00:00:00.000 Welcome to Topcast Episode 50, the big 5-0 if you're listening to this on audio anyway
00:00:24.600 I'm not sure what to put up, but I do know that we're doing Chapter 16 of the beginning
00:00:29.080 of Infinity Today, the evolution of creativity, and we're in our third part, the third
00:00:36.560 And so let's just get into it after just recapping what was happening in the last episode.
00:00:43.280 And we're talking about the evolution of creativity, we're talking about memes and how
00:00:47.880 memes come into existence and how the capacity for meme evolution occurs.
00:00:53.200 And David is comparing what goes on with animals who are able to imitate parrot to parrot,
00:01:01.640 If either of these animals were listening to a lecture of some sort, then they would
00:01:06.720 be able to repeat some of the content, but it's not because they would have exactly
00:01:10.760 acquired the memes themselves, in other words, acquired the meaning of the ideas, but instead
00:01:16.840 they'd just be repeating the noises in the case of the parrot.
00:01:20.280 So if this parrot is, say, listening to a lecturer, what David goes on to say, quote, is,
00:01:27.280 suppose that the lecturer had repeatedly returned to a certain key idea and had expressed
00:01:31.880 it with different words and gestures each time.
00:01:34.240 The parrot, or apes, job, would be that much harder than imitating only the first instance.
00:01:40.320 The students much easier, because to a human observer, each different way of putting the
00:01:46.160 idea would convey additional knowledge, pause there, just my reflection.
00:01:50.640 So this is an important insight about one of the other categorical differences between humans
00:01:58.600 A parrot that repeats what they've heard at a lecture, hasn't understood anything.
00:02:05.480 So they don't acquire the meaning, the meme that's actually there.
00:02:09.920 But of course a person may, you know, there are situations where, for example, a person
00:02:15.040 might simply learn by wrote the content of a lesson or a lecture, and thereby haven't
00:02:22.080 They haven't acquired the meaning behind the idea, but they may be able to verbatim, quote,
00:02:29.080 This isn't how learning typically happens with people, as David has just said there.
00:02:35.680 If a lecturer was to repeat the same idea over and again, but using different words, using
00:02:41.280 a different approach each time, it would be that much harder for a parrot to parrot, what
00:02:45.840 they're saying, because a parrot only imitates the same thing over and over again.
00:02:51.120 But a student would probably find it easier, easier because each different way of explaining
00:02:57.720 the same concept contains additional knowledge.
00:03:00.440 In other words, this is just sort of a meta comment on that.
00:03:03.640 A lot of people have learned Papa from David Deutsch, because he has repackaged, re-explained,
00:03:10.320 improved in certain ways what Papa has said through the fabric of reality and the beginning
00:03:16.120 So people have been able to pick up those memes that otherwise would have been elusive
00:03:21.960 Papa does famously write with great clarity in comparison to other philosophers, I should
00:03:27.720 hasten to add, but despite that high level of clarity, just with the passage of time,
00:03:33.160 language changes, problem situations change, and so therefore a modern philosopher like David
00:03:39.200 Deutsch, who re-explains what Papa is saying, is sometimes they better avenue into understanding
00:03:44.680 those ideas than the original philosopher, let's say.
00:03:48.520 Also just on this philosophy of education, thing that's kind of behind this short section
00:03:53.920 that I've read from the beginning of infinity just there.
00:03:56.880 It really points to something about the differences among teachers, and you can think
00:04:02.120 back to the teachers that you had at either school or university.
00:04:06.160 And it illuminates this idea that there is such a thing as good teaching or good explaining,
00:04:10.720 you know, fine and Richard Fine when it was famous for being good at explaining difficult
00:04:18.160 And the best teachers of course have a variety of different ways, at least two of explaining
00:04:25.520 If they only have one, well then not a particularly good teacher are they, they might very
00:04:28.440 well understand it themselves and might be able to regurgitate that explanation for someone
00:04:33.520 But if that explanation doesn't really suit the situation that you're in, the kind of
00:04:39.120 knowledge that you have at that particular time, or the problem situation you find yourself
00:04:42.240 in, then of course you might not be able to pick it up as easily as some other teacher
00:04:47.280 who might have exactly the same kind of knowledge and be able to pass it on in a way that
00:04:53.440 People talk about learning styles and that kind of thing, it's really just what your
00:04:56.040 background knowledge happens to be at that particular time.
00:04:58.880 There are certainly some teachers out there who teach by the textbook, input, school and
00:05:06.640 And these people are kind of an impediment to learning.
00:05:10.480 They don't really assist because they're kind of just getting in the way of the textbook.
00:05:14.560 You may as well just read the textbook if all they're going to do is to simply cleave
00:05:22.600 On the other hand if they can refer you to the text and then explain sections of the
00:05:28.720 text in a way that speaks to you a little bit more clearly than all the better and if
00:05:33.480 they have three or four such approaches to explaining then all the better still.
00:05:38.600 And if they can make it entertaining and funny then you really have one of those rare
00:05:42.920 teachers that can inspire your learning in a particular area and also help you with your
00:05:48.760 particular problem situation of wanting to find out how the world works in that particular
00:05:54.880 But if they're dry and they're just saying on page 62 here's what it says or suddenly
00:05:59.320 when I remember at school as we had people who would put up overhead projector things
00:06:04.480 and then they would just read off the overhead projector.
00:06:06.320 I had one of these in like second year physics at Uni learning relativity and this
00:06:12.640 lecturer would just project the lesson onto the screen and literally read the overhead
00:06:22.520 But you know at the same university I had some absolutely brilliant lecturers and the funny
00:06:28.720 thing was and this shows you how individual learning happens to be.
00:06:32.680 One of my favourite lecturers was basically one of the most disorganized as well would
00:06:37.280 arrive to the class just seemingly not knowing where we were up to exactly, would have
00:06:42.160 a hazy idea, would never really refer to the official curriculum as it was published and
00:06:47.240 it would often fill us in on their own particular area of obscure research.
