00:00:43.960 I didn't expect the introduction to go for as long as I said at the end of the last
00:00:47.800 So we're going to dive straight into the readings day with no introduction.
00:00:51.960 Now in the previous chapter, at the end of the previous chapter, David wrote, we are
00:00:58.900 channels of information flow, so are histories, and so are all relatively autonomous objects
00:01:06.880 But we sent it being so extremely unusual channels along which sometimes knowledge grows
00:01:15.280 And so that's important because at the beginning of chapter 12, a physicist history of
00:01:22.280 bad philosophy, with some comments on bad science, David writes in a conversation between
00:01:37.120 And the reader is asking David, the proverbial reader, the reader asks, so I am an emergent,
00:01:45.240 quasi autonomous flow of information in the multiverse, David, you are, okay.
00:01:51.280 So let's have a short reflection on what quasi autonomous flow of information in multiverse
00:02:00.160 So emergent, well emergent, so not at the fundamental reductionistic level.
00:02:08.640 So a person emerges from the laws of physics and from matter behaving in certain ways.
00:02:20.720 We are complicated objects, we are fundamental like an electron is fundamental, like a
00:02:27.320 People can have fundamental effects on the universe, but as he says there were emergent,
00:02:31.760 quasi autonomous, quasi meaning somewhat, somewhat autonomous.
00:02:35.480 So we are not entirely free, I'm not like Superman, I can't fly into the sky, I can't
00:02:43.800 But given the laws of physics, there are choices before me.
00:02:47.640 And my knowledge, the knowledge that I create is the thing that determines the measure
00:02:53.080 of universes in which a certain choice tends to have a higher measure compared to a lower
00:03:00.880 There are some places in the multiverse where I turn around and begin to do abstract
00:03:07.080 art on the wall behind me, but Breckall is not the person that tends to do that kind
00:03:15.840 There might be some sliver of universes where I just get bored with making YouTube videos
00:03:20.960 about the work of David Deutsch, but they are, so far as I can tell, highly unlikely,
00:03:27.360 highly unlikely because I've never had any impulse to do abstract art before.
00:03:32.720 If I started doing abstract art right now, that could possibly be explained by an
00:03:38.040 aneurysm or something like that, and it's an extremely small measure of universes, that might
00:03:46.440 So I'm quasi-autonomous in creating knowledge about the things that I'm interested in,
00:03:55.360 and usually only the things that I'm interested in.
00:03:59.760 If the laws of physics do not rule it out, then yeah, it happens somewhere in the multiverse,
00:04:03.560 but it's almost never in equal measure whenever there's a choice.
00:04:06.360 There's a choice here between me doing what I'm doing now and any of an infinite number
00:04:13.720 Now in the overall majority of universes, because I've preserved my personality over time
00:04:20.040 for many, many years, I'm doing precisely this, and I will continue to do precisely this
00:04:27.200 In some smaller number, I do something slightly different, and in some smaller number
00:04:34.800 The more and more different those things are, to what my personality has historically
00:04:39.880 been, the less likely and the smaller measure of universes in which that's going to occur.
00:04:46.680 So I'm an emergent, quasi-autonomous flow of information in the multiverse, David says, well,
00:04:51.520 the reader says, but David says through the reader, and so that's what that means.
00:04:57.400 And flow of information, so explaining how the multiverse itself evolves over time is
00:05:04.320 more about the flow of information rather than, well, it increasingly will be more about
00:05:10.400 the flow of information than it will be merely the movement of particles under the straightforward
00:05:19.080 It will be better explained by the flow of information and the creation of knowledge over
00:05:25.560 Now at the beginning of this chapter, and I won't read this part, David has this fictional
00:05:31.120 conversation with one of his readers, and the reader is summarizing what was going on in
00:05:37.160 the last chapter, and basically explaining how it is that we know the multiverse is the
00:05:44.920 best explanation for what's going on in quantum theory.
00:05:48.280 And so I'll just read the very last bit, where we're talking about, where David's
00:05:52.680 talking about how the way in which we understand multiple universes exist is because of
00:06:02.360 We are noticing where photons of light are landing and where they're not landing.
00:06:06.840 And the reader says, quote, so that trickle of photons through the interferometer really
00:06:12.240 does provide a window on a vast multiplicity of universes.
00:06:16.400 And David says, in response, yes, it's another example of reach, just a small portion
00:06:23.960 The explanation of those experiments in isolation isn't as hard to vary as the full theory,
00:06:29.680 in regard to the existence of other universes, it's incontrovertible all the same reader.
00:06:40.120 But then why is it that only a small minority of quantum physicists agree, David, bad
00:06:50.920 So here we're about to get into the discussion about bad philosophy.
00:06:55.200 And David just emphasizing there that only a minority of quantum physicists agree, they don't
00:06:59.240 do so far as I know, survey to professional physicists very often on what interpretation of
00:07:05.240 quantum theory they prefer, but even the most recent ones, do not show a majority of people
00:07:15.520 Most are still either instrumentalists or believe in something like the Copenhagen interpretation,
00:07:21.520 And this is what I was taught anyway in the 90s to 2000s with respect to quantum theory
00:07:29.200 at the universities that I went through anyway.
00:07:31.960 It was still the Copenhagen interpretation or it was some form of there's no point asking
00:07:37.800 no one understands or instrumentalism, of course, of course.
00:07:43.760 Just to be able to solve the problems, that's all that's important, that kind of thing.
00:07:48.560 Okay, so getting back to the book, David writes quote, quantum theory was discovered independently
00:07:53.760 by two physicists who reached it from different directions, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger.
00:08:00.000 The latter gave his name to the Schrodinger equation, which is a way of expressing the quantum
00:08:06.240 Both versions of the theory were formulated between 1925 and 1927, and both explained motion,
00:08:12.520 especially within atoms, in new and astonishingly counterintuitive ways.
00:08:18.080 Heisenberg's theory said that the physical variables of a particle do not have numerical
00:08:24.080 Instead, they are matrices, large arrays of numbers, which are related in complicated
00:08:28.720 probabilistic ways to the outcomes of observations of those variables.
00:08:33.280 With Heisenberg, we now know that that multiplicity of information exists because a variable
00:08:38.840 has different values for different instances of the object and the multiverse.
