00:00:00.000 Hello, so this is part two of chapter three. In the first part, we spent some time talking
00:00:13.400 about the printable of mediocrity and this idea that the earth is here to sustain us.
00:00:23.360 It's specially suited. We are specially suited to it and this has the idea of spaceship
00:00:28.880 earth. This is named the idea of spaceship earth and I've finished by saying that David had
00:00:33.760 written today almost the entire capacity of the earth's life support system for humans has been
00:00:39.360 provided not for us but by us using our ability to create new knowledge and he makes the
00:00:46.000 point that whilst other organisms appear to be specially suited to the earth, this is kind of a
00:00:55.680 misreading of the situation in at least one respect. They're suited to the environment as it
00:01:02.080 happens to be now but the purpose of biological evolution is to sustain genes over time not
00:01:10.000 any particular individual species. It's survival of the fittest genes in a very real sense and so
00:01:18.000 the earth is not going to sustain organisms, collections of genes. So let me continue reading
00:01:27.840 chapter three and he's speaking about other organisms on the planet. He says their home
00:01:35.360 environments do have the appearance of having been designed as life support systems for them
00:01:40.720 albeit only in a desperately limited sense that I have described but the biosphere no more
00:01:46.000 provides humans with a life support system than it provides us with radio telescopes. So the biosphere
00:01:51.920 is incapable of supporting human life. From the outset it was only human knowledge that made the planet
00:01:57.520 even marginally habitable by humans and the enormously increased capacity of our life support system
00:02:02.880 since then in terms both of numbers end of security and quality of life has been entirely due to
00:02:09.120 creation of human knowledge. We will see, this is me speaking now, this is not a quote, we will see
00:02:15.680 that as we proceed through the book David speaks, returns to this thing and speaks about these
00:02:21.680 wonderful examples such as Malthusian named after Thomas Malthus, these Malthusian
00:02:28.000 pessimistic prophecies. This idea that the carrying capacity of the planet is finite for humans.
00:02:36.640 Caring capacity works quite well if you're considering any other isolated organism. But those
00:02:42.640 isolated organisms in the environment are not creating knowledge. That is a such a crucial point
00:02:49.200 to grapple with. It's something that people who are concerned about the environment
00:02:56.480 don't consider in their calculations and it's very difficult to consider these things in calculations
00:03:03.680 because the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable. So when Thomas Malthus, as we will see
00:03:09.600 later chapters, tries to predict how long people can survive on this planet given that the amount
00:03:18.400 of land where we can grow food is finite, he doesn't realise that things can be done and things
00:03:27.360 are coming post Thomas Malthus, who was around in the 1700s, in particular in the 1900s.
00:03:35.840 Technology was found namely artificial fertilizers by this thing called the harbour process,
00:03:42.000 where you take nitrogen gas and you take hydrogen gas and you can make ammonia out of it
00:03:46.960 and the ammonia can then be used to create artificial fertilizers put into the soil,
00:03:51.120 which remarkably I heard recently some people regard as a terrible evil because some of the
00:04:00.000 fertilizers might go into rivers and cause algae to bloom and so algae bloom is a terrible
00:04:06.240 evil so we should stop using artificial fertilizers. If we did that a vast number of people on
00:04:14.400 this planet would die of starvation. People now are not starving in the numbers that they used to
00:04:20.800 because of artificial fertilizers because we now have the knowledge of how to create more food
00:04:26.960 with the same amount of land than we ever had before. There's something different about us.
00:04:33.680 We are not subject to the same sort of whimsical changes in the environment that other organisms are.
00:04:38.560 Other organisms, if the environment changes, they may go extinct. Now if the environment changes too
00:04:44.640 much and too quickly for us, we will go extinct. That's why we have to create knowledge as fast as
00:04:48.960 we possibly can. Having created it, we should use it to create technology which helps to sustain us,
00:04:55.280 to provide us with a spaceship earth. That's the only thing that provides the spaceship earth is
00:05:01.120 our building of it, our engineering of the planet, in order that it's more friendly for us.
00:05:08.160 So let me continue reading on the same thing David writes. The moral component of the spaceship
00:05:14.320 earth metaphor is therefore somewhat paradoxical. It casts humans as ungrateful for the gifts
00:05:21.040 which in reality they never received and it casts all other species in morally positive roles
00:05:27.120 in the spaceship's life support system with humans as the only negative actors.
