00:00:00.000 Hi, so I just wanted to make a few quick remarks about the Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin,
00:00:11.960 you're on Broken Greg's Hell Mirrory discussion that happened recently.
00:00:16.720 So this promised to be an interesting encounter given Yaron and the objectives of this view
00:00:24.200 on economics. And so I was really looking for some interesting discussion based around the
00:00:32.080 ideas that seem to be percolating at the moment with respect to people losing their jobs
00:00:38.000 and automation is coming. And so what do we do as a society if people start losing their
00:00:43.480 jobs? And or just some of the discussion about collectivism when it comes to economics
00:00:51.800 and how to maintain social cohesion when we have such divergent views about the role of
00:00:59.720 the individual when it comes to creating wealth. None of these economic discussions were
00:01:07.640 ever brushed. We never really got into the real area of expertise that I think the
00:01:15.360 objectivists do have and have something to teach people. Instead we got bogged down on questions
00:01:23.200 of epistemology. Now of course I'm interested in epistemology and I like listening to discussions
00:01:31.320 that people have about the various kinds of ways in which they think that knowledge is
00:01:37.640 formed. But it's a little frustrating. It's frustrating when we don't have a voice that
00:01:47.040 can clearly articulate some of the ways in which we know knowledge is constructed. Instead
00:01:53.240 we have people's pet ideas or ways in which people might have reason through these issues
00:02:01.600 themselves. Let's just listen to what some of them say.
00:02:51.120 I don't think reason is just about coming up with algorithm. I think we come up with
00:02:56.800 concepts, concepts enable us to assimilate vast quantities of similar things to one another
00:03:03.440 and learn from future instance from past ones. We can get quite subtle.
00:03:12.000 So we can learn about future instances from past ones. Now he said that there's some
00:03:20.120 interesting differences perhaps between himself as an objectivist and Jordan Peterson
00:03:25.960 and Sam Harris when it comes to this concept of reason and what reason means. Now what
00:03:32.920 we might hear in a moment is how the objectivist conception of reason is very, very broad
00:03:38.200 and it's so broad and umbrella that almost anything done with the human mind might be
00:03:44.680 considered reasons as long as it doesn't lead into irrationality. On the other hand what
00:03:51.400 we hear from Jordan is that his conception of reason is something similar to logic. It's
00:03:57.920 almost synonymous with logic. It's the ability to think in a mathematical type way, to
00:04:05.960 get from one claim to another in such a way as that it's valid. It doesn't allow for
00:04:13.240 anything beyond deduction as far as I can tell. What Sam and Jordan and Greg here and
00:04:24.200 even Euron all appreciate and indeed what Perpyreans appreciate as well is that deduction
00:04:31.720 cannot possibly be the way that knowledge is generated. All the deduction allows you to do is
00:04:40.280 to figure out what claim follows logically from whatever set of axioms you're starting
00:04:47.560 with or from whatever previous claims you've made. So you have these rules of inference
00:04:52.320 that you follow and if you follow them then you're liable to end up not producing errors
00:05:00.520 that you would have if you hadn't followed them. Logic is kind of an error correcting
00:05:06.000 mechanism. It's a way of thinking through the consequences of the ideas that you have but
00:05:14.760 it can't create the ideas in the first place and this has been a historic problem for
00:05:20.760 philosophers of science since anyone's been thinking about these issues. Given that deduction
00:05:27.840 is a way in which you ensure that the conclusions you have are valid given some set
00:05:34.320 of premises that you have, how is it that you get the premises in the first place? How
00:05:40.000 is it that you arrive at these ideas that you think are correct or that solve a particular
00:05:44.760 problem in the first place? The solution to this has traditionally been that if deduction
00:05:51.000 doesn't work, induction must work. So we invent a new word because deduction just
00:05:58.200 allows us to show how specific instances are correct given some general principle. So
