00:00:29.100 Welcome to Topcom, episode 43, if you're on the podcast of audio, only version.
00:00:35.740 Otherwise, this is the beginning of Infinity chapter breakdown, so as David Deutsch has called them.
00:00:42.780 And this is chapter 16, the evolution of creativity. Part one, I presume this is going to go
00:00:50.780 quite a while because that's always rereading it for the umph-dink time. I realized there was a lot
00:00:56.940 to unpack. There was a lot to breakdown and I was only a few pages in. And it's because this chapter
00:01:05.900 is unusual in a sense that I would say that it's not entirely self-contained. I think with a lot
00:01:12.620 of other chapters, let's take the multiverse chapter or a physicist history of bad philosophy.
00:01:19.500 I think you could dive into those chapters and pretty much take away some really important
00:01:25.260 messages without referring to other parts of the book. In this chapter, it's almost like
00:01:32.540 what has gone before have been the bricks cumulative building the knowledge required in order to
00:01:39.500 fully understand what's being said here. And so in a sense, I would argue there's some prerequisite
00:01:46.060 knowledge. But for the purpose of my breakdown, I'm going to try to provide some of that context
00:01:51.900 that may have appeared earlier on in the book so that anyone listening to this for the first time
00:01:56.540 will understand the gravity of what being what is being said here. I think that this chapter as much
00:02:03.500 as chapter seven, artificial creativity, is providing a guide almost for a research program,
00:02:13.580 avenues that need to be explored, the unknowns in what we know about creativity. I think
00:02:20.780 creativity is a genuine mystery. I think there's a number of these that exist now. Some people
00:02:28.460 deny certain kinds of mysteries or try to explain them away. But whatever you want to call this
00:02:35.420 unique feature of human beings, as far as we know, unique feature of human beings. Perhaps there
00:02:41.820 are intelligent life forms out there somewhere else that are also able to explain the world in which
00:02:46.860 they find themselves. But for now, as far as we know here on this planet right now, there's no other
00:02:53.260 being that can do what we do in terms of creativity. And it's explanatory creativity, which is the key
00:03:00.460 thing being able to explain the phenomena around us so that we can literally change the world
00:03:06.460 around us. And we're going to get to the significance of that. I'm going to reinforce some of the
00:03:11.260 things I've said earlier and some of the things certainly that David has said in the beginning of
00:03:14.860 infinity prior to us getting to this chapter. But there is an assumption here by the time we get
00:03:22.780 the chapter 16 that you are fully on board, I suppose, with the beginning of infinity worldview.
00:03:29.580 As I guess if you're reading the book chronologically from chapter one through to where we are now
00:03:33.980 in the penultimate chapter of the beginning of infinity, one will presume that you understand
00:03:38.540 what has gone before. And when you find yourself here at the evolution of creativity, David is
00:03:44.940 rightly, assuming you know what knowledge means, what explanations are about, what the correct theory
00:03:53.020 of evolution is, not Lamarckism, but neo-Darwinism. The fact that we don't understand certain
00:04:01.420 things about human creativity, that there's something unique about human creativity. And he
00:04:06.220 will again really dive into why it is that human creativity is going to be more significant than
00:04:15.900 certain other, what we might say, natural forces that exist out there in the cosmos. They still
00:04:23.260 exist and they're still going to shape the reality around us, but it is creativity that into the
00:04:30.540 future is going to become more and more and more important to the evolution, not just of human
00:04:37.340 civilization, but the physical universe as a whole, that we will be using knowledge, we have
00:04:43.580 descendants, any technological artificial general intelligences that we create, perhaps other
00:04:52.540 life forms that happen to exist out there as well. The major factor in how the universe will
00:04:57.980 undergo its evolution into the deep future is going to depend not just on the physical forces,
00:05:04.620 and this is one of the failings I suppose, a physical scientist when they try to
00:05:08.300 prophesy, they would say predict, but to prophesy exactly what's going to happen into the
00:05:13.340 distant future. You know, if we're talking astronomy and we're talking about the evolution of the
00:05:18.700 sun today, I happen to be recording this, I don't know when I'm going to release it, but on the
00:05:22.540 23rd of December 2020, yesterday being the summer solstice here in Australia, the longest day of
00:05:29.820 all, and in fact, and in fact, if I don't truncate this one so little quickly, we're going to end
00:05:37.260 up with sunrise shining straight in here, it's already quite bright at the moment, but I'm going
00:05:41.100 to be facing the sun straight away very shortly, we're shining straight into my eyes. This
00:05:45.740 happens very few times throughout the course of the year, but today is one of those days where
00:05:50.300 absolutely will, and that sun will continue to shine according to astrophysical models for at
00:05:57.100 least another five billion years, and astronomers are fond of saying and then the sun will die,
00:06:04.540 then the sun will become a nova, not a super nova, become a nova will expand into a red
00:06:10.380 giant, and then it will eventually have its core collapse, and it will release the outer layers of
00:06:15.900 the atmosphere off into the solar system, this is going to be called a planetary nebula,
00:06:21.100 leaving behind nothing but its cooling hot white core called a white dwarf. Now, all of that
00:06:28.620 story is a scientific prediction based upon our best astrophysics theories and explanations
00:06:36.780 as of right now in 2020. However, we don't know what people of the future are going to do.
00:06:42.700 It is as magical to us that any person would be able to change the evolution that a typical
00:06:51.660 star goes through like the sun, as would be people saying in the past that people of today
00:06:58.620 would be able to control something like lightning in a thunderstorm, but we kind of can now,
00:07:04.300 we kind of can, we can create our own lightning if we like. In power stations we can use it to
00:07:09.820 power civilization that would have seemed absolutely astonishing to the people of the past,
00:07:15.660 and we're only talking people of a few centuries. Imagine people not just a few millennia
00:07:21.340 hence, but people a million or a billion years into the future. Will they have the capacity to
00:07:27.900 control stars? Possibly no rule, no law of physics rules that possibility out, so people might very
00:07:36.700 well decide to do something to the sun, to keep it shining or perhaps to cause it to disappear
00:07:43.340 sooner than otherwise would have. Maybe they will use the matter in the sun for something.
00:07:47.660 Who knows? We can't do psychology on people a billion years into the future, but the point is
00:07:53.180 astrophysic who today say they can predict what will happen to the sun billions of years hence
00:08:00.460 are assuming that the choices that people make then will have no effect upon the sun, but they might.
00:08:08.140 People for that reason are cosmically significant, and it is their creativity that allows them
00:08:14.540 to come up with these possibilities, these explanations of reality, and then allow them to choose
00:08:20.940 amongst all of the new choices that are available to them to change reality in ways that no person
00:08:29.820 with a good understanding of the mere physics of the situation would be able to do.
00:08:38.300 Mere physics is not going to be able to tell you what people will choose to do with the sun
00:08:43.580 in the future. In fact, according to our best explanation of what people are and explanations
00:08:49.900 and the growth of knowledge, being that the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable,
00:08:54.460 and this means that people have the capacity to really choose to create new knowledge,
00:09:00.140 to bring it into the world, it wasn't there before, and it wasn't predictable beforehand.
