00:00:00.000 Welcome to topcast episode 53 for unusual episode where once again I'm deviating a little
00:00:21.760 from the usual beginning of infinity series and for this one first a disclaimer I am not
00:00:28.760 a professional historian, I'm not even an amateur historian to be honest, but I will
00:00:33.440 be making a lot of claims about what went on in history so just consider what I say to
00:00:38.960 be one perspective, one narrative, there's going to be others, let's get into the episode.
00:00:45.960 So I've called this understanding universality, it's about what universality is and why
00:00:59.560 The pantheon of Greek gods seem in a sense to be an arbitrary collection of entities evolving
00:01:06.800 out of the worship of even more ancient and a mystic spirits.
00:01:11.760 These gods, the Greek gods were not universal, their powers were restricted to narrow
00:01:17.640 domains like the god of love or the god of thunder or the god of fertility. Then someone
00:01:23.640 perhaps it was the early people of Israel, the Jews or perhaps it might have been the Christians,
00:01:28.160 I don't want to get into a theological debate on this point, may they jump to religious
00:01:33.440 universality of a kind, they created a god that contained within it the powers of all
00:01:41.920 This new god was omni, omni present, omniscient, omni potent, in short it was a universal
00:01:49.560 god, everywhere capable of everything, a god with reach into everything.
00:01:55.640 Jumped to universality in religion continued, Christians later on did not make it particularly
00:02:01.520 difficult for anyone to convert to Christianity. The early saints decided that not only
00:02:07.200 Jews but anyone at all could be baptized and brought into the religion, indeed in a sense
00:02:12.120 one story might be told that this gave birth to Catholicism, literally that means universality
00:02:18.520 or the universal church, universal because more or less anyone with relative ease could
00:02:23.720 become Catholic, one did not need to be born into the religion, one did not need to be
00:02:27.880 from any particular social class or an already existing member of some other approved faith,
00:02:33.040 there were things to do so to speak, one needed to go through the act of baptism, then
00:02:37.880 holy communion and ultimately confirmation, one had to participate in the sacraments in
00:02:42.640 order to be a fully paid-up member of the tribe, the Islamic religion took this a step further,
00:02:48.360 anyone could convert without so much as a ceremony, repeating a single sentence before
00:02:52.640 a couple of witnesses would do it, now this is not going to be a podcast about religion,
00:02:57.200 I'm just using those examples for illustrative purposes, it's a podcast about universality
00:03:02.760 I've already made a podcast which went for almost an hour about universality, it's a breakdown
00:03:08.080 of chapter six from the beginning of infinity and that chapter is titled, indeed, the
00:03:13.080 jump to universality, now having been engaged in this project of understanding the ideas
00:03:18.440 in the beginning of infinity in a public way, a very public way for a few years now, it
00:03:23.200 becomes clear which aspects of the book seem to me to be more or less well understood,
00:03:29.040 and chapter six would seem to me is a particularly underappreciated chapter, the whole concept
00:03:35.440 of universality is that once simple yet subtle to understand, in my words it's just all
00:03:42.360 about reach, but then that concept of reach is a technical term as used in the worldview
00:03:49.280 presented in the beginning of infinity, so let's start with reach and with those Greek
00:03:54.520 gods again, so many might know that Aphrodite, for example, is the Greek god of love, her
00:04:00.760 domain, her responsibilities if you like, extend across love and beauty and fertility, anything
00:04:07.240 to do with those things that her, she had reach within that restricted domain, she had
00:04:13.160 next to nothing to do with war, for example, that of course was the domain of Ares, the
00:04:18.760 Greek god of courage and conflict, he had reached across those areas, anything to do with
00:04:23.480 battles and the need to be brave, that's Ares, but the air itself and the heaven above,
00:04:29.080 that's the domain of Zeus, the king of the gods, but even his reach was limited to those
00:04:34.160 arenas, he did not get involved in, for example, the oceans or earthquakes, which was
00:04:38.800 the domain of Poseidon for Poseidon could reach into any part of the seas and the oceans,
00:04:43.560 but the point here is that none of those gods could do everything, they had reach more
00:04:49.560 than a mere mortal, you know, for example, a person playing at the seaside could make ripples
00:04:54.440 in the water, but their reach in this regard was limited by their physical strength,
00:04:58.760 Poseidon presumably could make waves as big as he liked, according to Greek mythology.
00:05:04.360 But no Greek god was omnipotent, they broadly speaking lacked the powers of the others.
