00:00:39.960 This is part 3 of chapter 12, a physicist's history of bad philosophy, with some remarks
00:00:47.120 And today we're going to be spending a little bit more time on the bad science aspect
00:00:52.440 Now when it comes to bad science, as we indicated at the end of the last section, at
00:00:57.440 the end of the last part that I did part 2, really what we're talking about is explanationless
00:01:03.960 There's studies that you can do, investigations, experiments if you like, that can support
00:01:12.560 Now an investigation that purports to find a relationship, a correlation between two variables,
00:01:19.000 it might be interesting, but unless we have a causal mechanism whereby one variable causes
00:01:25.880 another variable to increase, whereby an increase in one variable causes the increase in
00:01:30.160 another variable, we have an explanation as to what that cause is, we have explanationless
00:01:36.040 Now there are many examples of explanationless science.
00:01:38.920 David's going to use behaviourism as an example, really, of explanationless science, but
00:01:46.160 For example, in the area of public health, I can't remember if precisely when the study
00:01:50.200 was, I'm sure I could look it up now, but back in the 80s approximately, there was
00:01:55.800 a study purporting to show that the closer someone lived to a power stonching, the worse
00:02:04.800 And so this is explanationless science, until we have an explanation why proximity to
00:02:09.800 a power stonching causes poor health outcomes, we don't have a scientific theory or we have
00:02:16.080 as a correlation, there could be a third factor.
00:02:18.920 Now in this case, it is true, I think in certain areas of America, the closer you live to
00:02:23.680 a power stonching, the more likely you are to have a lower life expectancy.
00:02:29.400 And so many people at the time interpreted this as meaning, there are electromagnetic waves
00:02:34.800 coming out of those power stonchons, affecting people's DNA causing cancer, causing other
00:02:41.560 And so this was the reason why one wouldn't want to live near a power stonching.
00:02:46.520 Now physicists kind of knew that the electromagnetic radiation coming from a high voltage
00:02:53.320 power stonching is usually very low frequency indeed, you might get some radio waves.
00:02:59.240 But we have an explanation as to why that can't cause ionization of atoms in the DNA and
00:03:04.320 therefore cause mutations and therefore cause cancers.
00:03:07.200 So we had an explanation of that, a good explanation in other words as to why the power
00:03:11.880 stonching itself was not causing the worse health outcomes.
00:03:16.040 The better explanation, as it turns out, is that people who live close to power stonchons
00:03:25.280 People don't want to live near power stonchons, real estate agents have difficulty selling
00:03:29.280 houses around power stonches because you've got this big ugly tower in your backyard,
00:03:39.080 It causes the value of the land to go down, possibly for irrational reasons.
00:03:43.360 But if that's the case, people who live in those areas can't afford better healthcare.
00:03:48.680 Because they can't afford better healthcare, that means that their health outcomes are generally
00:03:53.760 Had nothing to do with radio waves or other kinds of energy coming from the electrical wires.
00:03:59.520 So this is a case where we can have a very good correlation between two things and yet one
00:04:08.400 And that third factor actually means that you can't extrapolate, you can't use that relationship
00:04:12.920 to make useful predictions, where an explanation, there's no possibility of making predictions.
00:04:18.200 A prediction would mean that you'd be able to take a particular person living in close proximity
00:04:23.800 to a power stonchon and be able to determine that that person is more likely to have worse
00:04:30.520 However, we could falsify this in many different ways.
00:04:33.160 There would be people who do not fit the trend.
00:04:35.640 Once you have people that don't fit the trend, another word for that is a falsification
00:04:39.800 of the theory that power stonchons cause bad health outcomes for people.
00:04:44.520 Now, similar kinds of bad science happen everywhere.
00:04:49.000 Not so much in the physical sciences and we'll get to the reasons why and it's got to
00:04:52.640 do with uncertainty analysis or being able to quantify your errors or at least being
00:04:58.400 able to say what the likely sources of error are going to be in your study.
00:05:03.640 But in other areas of science, let's say environmental science, there could be all sorts
00:05:09.760 of ways in which we could find a correlation between, say, increasing average global temperatures
00:05:15.920 and all sorts of supposedly bad environmental effects.
00:05:21.160 Species decline, increasing wildfires or bushfires, increasing hurricanes or tornadoes,
00:05:28.040 increasing desertification, decreasing corals, etc, etc, etc.
00:05:33.720 Now there may be mechanisms for some of these things, but I'm not too sure whether or not
00:05:38.640 the mechanism for all of these things must come down to an increase in the amount of carbon
00:05:46.200 It could be that these things are caused by something else.
00:05:49.640 It could still be due to climate change, but perhaps by some mechanism other than the
00:05:54.080 increase in carbon dioxide emissions, let's say.
00:05:57.680 So David has come to the point in this chapter where he's talking about the fact that
00:06:01.760 in behavioral studies of people's psychology, typically what is done is that surveys are
00:06:08.840 conducted or people's behavior is monitored and that behavior might include things like
00:06:16.480 And these survey responses might be used to determine whether or not someone is suffering
00:06:21.800 from depression or whether or not someone is functionally very happy or not.
00:06:26.000 And then some kind of genetic study might be performed.
00:06:30.000 As we might find a correlation between genes or genetic similarities between people and their
00:06:35.360 tendency to report themselves as having high levels of happiness, let's say.
00:06:40.240 But of course, marking checkboxes on a survey isn't really measuring happiness.
00:06:49.800 It's a subjective measure on the part of the person, on the part of the subject of their
00:06:55.800 own internal conscious states. And as we mentioned in the last episode, different people
00:07:01.320 might have different standards for feeling precisely the same way.
00:07:04.840 So two people, even though they're both saying that they feel a happiness level of
00:07:09.040 six out of 10, they both might actually feel in reality quite different.
00:07:13.640 And on the other hand, of course, two people who feel exactly the same, subjectively speaking,
00:07:17.840 we've got no access to someone's subjectivity at the moment, except by this proxy, this proxy
00:07:22.840 of marking a survey, making marks on a survey, two people that feel actually in reality,
00:07:29.360 ontologically the same, might in fact, might in fact report different levels of happiness.
00:07:36.200 One might say they're only a three out of 10, because they expect that life could be
00:07:39.720 a lot better than what it is. But on the other hand, someone might mark for exactly the
00:07:43.440 same sensations that they've got in terms of their physiology, they might mark themselves
00:07:49.000 seven out of 10, simply because they've got different standards. And why might people
00:07:53.960 have different standards? Well, some people could just be forepessimists and some people
00:07:57.800 could be real optimists. And that could be because of what they know about reality as well.
00:08:02.760 Now David's about to get to the point where he's talking about the fact that there
00:08:07.040 can be scientific studies, quite rigorous scientific studies, where the marking of checkboxes
00:08:13.760 is perfectly valid. It's not valid in that case where we're just talking about people
00:08:18.880 reporting on their own internal subjective states. Unless we can have a ruler or a thermometer
00:08:26.160 or some sort of objective test as to what's going on inside of that person's subjective
00:08:31.440 mental experience, we don't have access to that person's internal subjective experience.
00:08:36.320 All we have access to is their reporting on their internal subjective experience. This
00:08:43.680 is not typical science. We wouldn't go to a physicist and say, how did the temperature
00:08:49.040 of the water feel to you just describe it? No, we don't want them to say it felt really
00:08:53.200 hot to me or it felt cold to me. Or it felt approximately 25 degrees Celsius to me. We want
00:08:58.200 a thermometer reading. We want an instrument to be able to have access to that water and
00:09:03.400 not merely to have the physicists or chemist or whoever it is reporting on how they felt
00:09:08.600 at the time. That would be rejected in any other area of science, but of course in psychology,
00:09:13.640 this is de-regur, this is typical, this is what people do. And I guess to some extent
00:09:19.160 they're doing their best, they don't have anything else. And they're doing something,
00:09:23.000 but we can't say they're doing good science. So let me read from the beginning of
00:09:28.380 in Findi. And I'm up to page 317 for anyone who's following along. And David writes,
00:09:34.600 there are circumstances under which there is a good explanation linking the measurable
00:09:38.560 proxy such as marking checkboxes with a quantity of interest. And in such cases there
00:09:43.240 may need to be nothing unscientific about the study. For example, political opinion surveys
00:09:48.000 may ask whether respondents are happy with a given politician facing re-election under
00:09:53.160 the theory that this gives information about which checkbox their respondents will choose
00:09:57.000 in the election itself. That theory is then tested at the election, pause their my reflection.