00:09:05.020 That's so far as we know, this is a kind of law of epistemology as on solid foundation,
00:09:12.780 none of them are on solid foundation, as on solid foundation, as any law of physics happens to be.
00:09:18.140 We can't predict what people will do next, because we don't know what kind of knowledge they're
00:09:23.420 going to create next, because the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable,
00:09:28.460 and one reason it is, is because we don't know what problems we're going to encounter next.
00:09:32.460 That's another issue with predictability, and if we don't know what problems we're going to
00:09:36.460 encounter next, we can't possibly imagine what kind of solutions will be dreamt up by people
00:09:41.180 of tomorrow when they encounter the problems of tomorrow. We're not there, it would mean
00:09:45.900 predicting the future in ways that we don't have access to, getting far ahead of myself
00:09:51.020 and going off onto a tangent. As I say, in this introduction, possibly going to be me talking far
00:09:58.460 more than I'm reading. I think if I go back and I re-look at some of the episodes, you may
00:10:05.420 notice that it's often something of the order of 70% of me talking and 30% me reading,
00:10:11.420 and sometimes I'll get up to 50 or a little over 50% of the time I'll spend reading.
00:10:16.060 Today, I expect to be reading far less, talking far more. It certainly may be worth going back
00:10:22.460 and re-reading or re-listening to chapter 7. Artificial creativity prior to this, because it really
00:10:30.300 is key to understanding the evolution of creativity. Back there, we kind of have some explanations
00:10:37.100 of what we mean by creativity. Creativity of the humankind, not creativity of the evolutionary kind,
00:10:44.940 namely the kind of creativity that mindless DNA, mindless genes happen to go through in their
00:10:52.460 creation of new species. We use that word advisedly, but the species that come into existence really
00:10:59.420 are created, they weren't there before, and so the DNA is able to create these new species,
00:11:05.500 via the process of evolution by natural selection. We don't fully understand that process.
00:11:12.460 There are gaps in our knowledge about that, and I think I've said before, one of the gaps in
00:11:16.460 my knowledge about the beginning of infinity was that I thought, prior to the beginning of infinity,
00:11:21.740 and coming to understand David's perspective on this, the process of evolution by natural selection.
00:11:30.140 It's understood in broad strokes in some ways. In fine details, in other ways, but there is
00:11:36.060 no way that we understand everything by the metric that, as David puts it very well, and this is
00:11:44.140 also back in chapter seven, page 154, if you can't program it, you haven't understood it,
00:11:51.180 which is a deep maxim running through the beginning of infinity. That if someone purports to
00:11:59.900 understand something, consciousness, let's say, and they can't write an algorithm such that a
00:12:07.020 computer could be programmed to instantiate that particular quality, then the person doesn't
00:12:13.100 really understand what they're talking about. Their broad brush strokes will be too broad to really
00:12:20.060 capture in David's understanding what the term understand really means, and this is true of
00:12:28.700 evolution by natural selection. We cannot program a computer that can really evolve in the way that
00:12:35.740 life forms evolve over time on earth. All we get is evolution within the parameters of whatever
00:12:44.780 the programmer has decided those parameters will be and what those rules will be. But evolution by
00:12:49.980 natural selection in the real world throws up the unpredictable, throws up the genuinely new,
00:12:56.380 the genuinely created by a mechanism we don't have a full handle on. There are many unknowns
00:13:03.180 with evolution by natural selection, but it remains, of course, just because they're very,
00:13:06.940 very many unknowns, doesn't mean you leap to some other theory, with there are even more unknowns.
00:13:12.780 This is a common misconception within epistemology, and of course, that's the god of the gaps idea,
00:13:18.780 if someone comes along and says, well, you people who think that evolution by natural selection
00:13:24.780 is a good explanation, can't explain x, y, and z, and they might be right that we can't
00:13:31.100 explain x, y, and z. May then say, well, therefore, creationism of the kind that a religious person
00:13:38.220 believes in is really true. It's the better explanation. Of course, it's not, because they also
00:13:44.540 can't explain x, y, z, except by recourse to the general purpose explanation of God did it,
00:13:51.180 okay, or a wizard did it as David likes to say. So what evolution by natural selection does,
00:13:56.860 deficient though it is in some areas by which I mean unable to fully explain absolutely everything
00:14:05.180 about the origin of species and biology as we see it. All sciences are like this. All sciences
00:14:12.780 have gaps. That's the whole point of science. There's no such thing ever as a completed science.
00:14:18.300 What we have are ever better explanations, ever better theories over time,
00:14:23.180 and evolution by natural selection is one such, where we do not know with the fidelity required
00:14:30.620 to program a computer exactly how evolution by natural selection works. Now, there are some theories
00:14:36.700 that we know well enough that we can program a computer. These theories are often the ones that we
00:14:43.100 have shown to be false. And trivially, of course, Newtonian gravity, Newtonian mechanics, classical
00:14:49.180 mechanics is kind of like this. We're able to program computers to perfectly well replicate what
00:14:55.820 Newtonian classical mechanics is able to predict and it's able to predict to some extent
00:15:03.180 the emotion of bodies throughout the solar system. It gets it wrong in ways that general relativity
00:15:08.460 does not. However, we know well enough to be able to program a computer so too a general
00:15:13.420 relativity, of course. Now, when it comes to human creativity, we don't have the capacity either
00:15:22.300 to program into a computer, human creativity. If we did, then we could program a computer
00:15:28.140 to be humanly creative, which would then be able to program it to have the capacity of,
00:15:33.980 or have the quality of being a human. In other words, it would be a human, or at least be a person
00:15:39.820 would be a better way of saying things, of course. A human would be a special case of a person
00:15:44.540 in that case because we would have a person inside of a silicon device of some sort. But it
00:15:51.260 was still a person because it would be creating an open ended stream of knowledge, it would be
00:15:55.580 creating explanations, it would be trying to understand it's world in the way that we understand the
00:16:00.460 world through conjecture and refutation and so on in the way that pop or explain that knowledge
00:16:05.180 grows. So without further ado, let me get into the book and into chapter 16, the evolution of
00:16:13.100 creativity. And I'm going to stop quite frequently. I hope this isn't too frustrating for listeners,
00:16:19.660 but we'll see how we go. And David begins, what use was creativity? Of all the countless biological
00:16:26.460 adaptations that have evolved on our planet, creativity is the only one that can produce scientific
00:16:32.380 or mathematical knowledge, art or philosophy, pausing there because straight away, straight away,
00:16:38.540 we have a statement that should really make us put the brakes on and just unpack for a moment.
00:16:45.980 This here, this first claim here that creativity is the only one that enables us to produce
00:16:52.380 mathematical scientific knowledge, art or philosophy. Tells us something about the difference between
00:16:58.700 humans and other animals that long wondered about moral dichotomy. What makes us special? Are we
00:17:07.020 special? Aren't we just another animal, a curious kind of water ape that can talk? Well, these kinds
00:17:13.980 of ways of diminishing what people are, I would say, diminishing what people are. And as I like
00:17:19.580 to say, diminishing their cosmic significance suffer from the floor that they overlook the fact
00:17:26.220 that it is creativity. So far as we know, completely unique to humans in the universe as of today
00:17:32.540 that allows for us to produce science and philosophy. And the real key is that that capacity
00:17:38.860 allows us to model in our own minds the rest of reality, which increases our models increase in
00:17:46.780 their fidelity in representing the rest of reality over time as well. That is an absolutely astonishing
00:17:54.460 fact about ourselves and reality as a whole. And the laws of physics which allow this to happen
00:18:03.020 that inside of our minds, we create models of everything else that's out there. And over time,
00:18:09.660 through creativity, through generating explanations that become increasingly hard to vary,
00:18:18.780 the model in our minds more closely resembles the actual reality that is out there.