00:06:52.840 It would seem obscure but of course in order to understand the problem they were trying
00:06:56.040 to solve they would then go and explain all the foundational things that would beneath
00:07:00.840 All the knowledge that one needed in order to come at this problem from different angles
00:07:04.680 and so by the end of the lecture we would have a great understanding of this particular
00:07:10.080 niche area of knowledge, this area of specialty that this particular lecture was interested
00:07:14.680 in and that was the great part about of course going to university as you have these specialists
00:07:18.600 there working on very particular fundamental foundational or specialized problems that you
00:07:25.600 need expert knowledge in order to try and tackle to some extent you need expert knowledge
00:07:30.360 and so they would be able to lift you up to there to where they were at, to the amount
00:07:35.560 of knowledge they had by explaining what the problem was and all the things beneath that
00:07:39.960 problem that had led to that problem and so this was the kind of lecture I absolutely
00:07:44.600 loved and I remember at a lunch break one time having a discussion with fellow students
00:07:49.720 about this and there were other students there who yes agreed that this particular lecture
00:07:53.280 was fantastic because they were funny and engaging and went off topic and talked about
00:07:58.040 tangent and when I found tangents and gave anecdotes and it was just all and all the stuff
00:08:03.000 that was related but not necessarily central to the official curriculum and this was precisely
00:08:09.440 the thing that other people in the class couldn't stand and would say that lecture is
00:08:13.120 my least favourite of all because they disorganized and they go off topic I just want to
00:08:17.360 learn what's in the official curriculum so that I know what to study for the assessments
00:08:22.640 for the exams so I can pass the exams and get good marks and of course this illustrates
00:08:27.480 a great difficulty with that style of education anyway having classes of that kind but
00:08:34.840 I guess in a free market where people are going to choose amongst universities the only
00:08:39.480 solution I can think of and I don't know what the solution otherwise to this would be is to
00:08:43.240 have those two approaches there the kind of style where a student wants to go along and
00:08:48.560 learn from an expert in an entertaining way to sit there and listen to the lecture kind
00:08:53.200 of like a TED talk kind of thing where you're actually able to interact one on one with
00:08:58.480 the person giving the TED talk and to talk about all of the questions you might have
00:09:03.920 that the lecture itself doesn't particularly answer that's an ideal kind of learning
00:09:08.120 I would suggest or there might be other people whose style of learning is just I want to
00:09:13.480 know what the official curriculum is so that I can get credentialed so that I can pass
00:09:17.160 the exam and get the certificate to hang on the wall to say that I have this particular
00:09:21.400 degree or whatever then maybe universities could offer these two different sorts or maybe
00:09:26.800 lecturers could advertise themselves as a being of one of these two different extremes
00:09:31.200 or somewhere in the middle so you'd know what you're getting but of course at the moment
00:09:34.960 at university or course at school you don't know what you're getting you can't really
00:09:38.600 pick how well there's an extent to which of course you can pick you can look at the
00:09:43.320 list of lecturers and a list of subjects and then pick that way but sometimes maybe
00:09:47.800 you like the lecture but not the subject or vice versa so this is a great challenge
00:09:53.400 for universities I don't know what the solution is but I know it's certainly a challenge
00:09:57.040 at the moment because the only reason for the continued existence of that kind of university
00:10:04.320 thing is because of this whole idea of credentialing of getting someone an official degree
00:10:09.560 to say that you are now officially qualified in this particular area even though your level
00:10:14.480 of understanding of that area might be quite poor because if you are that kind of student
00:10:19.440 that just wants to learn the knowledge required to pass the exams then really the best
00:10:24.200 idea is to simply practice exam questions over and over and over again until you become
00:10:29.200 proficient at answering exam questions which might not be a very good indication of what
00:10:34.160 is happening in the real world when you actually have to solve a problem in other words
00:10:37.960 I think no one knows the answer to rather than just a puzzle which is a question in an exam
00:10:42.840 for example that someone already knows the answer and you have to come up with the correct
00:10:48.280 answer rather than the best possible answer given all of the unknowns which is what reality
00:10:55.600 and finding stuff out in science and various other areas of knowledge is in fact all
00:11:00.240 about okay whatever the case that was an extremely long diversion about something barely
00:11:05.440 related to this chapter so let's go back to the chapter just to recap we've got a
00:11:10.680 parrot and we have a student listening to a lecture and David is explaining the difference
00:11:17.320 between how they both acquire the capacity to repeat what the lecture is saying whether
00:11:23.320 word by word or the actual meaning of the lesson that lecture is delivering David writes quote
00:11:30.440 alternatively suppose that the lecturer had consistently miss spoken in a way that altered
00:11:35.240 the meaning and had then made one correction at the end the parrot would copy the wrong
00:11:40.760 version the student would not even if the lecturer had never corrected the error at all
00:11:47.280 a human misenter might still have a good chance of understanding the idea that was in
00:11:50.800 a lecturer's mind and again without imitating any behavior if someone else reported the
00:11:56.080 lecture but in a way that contained severe misconceptions a human listener might still be able
00:12:02.120 to detect what the lecturer meant by explaining the reporter's misconceptions as well as
00:12:07.240 the lecturer's intention just as a conjuring expert might be able to detect what really happened
00:12:12.960 during a trick given only a false account from the audience of what they saw rather than
00:12:18.520 imitating behavior a human being tries to explain it to understand the ideas that caused
00:12:24.800 it which is a special case of the general human objective of explaining the world when we
00:12:30.200 succeed in explaining someone's behavior and we approve of the underlying intention we
00:12:35.280 may subsequently behave like that person in the relevant sense but if we disapprove we
00:12:40.800 might behave unlike that person since creating explanations is second nature or other
00:12:45.800 first nature to us we can easily misconstrue the process of acquiring a meme as imitating
00:12:51.320 what we see using your explanations we see right through the behavior to the meaning
00:12:56.880 parrots copy distinctive sounds apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited
00:13:02.440 class but humans do not especially copy any behavior they use conjecture criticism and experiment
00:13:09.880 to create good explanations of the meaning of things other people's behavior their own
