe, but we're releasing here soon, and we'll be out by the time this one comes out. And let's actually think about this in terms of critical rationalism. So what is the status, the critical status of this theory that he is laying out in this book? I think that's what you're really asking.

[00:59:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:59:05]  Bruce: So is this a best explanation, or is this conjecture that's interesting, that may be the first level that we can break this down at?

[00:59:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:59:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:59:17]  Unidentified speaker: Good way to put it.

[00:59:18]  Bruce: And so I have argued that the CritRat community has, not just them, almost everybody, regularly makes mistakes of not understanding the difference between a best explanation and an interesting conjecture that they personally subjectively find really super compelling. And I even suggested how to tell the difference between those two. It depends on whether there's actual objective, if the theory has been framed in such a way that there's actually objective, testable, checkable, if you prefer, things that we can go out and check the implications of that theory, okay? Once we reach that point, the criticisms start to become objective, and it's no longer just, what does my gut say about this? So the obvious case here would be empirical sciences, where we have chosen to frame the theories in such a way and then made it so that there's an institutional rule that basically everything's going to cash out in terms of empirical tests. And so only theories that can cash out empirical tests are even going to be considered. And so everybody feels the need to make their theories increasingly explicit so that they can make it more testable. And there's an unspoken, until Popper spoke it, rule that you don't get to ad hoc save your theories, you have to actually, if you're going to save your theories, you have to do it through some sort of testable theory. And this is what we call the no ad hoc rule, or what I've called Popper's Ratchet, where you always constantly try to solve the problems of your theories using, by making the empirical content of your theories grow, not shrink.

[01:01:03]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:01:04]  Bruce: Once you've kind of reached that point, a theory can still have multiple statuses from here. They're not all on equal footing. So, for instance, you could have two equally good empirical theories. This happened in the case of light wave theory versus light particle theory, where for a long time, until quantum mechanics came along, both theories were equally good. The scientific community did not necessarily recognize them as equally good. There was overwhelming support. I always get this mixed up, but I think there was overwhelmingly stronger support for light wave theory, because there were experiments that showed that light was a wave. And there weren't equivalent experiments to show that it was a particle. Until Einstein came along and he did the photoelectric effect, which was an experiment that showed that it was a particle. Okay, and that led to, for a temporary period, that you just use which theory works the best. Both must be wrong in some way, both are right in some way. And then quantum mechanics was the unification of the two theories that explained why light was sometimes behaved like a wave and sometimes behaved like a particle. So you might have, all of this was just a fancy way of saying, the status might be you have a good competitor, or maybe you don't, right? The status might be that your theory makes an implication that is testable, but it hasn't yet been tested. So nobody really knows, at least that theory has some sort of non-adhoc nature to it, because we can think of how to test it, we just haven't been able to yet, okay?

[01:02:54]  Bruce: The theory might have a status where we have tested it, but the thing we tested didn't really refute the competitor. This is one that critical rationalists often miss, and Popper does talk about it, and he points out that a corroboration in this sense does still show that that theory is non-ad hoc, that it shows a lack of ad hocness. So that actually matters, it strengthens the status of the theory, because, and I know Popperians hate that term, I'm using it intentionally because they hate that term, because it shows, okay, this theory does lack ad hocness, it's actually saying something about the world that we can check. But it doesn't really refute the opposing theory, you might call that still a refutation by calling it an implicit refutation. The ultimate, of course, though, is the crucial test, where you come up with some sort of objective experiment, where at once, you show that your theory is non-ad hoc, it has an implication that nobody knew without the theory, that we can now, we've now tested and it's passed. And at the same time, the other theory makes a different prediction, and that prediction is shown to be wrong, and so we've refuted it at the same time. And that is a totally different status, okay, of a theory. And that, and science's ultimate goal is, let's figure out a way to make these theories empirical enough that we can do a crucial test between them. Because the crucial test is, in some sense, the definitive end goal, the gold standard that we're working towards.

[01:04:22]  Bruce: So once you really understand that theories just do have critical statuses like this, and that the status of the theory does strengthen, it's not the theory that strengthens, it's the status, or in other words, our understanding of the theory that strengthens, then it becomes a lot easier to get past the Popperian allergy to never talk about strengths of theories, and which really leads to this really big problem of Popperians trying to declare every theory a best theory, right? Just because you personally like it, it becomes a best theory. Instead of getting more realistic of what's the actual status of this theory, critically speaking. So what is the status of this theory that Deutsch is going through? Now, I've talked to many CritRats that would say it's a best theory and start to then embrace it as true because, you know, as critical rationalists, we're supposed to embrace a theory as if it's true, even if we're doing it tentatively and act as if it's true, because it's the best theory. And so they'll go around saying, oh, Deutsch proved that beauty is objective, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they'll now start to embrace it as if it's true. Let me suggest that you've actually got this right, that this is actually way more in the status of interesting conjecture. And let me explain to you why. I think that's just objectively the actual critical status of it. Now, first, let me just admit, I actually think Deutsch is right. Like if you were to ask me, Bruce, what's your gut feel on this? I think Deutsch is absolutely onto something here. So I am a supporter of this theory.

[01:06:04]  Bruce: But I'm trying to be realistic about what the critical status of the theory actually is, if that makes any sense.

[01:06:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:06:10]  Bruce: And the way you do that is you have to have to intentionally try to think of problems, and then try to address those problems. And progress will come from addressing those problems, which means you have to first not be afraid of the problems. And you need to be able to look at them straight on and head on and deal with them.