00:05:34.480 We get this sense in our culture that humans are forever damaging the planet,
00:05:39.840 that we are the cause of extinctions. I don't know how long it's been since there's been a
00:05:47.040 natural extinction according to the prevailing conception of what's going on in ecology.
00:05:56.320 We know that 99.999% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct. But over the last
00:06:04.320 50 years we hear about extinctions all the time, but simultaneously in all cases
00:06:14.240 this is a challenge I'll throw out there. We've never heard of a species that's gone extinct
00:06:20.640 naturally. Why is that? We know that they do, but they apparently don't anymore ever since
00:06:27.680 humans have arrived on the same with the only things that cause extinctions. More or less.
00:06:32.080 So we are a on this view uniquely evil species and yet coming this comes from the spaceship
00:06:45.440 earth idea and the surrounding philosophy. Yet the fact is that we're doing what we can
00:06:52.880 to not suffer the same fate as every other species that's ever gone extinct. And the only
00:06:56.800 thing that we can do is to try and mold the environment around us using our knowledge and technology.
00:07:03.120 I'll continue reading. But humans are part of the biosphere and the supposedly immoral behavior is
00:07:09.600 identical to what all other species do when times are good except that humans alone try to mitigate
00:07:15.600 the effect of that response on their descendants and other other species. The principle of
00:07:21.040 mediocrity is paradoxical too. Since it singles our anthropocentrism for special
00:07:26.960 appropriate among all forms of parochial misconception, it is itself anthropocentric.
00:07:33.520 Also it climbs at all value judgments are anthropocentric. Yet itself is often expressed in
00:07:39.440 valued late and terminology such as arrogance, just scum, and the very word mediocrity.
00:07:45.360 We'd respect to whose values of those disparagements to be understood.
00:07:48.640 Why is arrogance even relevant as a criticism? Also, even if holding an arrogant opinion is
00:07:54.480 morally wrong, morality is supposed to refer only to the internal organization of the chemical
00:07:59.120 scum. So how can it tell us anything about how the word world beyond the scum is organized
00:08:04.640 as the principle of mediocrity purports to? This was very David Deutsch by the way. This idea that
00:08:11.040 the principle of mediocrity singles out anthropocentrism and that itself is anthropocentric. So
00:08:18.000 taking one misconception and explaining how another misconception comports to it. I'll continue.
00:08:27.680 He's speaking about people in the past and he says that in a sense their whole problem was
00:08:33.840 that they were not arrogant enough. They assumed these primitive people far too easily that the
00:08:40.080 world was fundamentally incomprehensible to them. The misconception that there was once
00:08:45.760 a problematic era for humans is present in ancient myths of a past golden age,
00:08:50.560 and of a garden of Eden. The theological notions of grace, unknown benefit from God,
00:08:56.400 and providence, which is God regarded as the provider of human needs, are also related to this.
00:09:02.480 In order to connect the supposed unproblematic past with their own less than pleasant experiences,
00:09:09.280 the authors of such myths had to include some past transition such as a fall from grace
00:09:14.880 when providence reduced its level of support. In the spaceship earth metaphor, the fall from
00:09:19.600 grace is usually deemed to be imminent or under. Yes, so this idea of an unproblematic past. It has a
00:09:26.640 lot of modern variants beyond what David is speaking about now, but all sit under the same umbrella.
