00:00:00.000 Welcome to Topcast and to episode 103, the second of my ask me anything episodes.
00:00:07.720 The last one was a lot of fun and there were so many questions that I couldn't get to
00:00:10.960 them in the one episode last episode were all the questions I received, almost all the
00:00:15.040 questions I received from my Patreons I think there might be a few more to tidy up today.
00:00:19.800 Today we mainly questions from Twitter and a few other sources as well.
00:00:24.240 These ask me anything episodes are good for me because they're unscripted unlike with my
00:00:28.320 other episodes that go into detail about books I've read and ideas that I'm investigating.
00:00:34.200 I have to do a bit of research and write a little bit of a script and at least write
00:00:39.840 With these all I'm doing is taking the questions and then responding to them in an
00:00:44.320 unscripted way so hopefully it comes off a little bit more natural anyway.
00:00:48.040 First is Sam Harris likes to say and some of his podcasts a little bit of housekeeping.
00:00:52.600 This is going to be the first of the episodes that I'm going to release as an audio-only
00:00:57.320 priority so it's going to come out on all of the podcast platforms first and then it will
00:01:02.200 come out on YouTube and so that might be what I'm doing going forward.
00:01:06.680 There will be the odd video episode here and there which will be much shorter than what
00:01:12.840 Most of my regular episodes however are going to move to audio only.
00:01:16.800 That doesn't mean they're not going to be published on YouTube.
00:01:19.640 It's just that they won't be very video intensive.
00:01:21.560 They'll just have the minimal visuals there such that I can upload them as a video and
00:01:25.960 anyone who listens as audio only on YouTube will still be able to do that.
00:01:30.680 Now there are a lot of questions today so I'm not going to go through any more of a lengthy
00:01:35.680 introduction and instead just dive straight in to the questions so that I can hopefully
00:01:40.160 get through what is left of them so that I can hopefully get through all of the ones that
00:01:48.120 First one from Twitter from Jitten congratulations on getting to 100 he says.
00:01:58.320 How do people learn false things through conjecture and criticism also?
00:02:04.440 For example, how do home your paths learn their craft?
00:02:10.480 Well remember that according to a popularian framework everything that we know is false
00:02:18.720 It's going to turn out false in the final analysis.
00:02:21.160 What we have are misconceptions, misconceptions that are more or less close to the truth
00:02:26.400 but never the actual truth so what we're learning are false things.
00:02:30.120 So you might very well ask how do we learn Newton's Law of Gravity?
00:02:33.560 Well via this method of conjecture and criticism.
00:02:36.200 So the question can't be how do people learn false things as if that is something different
00:02:41.360 to learning true things because all of our knowledge contains misconceptions and so therefore
00:02:47.640 in the final analysis as I say it's going to turn out.
00:02:52.120 So we're learning those lessons, those theories, those explanations via this method of as
00:02:57.320 you say, conjecture and criticism and that's producing false things.
00:03:03.360 So if the question is how do people learn pseudoscience?
00:03:06.680 How do so many people learn these false things that the rest of us understand what the
00:03:10.520 explanations are for why they're false for much of our knowledge what we regard as our
00:03:16.040 best explanations, we don't yet know why those things are false.
00:03:21.160 One day we will and we will improve on the present best state of our knowledge but at
00:03:26.040 the moment we don't have good explanations as to how those theories, for example these
00:03:31.480 theory of quantum theory, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics,
00:03:36.240 the theory of genetics and so on and so forth, all of these great scientific theories,
00:03:40.240 the theories about how World War II started and finished and so on and so forth, pick your
00:03:47.680 One day we're going to find out that these theories contain misconceptions.
00:03:52.000 Now when it comes to homeopaths or astrologers or pick whatever one of these pseudoscience
00:03:58.840 is that you like, how is it that they learn those things well and exactly the same way
00:04:05.040 And it's not that their criticism can't be any good, it's just that they haven't yet
00:04:09.360 learned why these things are false, presumably.
00:04:12.960 And so it's just a bit of knowledge that they lack.
00:04:16.160 In the case of homeopaths, as I understand it, what you do is you dilute the solution
00:04:21.720 more and more and more and the more you dilute the solution, the stronger the nostrum,
00:04:26.440 the treatment, the medicine that you apparently have, the homeopathic remedy, the stronger
00:04:31.240 the remedy becomes, the more and more it's diluted, which of course is in stark contrast
00:04:35.840 to what we know of chemistry. Chemistry at work precisely the other way, the more that you
00:04:40.520 dilute something, the weaker and weaker the concentration is, or the more dilute the concentration
00:04:45.560 is I should say, and therefore the less of the active ingredient is in that thing.
00:04:50.840 Homeopathy says that the water has some sort of memory.
00:04:54.720 This violates what we know of physics and chemistry, you know, how is this memory stored
00:05:00.120 within the water, why does the water only remember the good things that were in it and not
00:05:04.560 for example, all the sewage that has ever been in it?
00:05:07.800 These things are questions unanswered and a homeopath who is sufficient or comes to learn
00:05:14.520 a sufficient amount of chemistry, would I suppose have to partition their mind logically
00:05:19.800 in some way in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance that would come with, simultaneously
00:05:25.880 thinking that homeopathy, where you dilute something more and more it becomes stronger,
00:05:30.640 in chemistry where if you dilute something more and more it becomes weaker, you would
00:05:37.800 But whatever the case is, yes, homeopaths have to learn their craft in precisely the same
00:05:46.680 They just wouldn't learn science alongside, and it's not that I suppose their criticism
00:05:52.360 can't be any good, it's that they don't know the criticisms, or if they've been presented
00:05:57.040 with the criticisms they don't understand it, or if they're presented with the criticisms
00:06:00.920 they might have a financial interest in simply ignoring the criticisms that they are
00:06:07.000 receiving, or perhaps they somehow have some emotional bias that could be all of these
00:06:10.520 reasons why they might not understand, or refuse to believe the criticism when the criticism
00:06:17.840 But there is only one way to learn, whether learning the best explanations we have, or
00:06:22.320 the misconceptions we have, or the completely not a myth that we have once understood.
00:06:28.040 Okay, Jitin has a second question, and he asks, persuasion still fails when trying to
00:06:34.760 persuade creationists, flood authors, anti-vaxxists, et cetera.
00:06:39.200 When you do have good explanations, how does it fail here?
00:06:43.080 So this is a related question, really, on the reasons why persuasion might fail, and my
00:06:49.960 understanding is, and my thoughts on this, would be that persuasion often fails in these
00:06:55.160 situations when the person trying to do the persuading has a bad way of trying to explain
00:07:04.440 Not always, but I like to put the owners back on the person doing the explaining.
00:07:09.560 One might wonder why are you trying to convince this person in the first place?
00:07:13.520 When we say, there exists a good explanation, we kind of mean that in the objective sense.
00:07:19.360 It's out there in abstract space, someone at some point has found this good explanation.
00:07:24.320 It exists, whether or not anyone believes that any more or not, if everyone was wiped
00:07:29.840 out by an asteroid tomorrow, but our books were left behind, by definition there would
00:07:33.200 be no one left to understand, to appreciate, for example, that we lived on a, well, that
00:07:43.480 And if an alien race came along, they would be able to pick up those books and find out
00:07:49.000 Why will persuasion fail to convince a creationist that they're wrong?
00:07:55.480 You might also consider, if you're ever explaining something to a child, why your explanation
00:08:05.080 I would say that although you might possess a good explanation, having the other person,
00:08:10.240 the child in this case, try to understand that good explanation, it's all on you.
00:08:14.440 It's all on you getting that across, especially if the child is particularly interested in
00:08:20.280 And if you can't get it across to someone, it suggests a couple of things.
00:08:24.640 It might suggest you don't actually understand that good explanation after all.
00:08:28.280 You think you do, but when you try to put it into words, you can't, which is a red flag
00:08:33.560 about the extent to which you really do understand it.
00:08:36.280 If you really do understand it, you should be able to put into more and more simple terms
00:08:41.160 such that the person can lead to me two half way in coming to appreciate what you think
00:08:49.480 Another thing is, some people are just bad at communication.
00:08:52.480 Some people are just bad at trying to persuade people, they mean about it, they lack compassion,
00:08:59.760 they lack empathy, they lack an ability to try and see things from the point of view
00:09:05.120 of someone who doesn't yet understand what they understand.
00:09:09.240 They've all had better and worse teachers, and the worst teachers are the ones that although
00:09:14.120 they might very well have the knowledge, the way in which they go about trying to explain
00:09:19.040 what they know is either boring or it's just in a manner which isn't unkind, there can
00:09:25.960 be any number of reasons why you aren't persuaded by the teacher even though at some level
00:09:31.560 they must have a good explanation operating on their mind or in their mind.
00:09:35.880 In the case of people who are in our culture, committed creationists, flat earthers,
00:09:41.840 anti-vaxxers, this kind of thing, people who embrace pseudoscience, there's a number of
00:09:48.440 I would blame firstly, possibly, the school system, in turning people off science, in
00:09:54.840 not presenting science in the way in which it should be presented as a process, but rather
00:09:59.960 turning it into a body of facts which you can't question, and then people come out of
00:10:04.400 school and they begin questioning things and they think that they've been indoctrinated
00:10:07.440 into these ways of thinking about science, this body of facts, and rightly they're skeptical
00:10:12.640 about everything they've been taught at school because they begin to understand that
00:10:16.480 at least some of what they were taught was wrong, and once you begin to be critical about
00:10:21.920 some of what you think, you might very well be critical about everything that you have
00:10:26.480 been taught because the way in which people who aren't creations aren't flat earthers,
00:10:32.800 aren't any of anti-vaxxers, try and persuade these people into coming around to their point
00:10:38.320 of view, is in the most unkind, ungenerous, pandering, patronising, and sometimes simply
00:10:44.480 insulting way, you're not going to convince a creationist, a young earth creationist, that
00:10:50.560 they're wrong by yelling at them about how stupid they are, by telling them that they're
00:10:55.920 ignorant, and of course so many people these days embrace the theories and explanations
00:11:02.160 of science, for precisely the same reasons that creationist flat earthers and anti-vaxxers
00:11:06.960 embrace the theories that they hold us true, in other words not because they've necessarily
00:11:11.360 reached it by a truly critical process but rather because they've memorised the body of facts,
00:11:17.280 now on the side of the people who memorised this body of facts in science,
00:11:20.800 well at least they're memorising our best set of facts derived from our best explanations,
00:11:26.160 but it doesn't mean they really understand what they're saying, you know this seems to happen
00:11:29.840 very commonly when it comes to questions about climate change, how many people truly understand
00:11:36.960 the mechanism by which climate change happens, they might understand for example there are these
00:11:42.240 things called greenhouse gases and the greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, but do they
00:11:47.200 understand how at the level of the molecule, what's precisely going on with carbon dioxide and
00:11:54.080 infrared radiation, do they really get what's going on, do they understand the explanation,
00:11:58.800 or are they outsourcing most of that explanation to the experts, and if they're doing that why
00:12:04.880 are they so vociferous in their emotional connection to this particular theory and willing to
00:12:11.520 insult their neighbours and other community members who disagree with them because they also
00:12:16.240 don't actually understand the theory, so we've got two people neither of whom understand the theory
00:12:21.600 on the one hand someone says climate change is real but they don't really understand the theory
00:12:25.840 and on the other hand a person who says climate change is not real, it's not really going on,
00:12:30.560 it's not anthropocentric or whatever, they also don't understand climate change, but these two
00:12:34.240 people are yelling insults at one another all about a theory they don't understand because they're
00:12:39.200 both dogmatically committed to a particular doctrine that comports with their worldview,
00:12:45.040 with their politics and so on and so forth, so this all comes down to why persuasion fails
00:12:50.480 because people aren't I think in many many cases genuinely trying to persuade one another about the
00:12:57.520 truth or falsity of these particular positions, everyone has to go in with and open mind
00:13:03.120 and a critical mind in order to really learn and I would say not to try and get caught up in these
00:13:09.440 discussions if you're not really interested and the other party is not really interested in making
00:13:14.400 progress on this front, there will always be people that don't yet understand the best
00:13:20.320 explanation and that's fine, you know not everyone has to understand everything and some people
00:13:25.360 can have misconceptions, there will always be people who have misconceptions, I would say that
00:13:30.800 so long as the geophysicist you're talking to isn't a flat earther, so long as the GP that you're
00:13:37.040 going to with respect to getting a vaccine isn't an anti-vaxxer, you're fine, it doesn't really matter
00:13:43.920 and this will be controversial but it shouldn't even matter if these people occupy political
00:13:50.800 positions either, if a creationist has a political position, if a flat earther happens to be the
00:13:56.160 present of the United States, if someone in the Senate happens to be an anti-vaxxer this shouldn't
00:14:01.680 really matter and the reason I think it shouldn't matter although it probably does, it shouldn't
00:14:05.760 matter because none of those positions should be something that the government has any interest in
00:14:12.240 really, in the case of vaccines produced recently, well private industry came up with them anyway
00:14:17.520 pretty quickly, in the case of creationism or people being committed to a particular kind of
00:14:23.360 religious mythology, every again everyone has misconceptions, no one is immune from wandering around
00:14:30.480 with misconceptions and many people want to pick on particular kinds of misconceptions as being
00:14:35.840 especially dangerous but if it's not directing the day-to-day decision-making which is in the
00:14:40.640 purview of the particular government then I'm not particularly concerned if the present or the
00:14:45.200 prime minister happens to be a young earth creationist, I might very well be more concerned that
00:14:50.560 presidents and prime ministers do things like print more and more money under the misconception that
00:14:56.800 this has no effect on the average person and the amount of money they have in their bank account for
00:15:01.040 example, so misconceptions are everywhere and persuasion should be expected to often fail because
00:15:07.920 sometimes people are not interested either in persuading, they're just yelling at insults at
00:15:14.000 someone else, or being persuaded again they're just dogmatically committed to a particular position
00:15:20.240 without really understanding it. Next questions from Ashik, less questions and more a list of things
00:15:27.760 to do. Number one, a refutation of physicalism, okay well let's deal with that one first.
