00:00:00.000 Ah, this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end
00:00:13.000 Well, thank you to Mr Churchill and welcome to episode 57, the beginning, chapter 18 of
00:00:23.400 the beginning of infinity, titled The Beginning.
00:00:26.440 So I guess to be fair, it wouldn't be until next episode or the episode after that, possibly
00:00:31.240 when we get to the end of the beginning of the end of the beginning of infinity, or the
00:00:36.800 end of the beginning, which is the chapter called the beginning, which comes at the end of
00:00:43.360 But it is only the end of the beginning of infinity, so far as I'm concerned, because there
00:00:48.360 are so many more interesting things going on with the beginning of infinity right
00:00:52.240 now. And if you head over to Naval Revocance channel on YouTube, and you can find the beginnings
00:01:01.560 of a new podcast series that it's been out for a few weeks now, and we're planning on taking
00:01:07.120 that on for another many episodes, I'm not sure exactly how many, but this conversation
00:01:11.960 that Naval and I had is being put into podcast format, and we're going to have a number
00:01:16.800 of these other conversations as well, further unpacking the beginning of infinity.
00:01:21.960 And perhaps trying to explain it in terminology that is even more accessible than what
00:01:28.920 So go there and begin the beginning of infinity explorations all over again, if you like.
00:01:34.240 And further also on Naval's channel there, you can find some conversations that I've had
00:01:39.240 on this new thing called Clubhouse. There are links there to our long conversations or more
00:01:45.400 with myself and Naval and some other people exploring the ideas that I've been talking
00:01:50.800 So this is all just getting started. And there are some other projects in the pipeline
00:01:55.280 that Naval and I have that we're very excited about in bringing to fruition more beginning
00:02:00.480 of infinity type themes. Naval has a real beginning of infinity mindset. He's one of
00:02:05.960 these rare people in business who has a contrarian mindset to a large extent, contrarian
00:02:11.400 about both the typical academic culture and the typical business culture as well. And so
00:02:17.040 this comes together in his love for the beginning of infinity because these ideas are about
00:02:22.200 the infinite future, which is something that Naval and David Deutsch have converged upon.
00:02:27.240 And it seems to be a wonderful meeting of minds that's just commencing now. So I'm looking
00:02:32.040 forward to see what's going to come of the encounter between the ideas of Naval and the
00:02:40.760 What kind of new people might be inspired to really take seriously what both of these impressive
00:02:46.480 people are saying? And it just so appropriate today that I am making this episode because
00:02:51.960 today Sam Harris, the neuroscientist podcaster, released another one of his making sense
00:02:58.240 podcast. And that is titled Food, Climate and Pandemic Risk. And there is some interesting
00:03:04.800 solutions in there about the ethics of eating meat, which I have my own views on, but
00:03:10.080 which I know many people are very concerned about the possibility that animals might be
00:03:14.480 suffering in the production of meat through factory farming and so on. Now there are interesting
00:03:19.840 solutions that Sam is interested in promoting about how to artificially create meat in the
00:03:26.760 laboratory. And I think this is a great idea for a number of reasons, not least of which
00:03:30.360 is well, it's just an innovative idea and more power to people who come up with innovative
00:03:35.320 ideas where there is a place in the market where people might be able to make a lot of
00:03:40.640 money in order to then go on and fund other interesting innovative ideas. But more than
00:03:45.600 that, any of these kind of ways in which we can figure out how to more efficiently, I suppose,
00:03:51.680 create food and feed even more people more cheaply than that's great. Solving some of
00:03:56.080 these problems of poverty in certain places where some people don't get enough of whatever
00:04:01.200 nutrient in their diet, especially protein in their diet. And so if we can do this via some
00:04:05.840 mass production method where it's cheaper, ultimately, in the long run, speaking then
00:04:11.200 having to raise cows and sheep and that old technology of animals and instead have just a factory
00:04:16.960 pumping out steaks and pumping out chicken fillets and pumping out your lamb chops, then isn't that
00:04:21.600 a wonderful idea? That's great. That's fantastic. But I bring it up because I listened to the entirety
00:04:28.000 of the podcast and although they were interesting and optimistic ways in which technology
00:04:33.760 might be used in order to solve this problem, it was interesting that the speakers
00:04:38.160 seemed a time to regret the fact that it came down to a technological solution.
00:04:43.520 That the technological solution was only necessary because they couldn't find a political way
00:04:48.960 in order to persuade everyone that what they were doing was wrong in this regard, namely that
00:04:54.000 we are all terribly immoral, we who eat meat, or that we aren't concerned or taken seriously
00:04:59.280 enough, the existential threat of climate change, although we simply didn't have our morals
00:05:05.280 calibrated and precisely the correct way that these people thought that we should.
