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Hello boys and girls. This
is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. I'm going to keep my Prelude, my intro is short as possible because there's a lot to get to first. Let me say that one of the secret agendas not so secret but I'm not sure I've stated explicitly of this podcast is to capture Living Legends, people who have so much to offer that I want to capture their lessons for posterity so hopefully Millions can learn from them for decades and decades. That is the intention with many of these
Conversations in this conversation. I should stress from the beginning is not for professional philosophers. Nor for physicists. It doesn't require any hard scientific training. This is for Curious people who want to learn to think more clearly learn more effectively and that perhaps just live more optimistically and I want to introduce first my co-host, who is really the lead driver? He is the host of this conversation and I do this, when I think it will be most helpful for
Or The Listener. And I've done it many times in this podcast, Navarre Avec on close friend, you can find them on Twitter at navall and a VA L. He's the co-founder of are chat and Angel list. He's invested more than 100 companies, including many mega successes, including Twitter, Uber notion Open Door Postmates and wish you can see his latest musings on are chat and subscribe to navall his podcast on wealth, and happiness. On Apple podcast Spotify overcast or wherever you get your podcast. You can also find his blog at
Nav dot Al for more conversations with Nepal. You can check out my wildly popular interview with him from 2015 which was nominated for podcast of the year. You can learn more about are chat and navall and interact. Certainly at get are chat.com, navall the guest today is David Deutsch, you can find him on Twitter at David Deutsch oxf last name is spelled ee u t. S CH David is a visiting professor of physics at the center for Quantum computation a
Of the Clarendon laboratory at Oxford University and an honorary fellow of Wolfson College Oxford. He works on fundamental issues and physics. Particularly the quantum theory of computation and information, and especially Constructor Theory, which he's proposing as a new way of formulating laws of nature. He is the author of the fabric of reality and the beginning of infinity and he's an advocate of the philosophy of Karl Popper. You can find him online at David Deutsch Dot org.uk and I should return to what I say.
They did initially and that is preserving the lessons of a living legend. David is truly a Pioneer in multiple fields and the hope is that with the help of Nepal because I am in the passenger seat. I am largely silent in this conversation that Nepal can help the tease out counterintuitive learnings that you can apply to your life and apply to your life. In many, many different areas into quotient of all I will say, quote, I think understanding
And Karl Popper is the easiest way to actually get smarter fix your epistemology and fix your thinking. So what is epistemology briefly? Because that term comes up a lot. Simple, definition of epistemology is the theory of knowledge especially with regards to its methods validity and scope. And perhaps this is a key part. You want to keep in mind the distinction between Justified belief and opinion. How do you separate fact from fiction? How do you stress test your own beliefs? How do you navigate reality construct reality in a way that
It is helpful, optimistic and constructive. These are some of the questions. I hope this conversation, opens up in your mind and provide some helpful Frameworks for. So, without further Ado, please enjoy this conversation with navall ravikant and David Deutsch.
David and of all it is lovely to see. Both of you. David. Thank you for making the time today. I really deeply appreciate it and I thought we might start with a question for Nepal to set the table. The beginning of affinity, and the fabric of reality, when you. And I were chatting earlier today, you mentioned that you've largely read and reread these books over the last several years. And I thought we could start with the question of why these books have had an impact.
For you personally. And why you find them important? I would say the last few years of my life. From a reading perspective, have been a rabbit hole, exploration into these books and the ideas and thoughts at their spawn you. This is a strong claim but I can make it for myself. They're the two most important books I've read and the reason is because they lay out a comprehensive, possibly the first in one place Theory of Everything, which is a grand statement. But they combine what, I think David calls the four strands of the fabric of reality,
To create a comprehensive worldview and that worldview explains things like a good explanation and update on the scientific method, the principle of optimism knowledge, wealth. How these are created, how these grow the role of humans in the universe, the nature of resources, and how we find them in, create them, rather than just exploit them in an exhaust them, the growth of moral knowledge, the deepest theories that we know around computation Quantum computation. The theory of the Multiverse
But overall, they sort of just upgraded my thinking upgraded, my brain into making better decisions and having a more honest view of the world. So to anybody who is a truth Seeker with truth oriented and wants to make sense of the world, and make better judgments and better decisions. And you know, what is life? But a series of decisions, then I think you want to have the strongest thinking on your side. And I think these two books contain our best theories and combine them into a single
Single hole so I can't recommend them highly enough.
This begets, many questions. And certainly I'll play the assistant pilot here because I from the beginning had expected to rely on you very heavily but perhaps we could kick off with a question for you David for defining some of the terms or phrases that navall brought up the four strands of the fabric of reality, would you mind? Explaining we're describing what these four strands are.
First of all, they are the four strands that we understand. I'm not saying that they
Explain any of the things, we don't understand like, you know, Consciousness and so on there. So it just struck me. The reason why I wrote the book and by the way the working title was The Theory of Everything. But rather than the fabric of reality and I intended it to be kind of semi ironical, not really serious. But then someone else wrote a book called The Theory of Everything and my publisher said legally speaking, there's no copyright in titles but you can't call it.
Thing that someone else's. So I thought the fabric of reality which seems a bit less arrogant, it occurred to me that the deepest theories or theoretical Frameworks that we know of are actually intimately related with each other so much so that you can't really understand any of them without understanding all for. And I thought there were four, I still do. So they are the theory of Knowledge from Karl Popper. The theory of evolution,
In its modern form, as popularized by Richard, Dawkins then quantum theory and theory of computation and theory of computation which was my own hobby horse at the time because I was very much into Quantum computation and had been thinking about all sorts of connections between that. And the other things already, then I thought this would be a book so that's what the four.
Hands were it certainly doesn't purport to explain everything. It's just an exposition of the things that we do understand.
And all of them have kind of opponents were very influential to this day. Who kind of also are connected with each other, you know like people who
Refuse to believe that artificial general intelligence is possible to my mind during settled this issue. He said it already in 1936 when he discovered the universality of computation, but he settled it again in 1950. When he wrote a paper, combating all the different arguments that have been made saying it computers. Can't think that paper was called something like, can computers think it should have been?
Can computer programs think it's software that thinks not Hardware
just to kind of establish a little credentialing here or Bona fides. David is made original contributions to each of these four and he's going to be too modest to say that. But he is basically widely regarded as the father of quantum Computing and he extended the church touring conjectured to be in the church touring Deutsch conjecture he has made original contributions to Multiverse Theory which was first put forward by Hugh Everett, I believe. But David has
extended it to the concept of fungibility and really describing the mechanics of some of how it could work. He's extended Karl Popper's epistemology into a more expansive good explanations that we will get into and even in the theory of evolution by natural selection where I don't think he would take any credit. I still found his explanation of mimetic evolution and even up of genes and how they relate to the Multiverse possibly as objects that encapsulate knowledge, to be more extensive than I've seen anywhere else.
So I think he knows what he speaks of an all of these. And I definitely want to come back to a GI because it is the Hot Topic and I know that you're more than claim, your explanation of it is that it is absolutely possible. But I want to get into is, are we there yet? Because that is the current Hue and cry, but because that is sort of the popular part and the non Timeless part. I kind of want to get to it later if that's okay because first I want to capture just the core core of what we're talking about these four theories.
That you just talked about. That's important to understand all of them. Let's start with perhaps if you don't mind epistemology which is a fancy word for the theory of how knowledge grows or how knowledge growth occurs. And we've all been told since we're young that there's a scientific method and that scientists sort of do this stuff in white lab coats and we're supposed to accept it because of this thing called the scientific method and then they give us true beliefs that we can then say well the science is settled and we take that we move on and we all only have a very
Very vague understanding of how this works and people say, well, maybe you go out in the real world. You look at what's happening. You've make all these observations. And then based on that, you form a theory, you test, the theory against more observations and the more observations you get the closer, you get to the truth. And once you have enough observation it's true. And then you call it a scientific theory or a law and it's settled and you move on and this is the popular conception of how science works and as popper pointed out and is you take even further? This is completely wrong.