00:15:33.760 Well the refutation of physicalism is simply that, they really do exist, abstract things in reality
00:15:39.680 and those can have causal effects in the world. I've used lots and lots of examples, there are
00:15:43.920 examples in the beginning of infinity of this before, let's come up with one now. Let's say you're
00:15:50.080 playing a computer game and let's say this particular computer game has various levels in order to
00:15:55.760 proceed from one level to the next. When you win a particular level the screen goes green,
00:16:02.640 at the end of that particular level, to tell you that you have one that particular level.
00:16:07.200 Otherwise it goes red and you have to start all over again. Imagine the screen turns green,
00:16:11.440 why does the screen turn green? Physicalism would say that you're supposed to look at the
00:16:15.920 individual pixels and trace what's going on at the level of the individual pixel, okay for
00:16:21.120 example there's electrical energy going through the pixel and that's causing some sort of photo
00:16:26.480 luminescence where the photons are coming out and they happen to be a green color and you trace
00:16:31.040 that back, that sequence all the way back through the circuitry of the computer and from the
00:16:36.160 circuitry of the computer you end up going out to the electricity supply and from the electricity
00:16:41.760 supply you go all the way back to the to the power station where perhaps coal is being burnt and
00:16:46.400 you're saying that this is the reason why, okay this long sequence of cause and effect events
00:16:51.680 is the reason why ultimately the pixels on the screen turn green and that's why the screen
00:16:56.640 turns green because all the pixels have and all the pixels have because this is what the electrical
00:17:00.880 circuits have told them what to do. Well that's if that was the only possible explanation and
00:17:07.280 with someone insist that that's the only explanation and the only thing therefore that exists
00:17:11.680 are the physical events then you would be a physicalist. I don't know who's really committed to
00:17:16.160 that particular style of physicalism whether there's other kinds of physicalism I don't know
00:17:20.960 but the refutation of that kind of physicalism is to simply say well the screen's gone green
00:17:25.520 because that's the rule of the game if you win the level then the screen turns green and talking
00:17:30.480 about games to begin with a computer game it's not a physical thing it's an abstract thing it's
00:17:36.000 it's something that can be printed onto a CD-ROM supposedly possibly or a DVD or download
00:17:43.760 it off a server somewhere and then it's run through a computer and following the rules of the game
00:17:48.800 the rules are abstractions and performing certain actions as a person playing the game
00:17:55.120 these things thinking through what you need to do the thinking part again is more abstract stuff
00:18:01.440 going on the best explanation for why the screen turns green is not in terms of the movement
00:18:07.440 of electrons through circuits the reason why the screen turns green should be at the level of
00:18:13.920 i1 the game and that's what happens and so much of the explanations that exist out there
00:18:19.200 in the human world come down to more than just the physical events at the level of subatomic
00:18:25.520 particles and physical forces question two is similar along these lines how laws of physics
00:18:33.120 and mind are abstractions so they're different they're certainly different kinds of abstractions
00:18:39.360 and this was in my interview with David we talked in fact about both of these and
00:18:44.560 well in terms of mind let's deal with mind first it's an interesting kind of abstraction we
00:18:51.360 both admitted there that presumably there is an algorithm for something like a human mind we don't
00:18:58.160 know what the algorithm is presumably you could write this algorithm down in something like natural
00:19:03.840 language on a piece of paper multiple pieces of paper perhaps might be a complex algorithm
00:19:09.120 and then that could be turned into code which you could you know put it into a particular
00:19:13.920 computer language maybe C++ and then you could program a computer with this particular algorithm
00:19:19.600 presumably that algorithm then would be an algorithm for creatively generating explanations
00:19:25.520 that algorithm is not made out of physical stuff that algorithm can be represented in different
00:19:31.040 physical substrates represented in but not identical to either the paper on which it's written
00:19:37.600 or the code in which it appears and in the computer but even then represented as code in a computer
00:19:42.960 or written down on a piece of paper it's not yet mind it's not yet mind it's not mind until it
00:19:47.120 starts to run until it starts to do something and so that's why it's an interesting kind of
00:19:52.000 abstraction compared to something like a number okay the number two exists as an abstraction and
00:19:58.240 can be written down as the numeral two that we're all familiar with or as the set of symbols
00:20:03.920 four over two or the screen of symbols something like that ten minus eight all of these things
00:20:09.040 represent that number two but there's no sense in which the number two need to run like a program
00:20:16.000 needs to run like presumably mind would need to run in a computer in order for the computer to
00:20:22.640 have a mind in terms of how laws of physics are abstractions well that's very interesting
00:20:27.840 the laws of physics can't be made of matter so because they're not made of matter that means they
00:20:33.760 have to be something other than matter and so that's why we say their abstractions and so that's
00:20:39.040 one sense in which they are abstractions their abstractions in a similar way to the number two being
00:20:44.720 abstractions however they have very important causal effects on the stuff going on in the universe
00:20:51.520 ultimately they determine everything that goes on the universe they don't explain everything that
00:20:55.760 goes on the universe we've made that point before and the interesting thing here is that we have
00:21:00.000 knowledge of the laws of physics and our knowledge of the laws of physics amounts to abstractions
00:21:04.400 so we have abstractions our knowledge of the laws of physics about abstractions the ontological
00:21:09.360 actual final laws of physics which we come to understand over time with increasing fidelity third
00:21:16.320 question from Ashik is your favorite chapters from the beginning of infinity and the fabric of
00:21:21.600 reality and also from Phil what's your favorite chapter from each book no ties my to our shadows
00:21:28.560 and the jump to universality for what it's worth yeah so okay well let's deal with the fabric of
00:21:34.960 reality first and I'm just here me turning the page perhaps so I can go to the contents certainly
00:21:42.720 shadows was the one that made me and I've said this before realize that I was in the presence
00:21:50.880 in terms of author of someone who was writing at a different level to anyone else I had
00:21:56.480 hitherto encountered because I was struggling to understand quantum theory and chapter two was the
00:22:01.680 thing that made me feel as if I did finally understand what was going on and so yes I have an
00:22:10.320 emotional connection to shadows chapter two of the fabric of reality because it's the one which
00:22:16.560 really convinced me there's a multiverse it's simplest that that's a realistic conception of
00:22:21.120 quantum theory and from then on quantum theory became not this hugely esoteric subject it became
00:22:28.800 something more like geology and astronomy I just got it even though other people refused to accept
00:22:34.720 and will get to this and one of the final questions refused to accept the multiverse to me it's
00:22:39.600 just a straightforward simple explanation about what's going on it was demystified so that's all
00:22:46.080 done in shadows in around 20 pages so highly recommend reading shadows if you want to understand
00:22:53.920 quantum theory now my second favorite chapter in the fabric of reality would be as we've just
00:22:59.600 been talking about a chapter about the first time I understood really something more about
00:23:06.000 abstractions namely chapter 10 the nature of mathematics where my favorite line if not of the
00:23:13.520 whole book certainly of that chapter is necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics
00:23:21.040 it is not the reward we get for doing mathematics so that's from chapter 10 of the nature of
00:23:26.080 mathematics of the fabric of reality rather and that appeals to me so much because prior to reading
00:23:31.920 that prior to really understanding what was being said there I was one of the people that David
00:23:37.760 was arguing against namely a person an intuitionist of a kind someone who thought that
00:23:42.960 mathematics was on a different level to every other kind of subject it was a subject where you could
00:23:50.480 really ensure it certainty where you had a solid foundation in thinking that you actually had the
00:23:58.400 final truth you were there you were inherently able to understand particular truths and so
00:24:05.600 that brought me out of that particular state of mind from then on I understood that mathematics
00:24:10.880 really depended upon our knowledge of physics and if our knowledge of physics said that
00:24:15.440 well matter behaves in these ways that could cause the symbols on the page for example to change
00:24:21.040 then it might very well be the case that what you think you have proven with a rock solid
00:24:26.480 mathematical proof could actually be an error in fact error had to always be part of the picture
00:24:31.760 and so yes chapter 10 of the fabric of reality convinced me of that the beginning of infinity
00:24:37.200 and chapter one the reach of explanations is probably my favorite chapter there now the reason
00:24:42.160 for that is although I'd read the fabric of reality and thought I knew what it was saying
00:24:46.960 and then I subsequently read some pop-up and thought I understood what he was saying
00:24:51.600 I never really got the fact that at the heart of everything in science and everywhere else
00:24:57.760 is this idea of explanations and of course there in chapter one as David says and we'll come to
00:25:05.280 this and another chapter I said before this is where the real innovation happens in the
00:25:10.000 fabric in the beginning of infinity where David explains what a good explanation is namely an
00:25:15.760 explanation it's harder very while still doing the work of explaining the phenomena that you're
00:25:20.960 interested in so that would be my favorite chapter from the beginning of infinity and then I think
00:25:26.880 I'd have to pick chapter 12 a physicist's history of bad philosophy just because I'm interested
00:25:32.240 in this topic of why don't people accept the best understanding of quantum theory and well it's
00:25:39.120 explained there very very well okay it's explained the bad turns and philosophy that happened
00:25:45.600 which caused academics and professional quantum physicists to inherit this particular way of
00:25:52.320 thinking and this bad philosophy this chapter on bad philosophy explains some of the things that are
00:25:58.720 going wrong even now so it's prescient in a sense once the philosophy goes wrong once academic
00:26:04.960 philosophy begins to go wrong a whole bunch of other things that can go wrong as well so physics
00:26:10.160 is kind of the canary in the coal mine to some extent if physics itself can start to be
00:26:15.600 upended by bad philosophy then certainly politics, history, biology, everything else can start to
00:26:23.760 be upended by bad philosophy so that chapter really tells you the reasons why you need to value
00:26:30.720 philosophy it's not merely something that is confined to the halls of academic institutions
00:26:38.800 it is there but it leaks out and if it goes bad there the bad stuff leaks out everywhere
00:26:44.640 next question from Tim Stevenson another question observation is theory laden
00:26:50.640 but a facts also theory laden is a fact not a theory that is said to be fallably true
00:26:56.720 yeah so both of those things are true I would say a fact is fallably true anything we think is a
00:27:03.680 good explanation is I would say that's what I like to say it's fallably true which sounds like
00:27:08.880 a bit of a cop out because once you start putting qualifiers in front of true like fallably true
00:27:14.240 what you really mean is not true so what I mean by fallably true is something like well
00:27:20.080 we're acting as though it's true for now okay take it seriously as true whilst keeping in mind
00:27:25.600 that ultimately it has to turn out false so that's what we mean by fallably true we just don't
00:27:29.920 know how it's false yet now if we don't know how it's false then we can act on the assumption
00:27:35.120 that it is true and we even do this with things we know we are actually false like
00:27:39.520 Newton's theory of gravity as I keep coming back to that trope example we know that it's false
00:27:44.000 but we can act as if it's true and solve problems using it but Tim asks
00:27:48.240 are facts also theory-laden yes yes so in the previous asking me anything episode people
00:27:55.360 asked me what I thought a fact was and I said it was just an elementary part of a particular
00:28:00.640 theory and I think there's a strict line between fact and theory at all I know that people who
00:28:07.600 oh look you know there are popular science communicators there are even famous scientists there
00:28:12.480 are comedians there are all sorts of people out there who like to try and put a strict line
00:28:17.120 between facts and theory so when we talk about the famous example that often comes up here is
00:28:22.800 the theory of evolution and people get very vociferous and I start you know bashing the desk
00:28:27.920 and saying but it's not a theory it's a fact or something like the word theory and science
00:28:33.120 means something different to the word theory anywhere else all of which is false okay the theory
00:28:38.000 of evolution it's both factual okay it's it's something that is so far as we know true at least
00:28:44.400 neo Darwinism the most modern versions of evolution by a natural selection that we understand
00:28:50.800 involving genetics and so on and so forth that's factual it's our fact in some way or a set of
00:28:56.880 connected facts it's also a theory it's an explanatory theory and theories are ways of explaining
00:29:04.000 the world some of which are good and some of which are not good so the real distinction is between
00:29:07.840 good hard to vary theories hard to vary explanations and less good and bad
00:29:14.960 explanations over the world but yes facts are theory laden pick a fact I mean the sky is blue
00:29:21.280 well to me it's blue that's theory laden because according to my eyes the sky appears to be
00:29:27.040 blue now we could take a spectroscope you know one of these devices that measures the wavelength
00:29:32.640 of the light and we could find out the light coming from the sky has a particular wavelength
00:29:37.520 and that wavelength corresponds to what we define as blue light and via that chain of reasoning we
00:29:44.320 end up with a conclusion that yes the sky is blue based on the readings of instruments but of
