00:00:00.000 welcome to topcast and to a regular episode. This is chapter seven of the fabric of reality
00:00:07.520 and it's going to serve mainly as an introduction to the chapter proper. I expect however it's
00:00:12.960 going to go for well over half an hour even though it's just an introduction because the majority
00:00:18.720 of the chapter is a dialogue, a fictional dialogue between David and the so-called crypto inductivist,
00:00:25.280 the person who is trying to argue for the gap that is left by the fact that knowledge can't be
00:00:32.960 scientific knowledge isn't able to be justified in some way, shape or form and David presents
00:00:38.960 the counter argument to that. It's nice for me to be doing a regular episode recently and I don't
00:00:44.800 normally say these things during a regular episode as to what else is going on with my podcast but
00:00:50.400 recently what's been happening is I've been doing unusual episodes. So yesterday I recorded a
00:00:57.120 response, episode, a response podcast. It's also available on YouTube as a video to one of Sam Harris's
00:01:04.560 recent podcast that he did that was titled The End of Global Order which was a very pessimistic
00:01:11.920 take on some things that are happening now that a particular author is extrapolating off into
00:01:16.960 the distant future and of course prophesying about how everything is going to get far, far worse
00:01:22.960 for us all. So I have a look for that one in the podcast feed and just before that I released a
00:01:28.160 video that I titled Origins. This video was a discussion about the first set of images, five images
00:01:36.560 released by the James Webb Space Telescope, the new telescope that's up there in orbit 1.5 million
00:01:45.280 kilometers away from the earth orbiting the sun and collecting data, evidence, photographs,
00:01:51.040 images about the deeper and deepest regions of space and bringing back some spectacular stuff.
00:01:58.400 And what I've tried to do there is to fuse the worldview that is summarized by what I speak about in
00:02:04.000 topcast here and what is in the beginning of infinity and the writings of David Deutsch more broadly
00:02:09.840 trying to fuse these two things together. What does something like the space telescope have to
00:02:15.200 do with knowledge, creation and optimism and all of that great stuff? Well, there's a discussion
00:02:20.800 there and hopefully the video is quite entertaining and because of the images of the James Webb
00:02:27.200 Space Telescope spectacular as well. So I have a look at that one and I've also been doing live
00:02:32.080 streaming on YouTube and they get recorded and uploaded automatically. They're very little work for
00:02:36.960 me. People have been asking me questions so they also serve as AMAs and I've been doing pre-recorded
00:02:41.840 AMAs as well. And then finally there is my sub-stack newsletter which also is a separate podcast
00:02:47.920 in and of itself. So I've been busy recently and this is the next episode all about the fabric
00:02:55.520 of reality. But also in the works and what will probably come out before this one is my discussion
00:03:01.360 of the next chapter of Stephen Pinkers book which is primarily focused upon Bayes theorem,
00:03:08.560 Bayesian reasoning so-called Bayesian reasoning and so I talk at length at great length all about
00:03:15.040 that particular chapter as well as what I see as the deep misconceptions for epistemology
00:03:21.840 that come out of a two-serious reading of the capacity of Bayes theorem to really do much at all
00:03:30.160 when it comes to either the creation or the validation of knowledge let's say. All right,
00:03:35.440 without further ado and with no more introduction let's get into an introduction to chapter seven
00:03:42.320 a conversation about justification or David and the crypto inductivist from the fabric of reality
00:03:49.680 and before I get to the readings I have to mention that at the beginning of the audio book
00:03:55.840 which is the fabric of reality, well worth picking up. David Deutsch himself does an introduction
00:04:01.360 where worth the price of the book itself and what he says there is that of the things that he would
00:04:07.200 change in the book where he writing it now would be the use of terminology in this particular
00:04:12.800 chapter because David is not a justificationist. David does not endorse justificationism
00:04:20.800 and so the whole point of the chapter is to reject justificationism that's where he's coming from
00:04:27.680 however he is speaking in the language of people the overwhelming majority of philosophers and
00:04:33.680 scientists and just the common man who speak this way, who talk about justificationism and how
00:04:41.040 things are justified. So he has trouble trying to convey the ideas using their language so that
00:04:47.680 we are speaking a common language that's always the hard part in philosophy and science
00:04:52.480 to try and understand exactly what the other person is saying they can be speaking English,
00:04:55.920 they can be speaking your native tongue but that doesn't mean you've really got a common language,
00:05:00.880 there is still a layer of translation that goes on because you're interpreting one another,
00:05:05.920 there is no such thing as an unambiguous language David says or as proper likes to say,
00:05:11.680 it is impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood and so all of these caveats
00:05:18.240 are inputting here because David himself is saying that he would rephrase things were he writing
00:05:23.600 this chapter now but I don't think we can blame him, I don't think we can blame him because
00:05:28.160 he's a pioneer of a kind trying to bring these ideas to the masses, now proper of course was
00:05:35.920 their first in many many ways but even proper you can see if you go to his first major work which
00:05:43.280 was called The Logic of Scientific Discovery, it's the one book that I typically do not
00:05:49.520 recommend to people because it's long, it's interesting if you're interested in the philosophy
00:05:56.560 of science but it's highly technical, it's laborious and it is in particular written in the
00:06:04.560 language of philosophers of his era so he knows his audience, his peers, other philosophers,
00:06:12.480 all of whom are inductiveists of a kind, all of whom believe in this justified true belief
00:06:19.280 conception of knowledge, so he is very much speaking to other philosophers writing in a technical
00:06:26.240 way and so trying to bring people along with him to explain new ideas in a new way, new ways
00:06:35.040 of understanding what science is, what knowledge is and how it's created, so how do you do that,
00:06:40.240 given that people have ever heard this stuff before, well you're going to talk about things like
00:06:46.320 confirmation and corroboration and being justified, verifying things or not verifying things,
00:06:55.120 you're introducing this new concept of falsification and refutation, you're trying to say that
00:07:02.080 knowledge is never justified, you can't prove things as true, all you can do is conjecture,
00:07:07.520 this is very new and counterintuitive, look it is decade since there has been a lineage of people
00:07:14.560 following in the tradition of proper ever since and we are still still having great difficulty
00:07:21.680 conveying these ideas through though they are, but you can say this about any true idea,
00:07:26.320 try to teach someone Newtonian physics for the first time, I mean it's been centuries,
00:07:32.160 so of course people still learning this stuff find difficult, try then teaching them special
00:07:38.240 relativity, then general relativity, much less quantum theory, anything new that is trying to get
00:07:45.120 at reality has nuance to it, has a way of using language which might be different even though
00:07:51.120 the words sound familiar to people, all of this stuff comes to bear on any technical explanation
00:07:58.960 of an area of expertise, so to speak, an area of knowledge, a way of understanding reality and
00:08:06.400 the world epistemology and the philosophy of science, our business here in our specific business in
00:08:12.640 this chapter here is absolutely no different except that maybe it's more difficult still because at
00:08:18.880 least when people go into something like learning areas of physics, like learning areas of
00:08:24.880 general relativity, let's say their mind is really open because they think well this stuff works,
00:08:29.600 we know that there's technology out there based upon this, so I am willing to grant certain
00:08:35.360 assumptions just so I can move forward and understand the thing as a whole so that then when I finally
00:08:41.360 get to the point where I say I understand it I can look back and realise all the misconceptions I
00:08:45.440 had, this is often not the way in which people approach things like epistemology, in my experience,
00:08:52.240 someone will say they're interested in epistemology, interested in having the discussion about
00:08:57.200 poppers ideas or David Deutsches ideas, but they go into the discussion thinking but I already know
00:09:04.080 how knowledge works, I know that I can be certain of particular things, I know that you can be
00:09:09.840 justified that you can prove things that the evidence shows some particular thing happens to be true,
00:09:16.160 that there is a matter of fact about the science which is settled, all of that stuff is
00:09:23.040 baggage that people accumulate through their schooling and education and so then when you try to
00:09:27.920 present them with the ideas that much of that it's completely and utterly misconceived,
00:09:33.120 you have great difficulty, whereas someone coming to something like general relativity has no
00:09:38.240 preconceived notions, or insofar as they do they understand all of these physicists, they experts out
00:09:43.920 there and they all agree that general relativity is the explanation of gravity so let me also gain
00:09:50.240 that knowledge and I'm willing to go along for the ride to try and understand it,
00:09:55.040 not so with epistemology to the same extent because philosophers broadly speaking don't agree with
00:10:01.680 papa and because they don't agree with papa, why should I? If this brittle fellow or David Deutsches
00:10:10.800 are telling me that this is the way in which knowledge is created, but they are a slim minority
00:10:16.240 view amongst the intellectual community, why should they be trusted over anyone else? And again
00:10:22.320 even that is the wrong question because we don't think that trust is actually a way in which
00:10:28.480 you assess the validity of ideas, but we don't judge the source of an idea, we instead try to
00:10:35.360 error correct. It's a whole worldview, it's a particular epistemology, it's a way of understanding
00:10:41.040 stuff and creating knowledge and so this is the hill we have to climb and this is the
00:10:46.400 hill we're about to climb today. So in saying all that that now is an introduction to David Deutsches
00:10:52.480 introduction to the fabric of reality in the audiobook where he says that he regrets using the word
00:10:59.760 justification and justified so often, particularly in this chapter. Now I have readily forgive him
00:11:06.800 for this because I think that again he is meeting the opponent halfway that pedagogically speaking
00:11:14.960 in terms of trying to help people learn these ideas, you have to bring them with you by
00:11:21.040 granting the words that they're using. As we say there's no such thing as an unambiguous language.