00:06:06.840 once we have the general principle then we can determine what follows from those general
00:06:12.440 principles. In particular, how do we apply it to specific situations? We've got the general
00:06:17.600 idea when counter a specific situation, deduction allows us to apply that general rule
00:06:24.840 to a specific situation. But as for coming up with the general rule in the first place,
00:06:31.920 the very purpose of science, deductions no help. So therefore, the only answer traditionally
00:06:38.800 that's being offered is this thing called induction and induction is where you simply
00:06:43.320 go out into the world to observe reality and from it you somehow read the general rule
00:06:51.440 and usually it's as simple as extrapolating. You generalize. You see the same thing happen
00:06:59.080 a number of times and you just presume that it will continue to happen. My favorite example
00:07:04.600 here has always been the boiling of water. You boil water for four minutes and every single
00:07:09.960 minute it climbs by 20 degrees Celsius. Then you expect on the fifth minute it will climb
00:07:15.800 by another 20 degrees Celsius. And so you have a rule that applying this amount of heat
00:07:21.400 for this amount of time causes a rise in temperature of 20 degrees Celsius. Of course,
00:07:27.440 if you think that is a rule that is valid to draw, valid to extrapolate, given the set
00:07:33.800 of observations, then you're liable to think that water is going to continue to rise in
00:07:38.840 temperature no matter how long you heat it. But anyway, it's actually bothered to heat
00:07:43.320 water. We'll know that once you get to the boiling point of water, usually about 100 degrees
00:07:47.560 Celsius at sea level, the temperature no longer rises. The temperature, even though you're
00:07:53.360 heating the water, remains at 100 degrees Celsius. And no amount of observing past instances
00:08:01.560 of water increasing in temperature upon the application of heat could ever have told
00:08:06.960 you that. So we have a problem. And we have a problem that merely observing things in
00:08:15.400 the world, even if a pattern is being followed, cannot possibly give us the general rules
00:08:23.560 that govern the world. That's not the way it works. The perperian said, or car popper,
00:08:31.680 a try to explain, that induction can't be the way in which we generate theories. Now,
00:08:37.960 he did say that if you want to demarcate science from the rest of science, forget about
00:08:42.360 trying to confirm things via some sort of inductive validation, instead what you should
00:08:47.680 be trying to do is to refute your theory where you can. And so this was the line of
00:08:53.240 demarcation. And he never argued that this kind of experimental refutation was a straight
00:08:59.680 forward thing. Instead, it's highly complex. And there are ways in which your attempts
00:09:05.920 at refutation, when they appear to be refutations, when they appear to be falsifications
00:09:10.840 might not be. Popper covered all this. But more importantly, for this particular discussion,
00:09:18.280 we do not have an answer as to how we arrive at these creative conjectures in the first
00:09:25.840 place. We know that we do. We know that we human beings are unique so far as we can tell
00:09:31.560 in the universe at being able to conjecture solutions to problems we encounter, to explain
00:09:39.240 the world around us, to reflect the reality that's out there within our own minds.
00:09:45.520 But that act of reflecting what is out there in here is not an act of reading, which
00:09:51.640 is the kind of sense we're going to get in a moment. This idea that somehow the facts
00:09:58.720 of reality are there, and if only we could decipher them, then we'd have access to the
00:10:05.280 ontological truth. We would derive the ontological truth. But this is not where it works.
00:10:13.600 Reality is a mess. It's out there. It's outside of our minds. And so our minds have
00:10:19.880 to conjecture, to create what it is that's happening out there in language, using symbols,
00:10:29.400 in our interactions with one another. What we try and do is to conjure the symbols and
00:10:36.160 the language in such a way as to explain, to reflect, to replicate the reality that's
00:10:43.880 out there in our explanations. Our explanations become a part of reality, independent of
00:10:51.920 us. But they arose from within us, and then are tested against the external reality.