00:13:14.560 and that of the world in general this is what creativity does and if we end up behaving
00:13:20.000 like other people it is because we have rediscovered the same idea okay I'm skipping
00:13:25.840 a little and then David goes on to a subsection which is titled both puzzles have the
00:13:31.240 same solution and he writes in this chapter I have presented two puzzles the first is why
00:13:37.880 human creativity was evolutionarily advantageous at a time when there was almost no innovation
00:13:44.200 the second is how human memes can possibly be replicated given that they have content
00:13:48.760 that the recipient never observes I think that both these puzzles have the same solution
00:13:54.040 what replicate human memes is creativity and creativity was used while it was evolving
00:14:00.280 to replicate memes in other words it was used to acquire existing knowledge not to create
00:14:06.200 new knowledge but the mechanism to do both things is identical and so in acquiring the ability
00:14:11.440 to do the former we automatically become able to do the latter it was a momentous example
00:14:17.120 of reach which made possible everything that is uniquely human pausing there my reflection
00:14:23.600 on that and David is going to get into this in the very next paragraph but just to
00:14:27.120 emphasize what's being said here the ability to acquire memes human creativity enables
00:14:37.680 us to acquire memes existing knowledge things that are already known to the populace
00:14:44.000 to other people to the culture and so on so creativity allows us to replicate those memes
00:14:50.880 the existing knowledge and maintain a tradition to a large extent however that same capacity
00:14:58.480 to create to create to recreate the memes to replicate the memes also gave us the ability
00:15:06.160 to create new knowledge that no one had ever had before so that's a really interesting
00:15:12.000 capacity of the human mind a unique capacity of the human mind and as we'll get into
00:15:17.120 a capacity that is universal and its ability to create knowledge in other words whatever
00:15:22.320 knowledge can be created can be created by us explanatory knowledge next paragraph David says
00:15:29.520 quote a person acquiring a meme faces the same logical challenge as a scientist both must discover
00:15:37.440 a hidden explanation for the former it is an idea in the minds of other people for the latter
00:15:42.080 a regularity or law of nature not the person has direct access to this explanation but both
00:15:47.600 have access to evidence with which explanations can be tested the observed behavior of people who
00:15:52.960 hold the meme and physical phenomena conforming to the law the puzzle of how one can possibly
00:15:58.720 translate behavior back into a theory that contains its meaning as therefore the same puzzle
00:16:04.080 as where scientific knowledge comes from and the idea that memes are copied by imitating
00:16:08.560 their holders behavior it's the same mistake as empiricism or inductivism or muckism they all
00:16:14.240 depend on their being a way of automatically translating problems like the problem of planetary
00:16:18.880 motions or how to reach leads on tall trees or be invisible to one's prey into their solutions
00:16:25.760 in other words they assume that the environment in the form of an observed phenomenon or a
00:16:30.480 tall tree say can instruct minds or genomes in how to meet its challenges then David goes on to
00:16:36.880 quote pop-up and pop a wrote quote the inductivist or lemarchian approach operates with the
00:16:43.440 idea of instruction from without or from the environment but the critical or Darwinian approach
00:16:49.840 only allows instruction from within from within the structure itself I contend that there is no
00:16:56.320 such thing as instruction from without the structure we do not discover new facts on your
00:17:01.200 effects by copying them or by inferring them inductively from observation or by any other method
00:17:06.240 of instruction by the environment we use rather the method of trial in the elimination of error
00:17:11.920 as Ernst Gombrich says making comes before matching the active production of a new trial structure
00:17:18.960 comes before its exposure to eliminating tests that's from the myth of the framework then David
00:17:25.360 goes on to say pop a could just as well have written we do not acquire new memes by copying them
00:17:32.160 or by inferring them inductively from observation or by any other method of imitation or instruction
00:17:37.840 by the environment the transmission of human type means means whose meaning is not mostly predefined
00:17:43.920 within the receiver cannot be other than a creative activity on the part of the receiver
00:17:49.920 memes like scientific theories are not derived from anything they are created afresh by the recipient
00:17:56.160 they are conjectural explanations which are then subjected to criticism and testing before being
00:18:02.880 tentatively adopted this same pattern of creative conjecture criticism and testing generate
00:18:10.320 in explicit as well as explicit ideas in fact all creativity does for no idea can be represented entirely
00:18:16.800 explicitly when we make an explicit conjecture it has an in explicit component whether we are aware
00:18:23.760 of it or not and so does all criticism pause there just a my reflection on that I've often been
00:18:30.800 asked in my having done this for a while now explaining aspects of the beginning infinity
00:18:38.640 why it is will never get a final theory of such and such usually it's physics why can't we
00:18:45.760 get to the final fundamental theory of physics okay and and one response is that I often give
00:18:52.080 like for example you know people talk about well what is the physical theory that might unite
00:18:57.360 general relativity and quantum theory people are trying string theory people are trying
00:19:03.520 various other approaches as well string theory is probably the most famous example of one
00:19:07.520 although it's not one theory there are many different forms of string theory when you look into it
00:19:12.480 I don't fully I don't claim to understand string theory however what I would say about that is
00:19:18.960 that even if it were successful it couldn't be a final theory of physics it wouldn't be the
00:19:25.440 last word on physics they would always still be more to know even at the foundations because you
00:19:30.960 would always be able to ask why is string theory why does string theory have the form that it does
00:19:36.400 there'll be unknowns there in the same way that the the laws of physics that we have now have
00:19:43.200 some really deep questions about the my favorite kind of question about the form that the laws
00:19:48.720 of physics take are the constants of nature where did these constants of nature come from
00:19:55.360 why do they have the values that they have you know the universal gravitational constant that
00:20:01.520 appears in not only Newton's law of gravity it appears in general relativity as well k big g which is
00:20:08.080 something like 6.67 times 10 of the power of minus 11 don't worry about what the units are
00:20:12.880 anyway this this number the value of this okay because you can you can actually change the number
00:20:17.120 if you change what the units are ignoring that complication this number tells you something about
00:20:22.560 the strength of gravity not just here on earth but throughout the universe okay there is this