00:05:11.360 And my last podcast, the episode before this was just a kind of lighthearted to some extent,
00:05:18.240 exploration of existential risk. And the reason why it was lighthearted was because sometimes
00:05:26.080 some of us do get frustrated with the identification of particular problems as being
00:05:32.480 the way in which civilization is going to go off the rails. But the thing is that if you know
00:05:38.160 there's a problem, even if you have a hint of there being a problem, then human beings will begin
00:05:42.560 to course correct, they'll begin to correct their errors. To the extent that they think it really
00:05:48.000 is an existential threat and during the conversation that Sam had with his guests, they were really
00:05:54.720 upset about the fact that the pandemic, the COVID-19 virus pandemic that happened through 2019,
00:06:02.960 2020 and throughout 2021, wasn't responded too sufficiently quickly and they thought this was a
00:06:08.960 cause for a certain amount of despair and that wasn't either shame that people didn't respond
00:06:13.680 faster. Now on the one hand, I can kind of agree, it's always better if we can respond to any
00:06:17.840 given problem faster than what we did, so the suffering is less. But I think the correct lens through
00:06:24.400 which to look at this pandemic is that it was a pandemic that we solved faster than any other
00:06:29.120 pandemic hitherto that has ever existed or affected people before. That globally, we managed to
00:06:34.320 globally coordinate this response in very, very quickly. I thought that the example of the way in
00:06:40.480 which the world responded to COVID-19 broadly speaking was a cause for optimism, a cause for hope,
00:06:47.200 a cause for thinking that should we encounter this kind of thing again, we'll be able to respond
00:06:51.200 even more quickly. That's the lesson of this, that the accelerating rate at which human beings
00:06:57.600 are able to collaborate and can't with solutions like that seems is a cause for celebration,
00:07:03.040 not despair, but this is just the usual mode in which intellectuals, public academics tend to respond
00:07:12.480 to any kind of problem, as if it's a source of despair that we didn't find the solution
00:07:17.520 quickly enough. But it's as if they don't know or unaware of and simply forget that problems
00:07:22.800 are inevitable. The problems will continue to happen all the time and anyone particular problem
00:07:27.760 that's been identified, there is a flip side to being concerned about the fact that it might
00:07:32.320 cause our demise. The flip side is, hey, we actually identified this thing in time,
00:07:37.520 because we should all of us be far more concerned about the thing we do not yet know about,
00:07:43.040 about the problem that is we are yet to encounter. And so the problems that we do know about,
00:07:49.200 I think they are by virtue of the fact that we know about them, for all the more reason,
00:07:55.200 less likely to wipe us out at all. And every day that goes by that we're aware of this particular
00:08:00.560 problem, it becomes less likely that that particular problem is going to in truth be an existential
00:08:06.400 threat to us. That insofar as climate change could cause some sort of economic catastrophe,
00:08:13.760 that alone environmental catastrophe, the more that that becomes clear, if it becomes more clear,
00:08:19.760 perhaps it will be turned over, we don't know yet, we don't know exactly what the future will hold.
00:08:23.840 But insofar as it continues to persist to be a problem globally and to cause environmental issues
00:08:30.080 that scientists seem to be able to agree, and other thinkers seem to be able to agree,
00:08:33.280 is actually the cause of certain problems that are happening right now today, for example,
00:08:39.280 certain weather events, certain sea level rises, certain declines in agricultural production,
00:08:45.280 I don't think there has been any declines in agricultural production, by the way,
00:08:48.720 just keeps on increasing. That every day that goes by, it is less likely that we will,
00:08:54.720 in the face of this, just ignore it, that the people of the world will just continue to
00:09:00.080 so-called ignore it or so-called down-platform. I don't think they are. If anything,
00:09:04.960 putting my cards on that table, at certain times I think there might be a tendency to overreaction,
00:09:10.960 a tendency to hysteria. I think that can sometimes be more of a problem than the problem itself,
00:09:18.480 the hyperbole, because what the hyperbole does, what hysteria tends to do, is persuade no one.
00:09:24.960 It frightens a whole bunch of people on the one hand, and it completely turns off a whole bunch
00:09:29.680 of other people on the other, because if your hysterical predictions don't come true,
00:09:35.040 within the time frame that you said that they will, then what does any reasonable person do
00:09:39.840 in that situation? When they are not experts, when they are lay people, well, they tend to switch
00:09:44.800 off from listening to you in the future, even if you are an expert, even if you are a scientist,
00:09:50.160 who is the best qualified person to actually explain what is likely to happen given this
00:09:56.160 particular scientific theory of, for example, the climate. It's not that we need to accept that
00:10:02.640 sometimes scientists get things wrong, and everyone needs to be taught that. It's that the scientists
00:10:08.000 themselves, when making a prediction, have to very carefully calibrate the language that they use
00:10:14.400 surrounding that prediction. If they say things like, for example, all the dams are going to
00:10:19.760 run out of water by 2020, and we're all going to be in a serious situation where we can't even find
00:10:26.800 drinking water. This was said in Australia, by the way, by some experts, back in 2005 or 2010.
00:10:34.320 And when that does not come to pass, and in fact, we end up having floods, if the same experts
00:10:39.600 turn around and say, well, it's not the drought that came due to climate change, but rather the floods,
00:10:45.200 in other words, any set of weather events that occur can be attributed to climate change.
00:10:51.120 It is quite understandable that people begin to switch off, which brings me to academics today
00:10:57.520 of all different stripes, who make similar noises about the ways in which there's going to be
00:11:05.440 demise on planet Earth. There's going to be regression on planet Earth. There's going to be technological
00:11:11.760 demise. There's going to be increasing amounts of starvation. If we don't do this or that other
00:11:18.640 thing, that was somewhat hinted at in the episode of making sense today released April 6, 2021,
00:11:26.080 if you're interested in having a listen to that. The idea was that if we didn't go down the road
00:11:31.520 of this particular solution, namely laboratory creation of particular kinds of meat, which I think
00:11:37.840 there's nothing wrong with, by the way, but if we didn't choose to go down that road, then there
00:11:42.400 would be massive amounts of starvation. This is the typical Malthusian argument, namely that because
00:11:50.080 there's a finite amount of land, but the amount of people on the Earth continues to grow,
00:11:56.240 logically speaking, we can only support so many people given the amount of land, but this has
00:12:02.000 always been shown to be false. We had vertical farms now, by the way. I talked about that in
00:12:07.520 another episode, vertical farming largely for the purpose of growing vegetables and plans,
00:12:13.360 but there's no reason why you couldn't have a vertical farm of chickens and cows. Now, of course,
00:12:18.320 I know I understand the animal rights people would be horrified if we had a skyscraper full of
00:12:24.720 chickens and cows and sheep, but I'm just saying that this is the kind of thing where if only one
00:12:32.240 solution is proposed to be the solution to any particular problem, it leads to this pessimistic idea
00:12:39.040 and this kind of authoritarian totalitarianism where the person with the purported solution says,
00:12:44.880 if you do not enact my solution, then things will go catastrophically wrong. It's an existential threat.