00:05:11.480 On the other hand, the Christian god is defined as having infinite reach in all domains,
00:05:15.880 that god, sometimes called Yahweh or Jehovah can, it is said literally do anything.
00:05:21.640 In other words, that god has infinite reach, and what does that mean?
00:05:27.120 Now, let's put religion aside and consider science, science, and in particular, but not
00:05:32.440 exclusively, the physical sciences have for a long time been concerned about finding laws
00:05:40.960 These are the laws of physics, Newton's law of gravitation is sometimes called the universal
00:05:48.400 It applies everywhere at all times, once it was discovered by Newton working in Wool's
00:05:52.800 Thorpe Manor in Granth and Linkeshy, England, that law suddenly reached out from his desk
00:06:01.440 That must have been a remarkable discovery in our remarkable feeling for him.
00:06:05.160 Perhaps he didn't think of it in those terms, precisely, or perhaps he did, a kind of
00:06:10.400 guest that he did, because when he first understood that law, he would have understood
00:06:14.920 that other planets, as well as objects on other planets, obeyed his law, his imagination
00:06:20.560 would have stretched to its cosmological limits, given what he understood about cosmology
00:06:25.440 Actually, we know Newton thought of a spatially infinite universe, because without it, his
00:06:31.520 law seemed to suggest everything would have collapsed upon itself with all the objects
00:06:35.520 in the universe gravitationally attracted one to another, and being pulled together towards
00:06:39.960 the centre of whatever the universe was in his theory, to quote the great man himself,
00:06:45.580 Newton said that if the starry heavens were of finite extent, they would fall down to
00:06:50.960 the middle, and there composed one great spherical mass, yet he avoided calculating the
00:06:56.800 time for gravitational collapse, for more on this see the article linked to in the description
00:07:02.840 So Newton got understood universality of a kind, a law that applied everywhere at all
00:07:10.200 Now in chemistry we have something analogous, the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev,
00:07:15.840 the prime originator of the modern periodic table, seemed to understand a certain kind
00:07:22.160 He understood that all matter must have been made of the elements, and more than this,
00:07:27.960 that these elements had to obey certain arithmetic rules.
00:07:33.240 He even predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.
00:07:36.840 And when another chemist, Italian Stanislaus Canizarro, discovered uranium, and claimed
00:07:42.680 it had an atomic white of 120, which he found empirically, which is to say experimentally.
00:07:48.200 Mendeleev was so confident that he, Canizarro, was wrong, based purely upon he Mendeleev's
00:07:53.400 understanding of the periodic table, that he, Mendeleev, published a paper saying so.
00:08:00.080 His periodic table and the rules of periodicity, he found, had reach.
00:08:04.680 They had reached even into the laboratories of experimental chemists in Italy.
00:08:08.880 And of course, like Newton's Law of Gravity, reached to the rest of the universe.
00:08:13.680 I think I've belabered the point enough, but we can't leave science without mentioning
00:08:17.920 Darwin, the theory of evolution by natural selection is, of course, universal as well.
00:08:22.920 We know of no other mechanism whereby complex organisms can come into existence.
00:08:27.560 So that theory is universal for life in the universe.
00:08:31.160 I'd like to think that Darwin thought that as well, that if there were alien life on distant
00:08:37.480 planets, then they, too, that life must obey the biological law or principle that is evolution
00:08:45.600 by natural selection, all life must evolve via that only known mechanism.
00:08:52.200 Now we've talked a little about reach and about universality.
00:08:59.920 In Chapter 6 of the beginning of infinity, David Deutsch talks about writing systems.
00:09:04.960 The earliest ones David refers to as pictograms.
00:09:09.040 Pictograms interestingly enough aren't quite like hieroglyphics, hieroglyphics in a
00:09:16.200 But pictograms only have symbols for a certain finite class of objects.
00:09:22.480 In other words, the pictograms were in one-to-one correspondence with a certain list
00:09:29.760 So a symbol like an arrow might mean tree and a symbol that is a circle might mean sun.
00:09:38.360 It has reach precisely to those objects of the people who write and understand the symbols
00:09:45.040 The number of possible things that can be expressed in such a system is finite.
00:09:51.240 We can improve the reach by adding more and more symbols, but each time in your discovery
00:09:58.120 One would expect the complexity of the pictures would increase without limit.
00:10:02.560 Such a system would become unwieldly for normal communication very quickly.
00:10:07.720 One imagines, indeed we know, the spoken language existed well before the written.
00:10:12.600 People can just invent new words, new combinations of sounds, but for the written language
00:10:17.240 to have infinite reach, there would need to be a way to capture parts of words phonetically.