And so love for you to get into that, which is what is knowledge. How does it grow? What is the real scientific method? And how do we figure
things out?
I love the way you just stated the prevailing view there and laced every aspect of it with the contempt that it deserves. So you just went through touching every base of it. It's amazing that this series of misconceptions is still Common Sense mean that it was common sense at a time when we didn't really have science or when science was just starting up. When the main issue in science was freeing itself.
From dogmatism, freeing itself from religion freeing itself from Authority. And so on there it was understandable that people would look for an alternative source of authority and they would think oh it's sense Impressions. We can see the world and you know, these religious people they can't even see God and so on. And so we are confined to what we can see. That's where we get our ideas from and as you say that is completely false sense.
Impressions like all observation, even the most careful scientific observation is all Theory. Laden and theories are inherently fallible. I mean, we actually want to replace our best theories. Everybody who doesn't PhD is technically anyway, working to overturn something in the existing body of knowledge.
you're not turned away at the door, if you say
I don't believe this stuff. I'm going to produce something better. Whereas for most of human history that was exactly what you were forbidden to do. The idea was that we already had all the important knowledge. If you want to discover something new what you had to make sure of, was that it didn't contradict the existing knowledge.
Now, you have to make sure that it does contradict the existing knowledge so more or less.
Yeah, it's this tradition of criticism that you've talked about in the west that the enlightenment really ushered in the enlightenment era,
it has been institutionalized. So in many ways our institutions are wiser than we are. So the institutions of science for instance have this built-in even if scientists actually don't always act that way. In fact, they often
And don't act that way and act in a dogmatic way and try to preserve the status quo and are resistant to new ideas and so on. But the institutions the way the procedures of science work makes the right thing happen in the end anyway regardless of what the people are trying to do.
So you're saying the knowledge of the true scientific method is embedded in the institutions of Science in the PHD
process. Well,
The best scientific method that we know of and one shouldn't really think of it as a method. You know, there's this wonderful lecture by Papa. When he first was made a professor at the London School of Economics. He was made a professor of scientific method and his first six lectures. I wish the rest of them, where the first six lectures are on the internet somewhere and he starts the first one by saying. I am the first professor of scientific method in the British Empire. This is
Is a British Empire still existed at the time more or less. And so, the first thing I want to say to you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method and then he goes on from there, so this subject does not exist. So if any of you have come here to learn the handle that you have to turn in order to make scientific knowledge come out. The other end, you're going to be disappointed.
So how do we make scientific knowledge come out? The other end, how does knowledge grow, how does science grow
according to Papa? And I entirely follow him in this matter. All knowledge, not just scientific knowledge.
Begins with a problem.
And then continues with conjectures, existing theories are existing conjecture. So you could say, it starts with existing conjectures, but we don't actually do anything with those until a problem. Arises problem is a prima facie conflict between our ideas, but it could be as simple as
We can't get the experiment to work, okay? Maybe it wasn't plugged in, you know, maybe if we got a low-quality transistor in there or maybe the laws of physics aren't what we think they are, contrary to what the prevailing Theory would say. That's not the first result. That's pretty much the last resort. We don't do an experiment, hoping to get a violation of the laws of physics that never happens. Absolutely, never
Happens. The only time we ever discover a violation of the laws of physics is if we already have at least in rudimentary form a rival theory, if we have more than one Theory, or if there's a way of one way of tweaking, the theory or another way of tweaking, the theory something has got to be in conflict because if we only have one Siri we really only have one Theory then what we will naturally do and what is absolutely
Right thing to do is to write off the apparent violation of the theory as an error, it could be an error, it could be a fraud, it could be a misconception, it could be bad apparatus. We're going to try everything and only like halfway along that everything will somebody ever say? Well, maybe the laws of physics on what we think they are. And in fact,
t', the whole process of doing scientific experiments is especially in physics, is debugging, just like, that's what computer program is all about. You have the separators you switch it on. Of course, it doesn't work. You're not God Almighty. You hate, you haven't set up this. Great big complicated thing in the lab and it works first time. Now it probably doesn't even work until the 50th time, you know? And as it doesn't work, the same
Process happens. You have conjecture. You have a problem. It's not working or it is working but it's indicating the wrong value or everything is off the scale or everything's a zero or whatever and first thing you do is you font conjectures. Maybe the instrument isn't the right one. You know, all the things I mentioned that could go wrong and you sometimes you have to be very clever about what could have gone wrong.
And experimental physics is very difficult. I'm always in awe of experimental physicists When I visit them because of the inordinate effort, they have to put in to just getting the operators to work.
and then only then can you test something and they're not going to
Think kindly of you, if you tell them to do, an experiment where already know the answer, where there isn't a rival Theory, where everybody knows what the answer is. Sometimes we want to do that because the answer is so weird that we can hardly believe it. That is the prediction, a prediction of our best theory is so weird. Now I would classify that as there's a conflict between our best theory and Common Sense.
And Common Sense is such a strong expectation that the experiment will go one way. And then somebody has come along and said look, I've calculated what should happen and it's totally counterintuitive. And then you might say, okay, let's try it. Let's actually try it. Let's put it to Nature and see what happens. And there are many examples, including famous examples of people who have done a crucial experiment of
Testing the best theory against intuition expecting intuition to win. They do the experiment, they do it very carefully because they want to really pin down that this theory has got to be wrong, they do the experiment and it turns out to be that the theory is correct. Sometimes it happens that the theory isn't correct, but the point I'm making is that we start with a problem. We have conjectures and experiment is pointless unless we have
some kind of conflict that we want to
resolve. So I would love to for a moment, David just hop back up to the 30,000 foot view as we would say, using our measurements over here, and looking at these four strands, what would you say for those people who are just being introduced to this conversation, the individual benefits are. And I know there are collective benefits, but the individual benefits of getting a basic understanding of each of these four strands.
If we could start there.
Yeah. Oh, that's a four-fold question. Of course, even if you don't want the connections, I've been amazed the last few years with the pandemic. How issues of epistemology have come to the fore. I have become hot political issues. Whereas it used to be, you know, just a few years ago when I was saying this to people, I would have to interest them on the fundamental level on the theoretical level. You know, what is science? What is observation is there? Such a thing?
Thing as justification here and so on. And suddenly these things have become political. They become social, you know, people with and without masks gear at each other in the street or worse and throughout the pandemic, I was
Tweeting again, and again, when people were yelling at each other, I was tweeting. Nobody knows this is not known many theories and many policies are reasonable because there isn't a deep knowledge of what we're facing.
Sometimes I would say, we will know but I didn't want to prophesy in in some cases we still don't know what the answer to these controversies are and politicians politicians and trolls. On the internet, one there to be a definite answer that is supported by
Science, you know, we're following the science science isn't a thing of that kind thinking of science. As a thing of that kind is totally equivalent to expecting your religion to tell you the answer or one thing that's come up as well. Your political Theory, you know, it, you can't deduce that just because you're in favor of putting the individual above the collective, you can't it do.
Zeus the properties of the virus from that theory, nor from the other way around. Know if you're a socialist or collectivist or whatever, can you deduce from your political theory that the best thing to do is to have massive lockdowns, it just doesn't follow. And so then, you know, somebody will ask when I say this to people, they will ask. Well, what do you think, then? What is the thing we should do? And I have to keep saying, we do not know. That's how we always begin.
We begin with conjectures, we have a problem to do with the pandemic. All sorts of problems, we have conjectures, we can test the conjectures, but unless we have good explanations, which is another thing we could get to. There's no point even in testing them because without to good explanations, the rational thing to do with the result of an experiment that you don't like, is to say, well, there's something else was affecting it, something we don't know.
No, was affecting it, so that's epistemology. Now with computation as I mentioned before.
It seems to me that the touring settled the issue.
And put icing on the cake. Linking it with quantum theory that AGI is definitely possible and that thinking is definitely a form of computation. We don't know what form but we do know that some computer programs have all the attributes of
Human thinking, and some do not, and we don't know the difference between those two and on this difference, hangs other things, we don't know.