00:08:43.360 But at the time, neither Heisenberg nor anyone else believe that his matrix valued quantities
00:08:49.320 literally described what Einstein called elements of reality.
00:08:53.640 The Schrodinger equation, when applied to the case of an individual particle, described
00:08:59.360 But Schrodinger soon realized that for two or more particles, it did not.
00:09:03.040 It did not represent a wave with multiple crests, nor could it be resolved into two or more
00:09:07.880 Mathematically, it was a single wave in a high dimensional space.
00:09:11.720 With Heisenberg, we now know that such waves describe what proportion of the instances
00:09:16.280 of each particle are in each region of space, and also the entanglement information among
00:09:22.720 End quote, some exposition of that just on my behalf.
00:09:30.040 So here is the Schrodinger equation, and the Schrodinger equation is a wave equation.
00:09:37.840 And that is at least one form of it, there is the time dependent, the time independent
00:09:42.040 Schrodinger equation we do not need to go into the details right now.
00:09:45.520 But this one is the time dependent one, and it says that at some particular time, t,
00:09:50.680 h gives information, the h is the Hamiltonian, gives information about the energy of a particle
00:09:59.800 And that is the epsilon, that Greek letter there.
00:10:03.320 We can graph, for example, the position, let us say, for example, the position of some
00:10:10.920 And we get a graph, a wave that evolves over time in fact.
00:10:14.440 Here is the Wikipedia animation of psi for that particle, right there.
00:10:19.400 And so roughly speaking, what we are seeing here is that the particle is in all these places
00:10:27.600 Now these graphs, these graphs of waves are analogous to a picture of a snapshot in time
00:10:37.800 What the range of energies is that it might have, or its momentum and so on.
00:10:44.600 Now this is physics that is different to classical mechanics, in classical mechanics, at a
00:10:48.960 certain point in time, a particle has a single numerical value for a particular physical
00:10:54.480 quantity, like position or energy or momentum or velocity.
00:11:01.480 Physicists have for a long time, physicists have for a long time, and indeed had for a long
00:11:06.680 time before quantum theory, been comfortable dealing with y and so I was natural for them
00:11:10.600 to interpret the Schrodinger wave equation that's describing a wave moving through actual
00:11:16.520 But as David just said there, it's kind of misleading.
00:11:19.760 It's a wave and a higher dimensional space, and what that means is a wave across the multiverse,
00:11:26.560 not a wave in a single universe, that's in one way of speaking anyway.
00:11:30.280 So an observer in a universe doesn't see a wave moving through space.
00:11:37.080 But another way of looking at quantum theory, as David has mentioned here, is what has
00:11:41.040 come to be known as the Heisenberg pictureal matrix mechanics.
00:11:45.160 And so matrices look like this kind of thing, and I've picked these ones deliberately.
00:11:50.640 These ones are known as the Pauli matrices, and the Pauli matrices can be used to represent
00:11:56.520 a number of different quantities, but in particular they can be used to represent the spin
00:12:02.920 The spin of a particle is analogous to its angular momentum.
00:12:06.120 Now in classical mechanics, if something is spinning, it's got a certain angular momentum,
00:12:10.280 the rate at which it is spinning, and the difficulty with which it might be hard to stop
00:12:16.320 this object from the spinning, and that will have a single value.
00:12:20.200 But in quantum mechanics, the spin of a particle is a matrices, it's not a single value.
00:12:25.800 And so even if you don't understand what a matrices, and it's going to important, what
00:12:30.680 is important is that it's not just a single number.
00:12:35.920 In particular, when it comes to something like an electron, it can have spin up or spin
00:12:41.640 down, so we say, and experiments can be done, showing that if you fire a particular electron
00:12:47.560 through this apparatus, the Stern-Gulach experiment, then it will demonstrate having two
00:12:53.640 different spins simultaneously over time, returning to the book.
00:12:58.080 I've got these two kind of pictures of reality, at some extent, there's this floating
00:13:02.600 right here of particles being governed by a wave equation, and so I appear to have some
00:13:09.000 sort of wave-like property, and that's floating as a picture.
00:13:12.880 And then Heisenberg's picture, which is that the physical quantities that tell you information
00:13:24.800 They have to be represented by a matrices in some way.
00:13:30.200 Although Schrodinger and Heisenberg's theory seem to describe very dissimilar worlds,
00:13:35.960 neither of which was easy to relate to existing conceptions of reality, it was soon discovered
00:13:41.720 that if a certain rule of thumb was added to each theory, they would always make identical
00:13:47.520 Moreover, these predictions turned out to be very successful.
00:13:50.600 With hindsight, we can state the rule of thumb like this.
00:13:53.160 Whenever a measurement is made, all the histories, but one, cease to exist.
00:13:58.600 The surviving one is chosen at random with the probability of each possible outcome being
00:14:02.960 equal to the total measure of all the histories in which that outcome occurs.
00:14:10.440 Instead of trying to improve and integrate those two powerful but slightly forward explanatory
00:14:14.200 theories into explain why the rule of thumb worked, most of the theoretical physics community
00:14:18.720 retreated rapidly and with remarkable docility into instrumentalism.
00:14:24.760 If the predictions work their reason, why worry about the explanation?
00:14:28.560 So they tried to regard quantum theory as being nothing but a set of rules of thumb for
00:14:32.760 predicting the observed outcomes of experiments, saying nothing else about reality.
00:14:37.840 This move is still popular today, and as noted, it's critics and even the sound of its
00:14:41.880 proponents as the shut up and calculate interpretation of quantum theory, pause there, my
00:14:48.320 reflection, yes, so this idea, the rule of thumb, where all of the history, when a measurement
00:14:55.880 happens, all of the histories, but one, cease to exist, all this seems absurd, doesn't
00:15:02.720 That the theory itself is describing, there must be multiple histories, there must be
00:15:08.800 all these different ways in which the particle exists simultaneously, all these positions
00:15:16.440 at occupies, all these different momentas it has, all these different energies it has.