00:20:27.440 number here on earth 9.81 which is the acceleration the local acceleration to gravity here near the
00:20:32.960 surface of the earth at sea level and so on and so forth okay that number easily changes if you
00:20:37.840 change your location around the solar system and around the universe that will change depending
00:20:43.120 upon what cosmological body you have me standing on in any particular time and how high you are
00:20:50.400 all that aside the universal gravitational constant is universally it applies everywhere throughout
00:20:54.960 the entire universe and the question is why does it have the value that it has why is it that
00:21:00.400 strong and not stronger or weaker and many this is the fine tuning problem and if we go back
00:21:06.640 through my episodes of the infinity there is a section there there is one of the episodes there
00:21:10.880 is on fine tuning I'll put that up on screen for you if you're interested more about this it's
00:21:16.400 certainly been a great fascination of mine having taken on astronomy looking into all of these
00:21:21.360 different constants of nature another one is simply the massive the electron or how how strongly
00:21:28.240 the strong force couples together the protons in a nucleus okay all of these constants of nature
00:21:35.280 come together such that we have a really interesting universe we have life in the universe
00:21:41.360 now there is no physical law that gives us those numbers that is able to predict what the
00:21:49.920 numbers are going to be those numbers are empirically known you have to measure them you have to
00:21:57.120 use scientific apparatus you have to go into a laboratory and actually figure out what these
00:22:02.240 numbers are in the case of G the universal gravitational constant is many ways you can measure
00:22:06.160 so the famous one is is the Cavendish experiment Cavendish experiment with those 1700s I think
00:22:11.760 something like that and it's basically the purpose of it is to find G and this is how we know G
00:22:17.520 we have to go out there into the universe and to use physical objects and find out what these
00:22:21.840 things are so it doesn't come from a theory so there must be a deeper theory we most you know
00:22:27.360 scientists physicists think well this is a this is a question this is an open scientific question
00:22:32.160 why is it that value or not something else and so far there's just kind of two approaches neither
00:22:37.600 of which I don't think anyone believes one is well the universe has been designed this way
00:22:42.960 so there's a god or a simulation which has selected those particular values so that
00:22:50.240 conscious observers can be here and wonder about that question the other is that there is a
00:22:58.320 megaverse there is a multiverse of multiverses okay a higher order of multiverse I'm not talking
00:23:03.280 about the quantum multiverse but rather I multiverse where every single possible logically possible
00:23:10.400 physical law or something like that exists out there somewhere or other and some of those
00:23:17.760 selections happen to have there is when you when you put together those
00:23:22.240 constants of nature in just the right way we'll end up producing interesting chemistry and
00:23:27.120 complicated life like ourselves so that could be a solution or you don't even need all the possible
00:23:33.200 physical laws you just need a multitude of them you need enough of them such that at least one of them
00:23:39.360 will produce us okay and so here we are to wonder about it because it's actually all the different
00:23:44.000 sorts of physical laws with all the different values of these constants of nature are out there somewhere
00:23:48.800 most of which don't have life and we happen to be in the one or few that do have life and so
00:23:54.320 that can be a solution now these two solutions are poor I guess they they raise more questions than
00:24:02.960 they answer where are these are the universes how can we experimentally detect these other
00:24:07.520 universes at the moment it seems like those other universes are basically the same category as
00:24:11.680 God may as well believe in God they're both metaphysical claims so I happen to think and I think a
00:24:16.960 lot of other scientists think as well it's that well we don't yet know the theory it's kind of like
00:24:21.680 we're at the position prior to when Darwin came up with evolution by natural selection prior to that
00:24:28.000 it was unimaginable to people that the appearance of design could arise without a designer okay
00:24:35.360 so Pailey's famous comment about the watch you pick up the watch in the field somewhere other
00:24:40.960 you assume by looking at the intricate workings of its mechanism that therefore there must be a
00:24:46.640 creator a designer a builder behind this watch that you find so then shouldn't it be the case that
00:24:52.880 the human eye or the eyes of mammals and fish and birds this is an even more intricate device
00:25:00.080 of a kind a more intricate thing that has appeared in nature so therefore if you're assuming that
00:25:05.600 the watch has a watchmaker you should definitely assume that life has a life maker and therefore
00:25:11.600 God exists that kind of thing so people couldn't conceive of a way in which design could just
00:25:17.920 arise it would otherwise seem like magic if you could say a watch just naturally appears according
00:25:24.240 acting under deterministic physical laws then this seems astounding it seems like there has to
00:25:30.240 be a watchmaker but of course now we know in now we know of evolution by natural selection we know
00:25:37.520 that over time life fills these niches and these niches get filled with organisms that are fit
00:25:46.480 in that particular niche and if one goes extinct then a new one will arise and have features that
00:25:52.240 in maybe more or less different depending upon how much the environment has changed over time
00:25:56.320 someone and so forth we know about neodymian is an evolution by natural selection it was a theory
00:26:01.760 prior to which people just couldn't conceive of how it would be possible for this kind of thing to
00:26:07.760 happen now actually there is a third way in which people talk about these concerts of nature and
00:26:14.560 one of them years and this is I think Lee Smolenside can look up Lee Smolens and Lee Smolens talks
00:26:19.120 about an evolutionary cosmology where black holes have this reverse side to them where there's
00:26:27.600 like a white hole and out of the white hole comes a new big bang and a new universe and these
00:26:32.880 universes that are produced have slightly different constants of nature and there's this evolutionary
00:26:39.200 process whereby the universes that proliferate tend to be more similar to the ones that they have
00:26:45.920 come from so these universes are giving birth via this black hole mechanism that is you know wherever
00:26:51.440 you find a black hole then that's a portal to another universe so the theory goes kind of thing I
00:26:56.560 don't really haven't looked into too much of the details but that universe that you go into once
00:27:01.840 you've gone through the black hole then has properties somewhat similar to the universe that we're in
00:27:06.160 right now but the constants of nature ever so slightly changed and so in this way you can have this
00:27:11.760 evolutionary proliferation of universes perhaps beginning with ours perhaps not beginning with ours
