00:00:00.000 Welcome to Topcast, and to the final regular episode on my discussions of Kiara Marletto's
00:00:07.680 The Science of Ken and Cart. This is chapter 7 titled A Journey There and Back Again,
00:00:13.680 which as a Tolkien fan evokes for me, the subtitle of Tolkien's Book the Hobbit. And that subtied
00:00:20.800 was There and Back Again. In the universe of the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit was actually written
00:00:26.160 by the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, and it was called in that universe There and Back Again.
00:00:31.520 And here in this final chapter, I can draw a couple of parallels between Kiara's book here,
00:00:37.920 as well as Constructed Theory more broadly, and some of the themes in Tolkien's work.
00:00:43.440 Now, before I begin, the first thing to mention is that for viewers on YouTube, for example,
00:00:49.040 but not for listeners, we have something for viewers just to look at. And don't worry if you're
00:00:54.240 simply listening on audio podcasts, as this will make no difference to the substance of today's
00:00:59.840 episode. But I have provided some vision, simply because, well, we're talking about a chapter
00:01:05.120 titled A Journey There and Back Again. So I thought it might be nice to have some video of some of
00:01:10.560 the journeys or walks. I take frequently on the South Coast of Australia, a near-o place called
00:01:16.240 Sanctuary Point. This place is interesting because it demonstrates a certain dichotomy
00:01:22.400 in a rather beautiful way. Some people like to be surrounded entirely by civilization,
00:01:28.000 to live as close to the centre of a city, for example, as possible. That's not really me.
00:01:33.760 Some people like to live entirely surrounded by nature, and that's also not me.
00:01:39.280 I like those places that are really on the border, where just behind you is civilization,
00:01:44.480 and you're in it. But you've also got a view of the entirely undeveloped and natural environment.
00:01:51.760 I like to be able to see what hasn't yet been developed, but might be. There could be.
00:01:57.600 The so-called natural environment and the built environment co-existing side-by-side
00:02:02.320 places where humans have constructed by turning the resources they've identified into
00:02:07.280 dwellings and roads and whatever else. And the places so far undeveloped Tolkien's work is
00:02:13.440 rather pessimistic in this regard. He was one of the first greenies, I suppose. He saw
00:02:18.960 industry broadly speaking as a blight on the landscape, and all of his works from the
00:02:24.400 Silmarillion through the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings have at their heart a message about
00:02:29.440 decay and the loss of nature. Corruption was what he was often on about and mentioned in his
00:02:34.960 books and what he seemed to mean by the word corruption, rather often, is something about where
00:02:41.040 technology of a kind came along and ruined a natural forest or something like that.
00:02:45.200 It's not exactly a picture we get of the world that I explain here. It's quite the opposite.
00:02:50.160 Now of course Tolkien lived through. He spent his formative years in the First World War,
00:02:55.520 and so he saw the destructive aspects of technology, and so that has coloured his view of
00:03:02.400 the impact of humans on the environment, of course. And he lived through a time when
00:03:07.920 he was no doubt witnessing the rapid pace of change in parts of rural England,
00:03:13.280 what the green countryside went through in places where coal mines and the burning of very
00:03:18.880 smoky, unfiltered stuff in order to lift people out of poverty was occurring. Economics is
00:03:24.800 not something he really focused on in Lord of the Rings, but I digress. Just to say that the
00:03:30.240 vision for today's episode, the videos that viewers are seeing, exists to give people something,
00:03:36.240 anything really, to look at. But it's not entirely random. It does give a sense of a journey,
00:03:42.400 and it does provide something of that dichotomy between the natural environment and those places
00:03:48.640 where human knowledge has transformed the world into something less hostile. The other thing to
00:03:54.080 notice here is that being Australia, for most of these video clips, you can get some sense of the
00:04:00.400 proportion here of the undeveloped part of the country, which is the overwhelming majority of the
00:04:06.640 landmass. And these little specks of development we call cities and towns by comparison. Nature
00:04:13.520 has constructed almost everything we still see if you step beyond your tiny city. Humans have
00:04:19.920 just begun to scratch the surface of the landmass that is Australia, to say nothing of the rest
00:04:25.200 of the world, the solar system, little on the universe. It is so very early in the history of humanity,
00:04:31.760 we have had almost no impact. Yes, I know. Unpopular opinion, apparently we are uniquely destructive
00:04:39.280 and we are almost at a tipping point where the damage we have done will be irreversible. I know.
00:04:44.240 Of course, I do not view human activity as damaging. I view the environment and the cosmos as
00:04:49.760 damaging to us, lethal even, we build and construct in order to provide some the scant protection
00:04:55.520 against the forces of nature, arrayed against us, whether those be cosmic in the form of asteroids,
00:05:01.440 supernovae, long-term climate changes or more urgently just catastrophic weather events like floods
00:05:07.040 and storms and fires, or other natural disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, planet earth
00:05:12.000 is a veritable death trap without our energy, technology and explanatory knowledge, helping us to
00:05:18.400 scratch an existence out from this otherwise implacably hostile rock. I have made the point before
00:05:24.640 that if we don't do what we can to control the environment, it will control us and eventually
00:05:30.640 destroy us and everything else on the planet. That's simply a logical consequence of what we know
00:05:36.240 from physics and science, either the asteroids going to hit us, or the sun's going to engulf us,
00:05:41.520 or at least expand so much the oceans boil, unless we learn what to do about all this.
00:05:47.680 The kangaroos aren't going to do it, the bacteria aren't going to do it, the trees aren't going
00:05:50.960 to do it, we need to create fundamental far-reaching knowledge now, which is one reason I read this
00:05:57.280 book about Constructa Theory. Reportedly, the most fundamental theory of physics we now have,
00:06:03.840 or at least one of them, and that book comes to an end today. This is the first popular science
00:06:09.840 book to have been written on Constructa Theory, it may not be, it should not be, the last.
00:06:15.280 It may be that Constructa Theory reaches into areas of science and philosophy, and much more,
00:06:20.960 in such a way as to radically transform our understanding of physics, and life, and ourselves,
00:06:27.120 that we can use it to solve some of the biggest problems. This final chapter is an excellent one
00:06:32.800 for bringing together the previous ones, because it serves as something of a summary of the rest
00:06:37.760 of the book, and then it looks forward to what we can hope for with Constructa Theory,
00:06:42.080 often to the infinite future, and well, let's just get into it.
00:06:45.520 Kiara begins in summary with, quote, at the beginning of this book, I made an ambitious claim.
00:06:52.000 I promised to present a new perspective on physical reality by explaining how to understand and think
00:06:57.360 in terms of counterfactual properties of physical systems, it is now time to head back to where
00:07:03.120 the journey began and to contemplate the new understanding that we have gathered along the way.