00:15:21.360 That really is what the theory is saying, if we take our theory seriously as a description
00:15:24.880 of reality, well that's what reality is, reality really is described by particles that are
00:15:33.400 But the rule of thumb says, when you make a measurement, when you do an experiment, you
00:15:36.880 only have a observed thing with one value, it's only every in one place, with one energy
00:15:44.040 And so the rule of thumb says, well, although the theory said that all these different
00:15:47.840 histories really existed, all these different variables exist simultaneously, the experiment
00:15:52.760 shows you there's only one, and so the rule of thumb is, all of them disappeared, except
00:15:57.840 Well, that's absurd, that that brings consciousness into physics in a very fundamental
00:16:03.760 way, that your act of observation has destroyed the vast bulk of reality, of physical reality,
00:16:11.520 which is an astonishing claim to make, and should not have been made, but it was, and
00:16:17.000 because it was just so unbelievable, then what the physicists have said is, well, let's
00:16:21.680 just deny the reality of multiple histories altogether, altogether deny multiple histories,
00:16:27.440 and just say, use the formalism, use the mathematical formula in order to make predictions
00:16:32.800 of what's going to happen next, probabilistic predictions of what's going to happen next.
00:16:38.440 And what should have happened was, except the fact all the histories exist and continue
00:16:43.800 to exist, and we only are observed one of those realities at any given time, okay, returning
00:16:50.120 the book, skipping just a little bit, and David writes, both versions, in other words,
00:16:56.000 Schrodinger and Heisenbergs, both versions of quantum theory were clearly describing some
00:17:01.320 sort of physical process that brought about the outcome of experiments, physicists, both
00:17:06.360 through professionalism and through natural curiosity could hardly help wondering about
00:17:12.440 So that physical process that brought about the outcomes of experiments, just me talking
00:17:16.760 again, remember the what the instrumentalist type people to shut up and calculate type
00:17:21.440 people were saying was that the only purpose of quantum theory was to enable you to predict
00:17:27.880 the outcome of experiments, but there has to be a physical process that produces the outcome
00:17:32.880 of the experiment, after all. And so no wonder, physicists through professionalism and
00:17:39.720 natural curiosity could hardly help wondering about that process. What is this physical
00:17:43.480 process? And David writes, but many of them tried not to, tried not to think about it.
00:17:48.880 Most of them went on to train their students not to. This counted the scientific tradition
00:17:53.800 of criticism in regard to quantum theory. Let me define bad philosophy, as philosophy does
00:17:59.920 not merely false, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge. In this case, instrumentalism
00:18:06.040 was acting to prevent the explanations in Schrodinger's and Heisenberg's theories from
00:18:10.800 being improved or unified. The physicist Niels Bohr, another of the pioneers of quantum theory,
00:18:17.240 then developed an interpretation of the theory, which later became known as the Copenhagen
00:18:21.640 interpretation. It said that quantum theory, including the rule of thumb, was a complete
00:18:25.720 description of reality, Bohr excused the various contradictions and gaps by using a combination
00:18:31.600 of instrumentalism and studied ambiguity. He denied the possibility of speaking of phenomena
00:18:37.840 as existing objectively, pause their minor reflection. So Bohr denied the possibility of
00:18:45.760 speaking of phenomena as existing objectively, does that sound familiar. Now this predates
00:18:53.320 the French post-modernists, but it had a strong influence on philosophy and a bad influence
00:19:01.800 on philosophy. Once the physicist, the hard-nosed physicist, the supposed refinement of
00:19:10.320 intellectual excellence that was physics, once the practitioners there started denying
00:19:16.160 the existence of objective reality, we've got problems, because those people were respected.
00:19:24.800 Einstein was one of the most famous people of the early 20th century. He was revered
00:19:32.280 and respected. His colleagues, therefore, also, were showered in the similar sort of respect
00:19:40.400 and reverence, especially among the rest of the intellectual community and the academic community.
00:19:47.280 So if one of their own, one of the great physicists, and physicists were, of course, respected
00:19:54.800 and trusted and well-liked and revered, because what the amazing things they predicted
00:20:02.280 worked, the amazing thing they predicted worked, they predicted theories of rocketry and
00:20:09.760 the rockets worked, they predicted theories about ever better bombs and bombs work, they predicted
00:20:15.520 theories about nuclear reactors and nuclear reactors work, etc, etc, etc. What they said seemed
00:20:21.520 to carry with it a weight because of how their theories worked. Now despite the fact the epistemology
00:20:28.080 there is all wrong, nonetheless, none the less, we have this culture of reverence for the
00:20:35.040 words of physicists in particular, and physicists can sometimes be regarded as the new priests.
00:20:42.880 And so unfortunately, if the priestate saying things like objective reality might not exist,
00:20:52.640 we have a real problem. We have a deeper problem than merely false signs or false claims,
00:21:00.640 because we have the beginnings of a bad philosophy. If we deny the existence of objectivity
00:21:06.000 and of objective reality, then we've got nothing to argue over. We've got no reason to debate,
00:21:10.480 and debate is all about something that isn't solid, and we can never arrive at true answers
00:21:16.640 if there's nothing true to argue about. Okay, let's go back to the book. David wrote,
00:21:20.480 quote, he denied the possibility of speaking a phenomena as existing objectively, but said that only the
00:21:30.640 outcomes of the experiment should count as phenomena. He also said that, although observation has no
00:21:35.760 access to the real essence of phenomena, it does reveal relationships between them, and that,
00:21:40.800 in addition, quantum theory blurs the distinction between observer and observed. Once again,
00:21:48.000 just reflect on that for a moment. So it blurs the distinction according to ball between observer
00:21:52.320 and observed. That might also sound familiar to some people. It's a somewhat Buddhist notion.
00:21:58.800 Buddhism may certainly have truth within it, especially when it comes to studying the subjectivity
00:22:06.160 of the mind, studying one's own mind, introspecting, etc. That aside, that the useful content of
00:22:13.440 Buddhism is not encapsulated by this claim that there is a blurring in this sense between the observer
00:22:21.600 and the observed. Despite this, it's this kind of thing which has been grabbed onto by mystics
00:22:32.000 of all stripes and new age type people as cashing out their own spurious claims,
00:22:39.680 because the pioneers of quantum theory, struggling to understand this, said some very unfortunate
00:22:46.080 things. But they were just the pioneers. They didn't understand quantum theory well enough,
00:22:51.360 and so they were apt at saying sometimes ridiculous things, especially in the case of ball.