00:11:27.520 Now writing today in light of what was written back then with the fabric of reality, the
00:11:32.800 fabric of reality was like a step required in order to bring us to the point where we could
00:11:37.600 understand the beginning of infinity. And so this was the first step for many many people of
00:11:43.200 taking them out of their slumber of thinking justified true belief, for example, is the way in
00:11:49.120 which knowledge works. And that induction is required in order to somehow or other give us confidence
00:11:55.440 in the theories of science. So that induction indeed is able to generate theories of science,
00:12:01.040 all of which is misconceived. But you have to start somewhere and so people are typically starting
00:12:06.640 at that point. And so chapter seven here is going to use those words, the terms of the people who
00:12:14.800 have the misconceptions, the traditional view. And I think the way in which to interpret this is
00:12:19.760 David is holding your hand and bringing you along through the mile of misconception.
00:12:25.520 But sometimes has to use the words of those people who endorse the false theories because that's
00:12:30.960 almost everyone. Here I want to sort of give props to Wittgenstein, which I don't often do,
00:12:36.800 but it's a it's a way of thinking about areas of philosophy that I think are useful.
00:12:42.400 What he said, what Wittgenstein said, Ludwig Wittgenstein said of his own philosophy because
00:12:47.840 he's basic thesis was philosophy as a discipline is useless, that it doesn't contribute anything to
00:12:53.760 knowledge. All you need is things like mathematics and science and philosophy itself
00:12:58.560 doesn't actually solve any problems. And this was a great schism between the people who follow
00:13:03.600 Wittgenstein and the people who follow Poppa. Poppa thinks there are genuine philosophical
00:13:08.640 problems, Wittgenstein thinks it's all word games. So there is this deep conflict between these
00:13:14.240 two ideas. And then, of course, people would object to Wittgenstein and say, well, hold on,
00:13:18.800 you are doing philosophy. How can you say all the philosophy is useless? And he granted it
00:13:23.760 now a very clever way of granting it. He said his own philosophy is kind of like a ladder,
00:13:30.000 a ladder that you use to climb out of a deep well, the well-being philosophy.
00:13:34.960 Once you've climbed out of the well using the ladder, you can do away with the ladder.
00:13:39.440 You no longer have any need for the ladder. So once you've understood his philosophy,
00:13:42.880 you understand that all of philosophy, including his own, is completely useless. So get on with
00:13:46.720 your life and just do science. Now, I disagree with all of that quite obviously. People who don't
00:13:52.240 think that philosophy is important, are liable to say things like, well, the evidence shows in
00:13:58.640 controvertably X. You can't debate the science because the evidence shows. Not realizing that,
00:14:05.520 for example, evidence needs to be interpreted. And that's not a matter of science. That's a
00:14:10.320 matter of philosophy that the claim that evidence needs to be interpreted, that evidence doesn't
00:14:16.240 speak for itself, but rather many scientists and others who reject the importance of philosophy
00:14:23.360 will make claims like this, that all you need to do is to extrapolate the data and then you've
00:14:27.840 got a trend in your doing science. That's not science. Science is about explanation. But that claim
00:14:33.520 that science about is about explanation is itself philosophical. So we have a problem in philosophy.
00:14:38.800 Popper was right. Is science about just predicting stuff? Is that all it's about? Or is it about
00:14:46.320 explanation? That's a philosophical problem. The solution is it's about explanation because you can't
00:14:51.760 make predictions without explanations anyway. So anyone who's making the opposite case is already
00:14:57.600 trying to pull them up and themselves up by their bootstraps and they have no bootstraps
00:15:01.920 because there is no way of predicting stuff without a pre-existing explanation. But that's
00:15:08.320 beside the point. Popper wins the argument, but Wittgenstein had a good quip. Use certain
00:15:15.520 philosophies to climb out of the well. And so what I want to say here is that with chapter seven,
00:15:21.360 it's kind of like a ladder to be used to climb out of the well of justificationism. And so the
00:15:28.400 runs of the ladder will now and again include the word justified and justification. And David
00:15:35.440 objects to it. So already we can concede David agrees that he said he would avoid the use of these
00:15:41.040 words. And so I'm going to highlight some uses of the word where I think you could get away with
00:15:46.320 it. And other areas where I think you might not want to get away with it, where you'd want to
00:15:49.920 say something different or the word justified is simply superfluous. You can just do away with it.
00:15:54.320 But what David says in the audio book in the introduction is words to the effect that you need
00:15:58.880 to interpret in this chapter the use of the word justified as kind of a moral or methodological
00:16:07.280 claim about what should be done. In other words, a normative claim. So if something is justified,
00:16:11.360 it's not justifying something as true or justifying something as probably true. That's the
00:16:17.040 era of justificationism. But when David says in this chapter that something is justified, what he
00:16:22.560 means is that you should use the best explanation should. Okay, should you're justified in using
00:16:29.520 the best explanation. And that's a reasonable use of the word justified. The whole chapter is about
00:16:34.480 this idea that there are these two people on the top of the Eiffel Tower. David and the crypto
00:16:38.880 inductive is having this debate about why one shouldn't jump off the Eiffel Tower. After all,
00:16:45.600 if you can't justify as true, the theory that if you do jump off, you're going to hit the ground.
00:16:51.600 Okay, general relativity or Newtonian gravity or whatever else that allows you to make that prediction.
00:16:55.760 If you're not justified in thinking it's true, then there's no reason not to jump off and just
00:17:01.280 think you're going to float to the ground. Isn't that the way that science works? Well,
00:17:05.280 now it's not. You're justified in not jumping off the Eiffel Tower because the best explanation is
00:17:12.880 theories of gravity that we have that predict you're going to hit the ground. Not justified as true,
00:17:19.120 but justified in following the best explanation. Well, it's an alternative not follow the best
00:17:24.240 explanation. And in fact, follow a bad explanation like you're going to float to the ground.
00:17:28.960 There's no explanation there. What is the mechanism that would allow you to float to the ground?