00:12:50.960 But this is just a failure of imagination on the part of certain public intellectuals. There
00:12:56.800 will always be human creativity, which can find alternate solutions to particular things. And what does
00:13:02.880 this have to do with today's episode? Well, the beginning, even though we continue to have people who
00:13:08.800 say things look terrible for humanity, things are getting worse. If we don't solve this problem,
00:13:14.960 we're going to go extinct. This has always been said. There are very few thinkers throughout
00:13:20.800 recent history who like David Deutsch have promoted the idea that human creativity can and has
00:13:28.720 been used and will continue to be used to solve the most pressing problems. And who've observed
00:13:34.320 that it is enlightenment ideas that have existed for the last few centuries,
00:13:39.520 they explain why things continue to get better. There's an explanation as to why it's not
00:13:44.400 merely a trend of getting better. Now, Stephen Pinker writes about the trend and all the examples
00:13:49.520 of how it is that things have gotten better. It's not that it's inevitable that it gets better,
00:13:53.520 but there is an underlying explanation about, as the beginning infinity lays out for us,
00:13:58.400 a culture of criticism, of people thinking of new ideas and being able to think of new ideas
00:14:05.280 because they're free to think of these new ideas. They've been trained in a certain extent,
00:14:10.320 educated in a culture that says it's okay to criticize these ideas, not to say that we
00:14:15.680 couldn't do a lot better on that front, but we have begun to reveal how it is that we generate
00:14:22.480 new ideas, how we're able to innovate. And we have people who, in real life, actually do this,
00:14:27.920 who innovate, who identify people who innovate, like Naval rubber can, then isn't it all the
00:14:32.800 more exciting and wonderful that we actually have a genuine concrete way in which the beginning
00:14:39.760 infinity can inform our worldview, personally, individually, in terms of the corporate world,
00:14:46.800 and in terms of governments and other kinds of institutions that can explore the space of
00:14:52.240 possibilities in a positive, optimistic way without being concerned and sidetracked about all the
00:14:57.280 ways in which people are either the cause of the problem, people themselves are an evil in some way,
00:15:03.760 or that there is almost no hope and that what we have to do is to merely reduce the amount
00:15:09.680 that we're producing, reduce the amount of energy that we're using, concentrate purely on efficiency
00:15:15.920 gains wherever we can because we're running out of resources, which again was mentioned today.
00:15:21.040 We're not running out of resources, we talked about that during the previous chapter.
00:15:25.280 Let's, after this extremely long introduction, get into the reading of the beginning,
00:15:30.480 chapter 18, which is the final chapter of the beginning of the beginning. Let's go.
00:15:49.680 And David begins with a quote from Isaac Asimov in his book, The End of Eternity, published in 1955,
00:15:58.720 where Asimov wrote, This is Earth, not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting
00:16:07.120 point of an infinite adventure. All you need to do is make the decision to end your static society.
00:16:14.640 It is yours to make. With that decision came the end, the final end of eternity and the beginning
00:16:21.840 of infinity. And then David goes on to write. The first person to measure this conference of the
00:16:28.880 earth was the astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene in the 3rd century BCE. His result was fairly
00:16:35.840 close to the actual value, which is around 40,000 kilometres. For most of history, this was
00:16:41.680 considered an enormous distance, but with the enlightenment, that conception gradually changed
00:16:47.120 nowadays, we think of the earth as small. This was brought about mainly by two things, first by
00:16:52.080 the science of astronomy, which discovered titanic entities compared with which our planet is indeed
00:16:57.680 unimaginably tiny, and second by technologies that have made worldwide travelling communication
00:17:03.120 commonplace. So the earth has become smaller, both relative to the universe and relative to the scale
00:17:09.120 of human action. Okay, just pausing there as a little side comment here. How did Eratosthenes
00:17:17.040 figure out the circumference of the earth in like 200 BC, something like that? So how he did it was
00:17:23.520 he had heard, purportedly, he heard that there's town called Cyrene, and in this town called Cyrene,
00:17:30.080 in Egypt, there was a well, and the well, one day during the year, this well, the sun above it,
00:17:37.600 cast no shadow. It just shone straight down into the well, so you could see the very bottom of the
00:17:42.400 well, which is interesting in red, so rare, and I mean, it could one day of the year of purportedly.
00:17:46.880 Now he wasn't in Cyrene, he was in another town, the city rather, called Alexandria,
00:17:52.560 and in those days the unit of measurement was the stadium, so the distance between the place where
00:17:59.440 the well was casting no shadow, and Alexandria was about 5,000 stadia. And so what Eratosthenes'
00:18:07.360 method involved, and school children do this now, was to take a stick of some sort, put that in
00:18:14.480 the ground, and then measure the length of the shadow that that stick cast at noon on that same
00:18:21.040 particular day. The length of that shadow, trigonometry, gives you a particular angle at the time,
00:18:26.960 actually the angle that he got was about 7.2 degrees, which is about 150th of an entire circle.
00:18:33.760 So he knew that if he knew the distance from Alexandria to Cyrene to Cyrene, which he knew,
00:18:39.760 which he knew, and he got within, I think, a few percent of what the actual value of the
00:18:45.520 circumference of the earth was. Okay, back to the book, and David Wright's. Thus in regard to
00:18:51.280 the geography of the universe and to our place in it, the prevailing worldview has rid itself
00:18:56.960 of some parochial misconceptions. We know that we have explored most of the whole surface
00:19:02.160 of that formerly enormous sphere, but we also know that there are far more places left to
00:19:08.000 explore in the universe and beneath the surface of the earth's land and oceans than anyone imagined
00:19:13.440 while we still had those misconceptions. In regard to theoretical knowledge, however,
00:19:18.880 the prevailing worldview has not yet caught up with enlightenment values.
00:19:24.480 Thanks to the fallacy and bias of prophecy, a persistent assumption remains
00:19:29.440 that our existing theories are at, or fairly close to, the limit of what is knowable,
00:19:35.440 that we are nearly there, or perhaps halfway there. As the economist David Friedman
00:19:40.800 has remarked, most people believe that an income of about twice their own should be sufficient
00:19:45.280 to satisfy any reasonable person, and that no genuine benefit can be derived from amounts above
00:19:50.480 that. As with wealth, so with scientific knowledge, it's hard to imagine what it would be like
00:19:55.840 to know twice as much as we do, and so if we try to prophesy it, we find ourselves just
00:20:00.240 picturing the next few decimal places of what we already know. Even Feynman made an uncharacteristic
00:20:06.240 mistake in disregard when he wrote, quote from Feynman, I think there will certainly not be novelty
00:20:12.960 say for a thousand years. This thing cannot keep going on so that we are always going to discover
00:20:18.080 more and more new laws. If we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels, one underneath
00:20:23.440 the other. We are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is
00:20:28.480 like the discovery of America. You only discover it once. Feynman, the character of physical law,
00:20:35.040 1965, paused there just my reflection quickly. No, it's not like the discovery of America at all.