00:22:57.680 Let's go back to the book and David writes, quote, As for what would happen if one observer
00:23:02.400 performed a quantum level observation on another, he, bore, avoided the issue, which became known
00:23:08.800 as the paradox of Wigner's friend after the physicist Eugene Wigner. In regard to the
00:23:13.920 unobserved processes between observations, where both Schrodinger's and Heisenberg's theories
00:23:18.960 seem to be describing a multiplicity of histories happening at once,
00:23:22.800 bore proposed a new fundamental principle of nature, the principle of complementarity.
00:23:28.080 It is said that accounts of phenomena could only be stated in classical language,
00:23:32.320 meaning that language that assigned single values to physical variables at any one time,
00:23:37.840 but classical language could be used only in regard to some variables,
00:23:41.440 including those that had just been measured. One was not permitted to ask what values the
00:23:46.400 other variables had, thus, for instance, in response to the question, which path did the photon
00:23:51.360 take in the mark send to interferometer? The reply would be that there is no such thing as which
00:23:55.840 path when the path is not observed. In response to the question, then how does the photon know
00:24:00.480 which way to turn the final mirror, since this depends on what happened on both paths,
00:24:05.040 the reply would be an equivocation called particle wave duality.
00:24:10.000 The photon is both an extended non-zero volume and localized zero volume object at the same time,
00:24:18.080 and one can choose to observe either attribute but not both.
00:24:21.840 Pause their my reflection. Yes, this is standard stuffing textbooks.
00:24:25.440 The typical physics textbook, high school undergraduate level,
00:24:29.520 when introducing quantum theory to people, generally falls back onto particle wave duality stuff.
00:24:39.040 And this is in fact what the majority of science popularizes today continue to regurgitate.
00:24:45.760 And so it sounds plausible and attractive that because it seems as though
00:24:52.720 given classical type experiments where there are certain observations we can make in quantum
00:25:00.560 theory that seem to show that particles like electrons really do act like particles some of the time.
00:25:07.360 They can collide into things. They can bounce off things. This is what particles do.
00:25:16.800 That this is evidence for their particle type nature.
00:25:21.600 But there are other experiments you can do, interference experiments passing single electrons through
00:25:28.000 narrow slits and we can then observe interference effects and these interference effects
00:25:33.120 are proof positive so it's said of a wave type nature. And so therefore we just say
00:25:40.000 electrons are waves and particles at the same time to some people that set a factory,
00:25:44.480 especially when you're introduced to the first time and everything else is really complicated
00:25:47.680 and difficult to understand. Well, being waved away with, oh it's a wave and a particle at the same
00:25:53.040 time can shut some people out. But of course if you understand what David just said there,
00:25:58.960 that an object like a photon or electron or any other particle is sometimes not sometimes,
00:26:08.800 it is simultaneously of near-zero volume, it's a particle localized and extended throughout all of
00:26:16.320 space, non-zero volume thing, simultaneously. Well this this violates logic. But of course some
00:26:23.360 of the early pioneers of quantum theory and even people today will say well there's something deeper
00:26:28.160 than logic which is quantum theory and so you need a new kind of logic to understand what's going on.
00:26:34.080 Now that's a violation of reason. If the law of the excluded middle is something we should want
00:26:40.720 to preserve, something can't both be x and not x at the same time. Either here I am here now
00:26:49.840 delivering another episode of talkcast or I'm not, I'm not simultaneously doing both. You might
00:26:55.920 say well I'm multiverse, I'm somewhere else I'm talking about. Now here right now in this universe
00:27:00.000 speaking to you either it's me here speaking to you right now or this is not happening. It's one
00:27:04.880 or the other. I'm not both here doing this and not doing this at the same time. But in quantum theory
00:27:09.680 some people want to say that that in fact is what's going on. The particles are both in one place
00:27:15.520 and in many places at the same time okay returning to the book and David writes quote,
00:27:21.040 often this is expressed this concept of the extended through space and localized at one point.
00:27:26.960 It's expressed in the saying it is both away from a particle simultaneously. Ironically,
00:27:30.800 there is a sense in which those words are precisely true. In that experiment the entire
00:27:36.160 multi-versal photon is indeed an extended object away. So across the multiverse we have this and this
00:27:41.680 has been explained in my previous videos. So the wave is extended through the multiverse.
00:27:47.120 While instances of it, particles in history are localized. Unfortunately that is not what is meant
00:27:53.280 in the COVID-19 interpretation. Then the idea is that quantum physics defies the very foundations
00:27:58.720 of reason. Particles have mutually exclusive attributes, period. And it dismisses criticisms
00:28:04.800 that the idea is invalid because they constitute attempts to use classical language outside its
00:28:09.520 proper domain, namely describing the outcome of experiments. Okay now I'm skipping a little bit
00:28:15.440 back to the book and David writes, for decades various versions of all that all this
00:28:20.400 vagueness with respect to quantum theory were taught as fact. The anthropocentrism, the
00:28:25.840 instrumentalism and all in university physics courses. And even today I should say.
00:28:32.000 Few physicists claim to understand it, none did. And so students' questions were met with such
00:28:37.440 nonsense as if you think you've understood quantum mechanics, then you don't. In consistency
00:28:43.440 was defended as complementarity or duality. Perochialism was held as philosophical sophistication.