00:17:33.440 We don't need to justify as true the idea that if you jump, you're going to fall to the ground.
00:17:39.360 It's not 100% absolutely certain, whatever level of confidence you want to put on this thing,
00:17:47.200 that if you jump off the air, you're going to hit the ground. After all, we can always
00:17:50.720 imagine ridiculous scenarios like immediately where you thought you were jumping off into empty air,
00:17:57.280 that someone had put a very fine net beneath you that you couldn't see and as soon as you jumped,
00:18:02.320 you hit the net safely and you never hit the ground. There could be all sorts of reasons of
00:18:07.440 extremely low likelihood that you can imagine that would mean that you didn't hit the ground.
00:18:13.600 So it's not absolutely certain things might not be justified true, but that's not important.
00:18:18.880 All of these exceptions to the reasons why you wouldn't hit the ground are completely
00:18:24.560 able to be ignored because you have a best good explanation, general relativity, that predicts
00:18:31.200 anything leaping off the Eiffel Tower is going to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second
00:18:36.000 squared towards the ground, or in fact not accelerated, general relativity, but you get my meaning,
00:18:40.080 you're going to hit the ground. The ground and you are going to come into contact, you're going
00:18:43.120 to be dead. Are you justified in thinking that's true? No. Are you justified in relying upon the
00:18:49.680 best explanation? Yes. So that's the way in which we're going to understand the word justified here.
00:18:55.600 Now, all of that is extremely technical inside baseball to some extent,
00:19:01.600 epistemology. These are debates within popularian circles that have been had about the use of
00:19:09.120 particular words, but why we're getting hung up on words, I don't know. That's very
00:19:14.000 of it, Genstinian. We can just explain the ideas, explain the ideas without worrying too much
00:19:20.960 about what words people use, because all words have ambiguity as we've already said.
00:19:26.880 You know, it reminds me a little, one more final thing, reminds me a little of this word
00:19:33.280 conjecture or guess, all knowledge is conjectural. And so we say it's been guessed, which is true
00:19:41.360 from what we understand now about the period of epistemology, knowledge is conjectural,
00:19:45.680 but every single claim that you can make is a guess as well. So what makes the difference between
00:19:50.640 a conjecture like general relativity or evolution by natural selection or the movement of
00:19:59.200 tectonic plates or how quasars work or what the ultimate cause of the COVID-19 virus was,
00:20:07.440 whatever the conjectures are that are out there, they don't all stand on equal footing.
00:20:11.760 The conjecture that the curvature of spacetime is what is the explanation of gravity
00:20:18.880 and gives the illusion of a force of gravity is conjectural. It's a guess, but it is one which has
00:20:27.360 survived many, many tests, and there is nothing else superior to it. Other rivals have been refuted,
00:20:34.240 it's the only one left standing, currently all experimental evidence is consistent with it.
00:20:41.360 That doesn't prove it true, but it means it can do something that no other rival has been able to do.
00:20:47.920 But we still call it conjectural knowledge, it's a conjecture, it's a guess.
00:20:51.440 But this word guess clearly is labeling something like that as well as something like
00:20:56.960 mutants theory of gravity, which is already known to be false and has been refuted by
00:21:01.760 Eddington's experiment. And of course not merely Eddington's experiment, but
00:21:06.720 any number of things that can only be explained these days by general relativity will in fact
00:21:12.560 of course gravity can only be explained properly conceived by general relativity. So there's that.
00:21:20.000 But if the word guess is to label that, and the word guess is to label Newtonian gravity,
00:21:25.440 already refuted. And the word guess is to label something like, well, I think gravity is just caused
00:21:31.520 by the fact that the earth loves the objects on it and that's why they're attracted to it
00:21:35.840 and they tend to fall towards it. There is a force of love, not a force of gravity.
00:21:40.400 Well, that guess, that guess, utterly uncoupled from reality still counts as a guess.
00:21:46.480 Wrong though it is, you know, explanationless though it is.
00:21:51.200 So this word guess, I mean, maybe we'll be looking back, the epistemology descendants in the
00:21:56.720 Perperian tradition a hundred years from now might very well look back to today and go,
00:22:00.880 look at the misconceptions these people were using back then. They were using these words
00:22:05.120 conjecture and guess to label a similar kind of a thing. Now we know better. Now we know what we
00:22:11.280 should be saying in these situations and explanation is actually this. It's not really a guess,
00:22:17.120 it's something else. Now I would say right now that it's a guess, it's really a guess of a kind,
00:22:21.040 but I can only rely upon the best knowledge I have in any given time. I could come up with
00:22:27.120 other ideas, but they're not better than what I know at the moment. I wish they were,
00:22:31.360 then I could be popular, but I'm not. I'm just communicating the ideas. And if I do think of
00:22:35.680 something that I genuinely think by my lights and after having consulted other people and
00:22:39.680 tested it against reality and tested it with conversations with other people, if then I figure
00:22:45.760 out that okay, well how we can make some further improvements on Popper and further improvements
00:22:50.400 on Twitch, then I will do so. But there's no urgency for this. I don't feel compelled to try and
00:22:55.360 do this at the moment. I don't see any particular problems that need to be solved by doing this
00:23:00.080 by changing our language, but justification is one of these words where we've learned better about
00:23:06.960 how to explain these concepts, and it's going to become clear in this chapter. But again,
00:23:11.280 as I say, I don't blame Popper for the way in which he wrote the logic of scientific discovery.
00:23:16.720 He needed to persuade the people that were important to the project of trying to understand
00:23:22.560 how science works, namely other philosophers, colleagues, that kind of thing, people are going
00:23:26.240 to spread the word. He did as well as he could and he refined his ideas in subsequent books.
00:23:31.120 And so the subsequent books are a far better read than what the earlier ones were.
00:23:35.120 I think even he would agree with that, I don't know, but I'm dumb. You know, your first work is
00:23:39.600 always going to be written for a particular audience and be grappling with misconceptions and
00:23:45.920 trying to pull people out of the misconceptions requires you to at least explain what the
00:23:50.960 misconceptions are in the language that people understand. So this is why Chapter 7 is written in
00:23:55.360 this way and looked at through the lens of the beginning of infinity, which only exists because of
00:24:00.720 the fabric of reality, we can see that there are subtle differences and ways of expressing things
00:24:08.080 that only in light of the beginning of infinity does the fabric of reality look in this sense,
00:24:14.320 dated in terms of the terminology, but not the central ideas. So that's a long preamble.
00:24:19.440 Now I'm going to get into the reading. David begins the chapter with a quote from
00:24:24.800 Carl Popper. And Carl Popper said, quote, I think that I have solved a major philosophical
00:24:31.600 problem, the problem of induction end quote. Let's begin with David. David says quote,
00:24:38.400 as I explained in the preface, this book is not primarily a defense of the fundamental theories
00:24:43.520 of the four main strands, it is an investigation of what those theories say and what sorts of reality
00:24:50.000 they describe. That is why I did not address opposing theories in any depth. However,
00:24:56.320 there is one opposing theory, namely common sense, which reason requires me to refute in detail
00:25:04.160 wherever it seems to conflict with what I am asserting. Hence in Chapter 2, I presented a
00:25:10.160 root and branch refutation of the common sense idea that there is only one universe. In Chapter 11,
00:25:16.080 I shall do the same for the common sense idea that time flows or that our consciousness
00:25:22.240 moves through time. In Chapter 3, I criticized inductivism, the common sense idea that we form
00:25:29.680 theories about the physical world by generalizing the results of observations and that we justify
00:25:35.280 our theories by repeating those observations. I explained that inductive generalization from
00:25:41.840 observations is impossible and that inductive justification is invalid. I explained that inductivism
00:25:49.920 rests upon a mistaken idea of science as seeking predictions on the basis of observations
00:25:56.960 rather than as seeking explanations in response to problems end quote, pausing there my reflection.