00:18:25.740 And as David says in one of his TED talks, it contains a superficial image of the things that
00:18:31.900 are out there. But far more than that, the relationships between the abstract objects that
00:18:38.300 are inside of our minds become far more closely related to the relationships between
00:18:46.460 physical objects that are out there in space time and behaving in certain ways in fact,
00:18:51.900 space time itself considered as an object in physical reality as well. That our models of these
00:18:57.900 things, space time, matter and energy, civilization, living things, so on and so forth, etc, etc,
00:19:07.500 are. Our models of those things inside of our minds come to resemble, to mirror what is going on
00:19:15.420 out there with increasing fidelity over time, never perfectly, and always with the possibility
00:19:23.580 that what we think could in fact be wrong. But there's something there that is converging. We
00:19:29.340 are converging upon a reality. The model here represents what's out there. And that's true for
00:19:36.300 everyone. And it's this very strange thing because I think it might be in Feynman who said,
00:19:40.780 people are interesting because it's almost like it's atoms observing atoms,
00:19:45.500 atoms looking at atoms. But it's far deeper than that of course, and not just atoms looking at
00:19:49.740 atoms. As astonishing as a fact as that might be, an insect would be a collection of atoms
00:19:57.500 looking at other atoms as well. This is a set of atoms that is observing the world certainly,
00:20:04.380 but coming to understand the world and generating a model of the world as well.
00:20:10.460 Okay, so let's continue. Now, as you can see, the sun is beginning to creep in,
00:20:16.380 so I'm sure it's destroying my green screen behind me in some way, but we will persevere anyway.
00:20:21.980 I could close the blinds, but I just want to see, I'm just using my creativity to see,
00:20:26.700 what the heck is going to happen with my carefully set up arrangement here, when the full force
00:20:31.900 of the sun, 150 million kilometers away at a core temperature of 15 million Kelvin and a surface
00:20:38.060 temperature of 5,500 Kelvin comes blaring straight through that window straight into my eyes.
00:20:44.780 Let's see what happens. I'm ready for this ride. Let's see what...
00:20:49.420 It's almost Christmas. I want to see if something really unusual happens.
00:20:55.340 Like it completely destroys my recording or something like that. Okay, okay, so we've read a
00:21:03.500 sentence so far. Let's go to the next one. Through the resulting technology and institutions,
00:21:09.820 it has had spectacular physical effects, most notably near human habitations, but also further
00:21:16.300 a field, a substantial portion of the Earth's land area as now used for human purposes.
00:21:21.980 Human choice, itself a product of creativity determines which other species to exclude
00:21:28.620 and which to tolerate or cultivate, which rivers to divert, which hills to level and which
00:21:34.460 wildernesses to preserve. Now I'm not even going to get through that sentence without pausing
00:21:40.140 myself right at the beginning of it, where David says, human choice itself a product of creativity.
00:21:47.260 This link, I haven't read anywhere else quite so explicitly. It may be out there among other
00:21:58.540 philosophers, but if so I haven't read them. I've read some of the texts that many other people
00:22:04.780 read on the topic, namely on creativity, and on free will. But we tend not to get this kind of
00:22:14.380 link and David doesn't mention much about free will in the beginning of infinity. But it is
00:22:20.540 mentioned, and it's mentioned in the context of creativity, and I'm really attracted to this
00:22:26.860 idea that human choice is indeed a product of creativity and it's certainly informed my own thinking
00:22:34.620 on this whole idea. I don't know how to divorce free will from choices that if choice exists
00:22:42.700 in the world, and then if choice exists in the world, and we are the agents that do the choosing,
00:22:53.100 then we have free will. Our will, the thing that we want is free to choose among these things.
00:22:59.660 Now it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be if, of course, as many people observe. If someone coerced you
00:23:06.220 in some way, then your will is less free. You want to do X, but you're not allowed to do X,
00:23:12.540 for fear of violence or something else. Fear of death perhaps. So you can't do X. So your will has
00:23:18.540 been constrained to do something else. You don't really have the free will that you do. So I think
00:23:23.420 free will is this spectrum, this degrees of freedom that you have. And importantly with human beings,
00:23:30.860 unlike with, say, dogs or cats, you have the classic experiment, figure out what food the dog likes
00:23:40.460 and so you put out two different kinds of food and you let the dog go to the one that it prefers.
00:23:46.140 The dog really make a choice. Well in one sense it kind of did because there were two things,
00:23:50.700 there in existence, but it did really contemplate or did it just rely upon what if genes were
00:23:57.020 telling it to do. Are we any different in this case? We are because unlike with the dog,
00:24:03.820 we can choose to create something completely new. That isn't there before us. And that choice
00:24:10.620 itself, that choice to actually do go through the effort of creating is itself a free choice
00:24:17.900 that we don't have to make. One can consider when, you know, in a similar situation,
00:24:23.580 in the evening, you want to have dinner, you've got a certain number of things in the fridge,
00:24:28.620 there's a certain number of ways in which you combine them into interesting meals,
00:24:32.380 you can choose among them, that's a free choice, but you could also choose to do something
00:24:36.380 completely different and go to the supermarket and buy some more ingredients or to call up a restaurant
00:24:41.900 and get something delivered, so on and so forth, etc, etc. We really can create new choices,
00:24:48.140 bring new choices into the world. This is our creativity and action, and the act of choosing among
00:24:54.620 these things is what I would regard as free will. So I just regard creativity, choices and free
00:25:03.900 will and this capacity to explain the world as all intimately linked. None of them have good
00:25:11.580 explanations. And so it's for this reason I kind of agree with David where he says also in the book
00:25:16.380 that they might all come along for the ride in the one jump to universality, that as soon as you
00:25:22.700 have this jump to explanatory universality, people being universal explainers, then all of those
00:25:30.220 things come along, including consciousness as well. Perhaps we don't know, but the point is that
00:25:36.540 it seems like a parsimonious idea that these are all facets of the one deep profound mystery of what
00:25:43.820 human personhood is about. What conscious we're creative, we make choices in the world, we do those
00:25:51.180 freely and so perhaps whatever the ultimate explanation is of these things or whatever the
00:25:59.900 explanation of the future is that enables us to create artificial general intelligence,
00:26:06.220 that we will recognize that these words that we use, creativity, consciousness, free will,
00:26:12.380 whatever, that all of these things will come together in some way and we'll have a better
00:26:16.460 understanding of each of them and the ways in which they are real. But I say that they're real,
00:26:21.980 one reason I say that they're real is because they are unavoidably part of the explanation of
00:26:29.100 what it is that people are doing, is an explanation of their behavior, an explanation of how it
00:26:35.740 is they create science and civilization and everything else. That trying to remove any of them
00:26:43.980 causes more problems than it solves. You're left wondering if you think something like
00:26:51.100 creativity isn't some kind of deep mystery that in fact all we need is ever more
00:26:58.700 faster hardware and eventually we'll achieve escape velocity, we'll have artificial intelligence,
00:27:05.020 that is creative and more creative than us and it's just a matter of processing power,
00:27:10.140 which is, it seems to be the most popular idea right now. Okay, this Nick Bostrom
00:27:19.820 singularity idea that all we need is faster processing and once we've got sufficient amount of
00:27:25.580 processing, sufficient amount of memory, so on and so forth, then we will have an agent that
00:27:31.100 is able to think faster than us about anything at all, better than us and therefore the problem
00:27:36.700 of creativity is solved at the hardware, the hardware level. Many of us think that it's completely
00:27:42.700 wrong that assumes a solution to what creativity is. It's sidelines creativity and says creativity
00:27:49.900 is no deep mystery that we are just processes with some memory and there's nothing particularly
00:27:57.340 special about the software. Of course, what the beginning of infinity teaches us what David Deutsch
00:28:02.380 has main point is and a lot of this is that the hardware has a very little to do with this
00:28:07.660 mystery at all. It's all about the software. This is the great mystery. We have this algorithm
00:28:13.660 running on our brains that is able to improve itself over time and improve its understanding of
00:28:21.420 the world at the time as well. It can augment itself with technology but it's got nothing to do
00:28:29.260 with how fast we can think. The computer can think faster than us but it's not more creative than us
00:28:35.660 right now. But of all of these qualities I would say of the human mind which may be synonymous
00:28:44.060 one with another, creativity, choices, consciousness, the ability to be universal explainer, free will.