00:20:42.080 No, no, it's more akin, I suppose, to the discovery that there are other galaxies.
00:20:49.280 Now, it used to be thought that the Milky Way galaxy was the entirety of the universe and then
00:20:55.040 it became clear that there were indeed other galaxies, islands of stars, just like our own.
00:21:00.720 Far beyond the Milky Way galaxy and once we kind of realized that it gradually became
00:21:06.560 a realization to us that there were just many, many, many more galaxies, hundreds of billions
00:21:12.960 perhaps an infinite number of galaxies. And in the same way, our theoretical knowledge,
00:21:19.200 our knowledge of science, our knowledge of philosophy has no bottom to it. There's no final
00:21:24.000 foundation that we can get to. Every time we dig a little further and find something more
00:21:29.360 and new and interesting, we can ask the question, why that and why is it that way and can it be
00:21:34.720 improved in some way and it can, it can. But it is the rare person that thinks or takes seriously
00:21:40.320 that idea. Some people pay lip service to it and in some modes appear to be fallibleists or who
00:21:46.720 believe in progress. But so many people, the overwhelming majority of people, certainly the
00:21:52.880 overwhelming majority of public intellectuals, think that as David just explained there, we're
00:21:57.760 almost there that we're, we're just about at the end of physics or the end of scientific
00:22:02.880 the end of science. As David is going to come to quite a famous book called The End of Science
00:22:10.080 by John Horgan about, all the ways in which progress must necessarily come to an end in some way.
00:22:16.240 And these are the sentiments of, I would say, a majority of physicists that we've got, for example,
00:22:22.960 the standard model of particle physics. Okay, this is the explanation of all the different
00:22:28.880 particles in the way in which they interact one with another. And it seems as though many
00:22:34.480 think that we are just about there, we might have to find the graviton. Okay, the particle,
00:22:40.320 that is the particle, the smallest particle of gravity. And then we'll just about have everything.
00:22:45.120 And maybe we'll need a few other particles as well, but essentially we're almost there,
00:22:49.440 we're almost done. Or perhaps it is that there's a layer beneath the standard model, maybe it's
00:22:55.920 string theory, but once we figure out what all the modes of vibration of the particular strings
00:23:00.480 are, then we'll be done. And, you know, that'll be the end of particle physics, that'll be
00:23:04.240 end of the fundamental physics. This is why we have Michio Karka releasing a book just very
00:23:09.200 recently called The God Equation. And The God Equation is something that even Paul Davies talks
00:23:15.440 about in his books, which is the final equation, the final explanation, so to speak, of
00:23:21.920 fundamental physics, about how all the forces actually interact. This is supposed to be
00:23:27.600 the final theory of physics. At the moment, we've got a unification, and the physicists have figured
00:23:33.920 out how to unify magnetism and electricity. So we have this single force electromagnetism now.
00:23:41.040 And then some smart people figured out that, well, you can actually unify another force called
00:23:46.080 the weak force. The weak force is the force that helps to explain what's going on during radioactive
00:23:52.240 decay, for example, how you can have electrons coming out of the nucleus, interesting process,
00:23:57.520 among other things. And this weak force can actually be united with the electromagnetic force,
00:24:03.120 and so we have the electro-weak force, and some people won the Nobel Prize for figuring out
00:24:07.600 the electro-weak force. And so what we have to do now is to figure out, well, how do we
00:24:11.360 unify the strong nuclear force, the force that keeps the nucleus together, with the electro-weak
00:24:16.000 force? And once we have this, we have the electro-weak strong force or something like that.
00:24:20.240 And this would be called a grand unified theory. But that grand unified theory would still
00:24:25.440 be leading out gravity. Now, we know from general relativity that gravity is not a force. However,
00:24:30.480 these people who are kind of particle physics fundamentalists think that everything must be
00:24:36.400 ultimately constituted of particles, and so there must be a particle that mediates the gravitational
00:24:41.280 force, even though it's not a force. And when we have that, then we'll have a unification of
00:24:45.040 the electro-weak strong force with gravity, and that will be a so-called theory of everything.
00:24:51.600 And David talks about that right at the beginning of the fabric of reality as well,
00:24:55.200 that this wouldn't be a theory of everything, because you've always asked why there's
00:24:58.720 that have that form that it does. There would be layers beneath it. There would be no end to
00:25:04.240 trying to understand physics once we have this so-called theory of everything if indeed it's
00:25:09.600 possible to have a theory of everything. So far, all attempts via this route to continue to
00:25:14.080 unify the forces to unify these forces with gravity have failed. But let's go back to the book
00:25:19.840 and David writes. Among other things, Feynman forgot that the very concept of a law of nature
00:25:26.240 is not cast in stone. As I mentioned in chapter five, this concept was different before Newton
00:25:30.960 and Galileo, and it may change again the concept of levels of explanation dates from the 20th
00:25:36.720 century, and it too will change if I am right, then as I guessed in chapter five, there are
00:25:42.080 fundamental laws that look emergent relative to microscopic physics. More generally,
00:25:47.440 the most fundamental discoveries have always, and will always, not only consist of new explanations,
00:25:52.480 but new modes of explanation. As for being boring, that is merely a prophecy that criteria for
00:25:58.320 judging problems will not evolve as fast as the problems themselves, but there is no argument for
00:26:02.480 that other than a failure of imagination. Even Feynman cannot get around the fact that the future
00:26:08.400 is not yet imaginable. Just on this pausing there, just my reflection on this, just on this distinction
00:26:14.480 between fundamental and emergent, and it's my reading of David Deutsch's work that has made me think
00:26:19.360 these two concepts are not really at odds. There can be emergent laws, in other words, laws that
00:26:26.560 come from the art workings of the laws of physics, or principles that come from the art workings of
00:26:32.960 the laws of physics. They emerge from, but they're still fundamental. In other words, fundamental,
00:26:37.280 but that we consider, appear in many different fields in the explanations of many different kinds
00:26:44.160 of disparate phenomena. Take, for example, evolution by natural selection. That process,
00:26:50.320 neo-Darwinism, if you like, this process of where the selfish genes of ours intends to get itself
00:26:56.480 replicated. That is a fundamental law, but it's also emergent. It's both fundamental and emergent.