[01:06:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:06:31]  Unidentified speaker: What is a problem?

[01:06:32]  Bruce: Well, obviously, one potential kind of problem is that there's some sort of observation that is at odds with the theory.

[01:06:39]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:06:39]  Bruce: So let's maybe look at that as one potential source of problems. Another one is that maybe it's at odds with another best theory. And another one would be, is the theory just too vague so that it's really easy to just keep varying it around?

[01:06:54]  Unidentified speaker: Is it easy to vary, in other words?

[01:06:56]  Bruce: And so you can just save it from anything. Okay, we don't want a theory like that. We want to make it way more explicit than that so that it's hard to vary and it's difficult to just keep adjusting it to fit any facts. One of the main things though, is like, can you tell me any implication of this theory that is unexpected that we didn't know already by the time Deutsch was writing this chapter? Okay, in other words, it's one thing to explain a number of observations that is already known. There's a certain power in that, right? Like, that might be a sign that this theory is interesting and we should look at it a little bit more. But as long as you're only explaining the observations that were previously known prior to the existence of the theory, the theory, according to Popper, and I've quoted this in past podcasts, may well still be entirely ad hoc, no matter how explanatory it is. And so the only way you can really be sure it's not ad hoc is that it must have some sort of prediction that without the theory you could not have made. And then you have to go check it, not knowing if that implication is going to come, which way that test is going to come out. And if it then comes out in favor of the theory, that's what a corroboration is, okay? And what you're doing with a corroboration, in this case, it might be refuting another theory, but it may not be, it may just be showing that this theory is not ad hoc. And that really does, that is a meaningful thing, that's a criteria that we need to look for, okay?

[01:08:42]  Bruce: Now, I would say that the examples that Deutsch uses all throughout this chapter, all of them were well known observations prior to him writing this chapter. So at this point, I don't think we have any really, any way to check if this is an ad hoc theory or not. Okay, and I don't even know how we would. Like the theory is just not explicit enough that we can go off and we can say, well, this is an implication of the theory and it would not be true except if this theory is true.

[01:09:13]  Unidentified speaker: Like I don't even know what that would be at this point.

[01:09:15]  Bruce: Okay, and because the theory is kind of an interesting idea, it's at that stage, it's not explicit enough to be able to be checked in that way. Okay, further, I think Deutsch is definitely making an argument here. He's not really going out and saying, okay, what are all the best competing theories that I need to do away with and show that those are refuted before I can say this is a best theory? In fact, he doesn't, first of all, I wouldn't expect him to know what all the best competing theories are because this isn't his field of study. Secondly, even if he was, I'm not sure what would have made a good book to meticulously write a paper taking each of the counter theories and trying to refute each of them. The truth is that even just myself, after reading this book, after being, sorry, this chapter and being very impressed with it and having that experience with work, I really saw, wow, I can see that Deutsch is right, that human beings are beautiful, right? Even ones that you wouldn't think of as beautiful. You know, going through all that and really feeling like there is something to this chapter, I then just started to do the critical rationalist thing and Google the competing theories. And it took minutes for me to start finding pretty good competing theories that I really don't think are refuted.

[01:10:40]  Peter: No, wait, wait, competing theories to explain why flowers are beautiful or why humans are attracted to flowers or bees are attracted to flowers.

[01:10:49]  Bruce: So almost every argument that he uses in this book, there are competing theories that could explain the same observation, but in a parochial way. You might argue they're not as good. You know, we're starting to get into critical rationalism. Isn't critical rationalism supposed to be about actual falsification? So what do I even mean when I say they're not as good? You know, is that compatible with critical rationalism? I think it is, but many people think it isn't. So let me, the one that I used as an example in a past podcast was this argument. So Deutsch says, so here's Deutsch's version. All these theories assume with little or no argument that for each logically possible aesthetic standard, there could exist, say, a culture in which people would enjoy and be deeply moved by the art, by art that met the standard, or that a generic [word uncertain] predisposition could exist with the same properties. But it is not much more plausible than only—but is it not much more plausible than only very exceptional aesthetic standards could possibly end up at the norm of any culture or by the objective towards which some great artists creating a new artistic style spent a lifetime working [quotation wording uncertain]. Quite generally, cultural relativism about art or morality have a very hard time explaining what people are doing when they think that they are improving a tradition. So let me see if I can explain the argument here. He's saying there isn't just arbitrary standards across cultures, right, of beauty, that when we talk abo-

[01:12:29]  Bruce: like we could imagine the child banging on the piano and there happens to be some culture that literally finds the child banging on the piano to be more objectively beautiful to them than Mozart, right? And yet we don't really expect to find that happen in real life, right? And so he's trying to use that as an argument, and kind of compelling one in my opinion, that there must be something more going on, that we don't just have arbitrary societies that have arbitrary differences in what types of music they like, that clearly, you know, or art they like or whatever, that clearly there is something more that seems to be leading to the different cultures deciding what's beautiful and why we often find each other's cultures beautiful, right? So here's the problem though, this whole argument could be used with waffle love. And this is the argument I've used before. So if you go into waffle love, which this excellent restaurant that exists in Utah and some other places around Utah, they make the best waffles in the world. And that's an objective truth that is not subjective in the slightest. So they have a story up on their wall, where the guy talks about how he wanted to quit his job as an accountant and he really preferred cooking. And so he kept trying to make waffles and then his family started to behave differently. As he got better at making the waffles, they would start to ask for the waffles more often. And eventually he reached a point where he realized, I'm onto something here. I've discovered this secret recipe for the greatest waffles.