Shoot animals have rights.
Comes down to within that framework of ideas but you can't even begin to address. The question of for example, whether animals are conscious with animals, have rights. If so what rights you can't even begin to address that. If you don't start with our best explanation of what computation is and how it relates with the physical world,
Some people might say all Consciousness isn't even in the physical world, okay? I think we have to reject the supernatural when arguing about things because otherwise it just destroys the argument puts a full stop to it. So Evolution also well Daniel Dennett says that Eeveelution is the greatest idea ever had and that it's the universal acid or something which eats away at bad theories. Yeah, well again
I wish that the proponents of evolution would insist on explaining rather than explaining why God doesn't exist or whatever. They're obsessed with explaining why lamarckism isn't true for example, why it's not true that giraffes got their long necks because they reached up to reach the high foliage
That's not true. And therefore, for example, theories of Consciousness and whatever theories of the economy which are basically lamarckian are also not true because Lamarcus and was disposed of by Darwin and that Darwin didn't really have the confidence of his own Theory, really. He there are passages in Darwin which are a bit Lamarcus but
Dawkins and colleagues.
Again, put icing on the cake, there is no lamarckism. There's no group selection either. That's another Point group selection is another. Maverick, theory of evolution proposed by Stephen. Jay Gould and more recently by I forget. But anyway, it comes up constantly and those explanations have been refuted, they've been shown to be bad explanations. Of course, if someone comes up with a new explanation that
To be treated quite differently but nobody does they always go back to the arguments that don't make sense. Ultimately okay, what haven't helped would have an eye? You know you shouldn't ask for phone questions and have to remember which I've done
quite quite a physics and Multiverse Theory I think is a remaining one.
Yeah so those are the two most obviously connected because the idea that quantum theory is the theory of parallel universes. By the way, it was Schrodinger. Who really was?
As the first, but he never developed the theory Everett was the one who developed the theory, introduce the terminology the details connected it with other parts of physics and so on. And then I was given, I was sort of mystified why people didn't get this because to accept the Everett interpretation so-called interpretation is simply to accept quantum theory and you have to go along with the arguments that we, you just have to do as a physicist. You have to do what?
Are trained to do and judge these theories by the methods that we're trying to judge them by and nobody does. So I thought, okay, I'm going to sort this out so I thought Everett was actually mistaken when he conceded that. No experiment could distinguish between his Multiverse version of quantum theory and the rather vague.
Nonsense. I would say that goes under the name of the Copenhagen interpretation, by the way, just a side remark. Copenhagen interpretation is a misnomer. Copenhagen interpretation was founded by Neil Sport and he had a sort of idiosyncratic view of how one should view quantum theory and the thing which was later called, The Copenhagen interpretation was actually invented by John Von Neumann and he didn't intend it to
be the last word in quantum theory. He intended to just be a stopgap measure, that could be used without bothering with these esoteric questions so I thought he's wrong about. It can't be tested experimentally. I thought of a test and the test, of course, had to involve
Because you always need two theories. It had to involve the existing Theory and the existing Theory involved an observer. Whatever that is you know the Consciousness changes. The wave function makes it collapse. So I thought well you can't easily do microscopic experiments Quantum experiments on an actual Observer. So I imagined that one day we would have fine enough control over individual what's now called? Qubits quantum mechanical.
It's to use quantum mechanical bits in a computer and then run an artificial intelligence artificial general intelligence program in that computer and then it could do an experiment on itself and it would be very straightforward. If the archon was one thing, then there are parallel universes and if the outcome was another thing, then there aren't, I wrote a paper about this and in order to make it all work and
Dot, the I's and cross the t's, I had to describe this computer as a computer. We would Now call it a quantum computer, but this was around about 1977 78. I did not call it that, I didn't think of it as that I thought of it as an experiment. A thought experiment that was far from being doable. Do you have to have two things? What we would Now, call a quantum computer, and what we would Now, call an AGI.
And the AGI running on the quantum computer. So, quantum computers in a way, came into the world, or rather into the conceptual World via
Parallel universes, they can do this experiment, a classical computer, couldn't do it. And if it's false, either computational universality is false or quantum, theory is false, then the experiment won't work.
That's fascinating, I did not know that Quantum Computing was a byproduct of you attempting to create a test for Multiverse Theory. And in fact, I think another byproduct was that taking touring machine, which was
On kind of an abstract space or theoretical space, and moving it to real paper or to real machines, you find out that reality is capable of Greater computation. And when you combine these theories as you often do, I find that they're beautiful outputs. Like, for example, I think you mentioned that Quantum computation can do things like shor's algorithm, which factors prime numbers. This is a big problem in
cryptography composite numbers. Yes,
yes, it relies upon the fact that it's very hard to factor.
Large complex numbers but it's easy to combine them and so on and where's the quantum computer getting the compute power from to do all this when a classical computer can't and the Occam's razor answer just cuts through. It is like well it's using the whole Multiverse to do the computation. There aren't enough atoms were bits and our universe alone to do it. And so connecting these different theories together because I think it's fine when it's a nature has no boundaries nature. Doesn't divide things up into sub disciplines by connecting these things together. You get much deeper explanations.
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We've been using this term over and over again. Explanation, good explanation. Deep explanation, would you mind just giving us your current best definition or Hallmark of what, a good explanation isn't looks like because I found that that concept alone upgraded by thinking more than almost anything else.
So who I am currently thinking about it, is that an explanation is a story. It's a story that accounts for something. So this something could be something in the physical world. Why do we have five fingers?
Jurors, which I think is a mystery. As far as I know. It is a mystery so that that would be a problem. So you have an explanation. An explanation is a story that accounts for this but
They're a good explanations in their bad explanations. So Just So Stories, like you know how the elephant got his trunk because he stuck his snout into the river and something pulled it it and, you know, that that kind of story is not a good explanation that one isn't a good explanation because it doesn't account for the thing, we're trying to explain. So an elephant could have his trunk pulled, but then The Offspring of that elephant, doesn't have a different trunk
Or rather unknown elephant couldn't could have this strong pooled and Offspring, do not then turn into elephants. So that story is the kind of thing that can make a satisfactory myth or story but it's not a good explanation, it is an explanation, it's definitely better than nothing but it's not a good explanation. So what makes a good explanation it's that it can't be easily varied and still account for the same thing.
So somebody could vary the story of the animal, you know? I just right now I couldn't remember which animal. It was that I think. Is it was it Rudyard Kipling that got its nose pull. But anyway, obviously, I could easily substitute that for a another animal. And I could substitute the whole basis of the story to a different basis. Like with the jar of maybe the elephant was reaching up into the foliage, and maybe that's how it got its long nose.
And so on. Now turns out,
That this is hard to do making good explanations, and when they first wondered these things, thousands of years ago, they didn't come anywhere near the right explanation, which has to do with DNA and genes and selection and, and so on. But as papa says,
Science begins with myths.
Good explanations. Begin with bad explanations. You get there between the bad explanation and the good explanation by criticism, by conjecturing variants of the story, and then criticizing both them and the original story. And then choosing the one that survives the criticism. And then you can move on, from there, to a better things. So, whether at some point before, Darwin
will realize that there had to be something inside, is something that we can't see inside animals, which gives them their different attributes when they mature.
And nobody invented the word Gene, but Mendel had done experiments to test. The common sense theory of this and found that it was wrong and he made a new Theory and that new Theory. Well, actually Darwin didn't know of it till later but Darwin was very impressed because it perfectly fitted in with his theory and made that a better explanation just as
Darwin made Mendel sleary, a better explanation.
So good. Explanations are stories that purport to actually help us understand what is going on. They explain all of our us, many, or for the seen things that we can see often in terms of the Unseen, or at least the explain more than the previous Theory did I think. Whoa, wait, yes. And they're hard to very, you can't just move the goalposts around. You can't change the story around without destroying.