00:09:34.320 There's a lot of health fads like this. If anyone's ever heard of the paleo diet, this idea that we
00:09:39.120 should eat like people of the Paleolithic era, and so just eat grains and meats. I think the
00:09:46.320 theory there is that everyone on the entire planet, no matter where they happen to be located,
00:09:50.640 we're eating roughly the same things. Anyway, it's the idea that unrefined food of some sort or other
00:09:56.800 is better for you than anything that has been processed in any way whatsoever. So it's
00:10:01.520 nutrition in the form of the past was definitely better. So it's nutrition in the form of
00:10:07.200 grace and providence, I suppose. Now, there might very well be a case to be made that certain
00:10:14.720 kinds of unrefined food are going to be better than certain kinds of food, but that's a vacuous
00:10:18.800 statement basically. You take any two foods, one's going to be superior, sometimes it will be the
00:10:22.960 refined food. If you take a carrot, firstly, the orange carrots are genetically engineered,
00:10:32.480 well they've been selectively bred. But too, as far as I know, if you eat the raw carrot,
00:10:38.560 then that's not going to provide you with as much nutrition as having cooked to the carrot,
00:10:42.960 and having cooked the carrot is a rather unnatural white thing to do. I'm not sure if
00:10:47.440 Paleolithic people are cooked carrots. I don't know. Whatever the case, cooking is unnatural,
00:10:56.320 using a microwave in order to process your food is unnatural. And yet, we know
00:11:02.320 that if you break down the cell walls of plants through mechanisms other than simply chewing them,
00:11:09.280 now only by applying heat, which partially digests the food outside of your stomach,
00:11:14.160 then you're able to extract more of the nutrients. All this is to say is that technology
00:11:19.040 and knowledge helps. Let's continue. The principle of mediocrity contains a similar misconception.
00:11:26.080 Consider the following argument, which is due to the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
00:11:30.640 Human attributes, like those of other organisms, evolved under natural selection,
00:11:36.240 in an ancestral environment. That is why our senses are adapted to detecting things like
00:11:41.200 the colours and smell of fruit, or the sound of a predator being able to detect such things,
00:11:46.240 gave our ancestors a better chance of surviving to have offspring. But for the same reason,
00:11:51.280 Dawkins points out, evolution did not waste our resources on detecting phenomena that
00:11:56.240 were never relevant to our survival. We cannot, for instance, distinguish between the colours of
00:12:00.720 most stars with the naked eye, and light vision is too poor and monochromatic, because not
00:12:05.760 enough of our ancestors died of that limitation to create evolutionary pressure for anything better.
00:12:10.720 So Dawkins argues, and here he is invoking the principle of mediocrity, that there is no reason
00:12:14.880 to expect our brains to be any different from our eyes in this regard. They evolved to cope
00:12:19.120 with the narrow class of phenomenon that commonly occur in the biosphere, and approximately
00:12:23.760 humans' scales of size, time, and energy, and so on. So phenomena in the universe happen to be
00:12:28.640 far above, or most phenomena in the universe happen to be far above or below those scales. Some
00:12:34.400 would kill us instantly, others could never affect anything in the lives of humans. So just as
00:12:39.600 our senses can not detect neutrinos or quasars, or most other significant phenomena in the cosmic
00:12:44.400 scheme of things, there is no reason to expect our brains to understand them. To the extent that
00:12:49.760 they already do understand them, we have been lucky. But a run of luck cannot be expected to continue
00:12:54.320 for long. And Stalkens agrees with our earlier evolutionary biologist, John Haldon, who expected
00:12:59.760 that the universe is not only queer than we can suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
00:13:06.080 This is a powerful argument. It's completely wrong, but it is very seductive. I think Dawkins uses
00:13:13.360 the terminology middle world. We don't understand things that are really, really small, like the
00:13:18.560 quantum, and so what's going on there kind of challenges our intuitions in such a way that it's
00:13:26.000 impossible to understand quantum mechanics, let alone string theory or anything else.
00:13:32.080 And we don't understand things moving too fast. So our intuitions don't really wrap around
00:13:38.800 relativity theory. Anything approaching a speed of light starts to do things that make it
00:13:44.240 difficult for us to understand. Okay, I'm going to pause now and change venue. I got to last time
00:13:51.840 was discussing Richard Dawkins middle world. I don't think that David uses those terms where I've
00:13:58.880 heard them or read them written by Richard himself somewhere or other. This idea that our brain is
00:14:06.400 an evolved structure, of course it is. And why should we think it any different to any other
00:14:13.440 feature of a biological organism? Namely, evolved in such a way that it's suited to the environment
00:14:22.400 in which it finds itself. This is what evolution tends to do. It tends to shape organisms
00:14:28.960 to their environment. That's why they seem so uniquely suited to those environments.