00:10:58.560 So they are not read from the reality. And this is the mistake, I think, that we will hear
00:11:04.600 from Jordan and from our objectives philosophers. And it's the kind of mistake you do tend
00:11:12.000 to hear from Sam Haus. You hear it from anyone who's not a perperian. This idea that because
00:11:17.280 reality is objective out there beyond our minds, and we all agree on that, that this
00:11:23.200 means that somehow, rather, we need to have a process of reading directly from the book
00:11:28.760 of reality, as though science were written in the language of maths, as it is sometimes
00:11:35.120 said. But this simply isn't the case. Mathematics, like any other language that we use to
00:11:41.240 describe reality, is something that we have created. And yes, once we've created it has
00:11:47.560 an independent reality of its own, but this should not be to say that there is some kind
00:11:52.560 of one-to-one correspondence between the creations that we have in order to explain
00:11:58.320 the world, namely our knowledge and the reality itself. The links between the knowledge
00:12:04.760 that we have and the ontological reality that's out there are conjectures, they're
00:12:11.120 fallible conjectures. They need to be refined and changed and sometimes completely overturned.
00:12:18.520 We can be absolutely wrong about the connection between our knowledge and the thing that
00:12:25.680 it is knowledge of, or the thing that it's attempting to explain. Those things can be mistaken.
00:12:32.600 Well, principles, I think moral principles are not things that take the form of simple rules don't
00:12:48.760 lie. It's your recognition of the fact that what's unreal is unreal and it can't be
00:12:51.320 a value. So, faking things won't work. It won't make the real somehow the thing you
00:12:56.480 need is going to come back to you. That's not a simple rule of what to do in each situation.
00:13:03.480 It's a kind of broad fact that you can use to steer your life by and in order to use
00:13:09.800 it to steer life by and to fully understand it, you need to think about how it plays out
00:13:13.920 in a lot of different contexts. You need to think about what it really means in practice
00:13:18.360 and art, stories but literature but also other forms of art I think are an indispensable
00:13:24.840 means to doing this, both with ethical truths like this and also with other metaphysical
00:13:31.840 So, I guess part of the discussion, as progresses, I don't necessarily mean this discussion
00:13:37.480 in particular, but obviously I've noted that in the reason why any stretch of the imagination
00:13:43.160 but I do see that it's hard for people who promote reason as the fundamental mechanism
00:13:49.000 to distinguish between reason and the generation of algorithms.
00:13:53.280 And you can say, well why concept of reason extends beyond the generation of algorithms
00:13:57.640 and fine but then my question would be, well exactly what are the mechanisms by which
00:14:02.800 reason functions with what it's doing isn't generating algorithms?
00:14:08.320 So, here Jordan is reaching for an answer to how is it that people are creative and
00:14:18.480 he's right to think that this is a mystery and our objective as philosophy is about to
00:14:26.520 Now, Jordan wants to say, or it seems to want to say that reason should be narrowly
00:14:33.000 construed as something like logic, that it's merely the sterilized way of speaking about
00:14:42.560 science or coming to arrive at conclusions such as happens in mathematics that it is not
00:14:50.720 to do with creativity, that we understand reason really well.
00:14:54.880 And our objective as philosophy is about to say something along the lines of, well we
00:15:00.920 don't understand it, it includes more than your narrow conception.
00:15:05.160 He'd be right about that but I think his umbrella becomes a little bit too broad.