00:26:03.520 You can see what I'm going to say here, I guess, if you're a long time listener. So much of the
00:26:07.600 beginning infinity is being prefaced here and it's easy to miss but he is David is highlighting
00:26:14.560 right there, the genuine purpose of science. It's not about primarily prediction and prediction
00:26:21.600 from observations which have been generalized from what has happened in the past. That's not
00:26:25.920 what science is about. Science is about explanations. Now seeking those explanations and finding
00:26:32.960 them, that's the hard part because we have to come up creatively with how to account for the
00:26:38.320 world. But once we've done that with a grand theorem of some way, a story we tell about the
00:26:46.720 mechanisms, the causes, the effects, all of the things that are possible in the world and not
00:26:53.040 possible in the world, what are ruled in and ruled out. Perhaps from that, some of that,
00:26:58.160 especially in physics or chemistry and the physical sciences, maybe if you're lucky, then you can
00:27:03.760 really control your variables. Then perhaps if you know that people aren't going to get involved,
00:27:08.480 you might just be able to make a prediction. You might be able to derive some claim about the future
00:27:15.120 or the past or even the present from that good explanation. But that's not the purpose of science,
00:27:20.720 that's just a happy fortunate result of your main project, which was to understand reality. So
00:27:28.640 lucky for you out of that understanding comes the capacity to sometimes make a prediction,
00:27:35.120 in particular circumstances. Now I'm qualifying all that because so much of science isn't about
00:27:40.960 the predictions. It really isn't. In fact, sometimes science says things are unpredictable.
00:27:45.760 Whole areas of biology, unpredictable. You can't know what the mutation is going to be
00:27:52.080 on the genetic code. Could be anything. That's just the way evolution works. It's blind.
00:27:56.960 It throws up the unpredictable, inherently unpredictable. When you're making distant forecasts
00:28:02.560 about the future, people get involved and their choices get involved and they create knowledge
00:28:06.880 in the creation of knowledge is unpredictable, causing their choices to be inherently unpredictable.
00:28:11.040 Not determined by the prior state of the universe in such a way that you can make a prediction.
00:28:18.400 So that can't be the purpose of science rather often. Even if you have a good scientific theory,
00:28:23.760 it often doesn't allow you to make this distant prediction about what's going to happen
00:28:29.040 to the earth, 10 or 1000 years from now, because people will have done stuff that's going to
00:28:35.520 change whatever your prediction is from your current best scientific explanation is, which might
00:28:41.200 very well be overturned any time between the next 10 and 1000 years. Okay, so let's keep on going.
00:28:48.320 David says, quote, I also explained following Popper how science does make progress by
00:28:55.040 conjecturing new explanations and then choosing between the best ones by experiment.
00:29:00.640 All this is largely accepted by scientists and philosophers of science. What is not accepted
00:29:07.200 by most philosophers is that this process is justified. Let me explain, end quote.
00:29:13.840 So there we have the first use of the word justified. So what David has just said is, quote,
00:29:22.400 what is not accepted by most philosophers is that this process is justified end quote.
00:29:28.240 All I would change about that would be something like him saying, what is not accepted by most
00:29:37.040 philosophers is that this process is the best explanation of how science works or the only known
00:29:43.280 explanation of how science works. There are no rivals. Whatever way you want to put it. It's not
00:29:48.400 justified in the sense of being justified is true, but we can interpret this use of the word
00:29:52.480 justified as saying that this process is what you should follow if you want to produce good explanations.
00:30:02.320 If you want to actually achieve the aim of science of understanding the world, of comprehending
00:30:08.240 things and solving problems, that's the sense in which it's justified. Not justified is true,
00:30:12.800 but justified as being the thing you should do methodologically. This is the the way in which
00:30:18.640 things work. That's all that means. David goes on. First, prefacing it by saying, quote, let me
00:30:23.680 explain, science seeks better explanations. A scientific explanation accounts for our observations
00:30:29.360 by postulating something about what reality is like and how it works. We deem an explanation
00:30:35.520 to be better if it leaves fewer loose ends, such as entities whose properties are themselves
00:30:41.280 unexplained, requires fewer and simpler postulates is more general, meshes more easily with good
00:30:47.040 explanations in other fields and so on, end quote, just pausing there. There's an interesting
00:30:51.520 just addition I had put on that, which is again, and this is directly from David Deutsch, where he
00:30:58.400 says just there, a scientific explanation accounts for our observations by postulating something about
00:31:03.520 what reality is like. So when he says that about what reality is like, he's invoking the things
00:31:09.840 that you don't see. So what reality is like usually includes a whole bunch of unseen phenomena
00:31:18.240 and the way in which you can determine which of the unseen phenomena is real and not is by the
00:31:23.840 scene, the scene of your observations. You look at what's going on in the with the sun,
00:31:30.880 you take measurements of the amount of light, you figure out how fast the earth is going around
00:31:36.720 the sun that tells you about the mass of the sun, you can tell the right at which energy is being
00:31:42.080 produced from the sun, given its mass, and you constrain what processes could possibly be
00:31:48.160 causing this amount of energy. And you rule out something like, well, it's chemical burning,
00:31:52.720 it's combustion, which is the only other fire that we know of. And you say, well, we've got to
00:31:58.160 come up with something better, and eventually you end up with nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion
00:32:03.920 reactions have to be powering that sun. You can't see the nuclear fusion reactions,
00:32:09.120 impossible. Number one, they're so far away, they're deep in the core of the sun, nothing could
00:32:13.440 actually get there. They involve the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, the smallest nuclei of all,
00:32:22.400 single protons being bashed together to form helium, that can't be seen. It's the unseen,
00:32:27.760 but it's something we're postulating something about what reality is like. Reality is like that,
00:32:32.400 that's what's really going on inside of the sun, to some approximation. Are there things,
00:32:37.600 are there mysteries there? Are there going to be problems that are out of that? I would say no doubt
00:32:42.080 there will be. Eventually, an observation from the sun will be inconsistent with something we know
00:32:47.520 about the rate of reactions. Who knows? Maybe in the center there's more than merely hydrogen going on
00:32:53.680 there. Maybe there's something else. I don't know. Maybe the triple alpha process actually begins
00:32:58.720 much earlier. This is getting into the technical astrophysical details. Who knows what could be found?
00:33:04.800 But I would be far more surprised were nothing found over the next century with respect to what
00:33:11.280 we understand about solar, nuclear, physics, solar, nuclear, stellar, nuclear synthesis.
00:33:19.840 Then if there were not something found, I'd be far more surprised were something not found
00:33:26.560 than if something was found, something new was found. An observation inconsistent with that
00:33:32.080 theory that I just gave you about what's going on in the sun with the fusion, the PP chain,
00:33:37.200 the so-called PP chain, the proton protons being bashed together to make helium or the CNO cycle
00:33:44.480 where carbon nitrogen oxygen is used to do basically the same thing, the outcome being
00:33:49.360 helium being produced from protons being fused together. I can readily imagine
00:33:56.800 someone coming along an overturning Fred Hoyle's conception of how all of this stuff works
00:34:03.280 which has remained relatively unchanged for decades. So I'd be surprised if that stands
00:34:09.360 in exactly the same form for centuries. I would expect that someone clever will find
00:34:15.680 wrinkles with it, errors with it, big or small. Okay, let's keep on going. David writes,
00:34:22.080 quote, but why should a better explanation be what we always assure me to be in practice,
00:34:29.520 namely the token of a truer theory? Why for that matter should a downright bad explanation,
00:34:35.760 one which has none of the above attributes say, necessarily befores. There is indeed no
00:34:41.280 logically necessary connection between truth and explanatory power. A bad explanation such as
00:34:48.080 solipsism may be true. Even the best and truest available theory may make a false prediction
00:34:54.560 in particular cases and those might be the very cases in which we rely on the theory.