00:10:23.400 The reason for this is that we cannot make an infinite number of discrete sounds.
00:10:27.560 We can make quite a lot, but the number of sounds a human can make in say a two-second period
00:10:35.000 So if you have an alphabet instead of a pictograph, which is to say a symbol that corresponds
00:10:40.680 not one to one with an object, but rather one to one with a sound, then you can start
00:10:46.680 putting the sounds or the symbols, the letters representing them, into an infinitely
00:10:54.280 Suddenly, with an alphabet, you have infinite reach, you have, in other words, universality.
00:11:00.840 If the thing can be said, expressed vocally, then it can be written.
00:11:05.560 For more on that, see the first few pages of chapter 6 of the beginning of infinity.
00:11:10.440 Okay, now on to number systems, which may also be universal to some degree or other,
00:11:17.680 even not universal at all, and this is important for what I will say at the end of this episode.
00:11:24.600 I guess I should, strictly speaking, say these are numeral systems, not number systems.
00:11:29.480 The distinction being a number is the abstract entity represented by the numeral.
00:11:36.600 You can't write down a number, you can write down numerals.
00:11:40.240 So whatever two is, two can be represented by the number two, or it can be represented
00:11:47.440 by four over two, or six over three, or seven take away five, and so on, add in for
00:11:54.720 You can write down these numerals representing that abstract thing that we call two, but
00:12:03.480 We can only utter noises that represent the numeral, or the numeral representing the
00:12:09.720 Anyway, the earliest numeral system was the telemark system.
00:12:13.480 Now it is universal in the sense that any number out there can be represented by telemarks,
00:12:21.880 Such a so-called unary system would need as many telemarks as there were objects that
00:12:27.240 you were interested in counting or representing, let's say.
00:12:30.920 Grouping telemarks is an improvement, but really not until something like the Roman numeral
00:12:35.880 system, do we have anything that genuinely improves efficiency?
00:12:41.320 But even here, there is a large symbol, the original symbol in Roman numerals for 1,000,
00:12:46.440 which was written in this way, the CD thing, and in later times, or even alternatively,
00:12:52.160 and what most people understand Roman numerals to represent 1,000 being is the letter M,
00:12:57.680 most people are familiar with M. So M is the biggest, or the CD thing is the biggest represents
00:13:03.120 1,000, but really what you have with the Roman numeral system then is just a fancy, more
00:13:08.840 complicated form of a tally system, because once you get up to that large, just a possible
00:13:13.480 number, you just write down repeated strings of M's, it's not really a huge improvement
00:13:20.400 over the telemark system, especially if you're doing complex maths.
00:13:24.600 Of course we, or the Romans, could have kept adding new symbols for bigger numbers, but
00:13:29.680 what this means to quote David Deutsch in the beginning of infinity is, quote, but the resulting
00:13:35.920 system would still always have a highest valued symbol, and hence would not be universal
00:13:45.520 The only way to emancipate arithmetic from tallying is with rules of universal reach, end
00:13:52.520 And that of course is the Indian Arabic number system we have in use today, the digits
00:13:56.960 zero to nine, where the value of a digit depends on its place in the number.
00:14:01.560 So the invention of this system, and importantly the invention of the zero, what I jump to
00:14:06.320 the universality of arithmetic, but David tells the story of how audit has been that
00:14:12.120 people have discovered universal things, yet really noticed their significance.
00:14:18.680 He illustrates this with the case of mathematician and mathematical genius, Archimedes,
00:14:23.480 who invented his own system of numerals, without recounting the entire tale here.
00:14:28.240 Suffice it to say he had a symbol M as well that represented a myriad, or a 10,000.
00:14:34.040 And with this system, symbols written above the M, kind of like an exponent, could be used
00:14:39.440 to multiply, and this is the key for my purpose now, that system stopped with single
00:14:45.240 exponents rather than allowing them to be stacked, one upon another off into infinity.
00:14:50.800 That would have been universally, you can actually have stacks high above the M, but instead
00:14:55.840 that system that existed at the time of Archimedes, arbitrarily stopped at a single T, and
00:15:01.920 even Archimedes who tried to take that yet a step further, using exponents of a kind, roughly
00:15:08.640 speaking, he used powers of a myriad myriad, so that's a big number, a myriad myriad,
00:15:13.960 and powers of that to represent super large numbers, and that does allow some very large
00:15:19.120 numbers to be represented, but he, too, still arbitrarily, kept the largest number to be
00:15:25.360 constructed from existing Greg numerals, so there was a large, just possible number that
00:15:33.800 This is key, it could have been another higher form of universality, without imposing
00:15:40.400 this idea of only allowing the myriad myriad to be raised to the power of an existing
00:15:45.240 Greg numeral, that rule prevented another jump to universality in his system.