00:10:04.200 So this is the whole idea of pre-polling or polls in general, maybe not exit polls because
00:10:09.640 David's there talking about beforehand before the election they're testing things before
00:10:15.000 they are supposed to be done after the election as well. And notoriously these days,
00:10:20.640 the our understanding of polling has really been pushed around the validity of polling.
00:10:27.640 One reason is of course that people are, it would seem possibly embarrassed to tell
00:10:34.120 pollsters how they really feel about certain candidates. In some cases they might actively
00:10:39.880 be lying to the pollsters for a whole bunch of reasons, which would make polling quite unscientific.
00:10:46.800 So in fact here, this idea actually presumes that people are honestly reporting on the
00:10:55.160 survey about the politician. If you ask whether you would vote for John Smith, if a random
00:11:01.800 pollster say stops you in the street or calls you on the phone and says how do you feel about
00:11:07.000 John Smith and you say very good, will you be voting for John Smith and you'll say absolutely?
00:11:13.640 Might very well be the case that you're just saying that an attempt to appear to have an
00:11:18.840 acceptable opinion to the pollster. This appears to be a fact of these days, it's a new phenomenon,
00:11:24.520 so far as I know, people being embarrassed or concerned about how they might be viewed by the pollster.
00:11:31.400 And this goes some way to explaining why polls are no longer completely reliable.
00:11:39.400 So we've seen that for the last few elections anyway. Whilst you made your elections in the
00:11:43.400 Western world anyway, people being concerned about how they appear to a random person who's asking
00:11:50.040 them how they feel about particular politicians. Now putting that aside, okay, so putting that
00:11:54.680 little quibble aside, it otherwise might be the case that certain surveys can be perfectly
00:12:00.120 scientifically valid. But as David says, there is no analog of such a test in the case of
00:12:06.040 happiness. There is no independent way of measuring it. Another example of bona fide science would
00:12:11.080 be a clinical trial to test a drug purported to alleviate particular identifiable types of unhappiness.
00:12:18.760 In that case, the objective of the study is again to determine whether the drug causes behaviour,
00:12:23.720 such as saying that one is happier without also experiencing adverse side effects. If a drug
00:12:29.560 passes that test, the issue of whether or not it really makes the patient's happier, or merely
00:12:34.520 alters the personality to have lower standards or something of that sort is inaccessible to science,
00:12:39.880 until such time as there is a testable explanatory theory of what happened, happiness is.
00:12:44.760 Pause name or reflection. So this is an interesting point that David's making there about,
00:12:49.960 let's say, antidepressants. So do antidepressants actually cause the person who's taking them
00:12:57.720 to in reality experience greater levels of happiness? Or is it the case that it makes the
00:13:05.400 unhappiness that they tend to feel more tolerable? And so it's very difficult for the person to
00:13:12.360 probably be able to distinguish between these two different cases, perhaps impossible. Certainly
00:13:17.080 for the person doing the study, it will be difficult to determine whether or not they've lowered
00:13:21.560 their standards or not. And so filling out a survey or reporting to the doctor that they feel better,
00:13:27.800 that they feel like their depression has been alleviated, could be a consequence of them
00:13:33.320 actually feeling more happy in reality? Or it could be the fact that they don't feel
00:13:38.920 in truth happier in reality, it's just that their standards have been lowered. Now are these two
00:13:43.560 things the same in reality? No, no, because there is ontologically some reality of a state of
00:13:51.240 happiness. Now we don't know what that is scientifically, but it must be the case that there are
00:13:58.360 in objective ontological reality. What's going on inside of your mind can either be very,
00:14:03.960 very happy or extremely unhappy in anything in between? And how you then feel about that state,
00:14:11.080 let's say that you are objectively on happiness level state nine, ontologically speaking,
00:14:16.840 Sam Harris likes to speak about this. So there is a reality to your subjectivity, and Sam
00:14:22.360 Harris gets this from John's soul, I think. And so this is where it really comes into its own
00:14:27.240 this distinction, this way of speaking about subjectivity and objectivity. Now your consciousness
00:14:35.320 has real existence, it really exists unless you're Daniel Dennett, of course, and you argue that
00:14:40.840 you have no such consciousness. Nonetheless, I think there's consciousness. I think most philosophers
00:14:47.560 believe that there is consciousness. No, that there is a kind of consciousness. We don't know how
00:14:52.440 to replicate consciousness. We don't have AGI yet. Nonetheless, consciousness exists. And if
00:14:58.040 consciousness exists and if consciousness states therefore exist, then there is a way of determining
00:15:05.400 that some are objectively better than others. This conscious state of suffering is objectively
00:15:11.720 worse than this conscious state of feeling joy, let's say, and there might be different levels of
00:15:16.360 joy or different levels of happiness. Now given that's the case, if you are objectively on happiness
00:15:23.960 level four out of ten, that's objectively where you are, then you will also have a theory about
00:15:30.280 how happiness level four exists. You might not know exactly what happiness level four exists
00:15:35.880 feels like. Now this is where it gets a little bit weird and complicated, but if we had a scientific
00:15:41.160 theory of subjective states, of consciousness, then in some far distant future we might know what
00:15:47.880 happiness level four for a human being feels like. Now when you are asked by the doctor, how do you
00:15:54.280 feel on a scale of one to ten, even though you actually in reality occupy happiness level
00:16:00.040 four at that particular point, you might say, oh, actually I feel like a three out of ten. Now you
00:16:05.080 would be wrong about that, but you've got some access to how you feel. Now you're just making an
00:16:10.200 error. You're making an error because you don't have an objective way of measuring your own
00:16:15.640 happiness and unhappiness on a scale of one to ten. Now when you take an antidepressant, it might,
00:16:21.240 it might be the case that it elevates you from what is in objective reality a four out of ten,
00:16:27.000 what you have reported as being a three out of ten. It might actually raise that to a seven out
00:16:31.480 of ten and you will report that having taken the antidepressant, you might report that it has
00:16:36.840 actually alleviated your depression. It has actually raised your level of happiness and you'd
00:16:43.320 be right about that. But you'd be wrong about, of course, having claimed that your own happiness
00:16:48.920 level three to begin with actually will reform. Now there is another alternative, of course,
00:16:53.960 that in fact what the antidepressant does is has no effect whatsoever on the objective state
00:17:01.000 that you occupy. You remain at happiness level four in reality and objective reality you're still
00:17:06.680 on a four, but it causes you to think, to change your opinions about what happiness level four
00:17:13.240 feels like. And so you will then report a seven, so it causes you actually to increase your errors.
00:17:19.240 Now you go and fill out the survey of seven out of ten and in both cases the first case where
00:17:24.680 in reality you've been raised to a seven, but the other possibility is of course that your
00:17:29.000 happiness level has not been raised. Your depression has not been alleviated, but
00:17:33.880 behaviorism, you know, effectively the antidepressant has worked because you're no longer
00:17:40.120 saying your depressed, even though nothing much about your brain chemistry, so to speak, has been
00:17:46.520 changed. Although, okay, I know in reality SSRI, serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors, I know that
00:17:53.240 they actually do all to brain chemistry, okay, all that aside. Let's go back to the book.