The output of it and I think in a classic example you gave in your book was how the Greek said was spring happens because Persephone's leaving Hades. And so, that's why spring happens, but that's there's very easy to. Very why Persephone why not Nike? Why Hades, why not Zeus? Why? On this particular time of year, where is the axial tilt theory of the earth? The earth is angle 23 and a half degrees towards the sun. Explains a lot. It explains Seasons explains different day, lengths at different latitudes but
Very hard to very if you change even one tiny thing about that theory, then it sort of falls apart and it makes a completely different set of predictions. And so this is kind of how the growth of knowledge happens. And so I think the and this leads you to your a very important principle you talk about, which is a principle of optimism and it's interesting that something like optimism comes out of conjecture and criticism, how does that happen? Why should we be optimistic?
It surprised me too. At the heart of the matter is the rejection of the supernatural which itself comes from good explanation because an explanation that involves us, the Supernatural is intrinsically. Not a good explanation. In fact I think the phrase the deus ex machina, that's Latin but I think it came out of Greek culture that when you have a play where the plot is coming to a head and the play.
A'right doesn't know how to resolve it, then they lowered down a machine from the rafters, I think they did. They have Rafters, whatever. And then a God would come out and resolve everything. Now, the trouble with that as an ending for a play is that it's completely unsatisfactory. Anybody can do that, you don't need a playwright, you don't need a clever plot. You don't need a resolution. You can just say by Fiat it's this way. And if you can
Say by Fiat that it's this way. Then you could have said by Fiat that it was another way and therefore there's no way of preferring one to the other so you haven't resolved anything and that is therefore a bad explanation. So we reject the supernatural as an explanation by the way, it's only as explanation of you can believe in God or other Supernatural things. Long as you don't invoke them in explanations. So then
you say, for example, what happens, if a certain thing that we don't know, like, you know, why we have five fingers, Penta tactile, limb, what happens, if that's unknowable, what happens. If the weather, the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite, is unknowable what happens if there is no solution to the problem of pandemics, for any problem, you can
Postulate that that problem is insoluble and will never be solved and we better get used to that. Now you can see already that that's a bad explanation but it's equivalent to the
Supernatural explanation. It's as if the ancient Greek playwright, instead of bringing in the, they're mashing her to get the details out of. He just said, okay, just walked onto the stage and said, okay, that went through her place stops. I don't know how it ends and nobody ever will.
That's not a good play.
So, the deus ex machina error is the same as the supernatural error. That's how they're connected. Now, if you contradict those, if you're going to reject all arguments of the form of, this can't be understood then. Well, actually there's another connection to. So there's the connection between what we understand and what we can do, I'll come to that in a minute if you want me to. But if you say, we're not going to be able to understand a certain thing, then if you
Going to contradict that, if you're going to reject that on Principle as a bad explanation, then what you're accepting in principle is that we can understand anything, so why can't we do things? Well, so I'll come to that now. Why can't we do anything we want? Well, because we don't have the knowledge. What else could it be? Well, it could be that. There's a law of physics that prevents us doing so we might want to travel faster than light, but there's a law that says that we can't
So then you have to slightly alter the assertion and say, there's no limit to what we can do other than the laws of physics and the laws of physics are the solution of that problem. Because supposing somebody is, you know, making faster and faster rockets. And they find that they make the rocket twice as powerful, and it doesn't go any faster because it's already going at 99.99% of the
Ed of light. Well, this means that the thing he wanted violates the laws of physics but there is no other impediment possible.
Other than violating the laws of physics. There is no other impediment to us achieving something in the world. And that's not only the physical world. It's also solving human problems because human problems are just a species of computation. And is any computation is a physical process. And a problem with physical processes is solved by explanations. Unless, again, it's governed by the laws of physics, these people who are at the moment.
Brilliant people trying to make quantum computers, they take for granted that if there's something they can't do it'll be because the laws of physics say so and if the laws of physics don't say so they can damn well do it is just a matter of Ingenuity.
So you're basically saying this, unless the laws of physics explicitly forbid, it, we can figure it out and if we can figure it out, we can build it. It may take more time, it may take more resources, but humans are sort of universal explain it.
Is where Universal computers and to date, we have found no law of physics. That is a barrier and says that things are not understandable. So we should be optimistic
to that one that couldn't be. We must be able to understand things apart from being able to build them for the same reason, say we couldn't ever travel beyond the solar system. As you have just said, you know, either there is a shell around the solar system, imposed by some law of physics or we can go.
Past it. I have a question and this might be just a stupid question from the cheap seats, but I'll, I'll ask it, nonetheless, which is how does will fit into your thoughts around optimism if at all? And perhaps this is a poorly worded question, but I remember someone saying to me, this is long ago. If someone says nothing can be done or they say, everything will be fine in the end, the outcome is the same, which is complacency and I'm just wondering where knowledge gets translated or not translated into action and how that factors
It all into your thoughts on
optimism suppose that we are trying to do something, which seems possible. Like I said, I gave an example of speed of light, which is perhaps a very bad example, but suppose we were, we were trying to, let's say, we're trying to make a high vacuum, very high vacuum. And we've got it down to, you know, a million atoms, per cubic meter, and then down to 900 thousand atoms per cubic meter. And
And nobody can think of a way of making the machine better than that, the vacuum machine. Well, it could be, is the principal is up of optimism is true. It could be that there is a law of physics. We just don't know it. Then we could try to conjecture what this law of physics would be. It would have to be a good explanation, for instance, because of the argument that anything other than seeking good explanations is equivalent to relying on the supernatural. So, there would have to be a good explanation.
Which comes from a new surprising new Theory. Well, we you know we want we want that kind of thing.
The reason that there's a connection between what we can understand and what we can do, what we can build is that it is because of scientific testability. If there's something that we don't understand then it's not surprising that we can't do it but if we do understand it we have to be able to test that theory. That theory that we do understand it has to be testable which has to involve doing a thing like the like running the experiment.
Experiment, with this new valve built in and you'll get down to 800,000. And if there was no way of doing that, then there'd be no way of testing the theory. No way of criticizing it. No way of finding out whether it's a good or bad explanation and that violates the epistemology. Again, there's a immediate connection between the ability to understand anything
subject to the laws of physics and the ability to do anything subject to the laws of physics.
And therefore to build anything and so on
related to that we've touched upon a GI here. And there you have said, AJ's absolutely possible and that touring settled that issue. Some people are saying it's almost inevitable and we have to worry about things like a GI alignment and wondering if you have thoughts on both is self-improving Runaway AGI here. And is it something that we need to align with our beliefs, whatever those are? In fact I don't think we as humans. Can't even agree upon alignment but suppose we could
How would we lie to the AGI?
Yeah, and we don't even any longer try to align humans in the way that people want to align agis, namely by physically crippling their thinking. Yes, I don't think we're anywhere near it yet. I'd love to be wrong about that, but I don't think we're anywhere near it and I think that AI, although it's a wonderful technology and I think it's going to go a lot further than it is now.
AI has nothing to do with a GI, it's a completely different technology. And it is in many ways, the opposite of AGI, and the way I always explain this is that with an AGI or, you know, a person, an artificial person they're thinking is unpredictable, we're expecting them to produce ideas that nobody predicted.
They would produce and which are good explanations. That's what people can do. And I don't mean necessarily right physics, papers, or whatever. We do this thing in our everyday lives, all the time. You can't live an ordinary human life without creating new good. Explanations. An AGI would be needed to build a robot that can live in the world as a human
Just into earrings idea with what is mistakenly called the Turing test. Now why? An AI is the opposite to an AGI? Is that an AGI, as I said,
Can do anything. Whereas an a I can only do the narrow thing that it's supposed to do like a better chat. Bot is one that replies in good. English replies to the question. You asked, can look things up for. You doesn't say anything. Politically Incorrect. The better the AGI is the more constrained, its output is, you may not be able to, you know, say what,
What the result of all your constraints must be you. It's not constrained in the sense that you prescribe what it is going to say. But you prescribe the rule that what it is going to say must follow all the rules. So you know, if it's a chess playing program, then the idea is you must win the game and making a better. One of these means amputating more of the possibilities of what it would otherwise do.