00:28:53.500 That last one, the free will one is the most contentious one it seems to me. Maybe consciousness
00:28:58.060 is up there as well. As I've observed elsewhere, there are certain philosophers who will deny
00:29:04.380 free will but regard some of the other aspects of this as deeply mysterious. Sam Harris
00:29:11.660 who I respect very much and love to listen to on this particular topic has written a book,
00:29:18.140 a vehement defense of the idea we do not have free will. Simultaneously, he also argues
00:29:27.020 that the deepest mystery in the universe, aside from the existence of the universe itself,
00:29:32.220 is the fact that we are conscious. So as he dismisses the free will issue,
00:29:37.500 up prizes consciousness as being a profound and deep mystery. And he says that his subjective
00:29:45.340 experience of consciousness reveals to him that free will doesn't exist, that you do not have
00:29:50.620 a subjective experience of consciousness. And here all I can say to that is we would just have
00:29:58.220 to disagree because I do have a subjective experience of consciousness. Now if you meditate and
00:30:04.860 clear your mind of everything, it should be no surprise to you that it seems as if you have no free
00:30:12.940 will because it then seems as if the thoughts are arising unbidden by you. But if you are really
00:30:20.940 trying not to concentrate and actively trying to dampen down your thinking, then of course it will
00:30:30.060 feel as though it will be a sensation and this is a theme running through Sam's philosophy,
00:30:35.900 this idea of feelings that you have the sensation or the experience of not having free will or
00:30:42.060 the absence of free will. I'm unsurprised that you feel as though you've got an absence of free
00:30:46.140 will when you're not thinking, when you're trying to think hard about what to choose to do next.
00:30:51.500 But if you try to be conscious of the choices before you, I think that in those moments and you
00:30:58.540 can be mindful in your conscious experience of the present moment, I think you will find that
00:31:04.140 you can experience the very real sensation of actually having choices in the world and that you will
00:31:10.140 freely be able to choose one thing over another. But this takes us far and wide away from where I
00:31:17.740 want to go with this chapter just to say that almost in any of these debates where people end up
00:31:23.740 loggerheads about the existence of free will or not, I think we can happily grant to people,
00:31:30.060 okay, I'll agree with you that your form of free will doesn't exist, okay, for the purpose of
00:31:34.860 moving forward and making progress on this particular question, what's the particular question,
00:31:41.020 the deep profound mystery that almost everyone interested in this topic will agree as they're
00:31:46.940 somewhere. So Sam might think, well it's not there in free will, okay fine, it's there in
00:31:52.060 consciousness, then I agree. I think we need to solve that. That's a really important thing to solve.
00:31:58.940 Now Daniel Dennard of course, as many of us when we've read his book, interpret him to be saying
00:32:05.580 that consciousness is no deep mystery. And so he dampens down consciousness but what rises up
00:32:14.140 for him is free will, he's a compatibleist and he says, well this is a mystery,
00:32:17.740 it's compatible with the deterministic laws of physics which is my view as well.
00:32:24.940 So it tends to be the case in Jaron Lanier, makes this point as well,
00:32:29.580 but when people deny one mysterious aspect of reality, it tends to crop up, I'm bitten somewhere
00:32:36.620 else in their ontology, what they think reality consists of in some way. And he uses the example
00:32:45.020 of the nature of personhood, that if you dismiss the deep mystery that he is,
00:32:51.260 what it means to be a person, what a person is and the fact that a person is, in his words,
00:32:55.340 an infinite well of mystery which is this idea that tries to capture the fact that we don't have
00:32:59.980 an answer to what a person is. We can't program computers to be people and he agrees with
00:33:03.980 David Deutsch there. He says that people who dismiss that as being some sort of deep mystery
00:33:07.980 tend to find themselves caught up in concerns or confusions about what the present moment means,
00:33:17.420 because the people who dismiss the deep mystery of personhood are often
00:33:23.180 reductionists in the physicalist sense. They see a block universe, as general relativity
00:33:30.060 might say, that the past times and the future times as well as the present time,
00:33:35.900 or just instances of times. There's just times often to the 13.7 billion years into the past
00:33:43.900 and often to the extreme deep distant future. But there's no privileged times.
00:33:50.300 Yesterday is just as real as today as tomorrow in this universe described by a special relativity,
00:33:59.100 this block universe. All of the times exist in some way and none of them are privileged.
00:34:03.820 That's the picture we get. It's just your perspective. If you're on the other side of the
00:34:09.420 universe, then the time that you see is not simultaneous with my time. We get into this deep
00:34:14.620 questions of physics. But a person who believes that there's no mystery there then has to try
00:34:20.700 and explain why it is that now here for you, things are special. Something is different. The present
00:34:28.620 moment is illuminated in a way that yesterday is not, that you don't experience yesterday in the
00:34:34.780 same way that you've experienced today right now. You only experience now now. So there's this
00:34:39.740 weird mystery that exists in the universe about why the present moment is different to other
00:34:46.220 moments, why you experience the present moment is different to other moments. This is what
00:34:50.300 John Lenny S is about people who try to deny the deep mystery of consciousness. It tends to
00:34:54.540 crop up in this other way. And so too I would say with any of these questions about creativity
00:35:00.060 free will or choice and consciousness. We've gotten barely through the first paragraph.