00:29:50.240 course all that depends upon the theory about how the instrument works okay so even if we have this
00:29:55.120 global consensus that the sky is blue it still comes down to a theory about what blue is so
00:30:00.800 it doesn't matter what your fact is there has to be theory behind it an explanation as to how you're
00:30:07.040 getting to that fact in the first place that's what the theory laden part is you have a theory
00:30:11.680 about how the knowledge has been generated and that theory is fallible and so therefore
00:30:18.320 you're reaching a conclusion that is fallably true as you say there all right moving on a question
00:30:23.360 from Danny thoughts on the mind body problem uh huh I don't think it's much of a problem really
00:30:30.080 um I think mind is software running on the body the brain and that's that there's certainly an
00:30:38.400 open question about as we've already talked about so far this episode is to what kind of program
00:30:45.840 the mind is what kind of software the mind is exactly and how this software gives rise to a
00:30:52.160 subjective sensation consciousness in other words these are tough questions we don't have answers to
00:30:58.720 at all but in terms of mind body I think this is just an ancient issue about the thought of that
00:31:06.640 mind being immaterial couldn't possibly have effects on things that are purely material you know
00:31:12.320 it's a day cat explained this you know that mind whatever it is might be a spirit of some kind
00:31:17.840 you know a spirit that's inside of your body in some way you're sold your immaterial soul is somehow
00:31:23.840 or other pushing around the physical stuff your body and I think he thought it was in the pineal
00:31:29.920 gland inside the brain which didn't really answer anything it just pushed it to a different level
00:31:35.040 it sort of just kicked that explanation down the road that non explanation down the road so the
00:31:40.800 mind body problem is not a real problem the software controls the hardware how does that work well
00:31:47.760 information in a computer is stored as a sequence of zeros and ones but what does that mean well
00:31:54.400 if you go deeper the the ones are usually higher voltage signals and the zeros are lower voltage
00:32:00.960 signals of some kind a voltage is a difference in energy between a set of charged particles one
00:32:06.640 set of charged particles usually electrons in this case and electrons and another set of charged
00:32:12.320 particles so some of the charged particles have high energy high voltage some have lower energy
00:32:17.360 low voltage throughout a computer system stored in transistors capacitors whatever you have a
00:32:22.640 pattern of such charges high and low voltages which represent the zeros and ones in the memory of
00:32:28.160 the computer and as they move around the circuits you're getting movement of these high and low
00:32:32.800 voltages so you've got actual physical things moving around but the pattern is not material right
00:32:40.080 because you can represent that pattern of stuff as sequences of zeros and ones written on a
00:32:47.120 standard piece of paper on a blackboard or typed out in a document somewhere so that's abstract
00:32:54.160 that's not material because it's independent of its physical substrate but it has to be
00:32:58.720 instantiated somewhere and once you put it into the computer and then you hit run on the computer
00:33:04.320 program well then what you've got going on is a whole bunch of physical interactions so
00:33:09.360 this is what's going on with the mind I'm explaining how software affects hardware but it's
00:33:14.480 exactly the same principle because what's going on is the circuitry through the computer or the
00:33:20.880 pattern of electricity that's moving through your neurons is actually physical forces upon
00:33:27.520 things so if we just stick to computers because I think they're better understood you know
00:33:31.920 the normal silicon computer is that in a normal computer the reason why the hardware does anything
00:33:38.320 at all why it moves so to speak why the pixels illuminate why the speakers make noise why the
00:33:44.800 printer ribbon prints and so on and so forth why stuff gets pushed around in the hardware is because
00:33:50.880 of that pattern of zeros and ones the pattern of zeros and ones represented as voltages and the
00:33:57.040 voltages have high and low energy and the electrons can push things because they're their actual
00:34:02.560 they're actually charged particles that can repel one another and those repulsions are physical
00:34:07.680 forces so that's it the the the the abstractions have physical effects of via that mechanism via
00:34:15.680 that physical mechanism but they can't be reduced to nothing but that after all as we say you
00:34:21.280 can take that pattern of zeros and ones once more and write them out by hand as zeros and ones
00:34:26.640 on a piece of paper and there it is you know there it is it it's different to the voltages at
00:34:32.080 that point and the same must be true of what's going on in the brain so I so I think it's not a
00:34:38.560 problem it's been solved it's been solved by us having a modern understanding of computation and
00:34:43.680 how computation works okay on to next question from Chrisman Chrisman Frank would love to hear
00:34:51.440 you talk about the ways Deutsch has improved on Popper and James Baird has said plus one okay
00:34:56.880 so absolutely an even David has admitted this very modest he doesn't admit to improving on
00:35:05.040 Popper in many ways but he does say that the innovation in the beginning of infinity is that he
00:35:09.600 has explained what an explanation is and he did that because people asked and so he thought about
00:35:15.120 all the different kinds of explanations that were but certainly as a as a specific thing coming up
00:35:22.400 with this idea of hard to vary while still doing the job of explaining Popper never had that
00:35:28.640 and generalizing that as being the well I shouldn't say generalizing emphasizing that that really
00:35:37.840 is the key not only in science but everywhere that were after these good explanations and this really
00:35:45.520 is the line of demarcation between science and non-science you can have falsifiable theories which
00:35:54.320 is what Popper of course came up with he figured out that line of demarcation but that's
00:35:58.880 necessary but not sufficient in science to explain the difference between for example a homeopathic
00:36:06.240 nostrum a homeopathic treatment and actual medicine the actual medical treatment that is going to
00:36:13.040 make claims about treating a person's illness but so too is the homeopathic remedy so they're both
00:36:18.080 going to be testable but that doesn't mean just because of the fact it is testable that the homeopathic
00:36:23.600 remedy is scientific at all it contains within a bad explanation about how homeopathy works so
00:36:31.760 this distinction between good explanations and bad explanations is certainly an innovation by David
00:36:37.600 Deutsch and an improvement on Popper I would also say that David has really certainly in my mind
00:36:43.600 linked morality and epistemology with this claim about do not destroy the means of error correction
00:36:51.040 that error correction is the thing that we need in order to continue to make progress and I don't
00:36:56.320 think Popper quite had that and so there's this computational digital view of epistemology which
00:37:02.640 leads into morality in a way and I think that's an improvement on Popper Popper was there with
00:37:08.400 the way in which we need to have progress but whether it was tied to error correction as explicitly
00:37:14.720 as in the work of David Deutsch I'm not sure I think David's improved on that and of course the
00:37:19.840 emphasis on optimism there is a flavor of optimism which I think we could call optimism in the style
00:37:28.080 of David Deutsch that is unique and stands apart from any other kind of optimism that even exists
00:37:35.360 today amongst the various other optimists as well and wasn't really there in the same way in the
00:37:41.920 work of Carl Popper and explicit and very good explanation about why probability fails in so many
00:37:47.840 places is something I don't think Popper quite got at but David Deutsch does and as I mentioned
00:37:53.280 earlier with my favorite chapter in the fabric of reality I think David really gets the heart
00:37:58.080 of the matter about articulating what the nature of mathematics is so I think he improves on
00:38:03.120 Popper there as well and of course absolutely explaining quantum theory I think Popper tried
00:38:10.320 to explain quantum theory failed but David Deutsch has managed to do that I think he even
00:38:16.880 improves on ever for that matter I mean ever it was the first one to come up with this idea of
00:38:22.400 the multiverse but David Deutsch has brought it to a whole bunch more people explained it more clearly
00:38:27.840 and so that's an improvement that's an improvement on Popper it's an improvement on his predecessors
00:38:32.640 as well and of course my personal favorite of all of these advances that I think David Deutsch has
00:38:39.200 made is on the nature of personhood I think the advance and what he has said about what I
00:38:44.160 personally is something that is just plagued philosophers for generations millennia to try and figure
00:38:52.080 out what is it that's about that is in us as human beings it is different to all other creatures
00:38:58.240 that are out there everyone has come at this who's thought about this and written about this
00:39:01.600 and talked about this from a different angle all of which capture aspects I will say of what
00:39:08.560 the heart of the matter is now that we understand and people would say oh we've got morality
00:39:13.120 or we've got art we've got the ability to do science and this separates us from the lower creatures
00:39:20.400 but all of those are mere manifestations of the capacity to generate explanations of the world
00:39:27.200 which give us a real connection to the rest of reality because the rest of reality is what we're
00:39:32.640 trying to explain and the fact that it's explicable by us makes us very special in this
00:39:38.560 universe and tells us something about what we are it's not the final answer to what a person is
00:39:43.360 after all we don't know how it is that we generate explanations but that we do generate explanations
00:39:47.920 separates us from everything else this connection to explanatory knowledge and I think so
00:39:54.160 that is absolutely a philosophical insight that stands alongside anything from the canon of
00:40:00.880 western and ancient philosophy okay next question Mike Stern what is one of the core ideas from
00:40:07.600 the beginning of infinity that you found most difficult to re-explain or clarify for people
00:40:13.920 new to this work and why I guess sustainability sustainability is a hard one it's such a common
00:40:23.440 word thrown around these days and it carries these very strong moral overtones and so
00:40:30.080 trying to explain that the only thing that's sustainable for us if we want to sustain ourselves
00:40:37.440 in other words survive off into an infinite future is constant progress constant consumption of
00:40:44.240 resources constantly increasing our population increasing our wealth spreading out beyond the earth
00:40:50.800 this is the only thing that's sustainable for us and not only us but if you care about the
00:40:54.640 panda bears if you care about the dolphins if you care about the forests you want to hope
00:40:59.840 that we can sustain the increased population wealth creation and power of people because
00:41:06.880 we know as a matter of science that if we don't do this everything absolutely everything on this
00:41:12.400 earth including the earth itself will vanish in a cosmological event of some sort or other
00:41:18.320 whether it is the sun eventually expanding to engulf the earth or something near the earth
00:41:23.520 or an asteroid or a number of asteroids hitting the earth or a supernova going off nearby
00:41:29.280 eventually over the next billion years or so life on earth will be exterminated
00:41:34.560 us and everything else if you don't want that to happen then there's no point trying to sustain
00:41:40.640 things at the present level to try and ensure the environment is unchanging to try and ensure
00:41:47.920 that climate does not change it's interesting that we accept as a sort of moral maxim that the
00:41:55.600 only constant is change except when it comes to the climate that we seemingly know the climate
00:42:02.000 is changing but we don't want it to well whether humans do it or not it's going to change
00:42:08.240 and so we should deal with that change possibly the best idea is to learn to live with the change
00:42:14.480 in some way or other if we're not going to actively try and reverse the change but this is where
00:42:19.440 sustainability is brought up always in these concerns about the environment concerns about people
00:42:26.160 just being a kind of evil that need to be damped down in terms of population growth always
00:42:31.920 population growth as regardless being the thing that is unsustainable but in fact it's the only
00:42:36.880 thing that is sustainable and so this is really hard to get across to people and I think of all
00:42:41.760 the messages in the bidding of infinity this is the one that is yet to make inroads but needs to
00:42:47.520 make inroads significant inroads because governments around the world are absolutely captured by
00:42:53.280 the notion that population for example is a pressing urgent problem but many of us on the other
00:42:59.920 side of the ledge I think well we agree it's a pressing urgent problem but we need more
00:43:04.960 we need more people we need a greater population of people living at a higher standard of living
00:43:09.840 but of course on the other side you hear people saying things we need fuel people and they need
00:43:13.760 to be living more like our ancestors they need to not have so much wealth because the wealth is
00:43:19.360 creating pollution and waste and changing the environment and we want to keep the environment as
00:43:26.080 it is we you can't do that without well if you want to keep the environment the same you need a
00:43:30.720 significant amount more wealth and more power and more technology in order to stop the climate
00:43:35.600 from changing because even if we quit all fossil fuels tomorrow and even if we left the earth
00:43:42.160 to its own devices the climate will change that's just the nature of climate it's it's like the
00:43:47.680 weather but on longer scales longer time scales so this is the thing that's really hard to get
00:43:52.800 across so there's that and related to that is infinite progress I mean just so many people find
00:43:58.560 it unbelievable fantastical that we could have infinite progress that literally humans and their
00:44:06.640 descendants will just go on forever solving problems and making this universe a better and better
00:44:12.960 place and we could we could be the first generation to be a part of that if only we were
00:44:19.440 harder to make more wealth and to solve problems and so on and so forth and so it's hard to
00:44:23.760 explain those two things without getting caught up in the emotion and in the politics and
00:44:29.600 encountering people that are touchy on these particular topics that are that are wedded to things