[01:14:17]  Bruce: And he would try to sell it to the public and he would watch the reactions. And so he ended up with this convergence towards this secret recipe that was hard to vary, that if you change anything on it, that it made the recipe worse.

[01:14:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:14:36]  Bruce: And so in other words, this waffle love story completely fits Deutsch's argument, the way he's presenting it, even though it falls into the category of taste, which Deutsch agrees is just parochial. And there's several examples in this chapter where he talks about like the honey example. You know, why do honey and bees, why do bees like honey and humans like honey?

[01:14:58]  Unidentified speaker: Well, that's just parochial, right?

[01:15:00]  Bruce: Because that's just we have shared genetics. Now, when I made this argument in a past podcast, I'm not arguing that Deutsch is wrong, that beauty is objective. What I'm doing is, is I'm assessing the strength of his argument by showing that the argument fails to discriminate like we would want it to. Okay, that if, let's start with the assumption just for the moment, that the other theory is that art is in fact just parochial, beauty is just parochial. And that because we all have certain shared genetics, that we're going to tend to like similar sorts of music, and we're going to tend to like similar sorts of art, because of purely parochial genetic factors, and that's it. Okay, this would be, I think, the best competing theory to Deutsch's theory of objective beauty. Okay, and this is the theory that Pinker was advancing, or at least suggesting existed, when he said, maybe music is just cheesecake for the ears. That there's certain genetic factors that make certain sounds sound better to us, or have genetic meaning to us, and we're taking those and we're putting them together. The example Pinker uses with cheesecake is that each of the different attributes of cheesecake, the way it's a little bit moist, the way it's high in sugar and so it's sweet, he kind of goes through the series of attributes that cheesecake has, and he points out that every one of the individual attributes has survival value on its own.

[01:16:41]  Bruce: And that what cheesecake really is, is it's taking these various attributes that are wired into us genetically and it's causing us to have all of them delight us at the same time, even though they actually evolved for different purposes. And so cheesecake, therefore, is causing you to get really delighted by pulling together all these parochial factors at once, and then causing them all to activate at the same time.

[01:17:09]  Unidentified speaker: And that's the feeling of delight you get when you eat cheesecake.

[01:17:12]  Bruce: So he's saying, maybe music is the same way. He's not really saying music is the same way.

[01:17:16]  Unidentified speaker: He's saying it could be music is the same way, okay?

[01:17:19]  Bruce: I think this is the competing theory with this chapter of Deutsch, okay? Deutsch's argument must differentiate between these two theories. It must in some way be a set of observations that shows the other theory can't explain that his can.

[01:17:38]  Unidentified speaker: And I don't think it is at this point, right?

[01:17:41]  Bruce: I think you can kind of use your gut feelings here, and you can kind of say, well, I kind of find Deutsch is more compelling, you know? But then, how do you know if it's really because the theory is better?

[01:17:53]  Unidentified speaker: It's just because you like it better, right?

[01:17:56]  Bruce: And I think that it is a tough thing. Now, I had a crit rat write to me after I gave this example in a past podcast, and he misunderstood. He thought I was arguing that Deutsch was wrong, and he'd say, no, no, you're wrong. Objective beauty really is objectively beautiful, and your example doesn't work because taste is mechanical, right? And it's just a mechanical process that goes into the brain, and therefore, it just isn't the same as art. And I'm like, okay, look, first of all, you're agreeing with me. I'm taking the argument that Deutsch made, and you're adding something to it. You're trying to add this concept of mechanicalness into the process somewhere, which by the way, is not maybe the best way to go about this, but this is what he was arguing. And you're trying to say, Deutsch's argument was deficient, and we need this concept of mechanicalness to improve it so that it properly differentiates. So you don't realize it, you think you're arguing with me, but you're actually making my point, you're actually agreeing with me. At this point, when I explained that, I said, look, we're just talking about whether Deutsch's argument was sufficient on its own or if it needed something more. He latched on to the word sufficient and said, oh, that's justificationism, you're a justificationist. And the whole conversation came to an end, and it was impossible to get past that point because no matter what I said, I was justificationist after that. So, I want to be a little bit more clear as to what I was really trying to say.

[01:19:29]  Bruce: What we're really looking at is try to lay out Deutsch's argument such that you have really and truly have refuted the opposing theory, okay? And the only really way to do that convincingly and not just make it come down to your gut feeling is you have to first improve his theory to the point where it does make some sort of interesting unexpected prediction. And I don't think you can do that today. Because of that, it's not that I agree with Pinker, I don't. It's that I can acknowledge that Pinker's theory, I'm going to call it Pinker's theory even though he's not really advancing it, that Pinker's theory is at least a surviving competitor at the moment. And it will take work, creativity to figure out how to differentiate between those two. And that was really what I was trying to say, is let's try to improve Deutsch's theory.

[01:20:25]  Unidentified speaker: Let's like take Deutsch's theory seriously, and let's take the competing theory seriously, and let's figure out how to come up with a way to improve both theories to where we can actually make some sort of experimental test or at least something that's checkable about them, so that we can figure out how to differentiate between these two theories.

[01:20:46]  Bruce: By the way, to my friend who wrote to me and said that the difference was that taste is just mechanical and it's just a bunch of chemistry, Deutsch himself in this chapter says, but when analyzed in sufficient detail, everything is mechanical, which is exactly why I had some concerns with even just where he was trying to go with this to try to improve the theory, but at least he had the right idea. We need something more to this explanation. And let me even suggest why the Waffle Love argument works so well. It's because Deutsch is kind of assuming that hard-to-variness equates to objectiveness.