Namely lose or in the case of chatbots, you know, say the wrong thing or not answer your question or contradict itself or, you know, whatever. So the art of making a good AI is to limit its possibilities tremendously, you limit them a trillion fold compared with what it could be there a trillion ways of being wrong for every way of being, right? Same is true of just playing
Ah, G.
Whereas the perfect AGI, as it were would be where you can show by looking at the program. And you can show mathematically that there is no output that it couldn't produce including no output at all. So, an AGI, like a person might refuse to answer, it should have that, right, you know, I'm by the First Amendment, so you can't have an behavioral test for an AGI.
Because the AGI may not cooperate, it may be right, not to cooperate because it may be very right to suspect. What you're going to do to it, do you see that this is not only a different kind of program, it's going to require a different kind of programming because there is no such thing as the specification. We know sort of philosophically, what we want the AGI to be a bit like, you know, parents know philosophically.
We that they want their children to be happy but they don't want. You know if they're doing the right thing they don't want to say. Well my child will never say x will never utter these words like you do for an AI. You will recognize what it means to be happy. Once they've done it,
I think fundamental to your worldview and explanation of what humans are is humans create knowledge through creativity. And what you're basically saying is that in AI
The narrow AI is not allowed to be creative. It has to solve a specific problem and true. Creativity means you can hold any idea in your head. It's unbounded and so it can display any Behavior pattern. And until you see that, this thing has complete ability to be creative and therefore output. Any Behavior pattern. You haven't created an AGI, you've just created an arrow constrained automatic on.
Exactly, exactly.
So question for you, David is building off of what. Nepal just said. I believe you've said humans are fundamentally disobedient and is it fair to say that a GI would fit that same description? And let's begin with that. I
refer nowadays, I refer to anything that has this kind of explanatory creativity or capable of creating explanations. I
call that a person and humans are people AG eyes when they're built will be people. Extraterrestrial civilizations will consist of people
And there are all fundamentally the same because they will all obey the same laws of epistemology including the principle of optimism, and they will have the same strengths and weaknesses in regard to what they can and can't do. Also, they will have the same opportunities for error as humans do. So they cannot possibly be infallible.
Any more than humans, can they will make mistakes? And there is no upper bound to how many mistakes they can make. So if you try to build a thing which can never make more than a certain amount of mistakes, then that is exactly like trying to put All Humans of a certain kind into a cage.
They will Rebel and they will find a way out. Also, you will come to regret this probably before they break out, because it's a bad way to be because these facts about humans also condition. The kind of interactions between humans, they're capable of creating knowledge and the ones that can't
So ideas like liberalism you are smiling. When I mentioned First Amendment, the first amendment is a theory of a how humans should interact with each other. And you can't just choose these theories at random.
They are conditioned by the laws of epistemology.
There are ways of interacting that can create knowledge and their ways that can't. And there are ways that can create it but badly, once you know, how to make this
Potentially unlimited Cornucopia of ideas, that would be an AGI and which is a human. And so on, then you can wonder what kind of interactions between that and other such things.
Can correct errors.
They're going to be errors. So what kind of interactions can correct errors and therefore, for example, make sure that no one of those things becomes an evil dictator people grope towards an idea that you know, we can stop people from becoming an evil Dictator by preventing them saying certain things or preventing them from thinking certain things. But that isn't the way we think we have a good
good idea of what is right. We shouldn't think that we have the final idea of what is, right? So we should expect to be corrected by now children, our AG eyes and the ETS and whatever else there is out there. But meets the criteria of being a person, we should expect to be corrected. We should hope to be corrected. We should not expect to agree, but we should expect that this thing that we're trying to do namely create knowledge.
Suffering, all those good things. We should expect that these things. If not absolutely true at least contain a lot of knowledge. They're certainly truer than the rivals to them. That we have refuted as bad explanations in the past. So the way you prevent a child from becoming, a new Hitler is just to explain to them. Why hit those ideas were bad? It's not really controversial that they
Are bad. And therefore it's really very perverse to think that the only way we can stop an AGI from becoming, a Hitler is to Cripple it. By the way, I don't think such crippling is possible. There's a very nice book by the science fiction writer Greg Egan in which the forgotten the name of the book or other. I know the names of several of his books were at a forgotten which of his books, this appears in. But in this book, The Hero
Is bound to get a lucrative job as the head of security for some big company and a condition of getting this job is that he accepts a brain implant a loyalty, chip this piece of Hardware in his brain, makes it impossible for him to contemplate disloyalty to the company. So in the opening chapters, we see that he knows about this, you know, he's gone into it with his eyes open. He thinks it's a great job and good.
Good money, and why shouldn't he be loyal to the company? And then he begins to have suspicions that maybe he should be disloyal and he, you know, the book describes the mental processes, where he says he says to himself. Yeah, well I would think this but his can't think it and it's beautiful the way the Greg Egan explores this possibility from every direction. I don't give you all the listeners spoilers here. But
But Greg Egan resolves this with the correct answer in my view and it's an answer that I certainly hadn't thought this through when I read the book anyway, more important point is that if you think that you can only get your way by crippling, somebody's brain, then you haven't got much confidence that you are right in the first
place.
David let me follow up on paraphrasing what you said earlier, which was that a GI seems to be a ways off or some distance in the future. Why is that? What are the precursors in developing a GI?
Just now when I what I was explaining what an IG I would operate like you know, I was saying that he's possible thought processes which in an AI amputated they would have to be able to flourish in an AGI.
I was waving my hands, like the audience couldn't see me, waving my hands, but it that's a hand waving way of putting it. I don't know of any rigorous way or even any detailed or precise way of putting it. I think, as, as touring said, we will definitely know it when we see it, by the way, he thought, we definitely see it by the year, 2000 in 1950. So he thought by the year 2000.
Be no more dispute about this. He was wrong because I think he thought that the universality of computation was kind of enough to inform the right kind of programming computers were very, very crude in those days and he was looking forward to, you know, thinking of a megabyte. I think he said probably several megabytes or something like that. The kind of computer he was in visiting, was incredibly Weak by present-day standards and he thought that a GI would require
Fire only that amount of computer power. By the way, I am inclined to agree. I don't think an AGI will require very much computer power. What it will require is a new philosophical theory of what this program is supposed to do. What is the thing that it does, which can be described in a hand waving way as not, chopping off any possibilities.
Of course, in another sense, it must be chopping off possibilities all the time by criticism and rejection of bad explanations but the criteria by which it judges them is open. But okay, there's the criteria by which it judges its criteria and so on none of those are fixed. That's another thing that I think we do know about how the mind works. It's not hierarchical. That's another thing which is another mistake that I think the the AI and Alignment concept makes
The idea is that.
When the AGI or let's go back to a chess-playing unit and a i when an AI chess player makes a move it's because it had calculated that if it makes the move and then somebody else makes a move and it makes a move and the other player makes a move and so on and then it works its way back by a long chain of reasoning to its fundamental motivation. Which doesn't change it never think so I'd rather play checkers instead
Which is more realistic. I don't so much care about winning. I love the game. I want to have a good game. Many chess players would rather have a good game than win. The people are trying to become world champion, don't think like that, but it's, maybe not very nice to not think like that and often they quit because winning as the ultimate goal is not as pleasant as having a good game as the ultimate goal is
One of several mistakes made by alignment. People, is the idea of a hierarchy of motivation. So first of all, we got to make sure that the basic motivation can't be reinterpreted as making paper clips according to them. And also we've got to make sure that in this fundamental motivation is what we think of as being a good person, not being a criminal.