00:14:34.400 So when it comes to the human brain, shouldn't we assume that exactly the same concept should
00:14:39.920 obtain that the brain is suited to the particular sizes and velocities and conditions in which
00:14:50.400 it is generally surrounded by or with which it is generally surrounded by. In other words,
00:14:57.280 the quantum world seems strange because we evolved in an environment which is much larger than
00:15:03.840 the quantum. So we don't notice quantum effects. Indeed, not only do we not notice them, we're
00:15:08.880 in some sense incapable of comprehending what's going on at the subatomic scale because it's so
00:15:15.200 unfamiliar. Similarly, trying to understand geological time or cosmological time for that matter
00:15:22.400 is very, very difficult for us, perhaps even intractively so. We can't have a good understanding
00:15:27.760 of what it's like to travel near the speed of light because we never travel near the speed of light.
00:15:32.720 Now, all of this is simply to say that there are limits to the human mind. We can't picture certain
00:15:40.400 things. We can't even understand certain things. Perhaps people like Neil deGrasse Tyson or some
00:15:46.560 others have read Richard Dawkins and taken the further leap to presume that there is no reason to
00:15:53.840 suspect. I think Sam Harris might have offered something similar. There is no reason to suspect
00:15:58.560 that the brains that we have have the capacity to understand much more than what we know right now.
00:16:08.080 This is the John Horgan, the end of science idea in a sense. John Horgan just thinks that we
00:16:15.120 actually are discovering everything that is possible to discover and we're going to reach a limit
00:16:20.560 in that sense. We're going to find the final theory and that's it, progress will stop at that point.
00:16:25.120 The other version of that, which often works in concert, is if there is something deeper than some
00:16:34.240 of our most fundamental theories, perhaps string theory lies beneath or is more fundamental than
00:16:39.520 general relativity and quantum theory, that we can just barely understand that. Only the greatest
00:16:48.160 theoretical physicists and mathematicians are able to struggle, mightily, to try and figure out
00:16:55.600 what's going on with string theory. That their failing could be an indication that we have
00:17:02.000 simply reached the end of human brain computing power. Whatever the laws of physics ultimately
00:17:09.360 turn out to be, so this argument runs, they might be simply too complicated for us to ever
00:17:14.720 possibly understand. So this is the idea of middle world. We occupy a middle-sized world,
00:17:22.240 it's not, we don't occupy the larger scales like super-classings of galaxies and we don't
00:17:28.000 occupy the smallest scales like electrons and photons do. So therefore we're trapped with our
00:17:34.640 brains able to comprehend human-sized things, human time scales. David is the first person here
00:17:42.080 and in this chapter to really challenge that in a deep way. I think he completely cuts the legs
00:17:49.680 out from underneath that entire line of argument, persuasive as or as compelling as,
00:17:56.560 that argument is. It makes sense, it makes common sense. Why should we have any capacity
00:18:02.640 to understand what it's like to travel into a bit of light? The very theory is that speak about
00:18:07.600 travelling near the speed of light. Also say how difficult it is. Need lots of energy and so
00:18:12.640 forth to accelerate masses like ours to anywhere near the speed of light. So it's almost as if it's
00:18:20.480 prohibited. We can't picture what's going on. We struggle to bring our common sense into line
00:18:28.960 with what we know from theories of physics. The faster you go, the more that time slows down.
00:18:34.240 Of course, in stating the problem that way, we also reveal what's wrong with it.
00:18:42.160 After all, people do understand the special theory of relativity and the general theory of
00:18:47.040 relativity and quantum theory. Counterintuitive as they are, we understand them. And we conclude
00:18:53.440 from this that our intuitions on these matters are false. There's a better way to understand
00:18:58.880 reality than simply guessing out with your common sense, with the intuitions that you grew up
00:19:03.760 with as a chart. You can overcome those. Now, why should we expect that if there are deeper
00:19:09.520 theories still and there must be deeper theories than either relativity or quantum theory,
00:19:15.600 which govern their in conflict? And so we know at least one of them is false, probably both.
00:19:22.240 But whatever the deeper theory is, why should we expect that to be any less counterintuitive?
00:19:26.160 It will be counterintuitive, I would guess, but that is not to say it will be incomprehensible.
00:19:34.640 In fact, it must be comprehensible because the universe is comprehensible and we can comprehend it.
00:19:42.000 Now we're going to hear David's argument for exactly that, and it has to do with one of his
00:19:48.720 many areas of expertise, namely his understanding of computation, of universal computation. And we're
00:19:56.480 going to apply that to human beings. Now, last few sentences I read with this,
00:20:03.440 most phenomena in the universe happen far above or below those scales, human scales.