[01:21:25]  Unidentified speaker: It just isn't the case, right?

[01:21:27]  Bruce: Hard-to-variness can come out of completely parochial factors, the whole cheesecake argument, right?

[01:21:36]  Bruce: It is an objective fact that Waffle Love's waffles taste better than other places' waffles. If by objective fact, you mean over a population, more people prefer it. But if you had somebody who did not like Waffle Love waffles and preferred Eggo waffles, there is no sense in which, maybe it's Eleven from Stranger Things, there is no sense in which that person is objectively wrong, because we're really only talking about parochial factors here. And so it's an objective fact about a population, not about an individual.

[01:22:15]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:22:16]  Bruce: Could we make a similar argument with beauty?

[01:22:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think we could, right?

[01:22:23]  Bruce: Like, I don't think that's right, but I don't see how you do away with or refute that competitor as of today. So let me give a couple of examples of why I feel that way. So you mentioned the peacock argument that he uses, and there is something weird about the peacock argument. I want to actually read what he says here. He says, occasionally it happens by chance that the parochial criteria of attractiveness that evolved within a species produces something that looks beautiful to us. The peacock's tail is an example.

[01:22:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:23:00]  Bruce: Now how does he know that that particular example is parochial, but the example of flowers isn't? He states it like it's a fact, but what's his explanation for why the peacock happens to be a parochial example of beauty that humans happen to find beautiful? And flowers is different. Now you might argue, well, that's he spends the whole book talking about that. Well, he does for flowers, but he kind of just moves on from the peacock example. What we're doing here is actually a problematic argument, okay, is basically what we really want is we want to take this idea of this idea of flowers, and we want to try to refute it. And the way you would refute it is, is you would say, okay, can I think of an example of two species finding the same thing beautiful, but in a circumstance where this argument that Deutsch is making doesn't make sense?

[01:24:01]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, with flower, it doesn't make sense.

[01:24:03]  Bruce: And the first thing that came to my mind when I was reading this chapter was, oh, what about peacocks? Because human beings obviously find peacock feathers very beautiful, peacock tails very beautiful. But you could never explain that peacocks are somehow trying to signal across species with their beauty because it's only needed for the female peacocks to like. So isn't that then a refuting example to Deutsch's theory? And in fact, it is. So Deutsch is now going to ad hoc explain it away. And by ad hoc, I mean in something that's not testable.

[01:24:41]  Unidentified speaker: That's all it means.

[01:24:41]  Bruce: It's just an objective fact about his argument by saying, well, in that case, it's just by chance it's parochial. Well, if we're going to take every counterexample and we're going to declare it parochial by chance, and we're going to thereby disallow counterexamples, then we have made the theory untestable, okay? And I think that's the status of the theory, is that the theory is not good enough at this point, that the way you would try to go about testing it would refute it. And so you have to unratchet it a little bit, and you have to say, well, okay, I admit there are some cases where my argument doesn't work, and that there must be some sort of by coincidence parochial beauty that humans find beautiful.

[01:25:22]  Unidentified speaker: Let me ask you something, though.

[01:25:24]  Bruce: Isn't this way more common than Deutsch says? Think about how often birds are beautiful to humans. Okay, it's almost always the males, just like with the peacocks, because it's the males that have to strut their stuff to the females in nature. And the females always look very unbeautiful to us. Like, it's super common. Like, it's not some rare occurrence. Like, there's something about the fact that human beings find male birds beautiful in exactly the same way that the female birds find them beautiful that really kind of runs counter to Deutsch's whole theory.

[01:26:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:26:07]  Bruce: And there may be a good explanation for that. In fact, I think there probably is a good explanation for that. That this is in fact a parochial thing.

[01:26:15]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:26:15]  Bruce: And I don't think it actually disproves this theory. But it does mean we would have to get way more explicit with his theory, so that we would want to come up with a testable reason, a testable explanation, why are birds an exception? And work that out, and it would have to be its own testable, non-ad hoc explanation before we could really start to take that seriously.

[01:26:34]  Peter: Okay, I guess that's one of the things I'm not quite understanding, is why, okay, so why the beautiful, the male birds, right, are the more beautiful ones. Why, because that's within a species, I mean, why couldn't those birds be creating something true objectively beautiful for the female birds? I mean, why does it have to be between species for his example to work?

[01:27:07]  Bruce: Okay, so consider female apes. So obviously, male apes find female apes beautiful.

[01:27:19]  Peter: Because there's a biological reason for it.

[01:27:21]  Unidentified speaker: Right, okay.

[01:27:23]  Bruce: In fact, every species finds the opposite gender of their species, assuming the species has genders, beautiful, right? Because that's a necessity for mating to take place.

[01:27:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:27:36]  Bruce: Okay, but we don't find female or male spiders beautiful, right?

[01:27:42]  Peter: Well, I might push back against that a little bit. I mean, I think you're assuming that they're beautiful in the sense that they're attracted to them somehow. It could just be the smell or something.

[01:27:53]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:27:54]  Peter: I mean, I don't know if a spider looks at another spider and thinks, oh, that spider is so beautiful.