00:35:00.000 No valid form of reasoning and logically rule out such possibilities or even prove them unlikely.
00:35:06.720 But in that case, what justifies our relying on our best explanations as guides to practical
00:35:11.680 decision-making? More generally, whatever criteria we use to judge scientific theories,
00:35:16.480 how could the fact that a theory satisfied those criteria today possibly imply anything about
00:35:22.480 what will happen if we rely on the theory tomorrow end quote? Yeah, so we don't prove
00:35:28.400 as true things in science. We tend not to prove things at all. That's not the metric we're
00:35:32.800 explaining stuff. Bad explanations are too appending something like solipsism, the idea that
00:35:38.240 maybe only you exist and you're just dreaming everything into reality. Maybe that's true.
00:35:42.800 It's a bad explanation because it can be infinitely varied in subtle ways. Maybe it's
00:35:46.960 you and your best friend that are dreaming everything into reality. Maybe it's everyone on earth
00:35:52.080 dreaming everything into reality. Everyone but one person dreaming everything into reality,
00:35:56.480 you can infinitely vary this. It's a single computer. It's two computers. It's one computer inside
00:36:01.760 of another computer simulating the universe. It's an infinite number of computers. It's an
00:36:07.360 uncountably infinite number of computers. Name your solipsistic idea that base reality is different
00:36:13.680 to just realism. Physical reality exists. We're being deceived by the demon. These are
00:36:20.320 solipsistic arguments. They're infinitely varied and that's what makes them a bad explanation. A
00:36:23.760 bad explanation by the terms of easily varied. Swap out one computer for 10 computers if we're
00:36:30.640 all living in a simulation. Who cares? It doesn't make any difference. But it makes a huge difference
00:36:36.800 to the good explanation of, for example, the sun is producing the energy that it does by fusion
00:36:43.120 power and that particular reaction that's going on is typically regarded as a majority of
00:36:47.840 PP chain reactions. Hydrogen nuclei directly colliding with hydrogen nuclei to produce heavier forms
00:36:53.840 of hydrogen and eventually ending up with helium 4 nuclei, which eventually is the only product
00:36:59.360 left. Once all the hydrogen is consumed then the sun expands and the core heats up and you end up
00:37:04.720 with the triple alpha reaction in a reaction of something called the helium flash and so on it
00:37:09.520 goes. There's a good explanation. I can't swap out protons for electrons in that situation.
00:37:15.840 I can't change the hydrogen for carbon. I can't change the helium for nitrogen. This is a hard
00:37:22.160 to vary explanation. I can't say there's more than the required number of protons in the
00:37:27.680 PP chain to produce the reaction required. I can't say it's fission rather than fusion,
00:37:34.000 hard to vary. Every single component of the good explanation serves a purpose, unlike solipsism,
00:37:41.760 where no particular version is a good explanation. No particular version is a good explanation.
00:37:47.600 It's all the same, whether you're dreaming stuff into reality or the demon is deceiving you
00:37:52.640 or it's a simulation or you're stuck in a cave, whatever it happens to be, these are bad
00:37:58.320 explanations. He's leewearied. That's what we got from the beginning of infinity. What you can see
00:38:03.680 here, it's already there in seed form in the fabric of reality. But here David is wondering,
00:38:09.520 well, well, he's opponent rather than wondering, asking the question. If we can't justify the theory
00:38:16.640 true today, how can we possibly rely on it tomorrow? If we don't know it's true today, why should
00:38:22.640 you rely on this thing tomorrow? I think it's just a silly question, but that's what philosophers
00:38:26.400 ask. And they still ask it today. And this is what basians are worried about and various other
00:38:29.520 people. Well, if you don't know it's true, or you're confident it's true, or you think it's
00:38:34.080 probably true, for what possible reason could you rely on this theory? You have to have a reason
00:38:40.720 for justifying the theory is true. It actually never comes up in real life science. You either
00:38:45.360 have an explanation or you don't. And rather often, if you're doing real science, if you're solving
00:38:49.680 problems, you don't have an explanation. That's your whole problem to begin with. You've got to come
00:38:53.760 up with an explanation. And once you come up with one, you're not going to justify it as true.
00:38:58.560 You're going to test it. And it survives the test where you've got nothing else to fall back on.
00:39:02.800 You better use that theory in order to continue to solve problems or you've got nothing.
00:39:07.600 But that's for justifying it's true. This is philosophical, naval gazing. It doesn't solve any
00:39:14.640 problem to go down this road. Taking up too much intellectual energy to even discuss the problem.
00:39:21.520 But some people need to be pulled out of it. I want to save the potential philosophers and philosophers
00:39:26.560 now and scientists now who are wasting their time writing books and delivering lectures and
00:39:31.040 trying to educate people and teaching cohorts of students about this rubbish, because it's a
00:39:36.480 waste of rain power when they could be doing other stuff, doing importance, solving actual problems
00:39:42.640 rather than learning misconception. It really is for a perperian who understands how knowledge is
00:39:47.360 created. It really is like generation upon generation of people being taught creationism. When you
00:39:52.640 know Darwinism is out there. Neo Darwinism is out there. That's what it's like. So why wouldn't you do
00:39:59.360 something? Why was Darwin and Haldein so animated about trying to persuade people of evolution
00:40:08.560 by natural selection? Why was it important to people to try and win that argument, to explain
00:40:14.720 stuff? Because people were wasting their time. Problems needed to be sold. There was important
00:40:21.120 biology to be done. And if people are wasting their time, they're trying to better understand
00:40:26.960 how creationism could work. By inventing variations of it like intelligent design,
00:40:32.000 the real biologists know that this is all completely misconceived in a waste of intellectual power,
00:40:38.560 a waste of humanity. And in the same way, we want to save people from inductivism and versions
00:40:45.840 of it like the modern intelligent design version called Bayesian epistemology. We want to save them
00:40:51.680 from because if only they took all of that energy and effort and put it into genuine creation
00:40:58.160 of knowledge which is optimistic and conjectural and allows the open-ended stream of knowledge
00:41:03.920 creation so that we can become the hub in the universe where the beginning of infinity really
00:41:09.680 begins as David Deutsch explains, then we need to help people learn this stuff, persuade them that
00:41:15.840 their present worldview is mired in misconception and they're being held back. That's the other thing.
00:41:22.640 You know what people to be held back? To be perpetually confused, not understanding why
00:41:27.200 things aren't working and rejecting pop around of hand because there are so many people out there,
00:41:33.040 prominent people out there who just detest the philosopher for reasons that still escape people,
00:41:39.680 possibly because pop it didn't like academic philosophy and philosophers. He didn't have kind
00:41:44.720 things to say at times about the entire project that they were engaged in because it was a waste
00:41:50.800 of time. As I'm speaking now, it doesn't sound kind. But what else can you do
00:41:54.560 when you just see children, young students, university people being indoctrinated with the wrong
00:42:03.120 ideas? It's exactly like the feeling that rationalist people have when they say that it's a waste
00:42:12.400 of intellectual power for so many people to be taught creationism, young earth creationism.
00:42:18.400 Yeah, it is. They should learn something better. But the adults don't know better.
00:42:23.120 So this is the situation we're in, where the philosophers don't know better. The scientists don't
00:42:27.280 know better. And perhaps the Perperian sometimes sound arrogant as perhaps I do. We've got the answers,
00:42:33.120 but we do. What else can you do? How else can you behave when you have the answers? I think generally
00:42:38.880 we're pretty kind, fun people, by the way. When we do explain this stuff, I'm not berating people.