00:20:09.840 Some would kill us instantly, others could never affect anything in their lives of early humans.
00:20:14.320 So just as our senses cannot detect neutrinos or quasars, almost other significant phenomena in
00:20:19.520 the cosmic scheme of things, there's no reason to expect our brains to understand them.
00:20:25.520 To the extent that they already do understand them, we have been lucky. But a run of luck
00:20:30.080 cannot be expected to continue for long. So like I say, this is a very powerful persuasive argument.
00:20:36.080 It's a good argument by Dawkins, but it's false, so let's continue. David writes,
00:20:41.920 that is a startling and paradoxical consequence of the principle of mediocrity.
00:20:46.160 It says that all human abilities, including the distinctive ones, such as the ability to create
00:20:51.520 new explanations, are necessarily parochial. That implies in particular that progress in science
00:20:58.160 cannot exceed a certain limit defined by the biology of the human brain. And we must expect
00:21:04.400 to reach that limit sooner rather than later. Beyond it, the world stops making sense or seems
00:21:11.440 to. The answer to the question that I asked at the end of chapter 2, whether the scientific
00:21:15.440 revolution and the broader enlightenment could be a beginning of infinity, would then be a
00:21:18.880 resounding no. Science for all its successes and aspirations would turn out to be inherently
00:21:25.920 parochial, and ironically, anthropocentric. In other words, what we discover is limited by our
00:21:33.840 biological evolution in particular by our brains. And so we can understand things at roughly
00:21:39.680 human size. Once things start to get too big or too small, they will be incomprehensible to us,
00:21:46.560 or perhaps of too long a duration or too short a duration. There could be any number of ways in
00:21:52.400 which we have trapped inside of a bubble, defined by the capacity of the human brain,
00:21:58.080 to compute what is going on out there. Even if those things that are going on out there
00:22:04.240 are governed by laws of physics, the laws of physics might be incomprehensible.
00:22:11.520 So just to preface what's about to happen, this line of argument arises out of a mathematical
00:22:19.280 proof. It's the mathematical proof that David himself did in 1986 on the universality of quantum
00:22:27.040 computation. The proof that quantum computers were possible, it says that whatever the physical
00:22:36.000 laws are, they must be computable. That's it. If they're computable, that means a universal
00:22:45.280 computer will be able to simulate those physical laws. Now people do object to this, but at the
00:22:51.440 moment it's a mathematical proof. Until someone can provide a refutation of the proof, it stands.
00:22:57.440 It's like Pythagoras is there. It is like that in terms of how fundamental it is.
00:23:07.760 Let's continue. David speaks about how Richard Dawkins says that within this human-sized world that
00:23:18.480 is comprehensible to us, the world can turn out to seem unproblematic. But outside once things
00:23:26.000 get too big to small, whatever, then there will be insoluble problems on that view. And David writes
00:23:32.480 that Dawkins would prefer it to be otherwise, as he wrote. I believe that an ordinary universe,
00:23:38.240 one indifferent to human preoccupations in which everything has an explanation,
00:23:43.280 even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place
00:23:48.880 than a universe that is tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic. Now of course,
00:23:58.160 and I think David says this later, if there can be no explanation about some phenomena, some
00:24:06.720 physical phenomena out there in the universe, if there can be an explanation. Then that, in fact,
00:24:11.680 is a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic. So Dawkins doesn't want it to be the case
00:24:19.920 that there are these insoluble problems. But he's arguing against, of course, supernatural beings.
00:24:27.440 He doesn't want supernatural beings to exist. He thinks that that's a pessimistic view of the
00:24:33.520 world. I would agree that if you've got all powerful beings, you've got gods or whatever, then that
00:24:42.080 would mean that there's magic in the universe somewhere other. And so phenomena like miracles could
00:24:46.960 exist because the gods could be doing it and you could never possibly understand it. Now he says
00:24:50.960 that that's objectionable, but it's more objectionable. So let me continue. Let me continue.