00:27:17.920 whatever the case some of those universes that are birthed from black hole events will have
00:27:27.760 conditions such that you life will arise but not all of them okay so this is a kind of a third
00:27:32.560 approach but it's not a new mode of explanation really is it it's the same kind of explanation as
00:27:38.080 evolution by natural selection so in David Deutsches terminology what we really want is a new mode
00:27:43.600 of explanation that would be my guess a new mode of explanation will give us the explanation of
00:27:49.600 why the constants of nature have the values that they do and it's a something that we can't
00:27:55.920 imagine just the moment well we could someone out there is going to come up with the answer to
00:27:59.600 this okay so they can imagine it I can't imagine what it will be if you have any ideas
00:28:04.800 that's common and I've never asked if people to comment in the YouTube comments before
00:28:10.240 perhaps comment in the YouTube comments okay tell me what your explanation for why the
00:28:15.040 constants of nature are the way they are don't mention God don't mention the super megaverse
00:28:20.560 and don't mention evolution by natural selection so if you can come up with a new mode of
00:28:24.160 explanation that no one's ever heard of before because that could be Nobel Prize winning time
00:28:28.960 science but that that long diversion is really off track is just to say that we don't yet have
00:28:37.440 a final theory of physics we never will because of that reason now because we cannot we will
00:28:44.080 need to know what those constants of nature and whether or not string theory can give us that I don't
00:28:48.080 know whatever the case the other approach to this why we can't have a final theory of physics or
00:28:55.520 anything else as David says there quote he says when we make an explicit conjecture string theory
00:29:04.640 would be an explicit conjecture as would general relativity any scientific theory it has an
00:29:09.600 explicit component whether we are aware of it or not and so does all criticism so this
00:29:15.040 in explicit component of a theory is always there and can be made more explicit over time but you
00:29:22.320 can never get rid of it altogether but the in explicit component is something that needs further
00:29:30.000 explanation that is kind of it's not that it's unknown in any complete sense but it does mean
00:29:36.240 that you aren't there at the final theory because you've got certain things that you can't explicitly
00:29:42.560 explain and surely a final theory would be perfectly explicit if it's not perfectly explicit
00:29:48.480 then someone can always say what do you mean by this particular thing at infinitum so you can't
00:29:55.760 get to the end you can't get the final answer because there is always in explicit content no matter
00:30:01.200 what the idea happens to be and just to tie this up into a neat little bow even if we did have
00:30:06.880 the final theory or physics or the final theory of everything we couldn't possibly know that
00:30:12.880 I don't think there can be a final theory of physics for the reasons I said because you can always
00:30:17.920 ask why is that the final theory does that final theory tell you why it's the final theory and if so
00:30:23.600 why can't we ask the question about why that explanation of why it's the final theory is in fact true
00:30:29.360 okay so we can always ask the deeper question about how do you know that why is that the case
00:30:35.440 and so on anyway back to the book and David writes thus as has so often happened in the history
00:30:42.720 of universality the human capacity for universal explanation did not evolve to have a universal
00:30:49.120 function it evolved simply to increase the volume of mimetic information that our ancestors could
00:30:54.880 acquire and the speed and accuracy with which they could acquire it but since the easiest way
00:31:00.800 for evolution to do that was to give us a universal ability to explain through creativity
00:31:06.320 that is what it did this epistemological fact provides not only the solution of the two puzzles
00:31:12.320 I mentioned above but also the reason for the evolution of human creativity and therefore the
00:31:18.240 human species in the first place it must have happened something like this in early pre-human societies
00:31:25.120 there are only very simple means the kind that apes now have they perhaps with a wider repertoire
00:31:30.560 of copyable elementary behaviors those memes were about practical things like how to get food that
00:31:36.240 was otherwise inaccessible the value of such knowledge must have been high so this created a
00:31:41.680 ready-made niche for any adaptation that would reduce the effort required to replicate memes
00:31:48.160 creativity was the ultimate adaptation to fill that niche as it increased further adaptations
00:31:53.680 cold old such as an increase in memory capacity to store more memes finer motor control
00:32:00.000 and specialized brain structures for dealing with language as a result the meme bandwidth
00:32:06.560 the amount of mimetic information that could be passed from each generation to the next
00:32:11.440 increased to memes also became more complex and sophisticated this is why and how our species evolved
00:32:19.600 and wider world rapidly at first memes gradually came to dominate our ancestors behavior
00:32:26.160 meme evolution took place and like all evolution this was always in the direction of greater
00:32:31.840 faithfulness this meant becoming ever more anti-rational at some point meme evolution achieved
00:32:38.560 static societies presumably there were tribes consequently all those increases in creativity never
00:32:44.880 produced streams of innovations innovation remained imperceptibly slow even as the capacity for it
00:32:51.680 was increasing rapidly even in a static society memes still evolve due to imperceptible errors
00:32:58.640 of replication they just evolve more slowly than anyone can notice imperceptible errors cannot be
00:33:04.560 suppressed they would generally evolve towards greater fidelity of replication as usual with evolution
00:33:11.280 and hence to greater statistic of the society pause their my reflection so if you're in an
00:33:18.560 ancient tribe in fact a really really ancient tribe day prehistoric ancient tribe you know
00:33:25.040 your coexisting here alongside sort of Neanderthals then you're using tools and the way in which
00:33:31.200 you're able to use it all is because memes have been passed on within the culture where you find
00:33:37.040 yourself and perhaps making these tools is part of a ritual so it might serve a jewel purpose if
00:33:43.680 you make a spear ever more sharp then you are adhering to the culture's memes ever better
00:33:51.360 and so you can't be accused of not trying to enact the memes of the society so you won't be cast
00:33:57.520 out similarly making the spear ever sharp up is going to actually have practical use and so
00:34:04.880 there's going to be there's a jewel reason why greater statistic of memes that greatest
00:34:12.080 statistic in the society can result in very gradual evolutionary change of the memes but
00:34:19.840 nothing creative actually being done so the ever sharper spear might actually have some practical
00:34:24.800 benefits but if you are required only to ever make ever sharper spears then you will never
00:34:30.560 innovate to make a bow and arrow or make anything else better that might be actually better