00:44:34.800 like the you know concern for the environment and they just dogmatically committed to the idea
00:44:40.320 that humans bad pollution bad waste bad large population bad and and and and just persuading them
00:44:48.960 of the opposite are is thought with all sorts of political divisions and moral hazards
00:44:57.440 do you think there are ideas within the beginning infinity it's Mike's next question
00:45:01.200 are there ideas in the beginning infinity that trace back farther than the enlightenment say to
00:45:05.200 Judeo Christian ideas values or myths yes sure every idea has a lineage now I'm not one of these
00:45:14.560 people necessarily I hear some conservative commentators say the really there are two pillars to
00:45:20.400 our civilization philosophically speaking one is the Greek tradition of philosophy and the other is
00:45:27.600 the Judeo Christian ideas I think the the Greek tradition is far more important far more important
00:45:36.080 for a whole bunch of reasons we might go into right now but yeah the Judeo Christian ideas do have
00:45:42.000 a place and I think they were an escape from and even more primitive more brutish way of
00:45:48.800 existing in the world bad as it was you know it happily live 2000 years ago under a Christian or
00:45:56.880 Jewish theocracy then in a hunter-gatherer tribe somewhere along sure the morality was oppressive
00:46:04.080 but it wasn't as bad as the constant warfare and the constant mistreatment of people within
00:46:09.440 those societies it was an improvement incremental perhaps but an improvement nonetheless and I guess
00:46:17.120 key the key thing from the beginning infinity that really comports in some way one might say
00:46:23.680 with many of the major religions is this the centrality of the person which is lost in atheism
00:46:32.320 to a large extent if you simply have atheism or if you simply have some other sort of political
00:46:38.160 ideology like for example forms of Marxism and things that flow from Marxism communism socialism
00:46:45.280 where you end up with the value of the collective over the individual in fact you lose sight
00:46:52.000 of the individual person and the importance of the individual person then all sorts of bad stuff
00:46:56.080 follow so the beginning infinity certainly places the person there as the unit which creates
00:47:03.200 generates explanatory knowledge and it's explanatory knowledge which transforms the world transforms
00:47:09.840 reality around us for the better putting that person putting the person back at the center
00:47:15.200 putting planet earth as a hub has something to do with with things that with religions like
00:47:21.280 Christianity which were the first crude attempt at doing something like that I don't think there's
00:47:27.360 anything whatsoever in the beginning infinity which is at all mythological or religious it's more
00:47:33.840 coincidence than anywhere than anything else except in so far as there is definitely virtue in
00:47:40.640 putting people putting a person at the center of your concerns within a society if you're
00:47:45.520 setting up a society having the person there and so I don't the Christians and Jewish people
00:47:51.120 and other people who are involved in major religions they I think would have the in explicit
00:47:58.080 understanding that people are absolutely central to this whole project without being able to
00:48:03.120 articulate why I think the beginning infinity articulates why from an analytical philosophical
00:48:10.320 tradition and a scientific viewpoint so yeah I guess that would be the way in which I trace
00:48:16.960 that that particular idea the centrality of the person from the beginning infinity back to
00:48:22.720 antecedents that exist in religion but I don't think David Deutsch got it from religion
00:48:28.320 it all I think he got it by independent means okay next question from O fallobelista how do you
00:48:36.560 see the spread of Deutschian ideas in the future what is the plan the plan I don't think there
00:48:43.840 is plan the plan it sounds a little bit like a secret cabal well it's more up to you and anyone
00:48:51.360 else listening really my hope would be that these ideas in the future continue to gain traction
00:48:58.720 and inform individuals more and more when they do that they can inform groups of people they can
00:49:05.600 then inform the social well-being of whole communities among other things and civilization as a whole
00:49:12.240 the messages in the beginning infinity give you if you take them on board and there are certain
00:49:16.880 other philosophies like this as well they can help treat I think the malaise that is happening
00:49:23.600 right now cause people to not be terrified of other people constantly or terrified of tomorrow or
00:49:29.680 despairing about tomorrow I can lead you to have greater understanding and compassion for an
00:49:35.920 interesting others interesting in others as a beginning of infinity interesting others as being
00:49:42.480 sources of ideas as being generators of explanations as being solvers of problems that's what we
00:49:50.080 want and this is why I say we need more and more people we need a greater population not a smaller
00:49:53.920 population the only thing that we have a poverty of is ideas we don't have a poverty of resources
00:49:59.600 we need more and more ideas about how to get more and more resources in fact and how to solve
00:50:04.880 the problems that are going to be before us and eventually there's going to be a problem that
00:50:09.680 far outstrips anything we've dealt with either too as a modern civilization so we better want
00:50:15.680 to hope that there's going to be a smart person out there that can contribute crucially to the
00:50:20.160 solving of that experiment and the more people we have the more likelihood there's going to be
00:50:24.880 that at least one of us creative people can come up with a solution in time so this is what we need
00:50:31.040 in the future more people to have this stance of thinking of their neighbours as important means by
00:50:38.320 which we can all solve our problems but there's no centralized plan on this and I don't think a
00:50:44.080 centralized plan would be good at all everyone should have their own plan what I'm doing is a podcast
00:50:52.000 many of us are trying to promote these ideas publicly and more people should do this and more
00:50:57.120 power to more people in doing this whether it can become even bigger even better in form people
00:51:04.960 that have even more wealth and power influence well the future will tell the future will tell
00:51:11.840 but certainly we're trying and with navalin board the reach of these ideas is certainly
00:51:18.880 increased over the last few years and we'll continue to increase we only hope it happens in time
00:51:26.320 as I say I am hopeful that will happen in time I'm optimistic will happen in time I'm not
00:51:32.480 despairing that the problem is going to be encountered that we can't solve okay so
00:51:38.560 on to the next question from rich martin you've advocated for rapid general progress
00:51:44.320 and yet careful incremental changes to our institutions this seems to be a contradiction
00:51:49.120 how do we resolve it great question rich yes I do sometimes I think I've miss spoken on this
00:51:56.160 in that I've said slow changes to our institution now rich hasn't said that here but thinking back
00:52:01.840 to what I've said I may have seemingly contradicted myself but the way in which riches put it there
00:52:07.040 is not a contradiction at all because and this is the way I do like to emphasize it the way
00:52:12.480 riches put it there I want rapid progress but at the same time I want incremental changes
00:52:17.360 incremental changes means you just change a small thing and then you check to see it's been
00:52:23.600 actual objective improvement and that can take some time but ideally you would want incremental
00:52:28.960 a a change reflection judgment evaluation if you might say before moving on to the next
00:52:35.280 change observation of what's going on judgment evaluation of what's happened so you know that
00:52:41.280 these incremental changes are in the right direction so we want as many of them as quickly as possible
00:52:47.040 and as many of those incremental changes as possible in quick succession would amount to
00:52:52.560 rapid general progress for institutions so I'm not for wholesale like that there's a lot of talk
00:52:57.280 at the moment I don't think these people necessarily we hope they don't have a huge amount of
00:53:02.400 influence and power people who want to completely upend the way in which the major democracies of
00:53:08.320 the world operate the way in which they work the way in which they have shown themselves to be
00:53:13.920 resilient over time and allow for this this stable incremental rapid ratcheting up of the
00:53:22.320 rate at which progress can occur progress has only occurred in the enlightenment tradition across
00:53:28.320 Europe parts of Asia now the angler sphere because of these institutions which allow for rapid
00:53:36.560 progress so there is no contradiction there so that the only time I have kind of contradict myself
00:53:40.720 if I think back and maybe I'm just being not very generous to myself but I think I might have
00:53:44.960 said I'm let's have slow changes to our institutions and rapid progress you know everywhere else
00:53:52.080 kind of thing but by slow I think I you know intended to say something like incremental
00:53:57.040 as Richard said there but incremental doesn't mean slow digital systems are incremental they move
00:54:02.240 by increments you know one thing at a time is done one task is accomplished then before you move
00:54:08.640 on to the next one and so when I say an incremental change in the institution check to see this one
00:54:13.600 change has had the desired effect and if it doesn't reverse it undo it go back and try something
00:54:20.160 else that's the way in which incremental change happens but you can do that as rapidly as you
00:54:23.760 like so no contradiction next question from Matt McGahn in the spirit of criticism because you've
00:54:30.880 thought the most about this stuff I'd like to know which parts of David work David's work
00:54:36.160 you think are incorrect or you disagree with and along the same lines pole synthesis asked
00:54:42.240 what did David get wrong or you disagree with both interesting questions I think I've been
00:54:47.920 asked these multiple times over the the years now so I might I'd have to take a step back in
00:54:53.760 order to answer this properly and to explain why I'm giving the answer that I'm about to give
00:54:59.200 well because I really became a fan of the work of David Deutsch soon after the fabric of reality
00:55:04.800 was published so that's you know 1997 25 years ago something as I said before I was in the
00:55:11.280 fortunate position to be a part of a community where we were able to discuss these ideas with
00:55:17.760 David directly so all the times that I thought I disagreed with David about the contents of
00:55:24.160 the fabric of reality all the times I thought you know I'm smart I'm a physics student I've
00:55:29.760 studied philosophy and so on I got to put my questions to David himself I got to have them answered
00:55:36.720 and clarified and through that process I ended up being persuaded that I was wrong
00:55:42.480 David was right and the same happened after the publication of the beginning of infinity
00:55:46.640 I read multiple times and in doing that you know on the first reading you might think I don't
00:55:50.560 really get that I don't really understand it I think I disagree you read it again you go oh I get
00:55:54.480 where he's coming from and then if I still disagreed I would be able to go to David he was very
00:55:59.680 receptive and very helpful in responding to questions and persuading me that I was looking at things
00:56:07.280 in a way that wasn't what he intended and you know so on and so forth he would clarify things
00:56:12.640 and so then it would come to a deeper understanding of this entire worldview so since the podcast
00:56:18.240 has been going and it's not even going for what four years or something I think I'm a podbean
00:56:22.560 and YouTube telling me have told me that it's about mid 2018 it seems longer than that or something
00:56:29.200 but anyway mid 2018 is only how long the podcast has been going for so all the time before that
00:56:34.960 back to 1997 really was something like me working through all the places where I
00:56:40.480 I thought I disagreed with David but when you disagree that typically means in these cases that
00:56:47.040 you misunderstand something so although I thought I disagreed I actually misunderstood
00:56:52.560 and in talking about the ideas I realized where the misunderstanding was I understood
00:56:58.240 came to understand and then I agreed and so in large part because of that because I came to
00:57:05.280 agree with the contents of the books and because the contents of the books were so amazing and all
00:57:11.360 my questions that I ever had were addressed adequately you know and I got to a point where I thought
00:57:17.680 well there's nothing that I find I really strongly disagree with at all or disagree with at all
00:57:22.800 and so that's the motivation for the podcast really I mean like the better question is why would
00:57:27.280 you make a podcast about this book well because it's a book where not only are the inside so
00:57:31.840 amazing but I can't find a place where I really have any significant disagreements with
00:57:37.360 the book at all and so that's why I'm promoting it so much and while I think it's you know one
00:57:41.200 of the reasons apart from the fact that it's civilizationally important but I don't find any
00:57:46.560 errors in there it might seem astonishing for me to say that that I can't find a place where I
00:57:52.000 disagree but that's the fact I don't now me personally and you know when I'm explaining the
00:57:58.000 ideas of course I have a personal bias and a personal emphasis which might be slightly different to
00:58:03.520 what David does but that's just personal taste it's not actually explicit disagreements so
00:58:09.120 far as I can tell so what did David get wrong I guess the most generous way I can put that is
00:58:13.920 I don't know what do I disagree with nothing that I can think of and I have thought about this
00:58:20.000 before previously next question from Hemza why does Deutsch object to the fact that morality is
00:58:27.360 about suffering what does it mean when morality is considered to be a question of what to do next
00:58:32.880 do moral facts exist because of our existence is free will consciousness explanatory knowledge
00:58:38.720 fundamentally tired why does Deutsch object to the fact that morality is about suffering does he
00:58:43.760 or does he just say that that can't be a foundation and the reason it can't be a foundation
00:58:48.160 because you don't need a foundation anywhere you don't need a foundation in physics we can always
00:58:52.560 ask why the foundations are the way they are what we're after is good explanations and that's true
00:58:56.640 in physics and biology and history and it's true in morality as well so I think that morality
00:59:03.520 certainly explanations within morality can touch upon suffering and the alleviation of suffering
00:59:08.480 no problem whatsoever the distinction is between whether or not suffering and the alleviation
00:59:14.400 of suffering utilitarianism and those kind of consequentialist arguments in morality whether that