00:07:08.480 With the last page approaching, one has to operate like a thoughtful traveler nearing the end
00:07:14.160 of their journey. Review the things that seem to note worthy, consider what new avenues they open
00:07:19.600 up and whether they are fuel for the creation of further knowledge. The central motivating
00:07:24.400 idea of this book is that a class of properties has been largely neglected in science,
00:07:29.280 and that this needs to be remedied because it is preventing progress on fundamental problems.
00:07:34.400 I called those properties counterfactuals. They are not specifiable by describing the actual
00:07:39.520 state of a physical system nor its law of motion. To specify them, one has to describe the system
00:07:45.040 in terms of what transformations are ultimately possible or impossible to perform on it.
00:07:50.400 As I have explained, counterfactuals are lurking at the core of most exciting open problems
00:07:55.120 in fundamental physics. I mentioned several examples. The interoperability of information,
00:08:00.400 chapter 3 and 4, the no cloning property and the reversibility of quantum information,
00:08:04.400 chapter 4, the resilience of knowledge, chapter 5, the conservation of energy and the distinction
00:08:08.880 between work like and heat like energy transfers, chapter 6 and the information based interoperability
00:08:14.480 of work media and thermodynamics, chapter 6. The main counterfactuals we have explored in this
00:08:19.440 book are summarized in the table that follows and I will read through the table.
00:08:23.280 So we have got the phenomenon of information. The counterfactuals involved are the possibility
00:08:28.400 of flip and copy. The physical laws involved are interoperability of information media
00:08:34.160 and the notable related entities are the universal computer and the universal constructor. As
00:08:38.720 pause there and just mention, when Kiara says interoperability, my understanding of that is
00:08:44.960 substrate independence. What that means is that when you've got an information media,
00:08:49.600 it's independent of the physical characteristics of that particular material. So you can have the
00:08:56.080 same information written on a piece of paper. You can have the same information painted onto a
00:09:00.080 window presumably. You have the same information represented in the pixels of a computer
00:09:04.240 screen or in the memory of a computer hard drive and so on and so forth in the mind of a person
00:09:09.200 indeed as some arrangement of neurons in the brain. So this is interoperability, the same information
00:09:15.280 can exist in different physical forms. Another phenomenon that Kiara mentions is quantum
00:09:20.960 information. The counterfactual involved there is the impossibility of copying certain information
00:09:25.920 carrying states, the possibility of reversing any transformation. The physical laws governing this
00:09:31.600 again is interoperability of information media and the notable related entities are the
00:09:37.600 universal quantum computer and the universal constructor. The next phenomenon that Kiara went through
00:09:43.520 was knowledge which he defines as resilient information. The counterfactual involved there is
00:09:48.560 the ability to enable transformations and of remaining embodied in physical systems,
00:09:54.720 the physical laws for knowledge have not yet been discovered. But the notable related entities
00:09:59.520 are abstract catalysts and the universal constructor and the final phenomena covered was work
00:10:06.320 and the counterfactuals involved there were the possibility of seesawing transformations
00:10:10.320 and the impossibility of changing energy without side effects. That's the conservation of energy.
00:10:15.680 The physical law involved is the conservation of energy, the interoperability of work media,
00:10:21.040 and the counterfactual second law of thermodynamics. And the related entities are the scale
00:10:26.160 independent heat engines, scale independent means it doesn't matter whether it's big or small
00:10:30.960 and the universal constructor wants more and then she goes on in a text to say a quote.
00:10:35.200 Having now an overall perspective one might notice that two general facts emerge,
00:10:39.920 the two overarching ways in which the power of counterfactuals expresses itself.
00:10:44.400 The first is that adopting counterfactuals brings entities that look superficially like immaterial
00:10:49.440 abstractions into the domain of physics. Information and knowledge, for example,
00:10:53.840 have been traditionally considered as mere abstractions as things that do not belong to the physical
00:10:59.120 world. However, by considering the counterfactual properties of physical systems that enable
00:11:03.920 information and knowledge one refutes society because whether or not a physical system has those
00:11:09.600 properties is set precisely by the laws of physics end quote. Yes, and so whether or not something can
00:11:16.640 generate knowledge or can contain information depends upon whether the laws of physics say
00:11:22.240 that entity can do so. And indeed, what the limits of knowledge creation are is bounded by
00:11:27.680 what we know about the laws of physics. Although knowledge is an abstraction of a kind,
00:11:32.880 it must be instantiated somewhere to count as knowledge. If you can't instantiate it, it doesn't
00:11:38.320 count as knowledge. And that includes inside your mind. So if you have knowledge in your mind,
00:11:42.160 obviously, it's instantiated there in your brain. It's represented somehow encoded. But that
00:11:47.360 encoding process is a physical process. Okay, this is related to the mathematicians misconception
00:11:53.600 that I've spoken about in top cast over the last few weeks and months. We cannot divorce
00:11:58.400 therefore epistemology from physics in any way, shape or form these. These things are intimately
00:12:03.680 related now precisely what the relationship is and what laws of physics will come to bear on the
00:12:09.360 possibility of generating knowledge. We don't know yet. We just know that it it must, in principle,
00:12:14.560 be bound by laws of physics in ways I've mentioned, but in new ways as well yet to be discovered,
00:12:21.040 which hopefully constructive theory will have something to say about. Let's continue.
00:12:25.680 Kara says quote. The other fact is that embracing counterfactuals allows one to express exact laws
00:12:31.440 about entities traditionally considered as approximate because these laws refer directly to the
00:12:36.880 macroscopic world such as information, energy, heat and work. When the counterfactual properties
00:12:42.560 enabling those entities are made explicit, it is elegant and easy to express laws about the
00:12:48.960 systems displaying those properties without approximations. This is how the power of counterfactuals
00:12:54.560 allows one to ground concepts that would otherwise be considered abstract or approximate
00:12:59.520 in exact fundamental physical laws. The logic of how that is done is the same for all the entities
00:13:05.440 discussed in this book. It is a unifying trait. First, one expresses the counterfactual property that
00:13:10.720 is required of a physical system for it to embody the entity in question. For instance,
00:13:16.240 if the entity is information, the counterfactual properties that the system must possess are the
00:13:21.520 possibility of the flip and the copy transformations. Then one can express regularities about the
00:13:27.840 physical systems with those counterfactual properties in the form of laws of physics. For instance,
00:13:33.760 interoperability laws, for example, a bit of information, looks like a pure abstraction until we
00:13:40.560 view it through counterfactuals, then one notices that for a system, for example, switch to
00:13:45.600 qualify as a bit of information. It must have two counterfactual properties. One, that it is possible
00:13:51.280 for it to be an either of the two physical states on and off, and two that the state on and the
00:13:57.200 state off can each be permuted into one another and also copied into any other physical system
00:14:03.040 that itself has the same two counterfactual properties. Whether a system has these two
00:14:08.080 counterfactual properties, it qualifies as an information medium. You see, then why a bit is not
00:14:13.760 an abstraction independent of the physical world, whether or not something has those properties
00:14:18.320 depends entirely on the laws of physics. Unlike, say, whether a given number is a prime number,
00:14:24.160 which does not depend in the least on what the laws of physics are. Those counterfactuals
00:14:29.040 provide the link between information and physical laws. In addition, one can state an interoperability
00:14:34.720 law about the system that is displaying those counterfactual properties. The interoperability law
00:14:39.920 explains why the counterfactual properties, though physical, are not dependent on most of the details
00:14:46.000 of the physical systems. It is because when there is an interoperability law,
00:14:51.040 those properties are shared by a class of physical systems. The details of the systems
00:14:55.840 all belonging to the same class become irrelevant end quote. Again, that's substrate independence.