00:35:08.780 Okay, so let's keep going. And I'm going to pause again shortly just to recap human choice
00:35:14.780 itself, a product of creativity determines which other species to exclude and which
00:35:19.260 to tolerate a cultivate which refers to divert, which yields to level and which wildernesses to preserve.
00:35:24.460 And this is a very beginning of infinity thing to say because again, cast people rightly so,
00:35:32.220 rightly so, has heroic in the universe as saviors, not destroyers, as people who are trying their best,
00:35:42.540 not only to survive on the planet, but to help other life forms as well with the only so far as I know,
00:35:49.660 modular, the odd exception to the rule out there somewhere other, but we are basically the only
00:35:56.220 species that consistently helps other species. There might be symbiotic relationships out there
00:36:00.700 somewhere other where sometimes one species will help another species in order to get help back
00:36:05.420 from itself. But people here on this planet, we try and save the pandas, even though the pandas
00:36:10.860 apparently don't want to be saved and aren't trying to save themselves. If human beings did not
00:36:18.460 exist, the extinction level event would eventually happen. It could be tomorrow, it could be
00:36:26.940 50 years, 50,000 years, 50 million years. The asteroid is coming, the supernova might happen,
00:36:35.740 the climate will change, and there will be nothing that other species on the planet will be able
00:36:43.820 to do about it. Only we and our choices and our ability to create knowledge will be able to do
00:36:52.220 anything about those things. And we will, we will choose to do the right thing for ourselves,
00:37:00.460 and as a side effect, that will often help other species. People like to preserve our wilderness
00:37:07.100 areas. Some of us more than others, because some of us think that wilderness areas are actually
00:37:12.940 beautiful, aesthetically beautiful. And so that's a reason for preserving them. We also do like
00:37:19.100 the look of tigers and lions and like to be able to go on safari. So if for no other reason
00:37:24.860 than that, we like to try and preserve the environment in which we find ourselves. Of course,
00:37:30.780 it's the consensus right now that humans are causing the next mass extinction and all of the
00:37:36.620 damage around the world. But this is not true. This is not true. It is only people that are saving
00:37:44.940 the planet from destroying everything that's on the planet. The geological forces,
00:37:51.340 the cosmological forces that are out there eroding the planet, destroying species and habitats,
00:37:58.620 only we are saving it. Now the small amount of if side effects that we have by us trying to
00:38:06.460 eke out an existence in this extremely hostile environment will of course sometimes
00:38:11.020 displace other animals from their habitat. But those other animals inevitably will be wiped out,
00:38:17.980 will go extinct by the next extinction level event, which is going to happen. That is the
00:38:24.140 history 99.9% of all species that have ever existed on the planet have gone extinct and that will
00:38:29.900 continue to happen. We want to be the exception. And the only way we can be the exception is to
00:38:36.140 use our capacity to create explanatory knowledge. And the only way we can make other species
00:38:42.140 the exception is to use our capacity to create explanatory knowledge and to use the resources
00:38:49.180 that are available to us to protect ourselves and those other animals. If we slow down our progress
00:38:55.420 and the rates of knowledge creation, not only do we condemn ourselves to certain extinction,
00:39:01.180 we condemn the rest of the species on the planet to certain extinction as well.
00:39:05.660 And even if you're only concerned about life in some form surviving, it won't. The expansion of
00:39:13.980 the sun absent us being here will absolutely sterilize the surface of the earth. So there is
00:39:21.980 this irony with us right now that we are the only species able to save the panda, for example,
00:39:30.060 or save the whale while with simultaneously being blamed for both of those species' extinctions
00:39:38.780 take the blue whale and the the Asian panda. We are the only ones doing anything to try and save
00:39:45.580 these animals. And yet we are consistently blamed for killing or destroying these animals.
00:39:53.100 Even if you think that it's possible that both of those things will happen, the whales and the
00:39:57.900 pandas will all be wiped out at some point in the future by a natural catastrophe,
00:40:04.220 unless we step in there. Nature is not friendly. It's hostile. The universe is terribly,
00:40:10.460 implacably hostile. Okay, I've nearly completed a paragraph. Let's go back to the book, David Rats.
00:40:20.380 In the night sky, a bright fast-moving spot may well be a space station carrying humans
00:40:26.460 higher and faster than any biological adaptation can carry anything. Or it may be a
00:40:32.300 satellite through which humans communicate across distances that biological communication
00:40:37.260 is never spanned using phenomena such as radio waves and nuclear reactions which biology has never
00:40:43.660 harnessed. The unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world. Okay, again,
00:40:52.220 and the sun has begun to shine straight into my eyes. I'm going to persevere anyway.
00:40:57.820 I'm not closing those blinds. I'm refusing to do so. I'm going to be creative and just see what
00:41:02.220 happens. Okay, so the unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world, said David
00:41:10.380 there. And I've made this point before about if you live in any city around the world and you
00:41:17.900 look around, then what you see is less due to the action of purely deterministic physical
00:41:28.060 forces, you know, in the case of Sydney, the action of geological weathering and erosion over time
00:41:36.460 eroded out the Sydney basin, you know, I've made this point before. But if you look at the
00:41:41.740 city skyline of Sydney, and I'll come back to this shortly with a specific example,
00:41:46.380 you look at the city skyline of Sydney, trying to use our natural sciences in order to explain
00:41:53.980 what's going on there, the appearance, what we see in this picture of the Sydney CBD,
00:42:00.700 trying to use geology or plain physics in order to explain any of this,
00:42:06.860 is going to be a fruitless exercise. You're going to miss the point if you try and use
00:42:13.980 those natural sciences. You need to use the proper explanation. Why does Sydney look like this?
00:42:20.460 Well, the reason Sydney looks like this, and there are a number of buildings there that are
00:42:23.180 prominent, but let's take Sydney Tower there, which is the tallest building at least as of today
00:42:30.940 in Sydney. Someone chose to build that thing, and someone chose to design it that way.
00:42:37.900 Someone created the design and then people came together and freely decided that
00:42:43.740 they would put their efforts in to constructing and raising this thing up into the sky.
00:42:50.700 That's the explanation. The geology and the physics kind of buy the buy. They're the things
00:42:56.460 that the people choose to use, to take advantage of, their knowledge of those things in order
00:43:02.700 to build structures like this. So if we seek to explain and not merely describe in terms of
00:43:09.420 deterministic laws, then we must invoke creativity, and various other abstract realities.
00:43:16.620 Reality is indeed a unified whole. Of course, reality is a unified whole. But at the same time,
00:43:21.900 we can divide it up into different ways. Space time and matter and energy, or fundamental
00:43:30.140 particles and emergent objects like cats and galaxies, or the physical and the abstract.
00:43:37.420 And these various ways of dividing up reality, of dividing things up, don't privilege one aspect
00:43:44.620 over and above the other. It is as correct to say that the cat is moving the atoms from A to B,
00:43:51.820 as it is to say that the cat moves from A to B because the atoms making up its body do.
00:43:58.380 But there is a real distinction between, and this is another way of dividing up reality,
00:44:03.100 explaining something in terms of things that exist, and having an in principle description of what
00:44:11.100 the particles are doing. And I've made this point with people recently, and I guess I am going
00:44:18.300 off on this tangent a little bit much. But let me just hop on again for a moment about this.