00:59:21.120 has to be your final ultimate unalterable foundation for morality or whether you might also need
00:59:26.400 to consider other things so whether you're a problem sir situation might entail not
00:59:31.200 regarding suffering as being the most important thing as I like to say my my thinking on this
00:59:37.280 is there will still be moral questions questions about what we should do next absent suffering
00:59:43.200 I think suffering is a solvable problem it's a soluble problem suffering is something like
00:59:50.000 pain with an explanation accompanying it so you can have mental suffering mental
00:59:55.440 language so you're going to be as mental pain this stress whatever else you want to call it
00:59:59.840 that's a form of suffering you're being coerced into suffering even if someone's not literally
1:00:03.920 sticking pins into your thumbs you might be coerced in some way shape or form even if you're not
1:00:10.400 under in physical pain you can be in mental anguish that's a form of suffering we I can imagine
1:00:14.560 a universe in which that's alleviated which people aren't routinely coercing one another into
1:00:19.760 things everyone's just freely exploring the right thing to do for them and they're not hurting
1:00:25.760 anyone else and everyone's being rational and reasonable and so on so there's no mental suffering
1:00:30.080 that's a physical suffering I can imagine a world in which we overcome that as well via technology
1:00:34.320 and medicine and and advanced distant future where pain has been alleviated for the most part
1:00:42.320 they're all all entirely you know I can imagine a world in which we exist in that state
1:00:47.520 but that doesn't mean that morality ends even if suffering has there would still be a question
1:00:51.760 about what to do next you know what projects to undertake in your own personal life
1:00:55.600 civilizationally what we should do should we go to this planet or that planet should we embrace
1:01:00.320 this architecture for the next best computer or that architecture we're building a virtual reality
1:01:05.040 environment which one do you want to go into into experience someone on so forth at infinite and
1:01:10.800 which uh physics theory do you want to get on board with and make contributions to
1:01:15.920 what you should do is a moral question right this is the central question in morality
1:01:22.080 what should you do next and if you're suffering you should try and alleviate your suffering obviously
1:01:26.640 but that's a solid any particular moral question is a soluble one and the question of suffering is
1:01:32.640 soluble I think even the the Buddhists accept this that the best understanding of what they're
1:01:39.120 about is dissatisfaction and so I don't think all dissatisfaction is suffering you know you
1:01:45.840 can be dissatisfied you may not um content with where you are right now I don't know if that
1:01:50.080 necessarily means you're suffering you might have a whole bunch of options before you all of
1:01:53.760 which are great but you need to try and figure out which of these fantastic options that are before
1:01:58.720 you in a world of no suffering that you want to do next and that's a moral question so that that
1:02:04.720 deals with the first two questions do moral facts exist independent of our existence well it depends
1:02:11.920 on what you mean by how if you mean human beings that live right now well yes they they do I mean
1:02:18.960 there could be other people in the universe and I think that has to answer the question I mean
1:02:22.720 there are people who existed in the past so those moral facts existed for them
1:02:28.720 but if you just take away all people everywhere well I think the question is like
1:02:33.440 does history exist without our existence you know does does politics exist without our
1:02:39.920 existence does art exist or a beauty exist without our existence and I think that question is I think
1:02:47.760 those style of questions aren't solving a problem is what I would say you know what probably
1:02:53.840 you're trying to solve in determining whether or not there's moral facts can exist without
1:02:59.520 up prior to the existence of any person ever anywhere it's kind of like this human biology
1:03:04.800 exist in some ontological way without humans ever having evolved in the universe well
1:03:12.320 what problem are we solving by even trying to commit that question it's a very very abstract
1:03:17.600 very removed from any practical issue question it's I would say it's like pseudo philosophy kind
1:03:25.600 of thing what place does morality have absent any conscious creatures whatsoever well I don't
1:03:32.160 think the answer it's like a necessary truth almost absent a physical universe of any kind what
1:03:37.680 is the meaning of mathematics you know does mathematics exist well nothing exists if you don't
1:03:42.560 have a physical universe of any sort well you get ourselves tied up in these pseudo problems
1:03:48.080 until the end of time so yeah is free will consciousness explanatory knowledge
1:03:53.680 fundamentally tied yes I think so I think all of these things are fundamentally tied we don't
1:03:59.600 know how and I should say we don't have an explanation I can check your ways in my blog if you
1:04:06.320 look up I think the title of the blog is something like free will consciousness and knowledge
1:04:10.320 something like that will creativity and knowledge for people watching on youtube I'll put it
1:04:13.920 up on the screen I'll put a link on the screen try to remember to anyway yeah I think that
1:04:17.840 something like my perhaps too clever by halfway of explaining this is to say that the creative act
1:04:24.800 of explaining something is what it feels like to be conscious so your that that experience of
1:04:33.440 being a creative entity is what we call consciousness now for anyone outside of you observing you
1:04:39.840 they kind of observe your consciousness but they can observe your creative output which is the
1:04:44.640 unique thing about you is your creative output and the thing that distinguishes people in general
1:04:49.840 from all other animals and if this is true of course this solves a whole bunch of moral issues
1:04:54.240 which I won't get into right now but it would say that consciousness is tied to the capacity
1:04:58.800 to create explanatory knowledge it may not be I'm happy to be wrong about that now free will is
1:05:04.240 this capacity to choose to create explanatory knowledge and people can choose to be fully focused
1:05:14.160 on the creative enterprise or not and this is where free will comes in now many people disagree
1:05:18.800 with free will but you know I think that free will is just this term that helps to explain what
1:05:24.400 is going on with people if you want to do away with it and say well you know people ultimately aren't
1:05:30.160 the chooses of their choices okay well yeah nothing is the ultimate cause of anything okay there's
1:05:34.960 always going to be another explanation I don't know the layer it which you can get to that
1:05:39.840 explains the thing that's happening now but if I say the thing that's happening now is a choice
1:05:43.760 is being made why is the choice being made because I'm freely able to do so and my my will is free
1:05:48.320 I'm free to choose amongst these different things and one of the things I'm freely choosing to do
1:05:52.080 is to use my will in order to generate explanations well yeah if you don't want to use free will I
1:05:57.040 just say I find I have to do linguistic acrobatics in order to deny the existence of free will this
1:06:03.120 is why I endorse it so I think these things are absolutely tied together well observed yes next
1:06:08.800 question from Christian Dean taking Deutsche Popper seriously iron rounds objectiveism seems to be
1:06:15.120 the only current socio-political theory that follows from them your thoughts on it and if it
1:06:21.200 survives criticism must it eventually prevail um follows I don't know if it follows from them does it
1:06:28.720 or look I'm not an iron-rand scholar I'm a fan of your own brook I in listening to iron
1:06:36.400 round in reading iron rounds work I just personally find your own brook much more captivating
1:06:42.960 much more compelling I better expositor of those ideas than iron round was I think iron round was
1:06:49.840 wrong in many many ways of course my central interest in a lot of these things is epistemology
1:06:55.920 and so of course I have major gripes with the epistemology but also the morality as well so that's
1:07:03.520 where I think she's wrong but you know I'm still a fan of a sort but I'm more a fan of your own
1:07:10.160 brook as I say I think that you're on using the ideas of iron round does the best job of defending
1:07:17.360 free markets that I know of and defending capitalism and defending freedom and so on I think that
1:07:22.640 it's a really well-informed robust resilient way of explaining the facility of those things the
1:07:29.920 moral importance of those things I think Rand was and remains absolutely an iconoclastic thinker
1:07:36.800 and I agree there's virtue to for example selfishness but I think she underestimates things like
1:07:43.360 tradition tradition is really really important in explicit knowledge really really important I don't
1:07:47.760 think it makes it's not mentioned in her work in explicit knowledge and I certainly get I get that
1:07:55.120 notion from you Ron who is certainly animated to debate for example conservatives on this point
1:07:59.680 they should otherwise be on a similar side of the ledger I think the main fight right now is against
1:08:05.840 authoritarians on the left side of politics I think we do not know all the ways in which a
1:08:12.320 society remains stable over time and we don't know all the ways that knowledge is instanciated
1:08:18.400 in our institutions and these institutions are important to maintain that stability and allow
1:08:23.680 for that progress and I think this has underestimated in the work of objectivists so I don't think
1:08:28.880 that undoing a whole bunch of them in rapid fire it's necessarily going to be a recipe for a
1:08:34.080 better society you know I'm look I'm just going to haven't read anything this AMA so let me go to
1:08:41.520 there's an article on the iron round lexicon all about tradition on iron round view of object of
1:08:48.400 tradition and I'm just going to read a paragraph here and then I'll I'll comment on this paragraph
1:08:53.280 that I read so Rand writes on the topic of tradition quote the plea to preserve tradition as such
1:08:59.680 can appeal only to those who have given up or to those who never intended to achieve anything in
1:09:05.920 life it is a plea that appeals to the worst elements in men and rejects the best it appeals to
1:09:11.040 fear sloth cowardice conformity self-doubt and rejects creativeness originality courage
1:09:16.800 independence self-reliance it is an outrageous plea to address to human beings anywhere but
1:09:22.880 particularly outrageous here in America the country based on the principle that man must stand at
1:09:27.280 his own feet live by his own judgment and move constantly forward as a productive creative innovator
1:09:32.960 end quote so I think that's just extremely confused about the role of tradition namely the tradition
1:09:40.480 of criticism and how this tradition of criticism this tradition of innovation okay so she's got
1:09:45.680 innovation there she thinks that innovation somehow just happens you just follow in the enlightenment
1:09:52.000 tradition and you will get innovation but that's just not true we don't know exactly how it is
1:09:57.600 that we've remained stable over time great Britain Europe United States Australia Canada these
1:10:03.440 these places part of Asia over long stretches of time we've managed to continue to be innovators
1:10:10.240 roughly peacefully and it is the traditions and the institutions that have allowed us to do that
1:10:14.880 so this innovation and this creative stuff that ironed round loves this individuality the courage
1:10:20.720 and the independence happens within traditions and specifically a tradition of criticism that we talk
1:10:26.160 about often here as well so you know that that's terribly misguided I think by honour and I'd
1:10:33.760 love to talk to your own book specifically about that kind of thing what are the traditions
1:10:39.040 and the institutions within our society that allow for open-ended progress and rapid progress
1:10:44.560 yes we need to value the individual I certainly do the individual is the prime originator of
1:10:50.400 ideas and we need to protect that but how we go about protecting that individual is a whole other
1:10:55.120 question and to ensure a stable society over time especially when a whole bunch of people
1:11:00.640 don't agree with you that the individual is so important especially when you have a whole bunch
1:11:04.320 of people right now who think the collective is the more important thing and just on that passage
1:11:10.080 just I think that passage is a good example I think Rand is bad at persuasion now the people who
1:11:19.120 like Rand like Rand but the people who don't can you see why I can yes of course she's terribly
1:11:24.880 forthright and she's honest about the contents of her own mind the problem is that that style
1:11:30.320 turns people off and you want to have to be a realist on that point or not the realistic
1:11:35.600 take is your style of speaking and writing is turning people off but I'm just being honest well
1:11:41.040 not good enough some of your ideas are absolutely fantastic but if you want those ideas to be
1:11:45.360 persuasive it's to really take off you need a new way of packaging them so thank god for your
1:11:50.640 own brook on this point because he is seemingly willing to engage in these discussions in a
1:11:57.200 much more friendly way and I think a lot of the objectives are much more friendly now so you know
1:12:04.000 in a passage like that you know it's understandable that some people get turned off but being told
1:12:08.880 you know they've given up or that they're sloths or sloth like I think that the this use of
1:12:16.160 pejorative's fails to achieve what she hopes it's like you know when certain famous biologists
1:12:22.160 insult religious people or even religious ways of thinking when you end up getting focused on
1:12:26.560 the contents of a particular individual's mind rather than certain objective ideas out there
1:12:31.360 it just turns people off you know the new atheists at times were only ever speaking to their
1:12:37.840 fanbase they were never really persuading people to give up on religion because the way in
1:12:42.800 which they went about it was hectoring and insulting and and now some of us quite enjoyed you know
1:12:48.400 watching Christopher Hitchens get up you know and give it to whoever the Bible thumping priest was
1:12:55.120 fun okay that's all fun but in terms of a person who was a follower of the Bible you're on the
1:13:01.440 side of the Bible thumper and you weren't persuaded by Christopher Hitchens some were some people were
1:13:06.080 but you know if this was a good technique why weren't a majority of people persuaded why aren't
1:13:10.640 they persuaded to listen to people who hector you act like that so yeah there's a sense in which
1:13:16.880 just tone and use of language has a lot to do with how persuasive a particular message is going to
1:13:22.880 be that's just reality oh and of course the finally on on Iran here um I can't stand the word