00:15:02.560 It doesn't matter if the information media is paper, magnetic tape, pits in a compact
00:15:06.880 disk, whatever, the same information can be transmitted from one medium into another. The details
00:15:12.320 of what the stuff is made of, whether it's paper or magnetic tape, doesn't matter. What matters
00:15:16.560 is whether you can do these flip and copy operations. I'm skipping a number of paragraphs and I'll
00:15:21.760 pick it up where Kara writes quote. As I have explained time and again, the traditional conception
00:15:27.040 of physics cannot express counterfactual properties. The traditional conception can refer to the
00:15:32.000 state of a switch either on or off at any given time and can predict what the state will be
00:15:36.320 a later time and why. However, a statement of this kind does not tell us anything about what
00:15:42.880 transformations are possible or impossible in the switch. This is why turning to counterfactuals
00:15:49.360 and related laws is essential to capture the physics of phenomena such as information
00:15:54.320 and the other entities you have discovered in this book end quote. So it really is a simple but
00:16:00.880 profoundly deep idea. You've got a switch. Okay, so you could do traditional classical physics
00:16:07.120 or even quantum theory and have some prediction about what the outcome of a particular process
00:16:12.160 going to be is the switch going to end up on or off. But at no point do you need to actually say,
00:16:17.280 if you ignore counterfactuals, what the possible state of that switch are going to be that
00:16:22.560 is a counterfactual claim saying it could be in the on position or it could be in the off position
00:16:28.560 is irrelevant to what you're trying to do. What you're trying to do is to make a prediction
00:16:33.200 and so it comes back to understanding to some extent as well. A whole new mode of explanation,
00:16:38.560 a new way of looking at this situation. I know it's simple. Okay, it's a switch but you can
00:16:42.080 in principle imagine this to be generalized to other more complicated, more interesting situations.
00:16:46.080 But if we're just talking about the switch, one would think if you want to have a fundamental
00:16:49.920 physical understanding of this object, you should want to know well it can be in one of two states.
00:16:54.800 And if you're sitting there thinking this is trivial, yeah it kind of is but here the two
00:17:00.240 physics, physics mind you, fundamental physics didn't have anything to say about this.
00:17:05.280 But now there is a way, there is a framework, there is this constructed theory which allows us to
00:17:09.680 talk about, well the switch could be on and it could be off, it's impossible for it to be
00:17:14.640 otherwise. It's not going to be something else, it's not some third state, it's honour it's off
00:17:19.200 and it is able to perform as a bit doing this particular operation. Okay, let's continue.
00:17:25.120 Okay, all right, quote, there is another unifying aspect of the approach I have been advocating
00:17:29.680 which was foreshadowed at the end of chapter two. All the counterfactual properties you
00:17:34.160 have encountered are expressible statements about which transformations are possible and which are not
00:17:39.680 and why a daring speculation is therefore that all the laws of physics could be formulated solely
00:17:46.240 in terms of principles about counterfactuals and that the laws of motion follow from them
00:17:52.400 as derivative and perhaps approximate properties, exploring this possibility is the start of an
00:17:59.120 exciting research program end quote. Okay, so just a little bit on the philosophy of scientists
00:18:04.400 suppose Kiara says there, this could be the start of an exciting research program, research program.
00:18:10.080 So, Popper talked about research programs. Okay, this is the idea that it forms that kind of
00:18:15.680 overarching framework deeper than a particular theory. So although constructor theory is called
00:18:22.960 constructor theory and it would be testable in a whole number of different ways, what we have
00:18:28.800 are the beginnings of ways in which to conduct scientific research to find particular laws.
00:18:35.360 And that's what a research program is. It's kind of a broader conception. It's almost like a
00:18:40.560 view of science, a view of the way in which physics in this case could be done. But of course
00:18:45.520 constructor theory is a broader even than just physics that reaches into biology or reaches into
00:18:50.160 epistemology. It's sort of like the physics of those areas, the dividing lines between these
00:18:54.800 domains are of course not sharp. But whenever I hear research program being used in this technical way,
00:19:02.240 I immediately think of Popper's remarks about evolution by natural selection Darwinism because
00:19:08.560 people would ask Poppy, you know, well, does this count as does evolution by natural selection?
00:19:13.920 Count as a scientific theory in your sense because in what sense is it testable? You know,
00:19:18.800 people will often say things like, well, you know, clearly evolution by natural selection
00:19:23.120 is testable. How Dan said the Great Defender of Darwin was well, one way you could test this is
00:19:28.480 if you find rabbits in the pre-cambrian. In other words, the evolution of a complex organism like
00:19:35.040 a rabbit at a time prior to the evolution of any complex life at the Cambrian period of geological
00:19:42.400 strategy. You have this thing called the Cambrian explosion and then lots of complex life arose
00:19:46.480 after that. But before that, you didn't have complicated life. So if you found rabbits there,
00:19:51.120 this would refute the claim that evolution by natural selection is this gradual process
00:19:56.080 of evolution, increased complexity of life. But in fact, in fact, as many people have observed
00:20:02.160 since then, that's not a refutation of evolution by natural selection. If you did indeed find rabbits
00:20:08.800 in the pre-cambrian, if you found rabbits much, much, much earlier in the fossil record,
00:20:15.040 then you expect that would be a problem, but it would not in any way shape or form refute
00:20:20.160 evolution by natural selection. It could just mean that, well, rabbits evolved more rapidly in
00:20:25.520 that particular place than they did anywhere else. And, well, they still evolved. They still evolved
00:20:30.640 by evolution by natural selection. And there's your fossils, the rabbits in the pre-cambrian
00:20:34.080 exist there because the best explanation is, they'd really good evolve really, really quickly.