00:28:50.560 Thus the theory claimed to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal by all modes of criticism,
00:28:56.720 a hallmark of bad philosophy. Its combination of vagueness, immunity from criticism and the prestige
00:29:03.440 and perceived authority of fundamental physics, open the door to countless systems of
00:29:08.720 pseudoscience and quackery, supposedly based on quantum theory. Its disparagement of plain criticism
00:29:13.840 and reason has been classical and therefore illegitimate has given endless comfort to those who
00:29:18.640 wanted to fire reason and embrace any number of irrational modes of thought. Thus quantum theory,
00:29:23.360 the deepest discovery of the physical sciences has acquired a reputation for endorsing practically
00:29:28.480 every mystical and occult doctrine ever proposed. End quote. Well that's a brilliant David Deutsch
00:29:36.720 passage there and it just sums up in a very forceful way how quantum theory, this amazing
00:29:49.040 pinnacle of human intellectual endeavour, the truth of quantum theory, what quantum theory has allowed
00:29:55.040 us to achieve as a species, new technologies, new ways of understanding reality, ironically because
00:30:01.520 of the way it began with vagueness and the immunity from criticism that some of the practitioners
00:30:10.480 couch these ideas in has caught quantum theory to, in the minds of some people, justify
00:30:19.280 all manner of weird stuff and so new age type people, certain kind of Buddhist thinkers,
00:30:26.320 quacks of various kinds, cranks of various kinds, dishonest interlocutters and as we will see
00:30:33.840 certain kinds of philosophers point to quantum theory as a justification for their own nonsense
00:30:41.840 that in some way because of the language used by the pioneers of quantum theory, the unfortunate
00:30:47.680 language, the unfortunate vagueness, that therefore their crazy claims are cashed out in some way by
00:30:57.920 the crazy claims of the pioneers of quantum theory but the crazy claims of the pioneers of quantum theory
00:31:04.400 or the bad claims of the pioneers of quantum theory were made for in many ways honest reasons,
00:31:10.080 they were honestly trying to find the truth and people today who use in point of quantum theory are
00:31:17.840 oftentimes being quite dishonest, dishonestly repurposing errors made in the past and presenting
00:31:24.960 them as fact and then not fact. Admittedly some of these people are innocently
00:31:30.560 simply ignorant but a lot of art, a lot of not. Back to the book David Wright,
00:31:35.760 not every physicist accepted the Copenhagen interpretation or its descendants. Einstein never did.
00:31:42.400 The physicist David Baum struggled to construct an alternative that was compatible with realism
00:31:47.120 and produced a rather complicated theory which I regard as the multiverse theory in heavy disguise
00:31:51.840 though he was strongly opposed to thinking of it in that way. And in Dublin in 1952 Schrodinger
00:31:57.440 gave a lecture in which at one point he jocularly warned his audience that what he was about to
00:32:02.240 say might seem lunatic, it was that when his equation seems to be describing several different
00:32:08.160 histories they are not alternatives but really happen simultaneously. We'll say that again
00:32:14.400 when his equation seems to be describing several different histories they are not alternatives
00:32:19.120 but all really happen simultaneously. This is the earliest known reference to the multiverse.
00:32:25.760 He was an eminent physicist, joking that he might be considered mad. Why? For claiming that
00:32:32.880 his own equation the very one for which he had won the Nobel Prize might be true. End quote,
00:32:41.760 that's another brilliant David Deutsch, very brief paragraph they're talking about Schrodinger.
00:32:46.720 So Schrodinger, one of the discoveries of quantum theory, early pioneers, 1930s
00:32:53.680 has said that his own equation that explains what's going on with subatomic particles
00:33:03.520 he said that these equations describe things, describe particles with many different histories
00:33:14.160 simultaneously that occupy many different positions simultaneously. And these alternatives
00:33:21.600 really do happen he said. And then David writes that he was joking that he might be considered mad.
00:33:29.680 Why? For claiming that his own equation the very one for which he had won the Nobel Prize might be
00:33:35.040 true. Okay back to the book David writes, Schrodinger never published that lecture and seems never
00:33:41.600 to have taken the idea further. Five years later and independently the physicist, Hugh Everett,
00:33:46.320 published a comprehensive theory of the multiverse now known as the Everett interpretation
00:33:50.720 of quantum theory. It took several more decades before Everett's work was even noticed by more
00:33:55.520 than a handful of physicists. Even now that it has become well known it is endorsed by only a small
00:34:00.160 minority. I've often been asked to explain this unusual phenomenon and fortunately I know
00:34:04.640 of no entirely satisfactory explanation. But to understand why it is perhaps not quite as bizarre
00:34:10.160 and isolated in an event as it may appear, one has to consider the broader context of bad philosophy.
00:34:15.840 Everett is the normal state of our knowledge and is no disgrace. There's nothing bad about
00:34:20.880 false philosophy. Problems are inevitable, but they can be solved by a imaginative critical thought
00:34:26.320 that seeks good explanations. Bad is good philosophy and good science, both of which have always
00:34:31.120 existed in some measure. For instance, Schrodinger always learned language by making,
00:34:35.360 criticizing and testing conjectures about the connection between words and reality. They
00:34:39.680 could not possibly learn in many other ways I shall explain in Chapter 16. Bad philosophy
00:34:44.880 is always existed to. For instance, Schrodinger always been told, because I say so. Although it is
00:34:50.160 not always intended as a philosophical position, it is worth analyzing it as one. For in four simple
00:34:54.800 words, it can tend to remarkably many themes of false and bad philosophy. First, it is a perfect
00:35:00.800 example of a bad explanation. It could be used to explain anything. Second, one way it achieves
00:35:06.160 its status is by addressing only the form of the question and substance. It is about who said
00:35:11.120 something, not what they said. That is the opposite of truth seeking. Third, it reinterprets a crest
00:35:17.200 for a true explanation. Why should something or other be as it is? As a request for a justification,
00:35:23.120 what entitled you to assert that it is so? Which is the justified true belief combural.
00:35:28.160 Fourth, it confuses the non-existent authority for ideas with human authority, power. A much troubled
00:35:34.720 path in bad political philosophy. And fifth, it claims why this means to stand outside the jurisdiction
00:35:40.000 of normal criticism. I am skipping a little bit, David writes about empiricism, empiricism
00:35:46.000 is a false philosophy, but it at least allowed progress to continue. But then empiricism
00:35:54.640 got taken to literally, and it became positivism. And positivism was about eliminating from
00:36:02.560 science anything that could not be derived from observations. But still this didn't cause,
00:36:13.360 this still wasn't really bad philosophy. This wasn't bad philosophy. This is merely false
00:36:17.360 philosophy because progress was still able to continue. It might just go through David's little
00:36:23.920 anecdote here about Ernst Mark, where he writes, quote, for instance, the physicist Ernst Mark,
00:36:29.600 father of Ludwig Mark of the Mark's Enduring Therometer, was also a positive philosopher,
00:36:34.240 influenced by Einstein, spurring him to eliminate untested assumptions from physics,
00:36:39.840 including Newton's assumption that time flows at the same rate for all observers.