00:24:57.520 An orderly, explicable universe is indeed more beautiful. See chapter 14. Though the assumption
00:25:06.000 that to be orderly, it has to be indifferent to human preoccupations is a misconception associated
00:25:12.160 with the principle of mediocrity. Any assumption that the world is inexplicable can lead only
00:25:18.000 to extremely bad explanations. For an inexplicable world is indistinguishable from one tricked out
00:25:24.640 with capricious ad hoc magic by definition. No hypothesis about the world outside the bubble of
00:25:30.000 explicability can be a better explanation than that Zeus rules there, or practically any myth or
00:25:35.600 fantasy one likes. Skipping a little, at root the principle of mediocrity and the spaceship earth
00:25:43.200 metaphor overlapping in a claim about reach. They both claim that the reach of the distinctively
00:25:50.320 human way of being that is to say the way of problem solving, knowledge creating and adapting the
00:25:55.920 world around us is bounded. And they argue that its bounds cannot be very far beyond what it is
00:26:01.920 already reached. Trying to go beyond that range must lead to failure and catastrophe respectively.
00:26:07.920 I'm going to skip a fair bit here. Once again, if you've never read the book, you should read it.
00:26:14.720 If you haven't bought the book, you should buy it because I'm only giving you a taste of what is
00:26:19.760 in any of these chapters. This one's a particularly long chapter, but I'll continue a little further
00:26:25.520 on now and he writes. Since the Enlightenment, technological progress has depended specifically on the
00:26:31.600 creation of explanatory knowledge. People had dreamed for millennia of flying to the moon,
00:26:36.640 but it was only with the advent of Newton's theories about the behaviour of invisible entities,
00:26:40.880 such as forces and momentum, as they began to understand what was needed in order to go there.
00:26:45.280 This increasingly intimate connection between explaining the world and controlling it,
00:26:51.520 there's no accident, but it's part of the deep structure of the world. Consider the set of
00:26:57.200 all conceivable transformations of physical objects. Some of these, like faster than light
00:27:01.600 communication, never happened because they are forbidden by laws of nature. Some, like the formation
00:27:06.720 of stars out of primemordial hydrogen, happen spontaneously, and some, such as converting air and
00:27:12.400 water into trees, or converting raw materials into a radio telescope, are possible,
00:27:16.640 but happen only when the requisite knowledge is present, for instance, embodied in genes or brains.
00:27:23.680 That's an important dichotomy. The two species of knowledge, if you like, that exist,
00:27:29.680 and it's a difficult one to grapple with the first time that it is encountered, but it's true.
00:27:34.880 This idea that there are two kinds of knowledge that exist on planet Earth. One is the knowledge
00:27:41.520 of how to build organisms, and that is contained within the genes of any organism. It is knowledge
00:27:47.760 that is produced by selection of mutations. That's what natural selection is about. The other kind
00:27:54.400 of knowledge is explanatory knowledge, which superficially resembles the production of which
00:27:59.760 superficially resembles how knowledge in genes is created, but there are crucial differences.
00:28:04.720 Explanatory knowledge is generated by a creative conjecture and refutation. Now, in both cases,
00:28:11.680 the genetic type knowledge and the explanatory type knowledge, we can state relatively
00:28:16.720 cleanly what mechanisms lead to the production of both, but that doesn't mean that we know
00:28:22.320 everything about them. When I say that, for example, conjecture and refutation leads to the
00:28:28.720 production of knowledge, or another way of putting that in more straightforward languages,
00:28:33.280 creativity and criticism, we don't actually know too much about creativity.
00:28:37.920 And the same way, when we talk about random selection and mutation of genes that create biological
00:28:45.120 knowledge, in other words, the knowledge of how an organism can survive in a given environment,
00:28:49.920 that too is not perfectly well understood. Well, nothing is perfectly well understood,
00:28:54.560 but we will come to see that we know that neither of these two great theories, the theory of
00:29:00.880 biological evolution and the theory of epistemology, aren't well understood because we cannot
00:29:09.200 program the computer in order to simulate either. We cannot program a computer in order to
00:29:15.920 simulate the capacity of creating explanatory knowledge. In order to do so, we'd have to actually
00:29:20.320 create an AGI and artificial general intelligence. We can't do that. Ergo, we do not know
00:29:26.160 about how knowledge explanatory knowledge is actually produced. It's not only explanatory knowledge,
00:29:31.760 it's any kind of declarative knowledge, I suppose, implicit knowledge, explicit knowledge,
00:29:37.280 knowledge that people have. The other kind of knowledge, the genetic knowledge,
00:29:42.240 we similarly cannot program computers in order to simulate evolution by natural selection.