00:20:38.080 That's possible. That's possible. So it doesn't refute evolution by natural selection. So then
00:20:42.000 we've got a problem, don't we, in the history of science or the history of ideas and the philosophy of
00:20:47.680 science. If evolution by natural selection is the deepest theory of biology, and what sense is it
00:20:54.080 truly a scientific theory? If we can't test it, is it any way of doing experiment which would
00:20:58.240 refute it? What observation would we have that could not possibly be explained by
00:21:03.520 evolution by natural selection? And this is why Popper said, well, it's better to consider that
00:21:08.480 as the research program. It's a framework in which we think about all the different ways in which
00:21:15.680 we can have theories of biology and theories of genetics and all this kind of stuff that is
00:21:20.320 related to the question of evolution by natural selection. Evolution by natural selection is just the
00:21:24.560 underlying fact. It's the only possible way in which in which evolution can happen. We can rule
00:21:29.600 out the Marxism. We can rule out creationism. The only one we've got left. The only explanation we've got
00:21:34.720 is evolution by natural selection. So you can't test it after I'll test it against what? There's
00:21:38.800 no viable alternatives. And that's one thing to say about this. But even in principle, there's
00:21:42.880 no observation that we can have, unless you saw the spirit from the sky come down and wave a
00:21:49.200 literal magic wand and create life there in front of you. Then you might have something. Although
00:21:55.440 then again, that entity, that spirit, whatever it is that was doing the magic, the creator,
00:22:00.080 maybe that thing evolved. So if that evolved, well, then that doesn't refute evolution by
00:22:05.920 natural selection. You just have to appeal to evolution by natural selection to explain the existence
00:22:10.960 of the creator, I suppose. So maybe evolution by natural selection is unfulcified, but that does not
00:22:15.920 make it a bad theory. It might make it kind of outside of science or prior to science in a way,
00:22:23.040 kind of like falsifiability itself, you know, the whole concept of falsification is not itself
00:22:28.240 falsifiable. Certainly a crucial part of science. So is it part of science or is it not part of
00:22:33.600 science? It's kind of prior to science. You know, the theory that in geology, rocks exist,
00:22:38.800 volcanoes exist. These theories of existence that these things just are. Well, they're not
00:22:46.640 falsifiable either. You make any claim of anything existing. So what this has to do with anything
00:22:50.240 is that it construct a theory might be considered as the start of an exciting research program,
00:22:56.960 as well as a set of physical laws or ways of informing our under deeper understanding of physical
00:23:03.520 laws. Let's keep going. Kara says, quote, to develop it, this exciting research program. One
00:23:08.880 would have to formulate laws of physics about systems displaying the counterfactual properties
00:23:13.760 discussed in this book and to show that dynamical laws such as quantum theory and general
00:23:18.960 relativity are emergent, derivative approximations following from those principles. This is
00:23:24.800 potentially a whole new avenue for physics being opened up by taking counterfactual seriously.
00:23:30.240 It is for physicists and other scientists and philosophers to explore its development in the years
00:23:36.000 to come. A program of that sort is no simple matter for a start in order to adopt any of these
00:23:41.680 putative laws about the counterfactuals as laws of physics, one would have to ensure they are
00:23:47.280 testable. And quite so what Kara's saying there is that you would need to find laws themselves
00:23:52.720 that are testable, counterfactual laws and testable, but this is different too for any individual
00:23:58.320 particular counterfactual physical law being testable, which makes it therefore scientific.
00:24:04.160 This is a different question to whether the whole research program that we might label
00:24:08.560 constructor theory, whether or not that thing is testable, whether the existence of counterfactuals
00:24:13.760 in the world and the fundamental nature of the counterfactual properties of physical reality
00:24:19.280 and the physical laws, whether that is testable, simply just seems to be the truth of the matter.
00:24:24.880 It just is the case that these counterfactuals exist in reality. That's a research program,
00:24:30.960 but that itself might not be testable. It's sort of prior to the scientific theory itself.
00:24:35.840 It's the thing inside which other theories testable theories are nested in the same way that
00:24:41.600 in biology, all the theories of genetics and the way individual species happen to evolve over time
00:24:48.800 is nested within this broader view of biology as species evolving via the process of natural
00:24:57.120 selection. That just is the case. Now, you then use that to see what follows, what specific
00:25:03.760 biological laws you end up and biological knowledge you end up creating, which itself is testable.
00:25:09.840 Okay, there goes on to say and explains what fans of podcasts will be more than familiar with,
00:25:15.840 but let's just read through it anyway. Right, quite. A law is testable if it produces
00:25:20.480 predictions about observable traits of a physical system. Testability, as I mentioned in Chapter 2,
00:25:25.360 is a pillar of the scientific method where a theory that makes testable predictions can be
00:25:29.920 refuted if its predictions are not borne out by experiments. A classic example, as recounted
00:25:35.200 in Chapter 2, is testing a prediction about the speed of a ball of a given mass rolling down a
00:25:39.840 slope with a given inclination. Economics and medicine are two disciplines where testability is
00:25:44.720 problematic because although predictions can be made, it is hard to make repeated experiments
00:25:50.640 under control conditions to check the predictions against reality. Physics, on the other hand,
00:25:55.520 is privileged because many of its predictions are testable. Can principles about
00:26:00.000 counterfactuals be tested? Yes, but the process is one step removed from the tests of rolling
00:26:06.480 ball predictions that you store in Chapter 2. Principles such as the conservation of energy are
00:26:11.840 in general tested by deducing their implications for the behavior of physical systems that are
00:26:17.280 assumed to obey them. Principles are laws about laws. They are meta laws. One needs first to have
00:26:25.040 at least two rival theories concerning a physical situation to which the principle reports to apply.