00:42:45.040 If no one wants to hear this, I don't have to hear this. I don't know. I don't like you have to tune
00:42:50.000 in the podcast. Okay, let's keep on going. David is wondering, how can we rely on the theory
00:42:58.560 tomorrow if the theory today is unjustified? He says, quote, this is the modern form of the problem
00:43:05.200 of induction. Most philosophers are now content with Popper's contention. That new theories are
00:43:10.480 not inferred from anything, but are merely hypotheses. They also accept that scientific
00:43:16.240 progress is made through conjectures and refutations as described in chapter three,
00:43:20.640 and that theories are accepted when their rivals are refuted, and not by virtue of numerous
00:43:26.400 confirming instances. They accept that the knowledge obtained in this way tends in the event
00:43:32.080 to be reliable. The problem is they do not see why it should be. Traditional inductiveists
00:43:38.720 tried to formulate a principle of induction, which said that confirming instances made a theory
00:43:44.240 more likely, or that the future were resembled a past, or some such statement. They also tried to
00:43:49.600 formulate an inductive scientific methodology, laying down rules for what sorts of inferences
00:43:55.040 one could validly draw from data. They all failed, for the reasons I have explained,
00:44:00.640 but even if they had succeeded in the sense of constructing a scheme that could be followed
00:44:04.960 successfully to create scientific knowledge, this would not have solved the problem of induction
00:44:10.400 as it is nowadays understood. For in that case, induction would simply be another way of choosing
00:44:16.640 theories, and the problem would remain of why those theories should be a reliable basis for action.
00:44:23.600 In other words, philosophers who worry about this problem of induction are not inductiveists
00:44:28.960 in the old fashion sense. They did not try to obtain or justify any theories inductively.
00:44:34.640 They did not expect the sky to fall in, but they did not know how to justify that
00:44:39.520 expectation end quote. Yes, and so modern day basians who I encounter, they do tend to accept
00:44:49.360 this idea that you can refute theories. Now I still don't understand how and you speak to them
00:44:54.080 and of course. Number one, they're typically not using basis theorem. That's the first thing.
00:44:59.360 In so far as they are, that is the very rare exception to the rule. People will call themselves
00:45:02.640 basians, but never actually employ basis theorem in assessing, actually calculating the probability
00:45:10.720 or likelihood of a particular theory. But in so far as they do, they accept that a refutation
00:45:15.280 takes the probability of the truth of the theory to zero. I don't know how that happens. I don't
00:45:19.760 think they do either, but they accept refutation. But they do think that confirming instances are a
00:45:25.840 thing that the more often you observe something happening, the more confident you can be. That
00:45:32.960 seems to be common sense to them. Maybe it is common sense to a certain person. You see something
00:45:37.840 happen three times in a row, four times in a row, five times in a row, well then you should expect
00:45:41.600 it. It's the sunrise in kind of thing. You've seen the sunrise on five occasions before,
00:45:48.000 you expect the sunrise tomorrow, or ever since you were born, you've seen the sunrise and so
00:45:52.560 you continue to think the sun's going to rise, and of course the whole ravens thing or the swans,
00:45:56.400 whatever, you've seen white swans forever, so you were sharing all swans of white, therefore,
00:46:01.840 why should you expect a black swan? These trope examples are the ones that can tend to crop up.
00:46:07.280 But of course, the gamblers long run fallacy. You're flipping a coin and 10 heads in a row, do you
00:46:14.320 expect the 11th head to be heads knowing it's a fair coin? Well, that's the thing. Do you know
00:46:20.560 it's a fair coin? All of this stuff are problems for basians, but not problems for
00:46:25.760 perperians who want good explanations and not merely predictions. Inductivists are the same,
00:46:31.680 well, in the basians are inductive. That's what they are. They seek predictions that they see
00:46:37.680 that the purpose of science is about being able to make a prediction. They're looking at
00:46:42.400 observations. They're focused on observations on the evidence, on trying to confirm the evidence,
00:46:47.760 as being true or probably true, indicating a trend is likely more or less, and therefore,
00:46:53.440 whether the trend can continue, and therefore, they've got graphs, and it all looks very scientific.
00:46:57.680 When you speak to basians, and when you look at their presentations, they have lovely graphs,
00:47:02.000 lots of data, and so they can, they're ruling things in and out on the basis of confidence,
00:47:08.960 number of observations, so on and so forth. But in real life science, what we're looking for is
00:47:13.520 creative conjectures, grand explanations, hard to come by, accounts of the world, stories we tell,
00:47:21.600 when I say story, I don't think fictional story, I mean, words in natural language,
00:47:28.080 that invoke things that really exist out there in reality, the causal links between them,
00:47:36.480 the relationships between them, I should say, and why what is happening is happening, why?
00:47:42.800 And then from that, you might get a prediction, you might be able to talk about trends and things,
00:47:46.720 but that's a derivative thing, not the central part of the philosophy of science, of science,
00:47:53.840 of epistemology, it just isn't. This way, induction is not a thing, merely observing stuff,
00:48:00.080 observing is just there as a test of the theory, guessed. The observation might throw up a
00:48:06.640 problem, in which case, let's come up with an explanation of why this problem exists,
00:48:11.520 was the observation made poorly, was the methodology used to generate the observation?
00:48:18.000 There was a problem with the telescope, perhaps, or the microscope, or the Large Hadron Collider,
00:48:22.480 with your scientific instrument, with your eyes. You look up in the sky and you think you've seen
00:48:26.960 a UFO, oh, observation. Well, no, you've seen something up there, it doesn't mean there's aliens
00:48:34.240 flying from another galaxy here to Earth. Then you've got a theory and now let we need observations
00:48:40.080 to rule that out, possibly. We need alternatives, we have a whole bunch of alternative
00:48:46.800 hypotheses about what that thing could have been in the sky. Then you need ways of ruling out
00:48:52.480 all the other things like human-made aircraft, Venus, shooting style, or meteor, any number of things
00:49:01.360 whether balloon. On that list, yeah, sure, let's throw the intergalactic space traveler. But
00:49:08.080 absent anything else, why we're jumping to that one? I don't know. This is what passes
00:49:14.960 for the way in which people think science is done. If they continue to see night after night,
00:49:20.320 after night, after night, particular lights in the sky, they're becoming more and more confident
00:49:24.880 that their favorite theory is more likely to be true. This is the Bayesian way of thinking.
00:49:30.960 Therefore, tomorrow, they're going to see the same lights in the sky.
00:49:33.680 Ah-ha, aliens are traveling from the other side of the galaxy or something like that. So David
00:49:38.560 talks about modern day philosophers as perhaps not being inductive us in the old sense. I think
00:49:44.080 some are when it comes to Bayesian and some kind of are. They worry about how to justify us
00:49:51.040 through their theories. If there's anything to go by with the modern movement of Bayesianism,
00:49:56.720 that's what people think. They've only been fed a certain way of they're not philosophers
00:50:02.560 to begin with. Many people who title themselves styled Bayesians today in the rationalist community,
00:50:11.520 they read about Bayesianism. That's it. You're a blanket view. Never considered anything
00:50:16.160 more broadly in philosophy or epistemology. It's just Bayesian reasoning and it's mathematical
00:50:23.760 and I love math because maybe they're coders or the engineers. They understand the basic
00:50:30.640 ideas. The hey, it's a formula. You can even code it in the computer and it can spit out numbers
00:50:36.640 for you and it can be used for so-called machine learning, even though it's not learning,
00:50:40.320 but it can extrapolate data and it'll even help your robot navigate around. Hey, works.
00:50:45.840 Works for generating theories. Now, works for Bayeses theorem works for specific things,
00:50:52.080 but I've got whole episodes on this. Look at the Stephen Pinker and most recent episode on that,
00:50:58.080 all about Bayeses theorem for that. I've been talking about it a lot recently, so I won't go
00:51:02.480 back down that road now where Bayeses theorem can narrowly be used and where it certainly isn't a
00:51:07.760 philosophy of science or an epistemology. So that's what we're talking about here. But there are
00:51:13.280 philosophers who are not inductive us in the old fashion sense, David says, but I'll continue.