00:17:58.200 David writes, in explanationless science one may acknowledge that actual happiness and the proxy
00:18:03.800 one is measuring are not necessarily equal, but one nevertheless calls the proxy happiness and moves
00:18:09.560 on. One chooses a large number of people, ostensibly at random though in real life one is restricted
00:18:14.840 to small minorities such as university students in a particular country, seeking additional income,
00:18:19.320 and one excludes those who have detectable extrinsic reasons for happiness or unhappiness,
00:18:24.520 such as recent lottery wins or bereavement. So one subject suggests typical people,
00:18:29.320 though in fact one cannot tell whether they are statistically representative without an explanatory
00:18:33.960 theory. Next one defines the heritability of a trait as its degree of statistical correlation
00:18:40.680 with how genetically related the people are. Again, that is a non-explanatory definition. According to
00:18:46.680 it, whether one was a slave or not was once a highly heritable trait in America. It ran in families.
00:18:53.720 Now, I'm just going to read that short paragraph again because we're going to come back to it,
00:19:00.680 and I think it's something that people tend to miss in this chapter. So I'll say it again.
00:19:07.320 One defines the heritability of a trait as its degree of statistical correlation
00:19:13.880 with how genetically related the people are. Again, that is a non-explanatory definition.
00:19:21.080 According to it, whether one was a slave or not was once a highly heritable trait in America.
00:19:27.720 It ran in families. More generally one acknowledges that statistical correlations do not imply
00:19:33.320 anything about what causes what, but one adds the inductive as to quivocation that they
00:19:38.520 can be suggestive, though. So just pause there. I'm just wanting to emphasize here. What David's
00:19:45.000 doing here is he is kind of setting up how it is that you go about performing a scientific study
00:19:53.080 that is a scientific study in form only. It's not scientific in the sense that you're producing
00:19:59.800 good, hard to vary explanations in science. This is the way you go through and you just go through
00:20:05.960 the formal process of appearing to do science, or appearing to do an experiment, or finding a
00:20:10.760 correlation, let's say. But at no point are you going to suggest that this thing causes that thing,
00:20:17.800 or that, or if you do, you're going to equivocate about it. David continues.
00:20:23.240 Then one does the study and finds that happiness is say 50 percent heritable.
00:20:27.880 This asserts nothing about happiness itself. Until the relevant, explanatory theories are
00:20:32.200 discovered at some time in the future, perhaps after consciousness is understood,
00:20:35.560 and AGI's are commonplace technology. Yet people find the result interesting because they
00:20:40.600 interpret it via everyday meanings of the words happiness inheritable. Under that interpretation,
00:20:46.360 which the authors of the study, if they are scrupulous, will nowhere have endorsed. The result
00:20:51.000 is a profound contribution to a wide class of philosophical and scientific debates about the nature
00:20:55.480 of the human mind. Pressure reports of the discovery will reflect this. The headline will say,
00:21:00.280 new study shows happiness 50 percent genetically determined without quotation marks around the
00:21:05.640 technical terms. Pause the MRI reflection. All you need to do is to go to Google and look up or
00:21:13.480 do a Google search on happiness genetically determined, or something like that. And you'll indeed
00:21:20.040 find studies precisely of the kind that David has talked about there. David continues.
00:21:26.440 Suppose that someone now does dare to seek explanatory theories about the cause of human
00:21:31.160 happiness. Happiness is a state of continually solving one's problems, they can
00:21:36.600 picture. Unhappiness is caused by being chronically balked in one's attempts to do that,
00:21:41.960 and solving problems itself depends on knowing how. So external factors aside,
00:21:47.960 unhappiness is caused by not knowing how. Readers may recognize this as a special case of the
00:21:54.040 principle of optimism. Pause the MRI reflection. So as David is hinting at here, we might very
00:22:00.840 well interpret unhappiness as being about not knowing how to solve the problem of not being happy,
00:22:08.600 you know, not being happy is a problem if you could solve that, then that would be the solution
00:22:13.000 to unhappiness. That's how to be more happy to continually solve your problems. Usually, of course,
00:22:19.000 the problem is not just this generic thing of I just want to be happier. It's a particular thing.
00:22:25.240 How to solve some particular problem like if you're chronically in pain and you don't want to be,
00:22:30.680 if you could solve that, then you would be happier. If you have an illness that you, there is no
00:22:36.760 cure for. You're unhappy until such time as you're cured of it. You're on your way to work, you're
00:22:42.200 already running late and you've got a flat tire until such time as you are able to fix the flat tire,
00:22:47.640 then you're more unhappy than you otherwise would have been. So this can be what unhappiness is.
00:22:52.600 Now, of course, many people do say that there is this very real state of being depressed when
00:23:01.000 everything appears to be going right in one's life, but nonetheless, you still feel unhappy.
00:23:06.280 What would be the view of this kind of philosophy for that kind of state? Now, it might very well be
00:23:13.080 that it could be a chemical imbalance, but it could also be simply that you don't know what the
00:23:20.840 problems are that are causing you unhappiness. It could be unconscious states. It could, of course,
00:23:26.200 be poor chemistry in your brain, in which case, it still comes down to the fact that you don't
00:23:31.560 know how to be more happy. And it might be that you need to fix this chemical imbalance in your
00:23:37.240 brain. I wouldn't say that that would be the solution to every single form of what is called
00:23:43.960 depression in psychological science. It's more likely to be the case that there's going to be
00:23:49.720 perhaps things one is not fully aware of, things one is not fully thinking clearly about that
00:23:56.760 is causing the unhappiness. And if those things could be identified, and this is where psychology
00:24:02.440 really is important, then the unhappiness could be cured, things like cognitive behavioral
00:24:08.680 therapy, things like any kind of talk therapy speaking to a psychologist are certainly going to
00:24:14.760 help people who are chronically unhappy or depressed. It still comes down to not knowing how to
00:24:22.840 solve the problem of unhappiness, because it might be the case that one does not know why
00:24:27.400 one is unhappy. It's about knowledge. It's never not about knowledge. It's never about simply
00:24:33.400 denying the fact that there is a solution involving an explanation as to why one's mental state
00:24:40.760 is the way it is and is the way that it is in a way that one doesn't want it to be.
00:24:46.920 Okay, so continuing the beginning of the infinity and David's talking about this study that
00:24:53.960 shows a correlation between unhappiness or happiness and certain kinds of genetic predisposition
00:25:01.480 towards the happiness or not. David writes, interpreters of the study say that it has refuted
00:25:06.680 that theory of happiness. That theory of happiness being that happiness is a state of continually
00:25:11.560 solving one's problems. At most, they say 50% of unhappiness can be caused by not knowing how.
00:25:19.800 The other 50% is beyond our control, genetically determined and hence independent of what we
00:25:25.480 know or believe pending the relevant genetic engineering. Using the same logic on the slavery
00:25:32.040 example, one could have concluded in 1860 that say 95% of slavery is genetically determined
00:25:38.600 and therefore beyond the power of political action to remedy. Pause their mind reflection.
00:25:43.080 This is a really powerful point. Many people, and it is a huge area of popular science right now,
00:25:51.240 seem to think that if something has a genetic component, then that means it must be genetically
00:25:57.560 determined that if there is some gene for a thing and there is no way in which, or if there
00:26:03.880 are some gene implicated in a particular feature of humanity, then there is no way that that can
00:26:09.400 be changed except via genetic engineering. But this is a perfect reputation of that. It is the case.
00:26:16.120 It simply was the case historically that in the United States that you could do a genetic study,
00:26:23.800 you could use modern methods of assessing the DNA of people and find that there is indeed a
00:26:28.920 genetic component to being a slave. But this does not mean that it was genetically determined
00:26:36.200 that it was necessarily the case because necessarily means it was unavoidably the case,
00:26:42.280 in much the same way that it is necessarily the case that element number six on the periodic
00:26:48.920 table is carbon. That is a scientifically necessarily determined thing or that four
00:26:54.120 circles mass times acceleration, a necessarily scientifically determined thing. Well this is not
00:27:00.680 the case with slavery. Slavery was the result of a particular very poor moral and political theory
00:27:09.880 about human beings. Typically white people from London did not find themselves slaves in the
00:27:15.240 south of the United States. There was a genetic component here, but this does not mean it was
00:27:21.080 determined to be the case. Any number of scientific studies could have concluded this and indeed
00:27:26.520 the problem of slavery of that kind was indeed solved. But it was not solved by genetic engineering.