00:26:31.840 For instance, one can consider a model for a pendulum that obeys the principle of energy
00:26:36.160 conservation. For example, a model based on Newton's laws and then another model that does not
00:26:41.440 predict that once the pendulum is set into motion, it spontaneously swings to higher and higher
00:26:46.080 points. Then one performs an experiment with an actual pendulum to test the prediction of one model
00:26:51.040 against the other. In the case of the pendulum, all experiments done so far have refuted the model
00:26:55.520 that predicts that energy is spontaneously created. Whenever it looks as though the pendulum swings
00:27:00.880 to higher and higher points, it is because some nearby system is actually providing the energy
00:27:05.760 to do so. For instance, by driving the oscillations with some mechanical engine, which provides
00:27:10.640 the required energy for the swings so far. The principle of conservation of energy has
00:27:15.280 withstood all tests performed on it in its domain of applicability. Okay, I'm going to skip a
00:27:21.520 fair bit and I'm going to pick it up in the chapter where Kiara begins to talk about, right about,
00:27:26.080 rather, a part of science she is actively engaged in in physics in trying to measure things that
00:27:34.640 are by. Well, you're not really sure what laws these things are by. Maybe they are by the laws of
00:27:40.560 general relativity. Maybe they are by the laws of quantum theory. Maybe these two sets of laws
00:27:46.080 actually make incompatible claims about reality. This is an interesting place where
00:27:52.560 constructor theory can have something to say. Let's read what she says about this intriguing
00:27:57.360 experiment that she has been working on. She writes, quote, the principle of interoperability
00:28:02.480 also has an intriguing twist, which allows one to make predictions about physical systems
00:28:06.960 without knowing exactly what their laws of motion are. It is something I have been working on for
00:28:11.120 the past few years. With dynamical laws, the only way to make predictions about what happens when
00:28:16.800 two systems are considered together is to know the dynamics of each of them, as well as how to
00:28:22.480 construct the composite laws of motion. But sometimes one does not know all that. For example,
00:28:28.000 it is still a matter of heated debate, whether and how gravity obeys quantum theory. The reason
00:28:34.960 is that the current best explanation of gravity is general relativity, a theory with no quantum
00:28:40.400 information media in it. So we may not have all the tools to describe the joint motion of a
00:28:46.800 qubit interacting with gravity, yet we may still want to make certain testable predictions
00:28:53.920 about that system. End quote. So that's intriguing. You can read more by looking up Kyara and
00:28:59.840 these gravity experiments. How a qubit behaves in a gravitational field. So you've got a qubit,
00:29:05.680 which is clearly being governed by a quantum theory, but then you're looking at
00:29:09.360 how it behaves according to gravity. So then you've got general relativity. So trying to
00:29:14.560 marry up these two things in such a way as you're observing it, observing its behavior. And so
00:29:20.800 coming to a deeper understanding, and I'll go back to the book and just pick it up where she
00:29:25.120 talked about something slightly different, where she says, quote, other times, even if the law of
00:29:29.920 motion is known, it is too complicated to follow all the motions of the constituents of one of the
00:29:34.720 systems. This is the case for complex molecules that have so many sub particles that it is impossible
00:29:40.480 to use the laws of motion to predict their behavior, too complicated, even for the existing supercomputers
00:29:46.160 in such cases, counterfactuals come in very handy because they allow us to still make predictions
00:29:51.200 end quote. Yeah. So even if you've got complicated molecules, and we're just talking about molecules,
00:29:56.400 then you can't make predictions about the evolution over time of the system of molecules interacting
00:30:02.880 just because the sub particles, the smaller particles that make up the bigger molecules are just too
00:30:07.760 many and too complicated. So never mind when you get to the level of cells made up of millions of
00:30:13.680 molecules and never mind when you put the cells together and you get an animal and never mind when
00:30:17.600 you the animal gets complicated that is a person and never mind when you put people together and
00:30:20.960 you get social and political and economic systems and people think you can reduce these things
00:30:26.400 the dynamical laws. People trying to make predictions about the stock market and people try to make
00:30:29.840 predictions about people making shopping choices and so on and so forth. We can't do it with simple
00:30:37.520 or complicated molecules and we're going to struggle to do it with simple molecules, by the way.
00:30:41.600 So all this is to say that this traditional conception of physics in terms of dynamical laws
00:30:47.920 that allow us to just make predictions of the evolution of the system over time, well,
00:30:53.360 not applicable when you get more complicated systems, but maybe a counterfactual approach
00:30:59.200 can bear fruit. And Chiarra writes on this quote, why? Because they,
00:31:04.400 counterfactuals, hold for those systems irrespective of their details, imagine that you know two
00:31:10.480 systems, each qualifies a bit, but you do not know all the details of their dynamics,
00:31:15.040 nor how to describe the dynamics when they interact with one another. The interoperability of
00:31:19.520 information would still allow you to make predictions about certain tasks on the composite system
00:31:24.880 because it is based on the counterfactuals rather than on the dynamics. This is an example of
00:31:30.400 how the laws about counterfactual properties can be useful and go beyond the testable predictions
00:31:36.160 of known dynamical laws. I want to mention a very recent example where this logic applies,
00:31:41.360 which is at the heart of the current struggle to merge the two best explanations of the universe
00:31:46.080 known to us, quantum theory and general relativity. There are some physical systems such as
00:31:50.800 particles with masses comparable to those of human cells for which both gravity and quantum theory
00:31:57.360 are thought to be relevant, yet there is no unified dynamical law that describes a system
00:32:02.000 that both gravitates and is quantum. There have been brilliant proposals to achieve that
00:32:07.600 unification, but to date, none of these candidates has been conclusively chosen over the others.
00:32:12.480 When it comes to those systems, we did not know what law of motion we should be using to make
00:32:16.720 predictions. Still, we know that the counterfactual interoperability law applies in that domain,
00:32:21.920 even when the specific laws of motion are unknown, so we can use the interoperability law
00:32:26.800 to make predictions in that domain. This approach with counterfactuals has recently led to an
00:32:30.800 idea to test effects in quantum gravity, which has created a lot of interest within the quantum
00:32:35.360 gravity and the experimental communities. The race to realize the experiment has started,
00:32:40.880 and if it is realized, it could finally refute the idea that gravity is not quantum,
00:32:46.400 such as the reach of counterfactuals. They provide a powerful underpinning of deep conceptual
00:32:50.960 ideas, as well as the robust theoretical nature, to support experimental ideas of this kind.
00:32:57.360 I expect there will be more experimental ideas to come, in addition to the exciting
00:33:01.360 consequences for physics, switching to counterfactuals has deep important implications for
00:33:06.080 other fields. One of them could be to revolutionize the understanding of knowledge and quote,
00:33:11.920 and just my reflection in this. This is a purported experiment, by the way. You can just do a
00:33:16.640 Google search to find out more of the details, just type in Kyara and Vlattko, who's a collaborator
00:33:22.800 on this, gravity and qubit. So there you're four big things that are the two authors of the paper,
00:33:27.920 and the two concepts we're talking about here. One of the papers by Kyara and Vlattko,
00:33:33.120 appears in the journal Nature, one of the most prestigious journals in the world.