00:51:17.760 He writes, quote, they do not try to obtain or justify any theories inductively. They do not
00:51:23.600 expect the sky to fall in, but they do not know how to justify that expectation. Philosophers
00:51:29.280 today yearn for this missing justification, they no longer believe that induction would provide it,
00:51:35.440 yet they have an induction-shaped gap in their scheme of things, just as religious people who
00:51:40.800 have lost their faith suffer from a god-shaped gap in their scheme of things. But in my opinion,
00:51:46.960 there is little difference between having an X-shaped gap in one scheme of things and believing in X.
00:51:51.760 Hence to fit in with the more sophisticated conception of the problem of induction,
00:51:55.840 I wish to redefine the term inductivist to mean someone who believes that the invalidity of
00:52:01.840 inductive justification is a problem for the foundations of science, pausing their my reflection.
00:52:07.760 Just on the god-shaped gap thing, yeah, so religious people who lose their faith have a god-shaped
00:52:11.680 gap. You see this all the time, especially in morality, say something controversial here.
00:52:18.720 Altruism and this idea of collectivism, it's a tribal idea, so religions inherited this idea
00:52:26.160 that the tribe is more important than the individual. Obviously, that was a thing in the tribe.
00:52:31.440 Religions took it on and then whole political movements have taken it on.
00:52:34.640 Now, atheists to reject religion kind of. Atheists, we should say, who reject God,
00:52:42.240 and then think of themselves as very rational people because they have rejected God,
00:52:47.920 tend not to reject many, many of the tenants of religion. Now, of course, they might
00:52:54.480 become political activists and say, well, I hate the Catholic Church, for example,
00:52:58.560 and I am very pro-abortion, let's say. So clearly, I'm not a religious thinker,
00:53:03.600 but many, many of these people will hold high this notion of altruism, self-sacrifice.
00:53:12.240 Where does the concept of self-sacrifice being a virtue come from?
00:53:16.160 Altruism is not generosity. I've written blog posts about this in podcasts about this before.
00:53:21.280 People who reject God and reject mainstream religion, and by the way, I don't regard myself as a
00:53:28.320 religious person, but I understand the fraught errors in simply rejecting religion and having
00:53:35.440 nothing to replace it with, because if you reject God and you reject mainstream religion,
00:53:43.840 especially the one in which you are raised from mother's knee, and you have nothing to replace
00:53:48.000 it with, it will be filled by everything that was in that religion and it will become a political
00:53:53.920 ideology. For example, Christianity well-teaches that the ultimate person as Jesus Christ,
00:54:01.200 he sacrificed his life for the rest of humanity. That was the greatest thing that could have
00:54:07.920 been done. He was altruistic, he spoke of altruism, give up your wealth, and follow him. This is the
00:54:14.560 ideal that we are supposed to strive for, and many, many atheist people still endorse the lessons.
00:54:22.640 They might reject God, reject that Jesus perform miracles, reject that Jesus is the son of God,
00:54:29.200 or perhaps even reject that Jesus ever existed, but insofar as he had wisdom there,
00:54:33.760 they still read wisdom into the New Testament of that kind, namely sacrifice yourself.
00:54:40.400 Don't merely be generous, give and give and give until it hurts a little.
00:54:44.240 The best thing you can do is to have your life set up so that it is for the service of others.
00:54:50.400 Again, I am not saying don't be generous, I am not saying don't be kind to compassionate,
00:54:54.000 you should be generous kind of compassionate, absolutely. Some of the most wonderful experiences
00:55:00.000 people can have in life is helping others, absolutely. But what Christianity does in particular
00:55:04.480 is it goes a little step further. It says, you do all that, but continue to do it until it hurts,
00:55:11.040 continue to do it until a little blood is drawn, until you begin to suffer a little. It's in the
00:55:16.880 suffering that you actually find, true virtue, and your true calling. Our Buddhism speaks that
00:55:24.240 you know, all life is suffering, which I disagree with, I think that suffering is just a problem
00:55:28.240 that can be solved. And Christianity says, if you suffer this is great, it's your cross to bear,
00:55:33.200 you should be seeking the cross to bear, you should be suffering, you should be sacrificing yourself
00:55:39.200 for others. If you've got a million dollars to give away, don't invest it in a company,
00:55:44.400 that's not going to do the greatest good, give it away, give it to a charity where it will
00:55:50.320 absolutely help people. Now, do I, am I arguing, get to charity? No, what I'm saying is,
00:55:54.400 it's not evil to invest that million dollars. And I'm not saying it's better to put it into
00:55:58.720 charity, give it to charity if you want. Yeah, absolutely. You're going to help people in particular
00:56:03.200 charities. You could invest it in a company like Apple, which is going to produce even better
00:56:07.840 iPhones that are going to help millions and millions of people be lifted out of poverty. That's
00:56:12.400 literally what happens with technology. And you would be a part of that interview invest in some
00:56:17.760 corporations, giving it away to poor people now is also going to help them. Yeah, absolutely.
00:56:23.280 But why a Christian, for example, would say, no, absolutely only way of helping people the only way
00:56:30.080 is to give it to charity because that's going to hurt you. You're not going to earn anything from
00:56:34.320 that except a good feeling, but investing money. Well, you're going to make a profit. You'll also
00:56:39.040 feel good. In fact, you're not supposed to feel good if you do that, by the way. If you invest in a
00:56:42.880 company that does really well, you're not supposed to feel good and virtuous. You're not supposed
00:56:47.440 to. You're supposed to feel a little bit guilty. You haven't sacrificed anything, the opposite.
00:56:53.200 But why shouldn't you feel good if the company you're investing does well and is selling products
00:56:58.000 to people and giving services to people, lifting the entire state of civilization to a higher
00:57:03.760 level of flourishing. That's a great thing. That's a virtuous thing. People have a God-shaped gap.
00:57:09.280 People have a religion-shaped gap. So atheists often just have the morality of Christianity.
00:57:14.640 They endorse almost everything about Christianity, except the God-bit, except the Jesus-bit,
00:57:20.240 although the example of Jesus, they think is good. Effective altruism is absolutely that.
00:57:26.480 It's absolutely that. It is the modern version of Christianity without Jesus.
00:57:32.000 It's a way of, he give away everything follow me and then you will achieve bliss and happiness
00:57:38.720 and enlightenment. I am not saying effective altruists are not doing good work. They are.
00:57:43.600 What I am saying is that altruism is not the most effective way of doing good.
00:57:49.440 Generosity is a higher calling, because there are many ways in which to be generous.
00:57:54.880 Investing in people, rather than simply giving it away. Investing in people means you may get
00:57:59.840 a return. You might not as well. You might lose it all. But hey, we charity. You absolutely lose
00:58:03.440 it all in the sense that it's gone from you to someone else. Is that bad? No, it's not bad,
00:58:09.440 but in the same way that investing in someone who's got a good idea is a startup and makes
00:58:14.960 lots of money and you make lots of money is also not bad for you. It's no less good just because
00:58:21.760 you make a profit, but I'm getting off topic. That's a rant on precisely this thing of
00:58:28.400 some people who lose their faith suffer from a God-shaped gap. That kind of thing.
00:58:34.640 People want to believe in something, believe in the higher power of some sort. In particular,
00:58:39.520 I want to have a morality that is basically just traditional religion. There are alternatives to that.
00:58:46.080 Look up, I think my blog post is Christian atheists, something like that. I've got a podcast out there
00:58:52.640 about it as well. Let's get going. Not only going to read a little bit more, and then we get to
00:58:56.480 the actual discussion itself, which I'm going to leave for part two. This is just the introduction.
00:59:00.720 Lengthier than I thought. David has just said, quote, and I'll read on a bit further.