00:44:25.260 The explanation as to why, at the higher emergent level, that certain things occur, is really
00:44:36.620 the explanation. It is not the fact that certain things were determined to have happened,
00:44:43.260 because the big bang happened, and the laws of motion acted upon particles over the time and
00:44:49.900 caused them to appear where they appeared today. That is not an explanation. That is an
00:44:56.940 in principle, you would be able to describe the motion of those particles and where they end up
00:45:01.900 today. And so this is why the fabric of reality, Winston Churchill copper atom story is just so
00:45:11.100 deeply profound. And I think escapes sometimes the escape discussions on this topic.
00:45:21.100 Let's just recap that. And you can fast forward the next 5 or 10 minutes as I go through this
00:45:25.900 yet again. But let me try and refine it in a certain way. The situation is this.
00:45:32.780 There is a statue in Parliament Square in London of Winston Churchill. And the tip of that statue
00:45:40.060 is a copper atom. Why is the copper atom there? Now on the one hand you can say that, well the
00:45:50.140 copper atom is there for the same reason that any atom is anywhere right now. And any atom is
00:45:56.220 anywhere right now, because 13.7 billion years in the past approximately, the big bang occurred,
00:46:02.060 and all of matter and space and energy exploded out from that point. And eventually some of it,
00:46:07.900 over millions of years, coalesced into stars, the first generation of stars. At the end of their
00:46:13.900 lives, some of them exploded in supernova, supernovae, explosions, and scattered their contents
00:46:20.620 across a wide region of space. And some of those atoms, due to astrophysical processes, were
00:46:26.700 copper atoms. Those copper atoms then coalesced, mixing with the hydrogen helium and the intergalactic
00:46:33.100 space, and some of them formed new stars, and some of them formed planets as well, like the earth.
00:46:38.620 And so the earth formed out of this previously exploded star or stars, and contains copper,
00:46:44.620 and the copper atom again, under the forces of nature, under gravity and electromagnetism,
00:46:50.940 and so on and so forth, weathering and erosion, ended up in a certain place where it was
00:46:58.140 quarried, and the forces of nature eventually caused it to end up at the tip of Winston Churchill's
00:47:03.500 nose. And that's why that copper atom is there, due to deterministic physical laws.
00:47:12.460 That's not an explanation. That's a general purpose statement about any particular
00:47:19.180 bit of matter anywhere in the entire universe. And when people try to invoke this,
00:47:26.220 to explain a way, something like free will, for example, and try to say it couldn't have been a
00:47:33.740 free choice, because you were determined to do what you were determined to do, because at the
00:47:38.940 Big Bang, the laws of physics that were there are still acting right now, and you have to obey
00:47:44.140 these deterministic laws in the same way that the copper atom had to obey a deterministic law
00:47:49.820 to end up where it did. It completely misses the point about what an explanation truly is.
00:47:54.620 Free will is not an attempt to get outside of the laws of physics, and it's an attempt to
00:48:00.540 explain what is really going on in the context of a deterministic universe.
00:48:05.660 In the context of a deterministic universe, we have species arising that didn't arise before.
00:48:15.100 But no biologist should be tempted to say, well, there's no such thing as evolution by natural
00:48:20.620 selection. Evolution by natural selection doesn't really create new species. All the
00:48:25.740 tapping is atoms are following deterministic laws of physics. They'll be ridiculous, and I don't
00:48:31.420 think any physicist makes this point, I don't think any scientist, no biologist makes this point.
00:48:34.940 What they say is, the explanation of the origin of species is evolution by natural selection.
00:48:40.860 It's this emergent concept that these things called species exist, this thing called selection
00:48:47.820 exists, and that niches are filled on niches, as some people say, by organisms that are
00:48:55.260 fittest in that particular environment. The environment changes, the genes are selected against,
00:49:00.940 and the species can sometimes go extinct. To be filled by new species with genes that are
00:49:05.820 fitted for that particular environment. That's an explanation, it's an emergent explanation,
00:49:10.700 but all of those things are real. They're really happening. Selection is really happening,
00:49:15.020 adaptation is really happening, niches really exist in species really exist and fill those niches.
00:49:21.580 Now, precisely the same way, all we have to say is that the reason why, for example,
00:49:29.980 the copper atom is at the tip of Winston Churchill's nose, the explanation of that is that there was
00:49:36.540 a war called the Second World War involving two sides of great powers, dominant among them,
00:49:47.180 the United Kingdom and Germany, the leaders of whom were Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill,
00:49:52.860 and Winston Churchill eventually won the war for his side, and so we like to, out of respect,
00:49:59.740 remember great heroes who saved civilization, one of whom was Winston Churchill,
00:50:07.660 and as whom we learned recently, Karl Popper thought was a great epistemologist. I'll go back
00:50:13.500 to a previous episode for that one. Winston Churchill is, his statue is there with a copper atom
00:50:22.060 at its nose because we make statues out of bronze, so that they don't weather away quite so quickly.
00:50:27.180 But someone chose to build that statue, chose to design it in that way. In fact, groups of people
00:50:35.660 came to that decision and freely chose to do so and trying to eliminate choice and freedom
00:50:43.180 out of that whole picture is to break what would otherwise be a good explanation because we try
00:50:49.580 to say it's merely determined by physical laws, deterministic laws, then we've missed the
00:50:59.580 entire point of trying to explain what's going on in the real world, this reductionist
00:51:05.900 conception of how it is that reality evolves over time is simply, it's not false,
00:51:13.100 but it simply misses the point, it's true vacuously. We can always say that anything that
00:51:20.860 happens was determined to happen, it doesn't get us very far. In denying the supernatural,
00:51:29.420 we don't have to embrace pure reductionist physicalism. We can take another avenue where we say,
00:51:38.540 yes, of course, physics is fundamentally true, it's correct as a description of reality,
00:51:47.660 but it doesn't explain everything that's going on and besides, the strange thing is
00:51:54.220 that for someone who says they could in principle predict what a person is going to do next
00:52:02.140 or predict what is going to happen next, if they had a full description of the laws of physics
00:52:09.500 and the initial conditions is doing nothing in my opinion, but invoking the supernatural
00:52:15.900 because what is this thing that is able to actually do that predicting? Well, an oracle
00:52:22.860 with the full knowledge of the laws of physics, well, this oracle is basically the omniscient
00:52:27.820 theistic God, the God that knows everything that's going to happen, the God that created the
00:52:32.940 universe and knows everything that's going to happen, so it is an appeal to the supernatural.
00:52:38.540 Now someone might say, oh no, we don't need that, maybe we can just have a supercomputer of the future.