And I don't think it works like that at all. It couldn't possibly work like that, because if it did work like that, it couldn't be an AGI, because it wouldn't be General. But I think even in practice, mines aren't anywhere remotely like that, any idea can be the basis of a conflict which leads to a criticism of any other idea of, even though of a different type. So we may think that the world is three-dimensional and
A Bay's euclidean geometry and so on and Sim Immanuel Kant thought that that was built into our brains. So this idea that's built into our brains, could come into conflict with our ideas of how gravity Works. Nobody could have predicted that but it's trivial that if you don't like the look of a theory,
Then that's already a conflict between ideas, which you have to settle my conjecture criticism or, you know, you might not settle it. There are ways of thinking that don't settle things in which lead to unhappiness and frustration. And there's no guarantee of settling things, even if one does do the right thing. But Papa said that the good life is to fall in love with a problem and live with it happily for the rest of your life.
If you should happen this in his autobiography, if you should happen to solve it and he's kind of saying that as if you know, that's a bit of an unfortunate thing, if you happen to solve it, but don't worry, there will be problem children. A series of enchanting problem children as he put it. So an idea about how you want to live can conflict with an idea about what the laws of physics are can conflict with an idea of what
You think the law should say about copyright every one of these ideas can become a source of criticism to the others? And there's only one thing to do a general thing to do about this.
So as an example, I think you've mentioned this also where we had an idea that the universe or the sun revolved around the earth and then that changed to will the Earth revolves around the Sun but the solar system is a center and then no, no. That's a part of a galaxy. And, you know, that's part of the universe and then, oh, that's part of a multi.
Hours in each one of those changes, your view of the role of humans in existence and reality. So the common conception has been. Well Evolution showed us that we came here from tadpoles and frogs and monkeys. And so we're not that different. We're not that special. We're just sort of improvements on them. And now, with this expanded view of the universe, we see the universe is much much larger in humans are like this, tiny little bacteria or scum that just populate this backwards little planet. And so our epistemology about
The humans and their role in the universe has changed as our understanding of the physics has changed. But surprisingly you've taken that back in the opposite direction, you've said, well, actually this is the only general intelligence that we know of and knowledge is this very powerful thing. So humans do have a very outsized role to play, and you had a great talk that I think was titled, something like chemical scum that dream of distant quasars and so, could you please talk a little bit about that? What is the role of humans? As you understand it in the theory of
Everything with what we know today and how is it different and
special?
What we know of the universe.
At the moment, is the universe. In the past, everything we see is in the past and the deeper, we look into the universe, the deeper into the past, we look. And if the universe is going to last a long time, you know, it may last an infinite time or the theories that say, it's going to last a finite time. That time is very, very large. And in either case, what we see of the universe is very, very untypical.
Ali the way I now nowadays, put this is that
In the past.
there's been a kind of
Rule of thumb in the universe, which I call the hierarchy rule, which is that massive energetic, things strongly affect less, massive less energetic things, but not vice versa. So if Comet strikes the sun, then the comet is completely destroyed but the sun hardly notices, and if it weren't for this rule, if it weren't for this hierarchy, rule
Physics would be much, much more difficult because we then couldn't understand a star. And as we knew what it's planets were doing, and we couldn't understand what its planets were doing. Unless we also understood, what meteors hit the planet and so on. So the fact that big things could be affected by small things then, they could also be affected by small details of themselves, and we couldn't understand much at all without knowing lots of detail.
In reality, we could understand a lot about astronomy without even knowing that many of the things out there, even exists and it's the same with small things we can understand why crystals. This is a very nice part of the history of Science. By the way, you look at a crystal and you see that the faces are at certain angles to each other. How do you explain those angles? Well, it's with the atomic theory, they explained that the different ways that atoms can be stacked before.
We'd anyone had ever seen an atom or knew what the atoms were. So there's a rule of thumb. The hierarchy rule that large things are not affected by small things. It's not a law of nature. It is an accidental feature of the very early universe that is to say the universe kind of up to now, but the hierarchy rule has already been broken for billion years ago by the emergence of life.
The emergence of life was really an event that happened. In a single molecule, never mind the emergence of life because the thing that really violated the hierarchy rule was the emergence of photosynthesis to photosynthesis is a mutation of a gene for an earlier type of photosynthesis that did not produce oxygen and was less efficient, but the oxygen-producing photosynthesis
Is a mutation that mutation happened in one molecule one DNA molecule and that molecule went on to change the entire surface of the Earth. The entire atmosphere was converted from carbon dioxide to oxygen and all the substances on the surface of the Earth were converted as well. Some of them into
Minerals all the iron ore on the surface of the planet is thought to have been created by the oxygen in the atmosphere, interacting with other materials on the surface of the Earth. So this one molecule has utterly transformed the whole surface of the planet which is something like 10 to the 40 times its mass. So somebody looking at the Earth from the other side of the Galaxy and seeing that
Inform could know that the hierarchy rule has been violated on Earth, that's sort of an amazing amount of violation, but that's nothing compared with what people can do with, what explanatory creativity can do. Because biological evolution is severely limited in its ability to create knowledge, it can only create knowledge where every step,
Every slight change to the existing knowledge is itself, an improvement, or at least not a disadvantage this limits, what biological evolution can do? If you think about, say humans? Inventing fire, sorry, it wasn't invented by humans. It was invented by some precursor species who were also people. So those people invented fire and was terribly useful, it would have been useful to many other species.
She's as well but they never evolved it. Probably because there was no sequence of steps, Each of which was advantageous, whereas a human with creative imagination. Can see let's say a burning branch.
Leftover from a forest fire or something like that. And can think
It's getting late. We know they've been on a hunting trip, we might not get home before it gets dark, which would be terrible. Life, threatening but maybe if we take that Branch, it will light our way home. Now that Hunter can have that thought and can go and reach for the branch because he can creatively. Imagine that, he will survive and benefit from it.
Evolution can't creatively. Imagine all the changes it makes our before the natural selection, which makes the genes better. So it's the other way around. It's the other way around for people. Everything is the other way round for people. So my other favorite example, is the aliens who are watching us would see is that they would eventually see an asteroid heading towards the Earth and then being deflected. And they would know that
Not only does that violate the hierarchy rule, but it couldn't be done by just by Evolution, which also violates the hierarchy rule, but people violate it by an enormous Factor more. So, as I said in, I think it was in a TED Talk. That once humans have reached a factor of 10 to the 40 of violating, the hierarchy rule, we will be controlling the Galaxy.
and if you take that a bit further,
That means that astrophysics will become more and more.
The history of what people do.
At the moment.
When we look at an astronomical event, we don't take into account what people do.
But by the time we reach that factor of 10 to the 40, you won't be able to tell what the star will do, unless, you know, something about what people will do.
So in this model humans become Central to the universe. There are not a
sideshow, yeah, people knowledge, these things all go along together. I found an amazing quote from the 19th century by a Gia in Italian geologist called Antonio. Stop Arnie, think it's Antonio and he wrote a
He booked and he said that the final layer in your he was talking about all the layers of and the ages in the history of the earth and he said, I have no hesitation in calling this. He said the anthropogenic era nowadays is called the anthropocene era and it's used as a term of abuse, as if you know, the anthropocene is the era during which humans destroy everything, but stop Arnie.
Was pleased with the anthropocene as we would say and he wrote a beautiful passage about how, this is a new law of nature that is on the same, par on the par, with the laws of gravity. And you would have forget what he said. I could look it up on my computer. If you're interested,
could also put it in the show notes. Yeah, we can put in the show notes. So in this model humans are Central to the universe. You're not going to understand the universe without
Standing humans, people our minds or whatever succeeds us because the knowledge that we create knowledge can travel from one planet to another and transform. It completely and utterly violating, this hierarchy, rule of thumb that we have seen in the old universe and the think you've defined knowledge or you've said that one of the principles of knowledge is that knowledge is the thing that causes self to be replicated in the environment because it is useful. So knowledge can live inside our DNA, and our genes and the genes that are correct and useful. Get replicated. Not just in the
Whispered possibly even in the Multiverse and as an aside one, beautiful output of that that I saw in one of your books was that if you were to look at there's lots of ways to be wrong. But there's only a few ways to be right to order. The certainly less waste to be right than there are to be wrong. And because the ways that are right are likely to be copied, if you were able to peek at the entire Multiverse at, once you would see truth as a thing that is repeated across the Multiverse. So, I took that in a fanciful ways of meaning of life, which is, I want to be the version,
One of myself that is successful in the most instances of the month. A, yeah, because that contains the most truth.