00:27:34.600 It was solved by people knowing better, learning better, creating the relevant moral knowledge
00:27:41.480 about what people are and it had nothing to do with changing people's genes. So that even though
00:27:46.680 there was apparently the genetic component to slavery, it had nothing to do with changing people's
00:27:52.040 genes to remove the slavery. So to then with unhappiness, it might very well be solved, you know,
00:27:59.320 the chronic unhappiness or depression, might very well be solved no matter what the genetic component
00:28:06.360 is if we can recognize what happiness actually is. If it is actually about being able to solve
00:28:13.800 one's problems once they are identified. Of course we have no scientific theory yet, but the
00:28:17.960 conjecture here and now is of course that happiness is about being thwarted in your problem solving.
00:28:26.440 Okay, now continuing with the book. At this point, taking the step from heritable to genetically
00:28:33.160 determined the explanationless psychological study has transformed its correct, but
00:28:38.040 uninteresting result into something very exciting. For it has weighed in on a substantive philosophical
00:28:44.040 issue, optimism, and a scientific issue about how the brain gives rise to mental states such as
00:28:50.280 qualia, but it has done so without knowing anything about them. But wait, so the interpreters,
00:28:56.120 admittedly we can't tell whether any genes code for happiness or part of it. But who cares how
00:29:02.520 the genes cause the effect, whether by conferring good looks or otherwise, the effect itself is
00:29:07.160 real. The effect is real, but the experiment cannot detect how much of it one can alter without
00:29:12.120 genetic and engineering just by knowing how. That is because the way in which those genes
00:29:16.680 affect happiness may depend on knowledge. For instance, a cultural change may affect what people
00:29:22.120 deem to be good looks, and that would then change whether people tend to be made happier by
00:29:26.600 virtue of having particular genes. Nothing in the study can detect whether such a change is
00:29:31.080 about to happen. Similarly, it cannot detect whether a book will be written one day which will
00:29:35.160 persuade some portion, some proportion of the population that all evils are due to lack of knowledge,
00:29:40.680 and that knowledge is created by seeking good explanations. If some of those people consequently
00:29:45.560 create more knowledge than they otherwise would have and become happier than they otherwise
00:29:49.240 would have been, then part of the 50% of happiness that was genetically determined in all
00:29:53.880 previous studies will no longer be so. Pause their my reflection. Okay, so the explanation was
00:30:02.840 study that might suggest that, for example, genes code for 50% of happiness could be
00:30:12.120 conferring that effect by good looks, but by those genes might cause people to look a certain way.
00:30:20.360 And so if those people are considered good looking because of the fact they've got these particular
00:30:25.800 genes, then because they're treated better in society because of the fact that they're better
00:30:30.280 looking or considered to be better looking, then this is the way in which the genes affect the good
00:30:36.440 looks which then cause people to be happier. And so we skipped the good looks bit and we just go,
00:30:40.680 well, the genes cause the better happiness. But as David says there, good looks is very much
00:30:47.560 cultural thing. And we know this. You just look at different cultures around the world and what they
00:30:50.760 consider good looking. We only have to go back to the middle ages and of course people who were
00:30:56.600 very large and obese were considered better looking. Today, people apparently who are far more thin
00:31:03.480 are considered better looking. So there is absolutely a cultural component to what is considered to be
00:31:10.200 good looking, which, by the way, should give you pause for a moment. When you consider that you're
00:31:16.200 attracted to someone or you have an attraction towards someone, you might think that this is very
00:31:21.720 much a genetically determined thing that you feel this way and have absolutely no choice in the
00:31:30.280 matter. However, if you have absolutely no choice in the matter, if it doesn't have anything to do
00:31:35.800 with what you know about reality, then this would mean that the genes that code for how attractive
00:31:43.480 you find someone are predetermined. But we know that the genes between the middle ages and today
00:31:50.040 haven't changed that much in that way. We know, for example, that we can take a person who is perhaps
00:31:58.040 would have otherwise been born into a culture that considers people with extremely long neck
00:32:02.600 subtractive and raise them in a culture where length of neck has absolutely nothing to do with
00:32:08.680 attractiveness whatsoever. And their mind about what they find attractive will have been changed,
00:32:15.160 not because the genes have changed, but because their ideas about what is attractive has changed.
00:32:21.080 So it's very much to do with ideas and not in-born ideas either. I would argue, okay, continuing
00:32:28.280 with the book. David Wright, the interpreters of the study may respond that it has proved there
00:32:34.120 can be no such book, no such book that can convince people that all evils are due to a lack of
00:32:39.000 knowledge. Certainly none of them will write such a book or arrive at such a thesis. And so the
00:32:45.560 bad philosophy will have caused bad science, which will have stifled the growth of knowledge.
00:32:50.360 Notice that this is a form of bad science that may well have conformed to all the best practices
00:32:56.360 of the scientific method, proper randomising, proper controls, proper statistical analysis,
00:33:02.360 or the formal rules of how to keep from fooling ourselves may have been followed. And yet,
00:33:07.800 no progress could possibly be made because it was not being sought. Explanationless theories
00:33:13.400 can do no more than entrench existing bad explanations. It is no accident that in the
00:33:19.320 imaginary study I have described the outcome appeared to support a pessimistic theory.
00:33:24.200 A theory that predicts how happy people will probably be cannot possibly take into account the
00:33:29.160 effects of knowledge creation. So to whatever extent knowledge creation is involved,
00:33:34.600 the theory is prophecy and will therefore be biased towards pessimism.
00:33:39.160 Behaviouristic studies of human psychology must by their nature lead to dehumanising theories of
00:33:44.840 the human condition. For refusing to theorise about the mind as a causative agent is the equivalent
00:33:50.760 of regarding it as a non-creative automaton, pause their my reflection. Now I could go on for hours
00:33:59.800 about this particular thing. It's such an important point. The link that David makes here between
00:34:05.560 the mind as a causative agent and also as being creative. The link between cause between creating
00:34:13.880 something and causing something to happen. To create new knowledge is to create new possibilities
00:34:20.760 in the world. That were not there before. That means once we've got these new possibilities in the
00:34:25.720 world because we've created some new knowledge. So once we've got the knowledge of nuclear
00:34:30.600 fission for example, then we've got the possibility of creating electricity via nuclear fission
00:34:37.960 reactors. That possibility did not exist before. We didn't have the choice about creating electricity
00:34:44.760 via that mechanism. So the creation of knowledge has created new choices in the world.
00:34:52.840 It has caused new ways of producing electricity in the world let's say. So again, to create new
00:34:59.240 knowledge is to create new possibilities which means new choices and acting on those newly created
00:35:04.600 choices means causing events in the world that were not otherwise have happened without that
00:35:10.280 knowledge creation. And this take on the nature of mind is so far as I know unique. David's overarching
00:35:18.600 theory of knowledge really is this breathtaking worldview encompassing how knowledge grows at a
00:35:25.800 level of a civilization, how it's growing here on earth right now, how it does have and will
00:35:33.160 continue to increasingly have cosmic significance and how it will increasingly have cosmic
00:35:40.600 significance and how it can be invoked to explain the nature of personhood which is what we're
00:35:45.800 going through here now. And how it is that we distinguish persons from other kinds of life in the
00:35:52.040 universe especially other animals. And to bring this full circle why therefore persons are
00:35:58.120 themselves important in the cosmic scheme of things. It's all about knowledge and the mechanisms
00:36:05.160 by which knowledge is created. And when that knowledge is created, how it causes the world to
00:36:12.680 increase the number of possibilities open to people. And so this is the sense in which I would
00:36:18.680 invoke free will because free will is just another synonym for what's going on here. The creation
00:36:25.480 of knowledge which causes us to have more choices in reality and those choices in reality will
00:36:31.720 only be there once we've made the choice to create the knowledge. And if we continue to create
00:36:37.000 more knowledge then we continue to have more choices, more possibilities and we'll be more free
00:36:42.120 to do more different things. If we don't create knowledge then we have fewer choices,
00:36:47.240 we have less freedom at which means we're also in more danger. So increased knowledge means
00:36:53.080 solving problems and preparing for the unknown, preparing for problems yet to be encountered.