1:13:29.120 the term objectiveism the self-described objectiveism especially when the epistemology is totally
1:13:33.920 subjectivist for reasons I won't go into now talk about this at length on other podcast and even
1:13:39.520 the morality is subjectivist that's all about the the individual which is important it's part of
1:13:44.720 morality but a copy the basis go back to the previous question for that one next questions from
1:13:50.320 Michael Chang when we say that a phenomenon requires explanation such as the initial conditions of
1:13:56.480 the universe what is the problem that such an explanation solves if a problem is a conflict between
1:14:01.600 ideas what are the ideas that are in conflict in this situation in that situation the conflict is
1:14:06.480 between the various different initial conditions that could have obtained at the beginning of the
1:14:11.280 universe why were the initial conditions what they were rather than something else so the initial
1:14:17.680 conditions of the universe require explanation because they could have been otherwise so far as we know
1:14:24.320 there have been attempts over time from mathematically minor types to try and produce a set of
1:14:29.760 initial conditions that are necessarily the case given some deeper set of physical laws so if you
1:14:36.000 went below the laws of physics as they are known general relativity and quantum theory if you went
1:14:41.360 below them to some ultimate theory of everything kind of thing then out of that ultimate theory
1:14:45.200 of everything would come the initial conditions those initial conditions are just there necessarily
1:14:50.320 the as the case now even if we could come up with a solution like that to the reason why the
1:14:56.480 initial conditions are the why they are because they are necessarily the case we still have the
1:14:59.520 questions to why those deeper laws of physics that ultimate theory of everything is the way it is
1:15:04.800 and why it wasn't some other particular law of physics now as for the initial conditions
1:15:09.760 necessarily falling out in a particular way I don't know it's the prevailing view amongst quantum
1:15:15.200 cosmologists particle physicists and so on and so forth I think most people expect that the initial
1:15:21.120 conditions could have been otherwise but whatever the successor to quantum theory is a quantum
1:15:25.440 theory of gravity or something like that that's the parameters these initial conditions could have
1:15:30.160 been otherwise now perhaps constructive theory can have something to say about this I don't know
1:15:34.080 I'm not an expert just apologies as well at this point if you can hear any tap tap tapping it's
1:15:38.480 because I'm experiencing a fairly heavy rainstorm at the moment here in Sydney and it's
1:15:44.800 and so large drops of rain are coming horizontally up against the winner right now second question
1:15:50.880 from Michael how can we reconcile the claimed objectivity of knowledge with the apparent
1:15:56.720 subjectivity of problems problems only exist if solving them is useful but utility is to find
1:16:02.480 with respect to a particular person what may be useful to one person may not be useful to another
1:16:07.360 uh-huh okay so here I think you may be conflating two kinds of objectivity the objectivity of
1:16:14.320 knowledge means that the knowledge is out there in the world instantiated in things other than
1:16:20.960 subjective minds individual minds so I can be written in books I mean instantiating computers
1:16:26.080 it can even be in physical objects as I like to say like telescopes instantiate the knowledge
1:16:30.960 of how to focus light so that's a sense in which the knowledge is out there in objects now the
1:16:36.240 subjectivity of problems means that the subject an individual person has a problem so there's no
1:16:42.960 problem here sometimes you there's no real issue here there's no no need to reconcile these things
1:16:48.320 it's just the fact that a person has problems and those problems can sometimes be resolved by
1:16:55.280 calling on objective knowledge if my personal subjective problem is hmm I don't really think
1:17:02.080 that Jupiter has planets going around it that's my subjective problem I don't believe all the images
1:17:07.920 I've ever been shown so that's your subjective problem now if you take a telescope the telescope
1:17:11.840 instantiate objective knowledge about how to focus light as I said and it will reveal to you
1:17:16.560 and it will solve your problem about how many moons you can see orbiting Jupiter and you say
1:17:21.760 utility is to find with respect to a particular person what may be useful one person may not be
1:17:26.240 used to learn yep I agree with that you know you might also have utility for a particular community
1:17:31.440 as well but more often than not in these cases you're going to be drawing upon
1:17:36.480 objective knowledge treatments in medicine are kind of like this a treatment for one person might
1:17:42.080 not be an effective treatment for another person but it will still the treatments whatever they are
1:17:46.560 still constitute objective knowledge even though the subjectivity of the problem is going to
1:17:52.320 come down to a personal very personal biology and the way in which that personal anatomy
1:17:57.360 physiology biology interacts with a particular medicine a particular treatment and third question
1:18:02.960 from Michael you've said differences between humans and machines is humans can create new choices
1:18:09.920 but machines only have a search over a predefined set of possibilities aren't new choices just
1:18:15.760 abstractions over more primitive possibilities though couldn't machines also generate new choices
1:18:20.960 via abstraction okay so if a machine can generate new choices via abstraction then they would be a
1:18:29.040 general purpose choice generator a general purpose problem solver they would be people and in that
1:18:35.680 case machine would be a pejorative it would be insulting a machine is mechanized it's an automaton
1:18:42.400 of some kind so it has to obey a particular sequence of steps it's just doing one thing after another
1:18:48.720 it's following a particular it's slavishly following a program a humans not doing that as we say
1:18:53.600 humans creating new choices so that's my delineation now the people might have different delineations
1:18:58.560 but better than saying humans and machines we could just say humans and non-humans or the better
1:19:03.920 yet more general people and non-people okay so people are these things that can create new choices
1:19:09.840 because they generate new explanations which bring things into the world that hitherto weren't there
1:19:14.400 and so therefore they can choose among these new things I think the example I've used before is
1:19:18.880 once you have the explanation of nuclear physics and perhaps the engineering explanation
1:19:25.040 of how to create a fission reactor then you have the choice you have a new choice before you
1:19:30.800 that you didn't have before namely do you want to continue to produce energy via or electricity via
1:19:36.960 the method of burning coal using a turbine or do you want to use the heat generated via the
1:19:41.920 fission reactions in uranium in a uranium nuclear reactor to generate electricity both of them will
1:19:46.560 boil the water and create the steam that you need but you have a choice that you didn't have
1:19:50.400 before because you didn't understand nuclear physics now if a machine could come up with generating
1:19:56.800 that kind of new choice if it could generate an explanation for example an artificial intelligence of
1:20:02.240 the future if it was able to create a proper explanation which had predictions and so on of how to use
1:20:09.040 I don't know quarks of some kind of exotic quark in order to generate a kind of fusion reaction
1:20:16.080 that he'd the two we didn't know about and a tiny amount of matter was able to produce a
1:20:20.880 stupendous amount of energy if a machine did that I think we should accept or not a fission
1:20:25.840 intelligence could do that I think we should accept we're in the presence of an explanation
1:20:30.080 generator we're in a presence of a person and presumably that thing could be asked questions if
1:20:34.560 indeed it can explain something like this sophisticated scientific theory presumably it could also
1:20:39.680 explain what it's experiencing right now and if it's experiencing something we're in the presence
1:20:44.560 of a person and not merely something that could be or should be described as a meme machine
1:20:50.480 like a car so a question from a patron who didn't quite get in before the deadline last time
1:20:57.040 but I've included him here from Anders hi Brett one of your patrons here and a big fan
1:21:01.600 thanks for all that you do two quick questions number one it seems in general that many of the
1:21:07.120 many from the pop-a-doid school seem to be fairly libertarian you and the vial case in point
1:21:12.080 did pop-a-doid influence this direction or do you consider their thoughts agnostic between
1:21:17.280 for example libertarianism and conservatism as long as error correction is maximized well let's
1:21:23.920 deal with that one straight away yeah definitely that I think my road to embracing freedom more
1:21:30.720 than I did previously was absolutely helped along by David Deutsch absolutely helped along by
1:21:36.080 car pop-up once I understood that what we need is rapid progress every time I saw a thing out there
1:21:43.760 in the world which seemed to slow down progress for bad reasons I thought was an urgent problem
1:21:51.520 that needed addressing you know I take seriously this idea from fabric reality in the beginning of
1:21:56.080 infinity that you know we would be immortal now if there weren't these times during which progress
1:22:02.320 halted slow down stopped we should want to have more and more rapid progress and there are people
1:22:08.480 against that and I'm against authority in every way shape and form I think it is the antithesis
1:22:17.600 of people being able to freely individually explore the space of ideas solve their own problems once
1:22:22.960 you have an authority making a decision for everyone then if that decision is the wrong decision
1:22:28.000 then everyone makes the same wrong decision everyone makes the same error you don't know what a
1:22:34.480 correct decision might have been but if you have you know 10,000 people each doing subtly different
1:22:39.280 things even if 9,000 of them all end up in failure you've learned something from the one
1:22:45.520 well you've learned something from the 9,000 people who failed but you also know that hey those
1:22:49.280 1,000 people has something to teach the rest of you but if you have an authoritarian system where
1:22:55.760 well all 10,000 people are just going to have to do exactly the same thing then if it goes wrong
1:23:00.880 and we should expect it to not be perfect and it will go wrong in some way shape or form we've
1:23:04.960 only trialed out the one ID so this is the argument for libertarianism or forms of libertarianism
1:23:12.160 I would just say anti authoritarianism in whatever way shape or form that is which is why
1:23:16.640 you know I appeal to people who are against authoritarianism to broadly come together because I
1:23:22.720 think that's the main fight is against authoritarianism and so broadly speaking modern
1:23:27.600 conservatives are against authoritarianism libertarians broadly speaking our against authoritarianism
1:23:33.120 the iron round objectives are against authoritarianism the free marketeers are against
1:23:38.000 authoritarianism and that is the major concern I have now I share that with many other people
1:23:44.640 so once you value progress knowledge creation creativity you realize that the enemy of
1:23:50.560 creativity and the enemy of reason is coercion authority force that kind of thing and so
1:23:55.200 you'll let down this road now of course many of us on this side in this particular
1:24:00.240 strand of the popularian worldview the David Deutsch's worldview still value tradition as I said
1:24:06.800 earlier for all the reasons I said and those traditions they have guardrails of a kind that doesn't
1:24:12.480 mean the guardrails can't be changed or tinkered with and so on and so forth but it just means
1:24:16.880 that outside of those guardrails we know that there are ways towards chaos and the ending of
1:24:23.280 progress because all the other dead civilizations didn't have the same guardrails even in the best
1:24:29.040 cases where you have you know Athenian society they had some guardrails but the guardrails apparently
1:24:34.960 were not sufficient in order to preserve their society now our guardrails are like you know the
1:24:41.040 very fast train that's going along these guardrails is making rapid progress that doesn't mean
1:24:45.760 you can't change the gauge now and again that doesn't mean you can't make improvements along the
1:24:49.840 way but you have to take seriously the idea that at the moment you've got the best thing that
1:24:54.000 has ever existed so far and when you start talking about devaluing tradition for example what
1:25:00.880 you're saying is what's working so far what has worked so far there's a problem with it for
1:25:06.960 reasons of we could only go fast if only if if only if we just took the rails away maybe the
1:25:11.760 train would go faster if only if we threw the engine away maybe we could get the train to go faster
1:25:16.560 if only we stopped using this fuel and we just threw that fuel into the engine even though that
1:25:20.640 fuel doesn't work in that engine maybe the train will go faster will have more rapid progress
1:25:24.480 more creativity greater innovation or that kind of thing so this is why we value tradition and
1:25:28.560 institutions because none of us really know exactly all the reasons why this particular train this
1:25:33.840 train of rapid progress works as well as it does we have some explaining to do and with that that's
1:25:39.520 part of this open-ended game of explanation that we're playing is not only in making scientific
1:25:45.040 advances and moral advances but also understanding our own culture that's really really important
1:25:50.000 part of this and the way in which we understand anything is via this libertarian view of things
1:25:56.560 or the authoritarian tender say these days of course is the train itself in and of itself is an
1:26:01.200 evil and we need to stop the train we need to turn the train around go in the other direction
1:26:06.000 or we need to destroy this train and just start all over again okay which is an absolute recipe
1:26:10.240 for disaster and everyone the Conservatives of libertarian is the object of us people in free market
1:26:15.840 is we need to be on the same side against that because that is a really strong push right now
1:26:21.280 so are there thoughts agnostic between libertarianism with services I am possibly I don't know
1:26:26.880 enough about especially the work of Karl Popper on what his view of the distinction there might be
1:26:32.880 I know that he definitely value tradition of course absolutely so he may have been more conservative
1:26:40.960 kind of thing less libertarian don't know but certainly he valued freedom and you know these people
1:26:45.680 are you know everyone from meal and Adam Smith through to run and through to Popper they value