[01:28:01]  Bruce: Okay, so Deutsch tries to address this, and this is all part of his argument. Okay, he says, it is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is the parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or an individual. The other is unrelated to any of these. It's universal and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge, but the second kind requires knowledge with universal reach. It reaches all the way from the flower genome with its problem of competitive pollination to human minds, which are, which appreciate the resulting flowers as art. Not great art, human artists are far better, as is to be expected, but with hard to fake appearance of design for beauty. Okay, so he's developed this idea of parochial beauty versus objective beauty, precisely because, and for the reasons you just explained, that we need to explain, we can't purely explain it in terms of attraction, because species that we don't find attractive somehow find each other attractive, right? And the problem, so that's why, like why would there be an evolutionary pressure for a male peacock to have an objectively beautiful tail when all it needs needs is some sort of parochial beauty, which might be nothing more than a pheromone or something, right? So why is there even a... So his argument is about the need for evolution to evolve across species. So it's a little weird that within species, we also get an involvement of objective beauty. And this really does run counter to his theory, okay?

[01:29:45]  Bruce: And he tries to explain it away ad hoc by saying, well, by chance, it happens. But it doesn't seem like it's by chance. Like literally, it's not that uncommon, right? That there's a lot, particularly with birds. And birds are a really interesting case for a number of other reasons. So, for example, and this is another one I've mentioned in past podcasts, you have mating calls for birds. And these mating calls, human beings often find them quite beautiful.

[01:30:14]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, well, why?

[01:30:16]  Bruce: Because the mating call could just be arbitrary, because it's just a parochial beauty. So why do we find mating calls of birds beautiful? And it gets worse than that. There are some species of birds that don't come with a pre-programmed mating call.

[01:30:30]  Unidentified speaker: Some do, some don't.

[01:30:32]  Bruce: Some of them actually compose their own songs, using their own creativity, creating the knowledge on the fly through trial and error of what song sounds good. They warble along, this is coming from Richard Dawkins, they warble along, and then they find various notes that sound good together, and then they start to string the good ones together, and then if they're a male bird that's better at stringing them together, because they're more creative, they're more intelligent than the others in their species, the females are more attracted to them, and these songs are more attractive to humans too. So again, it doesn't even make sense that there would be a need for birds, particularly if you buy the, I think, false view that all animals' knowledge is in their genes. This is a refuting example of that, right? That clearly if a bird is composing a song using its sense of objective beauty, and it creates this hard-to-vary song that humans find beautiful, then clearly this bird is creating knowledge, right? And this absolutely shows that animals can create knowledge, okay? But it also is a problem, a blow for Deutsch's theory, because why do they even need objective beauty? Because they could have, like most species, just used parochial beauty to be able to attract each other. Now, does this disprove Deutsch's theory?

[01:31:57]  Unidentified speaker: No, not even slightly.

[01:31:58]  Bruce: Like these aren't, what we're talking about here, isn't refutations of Deutsch's theory. We're explaining why the competing theory isn't yet refuted and what it would take to refute it, okay? And that may feel like to you a refutation of Deutsch's theory and you may then want to argue, oh, that doesn't refute Deutsch's theory. And then you might want to try to ad hoc save Deutsch's theory.

[01:32:22]  Unidentified speaker: Don't do that.

[01:32:23]  Bruce: That's how you don't make progress, okay? We want to be realistic that the competing theory that all beauty is parochial has not been put down yet. And we want to start thinking about how to improve our theories that we could. At some deep level, you might say, Bruce, aren't you just being dogmatic here? Yeah, I'm absolutely being dogmatic here. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? I at my deep gut level can't prove that Deutsch is right, prove where I really mean refute the competing theory. But I believe he's right. Like just in my gut, I believe he's right. I could give you some of the reasons. They're kind of not strong reasons, but I could probably explain to you why I suspect he's probably right. And yet, what I really want to do is I want to progress the theories to be able to figure out how to actually show this is the sole surviving theory to the criticisms we were able to raise.

[01:33:17]  Unidentified speaker: And I don't think we've done that yet.

[01:33:18]  Bruce: In fact, I think we've got serious problems to address before we're going to be able to do that. One of the ones that you and I talked about, Peter, was it's hard to imagine aliens coming to the planet, seeing our art and not recognizing it as art. It's really hard to believe that.

[01:33:37]  Peter: I think he even touches on that in the book.

[01:33:40]  Bruce: I think maybe you're right. So, we don't have any aliens to actually perform this test with, unfortunately. But if aliens came to the planet and they couldn't recognize our art, that would refute Deutsch's theory.

[01:33:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, so that's like a testable aspect of his theory.

[01:34:00]  Unidentified speaker: We just can't, as of today, test.

[01:34:02]  Bruce: If they did recognize our art, that really would be a blow for Pinker's theory, right? It would refute Pinker's theory. It's just that this is a test that we can't perform today. So, this shows maybe a sign that neither theory is entirely ad hoc, because both of them have a test that we could theoretically test between. I suspect the answer is that the aliens are going to recognize our art and in fact find it beautiful. Which I think is really going to once and for all at that point, put down Pinker's theory.

[01:34:33]  Unidentified speaker: At least, maybe not for the cheesecake.

[01:34:36]  Bruce: I don't know, but just at least some objective beauty actually exists.

[01:34:41]  Peter: Let me just read that section real quick and then I want to have a question for you about cheesecake. He says, extraterrestrial people whose senses detected radio waves, but not light or sound, would have art that was inaccessible to us and vice versa. And the reply to that criticism might be first, that perhaps our arts are merely scratching the surface of what is possible. They are indeed parochial, but they are a first approximation to something universal. Or the second, that deaf composers on earth have composed and appreciated great music. Why could deaf extraterrestrials or humans who were born deaf, not learn to do the same? If by no other means than by downloading a set of deaf composer aesthetics into their brains. Or third, what is the difference between using radio telescopes to understand the physics of quasars and using prosthetic senses wired into the brain to create new qualia to appreciate extra terrestrial art?