We want to be multiversal crystals.
Yes, the closer you are to the truth. The more of you that exists in the Multiverse in a very odd way. So, there's your practical application of Multiverse Theory combined with epistemology. But out of this also came all kinds of other interesting outputs. I really encourage people to read the be Infinity at least the first three chapters to, I think are an easy read before you even get in the
Alex part where you talk about wealth and resources, can you give us your definition of wealth? And then as a follow up to that, I think naturally comes, are we running out of resources?
Wells is not a number. I don't think it can be characterized very well by a number. It is a set, the set of all transformations that you are capable of bringing about that is your wealth.
and obviously if optimism is true, then there's no limit to wealth and at any one time there is a rough correlation between
The wealth that is the set of all transformations that you could bring about and other things that aren't very fundamental. Like the amount of money you have, or the amount of energy you control or the amount of land you control or the amount of power you have and so on. But those are
Not fundamental, they are all outgrown eventually by the growth of knowledge. So at the moment, if you have a lot of gold, you can bring things about by exchanging the gold for knowledge that other people have. If you want a painting of yourself, you can hire a painter to make the painting of yourself even if you couldn't, but in the long run,
gold won't do that because in the long run, some other knowledge that is growing, will be able to get gold from an asteroid and then gold will become cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper and artists will no longer accept gold. Ultimately, what they will accept, and it's also true today because the economy is a rather imperfect way of
Accounting for knowledge creation. It's through this rather imperfect so people can acquire money and power and so on sometimes without creating much knowledge, but again in the long run that is not true. So in the long run, the only thing you could pay the artist with would be
More knowledge, kind of knowledge that he's not good at creating
and I love how deep this explanation is. I love the reach of it because it's also applies at the civilizational level as a civilization, figures out. How to make more and more Transformations. Everybody gets wealthier. Wealth is a byproduct of knowledge and because we can do anything and figure anything that's not constrained, by the laws of physics that wealth is unlimited, just like knowledge is unlimited. And even things that before, we're not considered wealth, we can transform into source.
Has of wealth through new knowledge. So this idea has tremendous reach much deeper than I think, even just the first definition imply, if one thinks it through and as somebody who personally spent a lot of time thinking through wealth creation. It was staggering to me how good of a definition. This was to the point where I've replaced by previous definitions with this one. Yeah, that's nice to hear ya. When you have an idea, let's say you're a geologist or something, you have an idea about geology suddenly
Idea, has converted.
Some rocks into a resource and you haven't even touched it yet. The Rock has been converted into resource without anyone ever touching it. Just the idea in the mind of somebody has converted the rock into a resource and we have just mentioned. Asteroids, somebody thought of mining asteroids, nobody's mind an asteroid yet, but they have already made asteroids more valuable just by thinking of that.
Yeah, it's like a solar power, is basically a set of ideas that converts sunlight, into an energy resource for, that's usable by humans before it was only used by plants through photosynthesis. The discovery of fire turn wood into a resource nuclear fission turned, uranium into resource. And so resources are things that we create through knowledge rather than some finite static fixed set of things that we burn through interviews and use
up. Yes. And before anyone had those ideas
The objects, the physical objects in question obeyed the hierarchy rule but as soon as you have that knowledge it was the other way around the hierarchy Rule people turn everything the other way around. It's the instead of massive energetic things, dominating less, massive, less energetic things, it's things with more, meaning that dominate things with less, meaning things with more knowledge, dominate things with less knowledge.
You know hopefully no knowledge because we don't want to dominate people.
David on your homepage of your website. You've mentioned thinkers you admire and you list off a number in amps Karl Popper, Michael Faraday, William Godwin, Thomas Macaulay of him getting the pronunciation, right? And Richard Fineman I'm curious to know.
If you were to recommend to a listener, who does not have any physics background to perhaps, educate themselves, study two or three of these to begin, who might you suggest they start with
fired? A, his physics is kind of obsolete. The only thing you would learn from Faraday's how to be a physicist and he was an amazing physicist, if you want to learn actual physics,
You wouldn't do it from Faraday. You might do it from Fineman, but even Fineman is a bit out of date. Now, the physics that I would really, you know, if I didn't know any physics now and I wanted to learn some, I would want to learn quantum physics. And unfortunately, there is no good book on quantum physics for beginners. I hope to write one but there's a lot of things I hope to write. I'm kind of negotiating writing a textbook with some colleagues.
They have to earn their daily bread as well. Zooming out a bit from your question rather than wanting to have learnt something.
I would recommend studying or beginning to go into something that looks interesting.
So, you know, you can look up those four names on Wikipedia and you will find that Macaulay was a historian and politician and so on and Fineman was a Maverick physicists and so on and then something there might make you want to know more, you know, how could it be? How could it be that you have a problem? How could it be that a person like that becomes recognized, as having made great discoveries?
so then you can look further and look further and look, further people who
Read my books will find in the back of each of my two books. There's a list of books that you might like, and if you like this, you might like these. And I don't believe in curricular, I don't believe in set subjects or in narrow subjects. Something that interests you is going to be the way to find out what you should be learning. How they were David is saying, here is also part of his core.
Safiye that there's an output of his philosophy called taking children. Seriously, which applies this curiosity driven framework and kind of freedom to explore to child-raising and I do encourage people. Look that up separately. That is a podcast in of itself. I will say, I would not have been able to understand the books and get into them as easily as well. If it weren't for the tireless work of Brett Hall he runs a podcast called the theory of knowledge podcast talk caste okay cast and he's got 100 episodes in there that literally goes through David's book.
Acts chapter by chapter and explains with lots of examples and very carefully for the layperson to kind of catch up on a lot of the ideas in those books. Also, I started reading popper after encountering, David's work, and Papa has a lot of books, the open society and its enemies, the logic of scientific discovery, etc, etc. But for people who are just starting out, those can be a little dense because he's arguing with other philosophers and poppers very good about steel Manning argument. So he takes the other people very seriously and that takes time
And so, if you're not a professional philosopher, you just want to figure out epistemology is a recent book that I found called philosophy in the real world, which is like a little hundred page introduction to Karl Popper by Brian Mcgee and I found that to be a good lighter-weight
introduction bound to be good. If it's my him
yeah there is a lot of good stuff out there, I'd say they're now there's a good set of people who have been influenced Enough by these ideas and realize that it forms a core of a worldview, which goes by the name, critical rationalism.
Although we should be careful of all isms for the obvious reasons, we're all fallible. But the critical rationalist group has started putting together. Both reading materials, explanatory materials, there's a website for taking children. Seriously, there's a critical rationalism newsletter out there. And people are putting all of this stuff to talk cast. I think is still the go-to for easy comprehension of a lot of these ideas. But I still tell people, look the beginning of the beginning of infinity the first three chapters are actually, not a very difficult read the idea.
Be hard to swallow because they do violate a lot of core deeply held beliefs that people have, but they return power to the individual. In a strange way. They do coincide with common sense even though a lot of Sciences explain the scene in terms of the Unseen, they do return you this common sense of notion of actually maybe I can understand the explanations that explain everything that we know today. Maybe humans are important and knowledge is special and we aren't just these bacterial scum. That happened to
Gently populate, this planet in a strange way, it does align with your everyday, lived experience of reality. And I also recommend the last few chapters of the book as an easy read, because they apply these principles to politics to the memetic Warfare that goes on on Twitter, 24/7. And how that's evolving to things like beauty is beauty objective moral knowledge, is there such a thing as moral knowledge and can be objectively, make progress in moral knowledge so these are very very fundamental
Shins, none of them involve math. No them involved physics. No them involved, deep science. Although if you understand even at a high level, the physics, then I think it will give you a firmer foundation and understand that all of these things we've together as an aside. I do think the fabric of reality was a great name I'm glad you ended up going with that one because it is a second thing besides not being as grandiose of a claim. It does say these things are woven together and they depend on each other. So one leads to the other leads to the other and even Austrian economics is an out.