00:15:50.720 This will have an analog, I will come to later, but for now we need to consider perhaps
00:15:54.960 one of the more recent and amazing jumps to universality, computational universality.
00:16:01.560 So computational universality is largely to do with the universality of hardware, a device
00:16:08.160 that can in principle do the work of any other device.
00:16:11.840 And of course, the history of computation is a lecture series in itself, named such as
00:16:17.400 Jakarta, and Babbage, Lovelace, and Church all come into it, and it seems to be the case
00:16:22.360 that Ada Lovelace appreciated computational universality first, namely, the possibility
00:16:27.600 of a device that could do not only arithmetic for you, but in David's words, do algebra,
00:16:33.040 play chairs, compose music, process images, and so on, end quote.
00:16:37.320 For my purposes, I'm just going to mention two names here, and the first, of course, is
00:16:42.480 Turing was the first to develop the proper mathematical theory of computation.
00:16:46.800 In his theory, his description of the universal computer was such that it was a computer
00:16:52.440 that could have computed anything that was computable.
00:16:55.360 But in practice, the first computers were designed only for highly specific uses, like code
00:17:01.240 breaking or solving the equations of projectile motion.
00:17:04.480 Now the instructions for a computer are written in what's called a programming language,
00:17:09.080 and a programming language can be what's called Turing complete, or not.
00:17:14.000 Turing complete means that the language enables anything that a Turing machine can do,
00:17:18.920 namely anything that a computer can do, can be written in that language, so you can
00:17:23.480 give instructions to the computer such that the computer can do anything at all, almost
00:17:29.440 all modern computer languages are Turing complete, but there are reasons people might
00:17:34.360 utilize Turing incomplete languages, or non- Turing complete languages.
00:17:39.160 Now why this might be is because you might want the computer to actually stop in certain
00:17:44.480 cases to halt to not continue computing, because there are situations where a computer can
00:17:49.480 end up in a loop and just keep on doing the same thing over and over again, and there
00:17:52.760 are practical reasons why you want the computer, perhaps sometimes to be in a loop, but in
00:17:57.600 other cases, you might not want it ever to be stuck in a loop.
00:18:01.520 So if you don't want it to ever have the possibility of even being stuck in a loop, then
00:18:05.040 you ensure that this is something it can't do, namely, can't be stuck in a loop, so therefore
00:18:10.320 you don't want the language to be Turing complete, you want it to be Turing incomplete.
00:18:17.360 The other name, the second name I should mention, and this is of course David Deutsch, because
00:18:22.960 quantum computation, which is where David applied the laws of physics, the quantum laws
00:18:28.280 of physics, to the operation of a Turing computer, to Turing's theory about how computers
00:18:36.360 He said, of course, that computers aren't abstract objects, they're physical objects,
00:18:42.040 and you can have this thing called a quantum computer, which, operating under the laws
00:18:46.800 of quantum theory, can take advantage of the fact that there exist multiple universes,
00:18:53.040 and so therefore you can use these multiple universes, use the resources in these
00:19:00.600 So then you can efficiently compute certain things that a Turing computer can't do efficiently.
00:19:06.000 For example, a classical Turing computer, if it tried to model, let's say, how the electrons
00:19:12.000 move around an atom, that would be a kind of intractable problem for a classical computer
00:19:18.720 But with a quantum computer, you could actually simulate an atom, because an atom, of
00:19:23.360 course, is a quantum object, and a quantum computer would also be a quantum object.
00:19:28.720 But for more on that, go to my multiverse series, where I mentioned, where I talk more
00:19:38.280 But suffice it to say, the quantum computer is another level of a jump to universality.
00:19:46.040 But now, keeping in mind this distinction between Turing complete languages and Turing
00:19:51.440 incomplete languages, which exists for good practical purposes.
00:19:56.360 This is really the crescendo of the podcast, I suppose.
00:20:00.600 It brings me to a very contemporary example of a jump to universality.
00:20:05.600 The language that Bitcoin, the first of the cryptocurrencies that exists, that language
00:20:12.440 the Bitcoin is written in as known as Bitcoin QT, also known as Bitcoin Core.
00:20:18.480 It's based on the language C++, and if you don't know what I'm talking about here, C++
00:20:22.600 is just a programming language, and that language is, of course, Turing complete.