00:36:43.840 That happened to be an excellent idea. But Mark's positivism also caused him to oppose
00:36:48.960 the resulting theory of relativity, essentially because it claimed that space-time really exists,
00:36:53.520 even though it can't be directly observed. Mark also resolutely denied the existence of atoms because
00:37:00.240 they were too small to observe. We laugh at this silliness now, because we have microscopes that
00:37:05.360 can see atoms, but the role of philosophy should have been to laugh at it then. I'm skipping a little
00:37:11.360 bit. David mentions that Einstein rejected positivism because he was a realist, and so I'm
00:37:18.000 never accepted the COVID-19 interpretation. And David wonders out loud, if Einstein took positivism more
00:37:23.280 seriously, what he perhaps have included that space-time, that thing that general relativity
00:37:29.440 forced us to endorse the reality of, would he himself have to dismiss the idea of
00:37:35.440 space-time really existing? So David describes the leap from positivism, this idea that only that
00:37:44.480 which can be derived from observations should be considered meaningful in science,
00:37:50.240 and this led to a denial of physical reality in general, Thomas Cun, David wrote of Thomas Cun,
00:37:58.880 quote, Thomas Cun wrote, quote, there is a step which many philosophers of science wish to take
00:38:05.600 and which are a fuse. They wish that he is to compare scientific theories as
00:38:09.440 representations of nature, as statements about what is really out there, end quote of Cun.
00:38:15.760 David continues, positivism degenerated into logical positivism, which held that statements
00:38:22.000 not verifiable by observation are not only worthless, but meaningless. This doctrine threatened to
00:38:28.960 sweep away not only explanatory scientific knowledge, but the whole of philosophy. In particular,
00:38:33.440 logical positivism itself is a political theory, and it cannot be verified by observation.
00:38:38.560 Hence it asserts its own meaninglessness, as well as that of all other philosophy.
00:38:43.280 The logical positivism tried to rescue their theory from that implication, for instance by calling
00:38:48.000 it logical, as distinct from philosophical, but in vain. Then Wittgenstein embraced the
00:38:53.680 implication, declared all of philosophy, including his own, to be meaningless. He advocated
00:38:58.640 remaining silent about philosophical problems, and although he never attempted to live up to that
00:39:02.880 aspiration, he was held by many as one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century.
00:39:08.240 End quote, my reflection, even today, having gone through philosophy myself, Wittgenstein was
00:39:15.120 absolutely regarded as the preeminent genius by even my favourite lecturers. Now, I never
00:39:22.880 really understood. I think he has a few quotes. It depends upon the way in which you read him,
00:39:29.680 and Wittgenstein contradict himself. There's the so-called early Wittgenstein and a late Wittgenstein.
00:39:36.080 His way of speaking about philosophy is entered the philosophical tradition in many places.
00:39:42.800 For instance, people talk about word games. Maybe you hear this term word games.
00:39:47.280 That's from Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein thought that one function of language
00:39:53.920 was to communicate, but what we are doing as people is we're playing word games with our number.
00:40:00.320 And so when scientists are talking, they're engaged in a certain kind of word game,
00:40:03.440 which is very different to what a parent and a child might engage in or a patient and a doctor
00:40:08.800 might engage in. So yes, this was Wittgenstein's view, the late Wittgenstein.
00:40:14.960 The early Wittgenstein, who wrote tractatus philosophical, believed that language served the
00:40:24.960 function of simply describing physical reality, and that's it. And of course, only that which
00:40:31.360 could be observed was worthy of being a part of science and rational discourse.
00:40:40.960 And I think I've mentioned before that Wittgenstein had this view of his own philosophy as being
00:40:45.920 like a ladder, which one uses to climb out of a well. And once you've used the ladder to climb
00:40:52.560 out of the well, you can discard the ladder as well. And so that's what he thought of his own
00:40:56.160 philosophy. At the end of the tractatus, he has that famous line, where of one cannot speak,
00:41:02.560 there of one should be silent, or there of one must be silent. Now, on the one hand,
00:41:09.040 could be the case that it's as strong as, that what that means is that we should be silent about
00:41:15.840 all philosophical problems. And of course, that's ridiculous. That closes off knowledge
00:41:24.240 progress in many, many areas, because we need progress in philosophy. And this is one of the
00:41:28.080 great debates between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They didn't get on particularly well.
00:41:36.080 But Popper took his ideas seriously and criticized him in many places. You can go back
00:41:40.320 through my podcast or a talkcast. And there is an audio version of me describing Mr Popper's
00:41:47.440 problems. I think that's the title of it. And about some of the great debates between Popper and
00:41:53.680 Wittgenstein. But this, this quote Wittgenstein's at the end of the tractatus,
00:42:00.800 where of one cannot speak, there of one must be silent. Also has this other meaning,
00:42:09.680 like I say, people have different readings of Wittgenstein because he was vague,
00:42:14.480 which isn't a good quality, right? It's, it's kind of theology. But philosophers love this.
00:42:19.920 They love referring to the original texts and trying to grapple with what did he really mean.
00:42:24.640 But one reading of that quote is, for him, for him not to be in a position of dismissing
00:42:34.320 metaphysics, certain parts of philosophy. But him simply saying that, although there is this reality
00:42:41.280 beyond which we don't have a way of speaking, it's real, but it transcends
00:42:48.560 the ability of language to capture. And so, you know, he wouldn't necessarily reject something
00:42:56.400 like belief in God. He would simply say, well, it might very well be real. But there's no
00:43:01.200 point engaging in debate about it. There's no point getting upset and fighting about it
00:43:05.200 because we don't have the language to capture it. It transcends human intellect. Now this is not
00:43:13.040 a position I hold. I am a universalist with respect to the mind. And so, I think there is nothing
00:43:19.520 that can't be understood if we simply put our minds to it, if we're interested enough to
00:43:24.000 tackle that idea, tackle that problem. But Wittgenstein's position on that is at least interesting.