00:15:09.200 Because algorithm's aren't enough and we know that, right, which is why we don't have
00:15:16.480 So then the reason starts to look something like metaphor and starts to look something
00:15:21.360 like narrative and then I start thinking yeah but that's not exactly the enlightenment
00:15:25.240 concept of reason so we're starting to move into a different domain and so if more than
00:15:31.040 just algorithm than metaphor in narrative I think first of all, one thing reason can do
00:15:36.080 is come up with metaphors and narratives but there is more than just those three things
00:15:40.640 they also think there's the formation of abstract principles, I don't think what Newton did
00:15:45.440 in writing the print KB was coming up with algorithms, there are algorithms in it but
00:15:49.200 or things you can algorithmatize about how to prove certain things but the act of forming
00:15:53.680 the concept inertia that's not exactly, you know that's something else and I think it's a
00:15:57.920 inertia might be an algorithm but the act is coming up with you just something yes and I think
00:16:03.280 there's a whole an underexplored area of philosophy and maybe cognitive psychology thinking
00:16:08.800 about what are these apps, how does the reason function, how is it that we can go from
00:16:13.760 the science information we have in perception to a more and more sophisticated understanding
00:16:18.160 of the world and I've written some on this other people have I don't know how much I should
00:16:24.640 try to thank you but I can plug it. So here we have the idea that reason is broad, that it includes
00:16:35.040 a whole raft of different processes that might be regarded in a Percurian view as error correction
00:16:41.200 mechanisms. Now in both of them agreed then that there's this mystery to do with creativity
00:16:50.080 and the fact that we don't understand how knowledge is created, how it is we're able to generate
00:16:57.920 explanations about the world this is really interesting and Jordan indeed invokes often in his talks
00:17:07.280 artificial intelligence and how people who program artificial intelligence have great difficulty
00:17:12.800 in trying to program the senses of especially the robots, the embodied robots that he likes to talk
00:17:19.280 about in order for them to distinguish objects out there in the world because he's fond of saying
00:17:25.520 there are an infinite number of ways in which one can interpret the world and postmodernists
00:17:30.800 would say that given that fact then therefore there's no privileged way of interpreting the world
00:17:36.960 and Jordan's opinion is of course that there are some ways that work and some ways that don't
00:17:41.440 work and the great difficulty in artificial intelligence is trying to place values into the artificial
00:17:47.680 artificial intelligence system such that they're able to have a value system which enables
00:17:51.600 them to determine what's going to work and what doesn't okay that's one issue and it's important
00:17:58.080 to know that we're hinting there at there's something very unusual about people and people are
00:18:04.640 able to generate explanations they're able to have values they're able to figure out what works
00:18:09.680 in the world but how it is that we're able to create these explanations in the first place
00:18:14.960 at the moment is a complete mystery we don't know what it is we know that we have knowledge
00:18:21.040 and that we're able to come up with new knowledge it must be the case that the new knowledge
00:18:25.520 that we come up with is some kind of modification to the existing knowledge that we have
00:18:31.120 when we look at specific examples in the history of science such as Einstein coming up with
00:18:36.800 an improvement over the existing theory of gravity such that it completely undermined
00:18:43.200 the previous existing theory of gravity it didn't seem to be a mere modification it wasn't just
00:18:49.280 that Einstein took Newton's universal theory of gravitation which was the inverse square law
00:18:56.400 and then tweak it a little bit it didn't become an inverse two to the power of
00:19:02.320 sorry it didn't become an ethical g m1 m2 over after the power of 2.0001 or something like that
00:19:09.440 okay it was a it was a complete change in conception about how gravity worked how how did he
00:19:17.360 come up with this this completely new theory it doesn't appear like it was a modification of
00:19:25.680 the existing theory of gravity but it must have been a modification of something and indeed it was
00:19:31.520 that used existing theories of geometry it used some of our Galilean relativity it used some
00:19:40.800 concepts that were already there in electricity and magnetism somehow the genius of Einstein
00:19:46.720 was able to move beyond the theories that existed and to change them in a way that wasn't
00:19:55.600 a completely foreign to people after it was completely foreign to people it would have taken much
00:20:01.920 longer for it to have caught on to the degree that it is such that it's actually now informing
00:20:07.520 technology such that we know that it must contain truth given that it works but the process whereby