00:27:04.560 These two things do not have to be, do not have to contradict one another. It is required in
00:27:09.760 order to explain all of biology. One would dare say. So it is fundamental within that domain.
00:27:17.840 It may be even more fundamental than that, we don't know. But the thing is, it certainly emerged.
00:27:22.400 It emerged from, well, it came after the Big Bang. It came after, you know, once we had
00:27:27.920 complex chemistry, it emerged somehow out of that. We don't know exactly how, how the process arose,
00:27:33.680 but the process did arise. It did emerge from fundamental physics, but itself is fundamental.
00:27:39.680 For all we know, the laws of physics mandate that evolution by natural selection must obtain.
00:27:45.920 Also, my favorite example of this is the existence of people and what a person is.
00:27:53.040 A person is fundamentally important in the technical sense of fundamental,
00:27:58.480 namely that they have effects upon every other domain that is conceivable in principle.
00:28:06.320 They have effects upon planets. They can have an effect on chemistry. They have an effect,
00:28:11.920 they have an effect on ecosystems and biology. They have an effect on how knowledge is created.
00:28:17.120 In fact, they are unavoidably necessary in the explanation of how explanatory knowledge arises.
00:28:22.960 You need to have a person there. So I am starting to think that people are really
00:28:27.120 deeply fundamental to the cosmos, maybe like human beings, but people. And maybe the laws of
00:28:33.040 physics are such that no matter how if you rewound the type of the universe that you consistently
00:28:40.640 get people arising, I don't know, there doesn't appear to be evidence for that,
00:28:44.560 but here's a philosophical argument that that might be the case because at the moment,
00:28:49.040 we human beings being the only people that we know of appear to have this effect on every other
00:28:55.280 physical system that we are aware of, to some extent. Every other physical system on the planet
00:29:01.200 that we are aware of, to some extent, eventually we are going to have effects on every physical
00:29:05.760 system in the solar system, the galaxy and so on. So people are fundamental in a deep sense.
00:29:13.040 At the same time, of course, we are emergent. We are very, very emergent. We are one of the most
00:29:17.200 emergent structures that exist as well, but still fundamental. And just on the idea of new modes
00:29:24.720 of explanation, so a mode of explanation would be something like, well, prior to evolution by natural
00:29:30.560 selection, this idea that things can compete one with another and one can be more fit in a particular
00:29:39.760 environment and cause itself to be replicated more frequently than another, which might die out,
00:29:45.440 this unit of the selection in this case is a gene, but there wasn't always known to be a gene,
00:29:50.160 it was thought to be maybe a particular individual in a species, so on and so forth.
00:29:55.680 This is a new mode of explanation. No one had thought of that way of explaining things prior
00:30:00.480 to evolution by natural selection. But eventually, that mode of explanation is probably a precondition,
00:30:08.800 is a precondition in some sense to pop a zone idea about how knowledge is created and knowledge
00:30:17.360 tends to spread. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's within that same similar mode of
00:30:24.800 explanation, but Popper, of course, applies it to the abstract ideas of knowledge, whereas Darwin,
00:30:32.400 of course, was applying it to the very physical, very physical existence of species. Okay, back to
00:30:39.840 the book, David writes, shedding that kind of parochialism is something that will have to be done
00:30:45.280 again and again in the future. A level of knowledge, wealth, computer power, or physical scale
00:30:50.400 that seems absurdly huge in any given instant, will later be pathetically tiny. Yet we shall never
00:30:56.800 reach anything like an unproblematic state, like the guests at Infinity Hotel, we shall never be
00:31:02.560 nearly there. There are two versions of nearly there. In the dismal version, knowledge is bounded
00:31:08.160 by the laws of nature or supernatural decree and progress has been a temporary phase. Though this
00:31:13.920 is rank pessimism by my definition, it has gone under various names, including optimism,
00:31:19.040 and has been integral to most world views in the past, pause their my reflection, integral to
00:31:25.200 perhaps most world views in the present, I would say as well, as David goes on to say,
00:31:30.880 quote, he writes, in the cheerful version, all remaining ignorance will soon be eliminated or
00:31:36.320 confined to insignificant areas. This is optimistic and form, but the closer one looks, the more
00:31:42.240 pessimistic it becomes in substance. In politics, for instance, utopian's promise that a finite
00:31:47.440 number of already known changes can bring about a perfected human state. And that is a well-known
00:31:53.120 recipe for dogmatism and tyranny, pause their just to unpack that. So he says that utopians
00:32:02.320 in the political sense, promise that a finite number of already known changes can bring about
00:32:10.160 a perfected human state. And that is a well-known recipe for dogmatism and tyranny.
00:32:13.760 Yes, so so anytime you hear any of the ways in which to organize society that will provide
00:32:22.880 a final answer to suffering and to human wants, okay, which is just pick on communism.
00:32:36.000 Communism purports to be the system where everyone will get their fair Jew, and that will be the
00:32:41.200 end of it. They'll bring about a kind of perfected human state, this Marxist idea. And so therefore
00:32:47.040 you need to do what you can to implement this and that leads to dogmatism and tyranny.
00:32:52.320 Unlike the alternative view, the alternative view is just freedom, allowing people to pursue
00:32:58.400 their own happiness and wealth. And we don't expect there to be perfection at any point.
00:33:04.560 We expect just gradual incremental improvement, far better than stasis, far better than this
00:33:10.720 idea that we have the final utopian view where everyone will have what they need to the extent
00:33:18.400 they need it. And so, you know, this utopian ideal is perfectly summarized by, you know,
00:33:23.680 Karl Marx, Karl Marx comes up with this, this, this, this quip from each according to his ability
00:33:30.400 to each according to his needs. And so the idea there that, you know, the communist regime would
00:33:37.680 solve the problem of how to fairly and equally distribute goods and services and capital and so on.