00:36:59.720 The more knowledge we have, the more wealth we've created and the more we're able to solve problems
00:37:05.240 as yet unencounted. Okay, but back to the book. The behaviorist approach is equally futile when
00:37:12.440 applied to the issue of whether an entity has a mind. I have already criticized it in Chapter 7
00:37:18.040 in regard to the Turing test, the same holds in regard to the controversy about animal minds,
00:37:23.560 such as whether the hunting or farming of animals should be legal, which stems from philosophical
00:37:27.640 disputes about whether animals experience qualia and analogous to those of humans when in fear and
00:37:32.520 pain and if so, which animals do? Now science has little to say on this matter at present because
00:37:38.120 there is yet no explanatory theory of qualia and hence no way of detecting them experimentally.
00:37:44.440 But this does not stop governments from trying to pass the political hot potato to the
00:37:48.200 supposedly objective jurisdiction of experimental science. So for instance, in 1997 the zoologist
00:37:54.840 Patrick Bateson and Elizabeth Bradshaw were commissioned by the National Trust to determine
00:37:59.720 whether stags suffer when hunted. They reported that they do because the hunt is grossly stressful,
00:38:06.360 exhausting and agonizing. However, that assumes that the measurable quantities denoted there
00:38:11.880 by the words stress and agony, such as enzyme levels in the bloodstream, signify the presence
00:38:16.920 of qualia of the same names, which is precisely what the press and public assumed that study
00:38:21.880 was supposed to discover. The following year the countryside alliance commissioned a study of the
00:38:26.440 same issue led by the veterinary physiologist Roger Harris, who concluded that the levels of those
00:38:31.240 quantities are similar to those of a human who is not suffering, but enjoying a sport such as football.
00:38:38.680 Bateson responded accurately that nothing in Harris' report contradicted his own,
00:38:42.680 but that is because neither study had any bearing on the issue in question.
00:38:47.720 This form of explanation of science is just bad philosophy disguised as science.
00:38:52.280 Its effect is to suppress the philosophical debate about how animals should be treated
00:38:57.000 by pretending that the issue has been settled scientifically. In reality, science has and
00:39:02.440 will have no access to the issue until explanatory knowledge about qualia has been discovered.
00:39:08.120 Pause their my reflection. So I riffed on this particular passage in my article titled
00:39:17.560 Humans and Other Animals, and the ethics of eating meat, and you can find that on my website.
00:39:24.040 Just google my name, Brithall, Humans and Other Animals.
00:39:28.760 And precisely on this point here about how one can study
00:39:36.600 stags being hunted and find that certain enzyme levels are raised in their bloodstream.
00:39:41.560 And this is supposed to be an indication that the fact of the fact that they're suffering
00:39:47.240 while being hunted, that they're afraid, and so the enzyme levels rise, and so these
00:39:52.040 enzyme levels are proof positive somehow that these stags are suffering.
00:39:57.000 Yes, it's proof positive supposedly. They said that it was the hunting is grossly stressful
00:40:04.120 exhausting and agonizing. Why? Because the levels of this particular enzyme were raised in their
00:40:09.640 bloodstream. But another study said that a human could have high levels of these enzymes in their
00:40:20.360 bloodstream if they were doing a sport such as football. And so this is a problem, isn't it?
00:40:28.200 On the one hand, we have this exertion causing high levels of this enzyme in the animal,
00:40:32.920 and this exertion causing high levels of this enzyme in a human being.
00:40:36.520 But in the case of the human being, presumably they're enjoying this activity.
00:40:43.080 How do we know that the stag isn't enjoying this activity? Well, again, that begs the question
00:40:47.800 as to what it would mean for a stag to enjoy something in the first place and whether or not
00:40:51.720 they have the capacity to enjoy something in the first place. And this is something that I try to
00:40:55.800 explore in my particular piece. And in that piece there, I'll just read a very long piece.
00:41:03.800 I'll just read a small part of it, where I've written consciousness is central to our concern
00:41:09.640 about the possibility that other creatures experience pain. Let us concede for the sake of
00:41:15.400 argument that what they do feel we might term pain. But this would be very much like if we knew
00:41:20.760 they were capable of experiencing blue. Knowing that another person experiencing blue tells us
00:41:27.400 very little about the contents of that experience. Are they seeing the sky? The blue mosque in Turkey?
00:41:33.480 A policeman shirt? Far more information than blue is perceived would be required to give us an
00:41:40.040 idea of what that experience might be like. We would need context. We would need an entire
00:41:46.680 explanatory theory about what that blue might be like. And it would take us into circles about
00:41:52.440 can they see shapes and do they understand the relationship between those things? And do they
00:41:57.080 realize the skies and even a physical thing? Unlike what the ancients thought, they thought the blue
00:42:01.880 sky was like blue paint on glass. They thought it was a surface. They didn't know that what they
00:42:07.400 saw didn't actually exist. And so it is with pain really. Even if we have an excellent cause and
00:42:13.480 effect explanation of the physiology of how the stimulus we call pain is transmitted to a brain
00:42:18.840 and what might cause it to arise and what other stimuli, like say hormones being released into
00:42:23.160 the bloodstream, absent further information, we know very little about how the pain might be
00:42:28.040 interpreted. That is to say, even if we can describe the objective physical goings on in the
00:42:33.880 nervous system, this tells us nothing about the subjective experience of pain. For example,
00:42:38.760 the very same signals might mean that a person is exercising and enjoying pushing through the
00:42:43.320 pain or some such. Or perhaps a person is protecting in Jiu Jitsu and the pain is a necessary part
00:42:48.280 of the learning and so on objective good. Or perhaps the person is suffering a heart attack. Or
00:42:53.080 perhaps a person simply doesn't even understand what the sensation is and so on and so forth.
00:42:57.560 Okay, so that's end quote from my little blog posting, but if you're interested in more about this
00:43:04.200 this way of looking at the issue, the important issue of whether or not animals suffer,
00:43:09.480 and all the very many related issues surrounding this is it ethical to eat meat, for example.
00:43:17.800 Should we be able to milk cows, etc, etc, etc. Some people have very strong opinions on this.
00:43:23.400 Now, that's all very well, but to talk about the science of this, we have to be very disciplined
00:43:30.600 because there are no scientific studies that show animals experience pain, much less that they suffer.
00:43:39.320 All that we have are proxies and they might not even be proxies for pain.
00:43:45.480 Saying that particular enzyme levels are an indication of pain is untrue or not
00:43:53.000 possible to conclude until such time as we have a scientific theory of what pain is.
00:43:59.960 And we probably won't have that until we have a scientific theory of what consciousness is.
00:44:04.200 So I'm just going to steal David's thunder a little bit here for what is to come.
00:44:09.400 What he's talking about now is the importance of, indeed the centrality of, to a large extent,
00:44:16.840 errors in the process of science. Being able to report on your errors,
00:44:21.960 your uncertainties, the sources of error, how to quantify your uncertainties.
00:44:26.520 And if you're not careful about this, you're going to end up making false conclusions.
00:44:31.880 Whole areas of the physical sciences, in physical science courses at high school
00:44:37.000 university are devoted to error analysis. I'll put up on the screen here a section
00:44:42.680 from a particular high school syllabus about error analysis. You can see here it's quite large.
00:44:53.480 Sources of error are a crucial part of the methodology of any scientific study.
00:44:58.600 And in physics we have the special capability of being able to quantify our degree of uncertainty.
00:45:05.640 To some extent. Now this is not uncertainty in sort of the epistemological sense.