00:34:35.920 for capturing animals when you go hunting and so your tribal ancient static society is a real risk
00:34:45.200 of going extinct it can remain static for a very long period of time but as soon as the
00:34:52.400 problem comes along which requires creativity in order to solve you are singularly and all the
00:34:58.800 members of your tribe are singularly unable to do anything about it even though you have a creative
00:35:03.920 capacity because the creative capacity is latent in a way and you're not using it sorry about the
00:35:09.520 traffic noise back to the book and David writes status in such a society is reduced by trans
00:35:16.960 gressing people's expectations of proper behaviour and is improved by meeting them there would
00:35:22.480 have been the expectations of parents priests chiefs and potential mates or whoever controlled
00:35:27.280 mating in that society who with themselves conforming to the wishes and expectations of the society
00:35:32.800 at large those people's opinions would determine one's ability to eat thrive and reproduce
00:35:38.320 and hence the fate of one's genes pause there just reflecting on that and that's like an
00:35:44.000 aha moment at least it should be if you're encountering this for the first time so if a human
00:35:53.200 type creature or very early humans let's say who are evolving the capacity to replicate
00:36:01.920 means over time then those early people who are who have got certain genes which allow for them
00:36:11.840 to replicate means then the ones who are able to replicate means more faithfully are the ones who
00:36:19.680 eat thrive and reproduce and so therefore their genes for the ability to replicate means are being
00:36:27.120 passed on to their children okay so the ability to replicate means then becomes there's a selection
00:36:32.480 pressure on that there's a niche to be filled there and we're going to come to niches in just a moment
00:36:38.240 but I might just slag the fact that in a recent talkcast not really related
00:36:44.640 much the beginning infinity just more of a personal reflection of mine on the possibility of alien
00:36:50.320 life out there I mentioned various arguments and one of the arguments I mentioned because these
00:36:57.360 are just wild speculations for the most part no one knows much about the possibility of alien life
00:37:05.120 you know whether the biology will be the same as ours or different to ours and so on and so forth
00:37:10.640 but one of the arguments from an academic called Charlie Lineweaver is that
00:37:16.880 it's assumed that it's an intelligence niche but if we look at the history of life on earth it
00:37:22.720 appears as though this intelligent niche has only arisen once and maybe that is just a very
00:37:27.040 fortuitous happenstance occurrence and we shouldn't expect it to ever happen again maybe the intelligence
00:37:33.920 niche doesn't actually appear out there in the universe anywhere even if there is
00:37:38.320 life teeming throughout many planets in the universe because for a long time here on earth there
00:37:44.400 wasn't really an intelligence niche to be filled because there was no intelligence anywhere
00:37:50.240 the intelligence niches there is once it's filled by intelligence anyway that's slightly off
00:37:55.600 topic let's go back to the book and David writes but how does one discover the wishes and
00:38:00.000 expectations of other people they might issue commands but they could never specify every detail
00:38:04.720 of what they expected let alone every detail of how to achieve it when one is commanded to do
00:38:09.840 something or expected to as a condition for being considered worthy of food or mating for example
00:38:14.800 one might remember seeing an already respected person doing the same thing and one might try
00:38:18.560 to emulate that person to do that effectively one would have to understand what the point of doing
00:38:23.760 it was and to try to achieve that is best one could one would impress one's chief priest
00:38:29.840 parental potential mate by replicating and following their standards of what one should strive for
00:38:35.280 one would impress the tribe as a whole by replicating their idea all the ideas of the most
00:38:40.080 influential among them of what was worthy and acting accordingly hence paradoxically it requires
00:38:46.480 creativity to thrive in a static society creativity the enables one to be less innovative than
00:38:52.560 other people and that is how primitive static societies which contain pitifully little knowledge
00:38:57.280 and existed only by suppressing innovation constituted environments that strongly favored the
00:39:02.400 evolution of an ever greater ability to innovate from the perspective of those hypothetical
00:39:08.560 extraterrestrials observing our ancestors a community of advanced apes with memes before the
00:39:14.560 evolution of creativity began would have looked superficially similar to their descendants after the
00:39:19.520 jump to universality the latter would merely have had more memes but the mechanism keeping those
00:39:24.800 memes replicating faithfully would have changed profoundly the animals of the earlier community
00:39:29.920 would have been relying on their lack of creativity to replicate their memes the people
00:39:34.480 despite living in a static society would be relying entirely on their creativity
00:39:39.920 pause their mind reflection so what he said there well so there has been a jump to universe
00:39:44.800 ality there there was a species of human like but not human human like ape that had memes but no
00:39:54.720 creativity then a species arose human that did have creativity and I say human because here we can
00:40:03.840 just use it as a kind of synonym for people people being universal explainers people being able to
00:40:09.360 create explanations and people being able to form models in their mind of anything in the universe
00:40:18.240 anything that's out there in the universe we can come to understand
00:40:22.560 insofar as other animals and other species of ape can form models at all of the world around them
00:40:30.160 then it's only of their local environment of the things that the genes might have coded the
00:40:35.600 memes that they have for okay maybe my cat is at wonders around the house has a model of the house
00:40:41.440 it's like a visually major a map something like that it knows how to get around
00:40:45.840 but the cat has absolutely no capacity whatsoever to form a model like the standard model of
00:40:52.640 particle physics or a model of what an economic system is all about okay so we can do that
00:40:58.640 because we are universal explainers it doesn't matter what the phenomena is in reality
00:41:05.120 we can develop an explanation of it and so have a model of it whereas in so far as other creatures
00:41:11.040 are able to build models at all in their minds and they must be able to build models of some kind
00:41:16.080 there is a finite repertoire the cat would probably reach a limit of being able to find its way
00:41:24.720 around the physical environment what's the physical environment got too large and this is probably why
00:41:28.800 creatures like cats don't tend to wander too far from their homes but even if the cat is allowed
00:41:34.880 to go outside it tends to stay within a fairly short radius of wherever its actual house is
00:41:41.520 wherever the food is probably because it would it understands or its genes understand that if it