1:26:52.880 freedom and liberty in slightly different ways to different extent but that's what we need to concentrate
1:26:58.240 on now the fact that they they all value liberty okay next question it seems there is a beef between
1:27:04.320 Popper Deutsch in the formal education system is this a laboratory anywhere in their text
1:27:08.400 not covered to my recollection of BOR if I were in general they're good resources for the
1:27:12.320 perpyrean view on children you need to look up taking children seriously on the do explain podcast
1:27:22.000 Sarah gave an interview about the taking children seriously philosophy and Michael Golding's also an
1:27:27.680 expert in this area Lulu Tanett's an expert in this area and of course David Deutsch who originated
1:27:31.760 this particular philosophy this idea of non coercion in child rearing and that's a complex issue
1:27:38.880 that's not simply just that the child run free on the highway and let them do what they want
1:27:43.680 no it is far more nuanced than that you have to have a proper sophisticated philosophical view of
1:27:49.200 what non coercion is it's just to say that and again you can as with anything else you can
1:27:56.240 infinitely improve and iterate and and then just improve parenting parenting today as a heck of a
1:28:00.800 lot better than it was five generations ago clearly same as education is clearly you know I
1:28:06.080 have over spend a lot of time in education I have a problem a lot of problems with the formal
1:28:10.640 education system it is a system of indoctrination it is increasingly politicized it's increasingly
1:28:16.720 seen as a body effects and insofar as I think I was tweeting about this recently well I was I
1:28:20.960 did a threat on this recently about the idea that here teachers and academics exalting the
1:28:26.560 praises of teaching them how to think rather than what to think but I just think that you know
1:28:30.720 this whole idea of how to think is a real dead end in education right now children are being
1:28:34.640 taught how to think how to think in the wrong way how to defer to authorities how to think about
1:28:40.160 things like inequality how do you think about things like capitalism and so on and so forth so it
1:28:44.640 leads to a whole bunch of really bad wants so I'm extremely skeptical critical of these pushes for
1:28:52.640 teaching children how to think in a school I think schools are ill equipped to teach children
1:28:57.600 critical thinking I tried while I was there in schooling system to bring in a certain vision of
1:29:03.840 what critical thinking is to make it really critical of the curriculum as it was but there was
1:29:08.240 very little love for that kind of thing the schools are increasingly I'm on the side of the people
1:29:13.760 who are very very worried about the way in which schooling is turning into more and more political
1:29:18.560 indoctrination yeah it's always been a system of indoctrination but at least you know decades
1:29:23.600 ago well not that long ago really you know living memory decades ago a generation ago at least
1:29:28.480 it in science class you could get science at least in history class you could get relatively
1:29:33.040 objective history other form now everything's political everything's political every single subject
1:29:37.520 area seems to be mired in climate change and denigrating people surprisingly you know
1:29:43.520 even in catholic schools which is one place you would hope that you had a refuge from people
1:29:49.680 individuals human beings being run down as destructive in the environment well there's a thing
1:29:54.400 called eco theology that I've talked about on my podcast before now as well so how this happens is
1:30:00.560 because there are ideologues there are you know people motivate a primarily to try and win more
1:30:05.920 converts for their sign of politics it used to be the case that you wouldn't really know what the
1:30:10.320 political views of your teachers were nowadays you do and there is let's admit it only one kind of
1:30:15.920 politics that is really acceptable in many many schools now good luck if you're an actual
1:30:21.280 conservative good luck if you're actual libertarian and trying to work within a school so yeah
1:30:26.880 it's very concerning in many ways and many children have to go through many school students have
1:30:31.920 to go through this fast of pretending to believe one thing in order to get marks and once they
1:30:39.200 get out hopefully they become actual critical thinkers so there should be a beef between the
1:30:44.080 proper Deutsch view of knowledge for example and the formal education system after all
1:30:48.720 the formal education system is the bucket theory in action it's this idea that you just sit
1:30:53.280 in front of the teacher and you just absorb the knowledge right now what I want the way mechanism
1:30:56.400 as you can fiddle at the edges with the different teaching and learning styles this is what
1:31:01.200 educationalist and teachers talk about but effectively there is a body of knowledge there is a list
1:31:06.240 of facts that the student has to acquire and they're going to be tested on in order to achieve the
1:31:11.920 qualification to graduate from high school but we know this is why proper has this essay an
1:31:17.120 objective knowledge called the bucket and the search line and the search line is it's far more
1:31:22.480 about coming to a critical understanding of knowledge having a problem situation yourself that's
1:31:26.800 very individual to you you develop your own interests over time and you become expert in those
1:31:31.120 areas that you're interested in this is completely different to what school is school is just a
1:31:35.280 mishmash of everything now I personally like school I personally did well at school but that's
1:31:39.440 just me the other one majority of people I'm not like this and I don't think they should be
1:31:43.200 forced through this but it's weird the people that often do poorly at school they come out of
1:31:46.640 school and they want their children and young people around them to do well at school
1:31:52.320 as if their bad experience isn't some sort of refutation of the system itself okay next question
1:31:58.880 the question is any prerequisites for understanding the beginning of infinity what
1:32:04.080 else material what other material should I read before or with the beginning of infinity that's
1:32:08.160 worth as much to improve judgment logic and observation thanks in advance.
1:32:12.160 Oh Sandy I would say this is hard because different people have expressed to me things that
1:32:20.400 have pushed my own intuitions around about what I thought about the beginning of infinity prior
1:32:24.720 to prior to making this podcast I was largely speaking to people about the beginning of infinity
1:32:32.160 who are very much fans of the beginning of infinity from day one kind of thing and work kind of
1:32:36.880 more on board with the views of David Deutsch and had some understanding of physics some understanding
1:32:43.760 of epistemology and so on and so forth so we all kind of just thought naively I suppose
1:32:50.560 that well anyone can pick up this book and get a lot out of it because we did but if you're coming
1:32:55.520 to this brand new I think well you there's probably two types of people I think a lot of people
1:33:00.880 can absolutely pick out the book and take away something from it and then it's how much you take
1:33:05.360 away from it I think a lot of people can take a lot away from it without having any background
1:33:09.840 whatsoever so it's absolutely worth getting the book and just reading certainly that chapter
1:33:14.880 one the reach of explanation should help a lot of people but yeah I do accept that once you start
1:33:20.400 getting to like chapter four creation chapter six to jump to university chapter eight a window
1:33:28.480 on infinity you know some of these things they're going to require a at least some understanding
1:33:32.320 some background in mathematics biology even computation to a certain extent to some extent anyway
1:33:40.240 certainly chapter eleven the multiverse yeah that would not be my first go to for trying to
1:33:45.840 understand quantum theory the way in which if someone had no understanding of physics but was
1:33:49.920 interested in getting a reasonable understanding of physics especially quantum physics would be
1:33:54.880 to pick up a typical textbook just any old textbook we wouldn't really matter what and try and
1:34:00.000 understand quantum theory from that good luck okay you you will struggle or go to YouTube these days of
1:34:06.880 course and just watch a lecture on quantum theory and introductory lecture on quantum theory
1:34:10.800 so if you understand what's going on maybe you will maybe you won't I would then say compare whatever
1:34:15.760 you're getting on YouTube or from the textbook to chapter two of the fabric of reality shadows
1:34:21.840 because it's just so clear and simple about what's happening what's going on there that if you
1:34:26.480 go in with an open mind I think you come out the other end and you just go okay well that's
1:34:30.960 pretty straightforward there's some interesting insights there that might be hard to take on board
1:34:35.520 but I'll get to that in the next question I think you can go a long way to understanding
1:34:40.000 aspects of quantum theory as well as many people understand quantum theory and then from that
1:34:44.560 you might want to go to the most modern version of that which is the multiverse chapter chapter
1:34:50.080 eleven in the beginning of infinity which is a step up I would say this you know the use of the
1:34:55.440 term fungibility and uncountably infinite numbers of universes and all this kind of thing
1:35:01.840 yeah so in that sense yeah that chapter to the beginning of infinity I think probably has pre-worth
1:35:08.320 grids it's it's really and it novella said you know he's really it seems to some people
1:35:14.560 these writing for physicists he's writing for his peers so if you if you think that then yeah you
1:35:21.840 will need some basic knowledge of science but not as much as what people think I don't think I
1:35:26.880 think you can get through it and I think you should have a go at reading it what else could you
1:35:30.400 read to improve judgment logic and observation or just general thinking you're absolutely
1:35:35.760 read the fabric of reality first instead of the beginning of infinity go for the fabric of reality
1:35:41.200 the chapter is there on thinking and reasoning you know I read sort of basically at the beginning
1:35:49.920 of my university studies and there's I can't remember at the time struggling super much with
1:35:57.920 any of the content there really especially the stuff that's chapter three problem solving
1:36:01.760 anyone can read that and take a lot away from if you can read you can read that chapter
1:36:07.440 and you'll learn a lot hopefully that helps Sandeep from Ashish question for the next AMA
1:36:12.960 if a person has struggled academically throughout their lives life then does that signal a
1:36:18.800 lack of knowledge about the academic structure system or lack of knowledge about the learning
1:36:24.400 about learning things or both I think it's a shared responsibility really if you're struggling
1:36:28.960 academically well that's certainly a warning sign isn't it that's a criticism of what's happening
1:36:32.880 now it might very well be one of two things or a combination of both one is you're not actually
1:36:38.560 interested in the thing that you're doing you're not really really committed to it if you're
1:36:42.480 going along to lectures at a university and you're struggling to understand but you're not
1:36:47.360 simultaneously these days especially going on YouTube reading lots of books talking to people
1:36:52.400 about the content of your lectures then how committed how you really to that particular subject
1:36:56.720 you know if you're really committed to a particular thing then it becomes your life you're just
1:37:00.880 ensconced in it you're surrounded by it and even if you have a bad lecture you should be able
1:37:05.040 to get over it to some extent now if you really have a terrible lecturer who makes an uninspiring
1:37:09.600 such that you're not even interested to go and explore these ideas outside of lecture time
1:37:13.680 then yeah that's that's a problem with the academic structure and the system and of course
1:37:17.600 if you proceed through the system like you know you start university let's not talk about
1:37:21.440 scholastic with the university and you're really really committed day one there on let's say
1:37:26.000 mathematics you you want to be a mathematician of some sort and you have to take all these different
1:37:30.800 courses you know this was my story you ever take calculus and you take the thing called discrete
1:37:34.800 maths and you might take mathematical logic and you know there's all these different subjects
1:37:38.960 within the subject of mathematics different topics that you have to do different um units you
1:37:43.520 have to get units of credit you have to get in order to get the degree well you might start off
1:37:47.200 really really curious and interested in all of them and then you go through and you get to the
1:37:50.400 point of the exam and then exam is just a terrible experience it's hard you walk out of it just
1:37:55.920 feeling dejected and awful even if you did well sometimes these exams at university are just so
1:38:00.080 hard that you feel awful that's not a great way to learn is it I mean if you're you know going through
1:38:05.120 these terribly negative emotions that's part of the learning process which so often is part of
1:38:11.040 this formal system of learning namely examinations namely someone telling you you didn't learn
1:38:16.560 what you should have learnt then it's going to turn you off continuing to be passionate about
1:38:20.640 that particular subject so yeah there is this entirely systemic problem about that whole
1:38:26.000 formalised system which you know goes back centuries the Chinese were doing it for example on
1:38:31.040 hundreds of years before we started ever doing it putting people in classes having them learn
1:38:35.040 things by wrote and then answering exam questions on it it's a great way to destroy creativity
1:38:39.280 there are better ways of doing it but at the moment it seems to be the only way that formally people
1:38:43.840 are getting qualifications and degrees and these different things in certain places it works well
1:38:48.800 I think that in medicine for example if you're just a doctor and the whole idea is that you see
1:38:53.520 particular symptoms in a patient and there is only a fixed list of possible diseases that are
1:38:59.280 known to cause those symptoms then offering the treatment you know you know sort of wrote way
1:39:03.440 learning what the particular treatment is in a wrote way is the function of the doctor to some
1:39:07.840 extent or learning how to do a particular surgery but of course you just still want creative
1:39:10.880 thinkers but there are you know professions where learning certain things by wrote is absolutely
1:39:15.920 important but when it comes to pure science mathematics and various other creative enterprises
1:39:20.880 you yes you need a background to some extent but this idea of having a stricter background of a
1:39:26.640 huge vast amount of information that fills textbooks and you pass exams on this can just turn
1:39:31.440 you off being creative and teach you how not to be creative but rather teach you how to