00:29:49.760 We can do what are called evolutionary algorithms, and we'll get to this in subsequent chapters,
00:29:55.200 but that is nothing like biological evolution. In particular, I think one of the main
00:30:01.840 problems there is that in order to simulate biological evolution, you would need to simulate
00:30:06.800 the environment in which the biological organism is evolving. And simulating environments
00:30:13.520 has all the problems of trying to simulate with high fidelity the real world.
00:30:20.160 You don't only need to simulate the laws of physics, but you need to simulate emergent laws
00:30:25.120 as well. That can get exceedingly difficult, and the world is a complicated place, so there are
00:30:30.960 many, many complications. We can't simulate either, is the main bullet point there.
00:30:35.760 Let's continue, so the last sentence I read was some of those, like fast and light communication,
00:30:41.040 never happened because our forbidden by the laws of nature, some like formation of stars out of
00:30:44.640 primordial hydrogen happens spontaneously, and some such as converting air and water into trees,
00:30:48.960 or converting raw materials into a telescope, are possible, but happen only when the
00:30:52.720 requisite knowledge is present, for instance, embodied in genes or brains. But those are the only
00:31:00.240 possible abilities. That is to say, every putative physical transformation to be performed
00:31:05.920 in a given time with given resources, or under any other conditions as either, one,
00:31:10.800 impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature, or two, achievable given the right
00:31:16.320 knowledge. This is the dichotomy that many, many people who've read the book are really taken
00:31:22.640 aback by, taken aback in a good way. I certainly was. It's a phenomenal claim. It's something
00:31:29.120 that Sam Harris spent a lot of time on in at least one of the waking up podcasts where he
00:31:35.120 interviewed David, because he was taken aback by it. And many people have realised that this is
00:31:40.720 a, I don't know that it originated with David, but he's given it the best defence. I think
00:31:48.160 other people have hinted at this idea a few times, but no one has taken it quite so seriously
00:31:54.640 and taken it forward. So the momentous thing here is that you've only got two possibilities.
00:32:01.040 Either something is impossible because the laws of nature say it's impossible, for some reason,
00:32:08.640 example, fast and light communication, or it's possible given the right knowledge.
00:32:18.400 So when in the beginning of infinity, and when I'm talking about the beginning of infinity broadly,
00:32:26.320 and I make weed clients seemingly strange claims like the transformation of the Andromeda galaxy,
00:32:34.800 this entire galaxy 2.2 million light is away, made up of hundreds of billions of stars
00:32:39.440 to radically transform that galaxy. That could be done by human beings.
00:32:47.920 We could turn it into a galactic-sized city, maybe at some point it will be,
00:32:53.680 some millions of years from now. That could be surprised, it could be thousands of years.
00:32:58.160 That might seem science fiction and for now it is. However, we cannot say it's impossible because
00:33:05.200 there's no law of physics saying that turning or converting the Andromeda galaxy into a fully
00:33:11.440 fledged galactic-sized city is impossible. Anything that's not forbidden by the laws of physics
00:33:17.840 is possible given the right knowledge, to remarkable. So things are impossible because of
00:33:24.560 the laws of nature or they're achievable given the right knowledge and David writes.
00:33:30.320 That momentous dichotomy exists because if there were transformations that technology could
00:33:34.800 never achieve regardless of what knowledge was brought to bear, then this fact would itself be a
00:33:38.960 testable regularity in nature, but all regularities in nature have explanations. So the explanation
00:33:44.160 of that regularity would itself be a law of nature or a consequence of one. And so again,
00:33:48.480 everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable given the right knowledge.
00:33:52.960 This fundamental connection between explanatory knowledge and technology is why the
00:33:58.560 heldained Dawkins queer than we can suppose argument is mistaken and why the reach of human
00:34:03.840 adaptations does have a different character from that of all other adaptations in the biosphere.
00:34:09.920 The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature,
00:34:16.480 which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are,
00:34:21.120 but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge and
00:34:26.480 hence of people whom I shall hence forward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
00:34:36.400 Wow, so that is an extremely dense paragraph. There is a lot of stuff there happening.