00:33:44.560 And so everyone will have enough, enough for their needs, but you will have never have enough
00:33:51.680 for your needs. You will always have more needs and that's a great thing. You will always change
00:33:56.480 your mind, your interests, you will always need more. And that's a really good thing. You'll always
00:34:02.240 want to improve your computer, your car, the kind of food that you eat, the fashion you're
00:34:10.320 interested in, the kind of entertainment you pursue. These needs should be unending in their
00:34:18.240 change in the way in which they adapt according to people's new inventions. And so there can be
00:34:24.720 no final solution to what people's needs are. And people with these kinds of political ideas,
00:34:32.080 think that, as David says, there's just a finite number of steps in order to get us there. We'll
00:34:35.920 just change this, we'll change that, we'll change that. And then we'll instantiate this perfect
00:34:41.360 society, this perfect way of organizing people so that they have precisely what they need,
00:34:47.840 but they can't be given precisely what they need. And they're what there shouldn't be a
00:34:51.280 finite number of changes. Because we know that we need to change all the time, we need to be
00:34:56.720 able to adapt and be fast in our adaptation given that the problems that will come are always
00:35:02.480 unpredictable, inevitable, and we don't know what direction they're coming from. So we need to
00:35:06.400 allow them the agility to change whatever they're doing at any given point in time,
00:35:11.840 their needs will change at any given point in time as well. All right, back to the book,
00:35:16.320 David writes, in physics, imagine that Lagrange had been right that the system of the world can
00:35:21.360 only be discovered once or that Mickelson had been right that all physics still undiscovered in
00:35:26.160 1894 was about the sixth place of decimals. They were claiming to know that anyone who subsequently
00:35:32.880 became curious about what underlay that system of the world would be inquiring futilely into the
00:35:38.560 incomprehensible and that anyone who ever wondered at an anomaly and suspected that some fundamental
00:35:44.880 explanation contained a misconception would be mistaken. Mickelson's future, our present,
00:35:50.640 would have been lacking in explanatory knowledge to an extent that we can no longer easily imagine
00:35:55.520 a vast range of phenomena already known to him, such as gravity, the properties of the chemical
00:36:00.640 elements, and the luminosity of the sun, remained to be explained. He was claiming that these phenomena
00:36:06.800 would only ever appear as a list of facts or rules of thumb to be memorized, but never understood
00:36:12.240 or fruitfully questioned every such frontier of fundamental knowledge that existed in 1994
00:36:17.520 would have been a barrier beyond which nothing would ever be amenable to explanation.
00:36:22.080 There will be no such thing as the internal structure of atoms, no dynamics of space and time,
00:36:26.560 no such subject as cosmology, no explanation for the equations governing gravitation or electromagnetism,
00:36:32.320 no connections between physics and the theory of computation. The deeper structure in the world
00:36:37.600 would be an inexplicable anthropocentric boundary, coinciding with the boundary of what the physicists
00:36:43.120 of 1894 thought they understood, and nothing inside that boundary, like say the existence of a force
00:36:49.840 of gravity would ever turn out to be profoundly false, pause there just my reflection. And so it's
00:36:57.280 true today that again we can look back now and kind of giggle at how silly Mickelson must have
00:37:07.040 been. After all it's we learned the book, and there's any student of physics and tell you,
00:37:11.520 Mickelson was one of the people who helped to popularise the idea of relativity by Albert Einstein,
00:37:18.800 the Mickelson Moly experiment, which was an attempt to detect the luminous luminiferous
00:37:24.880 ether, the movement of the earth through this luminiferous ether, which was required for prior
00:37:30.320 theories about light prior to well Einstein's special relativity. Prior to this they
00:37:37.200 thought well light away even it needs a particular medium to move through that material
00:37:42.720 is the luminiferous ether. So Mickelson himself was instrumental in many ways experimentally
00:37:48.720 helping to refute other theories in favor of Einstein's own theory of special relativity.
00:37:56.080 And so he himself even though he thought physics was all tied up into a nice neat bundle
00:38:00.480 was one of the people who showed that in fact it wasn't. I think David will come to this in
00:38:05.840 the chapter as well that now more than any other time is quite obvious that we don't know
00:38:15.200 everything. There are just so many problems that seem to point to deep issues with
00:38:21.520 almost fundamental theories across the board. It's not to say that they're in wrong in all parts
00:38:28.240 in the same way that Newton's theory of universal gravitation wasn't wrong in all its parts,
00:38:33.120 but it contained misconceptions. So he must think now that our greatest theories themselves contain
00:38:38.960 misconceptions as David also says it wouldn't it be wonderful if we just agreed to call
00:38:44.880 our scientific theories scientific misconceptions that our best misconception at the moment is
00:38:50.160 about gravity is the general theory of relativity others have been falsified but this misconception
00:38:54.400 has not yet but right now I'm right now we have serious problems I mean why do galaxies rotate
00:39:02.560 at the rate that they do we don't know we postulate this thing called dark matter and the best
00:39:08.400 explanation says to be well it has to be a kind of matter it must be because we know of no other
00:39:14.640 thing no other entity that can create gravitation but purely speculating it could be the case that
00:39:21.760 some of that some of these very clever scientists physicists who are saying well maybe maybe just
00:39:26.800 maybe general theory of relativity is the problem and if we solved what if the problem was with
00:39:32.800 general relativity coming up with a new theory of gravitation we would solve these galaxy rotation
00:39:36.800 curves among other things among other reasons for thinking that dark matter exists or this
00:39:42.480 phenomena that seems to be causing these anomalous observations which we call dark matter could be
00:39:48.400 solved by another theory of gravity so we have this problem of dark matter that's one thing another
00:39:52.640 issue is of course and we'll come to this I won't say too much about it dark energy why is the
00:39:57.520 universe expanding at an accelerating rate we don't know this is a could be a very serious problem
00:40:04.000 for the foundation so the fundamentals of physics why does quantum theory say that things are
00:40:10.160 discrete and general relativity says that things are continuous what is the fundamental
00:40:15.680 deepest nature of reality in truth is that discrete or continuous is it a third thing that
00:40:21.520 doesn't fit into either of those categories that that could be interesting I doubt it and many
00:40:26.080 people of physicists have been trying things like string theory seemingly without success in physics