1:39:35.200 remember things off by heart so if you struggle academically it could be any one of those things
1:39:39.200 you're not good at doing exams but you might still be a really creative thinker you might
1:39:43.600 struggle academically because the teacher the professor the lecturer the tutor is just terrible
1:39:48.160 you might struggle academically because no one's actually encouraged you at any point no one's told
1:39:52.240 you hey rather than just paying attention during the lectures why not look online at different
1:39:57.600 lectures do it delivering exactly the same thing in a more interesting way maybe you don't know how
1:40:01.920 to maybe you don't know the the the the secrets to passing certain exams and so on and so forth so
1:40:06.880 it could be all of these things so I don't think there's a simple answer there but broadly speaking
1:40:11.040 shared responsibility it's sometimes hard to know who's more comparable is it you or is it that's
1:40:16.480 a teacher or is it the system yeah probably the system in many many cases John Ortiz asks me
1:40:23.520 any book recommendations the irony of this question in that it's one of the first podcasts I'm
1:40:28.000 producing without my video background of my bookshelf behind me so let me turn around and have
1:40:33.360 a look at what I've got here and I'm see if any of these speak to you depends on what you're
1:40:37.520 interested in if you're interested in philosophy and you don't know much a good introduction to
1:40:41.200 Popper is literally called Popper by Brian McGee it's a very short book it only goes for about
1:40:49.120 a hundred pages and it just explains Popper's thinking so it's not by Popper it's about Popper's
1:40:56.320 thinking if you like science broadly speaking and you want to book that contains geology and biology
1:41:03.360 and chemistry and physics all tied up in excellent expositions on a controversial issue then the
1:41:11.680 the book Rare Earth by Ward and Brownley is a really interesting take on the solution to the
1:41:17.520 Fermi paradox and it's one I talk about often all the the ideas in it I talk about often because
1:41:22.000 I don't think they're heard very often they're not well understood but astrobiology you know I'm
1:41:26.560 trying to understand what the conditions for biology are that are needed out there in the universe
1:41:32.800 if we're going to find ET we'll find the aliens if we're going to find life also in the universe
1:41:37.520 that brings together all these different areas of science so if you find a book about astrobiology
1:41:42.240 Rare Earth is one such book popular science book it can teach you a lot about all those areas
1:41:46.960 of science simultaneously sort of knitted together under this one heading of alien life you know
1:41:53.520 we don't know about aliens yet but we can constrain what the aliens might be made out of you know
1:41:57.440 they're not going to be pure beings of hydrogen for a whole bunch of reasons that come down to
1:42:01.200 chemistry and physical forces for history of philosophy I love Wittgenstein's poker and it's a
1:42:07.120 book I've talked about before it's by David Edmonds and John Eider now and if you're just
1:42:13.120 interested in two of the giants of philosophy of the 20th century kind of iconoclastic philosophical
1:42:20.160 to some extent enemies of one another they had diametrically opposed views on so much except
1:42:26.080 they both like to speak clearly and to try and well pop up more so than Wittgenstein but
1:42:32.640 they didn't they didn't have much truck with nonsense anyway and so Wittgenstein's poker is about
1:42:38.560 the tension between them and the one encounter they had in real life that came down to
1:42:43.680 Wittgenstein depending upon who you listen to in the book either attacking pop over the poker
1:42:51.760 not quite or simply just decorating with a poker to make a point so Wittgenstein's poker is
1:42:58.240 yeah our first hand accounts by a number of people about what happened and also the philosophy
1:43:03.120 of Wittgenstein and pop up oh no I've got I'm in terms of fiction I've got 1984 up there I think
1:43:08.000 everyone should read 1984 by George Orwell new speaks my favorite part of that especially right now
1:43:15.760 the massaging of words to take on their opposite meaning and to have people forget about what
1:43:23.680 they used to think it's just a great warning for the way in which societies can quickly fall
1:43:28.960 into authoritarianism but you know on my Kindle and various other formats I have lots of history
1:43:36.000 books as often what I just read for entertainment purposes anyway I have a brief history of
1:43:41.120 Bolivia concise histories of Korea I like reading reading about those two countries in particular
1:43:48.480 because they've been through so many rapid changes and I like looking into what happens when
1:43:53.920 countries undergo rapid change you know rapid change from base of the ground up where you know
1:43:58.400 effectively revolutions go on what can go wrong and how badly it can go wrong in different places
1:44:03.280 and in terms of scientific interest I'm interested in this idea of fine tuning so I read
1:44:09.040 everything that almost comes out on fine tuning behind me I've got the Goldilocks Enigma by
1:44:13.920 Paul Davies and I'm like Kindle I have a fortunate universe by Lewis and Barnes which is a
1:44:19.600 great overview of this state of research in this fine tuning question and what we understand the
1:44:26.320 problem to be whether it's actually a problem or not and what possible solutions people have
1:44:31.280 talked about so far next question from Glen Hall question that makes sense to me but you may not agree
1:44:36.640 is common sense and logic compatible with quantum mechanics to me especially the multiverse
1:44:41.680 defies common sense okay so this is the last question yeah absolutely it defies common sense
1:44:48.960 but so does almost everything in science I think common sense evolves over time if you
1:44:54.720 asked a person a hundred years ago what was common sense it wouldn't be the same as what
1:44:58.800 is common sense today you know two centuries ago it's common sense to just beat your children
1:45:04.000 if they do the wrong thing today the opposite is true it's common sense not to do that so common
1:45:09.360 sense itself evolves over time how far you have to go back when it was common sense that this
1:45:15.200 sun went around the earth rather than the other way around I don't know but now it's common sense
1:45:19.760 of the earth goes around the sun it just means the thing that people know so yeah the multiverse
1:45:24.640 defies common sense but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it's true and it is true
1:45:29.440 does it defy logic now it doesn't it is compatible with logic yes it is it has to be compatible with
1:45:34.880 logic things have to be compatible with logic or else they're logical and if something is a logical
1:45:39.920 then you can throw out in the bin now it is true that early on when people were trying to
1:45:44.240 understand quantum theory and they couldn't but some people some physicists just went the whole
1:45:49.520 hog and various others I think philosophers as well just went well what we're saying or what we
1:45:54.960 think we're seeing we think we're observing in quantum theory and some of these experiments defies
1:45:59.760 logic therefore logic has to go on the bin because science science takes promise it's like you
1:46:04.000 have this choice before you either you're going to accept the physics or you know accept logic
1:46:07.760 some went we're just gonna accept the physics I'm gonna throw logic in the bin in particular
1:46:11.360 there were these ideas that for example a particle could occupy multiple places at the same time
1:46:17.040 could be in different places at the same time so it could both be here at point x and
1:46:21.040 and not at point x at the same time or it could be located at a particular point in space
1:46:26.400 and simultaneously spread out throughout space okay these these are logical so this violates the
1:46:32.240 law of logic probably the most fundamental law of logic I would think called the law of the
1:46:36.240 excluded minute which is something can't both be and not be simultaneously either I am here recording
1:46:42.240 a podcast right now or I'm not doing that it's one or the other I can't be doing both I can't
1:46:46.880 both be recording the podcast not recording the podcast if you're listening to it now it must have
1:46:50.400 been the case that I record the podcast it can't have been the case that I never record the podcast
1:46:54.160 that's logic logic simple logic quantum theory has to be compatible with logic and so the problem
1:47:00.560 then became how do we make it compatible you have to just take it seriously if it if the theory says
1:47:05.440 that a particle can occupy multiple positions at the same time then it really does all could
1:47:10.640 apply multiple positions at the same time even if you don't observe them that just means that there's
1:47:14.240 something wrong with your ability to observe all the positions simultaneously hence the multiverse
1:47:19.040 so it obeys logic in fact it's the only logical way to understand quantum mechanics it's the
1:47:23.360 only way so all you need to do for this is to go to my multiverse here is also go to the fabric of
1:47:28.560 reality shadows understand the experiments that are done the uncontroversial content of those
1:47:34.320 experiments that whoever it is who are who performs experiments or whatever the physicist is they
1:47:39.040 all like all except how the experiment is done and what the results of the experiment is that's
1:47:43.520 not a problem so that's the uncontroversial part the controversial part then comes in as to
1:47:47.600 explain what's going on many of the if is to say well there is no explanation just except
1:47:53.920 the fact that this is what the experiment does without ever worrying about why which is kind of
1:47:58.720 like saying the earth goes around the sun in an elliptical orbit but you're not allowed to say
1:48:04.080 why you're not allowed to invoke something like gravity because you can't see gravity you're not
1:48:08.400 allowed to invoke Newton's inverse square law you're not allowed to invoke curved spacetime you
1:48:14.240 can't do any of those things all you can say is that today the earth occupies this position
1:48:19.520 on the elliptical orbit and tomorrow it will be there and then there will be there without ever
1:48:23.440 saying why that's not science science tells you why in in the case of Newton's theory well there's
1:48:29.520 this thing called the inverse square law and if you have the central body called the sun then there
1:48:33.440 is this force between the sun and the earth and that as the earth moves around the sun the force
1:48:37.440 exerted causes it to go this fast in the orbit is this is this big has this radius and so on and so
1:48:42.080 forth so you have an explanation of an account of why quantum theory is the same thing you have these
1:48:46.960 things these interference experiments where the particles if they were obeying if they're obeying
1:48:51.840 what people think of as common sense what people think of as logic should follow a particular
1:48:56.560 path but they don't follow that particular path so you've got some explaining to which is
1:49:00.000 otherwise the case in science you always have this unusual observation which causes a problem you
1:49:05.200 think what the heck's going on there and so what you have to do is to try and understand it so you
1:49:10.080 conjecture you come up with creative theories and lots of people tried to come up with creative
1:49:13.440 theories they would say things like well in these experiments where you're firing particles of light
1:49:17.600 these things called photons through the apparatus it's simultaneously a particle isolated at
1:49:22.320 a point and a wave spread out throughout space at the same time which I would say defies logic right
1:49:28.080 other people would say things like what consciousness had something to do with it when a human brain
1:49:33.840 observes when a person looks when they make an observation their consciousness somehow has an effect
1:49:39.440 on the outcome of the experiment it's very weird it's very spiritual weird stuff mystical
1:49:44.400 as if there was this force coming out of your brain affecting the trajectory on which the
1:49:48.720 photons or the other subatomic particles are moving I find that a logical as well after all what
1:49:52.480 is this force that's coming out of your brain how is it how is it working exactly never specified
1:49:56.960 the only thing that makes sense the only thing that explains everything about what's going on is
1:50:00.880 the multiverse the multiverse just says ah actually every time you fire this particle it's a
1:50:05.840 company by other ones that you can't see oh but you're not allowed to postulate particles you can't
1:50:09.920 see but hold on you're always postulating particles you can't see to explain the things you see it's
1:50:14.800 that science is all about the scene in terms of the unseen why is it that you see light coming
1:50:20.480 from the Sun well ultimately it's because of particles you can't see mainly hydrogen nuclei deep
1:50:26.560 in the core of the Sun being fused together to form helium and that creates heat and that heat
1:50:31.440 eventually leaks out through the surface of the Sun as photons and we see the photons so particles
1:50:37.840 we can't see in the center of the Sun causing phenomena we do see the same thing is kind of
1:50:41.680 happening what's not the same but it's analogous to what's going on here there's particles we
1:50:45.200 can't see giving rise to the phenomena that we do see this interference phenomena and so that's
1:50:49.600 all we're saying these particles we can't see aren't actually in our universe okay for a particular
1:50:53.440 definition of a universe it might even be better like just David says it will be better if we
1:50:58.400 had have just started calling scientific theory scientific misconceptions to begin with it would
1:51:02.960 help with people understanding the process of science that we move from worst misconception to
1:51:07.200 better misconception well the same might be true here if we just never had the word multiverse
1:51:12.000 maybe and we just had a parallel universe as we just said all the universe consists of the
1:51:17.200 scene in the unseen these are the parts of the universe that are unseen you know their physical
1:51:21.360 reality is bigger than what you think you can't you know the the laws of quantum theory say you
1:51:26.240 can't actually observe these particular other particles but they're there and they're the only
1:51:30.240 explanation for what we just I don't know but yeah people people struggle to accept the multiverse
1:51:36.480 because it defies today's common sense but you know decades from now it might very well
1:51:41.520 become a sense once we have quantum computers for the reasons I said in my last ask me anything
1:51:46.080 once we have quantum computers it would be very hard for people to stick to this idea that the
1:51:51.440 contents of physical reality aren't tremendously larger than what we think and the convenient way of
1:51:55.760 describing that is we exist in a multiverse okay so that is the last question and I think this
1:52:00.320 would have to be competing for one of the longest episodes of topcast ever and my voice is beginning