00:33:37.200 And you can look up the details there, and they talk about how Feynman was the one who first
00:33:41.920 suggested coming up with some kind of test. They've come up with a kind of test. These experiments
00:33:48.400 are about quantum theory and general relativity, but now Kyara goes on to talking about
00:33:53.760 counterfactuals and the relationship to knowledge, explanatory knowledge. And she writes, quote,
00:33:58.400 I said that knowledge is a particular type of information, with the counterfactual property of being
00:34:02.880 resilient. It can cause itself to remain instantiated in physical systems. I also explained that we
00:34:07.920 do not know exactly how it is created, but we know that it can arise out of no knowledge via the
00:34:13.680 process of natural selection, and that another process for creating new knowledge is what happens in
00:34:18.800 the brain when we think science does not know if there are new laws that govern this type of
00:34:23.440 resilient information, but routing knowledge and counterfactuals is the right approach to creating
00:34:28.400 a corpus of such laws. This is not least because the approach via counterfactuals freeze knowledge
00:34:33.840 from all the subjective connotations that have traditionally played theories of it end quote.
00:34:39.440 Yes, and so if this is a popularian view of knowledge, this is an addition on top of,
00:34:46.720 or goes deeper in some sense, then pop a view of knowledge, but properties of course,
00:34:51.680 and escape from all the subjective connotations that have traditionally played theories of knowledge.
00:34:56.080 So he certainly took the subjectivity out of knowledge. He's entire epistemology was to talk
00:35:02.160 about objective knowledge, and I've spoken about this before. If you're interested, one of my
00:35:06.640 episodes is just called objective knowledge. It's literally about pop-as-view of this stuff.
00:35:15.520 Quote, moreover with counterfactuals knowledge becomes a physical entity rooted in the resilience
00:35:20.960 of a particular kind of information, which is an objective counterfactual property
00:35:25.840 independent of observers, sentient beings, and the like. The most far-reaching consequence
00:35:31.200 of this shift is that some open problems that have been traditionally labelled as
00:35:35.280 spiritual, mystical, and even religious, such as finding laws and regularities about knowledge
00:35:40.720 and its evolution, can via that shift be posed firmly within the scientific domain,
00:35:46.480 without appeal to dogmas or supernatural ideas. This is the first necessary step in order to solve
00:35:52.080 these problems of our scientific methods, and it relies on counterfactuals in quote.
00:35:56.320 Yes, so knowledge as useful information, as information that solves problem,
00:36:01.360 is going to tend to get itself replicated in the minds of entities out there, and indeed,
00:36:07.280 well, in the minds of entities, whether those entities count as living or not. So you could have
00:36:13.200 some robotic system which doesn't count as living by some criteria, depending upon how you define
00:36:18.000 things, it may not replicate. It may be incapable or not want to reproduce, but it still
00:36:23.360 counts as a thinking conscious thing. I don't know, are all thinking conscious things necessarily
00:36:27.840 alive, but certainly not all alive things are conscious and thinking, like bacteria or trees,
00:36:33.680 but if you're a scientist looking into outer space and you find structures, technologies,
00:36:38.000 industry, buildings out there that have been created by an intelligence, then you've found a kind
00:36:44.640 of knowledge instantiated in those industries, that building, whatever happens to be the
00:36:48.640 diaspora sphere that you find, you've found explanatory knowledge of a kind, and it's not about
00:36:53.840 that knowledge being in the mind of any particular subject, it's not subjective, it's out there
00:36:58.640 having an effect on reality, taking advantage of knowledge of physical laws, knowledge of matter
00:37:04.560 and so on and so forth. Let's get going. Okay, all right, it's quite. This switch removes from the
00:37:08.960 shoulders of scientists and rationalists, a heavy burn that comes with those problems,
00:37:13.600 and apparent dilemma, which goes like this. On the one hand, there are certain phenomena that
00:37:18.000 require explanation. Phenomena such as artificial selection, the unfolding of creativity at the level
00:37:22.880 of the individual with new theoretical ideas popping up in various disciplines as a result
00:37:27.120 of individual creativity and of society with the progress of civilization. We are intrigued by
00:37:32.880 these phenomena and compelled to understand them in depth, yet contrary to this intuition,
00:37:38.000 it is often anathema to scientists to talk about the creativity in human brains, knowledge
00:37:43.200 and related phenomena as having any real significance. This is because of a prejudice that
00:37:47.920 affects the scientists in much the same way that prejudices of other kinds affect religious thinking.
00:37:54.480 Knowledge is regarded suspiciously as anthropocentric, subjective and related to
00:37:59.680 daykarts, mind, body, dualism, which is the root of all sorts of misconceptions that are also
00:38:04.960 deeply entrenched in religious thinking. As a result, many open problems about the human mind and
00:38:10.160 knowledge creation are sometimes regarded as not interesting by some scientists. The contemplation
00:38:15.920 of the possibility of laws applying to knowledge and the like appears, like literal nonsense
00:38:20.240 to part of the scientific community, some retreat to the domain of reductionism and materialism,
00:38:24.880 denying that knowledge is a phenomenon requiring an explanation. Others simply ignore the question,
00:38:30.480 thinking that it goes several steps too far into stuff that is not proper science,
00:38:34.960 end quote my reflection on that. Yes, well, some physicists are irrational, some physicists will say,
00:38:41.040 well, we don't have to have experimental testable theories. I've talked about that before,
00:38:45.040 some physicists will say, well, all we need is to have an instrumentalist view of quantum theory.
00:38:51.200 Well, what scientists, what particular scientists regard as proper science,
00:38:56.640 is of no concern. Science can be universal in its approach to looking at problems.
00:39:03.360 Some problems will be just by definition outside of its capacity to really make deep
00:39:09.200 inner agendas. So for example, moral questions are what should be the case? Because science is about,
00:39:14.640 what is the case? What is going on right now? How do we explain this particular phenomenon?
00:39:18.320 Now, if you're trying to consider trying to construct a theory of what should be the case,
00:39:22.160 well, now you've immediately left science. So by definition, if you want to prove a particular
00:39:26.240 theorem, well, you don't need to worry about the experimental testability of that particular thing,
00:39:30.720 it's independent of science. But for anything that exists, name it, you know, name your thing,
00:39:36.640 and even the existence of religion, of this thing called religion, that's a
00:39:41.360 mainable to scientific study in the sense that you can come up with theories and then you can
00:39:45.680 go out and try and refute these theories, you know, look in the world to see if your theory is
00:39:50.400 actually refuted by the existence of any particular religion that's out there right now,
00:39:54.240 or it ever has existed, let's say. And so to with knowledge, these conceptions of knowledge
00:39:59.040 that talk about knowledge as being just a thing that people think that's just going on inside
00:40:04.640 of human minds. Well, it's wrong, and we know it's wrong because, well, a proper explain, knowledge
00:40:09.360 is instantiated in physical objects. It can be written in the books, it can appear in our microscopes
00:40:14.960 and technology. That's knowledge. Knowledge has this all objective character, but it doesn't matter
00:40:20.640 what particular scientists or philosophers or anyone thinks, okay? People who want to make
00:40:25.760 progress can just largely ignore the game-sayers, you know, you just will, you know, sometimes it's
00:40:31.760 important to just solve your problem, to find the thing that you're interested in and solve
00:40:38.080 it, and whether it's someone wants to call what you're doing science or not should have no bearing
00:40:42.400 on your capacity to make progress. Who cares what names they call you, I suppose? You're not a scientist,
00:40:48.160 okay, fine. You're the only real scientist in it. It doesn't matter. Keep on going on this question
00:40:54.400 of whether or not things like knowledge is amenable to a scientific study.