00:40:34.800 so far we have Lee Smolin who talks about loop quantum gravity and maybe that's that's an avenue
00:40:41.040 that that might reveal something about the deep nature of gravity and how it can be combined
00:40:46.960 with quantum theory maybe David Deutsch and Kia or my letter who work on constructor theory
00:40:52.960 among other people maybe they have an avenue towards a quantum theory of gravity or a new way
00:40:58.480 of unifying these things there are mysteries are plenty within physics and so we could talk
00:41:05.360 about all the all the things that we don't know in physics right now what is the nature of
00:41:09.280 consciousness what is the what is the de geometry of the multiverse what what effect would a quantum
00:41:16.720 theory of gravity have for the quantum theory of computation would there be any effect at all I
00:41:22.880 don't know why do why do the constants of nature have the value that they do this is one thing
00:41:29.520 that I'm very curious about I know some people are working on this stuff the fine so
00:41:33.440 so-called fine-tuning problem I don't think there is a satisfactory answer for these things
00:41:39.520 maybe there is a megaverse out there again another open question in cosmology and physics
00:41:46.320 let's go back to the book nothing very important would ever be discovered in the laboratory
00:41:51.040 that Mickelson was opening each generation of students has studied there instead of striving to
00:41:55.520 understand the world more deeply than their teachers could aspire to nothing better than to emulate
00:42:00.240 them or it best to discover this seventh decimal place of some constant whose sixth was already
00:42:05.840 known but how the most sensitive scientific instruments today depend on fundamental discoveries made
00:42:10.800 after 1894 their system of the world would forever remain a tiny frozen island of explanation
00:42:17.760 in an ocean of incomprehensibility Mickelson's fundamental laws and facts of physical science
00:42:23.840 instead of being the beginning of an infinity of further understanding as they were in reality
00:42:29.040 would have been the last gasp of reason in the field I doubt that either Lagrange or Mickelson
00:42:34.720 thought of himself as pessimistic yet their prophecies entailed that the dismal decree
00:42:39.120 that no matter what you do you will understand no further it so happens that both of them
00:42:43.920 had made discoveries which could have led them to the very progress whose possibility they denied
00:42:48.640 they should have been seeking that progress should they not but almost no one is creative in
00:42:53.760 fields in which they are pessimistic pause their my reflection well let's just take that seriously
00:43:00.080 almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic you can take that as a
00:43:05.200 personal injunction to be optimistic if you want to be successful don't be pessimists don't
00:43:11.680 think that you can't make a difference don't think that you can't contribute you can and you
00:43:16.880 should try and it's only by accepting that as a precondition to making progress thinking that
00:43:22.720 you can make progress thinking that you can be creative that you will okay this idea that progress
00:43:29.760 must stop at a particular point is a good barrier to you making progress okay let's keep going
00:43:38.160 David writes our amount at the end of chapter 13 that the desirable future is one where we
00:43:44.480 progress from misconception to ever better less mistaken misconception I have often thought
00:43:51.600 that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories misconceptions
00:43:57.200 from the outset instead of only after we have discovered their successes thus we could say that
00:44:02.320 Einstein's misconception of gravity was an improvement on Newton's misconception which was an
00:44:07.440 improvement on Kepler's the near Darwinian misconception of evolution is an improvement on Darwin's
00:44:12.800 misconception and here's on Lamarks if people thought like that perhaps no one would need to be
00:44:17.680 reminded that science claims neither infallibility nor finality perhaps a more practical way of
00:44:23.520 stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge or knowledge not only
00:44:28.640 scientific as a continual transition from problems to better problems rather than from problems
00:44:34.560 to solutions or from theories to better theories this is the positive conception of problems
00:44:40.640 that I stressed in chapter one thanks to Einstein's discoveries our current problems in physics
00:44:46.080 embody more knowledge than Einstein's own problems did his problems were rooted in the
00:44:50.480 discoveries of Newton and Euclid while most problems that preoccupied physicists today are rooted
00:44:55.120 in and would be inaccessible mysteries without the discoveries of 20th century physics the
00:45:01.520 same is true in mathematics although mathematical theorems are rarely proved false once they
00:45:06.000 have been around for a while what does happen is that mathematicians understanding of what is
00:45:11.120 fundamental improves abstractions that are originally studied in their own right are understood as
00:45:16.480 aspects of more general abstractions or related in unforeseen ways to other abstractions
00:45:21.360 and so progress in mathematics also goes from problems to better problems as does progress in
00:45:26.160 other fields just pausing there just my reflection at the mathematicians apology that great book
00:45:32.000 written by G.H. Hardy about his meeting with Romano John the other great mathematician I remember
00:45:38.800 in in that book he quite proudly and I think he famously he would refer to the impractical nature
00:45:45.680 of the pure mathematics that he did so so even the meta mathematical point you know the mathematicians
00:45:51.760 who create mathematics thinking it definitely has no practical application sometimes surprised
00:45:58.960 there is a deeper understanding in effect the mathematics does indeed connect to physical reality
00:46:05.760 this is different of course to the idea that there can be mistakes made in mathematics
00:46:10.160 and just because of course a theorem is rarely proved false in mathematics once it's been
00:46:15.840 proved that's rarely shown to in fact be an error that doesn't mean that it can't be okay
00:46:21.040 as David is a pain to say and that's a subtle point that from the fabric of reality and I love
00:46:28.560 to quote this part of the fabric reality where he says that necessary truth is the subject matter
00:46:34.240 of mathematics necessary truth is not the reward we get for doing mathematics which is the
00:46:39.520 difference between necessary truth is the subject matter it's the thing that we're looking at
00:46:44.240 in mathematics but our knowledge of that which is what mathematicians are engaged in their
00:46:48.400 engaged in conjicturing ideas they're engaged in creating knowledge about this domain which we
00:46:55.120 call the domain of necessary truth so they're coming to try and understand what necessary
00:46:59.600 truths are now when they produce a theorem you know Pythagoras is theorem let's say C
00:47:03.840 squared equals A squared plus B squared I say this is a theorem well we can have new