[01:35:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:35:44]  Bruce: Just kind of address that.

[01:35:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:35:47]  Peter: But here, well, here's a question. Let me ask you a question about cheesecake cake, going back to what we were talking about before that I that I was just thinking of. Well, is is cheesecake. Really cheesecake for the mouth? Like, what I mean is that if I gave my dog a bowl of butter and sugar and whatever, I think my dog would be pretty happy. Most humans are not going to be happy with that for their dessert. You want like a beautiful, you want to even for what we eat, we're not just getting calories, we want to eat something beautiful, right?

[01:36:29]  Bruce: So the crumbled cake example here, that theoretically a crumbled piece of cake should taste the same as the nicely [unclear], but it never does.

[01:36:41]  Unidentified speaker: It doesn't.

[01:36:42]  Unidentified speaker: It never does.

[01:36:42]  Bruce: It really doesn't, right. So there's clearly some sort of, and there's like tons of experiments on this. Like you probably have heard of the example where they put a little parsley plant on the side of the can of soup. And their studies show that that improves the taste of the soup by 2%.

[01:36:58]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:36:59]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:37:00]  Peter: And you know, some of that could just be, I guess you could just call that a bias or something.

[01:37:04]  Bruce: But I forget who wrote the book where they talked about that.

[01:37:07]  Unidentified speaker: It was like Super Freakonomics or something.

[01:37:09]  Bruce: He points out that you want to say this is cheating or you want to say it's not really about the taste of the soup. But since the taste of the soup is your impression, it actually is about the taste of the soup.

[01:37:23]  Unidentified speaker: And he's right, right?

[01:37:24]  Bruce: It actually does taste 2% better when you put a little thing of parsley on the side of the can of soup. So there is some sort of other aesthetic value that absolutely overlaps with our sense of taste, right? So now I think Deutsch does, I mean, obviously he's trying to make his argument sound as strong as he can, right?

[01:37:48]  Unidentified speaker: And like, of course he does.

[01:37:51]  Bruce: Like, I wouldn't have expected otherwise. But he is at some point admitting, look, yeah, there must be some sort of parochial beauty, there must be some sort of objective beauty. And we can't tell the two apart today. Someday we will be able to, but we can't today. Like, I was thinking about how, when I went, I went on a vacation, I went to go see Needles Overlook, which in Utah is this totally unknown, stunningly beautiful vista that nobody knows about. Like, I've talked to a lot of friends about it, and none of them have heard of it. It's like it's a little mini Grand Canyon in the middle of Utah. And nobody was interested in it. Like, I would talk to the rangers, what about Needles Overlook? Like, I can see it on a map. They go, I can go there if you want. Like, it's not part of their parks. They were kind of discouraging us from going there. We drove up to it, got out, looked over, and my brain went into, like, cardiac arrest because it was so beautiful.

[01:38:51]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:38:53]  Unidentified speaker: Now, obviously, this isn't something that's designed.

[01:38:56]  Bruce: So, this, you would have to, if you took kind of the current theory that Deutsch is advancing seriously, you would have to say, this must be some sort of parochial beauty. And then the way he kind of responds to that is he doesn't actually ever declare it parochial beauty.

[01:39:12]  Unidentified speaker: He says, well, it's not designed.

[01:39:13]  Unidentified speaker: And it's obvious it's not designed.

[01:39:15]  Bruce: The night sky is very beautiful. The sun coming up [unclear] the morning is very beautiful. But nobody doubts that—nobody thinks those are designed. They're obviously not. They have other purposes. But then why do we find them so stunningly beautiful?

[01:39:30]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:39:31]  Bruce: Is it really just parochial? Or is there something more going on here?

[01:39:35]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:39:36]  Bruce: And if there is, then how would you, since they aren't hard to vary, how would you explain them? And I think there's a lot of questions like that at this point. And he kind of drops hints of how you might go about explaining these things. But he doesn't do so in any sort of testable way at this point. And his explanation is largely ad hoc at this point. And I think that's the status of the theory, is that it's a super interesting theory that I suspect is true. But I don't think it's progressed to the point where we can do any real testing of the theory. It has not survived the necessary corroborating tests for us to really start to see it as a great explanation and much less a sole surviving great explanation. So and I think that's kind of where we're at at this point. I suspect that there may be an interplay of parochial and objective that he doesn't understand. And this is something that Ella Hopper [name uncertain], I forget her name, a crit rat that I used to talk to a lot back in the day. She suggested that maybe a better alternative was that there's some sort of objective goal. Like if I'm trying to make the movie Godfather, I have goals in mind. I want the movie to be entertaining. I don't want it to be boring. I want it to make some sort of statement about human nature. I want it to have really compelling acting, where I'm defining compelling acting is it comes across like these are real people. You could kind of think through, and you probably never could make a complete list because a lot of it is inexplicit knowledge at this point as to what makes a good movie.