00:41:00.560 Okay, all right, it's quote, but counterfactuals provide a way out of this trouble if we use
00:41:04.880 counterfactuals to define knowledge as information with the ability to last, such as that in
00:41:10.800 genes that code for useful adaptations and creativity as the ability to create new knowledge,
00:41:16.720 we are able to free them of any subjective tinge making them objective. This is still very far
00:41:22.880 from providing a theory of those phenomena, but it provides a scientific handle on knowledge
00:41:28.960 by grounding it in the laws of physics, posing their own reflection. Just to say, wonderful,
00:41:33.920 that's great, isn't it? That's very, very cool that we have this physical way, this kind of
00:41:40.640 in-road into knowledge creation and epistemology from physics via constructor theory.
00:41:47.520 Let's keep on going. All right, it's quote, after taking this step, one can make further useful moves.
00:41:53.520 First, consider as a problem for physics, the fact that certain systems in the biosphere
00:41:58.000 exhibit a property that neither system in the known universe has, namely creativity,
00:42:02.960 the ability to create new knowledge by thinking human brains have this ability, it may be that
00:42:07.440 other systems say beetroot plants have it too, but it is at best much less manifest than it is for humans.
00:42:14.480 Pause the game on reflection. You don't know about that. This is one of those areas where we're
00:42:18.320 just saying postulating that, anything like a beetroot plant, having the capacity for
00:42:24.240 creativity of that kind, let's say we should specify the creation of explanatory knowledge,
00:42:31.920 what problem does it solve? What do we notice about beetroot plants? Perhaps someone does have
00:42:35.440 the problem, they think that the beetroot plant actually might be maybe there is some observation
00:42:40.960 out there that is crying out for explanation in the form of, well, the only way to understand
00:42:46.560 what's going on there with that beetroot plant is it's explaining the world. It's got a problem and
00:42:51.760 it's trying to create the solution by conjecturing explanations. Maybe, maybe we don't know enough
00:42:58.800 but at the moment I don't know that we have such a problem. Anyway, let's give it a go.
00:43:04.560 Right, it's quite now thanks to our objective definition of knowledge, stating facts like this
00:43:09.840 that human brains can create knowledge is no longer vulnerable to allegations of
00:43:15.040 anthropocentrism, claiming that it is anthropocentric would be equivalent to considering the
00:43:19.840 statement a dishwasher has special properties among all the known systems in the known universe.
00:43:24.320 As supporting a dishwasher-centric view of the universe, clearly it does not,
00:43:28.720 it is an objective statement about the fact that dishwashers can do certain things such as
00:43:32.480 quickly scrubbing away dirt from cutlery and crockery and being unchanged by the experience
00:43:37.120 to an accuracy that is unparalleled in the known universe. Likewise, the statement human brains are
00:43:42.240 capable of constructing new knowledge is not anthropocentric. The relevant difference between
00:43:47.040 the case of human brains and that of dishwashing machines is that the detailed functionality of being
00:43:52.560 knowledge-creating is not as well understood as the functionality of dishwashing machines
00:43:58.000 posing the MRI reflection. That would be to understate things. So, we understand very well
00:44:03.680 to high fidelity to the point where something goes wrong with your dishwashing machine,
00:44:07.600 you can fix it so they continue to dishwash. But on the other hand,
00:44:11.360 knowledge creation, we understand basically next to nothing about how it happens. We know that
00:44:16.240 all people do. We know that it's occurring in the brain in some way manifested in the ideas,
00:44:21.440 which are in the mind and so on and so forth. But we don't understand the genesis of any particular
00:44:28.080 bit of knowledge that we create. The brain is doing something remarkably unusual. And although
00:44:33.600 we carry around this head with us all the time, it's almost simultaneously the thing most opaque
00:44:40.720 to us. We just don't know where the ideas and conjectures are coming from. We just know that we
00:44:46.960 have them. Let's keep going. Carrots. Still, lie the counterfactual notion of knowledge. One can
00:44:52.320 now refer to knowledge creation in an objective fashion. It is the first essential step in
00:44:56.800 regarding problems about creativity as pertaining to the domain of science, which is in turn
00:45:02.080 step zero to even hoping to address them effectively. Quite right. Another consequence of this
00:45:08.320 which is that we can consider a number of other related issues as coming into the domain of science.
00:45:13.760 There are several examples. First, there is the issue of whether there are other systems in the
00:45:17.840 universe with the same creative capabilities as the human brain, other species on earth or the
00:45:21.840 forms of life and other planets, or possibly existing and future artificial intelligence,
00:45:26.320 related to this is the problem of understanding how knowledge comes into the world,
00:45:29.440 understanding the thinking process and creativity from the point of view of physics and
00:45:32.720 information theory, starting from our objective definition of knowledge, we can wonder probably
00:45:37.280 within science about such questions as how can one set up that creative ability in a computer?
00:45:43.520 Is the termination of creativity with death necessary as some would like to argue,
00:45:47.920 or is it actually possible to defer death to later and later in life by means of some sort of
00:45:52.720 error correction? What is it exactly that we have to store an error correct? Can a person be copied
00:45:57.200 stored and downloaded into another embodiment when the time of death for the body approaches?
00:46:01.680 Each of these topics requires very careful consideration and it could be the subject of
00:46:06.320 countless research programs. Here I just want to point out one fact,
00:46:10.480 whatever your view on these questions, it is far easier to approach them from the point of
00:46:14.960 view of science, free of the prejudice that knowledge related issues are anthropocentric,
00:46:21.040 subjective and non-scientific. Counterfactuals allow one to take all these issues seriously
00:46:27.920 and fully within the scientific method. End quote. That's great, that's great. Now,
00:46:33.280 Cara then goes through a couple of stories. One about Alexander the Great that I'm not going to
00:46:40.880 read and basically at the end of his long journeys of conquest, he comes back to his home and
00:46:48.000 basically becomes depressed because he's done it all. There's nothing left for him to do,
00:46:52.560 so he becomes depressed at the fact that he has nothing left to accomplish kind of thing. He's
00:46:58.400 profoundly dissatisfied, but on the other hand, Cara compares this to Odysseus, another
00:47:05.440 figure from Greek mythology, who goes on all of his adventures but comes back excited for having
00:47:11.920 been on the adventures and he's learned so much and he just wants to do so much more.