00:41:45.120 goes any further it gets lost it's probably it's it's ram on its little brain quickly gets
00:41:52.000 filled up anyway so the point is that prior to whatever the first universal explainer was
00:41:59.840 you had apes that relied on memes and then you had universal explainers that relied on creativity
00:42:05.120 however superficially these two creatures would have seemed exactly the same because the memes
00:42:11.360 would have been precise the same the content of the memes would have been the same it's just
00:42:14.880 that in the second case now the possibility for an infinite growth of knowledge existed there was in
00:42:22.480 that creature it was able to explain actually explain stuff and create new memes whereas the
00:42:28.240 previous one only had a finite repertoire of memes they could change but only very very slowly
00:42:33.920 and not about anything at all just about the kind of things that happened to be in its genes
00:42:38.240 okay let's go back to the book and David writes as with all jumps to universality the way in
00:42:43.840 which the jump emerged out of a gradual change it's interesting to think about creativity is a
00:42:48.560 property of software as i said we could be running AI programs on our laptop computers today
00:42:54.880 if we knew how to write or evolve such programs like all software would require the computer to
00:43:00.400 have certain hardware specifications in order to be able to process the required amount of data
00:43:05.200 in the required time it so happened that the hardware specifications that would make creativity
00:43:09.680 practicable were included in those that were being heavily favored for pre-created meme replication
00:43:15.440 the principal one would have been memory capacity the more one could remember the more memes one
00:43:20.880 could enact and the more accurately one could enact them but there may have also been hardware
00:43:26.320 abilities such as mirror neurons for imitating a wider range of elementary actions than apes could
00:43:31.360 ape for instance the elementary sounds of a language it would have been natural for such hardware
00:43:36.080 assistance for language abilities to be evolving at the same time as the increased meme bandwidth
00:43:41.520 so by the time creativity was evolving there would already have been significant co-evolution
00:43:46.560 between genes and memes genes evolving hardware to support more embedded memes and memes evolving
00:43:52.240 to take over ever more of what had previously been genetic functions such as choice of mate
00:43:58.560 and methods of eating fighting and so on therefore my speculation is that the creativity
00:44:03.520 program is not entirely inborn it is a combination of genes and memes the hardware of the human
00:44:09.760 brain would have been capable of being creative and sentient conscious and all those other things
00:44:15.360 long before any creative program existed considering a sequence of brains during this period
00:44:20.320 the earliest ones capable of supporting creativity would have required very ingenious programming
00:44:25.600 to fit the capacity into the barely suitable hardware as the hardware improved creativity could
00:44:31.600 have been programmed more easily until the moment when it became easy enough actually to be done
00:44:36.640 by evolution we do not know what was being gradually increased in that approach to a universal
00:44:41.360 explainer if it did we could program one tomorrow just pause there just um my reflection on the
00:44:47.920 part where David writes that speculates that the creativity program is not entirely inborn
00:44:54.240 combination of genes and memes what this what this doesn't mean is that therefore creativity of
00:45:01.520 the human kind necessarily requires the wet wherever brain a particular kind of hardware no that's
00:45:07.840 not the case you'll still be able to physically it has to be the case that we can put the
00:45:14.800 creative algorithm whatever it is into a silicon computer why must that be the case because of the
00:45:21.120 universality of computation that any physical process David Deutsch proved this remember
00:45:28.160 and in fact it kind of goes back to Turing as well and I'm Turing any physical process
00:45:33.440 can be modeled as a computation so whatever the physical thing is that's happening
00:45:40.320 you can write a computer algorithm in principle to capture that
00:45:44.080 for only a certain number of things have we actually have done that of course okay we can model
00:45:51.040 you know how cars work therefore we have car computer games with a model how narrow plane works
00:45:55.280 therefore we have aircraft simulators how the planets move we can do modeling of how the motion
00:46:02.560 of the solar system but we haven't written the program for a person for a human yet but
00:46:09.440 it's a physical process whatever the brain is doing is is physical so therefore that can be done
00:46:15.200 inside a computer so it's possible and it's provably possible I should say all right back to the
00:46:21.280 book and this section is titled the future of creativity and I'm skipping the first page or so of
00:46:28.800 this particular section and I'm jumping in where it says not only is creativity necessary
00:46:34.640 for human meme replication it is also sufficient deaf people and blind people and paralyzed
00:46:39.920 people are still able to acquire and create human ideas to or more or less full extent
00:46:44.800 hence neither walking upright nor fun motor control nor the ability to pass sounds into words
00:46:49.360 or any of those other adaptations though they might have played a role historically in creating
00:46:53.360 the conditions for human evolution were functionally necessary to allow humans to become creative
00:46:59.280 nor therefore they philosophically significant in understanding what humans are today
00:47:03.760 namely people creative universal explainers pause their my reflection this is a profound discovery
00:47:12.240 in philosophy by David Deutsch I do not know of any criticisms I've actually heard any criticisms
00:47:18.720 of this by the way from people who understand at least that this is human nature this is an
00:47:26.400 explanation of human nature you know it's it's been a millennia long search for what it is that
00:47:31.840 separates people from other creatures it's not you know people have talked about souls people
00:47:39.120 have talked about or is it our ability to be moral is it our ability to think about aesthetics
00:47:46.960 and science okay all of these attempts have kind of been circling or aspects of this fundamental
00:47:54.800 explanation namely that we are universal explainers universal explainers back to the book
00:48:01.360 David writes it was specifically creativity that made the difference between ape and
00:48:06.000 memes expensive in terms of the time and effort required to replicate them and inherently limited
00:48:11.680 in the knowledge that they were capable of expressing and human memes which are efficiently
00:48:16.480 transmitted and universal in their expressive power the beginning of creativity was in that sense
00:48:23.040 the beginning of infinity we have no way of telling at present how likely it was for creativity
00:48:28.960 to begin to evolve in apes but once it began to there would automatically have been an
00:48:34.560 evolutionary pressure for it to continue and for other meme facilitating adaptations to follow
00:48:39.920 in its wake this increase must have continued through all the static societies of prehistory