00:47:08.080 understandings of that namely when Pythagoras prove this or when he's whoever whoever did
00:47:13.440 first come up with this maybe it was Pythagoras maybe it wasn't this C squared equals A
00:47:17.680 squared plus B squared seems to be a thing that applies not only in the physical world but it's
00:47:21.600 just in controversial there's no way in which we could ever get around this but but of course it
00:47:25.840 is a special case that works in three dimensions now I think back in the Greek times though I
00:47:31.280 don't think no if they thought of four five six n different spatial dimensions and so you could
00:47:37.440 have a variant of Pythagoras's theorem that operates in different dimensions not to say that
00:47:44.160 Pythagoras theorem is wrong but we're wrong to think that it applies universally in all possible
00:47:49.840 mathematical areas okay let's just go back to the book and I'll read just a little more for
00:47:54.720 today we're going to spread this final chapter out I think to a few different parts David writes
00:48:01.680 Optimism and reason are incompatible with the conceit that our knowledge is nearly there in any
00:48:06.480 sense or that its foundations are yet comprehensive optimism has always been rare and the
00:48:12.880 lure of the prophetic fallacy strong but there have always been exceptions Socrates famously
00:48:19.440 claimed to be deeply ignorant and popular I believe that it would be worth trying to learn
00:48:24.720 something about the world even if in trying to do so we should merely learn that we did not
00:48:30.160 know much it might be well for us all to remember that while differing widely in the various
00:48:36.000 little bits we know in our infinite ignorance we are all equal and quote that was from
00:48:43.280 conjectures and refutations published in 1963 by Carl Popper just emphasizing again in our infinite
00:48:50.080 ignorance we are all equal there is an infinite amount that all of us do not know and are utterly
00:48:57.520 ignorant of and we're all the same in that we just happen to have little bits of specialized
00:49:02.800 knowledge Einstein had specialized knowledge of physics Popper had specialized knowledge of
00:49:09.200 epistemology of wazier had specialized knowledge of chemistry we can keep on going people sitting
00:49:16.720 at home might have specialized knowledge of soccer or football or netball or art we our own families
00:49:24.480 we have specialized knowledge and we're just differing those little bit specialized knowledge
00:49:28.480 that we have but we're all infantly ignorant there's there's an infinite amount that we don't know
00:49:34.880 and that will always be the case just the last paragraph David writes there he says quote
00:49:40.480 Infinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge
00:49:45.760 reject in the idea that we are nearly there is a necessary condition for the avoidance of dogmatism
00:49:50.960 stagnation and tyranny end quote and the reading there for today because David's about to launch
00:49:57.520 into a description of his his frenemy John Hogan the end of science which is basically the counterpoint
00:50:07.440 to the beginning of infinity and in fact John Hogan did an interview with David Deutschman
00:50:12.640 may got on very well may spoke all about the beginning of infinity and I don't know I don't think
00:50:20.080 John Hogan has ever changed his mind he's been on Clubhouse recently and he's talked about things
00:50:24.080 like well he's been in this book amongst other articles he he seems to get proper quite wrong
00:50:31.360 he seems to get the physics quite wrong so he seems to make a lot of errors which of course leads
00:50:36.480 him to conclude that science is just about ready to be finished because he thinks that I suppose
00:50:45.440 that our scientific theories aren't grand misconceptions and that we're replacing one misconception
00:50:50.640 with the other and when we read that earlier on let me just go back and and read what David says
00:50:58.720 David says that the desirable future is the one where we progress from misconception to ever better
00:51:04.080 less mistaken misconception and so he's talking there about how we correct we're correcting errors
00:51:11.440 and we're refuting what we hear the two regarded as our best theory we change our minds and light
00:51:19.360 of new evidence and we find a new theory but that theory we must expect also contains misconceptions
00:51:25.200 now does this mean that just everything is on equal footing as containing as being misconceptions
00:51:29.920 no no because we're finding some amount of truth now we can't quantify we can't measure
00:51:36.480 all way this amount of truth or we can say as we've corrected errors we've removed some
00:51:43.120 misconceptions we've removed some the mistakes some of the errors and so we then have something
00:51:50.320 else itself not perfect and it will never be perfect just that we're refining things we're
00:51:55.760 improving things we're making progress away from utter and complete falsehood towards the
00:52:03.200 ontological truth towards a description of reality which is more accurate now we can't quantify
00:52:08.800 this all we can say is this theory is better than that theory and that theory was better than that
00:52:13.360 theory and this theory c is better than b which it succeeded and better than a which is the first
00:52:19.600 one that we came up with our first best guess and b was better and now we're at c and we expect
00:52:25.360 that to be a d e f and we're gonna get to z and then we'll have to start over again with a a and a b
00:52:31.120 and a c and so on you get what I'm saying there is no end to this process of error correction
00:52:37.680 and moving from misconception to better misconception a less mistaken misconception the wonderfully
00:52:44.480 positive vision which means that we'll never get to the end of science and instead we are at
00:52:49.280 the beginning of infinity and we're moving towards the end of the beginning of infinity
00:52:54.560 but not yet we have I would say at least two more episodes left here and in the meantime
00:53:02.240 if you're waiting for more and you just can't wait to hear more about the beginning of infinity
00:53:06.160 go to David Deutsch's website DavidDeutsch.org.uk and from DavidDeutsch.org.uk you can find links
00:53:13.840 to for example constructor theory and the constructor theory material at constructor theory.org
00:53:22.320 has a lot of talks and interesting papers with David talking with the various other people talking
00:53:27.520 about that beginning of infinity okay that may very well be a beginning of infinity the
00:53:32.800 the constructor theory of information and the this new approach to the fundamental laws of
00:53:39.360 physics and if you want to still more go to Naval and if you just put into your browser
00:53:44.800 NAV.AL and that will take you to his website where his podcast is and is myself in Naval having
00:53:52.560 conversations there very short very short conversations that will will continue for for well
00:54:00.400 the indefinite future so yes you can go there and you can hear the conversation going on
00:54:06.560 then as I say if you type in Naval Naval River can't into YouTube you will also find
00:54:12.720 some conversations some more lengthy conversations I've done with him on Clubhouse recently about