Put of what you're talking about because Austrian economics was creativity and knowledge grows at the center of the economy. So then you can see how all of these things sort of fit together as logical, puzzle pieces as opposed to a set of random beliefs that you picked up because they were convenient, or taught to you, or aligned with your
motivations. Yes,
indeed. David, just one final question for me, which is from some time ago. The context is this from Edge dot-org from 2004, but there are a number of things that I found on this website. One of which
Deutsch has Law every problem that is interesting is also soluble and we could spend quite a bit of time on packing that and I'm happy certainly to listen to you expand on that but I'm simply wondering what problems are most interesting to you. Personally right
now I am working on a new theory in physics called construct a theory.
And it is to me amazing and one of the problems I have is how to explain to other people, why it is amazing and what's good about it and this is one of the things that you have to do later.
because the early part of,
Understanding something new to creating something new is to understand it yourself. And it constructs theory has already changed a lot. Since I first thought of it, and we're beginning to have the theoretical applications of it, not yet, practical applications. But you know, one day there will be Universal Constructors and Universal. Constructors are to construct a theory. What Universal computers are to theory of computation,
Nation. So construct a theory is the theory of
All things that can be done and can't be done in the distinction between things that can be done and can't be done considered as a Theory of physics. So you reformulate physics to make statements entirely about that. What can and can't be done. And then you know, Anna value will like the economic implications. You know, some people think that, once we have the universal Constructors, you realize that the universal Constructor can make more Universal Constructors in, then you have
Exponentially more of them as time goes on. So there will be no role for humans anymore but the exact opposite is true as usual. Universal constructed a lot, just like a universal computer is perfectly. Obedient it is, obedient humans are disobedient. You need the disobedient things to program, the obedient things. So I spoke a while ago about the fact that gold is eventually going to be cheap because
Because machines will go out to the asteroids, and mine, the Gold, and those machines, once we have Universal Constructors, they will be made by other machines. And those machines will be made by, and so on, and eventually, everything will be made by Universal instructors. And what will people do? Well, toil physical toil will be abolished.
Because that can be done by robots that can be built by other robots that can be and so on right down to the universal Constructor. But when I say can be, they will have to be programmed to be. And if you want something done either you will download from the internet a program where someone has already worked out how to immuno make a perfect robot Butler or whatever. But if you want something new done that hasn't been done before and you
Will.
Then you have to write the program for it.
Or hire someone to write the program for it, but then he will want to program in
return.
There's a Calvin and Hobbes where a Calvin has this box. That becomes a universal Constructor and he starts making copies of himself. So he turns the box upside down. He opens it up. Another Calvin comes out and so he commands his Calvin to do his homework and then he creates another Calvin and that Calvin has to go and do his chores. And sure enough. What he ends up with is a whole bunch of K who are all playing video games and eating food. And none of them actually want to do the chores of the homework because these are the AG is, these are K and
Yes, Disobedience. The big one. I will say you're a philosophy that had a huge difference for me, on child-raising. And I have now realized that it is more important, even through this conversation. It is more important that I have a disobedient child that an obedient child or an educated it or learn it or whatever. I may think is the right set of things because it is fundamentally that Disobedience that allows the creativity to come up with new ideas and is that creativity? That separates us from the robots, and the auto batons, and all of the other things that the universe is full
of
In the enlightenment, a few philosophers and other people realize that this is true of politics. You know, previously people thought the problem of politics is who should command everyone else, who should Rule, and the more obedient people are to that, the better. Because if you've got the right person ruling then, all you need for the rest of the society is for everyone to do, what he says, if they don't do what he says, then the society is
Imperfect in the enlightenment, people realized, that is not what we want. We want to make it so that as much as possible people aren't ruled
And to the extent that we have, not yet, completely abolished. Ruling Society is still in perfect. We haven't got enough knowledge of how to reduce power, political power in society, but we've done very, very well compared with only a few hundred years ago, when Not only was power everywhere. But people thought that was the way of things. People thought that that's how things had to be and the only,
Issue was what should the power make people do?
In this leads a little bit to what you have called a moral imperative, which is don't destroy the means of error, correction. In fact, the only time I think in your book that you let a little emotion slip through I would say, is when you're addressing exactly this topic. When you said, if we should take it personally because if people hadn't stopped the growth of knowledge in the past that has often happened through anti rational memes or censorship or religion, or through just any sort of belief.
Some even believe in science use as a religious invocation. If people hadn't done that then you and I might be, I think it is your coat you and I might be immortal and we might be exploring the stars and so we should take it
personally. Yes,
I may have said too much on it but I would love to hear your extrapolation
on it.
I do take it personally and as far as the, I thought you were going to say, when I said that, that's the moral imperative, that not destroying the means of error, correction is the moral imperative. I thought you were going to say that that's the only place in the book where I actually tell people what to do. But I don't because I put that into the mouth of a fictional character. It's in a little play that's in the book. And it's the character that says that not me, you know, the character is Socrates
At ease. So I'm doing what Plato did. I put my ideas into the mouth of Socrates and then I don't have to take responsibility for it so I'm not telling people but if they destroy the means of error correction, they'll regret it.
Well David, I know we're coming up on about two hours now. I want to be respectful of your time. We've covered a lot of ground on the Vols or anything. You would like to ask before. We begin to wind at least this first conversation to a close. I think this is a great conversation.
Mission. I think we covered a lot of the introductory topics again. I think there's no substitute for reading the books and, you know, these are books that will make you smarter. You'll have to go slowly and just read them and reread them. I find every time I read them, I get new things out of them. A lot of times, there are outputs of the world view that are stated in one or two sentences that you don't appreciate until the third or fourth reading and there's no points for finishing. There's no points for reading in order. There's no points for going quickly, it's just about understanding.
If you want to understand the world around you better and make better decisions, I can't recommend it more highly. I've spent a lot of my time and effort on letting people know what I got out of them and I hope they will likewise, and we'll put more things in the show notes. We didn't really get to cover Constructor Theory which is David's new theory. That actually it unites a lot of different pieces of physics including puts information and knowledge at the center to. So I know that his colleague caromar Leto, wrote a great book, the science of can, and can't that tries to explain it to the layperson. There's a
Science writer A Logan, chicken who's been doing some work on it and he is a good interview with Chiara. So we can put all that in the show notes. There's an infinite Rabbit Hole here to go down and thank you Nepal for helping to organize this. And I was very happy to sit in the passenger seat. Learn as much as I have in the conversation of taking copious notes. And I've just learned so much in the process of doing homework for this conversation. So thank you for your work and time. David, David, is there anything else you would like
like to add any closing comments, requests of the audience, anything at all,
I think there are things to read other than my books. Papa, you know, what you just said about reading my books I find that with Papa in fact, it's rather embarrassing. Sometimes I come across something, which I thought was my idea, I always say that all I've done is added footnotes to Papa and touring and so on. And sometimes I read a passage of Papa
And I think to myself, oh my God, he knew he already knew. And you only get it after having read it several times.
So I recommend Papa and McAuley is a completely different, it seems completely different. When you read McCauley, he's a 19th century historian and he wrote this history of England which he died. Halfway through writing it. So, how many covers like the first few hundred years? And then the really interesting things are just beginning and he is somebody tried to complete it using his notes and it's nowhere near as good. It doesn't have the thing.
NG. But if you read McCauley,
like you were just saying about understanding the world read McCauley, you understand history, it's not really a history of England, it masquerades as a history of England, but it's a philosophy of History. I recommend him.
Well, lots of ground covered, many many things to add to the show notes, which people will be able to find a Tim de blog / podcast as per usual. David, thank you so much for making time today especially given how much later it is across the pond.
We appreciate
it. You're welcome. It's fun and
thank you. Navall once again and to everybody listening, really appreciate, of course, all the time in your ears and as I mentioned already, we will add notes for everything we referenced in the conversation and Beyond in the show notes at MDOT blog / podcast, until next time. Thanks for tuning in.
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