00:48:46.880 okay just pause there and we're nearly at the final paragraph but that's really cool there and
00:48:53.040 again this kind of is sympathetic to the sentiments I expressed about line weaver and that other
00:49:01.040 topcast episode about life out there in the universe are we alone where David has written here
00:49:08.160 he said quote we have no way of telling at present how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve
00:49:14.000 in apes but that's a fundamental importance to this question about the possibility of alien life
00:49:20.320 out there it could be the case that creativity really does evolve okay frequently it crops up
00:49:28.160 whenever life crops up there is this question that I raised in that episode about well how
00:49:33.680 come it only happened once if it's so easy okay if the probability of it or the likelihood
00:49:39.840 of it arising in apes or anywhere else is high then why didn't it happen more than once
00:49:47.360 how likely is it for apes to appear are apes necessary could lizards you know evolve into
00:49:55.120 intelligent creatures okay you see this in science fiction type movies right and certain
00:49:59.360 computer games where you have intelligent lizards or intelligent cats and so on you know
00:50:04.560 that that assumes a kind of Lamarism or a kind of direction to evolution and specifically
00:50:10.480 it assumes that intelligence is this convergent feature of evolution which it doesn't appear
00:50:15.760 there's any evidence for whatsoever unlike the existence of the eye which keeps on cropping up in
00:50:21.600 lots of different species or wings crop up in lots of different species as well
00:50:27.440 brains that are able to do mathematics in the way that we can write poetry in the way that we
00:50:31.680 can appear to have a reason only once creativity appears to have a reason only once but we don't
00:50:36.480 know how likely it was David says that here so it could be really likely it's just that
00:50:42.480 earth life on earth has been unlucky in a sense and perhaps out there there's lots of other
00:50:48.640 different kinds of universal explainers or not perhaps it it arose once and that's it
00:50:53.920 throughout the universe by the way and for some of the mathematical arguments on that
00:50:58.320 you see that episode anyway final paragraph let's begin the David writes the horror of static
00:51:06.320 societies which I described in the previous chapter can now be seen as a hideous practical jerk
00:51:11.360 that the universe played on the human species our creativity which evolved in order to increase the
00:51:16.160 amount of knowledge that we could use and which would immediately have been capable of producing
00:51:20.400 an endless stream of useful innovations as well was from the outset prevented from doing so
00:51:24.960 by the very knowledge the memes that creativity preserved the strivings of individuals to better
00:51:30.960 themselves were from the outset perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their
00:51:36.800 efforts to exactly the opposite end to thwart all attempts and improvement to keep sentient beings
00:51:42.800 locked in a crude suffering state of eternity only the enlightenment hundreds of thousands
00:51:48.800 of years later and after who knows how many false starts may at last have made it practical
00:51:54.320 to escape from that eternity into infinity that's the end of the chapter wow what a great way
00:52:00.800 to to end it so yes our ancestors our ape ancestors the humanoid ancestors for hundreds of
00:52:09.200 thousands of years perhaps millions perhaps millions for the overwhelming majority of human history
00:52:14.560 when we lived in tribes in the African savannah when we traveled you know up through Asia
00:52:22.320 eventually got into to Europe etc we weren't making profound improvements you know the prehistoric
00:52:30.480 people were stuck in this static society even though they had the capacity for creativity the
00:52:35.680 creativity was being used for nothing other than maintaining the status quo what a hideous practical
00:52:41.760 joke as David says there remarkably somehow we we we escaped that I don't know what's more
00:52:49.520 astonishing the fact that we have all creativity at all that we evolved creativity and it was
00:52:57.040 used to maintain stasis in our society or is it more remarkable than either of those things that
00:53:05.120 we actually escaped that the creativity eventually enabled us to criticize to actually build a
00:53:15.600 critical tradition so that we could have a means by which to improve rapidly the ideas that we had
00:53:26.320 and then of course we get into you know beyond beyond that because sort of the the the the ability
00:53:31.920 to improve certainly kind of began certainly began you know long before the the enlightenment you
00:53:40.160 know the ability was always there but there were improvements happening slowly but clearly the
00:53:45.120 Roman Empire was not like an ancient prehistoric tribe a lot of improvements have happened but they
00:53:52.320 were not precisely a dynamic society not what we would call a dynamic society that the Roman Empire
00:53:59.280 from you know for a long time they just remained the same and clearly was not generating an open
00:54:07.040 ended stream of innovative knowledge because the Roman Empire fell apart it wasn't able to solve
00:54:14.080 its problems in time thus far we have been able to we the inheritors of the enlightenment tradition
00:54:20.560 have been able to solve the problems so far at a rate faster than what they are coming at us
00:54:27.040 and we should be we should be optimistic that this will continue it's not necessary that it
00:54:32.240 continues there could be a problem that could wipe out civilization but at the moment as long as
00:54:39.360 we maintain this tradition of criticizing everything in a panoptical way in all directions
00:54:46.000 because criticizing everything not not keeping anything off limits except one thing except one thing
00:54:52.880 as David Deutsch points out that tradition itself we don't want to undermine the means
00:54:58.080 of correcting errors we don't want to destroy that do not destroy the means of correcting errors
00:55:02.640 or in other words do not undermine these traditions of criticism and in our western enlightenment
00:55:11.120 tradition what that largely means is ensuring that the institutions that hitherto continue to
00:55:18.400 provide the framework in which this open ended stream of innovation can continue to happen
00:55:24.560 to ensure those institutions remain strong and we don't undermine them and we don't remove them
00:55:28.960 altogether because we don't know exactly how what the reasons are that our society has remained
00:55:38.240 so stable we can go good way to explaining why it is that it's able to make rapid progress
00:55:45.920 makes rapid progress because of this tradition of criticism but why the entire society shouldn't
00:55:52.400 fall apart given that it's criticizing everything all the time well that's harder and so then we
00:55:58.240 have these political institutions and traditions which are doing well at keeping things stable
00:56:03.520 some are better than others that's another topic so for now this has been episode 50 50
00:56:12.400 I don't know when the the next episode will be coming out I put out quite a few recently
00:56:17.520 but I look forward to two some new episodes for now so next time