00:45:10.520 This is uncertainty in the measurement sense. So when we've got a measuring device that is
00:45:15.000 able to measure to a certain precision or a particular technique that measures to a certain precision,
00:45:19.800 we report that. We say that we could be out by this much all that much back to the book.
00:45:26.280 Another way in which explanation of science inhibits progress is that it amplifies errors.
00:45:31.960 Let me give a rather whimsical example. Suppose you have been commissioned to measure the
00:45:36.120 average number of people who visit the city museum each day. It is a large building with many
00:45:40.680 entrances. Admission is free so visitors are not normally counted. You engage some assistance.
00:45:46.440 They will not need any special knowledge or competence. In fact, as will become clear,
00:45:51.080 the less competent they are, the better your results are going to be. Each morning your
00:45:55.640 assistants take up their stations at the doors. They mark a sheet of paper whenever someone
00:45:59.960 enters through their door. After the museum closes, they count all their marks and you add together
00:46:04.600 all their counts. You do this every day for a specified period, take the average, and that is the
00:46:10.040 number you report to your client. However, in order to claim that your count equals the number of
00:46:15.240 visitors to the museum, you need some explanatory theories. I'll pause there just in my comment.
00:46:21.320 This is Popper's idea of observation being theory laden. You first need a theory of what to observe
00:46:28.920 and how before you can start making claims about what those observations might tell you about reality.
00:46:35.880 Back to the book. For instance, you are assuming that the doors you are observing are precisely
00:46:41.400 the entrances to the museum and that they lead only to the museum. If one of them leads to the
00:46:46.520 cafeteria or to the museum shop as well, you might be making a large error if your client does
00:46:51.320 not consider people who go only there to be visitors to the museum. There is also the issue of
00:46:57.800 museum staff. Do they count as visitors? There are visitors who leave and come back on the same day
00:47:03.240 and so on. You need quite a sophisticated explanatory theory of what the client means by visitors
00:47:10.440 to the museum before you can devise a strategy for counting them. Pause their my reflection or
00:47:16.840 commentary. Already we see this quite profound yet simple point that it's not a simple process
00:47:26.520 in science of going out there and observing the world. This is why empiricism is wrong.
00:47:31.800 Observations do not come first, cannot possibly come first. You first need an idea about what to observe
00:47:37.640 and how and sometimes even something as simple as counting stuff, in this case counting visitors to
00:47:43.960 a museum, is going to require an entire structure of theory in order to account for what you're
00:47:50.280 trying to figure out in the world. So the theory comes first and then the observations and then
00:47:56.120 the decision between the theories that you're trying to test with those observations. Okay back to
00:48:01.080 the book. Suppose you count the number of people coming out as well. If you have an explanatory
00:48:07.160 theory saying that the museum is always empty at night and that no one enters or leaves other
00:48:11.480 than through the doors and that visitors are never created, destroyed, split or merged and so on,
00:48:16.280 then one possible use for the outgoing count is to check the in going one. You would predict they
00:48:21.640 should be the same. Then if they are not the same, you will have an estimate of the accuracy of your
00:48:26.840 count. That is good science. In fact, reporting your result without also making an accuracy estimate
00:48:34.600 makes your report strictly meaningless. Just my comment on that. Accuracy estimates are commonplace
00:48:43.240 in physics. They are absolutely routine. Not every other area of purported science can make the claim
00:48:50.440 that physics does in being able to quantify it's uncertainty. You're doing as well with uncertainty
00:48:55.720 is what physics does. One area I know a little bit about is astrophysics and a huge deal is made
00:49:02.600 about errors and areas of uncertainty and what could have gone wrong and there's always hedges
00:49:08.040 and caveats about all the ways in which the observations which purport to show something could in
00:49:13.480 fact be something else entirely or not even actually real. One reason for this of course is that
00:49:19.960 the amount of light we receive from distant parts of the universe is very very very low intensity
00:49:26.520 in some cases and so we are observing things that the very limit of our power of our instrumentation
00:49:33.640 but despite that we have extremely precise instruments but with extremely precise instruments
00:49:41.800 come quantifiable uncertainties. You know how good your instruments are and you report that as part
00:49:48.760 of your experimental report as part of your journal article so that people reading it know that
00:49:54.840 this might not be a real effect for various reasons. You might report things like the physical
00:49:59.800 attributes of the telescope, the resolution of the telescope and then you might report things like
00:50:05.560 how bright the object was that you supposedly observed and then the reader can gauge whether or not
00:50:11.560 the thing being observed, the thing thought to be observed might in fact be noise in the background,
00:50:17.480 might not actually be a real effect at all. They can judge that by having a look at the
00:50:21.720 sources of uncertainty, the sources of error that might be going on with that report. Now
00:50:26.760 in psychology we might wonder is there the same level of detail and strict adherence to
00:50:33.960 to some extent, strict adherence to the methodology of science in this respect of genuinely trying
00:50:40.840 to report all the things that might have gone wrong, all the areas of uncertainty, all the ways
00:50:46.040 in which the result, the purported result, could in fact be a huge error and not real at all.
00:50:52.600 Okay, so skipping a little bit and going back to the book. Now, suppose you are doing your study
00:50:57.640 using explanationless science instead, which really means science with unstated, uncritised
00:51:03.400 explanations, just as the Copenhagen interpretation really assumed that there was only one
00:51:08.920 unobserved history connecting successive observations. Then you might analyze the result as follows.
00:51:15.000 For each day, subtract the count of people entering from the count of those leaving. If the
00:51:19.480 difference is not zero and this is the key step in the study, call that difference, the spontaneous
00:51:25.400 human creation count, if it is positive or the spontaneous human destruction count, if it is negative,
00:51:31.560 if it is exactly zero, call it consistent with conventional physics. Okay, pause their
00:51:36.360 my reflections. So this is great. So what David's driving home here is the point that if you're not
00:51:41.640 being careful in your study about the sources of error and therefore not being careful about things
00:51:48.440 like counting visitors to a museum and you're doing things like counting the number of people going
00:51:53.000 into the museum and the known people going out, but you're making mistakes. This is why earlier on
00:51:56.360 he said the less reliable your assistants are, the less good they are at counting, the better for
00:52:01.960 your study because if they're really poor at counting, they might miss some people coming in, they might
00:52:07.000 add some people going out and therefore people are apparently, according to your very careful
00:52:12.120 scientific study are being spontaneously generated and so you can have a paper written about this new
00:52:18.120 kind of physics. And so this by the way is a criticism of explanation of science and of just
00:52:23.880 general bad science, which is explanation of science and large part. And we get this, I don't want
00:52:28.920 to say all the time, but more frequently than what it should happen and the softer the science
00:52:33.960 becomes, the worse it can be, not unheard of in the hard sciences, not by a long shot. There are
00:52:40.440 errors that are made in physics, there are errors made in chemistry, for anyone that's interested
00:52:46.440 one of the most famous errors is of course the cold fusion debacle. You can go and look that one
00:52:52.040 up chive I've mentioned in this series before. So errors can be made and in the case of the
00:52:57.720 cold fusion debacle of course, it was indeed the case that the poor results were reported as being
00:53:05.960 not consistent with conventional physics. So that's a rather boring thing when you're
00:53:09.720 conventional when you're consistent with conventional physics. But if you're making errors,
00:53:13.240 then you can make these grandiose claims that something about your findings, in fact,
00:53:19.080 violate well-known laws of physics. And so we might wonder, we can always bet on these things by the way,
00:53:24.280 whether or not the result of a particular study, which purports to violate some conventional
00:53:31.080 law of physics, is itself true, whether that's likely, a long-standing law of physics that so far
00:53:37.560 has no violations, has in fact been violated by the study, or in fact the study is just making
00:53:44.360 huge errors, making some errors somewhere other. And so you always have that choice to make,
00:53:49.000 now it can always be the case that conventional physics is being violated in various ways, that
00:53:54.360 we're wrong about what we know about the laws of physics. In fact, as per periods, we know that
00:53:59.880 we're wrong about the laws of physics because, well, knowledge is infinitely improveable,
00:54:05.000 and so whatever we know about the laws of physics right now, we'll be riddled with misconceptions,
00:54:09.560 and we will correct those misconceptions, we'll come to have a better, deeper understanding of
00:54:13.240 the laws of physics. So we know that the laws of physics, as we understand them now, is not the
00:54:18.920 final word. But this is not to say that tomorrow when Professor Solanso says that the study that
00:54:25.880 they've just recently done has shown, that the neutrinos are traveling beyond the speed of light,
00:54:30.360 that that therefore shows that the theory of general relativity, which thus far has had no
00:54:36.120 violation so far as I know, thus far there's been no experiments to show that physics in any way
00:54:42.760 is inconsistent with the theory of general relativity. But if some professor comes along tomorrow
00:54:47.800 and writes a paper about how neutrinos are violating the theory of general relativity by
00:54:53.240 traveling faster than the speed of light, then we've got a choice to make. Is it in fact the case
00:54:58.600 that this is an experiment which makes general relativity problematic, or is it the case that the
00:55:05.160 professor and their team have simply made and egregious error? And in fact if you go back and look
00:55:09.480 at the history of that particular one, which happened at the Large Hadron Collider,
00:55:12.920 or involved the Large Hadron Collider, you can find that in fact the neutrinos never did travel
00:55:18.760 faster than the speed of light, it was an error. And David's talked about that in the beginning
00:55:23.240 of infinity as well. Okay back to the book. The less competent your counting and tabulating are,
00:55:28.200 the more often you will find those inconsistencies with conventional physics. Next, prove that
00:55:34.280 non-zero results, the spontaneous creation of destruction of human beings, are inconsistent with
00:55:39.400 conventional physics. Include this proof in your report, but also include a concession that extraterrestrial
00:55:45.240 visitors would probably be able to harness physical phenomena of which we are unaware.