00:52:44.940 I doubt it, this supercomputer of the future would have to calculate all of the different
00:52:51.580 alternatives that could possibly happen in countless numbers of universes and it would have to know
00:52:57.420 with perfect precision what the initial conditions are at any particular given time,
00:53:03.100 so it can make this deterministic prediction, but we know from physics you cannot have
00:53:07.820 a perfect understanding of the conditions at any particular time. For all the atoms in the universe,
00:53:13.580 we're going to have a perfect understanding of where exactly they are. We know that's not possible,
00:53:19.260 given the Heisenberg uncertainty of principle among other things, but we know that we can't have
00:53:23.340 this complete knowledge simultaneously of every single atom in the entire universe,
00:53:27.580 relativity for another reason, so this idea that we could in principle, in principle have this
00:53:35.100 predictive mechanism that would allow us to determine exactly what's going to happen next,
00:53:39.980 is itself an appeal to the supernatural, the device required in order to do this would be magical,
00:53:46.620 it would have to have all the qualities that an omniscient creator of the universe would have,
00:53:51.500 and so this is why I reject this idea that in principle the idea that we could
00:53:59.580 with full knowledge of the laws of physics and full knowledge of the initial conditions,
00:54:03.900 predict what's going to happen next, therefore you don't have free will, I think is false,
00:54:07.740 because I don't think such an in principle argument has any bearing on the reality of free will,
00:54:16.620 when in practice it will never be possible, I'll never be possible because no such device
00:54:22.700 can do such a measurement of all the particles in the entire universe, it would have to be
00:54:27.900 a god of some sort, okay that takes me far away from anything to do with this chapter again,
00:54:34.300 I think I've just decided that this is not going to be episode 43, part one of chapter 16,
00:54:44.140 I think this is going to be part zero, this is an introduction to some introductory remarks to
00:54:51.180 the beginning of infinity, I can't really go back and insert this at the beginning of the chapter
00:54:57.340 because it's going to look a little bit weird because at the beginning if you remember the sun
00:55:01.020 wasn't shining straight into my eyes but now it is, so look a bit weird, if I cut from sun shining
00:55:07.660 into my eyes to sun not shining into my eyes to sun shining into my eyes again, that would look
00:55:12.140 a little bit disjointed, so we're just going to persevere what we were saying to recap to go back,
00:55:18.860 the David was saying that the unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world,
00:55:25.820 okay I wanted to go back to this idea that creativity is the thing that determines the
00:55:32.300 physical look among other things of the structures we see around us, David says dominate our
00:55:39.020 experience of the world, okay so I think he meant something significantly deeper than this, our
00:55:43.100 literal experience of the world as we're walking around the world we're creating explanations of
00:55:46.620 what we see when we interact with people with creating knowledge but just for illustrative purposes
00:55:53.820 I want to illustrate this with, again the Sydney CBD but a particular part of it that many people
00:56:00.300 will be familiar with, namely what's called the Sydney Harbour Bridge which connects the Sydney CBD
00:56:08.140 with the northern part of Sydney it took a while for this bridge to be built back in the 1930s prior
00:56:13.740 to which people had to drive a long way around the harbour and take many hours to get from
00:56:19.500 the southern part of Sydney to northern part of Sydney now it takes me minutes,
00:56:24.060 ah this is a very big bridge and I want to ask the question why it is that it looks the way that it
00:56:32.460 does, I just to hop on this for a little bit longer, well of course it looks the way that it does
00:56:38.780 because the architect and engineering team wanted it to look the way that it does, in fact I wanted
00:56:45.420 to look like the Tyne Bridge which is in Newcastle in England and also the Helgate Bridge in New
00:56:52.060 York looks similar as well, they wanted it to look like this but also and this is quite interesting
00:56:58.300 when you look at it it's got these stone pylons there which don't exist in the Newcastle Bridge
00:57:06.780 it it does exist in the Sydney Harbour now why, now it's interesting these pylons serve absolutely
00:57:15.580 no structural function they're not holding the bridge up, they look like they're nice and strong
00:57:21.340 don't they and in fact that's the whole point they're supposed to look strong so the story goes
00:57:27.340 is when the plans were first shown to the public that the Sydney Town Hall or something and people
00:57:33.180 were able to come on through or they'll put on the front of the newspaper whatever happened at
00:57:37.660 the time people objected that Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was proposed to look seemed a little flimsy
00:57:46.780 it seemed like it didn't have the structural integrity required to support the weight of all the
00:57:52.060 cars and trains and people going across it each day and so the the engineers decided well let's
00:57:57.660 add some big stone pylons there just to make it look stronger and that's what they did and that's
00:58:02.700 what ended up happening because people said yes this one looks a lot better and so it's interesting
00:58:08.300 isn't it that the reason why the Sydney Harbour Bridge looks the way that it does isn't due to
00:58:16.300 not only just merely the physical forces acting upon bits of metal in the deterministic ways
00:58:23.900 but it's also not only because of the choice of engineers and designers they weren't forced into
00:58:29.660 having this particular design given the constraints of physics that the choice was made the free
00:58:36.140 choice was made to add design features that serve absolutely no structural purpose whatsoever
00:58:43.580 they're just there to look good and so granite was mined from down south in Maroyo I think it was
00:58:51.740 Maroyo and the southern part of New South Wales uh 18,000 cubic meters of this stuff was brought
00:58:59.500 all the way up to Sydney you know carted in trucks and a three plus hour journey all the way north
00:59:06.220 to Sydney in order to build these you know carefully constructed stone pylons that again
00:59:12.220 do absolutely nothing so the reason why human creativity just for aesthetics so aesthetics
00:59:18.860 has forced up not forced it has caused brought into the world this particular huge structure
00:59:26.220 and that that's the explanation the aesthetic explanation is the explanation and trying to deny
00:59:32.460 the aesthetic explanation would be a kind of a ridiculous exercise I think okay back to the book
00:59:38.220 I'll read a little longer now I'll try and get through the entire next paragraph now days that
00:59:44.300 and by that they would mean the unique effects of creativity now days that includes the experience
00:59:49.100 of rapid innovation by the time you read these words the computer on which I'm writing them
00:59:54.620 will be obsolete there will be functionally better computers that will require less human effort
1:00:00.300 to build other books will have been written and innovative buildings and other artifacts will be
1:00:05.340 constructed some of which will be quickly superseded while others will stand for longer than the
1:00:10.460 pyramids have so far surprising scientific discoveries will be made some of which will change the
1:00:16.220 standard textbooks forever all these consequences of creativity make for an ever changing way of life
1:00:22.700 which is possible only a long lived dynamic society itself a phenomenon that nothing other
1:00:29.500 than creative thought could possibly bring about however as I pointed out in the previous chapter
1:00:36.620 n chapter one it was only recently in the history of our species that creativity has had
1:00:42.700 any of those effects in prehistoric times it would not have been obvious to a casual observer
1:00:48.860 say an explorer from an extraterrestrial civilization that humans were capable of creative thought
1:00:54.700 at all it would have seemed that we were doing no more than endlessly repeating the last
1:01:00.060 art which we were genetically adapted just like all other billions of species in the biosphere
1:01:05.420 clearly we were tool uses but so many other species we were communicating using symbolic
1:01:10.700 language but again that was not unusual even bees do that we were domesticating other species
1:01:15.980 but so do ants closer observation would have revealed that human languages and the knowledge
1:01:21.500 for human tool views were being transmitted through memes and not through genes this made us
1:01:27.660 fairly unusual but still not obviously creative several other species have memes but what they