00:47:16.560 In fact, I'll just read the end of what Cara says, a commentary on comparing that he's
00:47:21.040 two particular tales from antiquity. She writes, quote, unlike Alexander, Odysseus has not lost
00:47:26.640 himself at the end of the story but has acquired more knowledge and has the ability to put it to
00:47:31.520 some future use. The end of the Odyssey has a firm higher point than it starts, which is essential
00:47:37.440 for future improvement. It is richer in possibilities, which are a special case of counterfactuals.
00:47:43.200 Alexander, by contrast, has lost his capacity to dream of further deeds, his creativity,
00:47:49.120 and all the knowledge acquired along the way, is therefore useless because it cannot be put to any
00:47:54.000 further use. End quote. So this is a wonderful comparison of modern intellectuals, two ways of going.
00:48:00.960 Be Odysseus, be optimistic, learn as much as you possibly can, and realize in becoming enriched
00:48:07.520 with knowledge that there is always more to learn and problems to solve than this is unending.
00:48:13.200 Don't be like Alexander, the pessimist, who, upon gaining all this knowledge, thinks that,
00:48:18.720 well, it's just about all finish. We've just about discovered everything we can,
00:48:23.120 and in fact, I'm so brilliant and I'm so smart that I've already figured out all of these
00:48:27.600 problems that are definitely going to kill if not my present generation, and certainly my children
00:48:32.560 or their children's generation, because it's inevitable that humans are going to be destructive.
00:48:37.280 There's nothing more for us to accomplish, nothing to look forward to. Everything is dark and grim
00:48:41.840 that appears to be this comparison between Odysseus and Alexander. It's to visions of reality.
00:48:47.920 And we here like to be Odysseus, we here like to gain as much explanatory knowledge,
00:48:53.680 but realize we're always at the beginning, scratching the surface, and every problem solved,
00:48:58.720 opens up a new visitor of just more and more problems. Let's keep on going, because this is now
00:49:04.400 coming right to the end of the book, and so let's read the last few paragraphs. And,
00:49:10.240 K.R. Right, quite. More generally, any journey without necessarily being literally an exact circle
00:49:16.560 can still be a successful nostos of sorts, and its end can be a positive uplifting fact.
00:49:22.960 What matters is, whether along the journey the character has or has not managed to create
00:49:27.680 more knowledge while preserving his or her own individual capacity to create new knowledge.
00:49:34.960 So an ending can be a fertile starting point. It depends on whether the character reaching the
00:49:40.480 end is still capable of being creative. In fact, a successful nostos does not have an ending,
00:49:47.680 its ending is just the starting point of new adventures, and quote,
00:49:52.400 there's not a bit left to read, but I just want to, in fact, isn't that reminiscent,
00:49:57.360 doesn't that echo the beginning or infinity, and certainly the sentiments of the beginning
00:50:01.840 infinity and the David Deutsches worldview. Great to see this influence permeating this book
00:50:07.200 here. It was throughout the book, but here, particularly at the end, let's keep on going.
00:50:11.040 By the way, K.R. is using this word nostos, which is the Greek for a particular kind of story in
00:50:17.040 ancient Greece, which is a kind of a circular kind of a journey, you know, someone beginning in a
00:50:21.520 certain place and coming all the way back to the start, but as she says there, you don't want a
00:50:24.880 perfect circle. It's not approximately a circle, okay? You solve the problem and in finding
00:50:29.840 the solution, it reveals more problems. So you kind of back to you this start, you know, why?
00:50:33.760 Hey, you haven't been relieved of all problems. In fact, you've just got more again, but they're
00:50:37.840 better problems, hopefully, by Popper's lights anyway. And as she writes, quote,
00:50:42.880 just as with a nostos, there may be no actual ending for a book either, provided that something
00:50:48.560 particular occurs while the reader goes through the book when a reader makes his way through a book,
00:50:53.200 a unique relationship is established between the book and the reader, which grows within the space
00:50:58.080 that the writer Philip Pullman has masterfully called the borderland, the relationship is entirely
00:51:03.280 based on counterfactuals, the knowledge that the reader creates in their mind while reading the
00:51:07.920 book, and it is something unique and private to the reader. Whenever knowledge creation happens while
00:51:13.280 the book is read, the reader undergoes a nostos. Even once the book is completed, implications of
00:51:18.880 the knowledge created along the way stay with the reader for as long as the reader's mind survives
00:51:23.680 and can be put to some use in the future. In that case, the book does not really have an end
00:51:28.560 porting there, my reflection on that, and moreover, the knowledge that has been instantiated
00:51:35.040 in the text of a book by the author is not always the knowledge that is gained by the reader.
00:51:41.840 The reader has to go through this process of interpreting what is written there on the page,
00:51:46.240 and they may pick up subtly different lessons, and they may even go on to create an
00:51:52.160 end-of-mind new knowledge which goes beyond what is in the book as well. This is an interesting feature
00:51:58.320 of the transmission of knowledge or memes that happens between people. Last paragraph, and this is
00:52:03.520 of course where we're going to end it today. As I am writing these lines, I'm thinking of you,
00:52:09.360 my reader, like a modern Odysseus. You are now emerging from this journey, approaching the end.
00:52:15.520 You can moor the boat at the war, take a world of zurved rest at the hostel that overlooks the
00:52:20.160 harbour, and look back through your memories, considering them carefully, as you are pondering all
00:52:26.000 the ideas encountered in the book, perhaps a smile lights up your face. Before you, there is still
00:52:31.840 vast unexplored waters, waiting for you to take to the sea once more and create further knowledge.
00:52:39.440 May the knowledge you discovered in this book serve you well on the journey.
00:52:43.600 The end, that's the end of the book, and a beautiful way to end them, and hopefully my scenes have
00:52:50.480 captured something of the poetry, especially of this final chapter here today.
00:52:56.720 And so that's the end of the science of Ken and Ken, and yes, I'm sure people will ask,
00:53:02.320 will I have a discussion with Ken and no doubt I will at some stage, I'm not sure when,
00:53:06.880 but that will be what remains of my discussions of the science of Ken and Ken as to
00:53:13.280 speak with the author herself about what's been done since, perhaps the publication of this book,
00:53:19.600 and what deeper insights we might be able to look forward to when it comes to the application
00:53:25.440 of constructive theory to our deepest moments. Until next time, bye bye.