00:55:50.520 Also, the teleportation two or from another location would be mistaken for destruction,
00:55:55.240 without trace, and creation out of thin air. In your experiment and that therefore this cannot be
00:56:00.280 ruled out as a possible cause of the anomalies. Now why would you do this? Well of course, of course
00:56:07.480 to get media attention because you're hungry for fame, you want to be famous. Scientists are
00:56:14.040 not immune to this far from it. Far too often we see scientists who are desperate for fame and
00:56:22.040 will say and do next to anything to get in front of cameras. Now there are kind of legitimate
00:56:29.720 reasons why they want some funding and there are illegitimate reasons one might say why they
00:56:34.440 would do this simply because they crave prestige or in worst cases still authority. They want to
00:56:41.240 be able to have the ear of government by being a famous scientist who has discovered something
00:56:47.640 remarkable in the world and so they become mini celebrities and their own money and so on and so forth.
00:56:52.280 So scientists are just human beings, lots of people have these foibles and these
00:56:57.080 flaws, but here's the way that a scientist might go about doing that by making mistakes
00:57:04.840 and or perhaps in some cases lazily making mistakes in which case they're simply incompetent
00:57:10.920 or knowingly in which case they're fraudulent, making these errors so that they can then claim
00:57:16.600 meekly and mildly that perhaps it's the case that they've discovered evidence for alien life
00:57:22.600 but they don't want to say they don't want to quite say that okay so I'll just I'll just continue
00:57:26.680 reading when headlines appear of the form teleportation possibly observed in city museums they
00:57:32.520 say scientists and scientists prove alien abduction is real protest mildly that you have claimed
00:57:38.600 no such thing that your results are not conclusive merely suggestive and that more studies are needed
00:57:44.200 to determine the mechanism of this perplexing phenomenon you have made no false claim
00:57:49.240 data can become inconsistent with conventional physics by the mundane means of containing errors
00:57:53.400 just as genes can cause unhappiness by countless mundane means such as affecting your appearance
00:57:59.160 the fact that your paper does not point this out does not make it false
00:58:02.760 pause the entire reflection okay there there is a wonderful technique for detecting extra solar
00:58:11.960 planets planets beyond their solar system and it is by using the technique of finding solar
00:58:20.200 systems beyond their own where the alignment of the planet just happens to be such that it passes
00:58:26.280 between us and that other star and so if this is the star then the planet can come in front of
00:58:32.600 the star and that eclipses part of the light from star and given the precision of our instruments
00:58:39.400 now given how good our telescopes are in various other techniques that we use for analyzing the
00:58:44.360 light that the telescopes gather we can determine what the size of the object is that's going
00:58:50.760 around that star we look at what's called dips in the light curve okay what's that got to do
00:58:57.480 with this well recently over the last sort of over the last 10 years or so I think the most famous
00:59:03.800 example is referred to as Tabby's star that's Tabby T-A-W-B-Y I think and now it's named after an astronomer
00:59:14.280 who did this careful found this star where the dips in the light curve could not be explained
00:59:23.240 by conventional astronomy and it didn't seem as though what was orbiting the star apparently
00:59:31.720 was a planet in the usual sense or didn't seem to be a binary system and every single reasonable
00:59:39.000 explanation that the astronomers could come up with was ruled out by observations that were made
00:59:45.000 now I'm certainly not implicating the astronomer in question here in this at all whatsoever
00:59:50.200 but the media are prone to putting forth the notion things like well could it be alien
00:59:57.720 technology could it be an alien civilization that is causing these weird dips as soon as someone
1:00:04.520 reputable makes that kind of claim and they need not be a scientist they they could just be a
1:00:09.960 science popularizer of some sort and saying well we don't have any explanation for what's going on
1:00:14.200 an astronomy is rife with these kind of things where because we're looking at things we don't
1:00:20.440 always understand some people are going to disingenuously claim that because we don't understand
1:00:27.240 the observation we've made but therefore it's evidence of alien intelligence now it could be
1:00:33.320 but that's a general purpose response to almost any weed observation we can make of deep space
1:00:40.360 and so in the case of this start was immediately it was immediately latched onto as being
1:00:45.960 proof positive or near proof positive that there was indeed an alien civilization that had
1:00:51.160 that had created some huge structure there is actually this theoretical thing named after
1:00:54.840 Fremen Dyson I think Fremen Dyson came up came up with it called the Dyson Sphere and the
1:00:59.640 Dyson Sphere is theorized to be an alien structure it would be an alien structure a structure
1:01:06.760 built by aliens at the far distant future to capture all the light that is being invented by
1:01:11.160 a star if you wanted to really be efficient and not lose any of the energy coming from a star
1:01:15.880 because you have super advanced technology and you want to capture lots of the light coming
1:01:21.480 from the star because you're powering some time travel device or whatever which requires you to
1:01:25.800 warp space and time maybe you put an entire sphere of material around the start to capture all of
1:01:31.800 that energy now if you're only part way through constructing such a Dyson Sphere maybe what
1:01:38.520 earthlings would see when they point their telescopes towards your star with the partially
1:01:42.280 completed Dyson Sphere is something like the light curve of Tabby's star okay yeah that's a really
1:01:49.960 fun interesting explanation and certainly almost straight away the people involved in the study
1:01:55.320 became quite famous at least in the science community and the science appreciation community I
1:02:01.160 suppose so I don't know what the solution is to that now or if indeed they have a solution
1:02:06.200 but it can always be the case that it is observational error and that doesn't mean that the
1:02:12.440 astronomy themselves necessarily made a mistake although that can certainly happen it can just be that
1:02:17.640 the equipment has malfunctioned in some way which is what happened by the way with the large
1:02:23.960 Hadron Collider and the neutrinos experiment well effectively effectively it was an equipment malfunction
1:02:29.320 the cables were disconnected or something or other okay let's go back to the book okay I'm skipping
1:02:34.760 a little bit and David's talking about this study where people are apparently disappearing or
1:02:40.520 being created spontaneously and he writes you know if you're doing the study you're the person
1:02:45.640 doing the study for all you know they the people could be disappearing and puffs a smoke or
1:02:51.320 in invisible spaceships that would be consistent with your data but your paper takes no position on
1:02:57.240 that it is entirely about the outcomes of your observations so you would better not name your research
1:03:03.000 paper errors made when counting people in competently aside from being a public relations blunder
1:03:08.440 that title might even be considered unscientific according to explanation the science
1:03:12.600 for it would be taking a position on the interpretation of the observed data about which it
1:03:17.480 provides no evidence in my view this is a scientific experiment in form only the substance of scientific
1:03:26.280 theories is explanation and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design
1:03:33.800 of any non-trivial scientific experiment pause their my reflection and this is where we come
1:03:40.040 really to so much of what is done in various areas of psychology if you're only finding correlations
1:03:47.880 between things as happens in much of academic psychology you're not explaining why one variable
1:03:56.360 is correlated with the other you might be insinuating that one thing causes the other and in
1:04:03.560 certain areas of psychology let's say evolutionary psychology comes to mind the correlation is