00:59:06.320 I wish to redefine the term inductivist to mean someone who believes that the invalidity of
00:59:11.840 inductive justification is a problem for the foundations of science. In other words,
00:59:17.920 an inductivist believes there is a gap which must be filled if not by a principle of induction
00:59:24.240 than by something else. Some inductivists do not mind being so designated. Others do, so I shall
00:59:30.800 call them crypto-inductivists. Most contemporary philosophers are crypto-inductivists. What makes
00:59:37.120 matters worse is that like many scientists, they grossly underrate the role of explanation in the
00:59:43.120 scientific process. So do most perperian anti-inductivists, who are thereby led to deny that there is
00:59:49.120 any such thing as justification, even tentative justification. This opens up a new explanatory gap
00:59:55.520 in their scheme of things. The philosopher, John Worrell, has dramatized a problem as he sees it
1:00:01.280 in an imaginary dialogue between Popper and several other philosophers entitled,
1:00:05.760 why both Popper and Watkins fail to solve the problem of induction? This setting is the top of
1:00:11.120 the Eiffel Tower. One of the participants, the floater, decides to descend by jumping over the
1:00:17.120 side instead of using the lift in the normal way. The others try to persuade the floater that
1:00:22.400 jumping off means certain death. They use the best available scientific and philosophical
1:00:27.120 arguments, but the infuriating floater still expects to float down safely. And keeps pointing out
1:00:33.520 that no rival explanation can logically be proved to be preferable on the basis of past experience.
1:00:39.920 Pause there, my reflection. Yeah, of course. It's the wrong question, isn't it?
1:00:43.760 The floater is right that no rival explanation can logically be proved to be preferable.
1:00:49.440 Yeah, we can't logically prove it, but science isn't about logical proof. And if you're looking
1:00:53.920 for that bar, the bar is so high, you're never going to meet it. What we're after is good explanations.
1:00:59.840 We're after actual knowledge. We're after a situation in which we literally do have no rivals.
1:01:05.280 We've got one explanation. This is the explanation. This is what's going to happen.
1:01:10.720 Is it absolutely certain? No. Is it known to be true? No. Is it probably true? No.
1:01:15.840 It's just the only explanation we have. And if you want to rely on something else,
1:01:20.160 in particular, you want to rely on a bad explanation, that's on you. The rest of us are not
1:01:24.480 going to jump off the Eiffel Tower because we've got a good explanation. It's a very,
1:01:28.160 very good explanation. It's been tested in many, many different ways and many different situations.
1:01:33.680 I am justified in not jumping off, justified in the sense that I should not jump off the Eiffel Tower
1:01:42.160 and thinking I will not float to the ground because this best only existing scientific explanation
1:01:50.800 of how gravity works and how masses in a gravitational field behave tells me and that was me to
1:01:57.920 predict I'm going to hit the ground. I'm going to hit the ground in such a way that I'll absolutely
1:02:02.960 be dead. So you, Mr. Flotter, can rely on some other explanation, an unknown explanation,
1:02:09.760 but it doesn't enable you to make a prediction. Your non-explanation is just an assertion that you're
1:02:16.160 going to float. It's prediction without explanation, explanationless science. By what mechanism are
1:02:22.320 you going to float down? You have none. I have one that tells me that what happens when you jump
1:02:28.480 off the Eiffel Tower is you fall towards the ground and increasing velocity and you splat
1:02:36.160 and all your bones break and you die. This is what general relativity tells us. So what David
1:02:42.720 goes on to say is, quote, I believe that we can justify our expectation, the Flotter would be
1:02:48.240 killed. The justification, always tentative, of course, comes from the explanations provided by
1:02:53.040 the relevant scientific theories to the extent those explanations are good. It is rationally justified
1:02:58.000 to rely on the predictions of corresponding theories. So in reply to Laurel and our presenter
1:03:02.400 dialogue of my own set in the same place, end quote, and I won't begin reading the dialogue now.
1:03:08.880 But that last paragraph there is a lot of use of the word justify. And I think we can just do
1:03:14.480 away that I think we can just sort of say something along the lines of, we know the Flotter would
1:03:20.560 be killed. And when I say no, what I mean is tentatively, fallably, relying upon our best explanation.
1:03:29.120 So I would phrase it something like, I know that the Flotter would be killed. This claim comes from
1:03:35.360 the explanations provided by the relevant scientific theories to the extent those explanations are good.
1:03:40.960 It is right to rely on the predictions of the corresponding theories. So in reply to Laurel and
1:03:46.160 our presenter dialogue on my own, at no point do I need to talk about justified? At no point do I need to
1:03:50.480 use the word justification? I think David would be the same now because it just introduces
1:03:54.720 some confusion. Not because at that time in 1997 was he ever wrong in saying this because you
1:04:01.920 need to speak in the language of your opponents if you're, if you're going to make any headway,
1:04:07.280 quite often. Certainly I've learned this, unless you're willing to grant certain vocabulary,
1:04:11.920 there's no common ground, but they just don't know what you're getting at. So when I try and say,
1:04:16.480 try and explain what knowledge is or what the phrase I know means, well, I have to begin where they
1:04:21.520 are. People will say, oh, but you don't really know that. And so I have to concede that where
1:04:27.600 they're coming from is when they say and they emphasize, no, you don't know that. What they mean is,
1:04:32.320 I am certain that. Okay. And so I always say to them, well, no, you can't be certain of that.
1:04:38.400 I'm not certain of it either. Whereas what I really think is, of course, certainty isn't a thing.
1:04:43.200 You can't, there's no such thing as certainty. There's this feeling, right? There's this emotion,
1:04:48.240 you think that you label certainty, but even then that doesn't mean that it's absolutely true.
1:04:53.040 Okay. So there's all this deep ocean of background knowledge, but you have to meet someone
1:04:59.600 who's coming from the completely opposite perspective. You have to meet them some way. So you have to
1:05:04.400 grant them certain words and try and bring them with you for as long as they're interested in
1:05:09.520 being brought with you. And if they're not interested and they give up, well, there you go,
1:05:12.720 you don't have to force people into it. So it's an interesting debate for as long as people
1:05:16.480 want to have it. An interesting discussion, I should say, explaining world views to one another.
1:05:20.720 So that's what we're doing. And that's what David is doing here. So I look forward to the next
1:05:25.600 episode where we go through some of the dialogue. And I think I'll go through the entire dialogue,
1:05:30.240 but I think this is a really good chapter of trying finally to undo this idea of induction.
1:05:37.440 We've now, of course, got the problem of Bayesianism. So how much in-road we're making,
1:05:42.000 I don't know what to tell. And what's the real-life consequence? The real-life consequences
1:05:47.280 may be machine learning and artificial intelligence would do better if they weren't so
1:05:51.520 reliant on Bayesianism. Maybe there are better ways to go. Maybe, you know, even like AGI,
1:05:56.880 obviously, artificial general intelligence clearly cannot possibly be based on Bayesian inference
1:06:02.000 generation. That's clearly a misconception. We can rule that out. But I don't know enough about
1:06:06.560 just mainstream normal AI to know whether or not doing away with Bayesianism there might be a good
1:06:13.200 idea. That might be a bit of a dead end. There could be better ways of producing so-called
1:06:18.640 intelligent systems, just sophisticated computers, that do a different job of kind of guessing and
1:06:25.360 conjecturing in some way. I don't know how. That's for other people. I do what I do, other people
1:06:29.920 do what they do. But philosophy is important here. A epistemology is important here. If we want
1:06:35.600 technology to be better, people have to understand the way knowledge is generated, because that's
1:06:41.280 how progress happens. Not merely in the rarerified areas of philosophy and science, but in engineering
1:06:49.120 and technology and just everywhere in life. But that's enough for me. Until next time, bye-bye.