00:43:31.760 Kind of leads into some other linguists, philosophers, the sapphire wolf hypothesis is what I'm
00:43:37.600 thinking of. And these guys basically say that languages like a set of blinkers that you put on
00:43:44.080 and it constrains the way in which you can possibly think about the world. And that's in that
00:43:48.880 same tradition of languages, everything. And so, philosophy today, very much even in the
00:43:55.200 analytic tradition, we have, on the one hand, the continental and postmodernist type tradition.
00:44:02.160 And we have the analytic tradition. The analytic tradition is still very much centered on
00:44:06.560 linguistics and language. And David's about to get into that. And so, let's just go back
00:44:13.840 to that. And David writes, quote, one might have thought that this would be the Nadir of philosophical
00:44:19.040 thinking. But unfortunately, they were greater depths to plumb. During the second half of the
00:44:23.760 20th century, mainstream philosophy lost contact with and interesting, trying to understand science
00:44:29.120 as it was actually being done. Well, how it should be done? Following Wittgenstein, the predominant
00:44:34.160 school of philosophy for a while was linguistic philosophy, whose defining tenant was that what
00:44:41.200 seemed to be philosophical problems are actually just puzzles about how words are used in every day
00:44:46.240 life. And that philosophers can meanfully study only that. Next in a related trend that originated
00:44:53.600 in the European Enlightenment, but spread all over the West, many philosophers moved away from
00:44:58.080 trying to understand anything. They actively attack the idea, not only of explanation or reality,
00:45:03.440 but of truth and reason, merely to criticize such attacks for being self-contradictory,
00:45:08.880 like logical positivism, which they were, is to give them far too much credence for at least
00:45:13.360 logical positivism, Wittgenstein, where it's in making a distinction between what does and does
00:45:17.680 not make sense, albeit that they advocated I hopelessly wrong one. One currently influential
00:45:23.440 philosophical movement goes under various names, such as postmodernism, deconstructionism,
00:45:29.440 and structuralism. Depending upon historical details around important here, it claims that because
00:45:34.240 all ideas, including scientific theories, are conjectural and impossible to justify, they are essentially
00:45:39.680 arbitrary, then are more than stories, known in this context as narratives. Mixing extreme cultural
00:45:45.920 relativism, with other forms of anti-realism, in regards objective truth and falsity, as well
00:45:52.000 as reality and knowledge of reality, as mere conventional forms of words that stand for an
00:45:57.920 ideas being endorsed by a designated group of people, such as an elite or consensus, or by a fashion,
00:46:04.400 or other arbitrary authority. In regards science and the enlightenment, there's no more than one such
00:46:09.600 fashion, and the objective knowledge claimed by science as an arrogant, cultural conceit.
00:46:15.840 Perhaps inevitably, these charges of true of postmodernism itself,
00:46:20.880 just inserting my own commentary here, and the cultural Marxism that exists now, the grievance
00:46:27.760 study stuff that I've been talking about, where this has become even more pronounced.
00:46:33.680 Okay, so I'll just go back and reread this section. David Wright's quote, perhaps inevitably,
00:46:39.760 these charges are true of postmodernism itself. It is a narrative that resists rational criticism
00:46:44.800 or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative, creating a successful
00:46:50.560 postmodernist theory is indeed purely a matter of meeting the criteria of the postmodernist community,
00:46:56.960 which have evolved to be complex, exclusive, and authority based. Nothing like that is true of
00:47:03.040 rational words of thinking, creating a good explanation is hard, not because of what anyone has
00:47:07.440 decided, but because there is an objective reality that does not need anyone's prior expectations,
00:47:13.040 including those of authorities. The creators of bad explanations, such as myths, are indeed just
00:47:18.960 making things up. But the method of seeking good explanations creates an engagement with reality,
00:47:24.560 not only in science, but in good philosophy too, which is why it works, and why it is the antithesis
00:47:30.400 of concocting stories to need, made up criteria. Although there have been signs of improvement
00:47:35.760 since the late 20th century, one legacy of empiricism that continues to cause confusion and that
00:47:40.560 has opened the door to a great deal of bad philosophy is the idea that it is possible to split
00:47:45.280 a scientific theory into its predictive rules of thumb on the one hand, and its assertions about
00:47:49.840 reality, sometimes known as the interpretation on the other. This does not make sense, because
00:47:54.880 as with conjuring tricks, without an explanation, it is impossible to recognize the circumstances
00:48:00.400 under which a rule of thumb is supposed to apply. And it is especially does not make sense in
00:48:04.320 fundamental physics, because the predicted outcome of an observation is itself an unobserved
00:48:09.840 physical process, paused our reflection. And again, this whole idea of logical positivism,
00:48:15.680 and various other kinds of philosophy that assert that we cannot make meaningful statements
00:48:22.080 about that which are unobserved, those things that are unobserved, would completely dismiss
00:48:28.640 the vast bulk of science. Almost everything interesting in science is something we cannot observe,
00:48:35.360 the evolution of species over time. David's favorite example of dinosaurs, no one's going to
00:48:41.600 observe a dinosaur, we're only going to observe fossils. The big bang, no one's going to observe
00:48:47.600 the big bang, we observe things going on, 13 and a half billion years afterwards. Fusion in the
00:48:55.520 core of stars, subatomic particles smaller than protons, quarks and things, I don't know, maybe we
00:49:00.960 can see quarks. Neutrinos, planets that we have not yet observed orbiting stars that we cannot
00:49:08.640 yet see. There is a whole bunch of things that we can't observe, but which we know must be real,
00:49:18.000 given our best explanations, given what we know about reality. Okay, in the next bit, David goes
00:49:23.520 through the dinosaur interpretation of fossils that I just mentioned, and I've mentioned this many
00:49:29.280 times over the beginning of infinity series, so I won't go through it all there, but certainly
00:49:34.640 with reading there in chapter 12. So I'm skipping those few pages and instead we'll go to the
00:49:42.160 section on psychology, which has had a lot of influence actually, I think in the intellectual
00:49:49.760 community ever since the beginning of infinity was published. In fact, it was only a couple of days
00:49:56.160 ago. I myself received a paper from some psychologists working at the University of New South Wales,
00:50:02.160 my old alma mater, specifically talking about how our doctors work in the beginning of infinity
00:50:08.480 and elsewhere, had influenced their own thinking about psychology and their psychologists.