1:04:11.080 implied so strongly that we just that the practitioners seem to assume it is a causation that
1:04:17.720 this population of people here has this set of genes in common and that same population of people
1:04:23.640 with that set of genes in common tends to have this feature of their personality or mental life
1:04:30.920 and so on also in common and so it is a very small leap to say that the genes are causing the
1:04:38.280 behavior in these people that the genes are causing happiness the genes are causing depression
1:04:43.480 the genes are causing this that all the other they're the genes are causing intelligence
1:04:48.280 the genes are causing a propensity for mathematics or for music and so on and so forth that all of
1:04:53.160 these mental features of a person are somehow conferred on them at least in part by the genes
1:04:59.240 but there's no explanation made as to how the genes can actually cause certain things now I think in
1:05:06.360 some areas of evolutionary psychology people try to come up with explanations but I don't think
1:05:11.160 they're very good explanations and I must concede it might be the case that genes do indeed
1:05:17.640 cause let's say a propensity for an interest in mathematics it's possible but thus far the
1:05:26.680 explanations that have been put forth in order to link some set of genes with tendency to be good
1:05:35.400 in mathematics are very weak indeed but so many people simply assume it's part of the social
1:05:42.680 fabric almost in the Western world that some people simply are born good at mathematics
1:05:49.960 and some people simply are born bad at mathematics repeat for music repeat for languages repeat
1:05:55.480 for any other quality of the mind that you like and so many people have been taught to be genetic
1:06:02.040 determinists that if someone at the age of five doesn't show an interest in some particular subject
1:06:09.640 that they therefore lack of the capacity to ever have an ability in that subject and that is simply
1:06:17.080 false but our our worldview here denies that possibility because of the idea that we have of the
1:06:24.920 human mind as being this universal explainer and universal means that it can actually do anything
1:06:32.280 that anyone else can do there might be differences in speed and you know how fast a person can think
1:06:37.720 and how much they can remember and that may have a bearing in some sort but it's hard to imagine
1:06:42.360 that that would explain everything and that all of the people who are good at mathematics in the
1:06:47.640 world share these same share the same clock speed of their brains or share the same ability to remember
1:06:53.880 it in fact that doesn't seem to be the case but I'm traveling down an avenue that is a
1:06:58.760 dead end for the purpose of this chapter so let me reverse and go back to the book and David writes
1:07:04.520 speaking about the the counting study the counting people at the museum he writes
1:07:09.160 as the above example illustrates a generic feature of experimentation is that the bigger the
1:07:13.800 errors you make either in the numbers or in the naming and interpretation of the measured quantities
1:07:18.680 the more exciting your results are if true so without powerful techniques of error detection
1:07:24.200 and correction which depend on explanatory theories this gives rise to an instability where
1:07:29.240 false results drown out the true in the hard sciences which usually do good science false results
1:07:35.720 due to all sorts of errors are nevertheless common but they are corrected when their explanations
1:07:41.160 are criticized and tested that cannot happen in explanationless science.
1:07:44.920 Paul say my reflection obviously it can't happen in explanationless science because
1:07:49.400 we don't have an explanation of the meaning of the data what the what the theory is explaining
1:07:56.200 why this set of data is linked to that set of data we don't have an explanation of all the
1:08:02.200 sources of error that might be involved in collecting the data and analyzing the data it's simply
1:08:07.640 explanationless all we're doing is collecting data naively and in utter ignorance of the mechanisms
1:08:14.360 by which that data might be an error okay back to the book consequently as soon as scientists
1:08:20.920 allow themselves to stop demanding good explanations and consider only whether a prediction is
1:08:24.920 accurate or inaccurate they are liable to make fools of themselves this is the means by which a
1:08:30.360 succession of eminent physicists over the decades have been fooled by conjurers into believing
1:08:35.320 that various conjuring tricks have been done by paranormal means bad philosophy cannot easily
1:08:41.240 be counted by good philosophy argument and explanation because it holds itself immune
1:08:46.840 but it can be counted by progress people want to understand the world no matter how loudly they
1:08:51.560 may deny that and progress makes bad philosophy harder to believe that is not a matter of
1:08:56.440 refutation by logic or experience but of explanation if mark were alive today I expect you
1:09:02.760 would have accepted the existence of atoms once he saw them through a microscope behaving
1:09:06.680 according to atomic theory as a matter of logic it would still be open to him to say I'm not
1:09:12.200 seeing atoms I'm only seeing a video monitor and I'm only seeing that theory's predictions about
1:09:16.760 me not about atoms come true but the fact that that is a general purpose bad explanation
1:09:22.200 would be born in upon him it would also be open to him to say very well atoms do exist
1:09:27.240 but electrons do not but he might well tire of that game if a better one seems to be available
1:09:32.360 that is to say if rapid progress is made and then he would soon realize that it is not a game
1:09:40.120 bad philosophy is philosophy that denies the possibility,
1:09:43.320 desirability or existence of progress and progress is the only effective way of opposing
1:09:47.960 bad philosophy if progress cannot continue indefinitely bad philosophy will inevitably come again
1:09:54.760 into the ascendancy for it will be true and that's the end of the chapter so just that
1:10:02.120 last sentence there if progress cannot continue indefinitely so if there is some actual cosmic
1:10:09.720 limit on our ability to make progress and many people who have not encountered the work of
1:10:15.960 David Deutsch in other words the vast majority of the world so far unfortunately many people do
1:10:22.440 have this idea even people who purport to call themselves optimists by the way but not in the
1:10:26.840 Deutschian sense not in David Deutsch's sense some people who claim to be optimist nonetheless think
1:10:32.440 there must be an actual limit on how much progress people can make on what we can actually achieve
1:10:38.120 in this universe now David Deutsch's vision has is the counter to that it says that the only limit
1:10:45.640 is what the laws of physics impose everything else is just a matter of creating the knowledge
1:10:50.120 and creating the knowledge and time of course but this is not a logical proof that
1:10:58.520 there might not be a limit to progress even though we say according to our explanations
1:11:03.960 that there is no such limit if there was a limit however then this would mean that progress would
1:11:10.760 end if progress ends then it must be the case therefore that bad philosophy is actually true
1:11:19.160 why because bad philosophy is that set of ideas which says why progress cannot continue or should
1:11:29.640 not continue or will not continue or in other words as David says right at the very end of the
1:11:34.680 chapter it's philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge so it's quite a scary
1:11:40.840 thought really but happily as optimists in the David Deutsch sense we know we know that progress
1:11:52.040 will continue indefinitely that there is no such limit to producing more and more knowledge
1:11:57.480 and solving our problems the only thing the only thing that is preventing us and making ever
1:12:02.600 faster progress is our choices that's convenient that's precisely what the next chapter is all about
1:12:09.720 so i'll see you there in chapter 13 choices as always thank you to everyone who is supporting
1:12:16.520 top cast and my work here have a patreon account in fact i think you can just type in
1:12:21.880 top cast patreon into google and it should come up there's either that or there's a
1:12:26.760 paypal link on my web page as well thank you for all your support see you next episode