[01:41:33]  Bruce: But you could probably come up with an explicit list of quite a few things. And then the objective part of the beauty might be the degree to which you reach those goals and with no room to vary them. But the goals themselves might be entirely subjective. So it's not hard to see that there could be two very, very good movies that are such completely different genres and purposes that there's no way to actually compare them. Because they're not really moving towards some single goal of objective beauty, but instead, each of them is moving towards individual subjective choices. And those subjective choices might be built in because the laws of physics and are therefore themselves objective, or they might just be parochial. And maybe that just doesn't matter because we are humans. And so certain things are going to appeal to us just because of our shared genes. And that, by the way, is the explanation for waffle love. We have so many shared genes that, yes, of course, it makes sense that there's such a thing as an objectively better set of waffles if we're talking about a population, right? Like, of course, that's true. And so it may be that you can, in some sense, that objective beauty and parochial beauty aren't separate things, but that they're different aspects of the same thing. And we just don't have great language to talk about them yet. So that might be another possibility. And that might explain why we might go into awe of the beauty of the Grand Canyon just by looking at it, even though it clearly isn't designed, right?

[01:43:18]  Bruce: It might be that there are these parochial factors that the Grand Canyon objectively fulfills for us. One other one I just wanted to mention was he makes such a big deal about flowers being beautiful. And I don't blame him because that flowers really are this weird exception case. But it's not that uncommon for people to find other aspects of nature very beautiful. Like nature itself is often considered very beautiful. And there's actually been tests based on various evolutionary psychology theories. They've said, well, do we find all nature to be equally beautiful? Or do we find the nature that's the most similar to our ancestral environment to be beautiful? And the way they would test this is how popular are different kinds of paintings of nature. And the people who made this theory, they didn't know what the answer was going to be. So they went and they looked into it. And what they found is that actually it does line up fairly well with the type of nature that existed in the ancestral environment. Now, you know, we could criticize this. I'm not sure any one study tells you very much. And there's always the chance that they biased the study in some way. I didn't bother to look into it any further than this. But that result doesn't completely surprise me either. I mean, of course, there must be parochial factors in why we find nature beautiful. And it may have to do with... And the reason why I'm raising this is because that is the alternative to why are flowers beautiful. If you go look up, why do humans find flowers beautiful?

[01:44:53]  Bruce: You'll actually find all sorts of articles written on the internet. About half of them are people who are fans of David Deutsch and the other half have never heard of him. And the common alternative theory is that humans evolved a love of flowers because flowers were a signal wired into our genetics that showed that this land was something you needed to remember because it was likely in the future going to have fruit or not even necessarily fruit, because obviously not all flowers bear fruit that's edible to us. But it showed that the land itself had a certain quality that was desirable to humans, genetically speaking.

[01:45:35]  Peter: Well, I'm going to say my BS detector has been activated by that.

[01:45:38]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:45:40]  Bruce: So in other words, the alternative theory that existed prior to Deutsch writing this chapter, did try to put it in terms of just parochial genetic factors, right?

[01:45:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:45:53]  Unidentified speaker: And you know what?

[01:45:54]  Bruce: You say your BS detector, but how would you refute this theory?

[01:45:59]  Unidentified speaker: Like, could you?

[01:46:01]  Bruce: It's really kind of hard to refute. It's not maybe a theory that's specific or explicit enough that you could refute it, which is itself a problem. But I'm not sure Deutsch's theory is either.

[01:46:14]  Peter: Well, how about we, before we wrap up, there's two more claims in the chapter that I thought were so interesting that I just want to get your take on real quick, if that's okay.

[01:46:25]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:46:27]  Peter: First, the claim that I wish I could find the exact quote for this, but I think he covers it several times, that scientists are pursuing aesthetic truth. So when without aesthetic truth, there is no science, and that artists and scientists are both seeking universal objective truths, and he talks about the waste basket, and a lot of the same way. That's so unintuitive, but I think it rings true for me. Are scientists ultimately pursuing aesthetic truth just like artists?

[01:47:06]  Unidentified speaker: What do you think?

[01:47:09]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:47:09]  Bruce: So he mentions this idea that a beauty of a theory is a heuristic, that the theory is interesting and should be pursued. He refutes the idea that it guarantees that the theory is true.

[01:47:26]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:47:26]  Peter: And of course, I don't think anyone would say that.

[01:47:28]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:47:30]  Bruce: And he has the little quote about, there's nothing worse than having your beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. And then he points out that, but that one, when that happens, the example here was spontaneous generation. That when that happened, it was replaced by the theory of evolution, which really is more beautiful than the theory of spontaneous generation.

[01:47:55]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:47:55]  Bruce: So even though the ugly fact may have killed the beautiful theory, it didn't do so by replacing it with a theory that was aesthetically uglier.

[01:48:06]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:48:07]  Bruce: It replaced it with one that was actually aesthetically more beautiful. And there's a John Polkinghorne is a scientist. He's a priest turned scientist that has actually written quite a bit about this. And he actually sees God in this, right? That he's a priest that turned scientist. So this is what we would expect. He actually is a scientist turned priest. I forget which way he went, but he's on both. And he talks quite a bit about just how often it is true that the beauty of a theory actually does serve as a guide to that theory being something worth pursuing. And there is something, like, how would you explain that without admitting that there's some sort of objectiveness that must go beyond genetics? Like, why would genetics wire us to find certain physics theories more beautiful than others? Now, I don't know if you can say this is a true refuting case, because I've actually raised this to people who disagree with Deutsch's theory, and they'll say something like this. I can't remember the exact argument, so I'm not going to do it justice. But it was something along the lines of, well, it makes sense that certain aspects of explanations would have more survival value than others based on, say, their simplicity or based on other factors that we would then find beautiful. And so it makes sense that those would then be a guide towards certain theories. So I guess even this one, maybe we could come up with some parochial alternative explanation for it. But like you said, my BS detector is kind of going off at this point too.