00:20:28.400 But the Bitcoin version of that language, Bitcoin Core, is not, and deliberately so, for
00:20:35.120 It was designed so that the computers running the thing called the blockchain on which the
00:20:39.440 Bitcoin is based could not possibly get stuck in infinite loops, and thereby consume resources
00:20:45.440 on the network, which would slow everything down.
00:20:48.560 This helps reduce the possibility of so-called denial of service attacks, or to most people,
00:20:57.840 It means that Bitcoin is literally only a cryptocurrency.
00:21:02.160 It has been, for good reason, and yet also kind of arbitrarily, just like Archimedes'
00:21:07.400 number system, kneecapped into having a finite repertoire of uses.
00:21:12.600 And it is, in fact, used as a cryptocurrency only.
00:21:16.240 What's that got to do with a jump to universality?
00:21:18.520 Well, it's competitor, to some extent, known as Ethereum.
00:21:24.200 Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, but it's not only a cryptocurrency.
00:21:27.920 Ethereum was deliberately designed as a blockchain which served as a platform.
00:21:38.760 It's a decentralized system, but it's a system not simply for allowing the possibility
00:21:43.880 and the actuality of a cryptocurrency, but can also be used as a place to, for example,
00:21:49.200 design apps, so-called DAPs, decentralized apps.
00:21:53.240 This is, as I have said, in the language of the beginning of infinity, a jump to universality.
00:21:58.160 This is down to the language it is written in, which is known as Solidity.
00:22:02.560 For me, this step, this jump, seems rather amazing, although we're still very much in the
00:22:09.320 infancy of Ethereum and what Ethereum is being used for.
00:22:11.800 It has been used to make games and various other things.
00:22:14.840 You can look around on the internet as to what Ethereum has actually used for.
00:22:18.440 But it opens up the possibility to replace certain, huge companies.
00:22:23.760 This idea that we were waiting for competitors to what seemed to be monopolies, the
00:22:29.400 art monopolies, but which seemed to be monopolies, could very much be here, the beginnings
00:22:35.200 of the end of the so-called monopolies that Google has.
00:22:39.840 Google is centralized, Twitter is centralized because Google exists on Google servers,
00:22:45.880 on Google computers, Twitter exists on Twitter computers, Facebook exists on Facebook's
00:22:53.480 Those companies own the computers and have every right to, for example, censor people.
00:22:58.640 Take people off, remove them from their network, but a decentralized app like an Ethereum
00:23:04.480 Twitter, which doesn't exist yet as far as I know, would exist not on a central computer,
00:23:09.880 but on many computers, none of which is actually in control of the app itself.
00:23:15.760 And with such a platform, any app that could be written anywhere else could be written
00:23:21.840 Now Solidity, the language, has seemingly some issues to do with errors creeping into
00:23:26.760 the Ethereum platform, but this may be the price to pay for a jump to universality.
00:23:32.120 After all, problems are indeed inevitable, and error is the natural state of things.
00:23:36.480 What Bitcoin gains in terms of resistance to a certain class of errors, it loses in reach.
00:23:42.560 Ethereum, on the other hand, gains possibly infinite reach, but it means error correction
00:23:48.080 is that much more important, and errors will creep in.
00:23:51.720 But it seems to me, Ethereum is a real jump in technology akin to the creation of the
00:23:57.800 That is, the jump to universality, and a jump in a sense to a kind of dispersed capitalism
00:24:03.560 and freedom, a very libertarian kind of industry, and a way for people to interact, where
00:24:08.800 the arbitrary whims of a management cannot, or at least cannot with the ease we have seen recently,
00:24:14.480 sensor, restrict or control the flow of information, and so on.
00:24:18.680 Now that's a topic, I think, for a future episode.
00:24:21.440 I'll end with the most important kind of universality that exists in the universe.
00:24:27.200 The most significant jump to universality that the laws of physics have permitted, and
00:24:32.080 that, of course, is the jump to explanatory universality.
00:24:40.080 All other animals had a finite repertoire of behaviors, and possibly, if they had any
00:24:46.240 thoughts in their mind at all, those were finite, too, but human beings, people have an
00:24:53.160 infinite repertoire of possible things that they can consider, ponder, simulate, represent
00:25:04.640 Whatever can be thought of can be thought of by us.
00:25:07.560 Whatever phenomena exists out there in the universe can be modeled by our minds.
00:25:12.280 We are the most significant jump to universality, and it is us that allows the creation
00:25:18.360 of other kinds of jumps to universality, like Ethereum and computers.