1:01:32.860 do not have is the means of improving them other than through random trial and error so that
1:01:38.540 there is a exposing there that there is a crucial point that other animals might very well have
1:01:45.100 memes but not the means of improving them they might do this random trial and error thing
1:01:52.700 but they're not intelligently designing the knowledge as we would do we have memes and we are able
1:01:59.660 to construct memes deliberately if we like not always but if we want to we can construct certain
1:02:06.860 memes we can work hard to create a new theory and you design something that will persist over time
1:02:13.420 animals tend not to do this people are as David says in the beginning of infinity you know it's sort
1:02:20.140 of overly impressed by the modest achievements of the higher apes or a certain dolphins and so on
1:02:29.500 but it is a categorical difference between human beings and every other species on the planet
1:02:38.620 now there is something that David will say later about species that existed prior to us
1:02:46.380 homo erectus perhaps Neanderthal and so on these other
1:02:52.140 homo species that seem to have had the capacity to explain the world because they had
1:03:01.500 art they had the capacity to create fire there's a whole bunch of other bits of evidence and bits
1:03:08.860 of the puzzle that go together when considered as a whole one would say well it seems as though
1:03:15.900 these other species different to us did have this capacity now I'll have something to say about
1:03:22.060 this when we get there because it seems as though all of these species did arise in the same place
1:03:29.260 it seems like they had a common ancestor and that common ancestor we might wonder
1:03:36.700 could have been the first universal explainer and we've descended from that and for the reasons
1:03:41.660 that David will say in the book that capacity for explaining the world wasn't used for much at all
1:03:49.500 until recently biologically speaking or geologically speaking in terms of timeframes that we're
1:03:56.940 talking about so just just continuing talking about those other species that seem to have
1:04:02.780 memes like some of the great apes for example they don't seem to have the capacity to improve
1:04:09.100 those memes except through random trial and error and David goes on to say nor are they capable
1:04:14.220 of sustained improvement over many generations today the creativity that humans use to improve ideas
1:04:20.700 is what preeminently sets us apart from other species okay so pausing there and this is where
1:04:27.660 I'll end this week we got yeah just a little level one page I think director books this is a record
1:04:35.900 for me this is a record in terms of ratio to reading to commenting anyway this thing that sets us
1:04:44.780 apart from other species David says you know I would say the importance of this cannot be
1:04:48.860 understated it's it's everything especially in moral terms and this links to chapter 12 bad
1:04:55.580 philosophy what separates us as humans from other animals and this might very well include
1:05:04.060 knowing for example as is discussed in chapter 12 knowing whether or not other species
1:05:09.660 can suffer or indeed experience qualia of any kind have a subjective experience of any kind
1:05:19.980 one thing we know is that animals are nothing like people at all in this sense when it comes to
1:05:26.220 creativity we're very like in terms of biology granted the brain a brain the homologous structures
1:05:33.820 as we say look similar the brain looks similar in the human as it does in the great apes as it
1:05:39.180 does in the dolphins mammals and large brain creatures the brains all have similar structures
1:05:45.980 but this doesn't mean anything you know like computers have similar internal structures but
1:05:50.700 some of them will be running a word processor and some of them will be running a 3D game and
1:05:55.180 some of them will be running YouTube and so on what the computer is actually doing can look vastly
1:06:01.260 different and I think that the difference between the software that's going on inside of a human
1:06:06.060 brain and every other animal is categorically black and white different difference and it's not
1:06:12.780 just a matter of degree like dolphins can learn some tricks and we can learn lots of tricks
1:06:19.100 and apes can learn to communicate one with another and we can learn to communicate far better
1:06:23.500 their vocabulary is 50 our vocabulary is 500,000 you can choose your own favorite animal and then
1:06:30.220 the criteria by which you want to compare humans with that animal in order to say how intelligent
1:06:37.020 that animal is in comparison to us that they're kind of just like us well I would say no they're
1:06:42.540 completely different it's night and day because people are universal universal in their capacity
1:06:49.020 to create new knowledge which means literally whatever can be understood can be understood by us
1:06:54.940 if there is an explanation out there if there's a physical phenomena out there which has an
1:07:00.620 explanation we can find the explanation no other species that exists no other extent species on the
1:07:07.500 planet can do this it is this special capacity that we have this ability to model the universe and
1:07:16.140 this is how I kind of began today's episode that sets us apart from the other species that are
1:07:22.540 out there those other species can't create explanations of the kind that we can those other species
1:07:29.980 are trapped by their genes in what they can do their behaviors and if they can understand
1:07:35.900 anything at all it is only what their genes allow them to understand the difference between
1:07:41.500 poison and food for example the difference between hot and cold let's say possibly I don't know
1:07:47.900 but if it can understand anything at all it's condemned by its genes whereas we're not condemned by
1:07:54.220 our genes in the same way and there's more time goes on and more knowledge is accumulated by us
1:07:59.580 and as we create more explanations we escape we achieve escape velocity from our genes entirely
1:08:07.260 and so the disease is that ravage us because of the imperfections of our genome can be left
1:08:14.300 behind because we have used our names used our knowledge to overcome the problems that we have
1:08:20.060 genetically but the animal can't do this the environment changes and the animal can go extinct
1:08:27.340 the entire species of animals can go extinct unless we choose to do something about it as I've
1:08:31.020 also said this is not like a person the environment around a person changes and the person will
1:08:37.980 change the environment rather than be changed by it typically speaking sometimes the environment does
1:08:44.060 change too fast a tsunami happens an earthquake happens okay we get that but as time goes on our
1:08:50.700 capacity to deal with these things ever faster and ever more robustly will continue to improve
1:08:57.900 so we are categorically different there is something very special and unique about us
1:09:03.580 and we don't understand it fully David is about to explain the little we do know about how
1:09:10.140 creativity evolved here on planet earth and what it was used for for so long because apparently our
1:09:16.540 ancestors had it our ancestors went extinct and he'll talk about what did Homo sapiens do maybe we
1:09:23.100 were at war with these other species and that's the reason why those species are no longer here
1:09:28.380 I don't think he buys that particular idea because we can consider what static societies
1:09:35.740 were about we've talked about that previously but I have for one of another word ranted
1:09:42.380 this episode I talked a lot and so this is rather than titling this episode one I will go back
1:09:51.740 and retroactively title this episode zero because I don't think we got through enough to really
1:09:57.340 call this a proper beginning of an affinity chapter exploration this really is an introduction
1:10:03.660 and Brett having an opportunity to indulge himself with some of the very exciting things
1:10:09.500 that all come to bear that come together from the entire rest of the beginning of infinity
1:10:14.780 and and come together to really support for one to another word we shouldn't say support
1:10:21.340 that come together to frame and shape what this chapter chapter 16 is going to be all about
1:10:28.780 so look forward to the next episode which I hope will be out soon once more thank you to
1:10:35.900 all the patreon supporters and the paypal supporters as well find me on patreon
1:10:41.820 find me on paypal the links are there at www.bredhall.org on the front page there I think you can
1:10:49.180 find some links there to how you could support me and my endeavors in continuing to explore the
1:10:54.860 beginning of infinity and at this rate at this rate I was using today it will take us another
1:11:02.460 10 episodes to get through this chapter not won't I will promise to read more next chapter
1:11:08.140 and comment perhaps a little less we'll see how we go until then bye bye