[01:49:49]  Bruce: It certainly seems like there is something to this idea that beautiful theories, beautifulness in theories is, if nothing else, a sign of interestingness, a sign that you should pursue it further, presumably because there's something to this theory that you can learn from. Even if the theory itself isn't itself correct, like all the way correct. No theory is all the way correct.

[01:50:14]  Unidentified speaker: I guess that's the point.

[01:50:18]  Peter: Okay, I'll buy it. Okay, one more thing. I just want to put out there, just because I thought it was such an intriguing idea. I guess you could call this as a conclusion from the universal explainer hypothesis. And that's the idea that two humans are as different as different species. So he says signaling across the gap between two humans is analogous to the gap between two species. The amount of information in one human mind is greater than the genome of entire other species. So artists are signaling across the gap. But that was, I don't know what else to say about it, other than it's an intriguing and beautiful way to look at what artists are doing. Do you think that, does that ring true for you, Bruce?

[01:51:20]  Unidentified speaker: It does.

[01:51:21]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry, what page is that?

[01:51:22]  Bruce: I actually highlighted that one and now I can't find it.

[01:51:25]  Peter: Sorry, I was reading from my phone there what I wrote down.

[01:51:28]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, I found it.

[01:51:30]  Bruce: Okay, so yeah, humans are quite unlike that. The amount of information in the human mind is more than that of the genome of any species and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person. I would point out that I use this argument to explain why animals do create knowledge because that is just as true for animal brains, right? The knowledge, the information contained within an animal's brain and nervous system is overwhelmingly larger than the genetic information in its genome. Here's the thing, though. So, this is something that Byrne actually talked about way back when we did episodes on Byrne's theories. It's true that animals create knowledge, but the genes in animals have a much stronger hold on what type of knowledge they can create. And he gives an example using the mating bird example, that there are certain birds where the knowledge of the mating call is wired into the genes. And they know that because if you raise the baby bird away from the adult birds, it still knows the mating call. And there's other birds where there is no mating call. It's just a matter of them composing their own best song that they can come up with, objectively beautiful song they can come up with. But there's a middle case, and the middle case is kind of the norm, where the genes, they still must create the knowledge of how to do that mating call through trial and error. But the genes have wired them to have attention only to songs that are similar to the mating call. So they, in fact, they only need to hear it from their parents once.

[01:53:22]  Bruce: And they have genes that cause them to remember the song perfectly, and then they actually, by trial and error, practice against their memory of the song until they get it right. And the reason why they know that is through experiments. They tried taking the baby bird away from the parents. If they just take the baby bird away, it will never learn the song because it's something it has to actually learn through trial and error and create the knowledge of. But if they give it a different bird's mating call, it won't learn it. But if they give it the mating call of that species, but backwards, it will learn it. So somehow the genes have actually narrowed its attention so that it can only learn songs that fall within a certain range that would make it very, very likely to learn the right mating call. And I think this is really the big, even when I put it this way, I think this actually fits with Deutsch's argument quite well.

[01:54:25]  Unidentified speaker: Humans just aren't like this.

[01:54:26]  Bruce: Like we do have genetic factors that have drastic impact on us. Our genes absolutely can and do coerce us on a regular basis. And I've offered up the example of hunger and pain. And I always have crit rats respond, oh, but what about Gandhi? And it's like, no, no, no, no, you've totally missed the point.

[01:54:45]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:54:47]  Bruce: Yes, because humans are universal explainers, you can have exception cases even to an extreme case like pain or hunger. But how often do you come across people who want to be a monk?

[01:55:02]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:55:03]  Bruce: Like overwhelmingly, there's been cultures that have really put a lot of emphasis on trying to be a monk and not want sex and to be with God instead and things like that. But it's always been difficult for people, like super difficult, it's super difficult for committed monks, in fact, to the point where they often fail at it. How do you explain the almost consistent, with only a few exceptions, that there are certain things that humans will do? Well, it's because the genes actually do coerce us and have influence over us, sometimes very, very, very strongly.

[01:55:37]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[01:55:39]  Bruce: But I think it's the same thing going on here, is that no matter how much you try to coerce a human with genes, humans can always find a way around it and animals can't. So the types of knowledge an animal can create are super narrow controlled by the genes and just aren't for humans. So what he's saying makes sense to me, that if you want to communicate fitness, you know, from one human to the next, it wouldn't make sense that you would do it just through, say, a pheromone, right?

[01:56:13]  Unidentified speaker: Like animals would.

[01:56:15]  Bruce: That might have some influence on humans. It kind of makes more sense that the genes would need to start to seek out something that's way more objective than that, because human minds are so vastly different from each other compared to animal minds, which are so narrowly controlled by the genes. Sorry, does that make sense? I feel like I rambled a little bit there, but there really was a point that I feel like is actually agreement with what he's saying.

[01:56:42]  Peter: Yeah, no, that's compelling. And I appreciate your perspective there. And I've enjoyed discussing this chapter with you very much. And I think we should probably wrap up unless you have anything else to say. But it's been nice and I hope someone else out there likes it too.

[01:57:08]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:57:08]  Unidentified speaker: Well, thanks a lot, Peter.

[01:57:09]  Unidentified speaker: This has been fun.

[01:57:11]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Bruce.

[01:57:19]  Unidentified speaker: Hello again.

[01:57:20]  Peter: If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNNielsen01 [spelling uncertain]. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:58:04]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.