00:20:15.200 Einstein came up with the theory in the first place doesn't appear to be some logical process
00:20:20.880 which is why are sometimes interpret poppers book the logic of scientific discovery as being
00:20:26.640 itself a question was there a logic of scientific discovery and otherwise thought no there's not
00:20:31.120 there's no recipe that one can follow in order to gain scientific truth there is a logic to follow
00:20:42.400 to some extent when we want to wiggle away false claims from true claims or false claims from claims
00:20:50.640 yet to be shown false this is what the experimental method is about this is what criticism is
00:20:58.320 about this is how the refutation in conjecture and refutation earns its keep that there are
00:21:06.960 useful strategies to employ no matter what the domain you're interested in whether it's
00:21:11.600 mathematics science history your own personal life where the correct application of criticism
00:21:18.560 will enable you to figure out what is a better compared to a worse course of action
00:21:26.800 but the conjecture part of that the conjecture side of the coin is very very hard to articulate
00:21:33.040 if you want to know what the rules are in order to come up with a good conjecture once you've
00:21:37.680 got a conjecture we've got some good ideas about what to do with it but arriving at the
00:21:42.160 conjecture in the first place is very difficult and as even more difficult to explain our dark year we
00:21:48.320 don't have a theory of how conjectures are formed or how creativity works and this is what the
00:21:54.720 present discussion between Jordan and his interlocutors seems to be focused on and it's a little
00:22:00.400 bit of a stumbling block as it should be I think it's misguided in many many ways not least because
00:22:08.080 they don't see knowledge creation as a process of conjecture and then correcting errors
00:22:20.560 because that's what the application of reason really should be considered as
00:22:24.640 it's an attempt to correct errors in theories you've already guessed
00:23:09.920 the rumba doesn't have a brain but it is intelligent now this is a bias
00:23:16.080 if we want to call a brain that bit of wetware that exists inside of skulls of mammals or
00:23:22.800 other vertebrates very well however if you want to think about these issues in a non-procure way
00:23:31.280 better to just think of a brain as some bit of hardware consisting of a processor and memory
00:23:39.360 upon which a program can run which enables an organism or a robot to find its way through the
00:23:46.960 world now in the case of people many people know my views on this people have a special kind
00:23:55.200 of program that runs on that brain hardware and that's called the mind and the mind is that
00:24:01.680 entity in the universe which is able to generate explanations it's synonymous with being a person
00:24:08.640 it's a general intelligence it's a universal explainer all of these things mean
00:24:12.880 basically the same thing a mind is a very special program but program nonetheless a brain is
00:24:24.240 a computer it's a kind of computer that organisms use but there is nothing in terms of the
00:24:32.080 hardware that makes it impossible in principle not to capture every single capacity of it
00:24:45.120 okay and it works actually reconstructed how artificial intelligence robotics engineers were
00:24:52.000 conceptualizing intelligence and he thought it is something much more embodied rather than
00:24:56.400 conceptualism the room is actually the consequence of very very high level thinking about
00:25:01.680 the relationship between reason and action in the world like one of the things that
00:25:06.800 call the more sophisticated common the psychologist to be wrestling with is the fact that a lot
00:25:11.520 of what we thought of as abstract reason is actually something that's more dependent on embodiment
00:25:16.720 than we've ever ever possibly conceived right and so the idea of disembodied reason which is
00:25:23.520 also I would say that like the concept seems to be lacking it's lacking in functionality you have
00:25:29.120 to be embodied and the thing to me is that any body reason looks to me a lot more like the
00:25:35.360 hero of the story that it looks like a disembodied reason well I think this is a a straw man
00:25:44.480 I I just can't see the argument for anyone enlightenment or otherwise suggesting that
00:25:54.240 disembodied reason is a thing that in some sense you can have reason that fight flies
00:26:02.480 completely free of the mind in some way the mind can't be disembodied this is religious type thinking
00:26:09.280 reason is the process of attempting to find errors in your existing theories that's it
00:26:18.320 and it's a thing that people do there's anything that can be done by any other kind of entity
00:26:23.680 in the universe now when I say people of course I mean artificial general intelligence aliens
00:26:30.560 if they're out there but people people need to reason in order to figure out what's true
00:26:36.000 from what's false or what's beautiful from what's ugly and so on reason to me is synonymous with