00:50:15.520 So let's read what David writes about this. Let me give an example from a distant field,
00:50:20.000 psychology. I have mentioned behaviorism, which is instrumentalism applied to psychology.
00:50:25.440 It became the prevailing interpretation that field for several decades, and although it is now
00:50:30.080 largely repudiated, research in psychology continues to downplay explanation in favor of stimulus
00:50:36.320 response rules of thumb. Thus, for instance, it is considered good science to conduct
00:50:41.760 behavioristic experiments to measure the extent to which a human psychological state,
00:50:46.240 such as, say, loneliness or happiness, is genetically coded, like IKLA, or not such a state of birth.
00:50:53.520 Now, there are some fundamental problems with such a study from an explanatory point of view.
00:50:58.960 First, how can we measure where the different people's ratings of their own psychological state
00:51:04.720 are commensurable? That is to say, some proportion of people claiming to have happiness level
00:51:11.120 eight might be quite unhappy, but also pessimistic, but they cannot imagine anything better.
00:51:16.800 So it's paused down my reflection. So just to hammer that home a little bit,
00:51:20.960 two people could have exactly the same psychological state. And if you ask them,
00:51:26.000 you ask of, you know, let's say you've got, yes, you've got John and Joe. When John and Joe
00:51:31.920 are sitting there, and they both claim, they both in objective reality have the same
00:51:37.440 psychological state. And you ask them both, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being highest, how happy are
00:51:42.800 you? John might very well say eight, and Joe might very well say six. They don't have the same
00:51:47.920 standards. We don't know what the knowledge is that they've got in their mind about how they
00:51:52.560 should be feeling in any particular point. So that's a serious problem, that epistemology,
00:51:59.120 knowledge about knowledge, is going to affect their ratings of their own subjective experience.
00:52:06.880 But this is what psychology sometimes attempts to do, attempts to try to get at a person's
00:52:13.600 in a mind by asking them questions and having them do surveys, assessing the contents of their
00:52:19.520 mind, but how objective are they? How accurate are they? How commensurate is it that their
00:52:25.920 assessment is going to agree with the assessment of someone else. So their standards are going to
00:52:29.520 be the same as someone else's. No answer, of course. Right? So you're just continuing.
00:52:35.280 And David writes, quote, and then some of the people who claim only level three might in fact
00:52:40.240 be happier than most, but have succumbed to a craze that promises extreme future happiness
00:52:45.280 to those who can learn to chant in a certain way. And second, if we were to find that people with
00:52:50.480 a particular gene tend to rate themselves happier than people without it. How can we tell whether
00:52:56.080 the gene is coding for happiness? Perhaps it is coding for less reluctance to quantify once
00:53:01.520 happiness. Perhaps the gene in question does not affect a brain at all, but only how a person looks,
00:53:07.040 and perhaps better looking people are happier on average because they are treated better by others.
00:53:11.520 There is an infinity of possible explanations, but the study is not seeking explanations.
00:53:17.120 It would make no difference if the experimenters tried to eliminate the subjective self-assessment
00:53:21.360 and instead observed only happy and unhappy behavior, such as facial expressions,
00:53:26.960 or how often a person whistles a happy tune. The connection with happiness would
00:53:30.800 still involve comparing subjective interpretations, which there is no way of calibrating to a
00:53:35.920 common standard. The connection with happiness would still involve comparing subjective
00:53:43.840 interpretations, which there is no way of calibrating to a common standard. But in addition,
00:53:49.680 there would be an extra level of interpretation. Some people believe that behaving in happy ways
00:53:54.240 is a remedy for happiness. So for those people, such behaviors might be a proxy for unhappiness.
00:54:00.160 For example, reflection, so just notice that this is a theory in this positive psychology
00:54:08.400 movement that you can behave your way to happiness. So if you feel unhappy, then you should pretend
00:54:16.880 to be happy, and eventually you will be more and more happy. You should smile more often.
00:54:21.280 You should regard yourself as being happy even if you don't feel happy, and eventually that will
00:54:25.680 be its own reward. And so that's a problem for studies like this as well. David goes on,
00:54:31.040 quote, for these reasons, no behavioral study can detect what happiness is inborn or not.
00:54:35.920 Science simply cannot resolve that issue until we have explanatory theories about what
00:54:39.600 objective attributes people are referring to when they speak of their happiness, and also about
00:54:44.800 what physical channel events connect genes to those attributes. So how does explanation
00:54:49.280 free science address the issue? First, one explains that one is not measuring happiness directly,
00:54:55.200 but only a proxy, such as the behavior of marking checkboxes on a scale called happiness.
00:54:59.760 All scientific measurements use chains of proxies, but as I explain in chapter 2 and 3,
00:55:04.400 each link in the chain is an additional source of error, and we can avoid fooling ourselves
00:55:08.160 only by criticizing the theory of each link, which is impossible. Unless an explanatory theory
00:55:13.200 links the proxies to the quantities of interest. That is why, in genuine science, one can claim
00:55:18.480 to have measured a quantity, only one one has an explanatory theory of how and why the
00:55:23.680 measurement procedure should reveal its value and with what accuracy. Pause there, I'll end this
00:55:30.320 episode here, but that's an important point there to end on. The explanatory theory itself
00:55:39.360 will tell you what quantities can be measured, and also as David says elsewhere,
00:55:43.920 a physical quantity quoted without uncertainty is strictly meaningless.
00:55:48.640 So if someone just said, you could just say, my weight is 65 kilograms. Well, to a physicist,
00:55:56.160 one wants to know on what kind of scale that has been measured. Is it 65.0? Is it 65.0001?
00:56:06.480 Is it 64.9? These, the scale would give these, we'll give this sort of information.
00:56:14.000 So if you just say 65, well, that doesn't really tell us much at all. So we've got some more
00:56:18.080 left to go with this chapter. So it'll be episode three for chapter 12, and we'll finish this
00:56:27.360 in the next episode of Topcast. Once more, thank you to people who are supporting me on Patreon.
00:56:34.960 I have, I think I'm getting close to 10 Patreons right now, but thank you so much to everyone who is,
00:56:40.960 it means a lot, and it's certainly helping me continue with this series, which has many more
00:56:47.360 episodes to go. But until the next episode, see you later.