00:34:44.080 So this idea that the universe is queer than we can suppose,
00:34:48.640 that there are things out there that are inexplicable. In other words, there are things that we
00:34:53.520 cannot do. This is not possible. It's not possible because of the simple dichotomy that David gave
00:35:03.520 to us. Either things are impossible because they're forbidden by the laws of nature or they're
00:35:08.880 achievable given the right knowledge. There cannot be a third option. There cannot be this thing
00:35:13.680 that's out there that cannot possibly be done despite the fact it's permitted and we do have the
00:35:19.120 knowledge. Moreover, I would emphasize again that we have a proof that whatever is physically
00:35:27.280 possible is computable and our computers can compute anything that's physically possible. In other
00:35:31.760 words, anything that happens, anything that happens in physical reality, anything that happens in
00:35:36.640 physical reality is being governed by laws of physics. So if there's something out there that you
00:35:41.840 think is incomprehensible, then that thing that's incomprehensible is governed by laws of physics.
00:35:48.240 But the laws of physics are computable as proved by David Toich. If they're computable,
00:35:55.360 that means we can write a code for a computer to simulate those laws of physics. Now this is where
00:36:02.720 Martin Reese jumps in and says, but just because you can compute it doesn't mean you can
00:36:08.160 comprehend it. And this is a misunderstanding of what it would take to compute something.
00:36:15.680 What it takes to compute something is to write an algorithm. If you can write down an algorithm,
00:36:22.000 that means that you've understood something with sufficient accuracy in order to capture it
00:36:29.280 in a list of instructions which can then be coded in a computer language and put into a computer.
00:36:35.040 Computing something is comprehending it for a person. Those two things are synonyms. They're not
00:36:44.320 different for a person, for a human. Obviously, for a computer, if a computer is doing the
00:36:53.200 computation that's got comprehending anything. And the reason that's not comprehending anything
00:36:57.600 is for the reasons that we're just read out, namely, that a computer is not a person. It's not
00:37:03.920 a universal explainer. It's not creating knowledge. There's a lot going on here. So again,
00:37:12.080 we'll just say, so again, I should emphasize that we have here an explanation of what people are.
00:37:22.320 It's a definition, but I think it's a deeper than that. It's an explanation of what people are.
00:37:27.680 There is this thing called explanatory knowledge. explanatory knowledge tells us what's going
00:37:32.720 on in the world. It's an account of what's going on in the world. There's only one entity that
00:37:37.280 we know of in the entire universe that is able to create explanatory knowledge. And that one
00:37:42.000 entity in the universe are human beings, but presumably all intelligent aliens that are out there,
00:37:48.800 and it has to be the case that all intelligent aliens out there will similarly be able to explain
00:37:53.440 their world. If you can explain your world, then you are universal in the capacity to do so.
00:38:00.080 For the reasons that we just said, either a thing can be explained and be computed or it cannot be.
00:38:06.480 And someone has just started mowing their lawn outside, so I'm going to move for a third time.
00:38:31.760 Okay, so get another experiment. Outside one, there's a lovely lake again. Small waves coming in,
00:38:42.400 so hopefully it's not too distracting. I probably won't read for much longer anyway.
00:38:49.200 Okay, so we're just at the point where David provides the definition,
00:38:55.120 which I regard as an explanation of what a person is. A person is an entity that can create
00:39:03.360 explanatory knowledge. This is phenomenal and far-reaching and it's changed my view deeply on a
00:39:11.120 whole bunch of issues. It resolves a bunch of problems. I think it currently in the present
00:39:22.720 intellectual zeitgeist of the West really does go a long way to addressing a bunch of issues
00:39:29.520 associated with the pursuit of artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence.
00:39:34.720 In particular, general intelligence of course, but it separates out, qualitatively speaking,
00:39:40.480 the difference between artificial general intelligence, which is a kind of person from
00:39:46.560 artificial intelligence, which I compare simply to a toaster. It's something that operates
00:39:53.200 by following a set of instructions without any creativity whatsoever. I don't think there are
00:40:00.400 divisions between those two. I think it's a black and white categorical difference.
00:40:05.200 I don't think you can have a little bit of capacity to create explanatory knowledge.
00:40:09.840 I think it's an all or nothing thing. And it seems like the wind has picked up again,
00:40:15.200 the universe doesn't have it in for us, but sometimes I wonder.
